Introduction
Post-modern societies, those economies that are based on a highly technological knowledge, lay on a structural paradox: they push on knowledge and innovation but they are based on a form of non-knowledge which is, thus, structurally at the heart of the governance of innovation. Emerging technologies, in particular those aimed at enhancing human performances, such as nanotechnologies, synthetic biology, robotics, involve an ensemble of risks which is, indeed, the core of their novelty but, at the same time, only partially known. The development of scientific knowledge seems thus to entail an unavoidable sphere of unknown which is the essence of the process of innovation. The existence of this paradox, which is internal to the epistemic structures of being-there, was addressed by Bataille during his reflection on non-knowledge (Bataille 1998). Human enhancement technologies, with their legacy of risks and uncertainty, involving the set of values and rights at the base of post-modern societies (ter Meulen 2012; Koops, Pirni 2013), show that the dominance and control of non-knowledge are the core of European governance. Not production of knowledge but management of non-knowledge is, thus, the profound meaning of the practices that steer the development of emerging technologies in Europe. This process of management involves a set of practical knowledge and disciplines whose usage is crucial for the EU governance. Their balance requires thus an awareness of the consequences of their missed coordination. In this context the radical plurality of governmental tools, of legal, ethical and technical nature, interacts within the whole framework of governance by determining trajectories of innovation processes. Within this framework also human rights are an example of governmental instrument, especially if they are considered from the legal standpoint (Ruggiu 2013a). But due to their indeterminacy and their nature in the balance between the ethical and the legal realm, they run the risk of being weakened both as legal tools and as resources for ethics. This weakness is also the weakness of the whole governance of emerging technologies, since human rights question the justification of governance choices at their very root. Indeed, human rights represent the framework for the legitimacy of political choices, as well as the premise of the coherence of overall governance (Ruggiu 2013b). In order for such political choices to work at best, we need to distinguish the ethical from the legal field. This is the only way we can efficaciously use their resources as a whole. In this sense reflection on human rights can fully contribute improving the efficiency of mechanisms of governance and foster an awareness that the dominance of non-knowledge needs a clear set of principles and the control of its possible usages. This awareness can represent a form of wisdom whose presence is increasingly needed if we want to cope with the challenges of our technological modernity.
The age of techno-science in risk societies
«Know thyself!» (γνῶθι σεαυτόν) was inscribed in the forecourt of the temple of Apollo at Delphi. By recalling this inscription Socrates started his philosophy as rational analysis of the Self and its limits. According to Socrates, the starting point of this route towards the wisdom is the abandonment of the common knowledge and of a dogmatically conceived technical knowledge in favour of «knowledge of the not-knowing» (anything). «I know that I know nothing» (ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα) is one of the most famous sayings attributed by Plato’s dialogues to Socrates. This means that the finite nature of the human condition shall be the starting point of any experience. The historical nature of understanding was also the epistemological context of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics (Gadamer 1983). Our understanding is always shaped, influenced and conditioned by the anticipatory nature of our knowledge: by its prejudices, its past experiences, its foresight. The technological revolution, with the continuous development of new applications, questions the structures of human understanding. The finite nature of our knowledge seems to be forced by the endless possibilities of techno-science both with regard to the historical nature of being-there and the Socratic experience of non-knowledge. The possibility of a better integration between man and technology, which is opened by several applications of robotics, nanotechnologies, synthetic biology, contends with values and principles of post-modern societies. These technologies have a pervasive character, since they are not only around us, but they consist of applications that are on and inside the human body, especially in the case of human enhancement (Koops - Pirni 2013). This phenomenon is leading towards a better man/machine integration. For example, thanks to nanotechnologies scientists at Georgia Tech have crafted a new type of touch-reactive material that could give robotic prosthesis a human-like sense of touch (Wu et al. 2013). Pizotronic transistors are capable of converting mechanical motion directly into electronic controlling signals. Thus this innovation could represent a considerable step forward for both the development of new humanoid robots and rehabilitation robotics applications. The legal, ethical and sociological implications of these applications are, instead, controversial and, partially, still unknown. The diffusion of new research fields and new technological applications represents both an opportunity of greater development and a source of new risks (Beck 2000), most of them unknown, which needs to be governed by new and efficient regulatory tools. Not only the rise of new scientific research fields gives rise to unforeseeable (future) problems for the regulator, but also the spread of new technological products in the market (e.g. nanotechnologies) needs now the development of a different regulatory approach (Ruggiu 2013b). Also in front of the commercialization of new highly technological products someone has talked about a sort of mass experimentation (Wynne - Felt 2007), meaning that the ambit of what we do not know (and is an essential part of our present society) is nowadays even more important. Current societies are increasingly risk societies. Chernobyl and Fukushima are a dramatic case of possibilities that this process of risk distribution entails. This increasing mass of uncertainties needs the provision of efficient forms of normative control. Like in Ancient Greece, we need to develop a new awareness with regard to our world and our capacity to regulate it. It is clear that old normative tools, such as codes or statute law, cannot follow this uncontrolled race alone. Thus, in the international context there is a diffusion of normative instruments, different from the traditional hard law tools, with regard to techno-scientific challenges.
