Gernot Böhme: Techno-Philosophy, Techno-Criticism - Sample No. 2

The Philosophy of Technology

1. Paradigms

The question is why a philosophy of technology should exist in the first place - in any case something that is to be more than philosophy in the trivial sense in which one might speak of a philosophy of skiing or a philosophy of flower-arrangement. Why should there also be a specific discipline known as the philosophy of technology taking its place alongside other philosophical disciplines such as ethics, aesthetics, logic, metaphysics and the philosophy of nature? What gives rise to the question is the paradoxical situation that, on the one hand, the philosophy of technology exists in point of fact (viz. in the form of publications, curricula and professorial chairs), while on the other hand no convincing paradigm of a philosophy of technology has appeared in the field. That may be because philosophy, in any case contemporary philosophy, belongs squarely among the humanities and researchers in the humanities on the whole have only a very superficial knowledge of technology - because few in any case have sought to see the phenomena of technology from the inside. Could this also be why their results have been paltry and in some cases downright dull?

Though it must be said that this assessment is not quite accurate. Enumerating philosophy's subdisciplines already suggests a place for a philosophy of technology under the rubric of the philosophy of nature. When Aristotle for instance divides being-in-general into what exists of its own natural accord and what exists by virtue of technology (phusei on, technē on) in his Physics, this indeed suggests the possibility of developing a philosophy of technology alongside the philosophy of nature; indeed, in light of the proliferation of technology in today's world, the need to do so is urgent. What mode of being could technical devices and objects be assimilated to? The question itself implies that the philosophy of technology would have to be an ontology of technological entities. With his notion of Zeug (material, "stuff"), the Martin Heidegger of Being and Time might provide a pointer: being of a technical nature is "material", Zeug, with the existential character of being ready-to-hand. The latter consists in the usefulness of technological objects. In general they fit inconspicuously into a field of meaning, only becoming noticeable if they cease to be useful, in which case they fall back into a different existential mode - that of being merely present-to-hand. Yet as illuminating as Heidegger's approach is, it really only suits traditional technology, handicraft technology; modern technology is another matter. Heidegger obviously saw the limitation himself and in his later philosophy went on to sketch a philosophy of technology that oversteps all limits.

Moreover, it is not true that the philosophy of technology is altogether lacking in paradigms. Beside the ontological paradigm that derives essentially from Aristotle and Heidegger, we must at least make mention of the paradigms whose roots lie in anthropology and the philosophy of history. The anthropological paradigm goes back to the sophist Protagoras, or rather to Plato, who ascribes it to Protagoras in his dialogue of the same name. On this interpretation of technology, the guiding question is "What is a human being?" Technology is a humanum, a human competence with the help of which human beings compensate for insufficient natural endowments or indeed become capable of getting by in the first place. Technology thus belongs to the essence of being human. Human beings are by nature deficient beings - as Gehlen was to put it in the twentieth century. They are what they are only insofar as they also develop culture. For Plato/Protagoras, social or political skill is part of the picture, not just physical equipment. In Plato the capacity for politics also comes under the heading of technology; it is the technē politike.

The negative estimate of technology implicit in this concept (technology for Plato is merely a makeshift of necessity) already elicited a strong response in antiquity; in its modern re-formulation in the work of Gehlen it is radically re-valued; for Gehlen, technology is no longer a sign of a limitation that animals are not subject to, but a mark of distinction, a capacity through which human beings surpass other animals. Using technology human beings can be free of the given conditions of life, they can emanciplate themselves from the world of nature. Through technology, humanity creates an environment that suits it; technology becomes second nature to it - an idea already to be found in the work of Marx. Admittedly, examples of the use of technology among animals were now identified too - dam-building among beavers and the like; however, even if we assume that the use of technology is in the end something natural to animals, viz. a genetically inherited pattern of behaviour, the difference between the technological worlds of humans and animals nonetheless remains spectacular. Leaving inventors of the ancient world like Daedelus, Heron and Archimedes to one side, since the advent of the modern world technological discovery has come to have a dynamism that connects it in an essential sense with ingenuity (Lat. ingenium). The paradigmatic technologist on this conception is not actually the craftsman but the engineer. In modernity, technology is no longer simply a means of survival, but a means of substantially enhancing life.

