Paul Virilio and the temporal conditions of philosophical thinking

The temporal conditions of philosophical thought

Few philosophers have inquired into the temporal conditions of philosophical thought. One notable exception is Aristotle, who argued that there can be no philosophy without leisure (Aristotle, 1941: 690–691, 981^b15-982^c). He meant that philosophy requires an experience of time in which the mind is free to follow ideas and arguments where they lead, and that this experience is incompatible with the structure of time found in materially or socially necessary work. For Aristotle, therefore, a rigidly hierarchical structure of society was necessary in which slaves and women performed socially necessary labour and men were free to pursue philosophy and politics. While democratic struggles of all sorts have undermined the legitimacy of the oppressive hierarchies that Aristotle thought necessary, I will argue that his point about the relationship between philosophy and freedom from imposed routine remains valid. However, Aristotle himself, not having any experience of the social forces and technologies that threaten the temporal conditions of philosophical thought today, is of little help to defending the conclusion that I will defend. Instead, I turn to the work of Paul Virilio to help identify the threats to the temporal conditions of philosophy that technologically accelerated capitalist social processes poses.

Before I state and explain what I take to be four key temporal conditions of philosophy two qualifications are in order. The first is that I do not take these four conditions to be necessarily exhaustive of the temporal conditions of philosophical thought. I have developed these from reflection on my own experience as a philosopher and my knowledge of the history of (mostly) Western philosophy. The second is that I do not conflate these temporal conditions of philosophical thought with the total set of social, political, cultural, economic, and intellectual conditions of philosophy. The factors affecting the extent to which philosophical thought flourishes, who is regarded as capable of doing philosophy, the esteem with which philosophy is regarded, and the extent to which its conclusions are heeded are more complex than the temporal conditions I will examine. I concentrate on the temporal conditions of philosophical thought in isolation from the more complex set of factors not because they operate in a realm apart from other social factors, but because their importance to the possibility of thinking philosophically has not been carefully examined at the same time as they are in danger of being by undermined by the temporal dynamics of accelerated capitalism. They cannot be defended if they are not understood.

The first temporal condition of philosophical thought is the historically emergent character of the meaning and value of different possible normative structures. By ‘historically emergent character’ I mean that the truth of regulative principles of human life cannot be determined simply from analysis of the meaning of their terms but can only be determined by examining the effects these principles have on people’s lives over time. Thus, the first condition of philosophical thought concerns its substance or object and not its subjective practice as mode of thinking. Still, since thinking must have an object, the temporality of the development of that object is a factor and condition of the temporal conditions of the subjective activity. Thus, the historical character of human forms of life and value systems is the first temporal condition of the philosophical thinking that reflects on them as its object. This was Hegel’s point when he said that ‘the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’ (Hegel, 1967: 13). I will give an example to explain my meaning more clearly.

The revolutionaries who institutionalised the idea of human rights in the American and French revolutions could not have had any idea that their principles would be used, in the twenty-first century, to justify gay marriage. Yet it is the idea of rights to freedom of expression and association that underlie the legal-political dimension of the struggle to legitimate gay marriage. No ahistorical analysis of the meaning of the term ‘human rights’ in the eighteenth century could possibly have unpacked this implication, because the social and political movements necessary to give gay and lesbian human beings a public standing and a public voice had not yet emerged. Hence, the first temporal condition of philosophy is that the full meaning and value of social norms works themselves out over time, through history, via the agency of struggle. The limits of the meaning of the norm are determined by the limits of successful struggles on their basis.

How does this historical character of norms affect philosophical thought? First, it means that in order to comprehend the meaning of norms philosophically, one must have the time to study (at least in a cursory way) actual historical developments. Second, and more importantly, it means that philosophical insight into the limits of a given norm (liberal rights, in this case) is discovered not by abstract logical criticism that is outside of historical context, but by the discovery of the limits of successful struggle. To criticise the value of a given norm is to say, in effect, that successful struggles to improve people’s lives are no longer possible on its basis. Philosophical criticism in this sense must be rooted in history and cannot abstract itself from it to judge from some atemporal, ahistorical perspective what is right and wrong.

