File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0309, message 15


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


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