For anyone looking for a little more in explanation of one of the claims in my recent Böhme translation, a rough English version of the opening page and half of B's The End of the Baconian Age (Am Ende des Baconschen Zeitalters, 1993):
The Baconian Faith, The Baconian Programme
We are in the habit of giving names to eras only once we are bidding them farewell. It is only then that a particular characteristic of the age becomes noticeable as a fully-fledged characteristic mark - in the past we hardly noticed it at all because we took it as an unquestionable given of our existence in the world. If today we have reason to call the age of modern science the Baconian era, this is because a given of our existence has vanished - the basic conviction that scientific and technological progress amount to the same thing as human progress. In its time this basic conviction came into the world through Francis Bacon. We might call it the opening of the age of modern science.
The belief that techno-scientific progress was the same thing as human progress was not a given of the age that preceded Bacon: the notion of progress was quite foreign to antiquity, while in the Christian Middle Ages human progress was to be found on the path of religious salvation; it was certainly not what men and women looked to worldly sciences to provide. Bacon himself was highly conscious of the fact that his conviction was by no means something he could assume ordinary people shared. His entire output as a writer was a single propaganda campaign in support of this his guiding idea. In particular his object was to convince political authority - England's reigning queen and then its king - of the "dignity and progress of the sciences" - to persuade them, in short, to give science their financial and institutional backing. His programme of large-scale renewal (instauratio magna) was shaped by a notion that had been voiced by many - the call for the religious reformation that had been set in motion to be expanded into a general reformation of the entire world. What distinguished Bacon from the other reformers - those whose names are writ large in the figures of Cromwell and Comenius - was that he set his hopes for human progress on the development of science and technology rather than on political revolution or educational reforms. As he put it in the justly famous Aphorism 129 of the first volume of his Novum Organon:
"For the benefits of discoveries may extend to the whole race of man, civil benefits only to particular places; the latter last not beyond a few ages, the former through all time. Moreover, the reformation of a state in civil matters is seldom brought in without violence and confusion; but discoveries carry blessings with them, and confer benefits without causing harm or sorrow to any."
Here we find the consisest answer to the question what the Baconian programme consisted in - in short, in organising science into an enterprise devoted specifically to new inventions and in forming science into a social institution capable of transforming its discoveries for the benefit of humanity at large. . .
Showing posts with label Gernot Böhme. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gernot Böhme. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Gernot Böhme: Techno-Philosophy, Techno-Criticism - Sample No. 1
Invasive Technification - Introduction (from the German by CS)
1. Deep within the Brain
Not long ago, a book about an illness achieved the notable feat of making it onto German best-seller lists. Could it have been something to do with the way the account managed to move the reader to participate in the story? There are, after all, a plethora of medical narratives that aim to mobilise or strengthen our affective powers. Could it have been simply that this account was well written - that it displayed an authorial frankness placing it squarely in the tradition of European confessional literature? My suspicion is that the breadth and depth of public response has to do more with the content of the account - a content that triggers a sort of metaphysical terror in the reader.
The book is Deep within the Brain and in it sociology professor Helmut Dubiel tells the story of his experiences with Parkinson's Disease. The decisive point of his account - what makes it stand out from many a biographical account of illness - is when the progress of Dubiel's malady can no longer be kept in check with medication and he is having to come to terms with public humiliations because of ever more noticeable symptoms - at which stage he has a technically state-of-the-art implant inserted into his brain. The implant creates an electrical stimulus that regulates the interaction of brain hormones. (The latter gets out of balance in the absence of dopamine - the root cause of Parkinson's Disease.) Yet although artificial regulation does indeed result in a notable improvement of typical Parkinson's symptoms such as shaking and reduced motor functions, in some cases, like Dubiel's, it has extremely severe side-effects. The stimulus to the interior of the brain interferes seriously with the speech capacity of the patient - a catastrophic impairment for an academic with a lecturing position at a university.
Dubiel could thus not but view the medical intervention subjectively as a mistake and objectively as a failure. In his case the medical world had hit on a form of treatment that in a certain sense seems macabre - Dubiel reported in a newspaper interview, for example, that to other people he sometimes comes across as a sort of zombie: he can switch off the implanted pacemaker which stimulates the relevant region deep in the brain using a hand-held remote-control. This allows him to speak again without any trouble, however his Parkinson's symptoms recur, meaning for example that he can no longer walk. When he switches the device on again, he can walk and carry out deliberate bodily movements, however his speech capacity is again impaired - so much so for example that he can no longer give a lecture.