The second temporal condition of philosophy is rooted in what one might call the temporal expectations of success of philosophically reflective individuals. When it comes to philosophical argument and insight success cannot be willed. Unlike consumer demand, successfully arriving at a sound conclusion does not follow straightaway from the demand for it. When I shop, my demand is satisfied immediately – I pay the money and I receive the commodity. Philosophical insight – like the norms into which it seeks insight – is emergent, but in a time-sequence that cannot be accelerated or decelerated by individual choices. Arguments must ‘play out’. The one who would achieve philosophical understanding must therefore be a patient participant in argument and reflection on historically emergent patterns of life and value systems, and not a consumer of ideas. Philosophical insight only emerges as the outcome of reflections, arguments, and dialogues whose duration cannot be specified in advance (they might go on for an entire lifetime, and, in terms of the human philosophical project, have been going on for more than two and half millennia). Good philosophical reasoning obeys immanent standards of validity and truth (which themselves can be challenged by an interlocutor) whose satisfaction requires effort on the part of reasoners to meet. Hence, there is a fundamental difference between the time-experience of philosophical argument and the time-experience of consumer demand satisfaction. The later time-experience has no place for philosophical thinking and, indeed, the latter is impossible within it.

The third temporal condition of philosophical thought, which follows directly from the second, is that when one is thinking philosophically time is experienced as an open matrix of possibility guided by the immanent end of achieving insight into fundamental evaluative norms of human life. Elsewhere, I have argued that this experience of time as an open matrix of possibility for life-valuable experience and activity is the deepest meaning of free time, and employed philosophical thinking as a paradigm instance of that experience (Noonan, 2012).The experience of time as an open matrix of possibilities contrasts with the experience of time as a closed structure of routine governed by ends extrinsic to the process or activity undertaken. The paradigm example of the experience of time as a closed structure of routine is alienated labour in a capitalist firm. In any alienated labour process, workers are forced to work at jobs in which they find no intrinsic value or meaning, for a period determined by their labour contract, for the sake of a wage, at a pace and through timed sequences of specific activity determined by market forces and the functional division of labour. In other words, in a closed structure of routine, one cannot follow one’s own thoughts or a dialogue or argument where they lead, but must conform one’s thought and activity to the temporal demands and structure imposed by reified social forces.

In the experience of time as an open matrix of possibilities, by contrast, time is not experienced as a coercive external factor. If the passage of time is experienced at all, it is experienced as elastic: as stretching or contracting according to the pace and intensity of the argument which, in principle, goes on as long as it needs to go on in order to resolve itself. Hence, the temporal expectations of success discussed under condition two are intrinsically connected to the experience of time as an open matrix of possibilities. If every action and experience is dominated by coercive time-structures, one will never develop the patience to follow ideas and arguments where they lead. Every experience will take the form of immediate demand satisfaction, and philosophical insight cannot be achieved on demand.

The final temporal condition of philosophical thought specifies the institutional conditions necessary for the experience of time as an open matrix of possibility for achieving critical insight and understanding. The typical time-structure of work under capitalism is the closed structure of alienated routine discussed above. If philosophical thought requires the experience of time as an open matrix of possibility for free thought, then any society in which it is practiced must preserve some institutionally protected space in which this experience of time is possible. Classically, time for philosophy was reserved to a white male elite freed from other social demands on their time by the institution of slavery and the exclusion of women from public life. As I noted in my discussion of Aristotle, slaves and women did the materially necessary labour in ancient Greece so that a small class of male philosophers could think. Clearly, that way of institutionalising the space needed for the experience of time as an open matrix of possibilities for free thought-activity is incompatible with a democratic society. If democratic societies are to enable philosophical thought democratically, they need to institutionalise this need for free time differently: by funding public universities in which anyone with the aptitude for philosophical study is enabled to study, and by reducing the average work week so that people have more time outside of paid labour to reflect and argue about matters of shared concern.

