Maurizio Ferraris on the absolute device, your mobile, or at least mine, since my upgrade to the latest smartphone.

The cell phone, brining together in a single limited physical space all the functions that we have already listed (telephone, radio, cinema, television, e-mail, Web and data storage) is the absolute instrument. It is what the hand was for Aristotle and for Hegel. If we needed proof that German is a philosophical language, we could appeal to the fact that the Germans use a rather touching Anglicism for the cell phone, calling it ‘Handy’. And here we have to hand, within our grasp (as Heidegger would have put it Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit) the absolute tool, the machine that puts an end to all other machines because it summarises them all within itself. And the thing that is so serviceable – and the word ‘manageable’ has the Latin root for hand – is not, I repeat, an instrument for talking but an instrument for writing.

  ¶ 12:36 PM