The epistemology of risk and the unavoidable presence of the unknown
The concept of risk is «an essentially value-laden concept» (Hansonn 2005). Risks are always strictly connected to an unavoidable lack of knowledge. This fact makes the attempt at managing the technological risk intrinsically depending on the human factor. Risk is a multi-semantic concept. Definitions of risk can be embedded in two different conceptions: the first one defines risk as an entity of the real world (‘objective risk’, ‘real risk’), and the second defines risk as the result of a human judgment or as the application of a given knowledge to uncertainty (‘subjective risk’, ‘observed risk’, ‘perceived risk’). With regard to the epistemological studies on risk, the economics literature distinguishes risk from uncertainty. Both relate to unknown, but risk differs from the latter in being an attempt to control the unknown by applying a knowledge based on the orderliness of experience. The world is ordered and, relying on the regular experience of it, it is possible to manage what escapes our ordinary knowledge. The past, statistically shaped, is what ties a known present to an unknown future. Instead, uncertainty is a unascertainable phenomenon, a phenomenon which radically escapes our past knowledge, and our rationality. The rise of the concept of risk marks a shift from the mind-set of fate to one of choice (Althaus 2005). In the colloquial usage risk and uncertainty are conceptually treated as the same thing, but the ideal of diminishing, if not nullifying, uncertainty through a use of rationality is central in techno-science as such: everything, including life, is measureable and calculable in terms of probability. In this sense, according to the epistemological risk approach, emerging technologies should rationally follow our past technological experience. Thus risk would emerge as a quantitative notion, completely measurable and translatable in rational terms. For several reasons this is not possible. For example, probability no longer leads to a sort of regularity found in nature, but in the subject (Dupuy 2004). It is an attempt at rationalizing uncertainty in the technological field, by reducing and controlling it in epistemological terms. But this point is what is contradicted by the intrinsic status of emerging technologies. Because of their novelty, the original state of uncertainty cannot be eliminated: research is not completely developed yet. Emerging technologies, though they present a partially calculable set of risks, have an unavoidable core of unknown that is unpredictable, a core which avoids our control, our dominance, completely. In this sense, emerging technologies deeply question our concept of control, or, in Bataille’s words, of sovereignty. Measuring risk is problematic for two fundamental reasons (Hansonn 2005). First, the probability weighing is contested by the proponents of the precautionary approach, who want to give precedence to the prevention of large-scale accidents, though improbable. Secondly, the expectation value approach deals with the risk as an impersonal entity, by paying no attention to how risks and benefits are either connected or distributed. The relationship between people affected by risks and benefits is crucial for the way each person appraises risk. Measuring risk is an activity heavily affected by a risk of rhetoric. Most of our life, we handle dangers without knowing their probability. Those analysing risks can proceed as if decisions were taken under known conditions, whilst those conditions are not. When there is a statistically framed experience one collects and analyses its data and uses them to understand future equipollent experiences. This method can be only partially used with new and untested technologies, those that can produce a sufficient experience after many years. The development of new technologies leads also to the overlapping of sources of risk and their uncontrolled production, which makes the causality relation chaotic. If we assume that the cause-effect relationship is chaotic, then also the very idea of planning and adopting precautions seems to be a non-sense. Thus, emerging technologies are associated both with a quantifiable risk and with non-quantifiable uncertainty. While we are able to reduce the risks of a certain technology to a numerically quantifiable probabilistic value, there will always be a degree of uncertainty which will escape this analysis. This inextricability of risk and uncertainty makes the concept of risk closer to the theological dimension of mystery. Risk is a paradox in itself since it is at the same time calculable and incalculable, objective and subjective, visible and invisible, individual and collective.
