The Symbiosis Concept Applied to the Human Technological Culture

Abstract

This article examines the concept of symbiosis as a premise for elucidating the origin of the human-technology relationship. The starting point is the work of the biologist Lynn Margulis, who introduced the concepts symbiosis and symbiogenesis in the biological
sciences. Her idea is that a long-lasting physical association that as symbiosis may be defined, will eventually by symbiogenesis lead to an evolutionary novelty. From this perspective the human-technology relationship is explained using philosophical ideas of Bernard Stiegler and Helmuth Plessner, who both considered this relationship essential for being human. I explain what is typical about the human life form as it is thought by them. Basically, the difference between the human and other organisms is that in the human, something is moved outside that in animals stayed within. I explicate that this exteriorisation, as it is called by Stiegler, at the same time is an interiorisation. This movement should be considered as a form of endosymbiogenesis by which the long- lasting use of tools was cognitively internalized in mind and body and became eventually a condition for the origin of an organism with a technological culture—the human.