Dubiel's case gives dramatic proof of where society stands today vis-a'-vis new possibilities of highly technified medicine. When Dubiel talks about being able to switch himself on and off, what is fundamentally at issue is the meaning of this selfhood. Is he the human being who can move about in well co-ordinated fashion or the human being who can form proper sentences? Or is he perhaps the human being who has the subjective experience of switching on and off? The implant seems to have brought about a deep-seated dissociation of Dubiel's psycho-physical unity. The medical technology, viewed already by medical practitioners as invasive - that is, as intruding deeply and permanently into the body rather than merely supporting or supplementing bodily functions - can also be called invasive in a wider sense: in cases like Dubiel's it has failed to restore a human life damaged by illness or to allow such a life to be lived half-way normally again, and instead changed what life fundamentally is for the patient - changed, one could even say, what he or she is as a human being.
Today especially, developments are afoot in medicine that give good reason to critically apply the medical concept of the invasive to the technification of human relationships and of social relations across the board. It is true that the concept has military connotations - an invasion is of course a violent act of intrusion. Yet much medical technology has to be viewed as such too; it is viewed as such by the patients affected by it, it seems indeed to be sensed bodily as such - in the depths of our organic being.
The decisive question though is whether technification merely improves or extends an already existing form of human action or already existing human relations, or whether it fundamentally alters them. Clearly it is possible to object that technologies have always brought about fundamental changes to human life. Thus with the invention of writing - a communication technology - human society, and indeed what it was to be human, was fundamentally changed. Yet obviously up till now we have had little reason to see technological change in the problematic light we do today. Technology has instead been viewed almost totally from the point of view of means and ends - a way of looking at things that takes the ends wholly for granted. The result is that the ethics of technology - including medical ethics - have been almost exclusively utilitarian; problematic situations have been thought to demand a weighing up costs vs. benefits or expectations vs. risks. What has been overlooked is that the application of a new technology can change the pre-conditions of application, and that means also the very purposes and ends of application. The utilitarian approach to technology no longer suffices in light of the experiences medical technology confronts us with today. The question has to be asked: what does technology mean when it takes the form of invasive technification of the conditions of human life?
2. The Iron Cage
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sociologist Max Weber asserted famously that modern man was in the process of confining himself to an iron cage. What he had in mind were the constraints human beings have to impose on themselves to make the rationalisation of social life possible - at work and on the street in traffic, in business and in private life. A characteristic example is punctuality - a virtue without which the worlds of modern transport and work would simply be unthinkable. According to Weber, the detachment vis-a'-vis one's own feelings and moods necessary to operate technical equipment is radical. Human behaviour necessarily becomes cooler, more matter-of-fact.
By technology or technique (Technik) Weber understands the thorough-going rational organisation of activity for the purposes of increased efficiency. In this sense we speak not only of power generation technology, but of techniques of playing the piano as well. The concept of technology/technique involved here marks the rationalisation of the conditions of human life as a kind of technification. For Weber, feats of individual moral self-control form the background to the rational arrangement of social life with a view to efficiency, above all feats of inner discipline, worldly asceticism - industriousness, reliability, punctuality, matter-of-factness, in short the prime values associated with the puritan ethic that made the modern world possible. So for Weber the problem of the iron cage is the social problem of technical efficiency on the one hand and its ethical preconditions on the other. In 1954 Jacques Ellul drew together both sides of Weber's analysis under the rubric of technological society.
Today the Weberian metaphor of the iron cage makes a curious impression. For Weber is not thinking here of any physical structure, say the rail network that in his day was imprinting a new spatial order on the landscape; nor is he thinking of the steel and reinforced concrete structures that became the physical home of working and business life and in the form of warehouses helped to transform luxury consumption into mass consumption. Quite the opposite - the iron cage is for Weber precisely a metaphor for an inner state, for inner ethical or at most abstract social constraints.
