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."