Moving from Roberto Marchesini’s – one of the exponent of the so called posthumanism –
criticism against the dialectics “technophoby versus technomania”, this paper claims to
point out and discuss the unexpressed anthropological assumption lying at the basis of a
supposed unbiased approach to technology. In the idea of overcoming the traditional
image of human being (essentialist and anthropocentric), which may be considered
restrictive as it does not fully express its “being able to be”, a more specific thought is
hidden: that human being were, in fact, a basically creature of lack (an integral
Mängelwesen), needing healing and salvation. Technology was invested with such a
sotheriological aim, so that it is its thaumaturgical virtue which has to redeem man. It
realizes its purpose through a process called neoambientalità (neoenvironment), according
with the following stages: pauperizzazione (pauperization) and ferinizzazione
(feralization). Deprived of his own peculiar mondanità (wordliness), its having-world
(Welt), human being becomes poorer from an ontological point of view and therefore
placed into a mere environment (Umwelt) as an animal among the others. Such an
environment that is not a physical or natural one, but a technological environment,
which is why it is a neoenvironment. Behind the supposed technoequanimity claimed by
posthumanism hides a pure technolatry. This argument lead us to affirm that discriminant
and metron which has to be used in inquiring into the Frage nach der Tecnhik (the question
concerning technology) is a fideistic one. In order to face it, philosophy must always
answer to this question in one way: confirming its atheistic calling in referring to its own
skeptical ethos. When technology, as shape of the contemporary world, claims its epochal
injunction, philosophy has to make an act of supreme desertion.