The tyranny of the instant

While there has been a great deal of recent historical and social scientific analysis of the development, technological dynamics, and psycho-social implications of social acceleration, little has been written about its implications for philosophy (see Hassan, 2012; Rosa, 2015; Turkle, 2011; Wajcman, 2015). Virilio is a notable exception. Although generally understood as a media theorist and eccentric technology critic in the English speaking world, his ‘dromology’ (study of speed) exposes very clearly the contradiction between the temporal conditions of philosophical thought and the temporal dynamics of accelerated capitalism (Virilio, 1986). As Jonathan Crary argues,

Virilio … never was or is a historian/critic of media or a philosopher of technology in the way that these labels might apply to figures as disparate as Ellul, McLuhan, Kittler, or Stengler. Of course, his work has been uniquely valuable to anyone interested in these areas, but Virilio’s guiding pre-occupations lie elsewhere. To use quasi-Kantian terms, it is more accurate to see his work as a relentless examination of the conditions which make experience possible … Virilio’s project is to uncover the role of time in the multiple and abyssal de-linkages of perception and its possible objects. (Crary, 2009: 10)

The humanist foundation of Virilio’s work can easily be overlooked because his style is consistently anti-systematic, almost stream of consciousness. This eccentricity has led to not unfounded charges of unsubstantiated generalisation, hyperbole, and catastrophism (see Redhead, 2004: 136–162; Wajcman, 2015: 22–25). However, if we read the conflict between the temporal conditions of philosophical thought and the time-structure of accelerated capitalism as a dynamic tendency rather than a settled reality, and the threats that Virilio identifies as worst-case scenarios rather than inevitabilities, these problematic features of his tone can be mitigated. By mitigating the hyperbole, the humanistic, life-valuable moral-political argument concerning the threats that philosophical thought faces in the contemporary world can be heard.

For Virilio, the most important tendency of the modern world is acceleration of its social processes (production, consumption, communication) to the point where further acceleration is no longer possible: the instant. Military and economic competition drive technological developments that not only allow for but force actors to find ways of accomplishing their ends in less and less time.

In the nineteenth century, Progress meant the Great Commotion of the railways. In the twentieth century, still meant more the Great Speed of the bullet train and the supersonic jet. In the twenty-first century, it means the Instantaneity of the interactive telecommunications of cybernetics. (Virilio, 2010: 70)

The first temporal condition of philosophical thought was the historically emergent character of human values. Clearly, if Virilio is correct, and society is on a trajectory towards governance by instantaneous decision, this historical character will be undermined. The demand for instantaneous translation between ideation and execution will brook no delay for historical reflection on whether or not the decision in question can be justified, either in terms of the most historically comprehensive interpretation of existing values or in terms of the open-ended struggles necessary to make those values even more adequate to human needs that even the best of existing institutions fail to satisfy. Human values take time to emerge, their full scope can be reached only through struggles that take time, and those struggles themselves require patient thought about strategies, tactics, and appropriate forms of institutionalisation. Contraction of the time of decision towards the non-time of the instant is thus incompatible both with the historical time-structure of the emergence of human values and the development of historical consciousness in which philosophical understanding of those values demands. It is the time of a non-living machine-system, not human beings. Hence, if Virilio is correct, the first temporal condition of philosophical thought is being undermined.

A critic might rejoin: ‘Virilio is obviously incorrect. History has not been abolished and no process has been reduced to instantaneous realization’. If we read Virilio literally, then the critic is correct, but we should not read Virilio as making claims about what is absolutely the case but what the worst-case implications of tendencies towards social acceleration would be. Even if the worst case is not upon us, the drive towards it can still have real and damaging effects on processes like philosophical thought which have an irreducible historical dimension. When we think of the pace of on-line friendships, business, sex, cultural production, and politics, we are confronted with the reality of social acceleration and the problems its promise of instant friendships, etc., poses for forming depth commitments. When put is these terms, Virilio’s main worry seems well-founded.

