Bernard Stiegler Quote on Technics: Life by Means Other Than Life

Technics is the pursuit of life by means other than life. — Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time (1994)

Bernard Stiegler opens Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1994) with this definition, which he takes up from the French philosopher of biology Georges Canguilhem. It is the thesis of his entire project: the human is constituted through technics, and technics is a continuation of life by other means — an evolution that proceeds not through the genes but through the artifact, through exteriorized memory.

Context

Stiegler, a French philosopher who studied under Jacques Derrida and later directed the Institut de recherche et d'innovation at the Centre Pompidou, wrote Technics and Time as the first volume of a projected trilogy on the relation between technology and time. The book's subtitle, "The Fault of Epimetheus," recalls the myth in Plato's Protagoras: Epimetheus, the afterthinking brother of Prometheus, distributed the capacities of survival to the animals but forgot humanity, leaving humans naked and without instincts. Prometheus then stole fire and technics to compensate — but the gift is always too late, always a supplement. The myth, for Stiegler, is a philosophical statement: the human is the being who has no essence of its own and constitutes itself through what it makes.

The book engages the entire tradition of philosophical anthropology — from Rousseau and Kant to Leroi-Gourhan, Heidegger, and Derrida — to argue that technics is not an accident that befalls a pre-existing humanity but the very condition of the human. The definition "the pursuit of life by means other than life" expresses this: living beings pursue their persistence through organic processes; the human pursues its persistence through the inorganic — through tools, traces, and technologies that outlast the individual and accumulate across generations.

Meaning

The sentence says that technics belongs to the order of life. It is not the negation of life, not the death-drive, not a merely instrumental addition to an otherwise natural existence. It is a way of living — a pursuit, an endeavor, a striving — that continues the vital process but by means that are no longer simply biological. Where the animal adapts through the body and the gene, the human adapts through the artifact: the tool is an organ exteriorized, the written trace is memory exteriorized, the machine is process exteriorized.

The phrase "by means other than life" carries the full weight of Stiegler's argument. Life, in the strict biological sense, reproduces and maintains itself through organic mechanisms. Technics introduces a second, inorganic form of memory — what Stiegler, following Leroi-Gourhan, calls "epiphylogenetic" memory: the accumulation of experience in artifacts that transmit it to future generations without passing through the genome. This exteriorization is what makes history, culture, and the transgenerational accumulation of knowledge possible. The human is the animal that lives through its tools; its evolution is the evolution of its prostheses.

The deeper meaning is that the human has no fixed essence. Because technics precedes and constitutes the human — because the first human artifact is also the first appearance of the human — there is no original, pure humanity underneath the technical. Stiegler calls the human "the who" and technics "the what": the subject is constituted in relation to its objects. The pursuit of life by means other than life is thus the very history of the human, and the question of technics is the question of who we are.

Philosophical Significance

The definition reframes the philosophy of technology as fundamental philosophy. Against the tradition that treats technology as an applied or derivative topic — and against the humanism that posits a self-sufficient subject who then uses tools — Stiegler argues that technics is originary: it is the condition of possibility of the human, of time, and of memory. The claim radicalizes Heidegger's insight that the essence of technology is not technological by giving it a genetic and anthropological dimension: technics is the pursuit of life, and life is not an essence but a process.

The argument also has profound implications for the contemporary age of digital technology. If the human is constituted through exteriorized memory, then the industrialization of memory — the capture of attention, the algorithmic mediation of experience, the replacement of cultural transmission by industrial production — is not a mere change of tools but a transformation of the human. Stiegler's later work, with its diagnosis of "symbolic misery" and the destruction of attention, follows directly from the thesis of Technics and Time: if we live by means other than life, then the means we use decide what kind of life — and what kind of human — we are becoming.

Critics have questioned the anthropological sweep of Stiegler's claims and the extent to which technics can be said to "precede" the human without reintroducing a teleology he rejects. Yet the definition has become one of the most influential formulations in contemporary continental philosophy of technology, precisely because it refuses both the celebration and the condemnation of the technical. Technics is the pursuit of life by means other than life: a fact about what we are, and therefore a question about what we will have made of ourselves.

Sources

• Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.