A generation after Weber the growth of such constraints since early modern times was to be described by another sociologist, Norbert Elias, as the civilising process in a work with precisely that title. The notable point about Elias' study however is that in the very period of its inception, viz. the 1930's, the process itself was veering round 180 degrees - something that is easy to guage in the sole passage where Elias addresses the issue of modern technology. It is worth citing in full:
"Man denke an die holprigen, ungepflasterten, von Regen und Wind verwüstbaren Landstraßen einer einfachen, natural wirtschaftenden Krieger-Gesellschaft. Der Verkehr ist, von wenigen Ausnahmen abgesehen, ganz gering; die Hauptgefahr, die hier der Mensch für den Menschen darstellt, hat die Form des kriegerischen oder räuberischen Überfalls. Wenn die Menschen um sich blicken, wenn sie mit dem Auge Bäume and Hügel absuchen oder auf der Straße selbst entlang sehen, dann geschiegt es in erster Linie, weil sie immer gewärtig sein müssen, mit der Waffe in der Hand angegriffen zu warden, und erst in zweiter oder dritter Linie, weil sie irgend jemandem auszuweichen haben. Das Leben auf den großen Straßen dieser Gesellschaft verlangt eine ständige Bereitschaft zu kämpfen und die Leidenschaften in Verteidigung seines Lebens oder seines Besitzes gegen einen körperlichen Angriff spielen zu lassen. Der Verkehr auf den Hauptstraßen einer großen Stadt in der differenzierteren Gesellschaft unserer Zeit verlangt eine ganz andere Modellierung des psychischen Apparats. Hier ist die Gefahr eines räuberischen oder kriegerischen Überfalls auf ein Minimum beschränkt. Automobile fahren in Eile hierhin and dorthin; Fußgänger und Radfahrer suchen sich durch das Gewühl der Wagen hindurchzuwinden; Schutzleute stehen an den großen Straßenkreuzungen, um es mit mehr oder weniger Glück zu regulieren. Aber die äußere Regulierung ist von Grund auf darauf abgestimmt, daß jeder Einzelne sein Verhalten entsprechend den Notwendigkeiten dieser Verflechtung aufs genaueste selbst reguliert. Die Hauptgefahr, die hier der Mensch für den Menschen bedeutet, entsteht dadurch, daß irgend jemand inmitten dieses Getriebes seine Selbstknotrolle verliert. Eine beständige Selbstüberwachung, eine höchst differenzierte Selbstregelung des Verhaltens ist notwendig, damit der Einzelne sich durch dieses Gewühl hindurchzusteuern vermag. Es genügt, daß die Anspannung, die diese stete Selbstregulierung erfordert, für einen Einzelnen zu groß wird, um ihn selbst und Andere in Todesgefahr zu bringen." [English forthcoming]
Elias of course makes the comparison between the street in a traditional warrior society and the street of a modern metropolis in order to illustrate his thesis that the move from external constraint to self-constraint plays a key role in shaping the behaviour of individuals in transit and the sort of attention they pay to potential dangers. However because he describes a scene involving technologically regulated traffic, it becomes clear that in twentieth century modernity a shift back to external constraints has already taken place: the behaviour of modern human beings dealing with street traffic may indeed be disciplined, however it doesn't rest on self-constraint, at least not in the moral sense, but on technical constraints and technified methods of regulating traffic. The penalties for deviating from regulations are again external and are factored into one's expectations as such: deviations from appropriate matter-of-fact behaviour lead to accidents.
The external pre-conditions of everyday life, transformed over time into technical pre-conditions, have such a powerful effect on behaviour that individuals can progressively feel themselves absolved of ethical constraints. This leads subsequently - in tandem with a growing luxury economy - to a waning of the puritan ethic and a substitution of technical norms for moral norms. Cases in point are the replacement of traditional handicraft ethics and business ethics by quality control and obligatory declarations on the one hand and by government supervision on the other. A further case in point is the obsolescence of virtues such as thrift on the part of consumers. The standard example of technical norms taking the place of their ethical forerunners is the redundance of traditional sexual morality as a result of industrialised provision of effective means of birth-control.
3. Material Substitution
In the course of recent history, technology has come to have a civilisation-defining significance, not only in Weber's sense (viz. as a system of rules geared towards efficiency), but as a system of material means. In everything from our society's technical infrastructure (e.g. railways and more recently the internet) through to the pharmacological means for regulating the way we function physically and mentally, it is the technical conditions of life that determine how life is lived. In the process the metaphor of the iron cage is now taking on a different hue of ambivalence. Taken at face value, the metaphor of the cage implies that technology is something external to our actions and social relations. Yet the technology that governs human life today is no longer external. On the contrary, modern technology has penetrated deeply into social activity; technological systems are bringing about the technical regulation of human life in the very depths of our organic being. In the contemporary world, technology, in short, is not a cage in which human life can carry on protected and unchanged; it has instead become something like the skeleton of human life, abstractly put - a sort of infrastructure of life. The human all-too-human side of existence has thereby been reduced to a phenotype - what appears to wear all the bright colours of human individuality is little more than the game permitted by technical pre-conditions and their associated structures. In principle, everyone is in the same position. Individuality becomes a surface phenomenon.
