Pierre-Antoine Chardel. Crises and critique: eco-ethical and socio-philosophical challenges. Eco-ethica, 2024, The World in Crisis: What Is the Possibility of Philosophical and Eco-ethical Renewal?, 12, pp.37-46. ⟨10.5840/ecoethica202582069⟩.

Our capacity to act, which in principle should coincide with the power to exercise an art of interpretation in our complex technological environments, is further hampered at a time when the dynamics of structural disruption are at work, along with a crisis of governmentality. This destabilisation of established orders reaffirms the socio-philosophical effort we must make to develop an art of interpretation that is capable of embracing the complexities of the present. How can we try to identify the characteristics of such a crisis? How does it manifest itself in our technological (or ‘hypermodern’) societies? And how should such a crisis challenge us to renew our critical tools? With these points, we will see that if we are to make an eco-ethical effort to evaluate the ways of life established by the digital age, we have to recognise that developing a critical approach to digital technologies is fraught with a major difficulty, linked to the fact that we are dealing with technologies that function by creating a high level of opacity. What digital technologies produce, in terms of the propagation of data, information or flows, is totally beyond our immediate perception. While they allow us to see the world (and always from a range of angles, i.e. using certain modes of writing), our screens do not allow us to see their architecture. They therefore assign us to a structural invisibility that is highly problematic from a hermeneutical point of view. Such challenges are also a way of renewing our way of exercising – as practically as possible – our critical judgement.