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“The second edition of Philosophy of Technology is a must-read for everyone trying to sort out how societies, technologies, politics, and nature come together, tacitly or not, in the constitution of human knowledge.”

Jan Kyrre Berg Friis, University of Copenhagen

“This is an excellent selection of primary sources, essential to understanding technology and the conceptual debates about it. The editors are to be congratulated for their sensible choices and judicious introductions.”

Luciano Floridi, University of Oxford

Unrivaled in scope and valuable editorial content, Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition remains the most comprehensive anthology of philosophy of technology available. This second edition includes new and updated material on recent developments in the field, along with the editors’ insightful critical introductions to each topic. The combination of seminal essays with a fresh selection of contemporary material reflects changes in the field and in the world since the appearance of the first edition.

In addition to its analysis of the familiar political, social, cultural, and engineering contexts affecting the nature of technology, the volume includes a thorough examination of the influence on technology of historical, metaphysical, and epistemological concerns. It moves from readings on traditional concepts of technē, natural knowledge, and human nature to the latest assessments of inherited paradigms, rooted in Enlightenment thinking, concerning science, technology, and the philosophy of technology. A substantial portion of the anthology focuses on Heidegger’s writings on technology and their influence, and on a variety of questions animated by his work that interrogate technology’s connection to the current human condition, especially in the developed world. Further essays consider the proper place of technological practice in human life, the apparent autonomy of technological forces, the idea of technology as a social practice and as a medium of political power, and technology’s role as a model for contemporary conceptions of intelligence and information.

Robert C. Scharff is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of How History Matters to Philosophy (2014) and Comte After Positivism (1995; 2002), and the former editor of Continental Philosophy Review (1995–2005). He publishes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Continental philosophy (especially Dilthey, Heidegger, and the hermeneutics of science), the history of positivism (especially Comte and Mill, and the connection between classical positivism and recent analytic philosophy), and the philosophy of technology. He is currently preparing a collection of essays on Heidegger and technology, and editing a Blackwell Guidebook on Heidegger’s Being and Time.

Val Dusek is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire. His research focuses on the history and philosophy of science and technology, with a particular interest in the social factors influencing scientific and technological development. He has written on non-mainstream philosophical influences (Asiatic, hermetic, and Romantic) on the history of electro-magnetic theory. His numerous publications include Philosophy of Technology: An Introduction (Wiley Blackwell, 2006) and co-editorship of the first edition of this volume.

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Philosophy of Technology

BLACKWELL PHILOSOPHY ANTHOLOGIES

Each volume in this outstanding series provides an authoritative and comprehensive collection of the essential primary readings from philosophy’s main fields of study. Designed to complement the Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series, each volume represents an unparalleled resource in its own right, and will provide the ideal platform for course use.

1 Cottingham: Western Philosophy: An Anthology (second edition) 2 Cahoone: From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology (expanded second edition) 3 LaFollette: Ethics in Practice: An Anthology (third edition) 4 Goodin and Pettit: Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology (second edition) 5 Eze: African Philosophy: An Anthology 6 McNeill and Feldman: Continental Philosophy: An Anthology 7 Lycan and Prinz: Mind and Cognition: An Anthology (third edition) 8 Kuhse and Singer: Bioethics: An Anthology (second edition) 9 Cummins and Cummins: Minds, Brains, and Computers – The Foundations of Cognitive Science: An Anthology10 Sosa, Kim, Fantl, and McGrath Epistemology: An Anthology (second edition)11 Kearney and Rasmussen: Continental Aesthetics – Romanticism to Postmodernism: An Anthology12 Jacquette: Philosophy of Logic: An Anthology13 Jacquette: Philosophy of Mathematics: An Anthology14 Harris, Pratt, and Waters: American Philosophies: An Anthology15 Emmanuel and Goold: Modern Philosophy – From Descartes to Nietzsche: An Anthology16 Light and Rolston: Environmental Ethics: An Anthology17 Taliaferro and Griffiths: Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology18 Lamarque and Olsen: Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art – The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology19 John and Lopes: Philosophy of Literature – Contemporary and Classic Readings: An Anthology20 Cudd and Andreasen: Feminist Theory: A Philosophical Anthology21 Carroll and Choi: Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology22 Lange: Philosophy of Science: An Anthology23 Shafer-Landau and Cuneo: Foundations of Ethics: An Anthology24 Curren: Philosophy of Education: An Anthology25 Cahn and Meskin: Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology26 McGrew, Alspector-Kelly and Allhoff: The Philosophy of Science: An Historical Anthology27 May: Philosophy of Law: Classic and Contemporary Readings28 Rosenberg and Arp: Philosophy of Biology: An Anthology29 Kim, Korman, and Sosa: Metaphysics: An Anthology (second edition)30 Martinich and Sosa: Analytic Philosophy: An Anthology (second edition)31 Shafer-Landau: Ethical Theory: An Anthology (second edition)32 Hetherington: Metaphysics and Epistemology: A Guided Anthology33 Scharff and Dusek: Philosophy of Technology – The Technological Condition: An Anthology (second edition)

Philosophy of Technology

The Technological Condition: An Anthology

Second Edition

Edited by

Robert C. ScharffVal Dusek

This edition first published 2014© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc

Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

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Cover image: Catherine Abel, Maiden Voyage, 2003. Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art LibraryCover design by Nicki Averill Design and Illustration

Set in 9.5/11.5pt Bembo by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

1 2014

Contents

Source Acknowledgments ixIntroduction to the Second Edition xiii

Part I The Historical Background 1

Introduction 3

1 On Dialectic and “Techne”̄ 9Plato

2 On “Techne”̄ and “Epistem̄e”̄ 19Aristotle

3 The Greek Concepts of “Nature” and “Technique” 25Wolfgang Schadewaldt

4 On the Idols, the Scientific Study of Nature, and the Reformation of Education 33Francis Bacon

5 Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View 47Immanuel Kant

6 The Nature and Importance of the Positive Philosophy 54Auguste Comte

7 On the Sciences and Arts 68Jean-Jacques Rousseau

8 Capitalism and the Modern Labor Process 74Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Part II Philosophy, Modern Science, and Technology 89

Positivist and Postpositivist Philosophies of Science 91

9 The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle 101Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Otto Neurath

vi contents

10 Paradigms and Anomalies in Science 111Thomas Kuhn

11 Experimentation and Scientific Realism 121Ian Hacking

12 Hermeneutical Philosophy and Pragmatism: A Philosophy of Science 131Patrick A. Heelan and Jay Schulkin

13 What are Cultural Studies of Science? 147Joseph Rouse

14 Revaluing Science: Starting from the Practices of Women 161Nancy Tuana

15 Is Science Multicultural? 171Sandra Harding

16 On Knowledge and the Diversity of Cultures: Comment on Harding 183Shigehisa Kuriyama

The Task of a Philosophy of Technology 187

17 Philosophical Inputs and Outputs of Technology 191Mario Bunge

18 Analytic Philosophy of Technology 201Maarten Franssen

19 On the Aims of a Philosophy of Technology 205Jacques Ellul

20 Toward a Philosophy of Technology 210Hans Jonas

21 The Technology Question in Feminism: A View from Feminist Technology Studies 224Wendy Faulkner

Part III Defining Technology 239

Introduction 241

22 Conflicting Visions of Technology 249Mary Tiles and Hans Oberdiek

23 The Mangle of Practice 260Andrew Pickering

24 The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts 266Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker

25 Actor-Network Theory (ANT) 278Bruno Latour

26 Actor-Network Theory: Critical Considerations 289Sergio Sismondo

viicontents

Part IV Heidegger on Technology 297

Introduction 299

27 The Question Concerning Technology 305Martin Heidegger

28 On Philosophy’s “Ending” in Technoscience: Heidegger vs. Comte 318Robert C. Scharff

29 Focal Things and Practices 329Albert Borgmann

30 Heidegger and Borgmann on How to Affirm Technology 350Hubert L. Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa

31 Philosophy of Technology at the Crossroads: Critique of Heidegger and Borgmann 362Andrew Feenberg

Part V Technology and Human Ends 375

Human Beings as “Makers” or “Tool-Users”? 377

32 Tool Users vs. Homo Sapiens and the Megamachine 381Lewis Mumford

33 The “Vita Activa” and the Modern Age 389Hannah Arendt

34 Putting Pragmatism (especially Dewey’s) to Work 406Larry Hickman

35 Buddhist Economics 421E. F. Schumacher

Is Technology Autonomous? 426

36 The “Autonomy” of the Technological Phenomenon 430Jacques Ellul

37 Do Machines Make History? 442Robert L. Heilbroner

38 The New Forms of Control 449Herbert Marcuse

39 Technological Determinism Is Dead; Long Live Technological Determinism 456Sally Wyatt

Technology, Ecology, and the Conquest of Nature 467

40 Mining the Earth’s Womb 471Carolyn Merchant

41 The Deep Ecology Movement 482Bill Devall

viii contents

42 Deeper than Deep Ecology: The Eco-Feminist Connection 491Ariel Salleh

43 In Defense of Posthuman Dignity 495Nick Bostrom

Part VI Technology as Social Practice 503

Technology and the Lifeworld 505

44 Cultural Climates and Technological Advance in the Middle Ages 511Lynn White, Jr.

45 Three Ways of Being-With Technology 523Carl Mitcham

46 A Phenomenology of Technics 539Don Ihde

47 Postphenomenology of Technology 561Peter-Paul Verbeek

48 Technoscience Studies after Heidegger? Not Yet 573Robert C. Scharff

Technology and Cyberspace 582

49 Consciousness in Human and Robot Minds 588Daniel C. Dennett

50 Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing It Would Require Making It More Heideggerian 597Hubert L. Dreyfus

51 A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century 610Donna Haraway

52 A Moratorium on Cyborgs: Computation, Cognition, and Commerce 631Evan Selinger and Timothy Engström

53 Anonymity versus Commitment: The Dangers of Education on the Internet 641Hubert L. Dreyfus

Technology, Knowledge, and Power 648

54 Panopticism 654Michel Foucault

55 Do Artifacts Have Politics? 668Langdon Winner

56 The Social Impact of Technological Change 680Emmanuel G. Mesthene

57 Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals, with the Author’s 2000 Retrospective 693John McDermott

58 Democratic Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Freedom 706Andrew Feenberg

Source Acknowledgments

The editors and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book:

1. Selections from Plato, Republic, VIII, trans. G.M.A. Grube and C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), pp. 186–206, 210–12. Reprinted by permis-sion of Hackett Publishing Company Inc.

2. Selections from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), pp. 151–159. Reprinted by permission of Hackett Publishing Company Inc., and from Metaphysics I, 1, trans. W.D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), pp. 689–693. Copyright © Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.

3. Wolfgang Schadewaldt, “The Concepts of ‘Nature’ and ‘Technique’ according to the Greeks,” trans. William Carroll, in Research in Philosophy and Technology 2, ed. Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey (1979), pp. 159–171. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.

4. Francis Bacon, “Thoughts and Conclusions on the Interpretation of Nature as a Science Productive of Works,” trans. B. Farrington in The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964), pp. 90–96 abridged; reprinted by permission of Liverpool University Press. “The Plan of the Work 6” and “Aphorisms Concerning the Interpretation of Nature and the Kingdom of Man,” from Novum Organum, trans. and ed. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago and LaSalle: Open Court Publishing, 1994), pp. 29, 43, 53–56, 202; © 1994, reprinted by permission of Open Court Publishing

Company, a division of Carus Publishing Company, Chicago, IL. “On the Idols and on the Scientific Study of Nature,” from The New Atlantis, ed. Jerry Weinberge (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., rev. edn. 1989), pp. 71–74, 77, 79–83 abridged; copyright ©1980, 1989, reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons, USA. “Sphinx; or Science” and “On the Reformation of Education” from “Translation of the ‘De Augmentis’,” in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R.L. Ellis, and D.D. Heath (London: Longman, 1980), pp. 159–162 and 284–291, abridged.

5. From Immanuel Kant, On History, ed. and introd. L.W. Beck, trans. L.W. Beck, R.E. Anchor, and E.L.  Fackenhelm (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, Inc. 1957), pp. 11–26. Reprinted by permission of Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

6. Auguste Comte, “Lesson One,” in Cours de philoso-phie positive, from Introduction to Positive Philosophy, ed. and trans. Frederick Ferré (Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 1988), pp. 1–33. Reprinted by permission of Hackett Publishing Company Inc. All rights reserved.

7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Final Reply,” from Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, in Collected Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. 1, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1992), pp. 110–116. © University Press of New England, Lebanon, NH. Reprinted by permission.

8. Extracts from “The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus Value,” chapter VII in Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers,

x source acknowledgments

1967), pp. 173–177; reprinted by permission of International Publishers, New York. Extracts from Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1970), pp. 20–22; reprinted by permission of International Publishers, New York. Extracts from “Materialist Method” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C.J. Arthur (New York: Inter-national Publishers), abridged from pp. 42–43, 46–49; reprinted by permission of International Publishers, New York. Friedrich Engels, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man,” from Dialectics of Nature, 2nd edn., trans. Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1954), pp. 170–183. “On Authority,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer (Garden City, NY: The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, 1959), pp. 481–485; reprinted with kind permission of Robin Feuer Miller.

9. Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Otto Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle,” in Otto Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology, ed. M. Neurath and R. Cohen (1929/1973), pp. 299–318, abridged. Reprinted by permission of Springer.

10. Thomas Kuhn, “The Priority of Paradigms” and “Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries,” in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 43–65 (chs. 5 and 6). Reprinted by per-mission of University of Chicago Press.

11. Ian Hacking, “Experimentation and Scientific Realism,” from Philosophical Topics, 13 (1982), pp. 154–172. Copyright © by the Board of Trustees of the University of Arkansas. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company Inc., on behalf of the University of Arkansas Press, www.uapress.com.

12. Patrick A. Heelan and Jay Schulkin, “Hermeneutical Philosophy and Pragmatism: A Philosophy of Science,” from Synthese, 115 (1998), pp. 269–302, omitting some references. Reprinted by permis-sion of Springer.

13. Joseph Rouse, “What Are Cultural Studies of Science?,” from Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 237–259 (selections). Reprinted by permission of Cornell University Press.

14. Nancy Tuana, “Revaluing Science: Starting from the Practices of Women,” from Feminism, Science,

and the Philosophy of Science, ed. L.H. Nelson and J.  Nelson (Berlin: Springer, 1996), pp. 17–35. Reprinted by permission of Springer.