This is already to flag the transition to another of our paradigms, this one deriving from the philosophy of history. The anthropological paradigm might be said to take for granted an unchanging relation between human beings and technology; it fails to allow for historical change, even on the technological side of the ledger. Yet the history of technology is a sort of history unto itself and in relating it we can identify the major epochs in the relationship between human beings and technology. The most notable work to do so is not actually a work of philosophy, but a cultural history of nature, Serge Moscovici's Human History of Nature. Though one might not guess from the title, the book is also a cultural history of technology in the sense that it sets out the epochal differences in the characteristic relationship between forms of labour and concepts of nature. Handicraft work here corresponds to nature conceived according to the notions of matter and form, engineering is aligned with nature considered as an interconnected field of force and cybernetics with nature considered synthetically or as a construct. We can also talk here of the epoch of one or another dominant technology - thus of epochs dominated successively by form-giving handicraft technology, by mechanics and industrial technology as organising forces and by the controlling and ordering functions of Information Technology.

An interpretation of technology from the standpoint of the philosophy of history is actually to be found in the first philosophy of technology to explicitly identify itself as such. Ernst Kapp's philosophy of technology could also be subsumed under the anthropological paradigm, viz. insofar as Kapp seeks to interpret various technologies as projections of human bodily organs. In doing so he amplifies the Aristotelian notion of technology (that it imitates nature) by assuming that in technology human beings give external form to the structure of the human organism itself. Yet while the load-bearing structures of bridges may indeed resemble the lamella-structure of the human femur - and while the telephone network can certainly be interpreted as a sort of nervous system - it is of course easy to point to technologies that have no counterpart in the human body (the wheel for one). To be sure, there are grounds for interpreting technology as an imitation of nature. Nature's technical solutions prove time and again to be exemplary in terms of simplicity and efficiency: consider the stability of blades of grass from the structural point of view, the body-shape of the dolphin from the point of view of fluid mechanics, the capacity of the brain to store and process information. Yet imitation, especially today, is by no means unconscious. Rather, it is something based on research, viz. in the field of bionics.

The decisive point of Kapp's philosophy of technology however lies in his integration of technological development into the history of human consciousness. His magnum opus, the Principles of a Philosophy of Technology, is in effect the materialist counterpart to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Just as Hegel tracks the way spirit comes to consciousness of itself in the objective forms of its own works, so Kapp describes the way humans become conscious of themselves as embodied beings in their technological creations. The conceptual figure in Hegel and Kapp is one and the same: self-consciousness is attained by making the implicit explicit. According to Kapp, "self-consciousness thus proves to be the result of a process whereby knowledge of something external is converted into something internal." Just as Hegel thinks that in his very philosophy the world of spirit finally comes full circle, so Kapp thinks human beings achieve true self-consciousness in his Principles of a Philosophy of Technology. In Kapp's quasi-prophetic world-historical terms "the conscious creation of technology might shine brightly in the foreground of human achievement; it remains nothing more than a reflection of the depths of the unconscious, the elaboration of a consciousness that was first redeemed by rudimentary tools."

While Kapp's philosophy of technology is hardly known outside specialist circles, Martin Heidegger's later philosophy of technology has had considerable influence in the history of ideas. What makes this all the more astonishing is that Heidegger consciously positioned himself at a considerable distance from all matters technological both in life and thought. Yet it was probably for just this reason that he hit a raw nerve among those of his contemporaries who were disquieted by technological development. His compact Die Frage nach der Technik (The Question concerning Technology) can be read as a radical criticism of modern technology - on Heidegger's picture a technology that reduces nature to a mere resource, destroys traditional forms of life (and thereby traditional forms of technology too) and in the end turns human beings themselves into mere raw material. Heidegger paints into his highly stylised picture of Geschick ("destining") everything that for the individual appears overwhelming about modern technological developments - everything, indeed, that might be soberly described in terms of the emergence in modernity of a third cultural super-structure alongside the state and the market economy. Under the rubric of Gestell ("enframing"), technology itself becomes an epoch in the history of Being; it is the epoch when Being discloses itself through a technical Herausforderung ("challenging-forth") and thereby withdraws all the more decisively. Yet in the process the role of human beings in maintaining the openness of Being, indeed in maintaining truth itself, becomes open to view - and it is here that Heidegger detects the possibility of deliverance. It is impossible today to go along either with the subtly sanctimonious formula Heidegger borrows from Hölderlin:

"Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst
Das Rettende auch."
("Where the danger is, there too//The saving power grows.")

or his associative style of presentation, haunted as it is by obscure readings of Greek and German etymology. Yet something remains of Heidegger's philosophy of technology that is significant - a view of technology that, like the entire ontological paradigm, goes back to Aristotle. However, here we can speak of a further paradigm, viz. an epistemological paradigmatic model.