Let us consider an example to help substantiate the claim that there is a real tendency towards acceleration to the non-time of the instant and that this tendency is in conflict with the first temporal condition of philosophical thought. The ‘Big Data’ revolution in business is creating a crisis for traditional human managers. The ability of supercomputers to detect patterns in consumer behaviour which, when revealed by statistical analysis, can provide automatic guidance to decision making is undermining the organisational value of human managers’ experience and business instincts. As an overview of the implications of Big Data for business in the Harvard Business Review argued, ‘real-time or nearly real-time information makes it possible for a company to be much more agile than its competitors’, but only if it has the technological tools to process that information into decision-guiding packages (McAfee and Brynjoflsson, 2012: 63). Since human brains are too slow to provide the analysis, the work that used to be performed by ‘gut and intuition’ will now be done by algorithms (McAfee and Brynjoflsson, 2012: 62). Human beings will be reduced to the executors of the computer’s ‘decision’. Their research confirms Virilio’s argument that the key consequence of this sort of technological development is that ‘people are required to transfer their power of decision making to automatic responses that can function at the immobile speed of instantaneity’ (Virilio, 2012a: 33–34).

The point of this example is not to romanticise the expertise of business executives but to highlight the general danger to human insight and understanding. Even if their goals are radically different, there is a clear analogy between the type of historical and reflective judgement that managers used to exercise and the historically rooted normative judgements that define philosophy. If we extend what is happening to managers to other human practices that require reflective judgment but which are being re-organised to take advantage of the greater speeds of computer-meditated statistical determination of choices, it becomes apparent that Virilio’s concerns have merit. From player selection in professional sports to demographic patterns underlying ideological swings in politics, the Big Data revolution is displacing human judgement from areas of life once thought to be beyond mechanisation and digitisation. The justification in all cases is greater speed and certainty. Hence, Virilio has identified a real contradiction between acceleration and philosophy as historically informed normative judgement. If the contradiction is resolved in favour of further acceleration, philosophical thought will more and more be displaced from the public sphere of normative decision making. As more and more social activities are re-interpreted as essentially information-processing tasks, human experience and thought find themselves at risk of being replaced by computing machines because our brains cannot keep pace.

The machine knows nothing of the misery the execution of its programmes might cause because it is not self-conscious: it feels nothing, it cares for nothing. One might say: the machine can execute decisions so quickly because it is onto-ethically incapable of pausing to reflect. Hence, from the standpoint of a socio-economic power alienated from the normative structure of social life, the decision-machine is the ideal replacement for human beings precisely because it cannot stop to think. In both the economic system and the military (where Virilio locates the original impetus to social acceleration), speed is of the essence and human beings the obstacles to greater speeds (Redhead, 2004: 106–110; Virilio, 1977: 22). However, as philosophical reflection on ends is increasingly displaced by the execution of routines without guiding purpose beyond money-capital accumulation, social life as a whole tends to lose the qualitative complexity of a quilt of different practices with different meanings but integrated by an underlying value-system connected to the unifying goal of ensuring meaningful life for each and all. Life becomes more and more structured by meaningless routines of alienated labour and consumption, which make ever more pervasive the expectation of immediate satisfaction of demand in spheres of life where that expectation is directly destructive of the time structure upon which the practice depends. The second temporal condition of philosophical thought was the temporal structure of expectations of success. One cannot demand that an argument be resolved in one’s favour or that a conclusion be justified just because a deadline looms. Truth unfolds at its own pace and it does not respond to the logic of instantaneous desire-satisfaction typical of consumer markets. The acceleration of society also threatens this second temporal dimension of philosophical thought by making ubiquitous the routines and expectations of instant demand satisfaction typical of capitalist consumer society.

Again, Virilio speaks in absolutes that more cautious theorists will reject but which contain truth beneath their declamatory tone:

Day and night, all through the week and on Sundays, seven days a week …that is a way of life that has no direction for use … other than the repetition of repetitive processes. After the forced localization of de-Industrialization, forced dislocation is getting underway to the rhythm of a Progress now openly unnatural. (Virilio, 2012b: 60)

The on-line world, by contrast, recommends itself as superior precisely because it claims the power to put you anywhere you demand to be without demanding anything from you beyond a mouse click. One sits rooted to a monitor playing in virtual reality. The material determinations of the old reality cease to matter because of ‘the extreme reduction of distances which ensues from the temporal compression of transport and transmission … [and] the … general spread of tele-surveillance’ (Virilio, 2005: 13). As Rosa points out, Virilio worries that the tendency towards instantaneity is also a tendency towards immobility in place, and immobility in place is a threat to the social encounters in real space from which empathetic response derives (Rosa, 2015: 284). Again, Virilio’s concerns in this regard have been substantiated by empirical research. Sherry Turkle cites one study that has found a 40% decline in empathetic response amongst Unites States college students, a decline that she attributes to the decline of face-to-face contact and conversation as a result of ubiquitous electronic communication devices (Turkle, 2015: 171). The demand for instant gratification where one is right now rules. ‘La communauté virtuelle, Virilio concludes is “une realité de substitution qui nous prive de ce tact, de ce contact physique et de l’empathie necessaire a l” intersubjectivité communautaire’¹ (Virilio, 2007: 81).

