IS NATURE CONSERVATIVE? Written by Alaleh Navaii
CONTENTS
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FORWORD
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THE GREEKS
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TECHNOLOGY AND THE CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY
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NEUTRALITY OF TECHNOLOGY
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IS NATURE CONSERVATIVE?
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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FORWORD If philosophy is the attempt “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”, as Sellars (1962) put it, philosophy should not ignore technology. It is largely by technology that contemporary society hangs together. It is hugely important not only as an economic force but also as a cultural force. During the last two centuries, much philosophy of technology has been concerned with the impact of technology on society. In addition to this, there is also a branch of the philosophy of technology that is concerned with technology in itself. This entry focuses on the former branch of the philosophy of technology, which seeks continuity with the philosophy of social science and the humanities rather than science. This approach is analytic; it does not see technology as a ‘black box’, but as a phenomenon that deserves study in relation to the progress of our society. It regards technology as a practice, basically the practice of engineering. It analyzes this practice, its goals, its concepts and its methods, and it relates these issues to various themes from philosophy. The following discussion will be concerned with this form of the philosophy of technology. The new picture emerging from social studies of science and technology gives us excellent reasons for believing that rationality is a dimension of social life and as cultural phenomena. According to that tradition, technology will continue to affect more and more of social life, and less and less will remain free of its influence to constitute a cultural difference. But as Feenberg puts it, ‘… modern scientific-technical rationality is not the trans-cultural universal it was thought to be.’ The persistence of cultural particularity in this or that domain is not especially significant. The fundamental question would be if it is possible to find a balance between the universal rationality and cultural variety. The tools we use shape our way of life in modern societies where technique has become all pervasive. In this situation, means and ends cannot be separated. How we do things determines who and what we are. Technological development transforms what it is to be human. In this paper I will try to address this question through discussing different viewpoints varying from Aristotle to Heidegger and Feenberg. Despite important differences which I will discuss further on, for these thinkers modernity is characterized by a unique form of technical
action and thought which threatens non-technical values as it extends itself deeper into social life. In a sense they attribute a more than instrumental, a substantive, content to technical intervention with nature. According to these theories, technology is not neutral.
Alaleh Navaii Bergen - May 2009
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THE GREEKS Philosophical reflection on technology is about as old as philosophy itself. It started in ancient Greece. There are four prominent themes. One early theme is the thesis that technology learns from or imitates nature (Plato, Laws). According to Democritus, for example, house-building and weaving were first invented by imitating swallows and spiders building their nests and nets. Aristotle referred to this tradition by repeating Democritus' examples, but he did not maintain that technology can only imitate nature: “generally art in some cases completes what nature cannot bring to a finish, and in others imitates nature”. A second theme is the thesis that there is a fundamental ontological distinction between natural things and artifacts. According to Aristotle, the former have their principles of generation and motion inside, whereas the latter, insofar as they are artifacts, are generated only by outward causes, namely human aims and forms in the human soul. Natural products (animals and their parts, plants, and the four elements) move, grow, change, and reproduce themselves by inner final causes; they are driven by purposes of nature. Artifacts, on the other hand, cannot reproduce themselves. Without human care and intervention, they vanish after some time by losing their artificial forms and decomposing into (natural) materials. For instance, if a wooden bed is buried, it decomposes to earth or changes back into its botanical nature by putting forth a shoot. The thesis that there is a fundamental difference between man-made products and natural substances had a long-lasting influence. Even today, some still maintain that there is a difference between, for example, natural and synthetic vitamin C. Aristotle's doctrine of the four causes—material, formal, efficient and final—can be regarded as a third early contribution to the philosophy of technology. In one sense, what is described as a cause is that material out of which a thing comes into being and which remains present in it. Such, for instance, is bronze in the case of a statue, or silver in the case of a cup, as well as the genera to which these materials belong. In another sense, the form and pattern are a cause, that is to say the statement of the essence genera to which it belongs; such, for instance, in the case of the octave, are the ratio of two to one, and number in general; and the ingredient terms in a definition are included in the wider class of a definition. Then there is the initiating source of change or rest: the person who advises an action, for instance, is a cause of the action; the father is the cause of his child; and in general, what produces is the cause of what is changed. Then there is what is a cause insofar as it is an end (telos): this is the purpose of a thing; in this sense, health, for instance, is the cause of a man's going for a walk. "Why," someone asks, "is he 4