Getting to know non-knowledge
In a set of conferences held between 1953 and 1954, Bataille dealt with the issue of not-knowing, meant in its sacred acceptation, arguing that it is possible to develop a form of knowledge with regard to not-knowing. This is a paradox because it contradicts that there is nothing to say about what one ignores. Ignorance produces knowledge. It sounds strange, but this paradox is very topical in the emerging technologies era. Non-knowledge is essentially a non-issue, notwithstanding at the discourse level it is an issue, meaning that it is absolutely intelligible, and for the same reason it is the dissolution of the problem. Bataille addresses a set of experiences that can lead us towards non-knowledge: death, sacrifice, laughter and the experience of tears. Everyone is a complete outsider with reference to death, as we are with an under lock and key trunk we ignore the content of. The experience of our death, as well as the experience of the death of people we love, essentially transcends us. We can represent death but at the same time we do know that its representation is more than incorrect. It is a form of non-knowledge, a form of absurd, because we try to imagine a situation in which, for definition, there is no possibility for imagination, due to the radical absence of a being that can imagine, describe, and know. This is the reason why the last man on Earth would be in a dimension of absolute non-sense. Another experience connected with not-knowing is that of laughter and its symmetrical opposition of tears. One of the most worthwhile aspects of the unknown is given by what is ridiculous, that is by those objects that generate in us that inner upheaval called laugh. Even though this phenomenon is inexplicable, we can provide suggestions on how to make people laugh, which means that we are able of eliciting laughter. We do not know the object of laughter, which remains unknown, but we certainly have some sort of knowledge of it. This is a practical knowledge which does not abolish the mystery of its object, but contributes to building a framework of dominance in which the unknown takes shape. This does not cancel the fact that the meaning of laughter remains essentially unknown. One laughs not because of something we cannot explain as we are incapable of going more into depth into the question, but because the unknown makes us laugh. In the unknown, non-knowledge, as an object, and not-knowing, as a process, coincide, meaning that humans reach a dimension where any process of knowing is reset. In this sense there is no apparent reason to distinguish non-knowledge from not-knowing, because the development of knowledge reaches a moment where any process is annulled and it becomes itself a non-sense. In this regard, the zero degree corresponds to the annihilation of any process of knowledge, a space where the process is de-processualized and the object is de-objectivized. This reflection on the nature of the unknown, with all its paradoxes, provocations, its insights and its off-key moments, strongly arouses an in-depth evaluation of the limit, the non of being-there. The hermeneutics of Hans Georg Gadamer faced the question of the historical nature of our epistemological structure. At the core of hermeneutics is the theme of understanding. In this sense, language is the medium of a dialogic process with tradition, meaning that it is not the means but the dimension in which being-there is in constant dialogue with tradition. According to hermeneutics, existing is interpreting. In this way, understanding becomes the constitutive structure of experience. Nothing can exist without its interpretation, without the linguistic translation of its intelligibility in a dimension which necessarily transcends individual solipsism. Man should thus be meant as an entity whose being consists in understanding. But this activity is historically determined, is finite, since that entity whose being is interpreting is placed in the finite dimension of tradition. In this sense man is being-there and is deeply conditioned by its finitude. Being-there faces every day the limits of its understanding. Understanding is conditioned by the anticipatory nature of the structure of our knowledge. Knowledge is melt away into the forces of its prejudices, but prejudice has also a positive function since it can be interpreted as the starting point for questioning being-there. The process of knowing is essentially an hypothetical enterprise and in this sense is not completely rationally structured, meaning that the unknown is an unavoidable part of its course. But this also means that in this kind of knowledge a rational articulation, though partial, is also possible.
