Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2003 11:05:47 -0700 (PDT) From: That Pete <that_pete-AT-yahoo.com> Subject: H in the media Mapping the Debate Over Technology By Eugene Miller ... As noted above, some who refrain from advocating controls do so not because such efforts are undesirable, but because they are deemed to be fruitless. Martin Heidegger and Jacques Ellul are the most important thinkers of the past century to depict technology as an overwhelming or irresistible force, and certainly others, such as Gregory Stock, have suggested that technology now advances by its own dynamic, determining the shape of human institutions and defying all efforts to control it. Even so, the bulk of writing on this issue now comes from those who criticize ideas of "technological determinism" and "autonomous technology." These critics include historians who want to preserve room for human agency and choice (see the essays in Smith and Marx), philosophers who are sympathetic to Heidegger's critique of technology but reject his pessimism (see Andrew Feenberg), political theorists who advocate control through democratic initiatives (see Richard Sclove, Langdon Winner), sociologists who find "social construction" occurring at crucial junctures to bestow meaning on particular technologies and push their development in one direction or another (the SCOT approach), and economists who trace varying patterns of technological development and economic growth to human factors (see David S. Landes, Joel Mokyr, Nathan Rosenberg). ... Views that Emphasize Harms but see Controls as Ineffectual (lower right quadrant). Prior to the 1930s, there were many who saw the advance of technology as irresistible, but largely beneficial, and many others who feared technology's harms, but offered programs to combat them. Martin Heidegger was the key philosopher who emphasized at once the overwhelmingly harmful consequences of modern technology and the utter incapacity of humans to control or master it. According to Heidegger, technology is the destiny or fate of our time. We live inescapably in a technological age because the mysterious ground of being has opened itself up to us this way. Technology is no mere instrument or tool. It is a mode of revealing that determines our way of positioning ourselves in the world and perceiving its truth. More precisely, technology is a challenging revealing or "enframing," wherein all that is, including man himself, appears as raw material for our manipulation and use. This is its essence. Hope lies only with those few thinkers or poets who remain open to Being and the possibility of its coming to presence as some new truth. As Heidegger put it in an interview with Der Spiegel, "Only a god can save us." It is well known that Heidegger, as a university professor and later as Rector of Freiburg, embraced Nazism and worked for a time in its service. He sought to excuse this later by claiming that National Socialism at first had moved toward an adequate relationship to technology, one which, he might have supposed, would preserve community and high culture. This was the movement's "inner truth and greatness." Supposedly when the Nazis failed to carry through this program, he became disillusioned with it and formulated his distinctive view that technology is both uncontrollable and intrinsically malign.[xviii] By implication, people today in liberal societies who embrace technology approvingly, after Heidegger has explained its essence, are more blamable than he was for his early and hopeful embrace of Nazism. Post-war thinking about technological society and its ills was deeply influenced by Heidegger. His account offered no program of amelioration or reform, except for counseling a posture of openness to a new revelation of Being. Its effect, however, was to deepen the hostility that many in philosophical and literary circles felt towards technology and to provide them with a new way to formulate their opposition. Classical Marxism had taken a highly favorable view of technology's promise and its manageability, but under Heidegger's influence, leading works of the Frankfort School, most notably Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, came to view technology as a dehumanizing and uncontrollable force. Much writing today in Marxist circles is designed to recover the classical view by showing that technology is not inherently destructive, but mainly becomes so when developed under capitalism, and that it can be controlled democratically. Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society and George Parkin Grant's Technology and Justice advance arguments that are rather similar to Heidegger's, but unlike his they are grounded in Christian theology. Ellul, who had fought with the French Resistance during World War II, disassociated himself particularly from Heidegger's politics. Grant, an influential Canadian thinker, was more willing to acknowledge Heidegger's influence. http://www.techcentralstation.com/090203A.html __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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