15. Sandra Harding, “Is Science Multicultural?,” from Configurations, 2/2 (1994), pp. 301–330. © 1994 The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for Literature and Science. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

16. Shigehisa Kuriyama, “On Knowledge and the Diversity of Cultures: Comment on Harding,” Configurations, 2/2 (1994), pp. 337–342. © 1994 The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for Literature and Science. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

17. Mario Bunge, “Philosophical Inputs and Outputs of Technology,” from The History of Philosophy and Technology, ed. George Bugliarello and Dean B. Doner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), pp. 262–281, abridged. Reprinted by kind permis-sion of Ms. Virginia Bugliarello.

18. Maarten Franssen, “Analytic Philosophy of Technology,” from A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology, ed. Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen et al. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 184–188. Reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

19. Jacques Ellul, “On the Aims of a Philosophy of Technology,” from The Technological Society (1954/64), trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Knopf; London: Jonathan Cape). Translation copyright © 1964 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House Inc. Reprinted by permission of Random House UK, and Random House, Inc.

20. Hans Jonas, “Toward a Philosophy of Technology,” Hastings Center Report 9/1 (1979). Copyright © The Hastings Center. Reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

21. Wendy Faulkner, “The Technology Question in Feminism,” from Women’s Studies International Forum, 24/1 (2001), pp. 79–95. Copyright © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.

22. Mary Tiles and Hans Oberdiek, “Conflicting Visions of Technology,” in Living in a Technological Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 12–31. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Books.

23. Andrew Pickering, “The Mangle of Practice,” from Rethinking Objectivity:Contemporary Interventions, ed. Allan Megill (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 109–125.

http://www.uapress.comhttp://www.uapress.com

xisource acknowledgments

24. Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts,” from The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of  Technology, 1987), pp. 17–22, 24–28, 46–50. ©  1987 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reproduced by permission of the MIT Press.

25. Bruno Latour, “Actor-Network Theory,” from “Introduction: How to Resume the Task of Tracing Associations,” in Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 5–25. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.

26. Sergio Sismondo, “Actor-Network Theory: Critical Considerations,” from An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 81–92. Reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

27. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” from Basic Writings, rev. edn. (New York: HarperCollins, [1993] 2008), pp. 311–341. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins USA, and Taylor & Francis Books UK.

28. Copyright © Robert C. Scharff.29. Albert Borgman, “Focal Things and Practices” and

“Wealth and the Good Life,” from Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 196–226, 285–289, abridged. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press.

30. Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa, originally “Highway Bridges and Feasts: Heidegger and Borgmann on How to Affirm Technology,” from Man and World, 30/2 (1997), p. 159–177. Reprinted by permission of Springer.

31. Andrew Feenberg, “Philosophy of Technology at the Crossroads,” from Technology and the Good Life?, ed. Eric Higgs, Andrew Light, and David Strong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 294–315. Reprinted by permission of University of Chicago Press.

32. Lewis Mumford, “Tool Users vs. Homo Sapiens and the Megamachine,” from Knowledge Among Men: Eleven Essays on Science, Culture, and Society Commemorating the 200th Anniversary of the Birth of James Smithson, ed. Paul H. Oehser (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), pp. 126–141, published

by Smithsonian Institution Press. Reprinted by permission of the Smithsonian Institution.

33. Hannah Arendt, “The ‘Vita Activa’ and the Modern Age,” from Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 7–11, 280–313, some notes abridged or omitted. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press.

34. Larry Hickman, “Putting Pragmatism (especially Dewey’s) to Work,” from “Tuning Up Technology,” ch. 2 of Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture: Putting Pragmatism to Work (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 17–20, 20–22, 22–23, 25–43. Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press. See endnote 1 below for abbre-viations used in this selection.

35. E.F. Schumacher, from Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper Trade, 1989), pp. 50–59.

36. Jacques Ellul, “The ‘Autonomy’ of the Technological Phenomenon,” from “Autonomy,” ch. 5 of The Technological System (New York: Continuum, 1980), pp. 125–150, 335–338, abridged. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Group Inc. (Continuum).

37. Robert L. Heilbroner, “Do Machines Make History?” from Technology & Culture, 8 (1967), pp.  335–345. © 1967 Society for the History of Technology. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

38. Herbert Marcuse, “The New Forms of Control,” from One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964), pp. 1–18. Copyright © 1964 by Herbert Marcuse. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.

39. Sally Wyatt, “Technological Determinism Is Dead,’ from The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael E. Lynch, and Judy Wajcman, 3rd edn. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 165–180. © 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted by permission of the MIT Press.

40. Carolyn Merchant, “Mining the Earth’s Womb,” from Machina ex Dea: Feminist Perspectives on Technology, ed. Joan Rothschild (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1983), pp. 99–117. © Carolyn Merchant. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.

41. Bill Devall, “The Deep Ecology Movement,” from Natural Resources Journal, 20/2 (1980), pp. 219–303, abridged.

xii

42. Ariel Salleh, “Deeper than Deep Ecology: The Eco-Feminist Connection,” from Environmental Ethics, 6/4 (1984), pp. 339–345. Reprinted by per-mission of the author.

43. Nick Bostrom, “In Defence of Posthuman Dignity,” from Bioethics, 19/3 (2005), pp. 202–214. Reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

44. Lynn White, Jr., “Cultural Climates and Technological Advance in the Middle Ages,” from Viator, 2 (1971), pp. 171–175, 186–201. Reprinted by permission of the University of California Press and Lynn T. White III.

45. Carl Mitcham, “Three Ways of Being-With Technology,” in From Artifact to Habitat: Studies in the Critical Engagement of Technology, Research in Technology Series 3 (Bethlehem, PA: LeHigh University Press, 1990), pp. 31–59. Reprinted by permission of Associated University Presses.

46. Don Ihde, originally “Program 1: A Phenomenology of Technics,” abridged from Technology and the Lifeworld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 72–108. Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press.

47. Peter-Paul Verbeek, “Postphenomenology of Technology,” from What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency and Design, trans. Robert P. Crease (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), pp. 99–119.

48. Robert C. Scharff, “Technoscience Studies after Heidegger? Not Yet,” from Philosophy Today, 54/5 (2010), pp. 106–114.

49. Daniel Dennett, “Consciousness in Human and Robot Minds,” from Cognition, Computation, and Consciousness, ed. Masao Ito, Yashushi Miyashita, and Edmund T. Rolls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 17–30. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.

50. Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing It Would Require Making It More Heideggerian,” from Philosophical Psychology, 20/2 (2007), pp. 247–257, 260–268. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

51. Donna Haraway, “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” from Socialist Review, 80 (1985), pp. 65–108, abridged. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.

52. Evan Selinger and Timothy L. Engström, “A Moratorium on Cyborgs: Computation, Cognition, and Commerce,” from Phenomenology and Cognitive

Science, 7 (2008), pp. 327–341. Reprinted by per-mission of Springer.

53. Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Anonymity versus Commitment: The Dangers of Education on the Internet,” from Ethics and Information Technology, 1/1 (1999), pp. 15–21. Reprinted by permission of Springer.

54. Michel Foucault, “Panopticism,” from Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (Pantheon, 1978), pp. 195–209, 216–228, 316–317, 326–333, abridged. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt and Penguin Books UK.

55. Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” from Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Copyright © 1986 by the University of Chicago. Reprinted by permission.

56. Emmanuel G. Mesthene, “Technology and Wisdom,” from Technology and Social Change, ed. Emmanuel G. Mesthene (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Inc., 1967), pp. 57–62. “I. Social Change,” “II. Values,” “III. Economic and Political Organization,” and “IV. Conclusion,” from Emmanuel G. Mesthene, “Some General Implications of the Research of the Harvard University Program on Technology and Society,” Technology and Culture, 10/4 (Oct. 1969), pp. 489–490, 495–501, 507–511, 513, abridged. Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Society for the History of Technology.

57. John McDermott, “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals,” originally from The New York Review of Books (1969); abridged. © John McDermott. Reprinted by kind permission of the author. “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals,” with author’s 2000 retrospective © John McDermott. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.

58. Andrew Feenberg, “Democratic [originally “Subversive”] Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Democracy,” revised version of an article in Inquiry, 35 (1992), pp. 301–322. Reprinted by per-mission of Taylor & Francis.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list, and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incoporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

source acknowledgments

Introduction to the Second Edition

The first edition of this collection grew out of the editors’ experienced needs as teachers of the philosophy of technology. Since its appearance, schools of thought and lines of research have started to differentiate them-selves more clearly in this young field, new problems have been identified, and older ones reconceived. Our second edition takes many of these developments into account. Yet in certain basic ways, the original design of  our anthology still seems right to us. Although the number of well-stocked anthologies has grown, we continue to believe that our collection best addresses two unfortunately common philosophical lacunae. First, most anthologies contain very little material from classical sources (e.g., Aristotle, Bacon, Kant, Comte, Marx) in terms of which technology, or basic concepts that contribute to our current ways of conceiving tech-nological practices, are already discussed. Second, in many cases, the main focus is on specific technological issues and case studies, with the result – truth be told – that the selections are sometimes philosophically thin. In our view, especially when it comes to the philosophical consideration of technology, structuring an anthology after the familiar model of the applied ethics reader is likely to have unfortunate pedagogical consequences. In the typical application of this model, one starts with familiar, extra-philosophically identifiable “problems,” samples the variety of “values” or “criteria” in terms of which it has been claimed these problems can be han-dled, and then more or less leaves it up to the instructor to explain how philosophy somehow gets involved in testing the selection and “justification” of these values or criteria.

Regarding the philosophy of technology, however, we believe that this model gets things strategically back-

wards in important ways. One unintended consequence of its use is that it can leave students, especially those who have not had much previous exposure to philosophy, with the impression that philosophy mostly happens at the level of a “debate” among a smorgasbord of compet-ing sets of values that themselves are somehow sim-ply found, or “given” as logical or sociological options. This  serves to confirm the popular non-philosophical conception of philosophy as a “belief system” that one already has or can pick out and thereafter “defend.” The whole idea of philosophy as a process of inquiry, or as critical self-discovery, or as involving a reflective struggle with inherited orientations, is thus muted or occluded. Moreover, as some of the authors below complain, the problems-model also has the effect of privileging one very familiar but perhaps not so innocent outlook regarding technological problems – namely, the idea that technology itself is not a problem, that it simply provides us with a collection of instrumental means, and that the main task is  to decide what ends it should serve. To a significant number of philosophers of technology, this allegedly “neutral” interpretation of technology should itself be identified as a topic to be carefully questioned.

The second gap we have found in the available texts is  a widespread failure to consider the question of the relation between contemporary technology and modern science. As pressing and immediate as the issues of, say, technology transfer, medical patients’ rights, informatics, and biotechnology clearly are, debates that stay at the level of these issues often silently perpetuate long-standing, deeply held, but now hotly contested assumptions about  the nature of science, about the technological applications of science, and even about the proper place of science and technology within the larger scope

xiv introduction to the second edition

of human affairs. For example, is knowledge essentially connected to a drive for power, as Bacon claimed and Foucault still insists? Is technology primarily to be understood as “applied modern science,” or is the ancient human concern for “making” already implicated in the very development of science itself, as (in very different ways) Comte, Marx, Heidegger, Mumford, Arendt, and various sorts of pragmatists maintain? And should we expect, or do we even have a choice about, technological practices increasingly coming to define the nature and axiological direction of human life? Such questions simply cannot be addressed adequately if they are permitted to arise only between the lines of selections focused primarily on issues of how to control, modify, or conceptually clarify this or that specific political, ethical, aesthetic, or engineering problem.

With these concerns in mind, then, we have structured our revised anthology as we did the original – in a way that, with or without sharing our reasoning above, instructors have the option of making historical, meta-physical, and epistemological issues just as prominent as ethical, political, aesthetic, and engineering problems. Because we envision this text as useful for anything from  introductory undergraduate courses to graduate seminars, our selections vary considerably in length and difficulty, and we have elected to place most of our introductory material at the beginning of the sections rather than all together in one opening essay. Here, we confine ourselves to a brief explanation of the general plan of the six main parts of the text.

The purpose of Part I is to provide a forum for some familiar voices in the Western philosophical tradition whose views about the relation between knowledge and its applications have played an important role in setting up the inherited context within which contemporary phi-losophy of technology takes its bearings. Our selections were made in a way that is also designed to encourage consideration of the question of why – in comparison to other philosophical topics – a philosophy specifically of technology is so relatively recent in origin.

Part II contains contemporary readings that especially emphasize and critically assess the basic assumptions handed down to us from the nineteenth century about science, the relation between modern science and technology, and philosophy’s proper treatment of both. We have divided this part into two sections. The first section provides a kind of mini-history of the rise and decline of logical positivist, or Vienna Circle, philosophy of science, together with the emergence of various

postpositivist criticisms and alternatives. Our intention is to highlight the ways in which these alternatives all tend to stress the importance of precisely the social, cultural, and historical context of scientific practice that positivis-tic philosophy of science urges us to ignore. The readings in second section illustrate how stressing or ignoring this context directly affects how one conceives the nature of and the relation between the philosophies of science and of technology.

The readings in Part III illustrate what issues are at stake in trying to define technology, how unsettled and pluralistic are today’s attempts to do so, and the extent to which many recent efforts to define technology still tend, sometimes in spite of themselves, to reflect older, more traditional assumptions about what science is and how philosophy should approach it. In addition, these selections make it plain that, whether deliberately or unintentionally, efforts to define technology tend to take a stand on two controversial topics – namely, whether and how modern science has transformed “prescientific” technologies, and whether technology is essentially “applied science.”

Part IV reprints Martin Heidegger’s essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” and a sampling of  responses to it. Heidegger’s essay presents what is probably the single most influential – though by no means most popular – position in the field. Many of the issues discussed in the sections that follow, especially in Part VI, are framed in a way that reflects some species of agreement or disagreement with his views.

In Part V, the readings raise a cluster of general issues concerning technology’s proper role in mediating our relations with the natural world. One section considers the question of whether human beings are essentially just “tool-users” and thus most themselves when they are engaged in technological activities. A second section raises the issue of whether, as some writers have argued, the influence of technology in our lives is so strong and pervasive that it actually functions as a virtually autono-mous force and makes all optimistic talk of “controlling” it seem naïve. The essays in the third section bring the issues of human nature and technological power together in relation to the widely debated ecological question of  the legitimacy of the famous (or perhaps infamous and  even male-gendered) Baconian imperative that encourages us to think of “knowledge” primarily as giv-ing us the power to control our natural surroundings.