The same essential concern is echoed in Jonathan Crary’s superb critique of the 24/7 structure of time of global capitalism. ‘A 24/7 environment has the semblance of a social world, but it is actually a non-social model of machine performance and a suspension of living that does not disclose the human cost required to sustain its effectiveness. It must be distinguished from what Lukacs and others in the early twentieth century identified as the empty, homogenous time of modernity … What is new is the sweeping abandonment of the pretense that time coupled to long-term undertakings. … 24/7 is a time of indifference, against which the fragility of human life is increasingly inadequate” (Crary, 2013: 9). As Crary makes clear, the roots of 24/7 lie in the capitalist economic system and the emergence of a truly global market in which every sector is wired for 24/7 communication. This global market enmeshes human beings in a machine-time which is indifferent to the human need to govern social life with meaningful purposes. Virtual 24/7 makes it appear that the whole universe can be made responsive to our every demand, but at the cost of cheapening the meaning and the value of that which the telepresence allows us to experience. The implication of the indifference of 24/7 to the human need for qualitatively varied activity, for rest, and for material connection to real people and real places, is, according to Virilio, totalitarian and nihilistic. Totalitarian – indeed, a ‘totalitarianism of totalitarianisms’, because only one principle rules: accelerate the cycles through which profit is produced and monitor everyone in real time to ensure they are complying with the demands of this programme to function as compliant consumers (of products, of media, etc.) (Virilio, 2012a: 39). Nihlisitic, because all political, ethical, and cultural values are negated by the one imperative to make more money in less time. Since normative governance of human life requires evaluative judgement, and evaluative judgement depends upon the patience to allow the truth to be worked out through the open-textured time-structure of argument and reflection, the acceleration society threatens the second temporal condition of philosophical thought.

The third condition of philosophical though was the experience of time as an open-ended matrix of activity as opposed to a closed structure of routine. More and more zones of social life are being routinised, giving rise to ubiquitous expectations of instantaneous success. The consumeristic routinisation of life undermines the possibility of the experience of time as an open matrix of possibilities for (in this case) reflection, deliberation, argument, and rational choice between value alternatives. ‘The development of the …  NANOCHRONOLOGIES of the infinitely short-term of cybernetic instantaneity— [threatens] the definitive powerlessness of our awareness of the facts and of our judgement of values in the face of the sudden metamorphosis of our environment’ (Virilio, 2012b: 72). The forces of technological development threaten to render us powerless to arrest them or at least steer them in humanly valuable directions because they undermine the time it would take to stop and think through the deleterious consequences of where they are leading. Where they are leading is beyond the embodied finitude of human life towards a machinic transhumanism in which the biological platform of human life is replaced because it is too slow (see, e.g., Kurzweil, 2005: 127).

Lest anyone think that this claim is an exaggeration, let us consider another contemporary example that illustrates the reality of the tendency that worries Virilio: the (perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek) campaign to enlist Watson, the IBM supercomputer, to run for President of the United States. I say ‘perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek’ because the organisers of the campaign well-understand that Watson cannot run. At the same time, the reason that they cite in support of their bid is non-frivolous and exemplifies the affirmation of the speed and programmed determinacy of the machine over the open temporality of human deliberation. ‘It is our belief’. the organisers say,

that Watson’s unique capabilities to assess information and make informed and transparent decisions define it as an ideal candidate for the job responsibilities required by the president. Watson is a system of computer software processes used for answering questions posed in natural language, initially developed by IBM for the quiz show Jeopardy! Watson compiles information from a variety of sources into multiple terabytes of data used as reference for generating responses. The more information Watson is able to consume, the more informed its decision making capabilities become. It's also capable of accepting information from any resource, allowing the possibility to analyze different perspectives and political agendas on a particular subject. (http://www.watson2016.com)

The great merit of Virilio’s analyses is that he makes it clear that humanity faces a choice: whether to acknowledge that we remain beings of the flesh, needy, vulnerable, rooted to definite material contexts, interdependent with each other and capable of governing our collective and individual lives according to universally life-enabling values, or to cede control over the future to technologies which will determine our horizons by dispensing with the conditions of possibility for philosophical reflection and argument.

