concerning technology(sabreena&sally)

“What Things Do”

Part 1
Introduction: To the things themselves:
The Death of things:

Page1:
Q: What role do artifacts play in our technological cult?

Our every being from birth, travel, eating and so on depends on these artifacts-technological artifacts.

Q: What effects do these artifacts have on us, and how can we understand their role in our lives?

Until recently, philosophers have paid scant attention to this question, preferring to devote their attention to words and ideas, rather than to material things.

People never really focused on material and changeable things, until the linguistic turn.

Page2:
However important the role of language may be, its absolution assures that things and artifacts can no longer be philosophically analyzed and only talked around.

It is only philosophy that has failed to recognize the significance of things and their products are devised principally to serve as signs, rather than material things. That is, as symbols or icons for their owner’s lifestyles.

In an attempt to give artifacts their due, comes the realizations such as lamentations that the loss of materiality is characterized as a form of alienation. Implying that changes in our material world is a loss of authenticity.

Page2:
Technology is represented as a radically transformative power that estranges human beings from themselves, from each other, and from reality itself. Technology culture is seen as transforming human beings into clogs in a social machine, and as transforming reality into a raw material that can only be approached via domination and control.

This is the standard picture of technology that is evident in the work of Karl Jasper and Martin Heidegger, and it has been under harsh critique in the recent years.

The book seeks to undertake a systematic analysis of the relationships between humans and technological objects.

The thing about the philosophy of technology:
Page4:
Classical Philosophy:
Classical philosophy of technology has not devoted enough thought to the role of technological artifacts in contemporary society and daily life. Classical philosophy tends to approach technology in terms of what technology requires or presupposes; the kinds of technological thinking it fosters, for instance, or the principles around which our social life must be organized in order for technology to function in it. If concrete technologies enter into these analyses, it is merely as an illustration of the origins or presuppositions of technology as not as points of denature for investigation into how technologies concretely shape human life.

Classical and empirical philosophies of philosophy:

Classical philosophers of technology have painted an excessively gloomy picture of technology in contemporary culture; by worrying that technology would end up alienating human beings from themselves and reality.

In technological organizations of contemporary social life, human beings no longer appear as unique individuals but only as functional workers needed to keep the highly structured apparatus of mass production working.

Page 5:
Empirical studies have called into question the classical picture of technology as an all-determining and alienating power, and therefore brought to light a more complex side. By researching specific technologies in concrete applications, they have brought to light the fact that technology has different impacts in different contexts, and that technologies do indeed strongly shape the form and the context in which they function.

Empirical studies of technology provide the role of technology in human existence and experience. Its challenge is to understand technology not only in terms of its conditions of possibility, but in terms of concrete artifacts, and to continue to pose philosophical and not merely empirical questions.

The orphic temptation:
Page7:
In a certain sense, traditional philosophy approached its subject matter from a transcendental direction, where transcendental philosophy achieved its zenith in the works of Emanuel Kant, and takes as its point of departure the analysis of conditions of possibility. Presuppositions that are brought to light in this way are not empirically observable, but transcendental; that is they overlap or transcend (they cannot be found in) empirical reality.

Classical philosophy of technology uses this style of philosophy. Where it tried to understand technology form its conditions of possibility, from what must be presupposed in order for it to be passive. It thought backwards that its.

This approach has produced many relevant insights and to a large extent has shaped the understanding of technology and its role in the contemporary culture. But it makes our picture of technology distorted if we look at it from this angle only since we are then speaking about technologies themselves, and the transcendental perspectives become absolutized into transcendentalism.

This was how classical philosophy of technology looked at technology, resulting in the discovery of alienation, as it failed to se that technology presupposes a dominating manner of thinking or functional orientation of social life and does not necessarily imply that dealing with concrete technologies can only produce this domination and functionalism.

Page8:
Classical philosophy met the same fate that befell Orpheus in Greek Mythology. As such it should resist the temptation of looking back.

Technology cannot be reduced without a remainder of what underlies it.

When dealing with technologies, much ore happens than object manipulations. Hence the new philosophies think forward, starting from the technologies themselves, and asking what role they play in our culture and daily lives, instead of reducing them to the conditions of their possibility and speaking abut these conditions as if we were speaking about technology.