1. Deep within the Brain
Not long ago, a book about an illness achieved the notable feat of making it onto German best-seller lists. Could it have been something to do with the way the account managed to move the reader to participate in the story? There are, after all, a plethora of medical narratives that aim to mobilise or strengthen our affective powers. Could it have been simply that this account was well written - that it displayed an authorial frankness placing it squarely in the tradition of European confessional literature? My suspicion is that the breadth and depth of public response has to do more with the content of the account - a content that triggers a sort of metaphysical terror in the reader.
The book is Deep within the Brain and in it sociology professor Helmut Dubiel tells the story of his experiences with Parkinson's Disease. The decisive point of his account - what makes it stand out from many a biographical account of illness - is when the progress of Dubiel's malady can no longer be kept in check with medication and he is having to come to terms with public humiliations because of ever more noticeable symptoms - at which stage he has a technically state-of-the-art implant inserted into his brain. The implant creates an electrical stimulus that regulates the interaction of brain hormones. (The latter gets out of balance in the absence of dopamine - the root cause of Parkinson's Disease.) Yet although artificial regulation does indeed result in a notable improvement of typical Parkinson's symptoms such as shaking and reduced motor functions, in some cases, like Dubiel's, it has extremely severe side-effects. The stimulus to the interior of the brain interferes seriously with the speech capacity of the patient - a catastrophic impairment for an academic with a lecturing position at a university.
Dubiel could thus not but view the medical intervention subjectively as a mistake and objectively as a failure. In his case the medical world had hit on a form of treatment that in a certain sense seems macabre - Dubiel reported in a newspaper interview, for example, that to other people he sometimes comes across as a sort of zombie: he can switch off the implanted pacemaker which stimulates the relevant region deep in the brain using a hand-held remote-control. This allows him to speak again without any trouble, however his Parkinson's symptoms recur, meaning for example that he can no longer walk. When he switches the device on again, he can walk and carry out deliberate bodily movements, however his speech capacity is again impaired - so much so for example that he can no longer give a lecture.
Dubiel's case gives dramatic proof of where society stands today vis-a'-vis new possibilities of highly technified medicine. When Dubiel talks about being able to switch himself on and off, what is fundamentally at issue is the meaning of this selfhood. Is he the human being who can move about in well co-ordinated fashion or the human being who can form proper sentences? Or is he perhaps the human being who has the subjective experience of switching on and off? The implant seems to have brought about a deep-seated dissociation of Dubiel's psycho-physical unity. The medical technology, viewed already by medical practitioners as invasive - that is, as intruding deeply and permanently into the body rather than merely supporting or supplementing bodily functions - can also be called invasive in a wider sense: in cases like Dubiel's it has failed to restore a human life damaged by illness or to allow such a life to be lived half-way normally again, and instead changed what life fundamentally is for the patient - changed, one could even say, what he or she is as a human being.
Today especially, developments are afoot in medicine that give good reason to critically apply the medical concept of the invasive to the technification of human relationships and of social relations across the board. It is true that the concept has military connotations - an invasion is of course a violent act of intrusion. Yet much medical technology has to be viewed as such too; it is viewed as such by the patients affected by it, it seems indeed to be sensed bodily as such - in the depths of our organic being.
The decisive question though is whether technification merely improves or extends an already existing form of human action or already existing human relations, or whether it fundamentally alters them. Clearly it is possible to object that technologies have always brought about fundamental changes to human life. Thus with the invention of writing - a communication technology - human society, and indeed what it was to be human, was fundamentally changed. Yet obviously up till now we have had little reason to see technological change in the problematic light we do today. Technology has instead been viewed almost totally from the point of view of means and ends - a way of looking at things that takes the ends wholly for granted. The result is that the ethics of technology - including medical ethics - have been almost exclusively utilitarian; problematic situations have been thought to demand a weighing up costs vs. benefits or expectations vs. risks. What has been overlooked is that the application of a new technology can change the pre-conditions of application, and that means also the very purposes and ends of application. The utilitarian approach to technology no longer suffices in light of the experiences medical technology confronts us with today. The question has to be asked: what does technology mean when it takes the form of invasive technification of the conditions of human life?