Ultimately, it is the whole problem of immediacy and instantaneity in politics that is posed today. After the authority of human beings over their history, are we going to yield, with the acceleration of the real, to the authority of the machines and those who program them? … After the disasters of technocracy, are we going from the frying pan into the fire by yielding to the social cybernetics … to cede the administration of life to inanimate but ultra-rapid devices?(Virilio, 2007: 122).

While the possibility of reflective critique has not been completely undermined, the institutional spaces in which the experience of time as an open matrix of possibilities for activity can be had are shrinking. The fourth temporal condition of philosophical thought was the funding of institutions in which the experience of time as an open matric of possibilities for action rules. Elsewhere I have called this experience of time as it regards intellectual activity ‘thought-time’ and identified the university as the institution which has historically protected it from the time-demands of consumer capitalism (reference removed to protect anonymity). The university is less and less able to offer this protection as it, like all other social institutions, is being subsumed under the routines and time-structures of accelerated capitalism. Rather than serve the purpose of protecting time as an open matrix for reflective, evaluative, and critical thought, it becomes more and more a node in the production of compliant workers and consumers. Academic capitalism undermines academia and its open-textured experience of time (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004).

Virilio does not deal directly with the threats that the acceleration of social life poses to the university and its ability to continue to fulfil its historical mission to protect thought-time. He does acknowledge my claim indirectly in his idea of the ‘University of Disasters’. The underlying idea of the University of Disasters is that the ecological and ontological threats posed by social acceleration and the increasing substitution of virtual for material reality can only be countered if they are studied. The contemporary university (he implies) is part of the technical-scientific-military-economic complex and thus can no longer serve as the institutional space for reflective critique of the potentially destructive implications of that complex. Hence, the need for a new university whose focus will be the multiple vectors along which global catastrophe could arrive. The approach of this university will be to contest the

aveuglement volontaire et se refuser à voir non seuelement la contradiction, mais l’incompatibilité entre les impératifs ecologiques de le sauvegarde d’une mode de vie dispendieux et l’hystérie d’une société developée qui ne se contente plus d’une consumerisime des produits finis de l’industrie, mais encore et surtout de la consummation effrénée de l’espace de temps des distances d’une planète décidémenent bien trop étroite pour arbitrer plus longtemps la course du vivant.² (Virilio, 2007: 145)

The nihilism of machine-time functioning

Virilio’s work has identified tendencies towards the acceleration of social life that would undermine the temporal conditions of possibility of philosophical thought, reflection, argument, and deliberation. Against the grain of modernist thinking (including its most critical exponent, Marx), Virilio believes that ‘the speeding up of society is far from emancipatory. On the contrary … acceleration has had largely detrimental consequences with the decline of the public sphere, the erosion of democratic processes and the increased power of the military complex’ (Bartram, 2004: 289). What Virilio does not provide, at least not in any systematic way, is a positive account of the good for human being that would allow the coherent development of his warnings into a concrete set of social and political goals. In other words, he demonstrates the dangers that acceleration towards instantaneity poses to philosophical thinking and democratic deliberation, but he never fully spells out what the good of philosophical and democratic deliberation is. Nevertheless, on the basis of what he does say it is possible, I believe, to infer a set of positive values that his critique presupposes. Those positive values, I contend, are best interpreted as ‘life-values’.