going for a walk?" "For the good of his health," we reply, and when we say this we think that we have given the cause of his doing so. All the intermediate things, too, that come into being through the agency of something else for this same end have this as their cause: slimming, purging, drugs, and surgical instruments—all have the same purpose, health, as their cause, although they differ from each other in that some of them are activities, others are instruments. The three fundamental modes of activity (energeiai) in Aristotle's description of the logos are: theoria, poiesis and praxis. These correspond to three natural potentialities of the soul, or dispositions; respectively sophia. Theoria in Aristotle is the activity of contemplation of necessary objects, while praxis and poiesis require knowledge of dependent objects. Whereas poiesis is an activity of making, aiming at a goal that is distinct from the action involved in the achievement of the goal, the goal of praxis is achieved in accomplishing the very action itself. What about the goal of "contemplation" (theoria)? Aristotle is quite clear that theory is sufficient unto itself; that the goal of theory is not something other than the activity of contemplation itself, and that it is non-poietic. Likewise, happiness, which is activity (energeia) in accordance with the exercise of sophia as the highest virtue, (and sophia is the disposition associated with theoria), is self-sufficient and an end unto itself. Theory is clearly not poietic activity in Aristotle. Is it a form of praxis? A final point that deserves mentioning is the extensive employment of technological images by Plato and Aristotle. In his Timaeus, Plato described the world as the work of an Artisan, the Demiurge. His account of the details of creation is full of images drawn from carpentry, weaving, modelling, metallurgy, and agricultural technology. Aristotle used comparisons drawn from the arts and crafts to illustrate how final causes are at work in natural processes. Despite their criticism of the life led by merely human artisans, both Plato and Aristotle found technological imagery indispensable for expressing their belief in the rational design of the universe. At this point another, and distinctively Aristotelian, principle comes into play: that the nature of something is best seen (not by analysis into elements, or by looking to its origins, but) by studying the mature and fully-developed being of that thing. To understand a thing's nature you do not look to its origin but to its full development. In nature the fully-developed instance is the goal or end toward which development takes place, so if you look to the end you can understand the earlier stages of development. In Aristotle's philosophy, "nature" is the principle of growth or development: a thing's nature is what makes it develop in a certain way, and development is for the sake of its goal. Aristotle's physics is said to be teleological, from the Greek word "telos", a goal or end. According to Aristotle every nature exists for some purpose. (However, he did not think that nature was designed by a mind; Aristotle did believe, for philosophical reasons, in a supreme being or god, but he believed that the world had existed eternally, that it was not created by God, that God was not the designer of things. Natural purposes are, so to speak, blind and unconscious, except in human beings.)
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TECHNOLOGY AND THE CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY
At the start of the modern age, Descartes executed an anthropocentric shift when he proposed that human rationality constitutes the ground for the truth, reality, and being of entities. For Descartes, something ‘to be’ means for it to be represented as an idea whose clarity and distinctness matches that of the cogito, the rational subject’s certainty about its own existence. Since only phenomena studied by quantitative sciences such as mathematics and physics can meet this area, science came to play a role in defining truth and reality in modern times. This scientific rationality discloses things in a powerful but limited way where modern humanity began to view itself as an elaborate mechanical entity. For Heidegger, "technology's essence is nothing technological". Instead it is a system, Gestell, looming but undefined. Gestell, literally "enframing", is an all-encompassing view of technology, not as a means to an end, but rather a mode of human existence. As such, the real danger of technology for Heidegger was the process by which the machines begin to alter our existence, where everything -including humankind- stands revealed as raw material for the goal of greater power and security. According to Heidegger this arrogant anthropocentric humanism (whether capitalist or communist) not only diminishes humankind, but also wreaks havoc on nature. Human efforts to reform existing process cannot succeed and in fact will make matters worse, because widespread cultural, social and ecological crises are symptoms of humanity’s obsession with control. What Heidegger called "the essence of technology" infiltrates human existence more intimately than anything humans could create. The danger of technology lies in the transformation of the human being, by which human actions and aspirations are fundamentally distorted. Not that machines can run amok, or even that we might misunderstand ourselves through a faulty comparison with machines. Instead, technology enters the inmost recesses of human existence, transforming the way we know and think and will. Technology is, in essence, a mode of human existence, and we could not appreciate its mental infiltrations until the computer became a major cultural phenomenon. Hence, Heidegger concluded, humankind can be saved only if there arises an alternative to modern technology’s one-dimensional disclosure of the being of entities. For Heidegger, Theorie is no longer concerned with the contemplation of necessary objects. Theory in Heidegger involves stepping back from the world, and conducting a cold analysis of things seen as merely present in the world. Unlike Aristotle's theoría, however, theory in Heidegger is in no way directed towards the end of contemplation, nor does it study "necessarily existent" objects. Theoretical behavior is looking at things, without looking at them in terms of use. This theory is a derivative form of poíésis, stemming from the original moment of involvement in a situation. Theorie is not an entirely separate realm of activity, but is already permeated with the productive.
