From Hypochondria to Disruption: Hegel and Stiegler on Youth

Considering the quotation above in which Bernard Stiegler (see also Stiegler, Nancy, & Jugnon, 2016) discusses the perceived catastrophic effects unleashed by digital technologies upon societal structures, in what sense can we grant the fundamental technological disruption experienced by the youth of today a proximity and relationship to the self-diagnosed hypochondriasis or hypochondria suffered by G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) in his youth? At first glance, this question is a strange and unconventional one but, nonetheless, it is important and thought-provoking and, indeed, timely, as it informs the struggle for knowledge as such. Moreover, the comparison between the two thinkers is helpful as it explores in a new way the following questions: 1) what knowledge precisely is? and 2) what is the nature of the formation of Bildung (liberal learning or culture)? Both questions I assert address shared themes and key issues in both thinkers. The questions also serve to inform the meaning of crisis (κρῐ́σῐς, Krisis in ancient Greek means decision or judgment), both in terms of the personal crisis and philosophical crisis of Hegel, as well as the psychical and societal sense of crisis among youth in the contemporary digital age (Stiegler 2010; 2017). Despite their different contexts and different philosophical traditions, Hegel and Stiegler both offer a philosophy of youth, a philosophy of age, a philosophy of spirit, and because of this illuminate a particular response to the crisis found in the development of Bewusst-sein or conscious being. Both are vital thinkers for discussing the trials and tribulations of contemporary youth. With this in mind, a comparison is made between the empty subjectivity of young Hegel’s hypochondria–a general melancholy or anxiety–and the very disruption of desire itself among contemporary youth who, in facing not only the stark realities of climate change and the Anthropocene, but also robotization, the breakdown of educational institutions and the ongoing deskilling of the workforce, can no longer envisage a future. The question is: in what sense is Hegel’s hypochondria comparable in any way to the nihilism and alienation of Florian, the teenager in Dans la disruption [The Age of Disruption] (2016), who Stiegler describes as suffering from a profound loss of belief in the future? The conclusion speculates on whether the current technological era has distorted the process of individuation (the becoming of itself of the subject, a concept derived from Gilbert Simondon) to such an extent that the necessity of psychological passage through forms of youthful hypochondria or alienation has been superseded by an altogether different mode of enculturation or inculcation (a mode of automatization or what Antoinette Rouvroy calls “algorithmic governmentality” (2013)). Any answer to the above set of conundra must understand Hegel’s profound hypochondria–his existential crisis–in terms of a response to both the historical moment (the French revolution, politics in the modem world, the consideration of the impossibility of absolute knowledge) and the personal intellectual journey that begins in youth and sojourns its way towards knowledge. This passage is seen by Hegel in terms of Bildung, or how one becomes an educated moral being. Further exploration of this concept will help to qualify and understand its different psychoanalytical, philosophical, existential, pharmacological senses, as well as the array of disorders such as autism, trauma, hysteria, schizophrenia, Zerrissenheit or utter dismemberment, paranoia, melancholia and alienation and the apparently new malady - disruption or unprecedented technological change – which is singled out for particular attention by Stiegler. In other words, it seems essential to examine and confront the epochal differences taking place which are rewriting the meaning of hypochondria, hysteria, Zerrissenheit and schizophrenia, on the one hand, and, …