Number is not merely numeration. Since the founding of the Quantified Self (QS) movement in 2007 by Wired editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, self-tracking has increasingly cultivated self-knowledge through continuously captured personal dataânumbers that come to function not only descriptively but authoritatively, granting them a quasi-clerical authority. This essay develops a philosophy of number through an examination of the QS movement, arguing that number reconstitutes the humanâtechnology relation as a numberâself relation under a quasi-clerical regime of computational governmentality.
A Philosophy of Number
This essay asks what kind of philosophy the Quantified Self (QS) movement pursues through self-tracking, and how this philosophy reconstitutes the humanâtechnology relation as a relation between number and self under what may be called a quasi-theocratic regime of computational governmentality in the digital era. It argues that the QS movement institutes a technology of the self-grounded in the computational enhancement of numberâa configuration I conceptualise as a philosophy of numberâthereby rendering self-tracking a form of secular asceticism oriented toward numerical divinity, such that self-optimisation comes to resemble doing penance before the number.
It should come as no surprise that such a conceptualisation is possibleâand thus intelligibleâonly within a historical moment in which the governmentality of computational apparatuses, together with their associated data deluge, has become quasi-omniscient, operating under the sovereignty of a quasi-theocracy. Within this philosophy of number, the individual human body is positioned as an imperfect, opaque, and noisy somaâone that must be optimised and transformed into a Quantified Self through habitual, attentive self-tracking mediated by digital devices. In this process, the soma is reconstituted as body data: observable, decipherable, and readable. These data are first manually entered by the self-tracker; they are then periodically captured by tracking devices and translated into numerical metricsâcurves, graphs, dashboards, or signalsâthrough which the slogan âself-knowledge through numbersâ is operationalised as a regime of visible indicators.
Nevertheless, my argument would amount to little more than a familiar critique if I simply treated this philosophy of number as a digital version of Stiegler's âtechnicization through calculationâ. In Stieglerâs account, technicization through calculation involves a process of numeration that entails a loss of originary and apodictic meaning, driving Western knowledge âdown a path that leads to a forgetting of its origin, which is also a forgetting of its truthâ (1998, 3â4). Under this reading, the QS movementâs slogan of âself-knowledge through numbersâ would represent merely another instance of knowledgeâs technicizationâyet another iteration of the Husserlian diagnosis of âthe crisis of the European sciencesâ (Stiegler 1998, 3â4).
Numerical Divinity in Platoâs Timaeus
A philosophy of number must begin by asking what ânumberâ means. In this sense, Platoâs Timaeus can be read as a prototypical philosophy of number. In the Timaeus, number figures as the consistent and enduring principle of Platonic cosmogony: the Demiurge, a skilled craftsman god, fashions the cosmos in the likeness of an eternal paradigm through mathematical proportion, geometry, and harmony. Platoâs Demiurge thus appears as a divine agent of ratio who imposes order numerically. This stands in contrast to strands of Presocratic Greek natural philosophyâfor example, Empedoclesâwhich tend to explain the formation of the cosmos and of living beings as the outcome of contingent encounters and chance combinations of parts (Plato 2008, xvi, 17, 25).
Moreover, in the Timaeus, the ordered sequence of numbers is bound to the moving âlikeness of eternityâ fashioned by the Demiurge: it names a principle through which cosmic becoming is rendered intelligible, and it is something we experience as timeâmeasurable, readable time. On this view, numerationâthe practice of numberingâis not merely an instrumental form of calculation, as contemporary critique of technoscience would have it; rather, it is intrinsically bound up with a kind of ânumerical divinityââan ordering power that governs the becoming of the cosmos and of living beings, as the Timaeus suggests. Indeed, it is this philosophy of number that makes the Timaeus read almost like a religious text. To recognize and grasp numerical divinity is, in effect, to think through what comes to be as suchâthrough the characterless âreceptacleâ that Plato introduces to name that in which phenomena occurs and out of which they are formedâin order to maintain the decisive distinction between âwhat is it that always is, but never comes to be, and what is it that comes to be but never isâ (Plato 2008, xlix,16, 43). In this way, one grasps the spatio-temporal conditions that shape the human body and soul. In this sense, we might even imagine that the motto of a âself-trackerâ in the Timaeus would be: âRead the numbers set before you, and know thyselfâ.
Penance to Number
In the petabyte era, the philosophy of number takes on a different imperative. The self-trackerâs maxim becomes: Read the numbers and optimise yourself. Under a computational quasi-theocracy grounded in petabyte-scale datasets and algorithmic governance, numbers are ordained into personal digital tracking devices and circulated back to individual self-trackers as authoritative signs. The self-tracker comes to place faith in these numbers, consult them daily, and cultivate an attentive habit of scrutinising bodily irregularitiesâor incipient illnessâbefore the tribunal of metrics. Health and self-improvement are then pursued in accordance with what the numbers demand, as if one were doing penance before the numberâa form of secular asceticism, as I have called it.
Instead of following post-phenomenology's humanâtechnologyâworld trajectory, I propose a numberâtechnologyâself framework to indicate an epistemic shift from the lifeworld to life itself. Post-phenomenology privileges the lifeworld and approaches technology as a mediator of worldhoodâa relatively neutral relay that reconfigures how the world appears in experience (whether through embodiment or alterity relations). A philosophy of number, by contrast, centres the analysis on life. Under conditions of computational governmentality and data proliferation, technology no longer functions merely as a mediator of world-disclosure but as a quasi-clerical authority that ordains numbers as normative signs and organises practices of self-scrutiny around metrics. This process installs what Foucault, in Technologies of the Self (1988), called âtechnologies of the selfââconfession and examination as practices producing self-knowledge. Self-tracking thus becomes an economy of optimisation that resembles penance paid to the number, as the lived self is increasingly renouncedâor displacedâin favour of the quantified âdata doubleâ (Gerlek and Weydner-Volkmann 2022).
In conclusionâalbeit not a closed oneâmy philosophy of number examines how quasi-clerical computational governmentality produces the penitent subject by binding the Quantified Self to the coercive stickiness of numerical data-memory. Yet it does not stop at critique: it points beyond this bind, toward a practice of philosophising off-ness-in-motionâa movement of active dis-attachment from the viscous hold of single-metric normalisation.
References
- Gerlek, Selin, and Sebastian Weydner-Volkmann. 2022. âSelf-Tracking and Habitualization. (Post)-Phenomenological and Pragmatist Perspectives on Reflecting Habits with the Help of Digital Technologiesâ, In: Selin Gerlek, Sarah Kissler, Thorben MĂ€mecke, and Dennis Möbus (eds.): Von Menschen und Maschinen: Mensch-Maschine-Interaktionen in digitalen Kulturen, 136â149.
- Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
- Martin, Luther H., Huck Gutmann, and Michel Foucault. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
- Plato, Robin Waterfield, and Andrew Gregory. Timaeus and Critias. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
- Stiegler, Bernard, Richard Beardsworth, and George Collins. Technics and Time / Vol. 1, the Fault of Epimetheus, Transl. [From the French] by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Technics and Time. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Author Bio
Zhanglun Dai is a Research Masterâs student in the Gender Studies programme at Utrecht University.