Governance of emerging technologies in uncertain times
A new sort of risk is accompanying the raise of the technological revolution in contemporary societies. This elicits new regulatory efforts at controlling the advance of knowing. Producing norms means having the capacity for producing knowledge. Such capability is a kind of know-how. Within legal hermeneutics law is a form of “art” (from Latin ars), a practical knowledge (Zaccaria 1990) which involves a plurality of subjects: the legislator, judges, jurists. In the emerging technologies era also ethicists and scientists are all called to co-operate in regulation. In this sense the challenges of techno-scientific developments arouse new and flexible forms of knowledge in order for their novelty to be controlled and dominated. Within the European Union the development of emerging technologies accompanies the spread of regulatory instruments which has arisen as the so called «new governance turn» (Scott - Trubek 2002). Given the difficulty of devising new hard law tools capable of forestalling risks laid by new emerging fields, the Union has fostered a regulatory framework constituted by guidelines, declarations or recommendations containing principles and standards or voluntary measures (self-regulation tools, voluntary codes of conduct, third-party certification systems). Such measures are not supported by any formal sanction, but can nevertheless have legal effects. Not only legal norms contribute to the governance of emerging technologies, but also ethics actually plays an increasing role in Europe. This implies the interaction of different subjects that can be different from public actors. Ethical committees, corporations, NGO’s, international organizations constitute the indispensable support for on-going technological governance. This flexible approach should have been able to largely involve stakeholders. The Commission code of conduct on nanosciences and nanotechnologies research can be taken as an example. In this framework the recourse to forms of hard legislation should have been only exceptional. This plan has been only partially successful and correctives of hard law nature have subsequently become necessary, giving rise to a sort of ‘case-by-case approach’. The current regulatory landscape in Europe is thus characterized by the interplay of different kinds of legal norms (hard and soft), of different spheres of normativity (legal, technical and ethical), and actors (public and private). Because of its contingent and fortuitous nature, this approach runs the risk of lacking due coherence (Ruggiu 2013b). In this sense, the set of goals laying at the base of legitimate choices of policy is fundamental. Values such as human rights on which European societies are built are strategic from this point of view. They are part of that know-how of practical nature which contributes to guide trajectories of governance. The development of all these forms of knowledge contributes to the creation of a kind of governance of risks. This regulatory complex also represents a form of control on the sphere of not-knowing, which accompanies the development of scientific knowledge. Nowadays an ensemble of scientific and non-scientific knowledge (of legal, ethical, technical nature) has produced a set of governance tools enabling us to dominate a world on which we can have only an indirect control. In this sense emerging technologies seem to confirm the fact that it is possible to develop a form of knowledge about not-knowing. Improving this knowledge is the most interesting challenge of our time. In contemporary societies wherein information technologies allow us to handle a wide range of information, governing non-knowledge has paradoxically become crucial. Nowadays controlling the possibilities of what is ignored and grows up with us is even more fundamental. The market cannot wait for the slow course of our scientific knowledge and the legislator does not want to assume the responsibility to stop or slow down the race towards progress. We cannot wait for uncertainty to be overcome. We cannot wait for risks to disappear. Risks are the measure and structure of our market and our irresponsibility (Beck 2000), but are also an unavoidable part of our world. Without risks there is no innovation. Without risks our high-technological societies could not exist. We should thus point out a consequence: if we can talk of the European knowledge society, this appears structurally connected to non-knowledge, which represents the engine of its development. Non-knowledge, understood in its lay meaning, is targeted by a new and pervasive form of knowledge of practical nature which characterizes our modern societies, since governing entails knowing. In this sense paradox is the most characterizing feature of our societies. Governance is an aspect of the process of ‘disenchantment of the world’ described by Weber. It is part of the process of the instrumentalisation of nature thanks to which non-knowledge can be controlled, but it leaves the question of its goals debatable (ter Muelen 2012). Human rights are in this sense a clear option already set out by contemporary societies, but in order to work at best they need to be clearly designed with a clear-cut distinction between ethical and legal fields. Since their indeterminacy undermines their workability both as a legal tool an as ethical principles, human rights are a weak tool of governance. European governance thus loses a fundamental guiding light in the process of steering the unknown: a resource able to set out goals of governance. Due to their nature in balance between the legal and the ethical realm human rights have been used by EU authorities mainly as merely ethical tools, confusing between the two spheres. This is the consequence of deeming them incapable of providing a practical tool for policies. On the contrary, thanks to the contribution of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights their content is not indeterminate and they are already capable of directing governance, providing it with the radar made essential by the development of emerging technologies, especially those on the human body. This is the only way the practical knowledge characterizing the Weberian process of ‘disenchantment of the world’ can envisage goals through which to direct the inexhaustible process of production of non-knowledge in post-modern societies. This is the only way the process of dominating not-knowing can be turned into a kind of wisdom.
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