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Talking about productivity, Feenberg comes up with a good example. He says:
‘The craftsman brings out the "truth" of his materials through the symbolically charged reworking of matter by form. The modern technologist obliterates the inner potential of his materials, "de-worlds" them, and "summons" nature to fit into his plan. Ultimately, it is not man, but pure instrumentality that holds sway in this "enframing" [ Gestell]; it is no merely human purpose, but a specific way in which being hides and reveals itself through human purpose.’ The issue is not that machines are evil nor that they have taken over, but that in constantly choosing to use them over every other alternative, we make many other blind choices. The overall effect of our involvement with technology cannot therefore be interpreted as a relation of means to ends. Many argue that as technology progresses, techniques are perfected, which in a manner approaching a more precise mathematical precision, leading to procedures of selecting the most effective means in the given context. As a result, more quantitatively determined process. This makes Ellul to make a rather strong claim; in 1964 he wrote: ‘ Modern technology has become a total phenomenon of civilization, a defining force of the new social order in which efficiency is no longer the option but a necessity imposed on all human activities.’ For him technology is autonomous with respect to traditional values because, assuming if we continue to refuse to interfere in any way with efficiency, it is relevant only in technical criteria, which are logically independent of all other estimates of worth.
As the twentieth century draws to a close, it is evident that, for better or worse, the future of computing and the future of human relations are now thoroughly intertwined. We need to seek alternatives, social policies that might undo the monotonous legacy of modernism: pervasive systems of one-way communication, preemption of democratic social choice corporate manipulation, and the presentation of sweeping changes in living conditions as something justified by a univocal, irresistible "progress." No doubt Heidegger is right to claim that modern technology is immensely more destructive than any other. And it is true that technical means are not neutral, that their substantive content affects society independent of the goals they serve. Thus his basic claim that we are caught in the grip of our own techniques is all too believable. Increasingly, we lose sight of what is sacrificed in the mobilization of human beings and resources for goals that remain ultimately obscure. If there is no sense of the scandalous cost of modernization, this is because the transition from tradition to modernity is judged to be a progress by a standard of efficiency essential to modernity and alien to tradition. The substantive theory of technology attempts to make us aware of this.
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NEUTRALITY OF TECHNOLOGY As Marshall McLuhan puts it, ‘ It is not that there is anything good or bad about technology
but that unconsciousness of the effect of any force is a disaster, especially a force that we have made ourselves. We are what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.’ What Heidegger diagnoses quite well is the supposedly neutral and purely instrumental kind of technological rationality under which we now suffer. What he misses is the possibility of transforming it into a more holistic, politicized, and ontologically sensitive rationality—a rationality that would begin with the question of what technology is making of us and end with the open question of what we can make of it. As Feenberg argues elsewhere, technology is never neutral. Every technology has an internal "code"—a normativity that determines what it is, what it does, under what conditions, to what things and what people. There is no reason why our currently exploitive, dehumanizing, instrumentalistically coded technologies cannot be subjected to "democratic interventions" that would make them more life affirming. To address and answer this issue I’d like to bring in two theories, namely the instrumental and the substantive theory. The instrumental theory
The substantive theory
Technology is neutral, just a tool
Technology is not neutral; it’s not just a tool
Technology has no social agenda
People are the raw material of a tech. system
Technology is indifferent to politics.
Technology is autonomous – beyond culture
Technology is rational and confirmable
People can make choices about technology
Technology is efficient – standards/norms
Technology becomes the environment
I believe whether we accept the neutrality of technology or not depends on each individual’s philosophy or personal values. Either one tends to be pragmatic and consequential, rather situational, or absolute and one-dimensional. Those who believe technology is neutral would argue that for example buildings are not built by machines, but by people. Those who believe the opposite, like Ellul, would claim that whether one believes the technological system to be a good or bad influence is immaterial. The nature of technology, for Ellul, was so multidimensional that it defied being judged. Whether we believe in it or not, and whether we think it is good or bad, technology continues on its course doing what it always does - conquering humanity. When considering the new communication media it is important to understand that digital transformation happens within a context of the social fabric of the society. The digitization of 8
society is not without consequences. Ellul argued that, ‘All technical progress has three kinds of effects: the desired, the foreseen, and the unforeseen". Of course the great challenge is to recognize the possible negative effects before it is too late. Unfortunately, technological advances seldom announce their less desirable side effects. But even if they did, would we have the courage to make the difficult choices? Ellul's on-going premise is that the individual has had to adapt to life in a technical milieu rather than the other way around. One reason for this may be our feeling of helplessness at the hands of technology and tools of our making. Contrary to their intended purpose, our inventions appear to be set on making life miserable for us. And when technology threatens to get out of control, history has shown our first reaction has often been to respond with force.