Part VI focuses on issues that arise when technology is viewed, not so much as an expression of human nature

xvintroduction to the second edition

or as an instrument for controlling nature, but rather as  defining a specific and (at least in the so-called “ developed” parts of the world) increasingly dominant kind of sociocultural practice. The essays in the first section all ask, in the words of one of the authors, what it is like to “be-with” technology, such that it mediates most of our relations not just with nature but also among ourselves. In “Technology and Cyberspace,” the second section, several authors consider the puzzling issue of whether the computer revolution promises to alter, like it or not, our basic notions of who we are, what  a “mind” or “consciousness” is, and what it is to experience “reality.” A third section brings into focus a question implicit in numerous other readings, namely, what are the ramifications for the future of political democracy of our ever more predominantly technologi-cal forms of social practice?

Finally, we add a note of grateful acknowledgment. We would like to express our thanks to the publishers and other copyright holders who gave us reprint permission, and to the virtual army of persons who have encouraged and advised us in putting both the original and this revised text together. Among them are (with apologies to those we have inadvertently omitted) Thomas Achen, Babette Babich, Robert Crease, Fred Dallmayr, Jan Kyrre Berg

Friis, Trish Glazebrook, Gert Goeminne, Donna Haraway, Patrick Heelan, Michael Heim, Don Ihde, David Kolb, Theodore Kisiel, Carolyn Merchant, David Richard Moore, Søren Riis, Robert Rosenberger, Joseph Rouse,  Evan Selinger, Hans Siegfried, David Stone, Timm Triplett, Peter-Paul Verbeek, Kenneth Westphal, Michael Zimmerman, and the two sets of anonymous reviewers of each edition for Blackwell Publishers. Special thanks are due also to Andrew Feenberg for volunteering to produce a revised versions of “Democratic [originally, “Subversive”] Rationality: Technology, Power, and Freedom [originally, “Democracy”]”; and to John McDermott for writing, on very short notice, a retrospective on his “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals.” We are also grateful for the continuing support and patience of Jeff Dean, our Blackwell editor, who saw both manuscripts through the press, and Jennifer Bray and Janet Moth, our project editors for this edition. Let us add that we are painfully aware that in this rapidly growing field it is impos-sible for anyone to maintain a working knowledge of “everything important” that might be suitable for a reader such as ours. We therefore continue welcome all criticisms and suggestions about possible sins of omission as well as commission. And, of course, we ask that those we have thanked above be held blameless for this final product.

0002025686.INDD 15 11/4/2013 6:24:18 PM

The Historical Background

Part I

Introduction

At first glance, it may seem surprising that until recently,  philosophers have not devoted much time to the question of technology. One might have thought that greater attention would at least have come to be paid to this phenomenon in the modern period when advances in natural and biological science increasingly and obviously made technology a central and dominant feature of society and culture. Yet the fact is that even today – in the North American and British mainstream of analytic philosophy and to a lesser extent among those influenced by late nineteenth- and twentieth-century postpositivist and Conti nental European sources – the philosophy of tech-nology is still widely regarded as not much more than a small and not particularly prestigious area of specialization.

In part, the reasons for this secondary status for the philosophy of technology are reflected in the general features of modern intellectual history. In the Anglo-American empiricist, French Enlightenment, and European positivist traditions, technology is widely depicted as an unproblematically beneficial force for human progress. For these traditions, technology needs only the proper association with modern science to fulfill its promise; hence the genuinely philosophical issues lie primarily in  the epistemology of science, which explains how genuine knowledge is to be obtained, and in ethics, which determines what that knowledge is for. With epistemology and ethics thus focused on the two cen-tral  issues of what we can know and what we should do,  technology falls through the cracks, understood as just the relatively neutral means for employing scientific

knowledge to bring about the ideal relations in the natural and social world that ethical decisions pre-scribe. It is true that for the Romantic and post-Hegelian “Continental” traditions, this judgment must be qualified slightly, for in these traditions there is less inclination to  conceive all knowledge according to the model of science or to conceive of science as an essentially progressive force. Yet science itself (especially natural science) is just as often viewed by them also in strictly instrumentalist terms, and technology is widely under-stood as simply applied science – with the difference being that the cultural implications of all this are more  likely to be conceived in critical and pessimistic terms,  not in the progressive or even utopian terms characteristic of the empiricist and positivist traditions.

To fully understand the philosophical neglect of tech-nology, however, one must go back to ancient Greek thought and to the manner in which figures like Plato and Aristotle drew their distinctions between theoretical and practical understanding. There is no question, of course, that the ancients took the distinction seriously. It  is known, for instance, that Plato’s teacher, Socrates (c.470–399 bce), often discussed this distinction. He insisted that the “craft” knowledge of farmers, shoemakers, and bakers, as well as physicians, is genuine knowledge. Socrates’ point, however, is one of criticism rather than defense. Craft knowledge consists primarily in a kind of technical understanding, limited to its concern with the pursuit of particular trades or practices. Unfortunately, those who possess such knowledge (and especially those

Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: An Anthology, Second Edition. Edited by Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

4 introduction

who achieve worldly success because of it) are often misled into thinking they possess wisdom about life in general. Socrates is thus at pains to argue that practically oriented craft knowledge is in fact quite different from the knowledge of the good life that has always been the concern of the religious seers and poets. Plato (c.429–c.347 bce), too, employs this general Socratic distinction of craft knowledge vs. knowledge of life; moreover, his dialogues are full of images of actual technological devices. The water clock, the astronomical orrery, and the mechanical puppet show all figure prominently as metaphors and models for several of his myths – for example, of cosmic creation in the Timaeus, the last judgment in the Republic, the history of the cosmos in the Statesman, and the shadow play of puppet-objects in the myth of the cave in the Republic’s account of the triumph of reason over sensual experience in genuine philosophical learning.

What Plato also makes explicit, however, is that the Socratic distinction between technical or craft know-ledge, on the one hand, and knowledge of the good life, on the other, is fundamentally a distinction between two unequal phenomena. Craft knowledge is ordinary, lower, sense-experientially based understanding focused on practical affairs. Knowledge of the good life and of the ultimate nature of things – that is, the “wisdom” that philosophers “love” – is a higher, theoretical, and genuinely rational knowledge to which the former kind of knowledge is rightfully and ultimately beholden. Thus, for example, in the Republic, Plato envisions the education of the philosopher king as involving extensive training in pure mathematics (including theoretical astronomy and music theory) as the proper background for further and still higher training in philosophical dialectics. And in the Gorgias he shows how technical understanding (e.g., of rhetoric) is useless, or worse, when cut off from the deeper knowledge of what rhetoric is truly “good” for.