Page9:
Gilbert Hottois:

· Belgian philosopher of technology

· Observed tat the phenomenological tradition of philosophy of technology to which Heidegger belonged to was technophobic, his reason being that it filed to notice the unique and radically new character of modern science and technology.

· Phenomenologists conceive technoscience as a particular kind or interpretation of reality and fails to see the operativity, which makes it transcend the realm of interpretations.

Heidegger’s approach should not be considered completely absolute.
Reasons being that:

They have drawn attention to an important dimension of technology; namely the relation between technology and the way in which humans interpret and engage in their world.

This perspective however can be filled in much better with a closer contact with technology itself; which is what becomes possible via an analysis of technology in terms of concrete artifacts. This would describe technology in terms of its concrete presence and reality in human experience and practices.

Towards a philosophy of artifacts
Page 10:
Karl Jasper’s existential approach:

• Emphasizes the idea that technology creates large-scale “mass rule”
• This mass rule fosters mass production, mass culture, and promotes entirely new ways of existence in an entirely new material environment.
• This development brings about the alienations of humans from themselves and the environment hence entails the loss of authenticity.
• His proposition to overcome alienation is that humans need to realize that technology is ultimately only a neutral means for achieving goals they set. Were this to happen, then coming to terms with technology would be seen as a task or challenge for human existence, rather than undermining it.

Martin Heidegger:

• His approach highlights the technological relationships of humans to the world.
• He understands technology as a particular manner of approaching reality, a dominating and controlling one, in which reality can only appear as a raw material to be manipulated

The works of Jasper and Heidegger represent two poles of phenomenological tradition within the philosophy of technology. These being:

• Existential phenomenology
• Central question is how human beings realize their existence and thus are present in their world
• Hermeneutical phenomenology
• Examines the ways in which reality is interpreted and thus present for humans.

Part 2

The thing about Technology”(p49-95)

“The things things”…

The importance where it is clear that technology cannot be understood solely in terms of its conditions of possibility, but it should also be analyzed in terms of concrete artifacts that play a role in the relation between human beings and their world.

Jasper: existential issue of the role technology plays in human existence
Heidegger: raises the hermeneutical issue of the role technology plays in the way human beings encounter and interpret reality.

Heidegger’s philosophy is seen as Monolithic, Abstract, nostalgic by Verbeek
That is it looks at the philosophy of technology by looking backwards rather than looking forward.

Heidegger’s philosophy of technology:
The three stages:
1) Why technology cannot be thought of as a means to an end.
2) Why technology cannot be conceived as a human activity
3) That technology must be understood as the “greatest” danger

Technology as revealing:
What Heidegger thinks according to him is not thought anymore. What does Heidegger mean when he says that technology is not a way of “revealing”. What we call reality is not present the same way at all times and in all cultures. It’s not absolute.
Only in the relationship humans have with entities do these entities become reality for them. The relationship between humans and being is the basis of Heidegger’s entire thought. Heidegger had a distinction between being and beings that was forgotten. Where his distinction was that being meant emerging out of concealment into unconcealment.
This means that technology reveals whatever it does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us. Aristotle distinguishes between four causes of what is responsible for what something is brought into being.
These are:
1) The efficient cause - Bring about the effect that is finished
2) The material cause – The material, the matter of which it is made out of
3) Formal cause - The form, the shape into which the material enters
4) The final cause – The end to which the produced object is put.

Poses the question “ what is the significance of technology for the way human beings encounter reality; and how does it affect the manner in which we interpret the world?”


In Modern technology’s approach to reality, humans no longer encounter entities that emerge from concealment into unconcealment. Reality acquires its identity from what can be done with it.

For Heidegger, this happening or event is the “coming to appearance” or the emerging out of concealment to unconcealment.

Technology as enframing:
Heidegger tries to show that this technological way of revealing is not a human activity.
Human beings only gain access to reality thanks to the meaning that being has in the epoch (period/era) in which they live in.
The Gestell (enframing) is the fall of unconcealment, the way of “being” of reality, that holds sway in the period of technology. This form of unconcelament brings to presence whatever is revealed as standing reserve.
In the Gestell, the essence of technology is to be found. This is very important. Essence however is to be understood as a verb, not as a noun.