In his Nichmochean Ethics, Aristotle enumerates a series of types of knowledge, forms of aletheia. Reason, wisdom, science and ethical insight are on the list, but so too is technology. The high regard for technology as an independent form of knowledge is all the more impressive in that technology doesn't even appear on the graded scale of types of knowledge Plato sets out in the so-called "analogy of the divided line" in The Republic. Though one should not draw the conclusion that Plato's attitude to technology is therefore contemptuous - for example that it involves looking down on artisans as too banausic. On the contrary, it was the expertise of craftsmen that best met Socrates' challenge to his contemporaries' claims to knowledge. Likewise Plato's thorough-going rationalisation of all forms of public activity called for the development of a specific technique - a technike - appropriate to each activity.

In Aristotle technology is characterised as a form of knowledge that guides the fabrication of things. Making things (poiesis) for Aristotle is a form of human action to be distinguished from praxis - the (self-contained) fulfilment of life's activities. Making has its aim in a product or work, whereas the goal of praxis lies in itself.
This is the late Heideggerian point of departure; for Heidegger thinks that with the advent of modern science, all forms of knowledge have come under the domination of the technical model of knowledge. Since Galileo, indeed, it has been in technical contexts, through experimentation and measurement, that nature has been an object of knowledge; according to Descartes' maxim, we should seek to understand nature as the expert craftsman understands the products of his craft: to know something means knowing how it can be fabricated. Science thus becomes an exercise in technically reproducing nature: that at least would be the identifiable meaning of Heidegger's speculations about the history of Being. The epistemological model of technology implicit in the technologist's view of the world becomes the dominant form of knowledge in modernity. The critical potential of Heidegger's philosophy of technology is hence essentially a critique of the modern world-view - a critique of science similar to what we find in Goethe's Theory of Colour and continuing all the way through to Habermas' Science and Technology as "Ideology" and the phenomenology of the present-day. Goethe and the phenomenologists object to the technical model of knowledge by opposing it to a knowledge that establishes a personally meaningful subjectively coloured orientation with the help of a systematic description of phenomena. Critical Theory on the other hand objects to the technical model of knowledge on the grounds that it is technocratic. What Aristotle calls poiesis and  praxis has its place in a critical theorist such as Habermas under the rubric of purposive-rational action or interaction. In opposition to technocratic knowledge, critical theory posits a form of knowledge capable of effecting practical change through critical reflection about existing social circumstances - reflection that is guided through and through by what Horkheimer called "an interest in rational conditions."




Once these four paradigms of the philosophy of technology have passed muster we might well ask why, in spite of such splendid beginnings, we still have the impression that a true philosophy of technology hardly exists. Our disquiet here can only stem from the fact that these philosophies don't really help us to deal with the problems that technology actually poses. Speaking generally, we can say that they all view technology as a domain unto itself - something that human beings may indeed stand in essential relation to, but that in the final analysis remains foreign to them. Human beings are what they are; they cannot but make use of - or, as Heidegger says, cannot but be made use of by - technology. What concerns us though today - and what will concern us in the present book - is invasive technology: technology with the potential to alter what we understand as the specifically human aspect of human life.

The main consequence of this way of approaching technology as a domain unto itself is that we set out to grasp something like the essence of technology. This is understandable in a philosophical context and of course goes back to the tradition initiated by Socrates' insistence on the question ti ēstin - what kind of thing is that? However, the decisive question today cannot be the question of the essence of technology, but rather the problem of technology as a process - as technification. Technology considered as technification is not something external that supplements what is essentially human, but something whose role in shaping what it is to be human needs to be the basic theme of our discussion. The concept of technification requires us to comprehend technology as part of a dynamic field of historical tension which can generate resistances and, in certain circumstances, release the potential for criticism.

In specific terms, we can say the following: in making an in principle distinction between technology and nature, the ontological model of the philosophy of technology contains the theoretical seeds of a critical approach that has been and will likely continue to be highly effective in some parts of the world. The potential difficulty here is that the technification of nature could mean that the concept of nature loses its normative - and hence its critical - relevance vis-a'-vis technology.

What speaks for the anthropological approach is that it takes technology's meaning for human beings seriously, in particular its meaning for human beings' conception of themselves. However, this approach revolves too narrowly around an instrumental model of technology; it views technology as a means to an end. It is not that the anthropological paradigm has somehow come to seem obsolete because it has been overtaken by technological developments themselves - though it is true that modern technologies can no longer be understood using the concept of utility or from the point of view of instrumental relations. Rather, it is precisely in an anthropological sense that this strand of the philosophy of technology is out-dated. We can no longer speak of an invariant human essence in the sense of mainstream historical anthropology. The task of the philosopher of technology is rather to arrive ever anew at an adequate historical conception of the human self. Thus, for example, one historically important way of differentiating human beings from other animals no longer plays much of a role, particularly today – on the one hand our proximity to the animal kingdom is something we no longer shrink from. On the other hand, the gulf between the human and the animal – in part precisely because of the development of technology – has become both unmistakable and unbridgeable.