It is this higher, genuinely rational understanding of the essential nature of things that Plato identifies as the concern of the philosophers; and it is this hierarchical conception of theoretical over practical understanding that he (and, in a somewhat differently interpreted way, Aristotle) bequeathed to the Western tradition. Moreover, in their enthusiastic preference for the rational and theoretical over the practical and sense-dependent, many later Platonists, Neoplatonists, and some say even Plato himself (in the controversial reports of his allegedly “unwritten” doctrines and “Lecture on the Good” given

at his Academy) came to identify numbers with the ideal,  timeless form of philosophical knowledge. The  distinction between mathematical knowledge and philosophical knowledge thereby came to be blurred, and it is perhaps not too much of a stretch to suggest that one can hear an echo of this ancient preference for mathematical metaphor in the later Western conceptions of technocracy, or rule by scientists and technologists. In any case, Plato did advocate the rule of the “wise,” by which he meant those trained in philosophy, where philosophy is understood as the love of a knowledge that is “like” that of the mathematical scientists but with an additional concern for cultivating a rational vision of the ultimate principles of all things.

Aristotle (384–322 bce) makes just as strong a distinction between higher and lower understanding and  is just  as convinced as Plato that the highest kind of  human life is one of rational contemplation of the  “highest things.” Against Plato, however, Aristotle argues  that the distinction between practical-technical- artistic  understanding, on the one hand, and scientific-philosophical understanding, on the other, really cannot be a distinction involving possession of two kinds of “theories.” Plato’s Socrates appears to claim that moral virtue is a kind of knowledge; but this, counters Aristotle, must be wrong – if for no other reason than that this idea of moral virtue is unable to account for our familiar experience of the weakness of the will. Too obviously, it is possible to have knowledge of what to do but fail to do it. For Aristotle, moral virtue must therefore be conceived as a kind of practical reasoning (jρóνησις, phrones̄is) achieved through exposure to experienced teachers, the building of good character, and the formation of the proper habits of activity.

Aristotle also objects to Plato’s tendency to overuse mathematical imagery in depicting not only philosophi-cal and scientific knowledge but practical and political reasoning as well. In the Republic, for example, Plato pre-sents abstract mathematical knowledge as a preliminary to political practice. His Philebus even entertains the notion of a “science of normative measure” (perhaps inspired by the mathematical theory of utility of the leading mathematician Eudoxus, who had joined the Academy). In contrast, Aristotle claims that different disciplines have different degrees of rigor that are appro-priate to them. It is wrong to demand mathematical exactness in, say, ethics or politics. The largely implicit practical wisdom required of the citizen or politician, as well as the expertise of the artist and craftsperson, is

5introduction

concerned with generalizing about particular situations and individual things; and this sort of expertise must be  carefully distinguished from the explicit theoretical knowledge of the scientist or philosopher, who is concerned with the truly universal and essential in all situations and all things.

For all their differences, however, Plato and Aristotle both developed hierarchical conceptions of knowledge that make philosophical or scientific understanding of the universal and essential superior. Evidence of this line of thinking can be seen in the fact that the ancients did not conceive of technological change and economic production in the modern terms of efficiency and progress. As Schadewaldt explains, our whole modern cluster of terms – nature, knowledge, technique, practical activity – have a very different ontological cast from that of the ancients. Above all, the Greeks did not under-stand their surroundings as what we call “nature” – that is, as a kind of external reality regarded as the object of our drive toward knowledge. For the Greeks, the cosmos is first of all 𝜑ύ𝜎iς (physis, from which our word “physics” comes) – the whole of things, with all of its motion, changes of shape and, size, and physical development and growth, and generation and degeneration – and we are part of it, placed in it, and the human spirit thus seeks to understand it as that with which we are in any case involved. Hence, it would make no sense to Plato or  Aristotle to think of any kind of knowledge as something freely fashioned by us to give us control over something apart from us. Scientific understanding and practical techniques were both judged as analogous to the dynamic processes of the cosmos. The Roman aqueducts, for example, may seem “overbuilt” by modern standards, but that is because they are designed not just to  carry water but to do so in perpetuity, to “be” as if things of the cosmos, like rivers and streams. Hence, where we might distinguish between “merely” aesthetic considerations and utility or efficiency in our crafts and practical productions, the ancients would consider both together as inseparable and as receiving their sanction from 𝜑ύ𝜎iς and our under-standing of it. (We might note in passing that, in keeping with the supposed natural order of things, the “higher” arts of economic production as well as architecture and sculp-ture were regarded as best suited to men, whereas manual labor and hands-on crafts were widely considered to be lowly activities fit mostly for women and slaves.)

Through this Greek-pagan orientation, then, there runs a pervasive sense of our being destined to live in harmony with an awesomely comprehensive cosmos to which we

are never closer than when we strive to contemplate its first principles. In contrast, Christianity tends to encour-age an outlook that fosters the idea of our separation from and superiority over nature. The Christian concep-tion of the material universe as created from nothing by an all-knowing, rational God seems somehow to make that universe both less mysterious than Greek cosmology (see Mesthene’s “The Social Impact of Technological Change,” Chapter 56) and more remote from our true being. The theological interpretation of history as a progress toward our salvation paved the way for the later notions of linear scientific and technological progress. At the same time, the struggle for self-purification against the natural and material forces (introduced in the monas-tic orders) implicitly increased the dignity of the idea of work, and this imagery would later suggest the possibility of technological and scientific revolutions. All such developments, however, had to await the transfer of these views to a non-religious context (see Lynn White’s essay, Chapter 44). Only in the early modern period did the human control of nature and the essential beneficence of applying scientific knowledge to technology become ruling ideals. The remaining selections in Part I provide a  sample of some of the major variations on these modern themes.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) famously claims that knowledge is power – that is, that through knowledge of nature and its technological applications, humans can achieve a purity of mind and behavior that was lost after the Fall in the Garden of Eden. Thus, in The New Atlantis, Bacon envisages a utopia in which the workers at “Saloman’s House” study the resources of the island and the world to improve the health and welfare of the inhabitants. Here, Plato’s philosopher kings have been transformed into proto-scientists and technologists who guide the nation. Further selections reveal Bacon’s colorful and (as discussed later by Carolyn Merchant, Chapter 40) sometimes disturbingly gendered ways of depicting the acquisition of scientific knowledge and what sort of power it is that such knowledge allegedly gives us. Perhaps most famous of all, there is his Myth of the Sphinx, in which Bacon likens science itself to a seeming monster (to those ignorant of its nature), with wings (for the rapid dissemination of its discoveries), sharp claws (which grip the mind with its clear axioms and telling arguments), mountaintop abode (as befits something so lofty), and apparent riddles (which, when solved, reward beyond measure in the power over igno-rance conquered and technologies gained). It is worth

6 introduction

contrasting the image of “nature” that must lie behind this conception of knowledge and its acquisition with that of the ancients.

A sophisticated and nuanced version of the secularized doctrine of linear historical progress is found in “The Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). All “ animals,” Kant suggests, are destined to fulfill their natural purposes, and in the case of human beings this means the develop-ment of scientific and ethical rationality. The idea of human progress toward world government and perpetual peace that Rousseau ridiculed is presented here as empowered by the “unsociable sociability” of humans. Though written in an admittedly somewhat speculative vein, Kant’s essay nevertheless expresses the modern out-look of many who suppose its truth even when they are silent about it. For Kant’s portrayal of rational progress seems to justify the Enlightenment doctrines about our elevation above and over against nature. At the same time,  it points forward to the less qualified historical claims of Hegel, Comte, and Marx.