2. The Iron Cage
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sociologist Max Weber asserted famously that modern man was in the process of confining himself to an iron cage. What he had in mind were the constraints human beings have to impose on themselves to make the rationalisation of social life possible - at work and on the street in traffic, in business and in private life. A characteristic example is punctuality - a virtue without which the worlds of modern transport and work would simply be unthinkable. According to Weber, the detachment vis-a'-vis one's own feelings and moods necessary to operate technical equipment is radical. Human behaviour necessarily becomes cooler, more matter-of-fact.
By technology or technique (Technik) Weber understands the thorough-going rational organisation of activity for the purposes of increased efficiency. In this sense we speak not only of power generation technology, but of techniques of playing the piano as well. The concept of technology/technique involved here marks the rationalisation of the conditions of human life as a kind of technification. For Weber, feats of individual moral self-control form the background to the rational arrangement of social life with a view to efficiency, above all feats of inner discipline, worldly asceticism - industriousness, reliability, punctuality, matter-of-factness, in short the prime values associated with the puritan ethic that made the modern world possible. So for Weber the problem of the iron cage is the social problem of technical efficiency on the one hand and its ethical preconditions on the other. In 1954 Jacques Ellul drew together both sides of Weber's analysis under the rubric of technological society.
Today the Weberian metaphor of the iron cage makes a curious impression. For Weber is not thinking here of any physical structure, say the rail network that in his day was imprinting a new spatial order on the landscape; nor is he thinking of the steel and reinforced concrete structures that became the physical home of working and business life and in the form of warehouses helped to transform luxury consumption into mass consumption. Quite the opposite - the iron cage is for Weber precisely a metaphor for an inner state, for inner ethical or at most abstract social constraints.
A generation after Weber the growth of such constraints since early modern times was to be described by another sociologist, Norbert Elias, as the civilising process in a work with precisely that title. The notable point about Elias' study however is that in the very period of its inception, viz. the 1930's, the process itself was veering round 180 degrees - something that is easy to guage in the sole passage where Elias addresses the issue of modern technology. It is worth citing in full:
"Man denke an die holprigen, ungepflasterten, von Regen und Wind verwüstbaren Landstraßen einer einfachen, natural wirtschaftenden Krieger-Gesellschaft. Der Verkehr ist, von wenigen Ausnahmen abgesehen, ganz gering; die Hauptgefahr, die hier der Mensch für den Menschen darstellt, hat die Form des kriegerischen oder räuberischen Überfalls. Wenn die Menschen um sich blicken, wenn sie mit dem Auge Bäume and Hügel absuchen oder auf der Straße selbst entlang sehen, dann geschiegt es in erster Linie, weil sie immer gewärtig sein müssen, mit der Waffe in der Hand angegriffen zu warden, und erst in zweiter oder dritter Linie, weil sie irgend jemandem auszuweichen haben. Das Leben auf den großen Straßen dieser Gesellschaft verlangt eine ständige Bereitschaft zu kämpfen und die Leidenschaften in Verteidigung seines Lebens oder seines Besitzes gegen einen körperlichen Angriff spielen zu lassen. Der Verkehr auf den Hauptstraßen einer großen Stadt in der differenzierteren Gesellschaft unserer Zeit verlangt eine ganz andere Modellierung des psychischen Apparats. Hier ist die Gefahr eines räuberischen oder kriegerischen Überfalls auf ein Minimum beschränkt. Automobile fahren in Eile hierhin and dorthin; Fußgänger und Radfahrer suchen sich durch das Gewühl der Wagen hindurchzuwinden; Schutzleute stehen an den großen Straßenkreuzungen, um es mit mehr oder weniger Glück zu regulieren. Aber die äußere Regulierung ist von Grund auf darauf abgestimmt, daß jeder Einzelne sein Verhalten entsprechend den Notwendigkeiten dieser Verflechtung aufs genaueste selbst reguliert. Die Hauptgefahr, die hier der Mensch für den Menschen bedeutet, entsteht dadurch, daß irgend jemand inmitten dieses Getriebes seine Selbstknotrolle verliert. Eine beständige Selbstüberwachung, eine höchst differenzierte Selbstregelung des Verhaltens ist notwendig, damit der Einzelne sich durch dieses Gewühl hindurchzusteuern vermag. Es genügt, daß die Anspannung, die diese stete Selbstregulierung erfordert, für einen Einzelnen zu groß wird, um ihn selbst und Andere in Todesgefahr zu bringen." [English forthcoming]
Elias of course makes the comparison between the street in a traditional warrior society and the street of a modern metropolis in order to illustrate his thesis that the move from external constraint to self-constraint plays a key role in shaping the behaviour of individuals in transit and the sort of attention they pay to potential dangers. However because he describes a scene involving technologically regulated traffic, it becomes clear that in twentieth century modernity a shift back to external constraints has already taken place: the behaviour of modern human beings dealing with street traffic may indeed be disciplined, however it doesn't rest on self-constraint, at least not in the moral sense, but on technical constraints and technified methods of regulating traffic. The penalties for deviating from regulations are again external and are factored into one's expectations as such: deviations from appropriate matter-of-fact behaviour lead to accidents.
