Expanding the Noosphere and Re-elevating the Anthropos

The article argues that Bernard Stiegler's concept of the Neganthropocene, which calls for transforming the destructive technosphere into a constructive one, overlooks an important resource: psychedelics. Unlike the digital technologies Stiegler focuses on, psychedelics offer a nontechnical means to expand human noetic experience beyond the digital realm. They may grant access to dimensions of reality that could help humanity awaken to a postanthropocentric planet and commune with nonhuman intelligences in a shared noosphere. The author contends that this psychedelic pharmakon may be essential for the neganthropic transformation to succeed.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Stiegler understands the Anthropocene as the age in which planetary enframing engenders an avalanche of entropization, putting humanity’s survival at risk. To avoid catastrophe, the so-called technosphere should be transformed from an entropic-destructive into a negentropic-constructive assemblage, ushering in the Neganthropocene. Stiegler’s focus is on the noetic dimension, in particular as constituted and conditioned overwhelmingly today by the digital pharmakon. In this article I want to make a case for the importance of an entirely other noetic pharmakon not addressed by Stiegler: the nontechnical pharmakon of psychedelics, which allows for the expansion of humanity’s noetic frontier beyond the digital, providing access to dimensions of experience—and possibly also of reality—that may support the emerging neganthropos to awaken on a postanthropocentric planet in which it is enabled to commune in a noosphere made up by many other, nonhuman intelligences, which may prove essential for the neganthropic transformation to succeed.