Abstract

In this contribution, we wish to examine a hermeneutical hypothesis that may seem strange. This hypothesis is that some of the most interesting contemporary philosophical contributions to thinking about the digital and algorithmic are produced by authors who are very familiar with the philosophy (epistemological, metaphysical, moral and political) of the second half of the Renaissance (they have, for example, devoted their doctoral thesis to a current or thinkers from this period of European history). As far as we know, there is no such correlation, at least at this level, between philosophers trained by more recent currents and thinkers (from the 17th to the 20th century) and an interest in philosophy for the problems posed by the digital and algorithmic world. There seems to be no affinity between readers of Descartes, Spinoza, Kant or Hegel and algorithms, whereas between the latter and readers of Machiavelli, Bodin, Montaigne and La Boétie, not only do they exist, but they also give rise to original theoretical productions. Our aim is first to examine what justifies this hypothesis, and then to identify some of its heuristically interesting consequences. These consequences give us food for thought about the relationship between political philosophy and technological discourse, and thus enable us to shed new light on the massive deployment of artificial intelligence in our time. There are several reasons why this hypothesis is credible. On the one hand, it has to do with a certain configuration, homogeneous between the Renaissance and today, in the distribution of practical and theoretical knowledge, to which modern philosophy has literally turned its back. On the other hand, it's possible to argue that the political logic of the digital and algorithmic world corresponds in some respects to that before the institution evoked by Hobbes' Leviathan (1651). This does not mean that the world governed by digital technology and algorithms is returning to an anomic sociality, and even less to a state of nature understood as pure violence (which Hobbes always claimed was fictitious), nor that legitimate public authority is no longer granted to states in the contemporary world. It's rather that the type of normativity that unfolds in societies governed by networks and algorithms is of a different kind from the modern normativity instituted by Hobbes: digital and algorithmic governmentality (Rouvroy & Berns, 2013) corresponds to forms of post-modern normativity, which, in the logic induced by what we call "wild innovation" (Ménissier, 2021) evokes the Machiavellian game of tumulti that call forth ordini that bear no resemblance to the Hobbesian institution (Machiavelli, 1531). And to push certain consequences of the hypothesis further, can we shed more light on what is currently happening with Renaissance authors? Our answer is affirmative, and we will mobilize other arguments from Renaissance authors to explore certain areas of digital and algorithmic sociality and ways of being, notably La Boétie, Montaigne or the promoters of ancient skeptics like Sextus Empiricus.