‘Life-value’ is a term that derives from the onto-axiology of John McMurtry. For McMurtry, all values presuppose and are grounded in the existence and the needs of living beings. Life-values as such come in two forms: instrumental life-values, which are goods that satisfy the various life-requirements of living beings, and intrinsic life-values, which are the expressed and realised life-capacities of living beings (McMurtry, 2011: 15). In terms of human beings, our life-requirements embrace both natural resources and socio-cultural institutions, while our life-capacities, the activities and experiences that make a life good and worth living, include thought, imagination, creative practice, and mutualistic relationships. If we think of value as grounded in the needs of life, and our good as expressed in the realisation of the capacities that define as a definite form of bio-social life-activity, we can construct, as indeed I have elsewhere, a materialist ethics whose goal is not the defence of abstract rules of right and wrong, good and bad, but a critique of concrete social practices, tendencies, ideologies, and value-systems that systematically impede the satisfaction of our life-requirements, and therefore also the full and free realisation of the life-capacities of those sets of (exploited, alienated, and oppressed) people whose life-requirements go unmet (reference removed to protect anonymity).

Because human beings are (a) social and (b) mortal, the needs of our lives go beyond mere physical subsistence to include the need to participate in the determination of the laws and policies that will govern our public, collective life, and the experience of time as free, as an open matrix of possibilities for life-valuable activity and experience that I have already noted above. We need democratic participation and free time in order to fully realise our agency, and, since life as a social self-conscious agent is a real potentiality of human beings, to be prevented from realising that essential human potentiality is a real harm. If we follow McMurtry’s definition of need, according to which ‘N is a need, if and only if, and to the extent that, deprivation of n results in reduction of organic capability’, then failure to develop or capability for social self-conscious agency is a real harm (McMurtry, 1998: 164). What Virilio does, if we think his critique in these terms, is to explain in fine-grained detail the forms of harm that social acceleration is causing to our need for the temporal conditions of democratic deliberation and philosophical thinking.

Thought in terms of materialist ethical principles, Virilio is not so much a critic of technology as such as a critic of the life-destructive use of technology, where ‘life-destructive’ means not only directly destructive of physical existence but damaging to the full set of human life-capacities. Indeed, he himself argues that his quarrel is not with technology, but technology disconnected from service to good human lives.

We need to be able to dominate the domination of progress. There is a distinction between progress and propaganda. Speed. The cult of speed is the propaganda of progress. The problem is that progress has been confused with its propaganda. To be clear, my fight is against the propaganda of progress and not progress itself. (Virilio, 2012a: 38)

To abolish the time for philosophical reflection, argument, and dialogue is tantamount to abolishing the intellectual inquiry into the values of human life.

Technology’s time is not past, but it can no longer continue like this. It can no longer continue … because we are losing sight of the meaning of what we are doing, and we are consciously building an uninhabitable world. (Virilio, 2012a: 80)

Whatever it is in particular that we identify as the best in the different spheres of human endeavour, all have this trait in common: they are achievements that required work in open-ended time frames of and whose outcome was uncertain. No one feels satisfaction at climbing a virtual mountain in a video game, but only through risking oneself doing the real thing. Human life-value plays out in physical space, through projects that require open-ended time frames, for the sake of other people to whom one is tied by bonds of interdependence, friendship, family, and love. Money-value, by contrast, which drives the technological acceleration of society beyond human speed limits, regards the time-structure of free human life as an impediment to be overcome once for all:

this digital disruption, in which the reign of quantity is mobilized to sweep away everything in its path, in the name of profit, that veritable geocruiser of an astronomical financial history, in which the just-in-time delivery systems of the closed circuit of the world economy turn the warehouse, or the abandoned dock, into the latest vehicle in a mass movement of Progress that destroys, one by one, the stasis of common places, along with the stability of social bonds. This is the futurism of an uninhabitable instant. (Virilio, 2010: 31)

To choose a different course requires philosophical thought in the broad sense in which I have been using the term, and turning it to life-valuable ends, i.e., universal goals embedded in the bio-social nature of human beings. To reiterate by way of conclusion, those goals concern, on the one hand, satisfying our fundamental life-requirements for the sake of, on the other hand, the comprehensive expression of our life-capacities: feeling, imagination, thought, creative activity, and mutualistic relationship. These materialist ethical values, implied but not explicated in Virilio’s critique of accelerated capitalism, provide the key to explain the depth problems the acceleration of society beyond the speed limits of philosophical thought cause.