The external pre-conditions of everyday life, transformed over time into technical pre-conditions, have such a powerful effect on behaviour that individuals can progressively feel themselves absolved of ethical constraints. This leads subsequently - in tandem with a growing luxury economy - to a waning of the puritan ethic and a substitution of technical norms for moral norms. Cases in point are the replacement of traditional handicraft ethics and business ethics by quality control and obligatory declarations on the one hand and by government supervision on the other. A further case in point is the obsolescence of virtues such as thrift on the part of consumers. The standard example of technical norms taking the place of their ethical forerunners is the redundance of traditional sexual morality as a result of industrialised provision of effective means of birth-control.
3. Material Substitution
In the course of recent history, technology has come to have a civilisation-defining significance, not only in Weber's sense (viz. as a system of rules geared towards efficiency), but as a system of material means. In everything from our society's technical infrastructure (e.g. railways and more recently the internet) through to the pharmacological means for regulating the way we function physically and mentally, it is the technical conditions of life that determine how life is lived. In the process the metaphor of the iron cage is now taking on a different hue of ambivalence. Taken at face value, the metaphor of the cage implies that technology is something external to our actions and social relations. Yet the technology that governs human life today is no longer external. On the contrary, modern technology has penetrated deeply into social activity; technological systems are bringing about the technical regulation of human life in the very depths of our organic being. In the contemporary world, technology, in short, is not a cage in which human life can carry on protected and unchanged; it has instead become something like the skeleton of human life, abstractly put - a sort of infrastructure of life. The human all-too-human side of existence has thereby been reduced to a phenotype - what appears to wear all the bright colours of human individuality is little more than the game permitted by technical pre-conditions and their associated structures. In principle, everyone is in the same position. Individuality becomes a surface phenomenon.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
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."
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."
Friday, April 2, 2010
By way of introduction: Gernot Böhme, Philosopher
Gernot Böhme (born 1937, Dessau, Germany) - German philosopher
Böhme was Professor of Philosophy at Darmstadt Technical University and has risen to prominence through his work in aesthetics, the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of embodiment, the philosophy of technology and his conception of practical philosophy as a capacity for dealing with the exigencies of life. He has become known beyond specialist cricles too, with interviews and articles for newspapers and magazines, as well as numerous publications on Plato, Kant and Goethe. Böhme's essential concerns are to preserve both human values and the natural world under the conditions of a technological civilisation.
Classical Philosophy, Ethics
Philosophical practice for Böhme means the necessity of formulating questions about life and the elaboration of an art of living. It is connected at the same time with the work of the self on the self. Modern academic philosophy refuses this philosophical tradition which derives from the classical world. Philosophy however is not just a form of methodical knowledge related to science, as it is practised within universities. It is simultaneously the wisdom of the world and a form of life. In speaking of philosophy as a form of life, our concern is as it were with cultivating ourselves as human beings, following in the footsteps of Socrates and the world of antiquity. Philosophy considered as the wisdom of the world draws on Kant, who defined it as the type of philosophy that deals with what is of interest to each and every human being. Today the concern is particularly with questions of social significance. Socrates, as a type, represents an anthropological condition distinguished above all through conscious thought. Böheme's conception implies sensitivity towards what is part of one's own existence that is not part of the self (c.f. the Socratic daimonion). Care of the self does not entail that The Other is denied a sense of self. According to Böhme, in dealings with the irrational components of the self, the task of ethics is to develop forms that allow those components to appear necessary, useful and amenable to control. Böhme has become prominent in Kant scholarship through Das Andere der Vernunft (The Other of Reason), a book published with his brother, Hartmut Böhme. The work presents a critical view of modernity, influenced by psychoanalysis. For Böhme, Kant's epistemology turns out to be a theory of alienated knowledge - it articulates an ideal of the autonomous rational individual, who represents a sort of hard-won strategy of self-mastery. Böhme, by contrast, speaks up for "the other of reason", thus especially for the world of nature, the body, imagination, desire and the emotions. In this connection he has put forward a new interpretation of The Critique of Judgment - the beautiful as atmosphere - and a reconstruction of the metaphysical first principles of natural science. Böhme is critical of the Kantian concept of becoming human through education.