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IS NATURE CONSERVATIVE? It is not necessary for us to either continue to endure the nightmare of further dehumanization or join Heidegger in the mystical idea of waiting for a new god. There is a third possibility--namely, to develop a new and more democratic form of technological rationality: ‘The oppressive features of technological society are not due to excessive materialism and technicism…[R]ather [they lay] in the arrest of materialism and technological rationality in a dehumanizing and undemocratic form.’ The recognition of humans as dependent on and involved with nature is a nonhierarchical interactive realization of the human place in the natural world. In Heidegger's interpretation, the "world" unfolds as a set of possibilities that can be explored and nature becomes a set of potentialities that can be utilized for human ends. The disruption of this potentially harmonious relationship with nature occurs in the modern shift to an anthropocentric domination of nature as resource and raw material—which then turns everything, including ourselves into "standing reserves" for use in modern technological practices. Thus, as Feenberg explains, what the Greeks saw as the potential in nature to be shaped to human ends and goals is irreplaceably lost in our modern technological way of existing: ‘The technological enframing that takes its place does not so much create meanings as destroy them, de-worlding things and reducing them to a "objectless" heap. To the extent that it reveals meaning, what appears is an endless repetition of the same "standing reserve," not the rich variety the Greeks found in their world’. This lost ability in modern times to recognize the potential of nature as a process of unfolding and revealing possibilities of living provides Heidegger with the gloomy prediction that any hope is out of the hands of human agency and a radical reconstruction of existence can only occur through a quasi divine intervention of new forms of revealing being. According to deep ecology, for humanity to realize its genuine potential, and thus to be authentic, existing authentically does not mean achieving ever greater technical power and security at the expense of everyone and everything else, but rather existing in a manner that lets things manifest themselves in ways that are appropriate to the things themselves. Modernity’s interconnected social and ecological crisis will end only when humanity sheds its dissociative attitude toward nature and beings instead to identify more widely with all things. Neither deep ecologists nor Heidegger, however, convincingly explain how such a radical transformation of modern human existence might occur. As an example, the language machine regulates and adjusts in advance the mode of our possible usage of language through mechanical energies and functions. As McLuhan puts it: ’The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way’. The language machine is-and above all, is still becoming-one way in which modern technology controls the mode and the world of language as such. Meanwhile, the impress is still maintained that man is the master of the language machine. But the truth of the 10
matter might well be that the language machine takes language into its management and thus masters the essence of the human being. Once humans realize that our activities produce our current horizon of being, we can recognize that the "chains" of our social structures are self-imposed. In taking something as something, I have already "seen" it in relation to its situation, and to my situation. In projecting its possibilities, I have already projected myself, and seen myself in relation to it as possibility. I look towards what it can be (in its situation, as part of my factual situation), in referring to what it has been (how it has worked before, what I know myself to be capable of), in order to realize a certain present possibility. Thus the future and having-been are the ground of the present. But it is primarily the future-oriented nature of projection, looking ahead to possibilities, that makes it possible for anything to be seen as something. The as structure (like understanding and interpretation in general) is thus grounded in delighted temporality. Phenomenology, according to Feenberg, provides an ontological framework to describe the interaction between human perception and nature that can recognize the potentialities hidden in the process of creative activity: "A reciprocal interaction and exchange takes place joining maker and materials in a unity in diversity, a totality". The resultant "harmony" between human and nature is a requirement for recognition of the potentialities inherent in the interactive process of production. A new form of perception can hopefully be developed that is currently missing in the dominating gaze of modernity. Coupled with this phenomenological insight is the critical social insight that current conditions are oppressive and could be changed to include more liberating designs and actualities: ‘In a free society the universal element involved in all perception, the "concept" under which a "manifold" is unified, would incorporate an immediate awareness of the potentialities of the object. The object would be perceived through its concept, as it is today, but that concept would include a sense of "where the object is going," what it can become. The object to which these qualities are attributed is not the object of science. It is the lived experience of the world in which the perceived incompleteness and imperfection of things drives action forward.’ Feenberg This active perception is most needed in our technological designs regarding nature. We can't go back to nature, but rather we must go forward to a transformed future full of creative potentialities—a future that is currently concealed from view.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Heidegger, martin (1977) The question concerning technology Heidegger, martin (1977) Only a God can help us now Feenberg, Andrew (1998) Technique and modernity
Feenberg, Andrew (1997) Heidegger, Habermas and the essence of technology Marshal Mcluhan (1962)
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The making of Typographic Man
Stanley N. Salthe The Natural Philosophy of Ecology: Developmental Systems Ecology Arakawa We have decided not to die
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