Approaches to the philosophy of technology that originate in the philosophy of history come across nowadays as grand but fantastic speculations. If they fail to speak to us, this is precisely because they tend to view technological development as an unconscious process or as an over-powering fate. They function like metaphysical glosses on the old trope of technology as a demonic power. In the background of Heidegger’s thought on the subject one detects a radical critique of modern technology. But precisely in stylising technology as a destining that human beings cannot but conform to, it again leaves us at the mercy of historical developments.

The epistemological paradigm of the philosophy of technology provides the most promising basis for critique. Yet alternative forms of knowledge such as phenomenology which would be well suited to articulating alternative pictures of what distinguishes technically-mediated experience of the world are yet to be used to critically describe the processes of technification. Instead, the alternatives (Goethe’s theory of colour vs. Newtonian optics, the world of science vs. the everyday life-world) have simply been placed alongside one another without any reference to the dramatic changes that arise when one such point of view begins to displace the other. In particular what is overlooked on the epistemological model is that things themselves evince different structures when they come within the purview of one or another type of knowledge. In short, what is lacking here is an awareness that a technification of our ways of seeing also alters the very world in which we live.

2. Philosophy of Technology as Critique

What would a philosophy of technology that sought to understand the meaning of technology from the point of view of technification have to look like? For example, do theories of rationalisation or modernisation already provide such a philosophy? These indeed are theories that attempt to pinpoint the characteristic marks of ongoing change – both in the lives of individual human beings and in human society at large. Examples of such theories are to be found in the work of Max Weber and Jacques Ellul and although both are actually social theories, they could also be regarded as philosophies of technology were one to accept their preferred definitions of technology/technique as something like a system of rules oriented towards efficiency. As we have noted, one can speak in this sense of a pianist’s technique or of a technique for producing goods. As we have also seen, such a concept of technology/technique has its origins in Aristotle’s notion of techne, though the emphasis in Weber and Ellul, in typically modern fashion, is not so much on what is fabricated or created but on the efficiency of the fabrication process itself. No doubt this is a notion of technology very well tailored to capturing the dynamics of processes of technification and the totalising tendency associated with it. In the modern world, technology is indeed no longer an object or set of objects we can neatly separate from others; rather it is something omnipresent, something that pervades everything from the life of the individual to the way we shape the environment. The only problem is that this concept of technology is in a certain sense too idealistic. It completely neglects the concrete forms technology takes on, from craft tools and machine tools all the way up to the infrastructure of our communication and transport systems. Granted these systematic arrays of material instruments also serve the purpose of rationalisation and increased efficiency - in such systematic arrays the latter take on material form as it were. Yet they also condition human relationships in quite a different way to mere rationalisation; through their very existence they set the conditions of possibility of the lives of individuals and societies. Driving a car is not simply a more efficient form of walking, to phone someone is not simply to speak to him or her at a distance, a sleeping pill is not simply a faster means of falling asleep, and the integration of our society via the internet is no mere rationalisation of human interaction. As a systematic array of material means, technology does not simply leave as they were the human relationships whose fulfilment it serves, it transforms them structurally. And it is these structural changes which exceed the scope of concepts like rationalisation and modernisation and ought to be referred to as technification in the true sense.

We have to regard technology as a system of material means because the interpretative model provided by hand tools no longer suffices in light of modern technological developments. The meaning of modern technology can no longer be grasped by considering isolated technical devices because what the latter are can be understood today only in terms of their integration as parts of systems. In general, technical devices no longer perform the tasks they are supposed to perform when de-coupled from the systems they are usually embedded in. Thus a car is no longer functional in the absence of the relevant material infrastructure made up of streets, petrol stations and traffic signals, as well as more abstract socially defined structures like road rules, insurance, etc. Indeed, not even something seemingly as simple as a wrist-watch functions as it should without reference to global measurements of time.

Technology that takes the form of systems of material means also requires us to disregard the concept of functionality in certain respects. Though Heidegger is right to suggest that the classical technological object, the hand tool, has to be understood in terms of its usefulness, this is not something that can be said of modern technologies in general. The latter may well be devised for particular purposes initially, but once they are in existence they can serve other purposes as well. A classic example is the internet. Originally developed as a tool for military communication, today it fulfils a vast array of functions – including the role of a new public realm, a virtual market place and a social network.