Aesthetics as Aisthetics
Böhme is concerned to thematically extend philosophical aesthetics. He conceives aesthetics as aisthetics, that is as a general theory of perception. The concepts of design, nature and art form the centrepoint of his reflections. The task of aesthetics is not to be a mere medium for the transmission of modern art. An exlusively intellectualistic interpretation of works of art is rejected. Aesthetics also has to take up the theme of human beings' new relationship to a natural world increasingly shaped by their action. Moods and affects play a particular role in aesthetics. What Böhme calls "atmosphere" is the primary reality aesthetics has to deal with. It relates to moods and their spatial carriers - which are essentially what the beholder of a work of art and what he or she perceives have in common. By perception, Boehme understands a mode of bodily presence - with an emphasis on emotional components. Perception for him is primarily the sensation of a presence or, alternatively, a certain atmosophere. Atmosphere belongs neither in the sphere of the object nor in that of the subject; rather it is a co-presence that exists within the terms of the subject/object division. Atmophere is only differentiated retrospectively into a polar relation between "me" and the thing I perceive, thus taking on the fixed duality of subject and object:
"In perceiving an atmosphere I sense what sort of environment I find myself in. The perception thus has two sides to it: on the one hand, there is the environment which radiates a certain quality of mood, on the other hand - me, participating in this mood through my very situatedness and thereby becoming aware where I now am . . . To put it the other way round, atmospheres are the very forms in which things and environments present themselves."
An atmosphere flows out into a space in a far from definite way. We can only follow up its traces to the extent that we have direct experience of it. We have to open ourselves up to it, be affectively influenced by it, affected in both senses of the word. Thus for example a certain cheerful or oppressive mood can prevail in a space. But this is not something subjective. The atmosphere is something we have an immediate experience of as quasi-objectively exterior to us. What is designated as atmospheric here is a condition common to the perceiving individual and his/her environment. We have an immediate experience of "atmospheric phenomena" as free-floating qualities, like energy in the bodily or emotional sense or the partly personified forces of nature. Böhme differentiates between the different characteristics of atmospheres. He counts wealth, power and elegance among social characteristics. Warmth, coldness and brightness are among the so-called synaesthetic characteristics. Tension or tranquility are examples of communicative atmospheric qualities. Atmospheric impressions created through movement can be, among other things, oppressive, uplifting, agitating. There are also moods in the narrower sense, such for example as the sense of scene created by an english garden. In perception, the individual doesn't just sense the presence of something external, he or she has a bodily sense of it - in the process sensing him/herself too. Material things arise out of this sensitivity to the atmospheric through processes of defense, differentiation and restriction. Perceiving them is a dynamic process, because they themselves produce atmospheres and hence our sense of situatedness. What distinguishes things is their spatially fixed place, their corporeality, their identity, the way they function as potential condensation points for qualities perceived atmospherically. It is the perception of things that first constitutes the subject-object relationship. We experience them as factually existing in an objective world beyond the subject as defined by this relationship.
Böhme was Professor of Philosophy at Darmstadt Technical University and has risen to prominence through his work in aesthetics, the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of embodiment, the philosophy of technology and his conception of practical philosophy as a capacity for dealing with the exigencies of life. He has become known beyond specialist cricles too, with interviews and articles for newspapers and magazines, as well as numerous publications on Plato, Kant and Goethe. Böhme's essential concerns are to preserve both human values and the natural world under the conditions of a technological civilisation.
