Treating language as a self-running nature reduces humans to pilots of inert forces.

Evidence

If we are to make man arise in the midst of techniques which are applied all by themselves, of a language which speaks itself, of a science which constructs itself, of a city which builds itself according to its own laws, if meanings are fixed in in-itself while we preserve a human transcendence, then the role of man will be reduced to that of a pilot employing the determined forces of winds, waves, and tides in order to direct a ship. But gradually each technique in order to be directed toward human ends will require another technique; for example, to direct a boat, it is necessary to speak. Thus we shall perhaps arrive at the technique of techniques—which in turn will be applied by itself—but we shall have lost forever the possibility of meeting the technician. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1217

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the paradigmatic statement of how the reification of practice (language, science, city) degrades the human into a ‘pilot’ of forces — it explains the causal trajectory from the bad-faith reification of speech to the loss of the human subject. Dense, layered, and arguably the moral core of the entire book.
• XREF: This pilot image directly sets up Beauvoir’s central concern: the question of whether freedom can be submerged into roles under systems that run ‘by themselves’ — the ethics of situated freedom as resistance to this reduction. — connects to: The discourse of work and action reduces the human to a laboring animal. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 118; Orientalist discourse reduces human plurality to a few fixed collective abstractions; Ideologies reduce ideas to self-moving instruments for calculating history. (+2 more)
• SEED: The ‘technique of techniques’ — a self-applying system that devours access to its own practitioner — is a ready-made essay angle on how institutional automation (algorithms, bureaucratic process) similarly erases the human as subject.

Broader Connections

• The discourse of work and action reduces the human to a laboring animal. #complicates (0.85) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 118
• Ideologies reduce ideas to self-moving instruments for calculating history. #corroborates (0.85)
• Orientalist discourse reduces human plurality to a few fixed collective abstractions #exemplifies (0.82)
• Mastery over nature becomes mastery over other humans, weakening the individual. #corroborates (0.78)
• Descriptive grammarians distort living language by dissecting it into artificial parts. #exemplifies (0.72) — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 443