The basis of this multi-functionality is precisely the materiality of these new forms of technology. Once installed, they function independently of their creators’ intentions. New users can devise entirely new usages. We have reached the point where it is possible to speak of the technological legacy of a society (as opposed to that of individual inventors and innovators) – even of the technological legacy of humanity as a whole. Technological infrastructure outlives the generation of its creators and in turn supplies the basic pre-conditions for the lives of subsequent generations – precisely the sort of effect one can call technification in an emphatic sense of the word. Clearly culture itself is a sort of inheritance that marks out what is possible in life from one generation to the next. Yet it does so only insofar as it is continually assimilated anew through processes of socialisation and learning. Technological infrastructure, on the other hand, sets boundary conditions that are given quasi-naturally; Marx speaks quite rightly in this regard about a second human nature. To be sure, each generation defines and re-defines technological possibilities. Each assimilates given technological pre-conditions in its own way. Yet to begin with socialisation requires accommodation; it is above all up-and-coming generations that take pre-existing technology as a kind of natural given.

Under the conditions of contemporary life, technology is thus not simply a means with which to reach certain ends or the means we have to invent from scratch to reach ends. Rather it is primarily what we find given as a pre-condition – a pre-condition that defines in all cases what a human life can be. Technology has become a sort of infrastructure of human life itself, a medium of human life. What it is to travel in our contemporary life-world, what communication is, what work is, what perception is, can no longer be determined independently of technical structures. And yet we should avoid focusing solely on the limitations of our predicament here, for technology is clearly what also makes many previously unthinkable forms of human existence possible in the first place. A classic example is the enormous expansion of the human power of sight by means of the telescope and the microscope. Travel is another obvious example. Extending the range of the humanly possible was indeed precisely what stood in the foreground of modern scientific and technological development from the outset, for example in the work of Bacon. If today we are compelled to emphasise the limitations associated with technology and its intrusion into so many aspects of human life, it is important to bear in mind that limitations do not necessarily imply the opposite of an enlargement of the field of the possible, but can also mean limits in the sense of formal conditions: by penetrating into the way human beings behave and relate, technology defines what behaviour and relationships actually are. To stick with examples for a moment: compared to seeing something with the naked eye, seeing something through a telescope is a different type of vision; compared to train travel, air travel is likewise a different type of travel, involving the substitution of an experience of a physical path between two places with a period of time spent in the hermetically sealed confines of a plane’s cabin. And clearly falling asleep with the help of sleeping pills is something structurally different to sleep that involves losing oneself in a gradually dissipating haze of mental images. For the purposes of our proposed investigation, to capture both sides of technology – its limiting and its enabling aspect – we take up a concept Michel Foucault re-introduced into philosophy: the dispositif. (Foucault himself, it might be noted, is looking back to the Aristotelian concept of diaresis, meaning a disposition, arrangement or inner order; already in Aristotle the way something is shaped by its very possibilities is known as its disposition or diaresis.)

In the context of a philosophy of technology whose main theme is processes of technification, technology can be called a material dispositif. Technology is thus defined relationally, for the concept of a dispositif contains one open variable. In individual cases we will thus speak of technology as a dispositif of communication, as a dispositif of perception etc. Our proposed concept of technology defines technology as the condition of the possibility, the guiding principle of the arrangement, of human behaviour and interaction insofar as the latter are determined by material arrangements rather than discipline, education, strategies of individual self-cultivation or social convention. The notion of “the material” should not be taken in too narrow a sense here, for clearly such arrangements are just as likely to consist of software as they are of hardware. A decisive point of our conception of technology is that the latter is independent of the individual human beings who might or might not have accommodated themselves to a particular set of technological arrangements by acquiring this or that technical skill.

A philosophy of technology that deals with the processes of technification is by its very nature critical insofar as it sees technology as standing in a relation of tension to what it is a technification of. The description of individual processes of technification as we conceive it is already critical in the Kantian sense, viz. insofar as such description brings to light what processes of technification exclude in the very act of enabling particular forms of human relationship and behaviour. The notion of a dispositif already expresses this very ambivalence.

The works of Hubert Dreyfus and Joseph Weizenbaum each contain critical philosophies of technology in this sense. Both can be located on the margins of a critical theory of technology. The task of such a critical theory – which is one of the tasks the present work sets itself – would not merely be to bring processes of technification into critical confrontation with what they are technificaitons of, but to critically assess technification in light of alternative technological possibilities.