Classical Philosophy, Ethics
Philosophical practice for Böhme means the necessity of formulating questions about life and the elaboration of an art of living. It is connected at the same time with the work of the self on the self. Modern academic philosophy refuses this philosophical tradition which derives from the classical world. Philosophy however is not just a form of methodical knowledge related to science, as it is practised within universities. It is simultaneously the wisdom of the world and a form of life. In speaking of philosophy as a form of life, our concern is as it were with cultivating ourselves as human beings, following in the footsteps of Socrates and the world of antiquity. Philosophy considered as the wisdom of the world draws on Kant, who defined it as the type of philosophy that deals with what is of interest to each and every human being. Today the concern is particularly with questions of social significance. Socrates, as a type, represents an anthropological condition distinguished above all through conscious thought. Böheme's conception implies sensitivity towards what is part of one's own existence that is not part of the self (c.f. the Socratic daimonion). Care of the self does not entail that The Other is denied a sense of self. According to Böhme, in dealings with the irrational components of the self, the task of ethics is to develop forms that allow those components to appear necessary, useful and amenable to control. Böhme has become prominent in Kant scholarship through Das Andere der Vernunft (The Other of Reason), a book published with his brother, Hartmut Böhme. The work presents a critical view of modernity, influenced by psychoanalysis. For Böhme, Kant's epistemology turns out to be a theory of alienated knowledge - it articulates an ideal of the autonomous rational individual, who represents a sort of hard-won strategy of self-mastery. Böhme, by contrast, speaks up for "the other of reason", thus especially for the world of nature, the body, imagination, desire and the emotions. In this connection he has put forward a new interpretation of The Critique of Judgment - the beautiful as atmosphere - and a reconstruction of the metaphysical first principles of natural science. Böhme is critical of the Kantian concept of becoming human through education.
Aesthetics as Aisthetics
Böhme is concerned to thematically extend philosophical aesthetics. He conceives aesthetics as aisthetics, that is as a general theory of perception. The concepts of design, nature and art form the centrepoint of his reflections. The task of aesthetics is not to be a mere medium for the transmission of modern art. An exlusively intellectualistic interpretation of works of art is rejected. Aesthetics also has to take up the theme of human beings' new relationship to a natural world increasingly shaped by their action. Moods and affects play a particular role in aesthetics. What Böhme calls "atmosphere" is the primary reality aesthetics has to deal with. It relates to moods and their spatial carriers - which are essentially what the beholder of a work of art and what he or she perceives have in common. By perception, Boehme understands a mode of bodily presence - with an emphasis on emotional components. Perception for him is primarily the sensation of a presence or, alternatively, a certain atmosophere. Atmosphere belongs neither in the sphere of the object nor in that of the subject; rather it is a co-presence that exists within the terms of the subject/object division. Atmophere is only differentiated retrospectively into a polar relation between "me" and the thing I perceive, thus taking on the fixed duality of subject and object:
"In perceiving an atmosphere I sense what sort of environment I find myself in. The perception thus has two sides to it: on the one hand, there is the environment which radiates a certain quality of mood, on the other hand - me, participating in this mood through my very situatedness and thereby becoming aware where I now am . . . To put it the other way round, atmospheres are the very forms in which things and environments present themselves."
An atmosphere flows out into a space in a far from definite way. We can only follow up its traces to the extent that we have direct experience of it. We have to open ourselves up to it, be affectively influenced by it, affected in both senses of the word. Thus for example a certain cheerful or oppressive mood can prevail in a space. But this is not something subjective. The atmosphere is something we have an immediate experience of as quasi-objectively exterior to us. What is designated as atmospheric here is a condition common to the perceiving individual and his/her environment. We have an immediate experience of "atmospheric phenomena" as free-floating qualities, like energy in the bodily or emotional sense or the partly personified forces of nature. Böhme differentiates between the different characteristics of atmospheres. He counts wealth, power and elegance among social characteristics. Warmth, coldness and brightness are among the so-called synaesthetic characteristics. Tension or tranquility are examples of communicative atmospheric qualities. Atmospheric impressions created through movement can be, among other things, oppressive, uplifting, agitating. There are also moods in the narrower sense, such for example as the sense of scene created by an english garden. In perception, the individual doesn't just sense the presence of something external, he or she has a bodily sense of it - in the process sensing him/herself too. Material things arise out of this sensitivity to the atmospheric through processes of defense, differentiation and restriction. Perceiving them is a dynamic process, because they themselves produce atmospheres and hence our sense of situatedness. What distinguishes things is their spatially fixed place, their corporeality, their identity, the way they function as potential condensation points for qualities perceived atmospherically. It is the perception of things that first constitutes the subject-object relationship. We experience them as factually existing in an objective world beyond the subject as defined by this relationship.
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