Technology as the “Great Danger”
The Gestell he claims is to be seen as danger.
Q: But what is so dangerous about technology?
A: Humans will misinterpret the unconcealed.

He gives two reasons for this:
1) It threatens humanity itself
2) When the Gestell hold sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing

Heidegger’s way out of this danger, through the saving power, “where danger is, grows / the saving power also”, that is where the saving power is seen as an open way for a possibility of a way out. This is why the essence of technology must be thought of as a verb; it is not what technology is, but how technology is present.
Heidegger reflects towards a particular attitude and behavior and a comportment, which is to be adopted to technical artifacts in order to make the saving power possible. He names this comportment releasment.
The dilemma that Heidegger wants to resolve through the notion of releasement is that technology imporivishes their relation to reality, while on the other hand the use of technology seems inescapable.

Releasement can be seen as essential reflection.

When human beings allow themselves to be swept away by technology, it is then that they become alienated from the world.

Abstract and monolithic:
Heidegger’s transcendentalism:
Heidegger’s philosophy of technology is seen as too general, since it declares modern technology as a stage in he history of being and therefore leaves no room for the developments of alternative practices. The reason according to Feenberg that leads Heidegger to lump together agricultural techniques and atomic bombs is that he sees technology “merely as different expressions of the identical enframing”. That is how Heidegger looks at technology as a form of world disclosure, as opposed to looking at specific technologies of our world.

When Heidegger speaks about technology he means not specific technologies, but rather the Gestell. This makes his work of necessary abstract in the sense that he abstracts from the specific technological practices. Heidegger overlooks important aspects of technology. That is because he sees technology as an expression of ascending of being. He reduces concrete technologies to the ascending of being that forms the condition of possibility. Human beings can only await and prepare for the arrival of a new sending of being, but cannot bring it about.

Q: Should we follow Heidegger in his claim that the Gestell is the only form of concealment of our world?

When they are used, technologies may make it possible for human beings to have a relation with a reality that is much richer than those they have with a manipulable stock of raw materials.

Philosopher Gilbert Hottois has argued that technology is characterized not only by the fact that it depends on an interpretation of reality, but also by the fact that it intervenes in reality. Meaning that it is not adequately understood if it is grasped only in terms of interpretation because this reduces it to the domain that it actually transcends.

Technology needs to think forward rather than backwards in the modern world. Then technology will not appear as a form of alienation from the “full richness” of reality, but as a form of mediation of the relation between human beings and reality.

Nostalgia:
Don Ihde says that Heidegger’s descriptions of traditional and modern technologies are colored by the romantic thesis that traditional technologies are preferable to modern technologies. According to Ihde, Heidegger is selective in his descriptions not only according to traditional technologies, but of modern technologies as well. Heidegger contrasts between two ways of disclosing reality; a standing reserve and as fourfold, where fourfold is the world as it is gathered by earth and skies, divinities and mortals. These four components form the dimensions that open up the realms through which human beings experience the world.
In a word, Ihde’s critique boils down to the fact that Heidegger’s nostalgia rests more on romance than on argumentation…

Verbeek critiques Heidegger’s nostalgia by stating “when analyzing traditional artifacts he uses an ahistorical perspective, while he approaches modern technologies using a historical perspective.

One can be nostalgic only when one thinks that something essential has been lost, and that becomes problematic precisely when one thinks historically, for then something can only be essential within a historical context.

Heidegger’s understanding of modern technology in terms of alienation in which something ordinary gets lost would not have been possible without applying a double standard.

Heidegger’s develops his two standards in two different contexts; the historical standard and the ahistorical standard. (p74)
Measures tradition and modernity with different scales, when he speaks about traditional technology, he does so in ahistorical terms; when he speaks about modern technologies he is a historian.



Heidegger and Things

Heidegger’s earlier work in Being and Time:
This view analyzes the role of equipment in the relation between human beings and their world. Instead of reducing the relation between human and world, technological artifacts generate specific forms of access to the world for human beings.

Heidegger’s philosophy of “being” changed (77)

Tools as providing access to the world
“Being in the world”
What makes a tool are piece of equipment what it is, is that it makes it possible to practice.
Human beings do not focus on the tool or piece of equipment they are using, but rather on the work in which they are engaged. The more aware the tool is the more difficult it becomes to do something with it
Tools shape the world
Things in short Disclose a world