The theme of what would later be called technocracy truly came into its own in the early 1800s with the w ritings of Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Comte began his career as Saint-Simon’s assistant, and he came to exert a powerful if often unacknowledged influence over a wide and diverse range of other thinkers by clarifying and extend-ing Saint-Simon’s often sketchy and disorganized ideas into a “System of Positive Philosophy.” The first half of his system focuses on the epistemology of science (his Cours de philosophie positive); the last half develops his ideas on the social and political organization that Comte assumes successful science will make possible (his Système de politique positive). At the heart of his system lies Comte’s philosophy of history and its Law of Three Stages. This law depicts humanity as moving (first intellectually and then in action) through three phases of development, utilizing three “methods” of philosophizing – namely, the theological (or fictive), metaphysical (or abstractly speculative), and scientific (or “positive”). Comte founded and named sociology as the science of society, and his later work is quite explicit about the need to replace traditional religion with a “Religion of Humanity,” so that natural and social scientists and those who apply their knowledge, not the priests of the Catholic Church, would rule. A few positivist churches were actually founded, and some still exist in England and Latin America (Brazil’s flag contains Comte’s slogan,

“Order and Progress”). More importantly, however, Comte’s notion of the “priestly” role of scientists and  technologists possesses – albeit in a less explicit form – a much greater worldwide significance in twenty-first-century industrial societies, East and West.

Karl Marx (1818–83) ridiculed the Saint-Simonian and Comtean blueprints for a technocratic utopia, calling  them “recipes for the cookshops of the future.” Yet Marx’s collaborator, Engels, displayed much greater sympathy toward their doctrines, and through him, Saint-Simonian phrases – for example, “the administra-tion of things, not of men,” “society as one vast factory,” and “artists as engineers of the soul” – found their way into the Soviet Marxism of both Lenin and Stalin. (Is it mere coincidence that the planners of Disney World are called “Imagineers”?)

In his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) opposes the prevalent Enlighten-ment optimism concerning science and its applications. He shocked his contemporaries by challenging their complacent progressivism. Where they saw only scien-tific progress and the promise of what Comte called “social reorganization” leading to world peace and human happiness, Rousseau perceived progress of the sciences and the arts as leading instead to decline and decadence. Where philosophes such as Voltaire, d’Alembert, and Condorcet anticipated Saint-Simon and Comte in  assuming that scientific progress of necessity leads to  moral and political progress, Rousseau claims instead that the virtue and vigor of the barbarian nations is  destroyed by the spread of civilization. Rousseau’s sensational anti-Baconian manifesto presaged and nour-ished the Romantic critique of the industrial revolution in subsequent generations in Germany and England.

Marx may have ridiculed the Saint-Simonian and Comtean conceptions of scientific and technological progress. Yet he was, after Bacon, the modern philosopher who made technology most central to his system. Marx’s vision of human history combines elements of the Baconians and Enlightenment philosophes with elements of the German and British Romantics. Like Bacon and the Enlightenment thinkers, Marx is optimistic concern-ing the development of science and technology as well as about their benefit for humanity in the long run, with the eventual establishment of communism. He shares, however, the pessimism of Rousseau and the Romantics concerning the oppression and alienation produced by science and technology, especially in relation to private property, in the present and short run.

7introduction

Marx’s account of the role of technology in social change varies from writing to writing. The Poverty of Philosophy contains his famous quip, “the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.” His brief and highly influential “Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy” identifies the “base” of society as con-stituted by technological forces and social power relations of production. Many orthodox Marxists have interpreted these passages as proposing a technological determinism. (Ironically, there are many technocrats today who are strongly anti-Marxist but espouse a conception of contemporary post-industrial society that is just as technologically deterministic. For contributions to the non-Marxist debate concerning technological determin-ism and autonomy, see the later selections by Ellul (Chapters 19 and 36), Heilbronner (Chapter 37), Wyatt (Chapter 39), and Winner (Chapter 55). In the much more detailed discussions of Capital, however, Marx claims that class structure and class struggle control what sort of technology is developed. In these passages, some readers have seen a social determinism that can be used to criticize of technological determinism. Many twentieth- and twenty-first-century non-Soviet Marxists – from Chinese Maoists to European Marxist humanists – have gone on to argue that the very idea of technological determinism is a product of a technocratic capitalist ideology (see, e.g., Marcuse, Chapter 38). One key issue in this dispute over whether technology determines social relations or social power determines technological developments is the question of the relative weight of the

technological division of labor (i.e., job roles determined by technology) vs. the social division of labor (i.e., job roles and technology determined by the desire of owners and managers to control workers). That Marx and Engels embrace the latter view can be seen, for example, in The German Ideology, where they describe a communist utopia in which one could be at once fisherman, hunter, and intellectual; or in Engels’ later writings, where he rejects the anarchists’ claim that labor discipline and hierarchy can be eliminated. Engels argues that technology by itself enforces certain types of labor discipline and hierarchy.

In any case, through all of these Marx-Engels selec-tions there runs another theme that has also become a major topic of debate. According to Marx, human beings modify their environment with tools because this is our nature, and insofar as we do so, we exhibit our difference from other animals (see, e.g., The German Ideology). In his lifelong collaboration with Engels, Marx developed this conception of the human species into a full-blown account of human evolution from the apes (see “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man.) This evolutionary conception of humans as essentially tool-making animals has been vigorously criticized by later philosophers of technology, including even human-istic Marxists (see Mumford and Arendt, Chapters 32 and 33). Arendt’s argument is especially challenging, for it contains an immanent criticism, namely, that Marx’s concept of labor displays a deep ambivalence between understanding technological labor as, on the one hand, involving creative world-construction and, on the other, as inseparably linked to degrading oppression.

On Dialectic and “Techne ̄”

Plato

1

From the Republic

[…]Next, I said, compare the effect of education and of the lack of it on our nature to an experience like this: Imagine human beings living in an underground, cave-like dwelling, with an entrance a long way up, which is both open to the light and as wide as the cave itself. They’ve been there since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able to see only in front of them, because their bonds prevent them from turning their heads around. Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Also behind them, but on higher ground, there is a path stretching between them and the fire. Imagine that along this path a low wall has been built, like the screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets.

I’m imagining it.Then also imagine that there are people along the

wall, carrying all kinds of artifacts that project above it – statues of people and other animals, made out of stone, wood, and every material. And, as you’d expect, some of the carriers are talking, and some are silent.

It’s a strange image you’re describing, and strange prisoners.

They’re like us. Do you suppose, first of all, that these prisoners see anything of themselves and one another

besides the shadows that the fire casts on the wall in front of them?

How could they, if they have to keep their heads motionless throughout life?

What about the things being carried along the wall? Isn’t the same true of them?

Of course.And if they could talk to one another, don’t you think

they’d suppose that the names they used applied to the things they see passing before them?1

They’d have to.And what if their prison also had an echo from the

wall facing them? Don’t you think they’d believe that the shadows passing in front of them were talking whenever one of the carriers passing along the wall was doing so?

I certainly do.Then the prisoners would in every way believe that

the truth is nothing other than the shadows of those artifacts.

They must surely believe that.Consider, then, what being released from their bonds

and cured of their ignorance would naturally be like. When one of them was freed and suddenly compelled to stand up, turn his head, walk, and look up toward the light, he’d be pained and dazzled and unable to see the things whose shadows he’d seen before. What do you think he’d say, if we told him that what he’d seen before

514

b

c515

b

c

d

Selections from Plato, Republic, VIII, trans. G.M.A. Grube and C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), pp. 186–206, 210–12. Reprinted by permission of Hackett Publishing Company Inc.

Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: An Anthology, Second Edition. Edited by Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

10 plato

was inconsequential, but that now – because he is a bit closer to the things that are and is turned towards things that are more – he sees more correctly? Or, to put it another way, if we pointed to each of the things passing by, asked him what each of them is, and compelled him to answer, don’t you think he’d be at a loss and that he’d believe that the things he saw earlier were truer than the ones he was now being shown?

Much truer.And if someone compelled him to look at the light

itself, wouldn’t his eyes hurt, and wouldn’t he turn around and flee towards the things he’s able to see, believing that they’re really clearer than the ones he’s being shown?

He would.And if someone dragged him away from there by

force, up the rough, steep path, and didn’t let him go until he had dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t he be pained and irritated at being treated that way? And when he came into the light, with the sun filling his eyes, wouldn’t he be unable to see a single one of the things now said to be true?

He would be unable to see them, at least at first.I suppose, then, that he’d need time to get adjusted

before he could see things in the world above. At first, he’d see shadows most easily, then images of men and other things in water, then the things themselves. Of these, he’d be able to study the things in the sky and the sky itself more easily at night, looking at the light of the stars and the moon, than during the day, looking at the sun and the light of the sun.

Of course.Finally, I suppose, he’d be able to see the sun, not

images of it in water or some alien place, but the sun itself, in its own place, and be able to study it.

Necessarily so.And at this point he would infer and conclude that

the sun provides the seasons and the years, governs every-thing in the visible world, and is in some way the cause of all the things that he used to see.

It’s clear that would be his next step.What about when he reminds himself of his first

dwelling place, his fellow prisoners, and what passed for wisdom there? Don’t you think that he’d count himself happy for the change and pity the others?

Certainly.And if there had been any honors, praises, or prizes

among them for the one who was sharpest at identifying the shadows as they passed by and who best remembered

which usually came earlier, which later, and which simultaneously, and who could thus best divine the future, do you think that our man would desire these rewards or envy those among the prisoners who were honored and held power? Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer, that he’d much prefer to “work the earth as a serf to another, one without possessions,”2 and go through any sufferings, rather than share their opinions and live as they do?

I suppose he would rather suffer anything than live like that.

Consider this too. If this man went down into the cave again and sat down in his same seat, wouldn’t his eyes – coming suddenly out of the sun like that – be filled with darkness?

They certainly would.And before his eyes had recovered – and the adjust-

ment would not be quick – while his vision was still dim, if he had to compete again with the perpetual prisoners in recognizing the shadows, wouldn’t he invite ridicule? Wouldn’t it be said of him that he’d returned from his upward journey with his eyesight ruined and that it isn’t worthwhile even to try to travel upward? And, as for anyone who tried to free them and lead them upward, if they could somehow get their hands on him, wouldn’t they kill him?

They certainly would.This whole image, Glaucon, must be fitted together

with what we said before. The visible realm should be likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the fire inside it to the power of the sun. And if you interpret the upward journey and the study of things above as the upward journey of the soul to the intelligible realm, you’ll grasp what I hope to convey, since that is what you wanted to hear about. Whether it’s true or not, only the god knows. But this is how I see it: In the knowable realm, the form of the good is the last thing to be seen, and it is reached only with difficulty. Once one has seen it, however, one must conclude that it is the cause of all that is correct and beautiful in anything, that it produces both light and its source in the visible realm, and that in the intelligible realm it controls and provides truth and understanding, so that anyone who is to act sensibly in private or public must see it.

I have the same thought, at least as far as I’m able.Come, then, share with me this thought also: It isn’t

surprising that the ones who get to this point are unwill-ing to occupy themselves with human affairs and that their souls are always pressing upwards, eager to spend

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11on dialectic and “techne ̄”

their time above, for, after all, this is surely what we’d expect, if indeed things fit the image I described before.

It is.What about what happens when someone turns from

divine study to the evils of human life? Do you think it’s surprising, since his sight is still dim, and he hasn’t yet become accustomed to the darkness around him, that he behaves awkwardly and appears completely ridiculous if he’s compelled, either in the courts or elsewhere, to contend about the shadows of justice or the statues of which they are the shadows and to dispute about the way these things are understood by people who have never seen justice itself?

That’s not surprising at all.No, it isn’t. But anyone with any understanding would

remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways and from two causes, namely, when they’ve come from the light into the darkness and when they’ve come from the  darkness into the light. Realizing that the same applies to the soul, when someone sees a soul disturbed and unable to see something, he won’t laugh mindlessly, but he’ll take into consideration whether it has come from a brighter life and is dimmed through not having yet become accustomed to the dark or whether it has come from greater ignorance into greater light and is dazzled by the increased brilliance. Then he’ll declare the first soul happy in its experience and life, and he’ll pity the latter – but even if he chose to make fun of it, at least he’d be less ridiculous than if he laughed at a soul that has come from the light above.

What you say is very reasonable.If that’s true, then here’s what we must think about

these matters: Education isn’t what some people declare it to be, namely, putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes.

They do say that.But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows

that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul and that the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body. This instrument can-not be turned around from that which is coming into being without turning the whole soul until it is able to study that which is and the brightest thing that is, namely, the one we call the good. Isn’t that right?

Yes.Then education is the craft concerned with doing this

very thing, this turning around, and with how the soul can most easily and effectively be made to do it. It isn’t

the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately.

So it seems.Now, it looks as though the other so-called virtues of

the soul are akin to those of the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand but are added later by habit and practice. However, the virtue of reason seems to belong above all to something more divine,3 which never loses its power but is either useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way it is turned. Or have you never noticed this about people who are said to be vicious but clever, how keen the vision of their little souls is and how sharply it distinguishes the things it is turned towards? This shows that its sight isn’t inferior but rather is forced to serve evil ends, so that the sharper it sees, the more evil it accomplishes.

Absolutely.However, if a nature of this sort had been hammered

at from childhood and freed from the bonds of kinship with becoming, which have been fastened to it by feast-ing, greed, and other such pleasures and which, like leaden weights, pull its vision downwards – if, being rid of these, it turned to look at true things, then I say that the same soul of the same person would see these most sharply, just as it now does the things it is presently turned towards.

Probably so.And what about the uneducated who have no experi-

ence of truth? Isn’t it likely – indeed, doesn’t it follow necessarily from what was said before – that they will never adequately govern a city? But neither would those who’ve been allowed to spend their whole lives being educated. The former would fail because they don’t have a single goal at which ail their actions, public and private, inevitably aim; the latter would fail because they’d refuse to act, thinking that they had settled while still alive in the faraway Isles of the Blessed.4

That’s true.It is our task as founders, then, to compel the best natures

to reach the study we said before is the most important, namely, to make the ascent and see the good. But when they’ve made it and looked sufficiently, we mustn’t allow them to do what they’re allowed to do today.

What’s that?To stay there and refuse to go down again to the

prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors, whether they are of less worth or of greater.

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12 plato

Then are we to do them an injustice by making them live a worse life when they could live a better one?

You are forgetting again that it isn’t the law’s concern to make any one class in the city outstandingly happy but to contrive to spread happiness throughout the city by bringing the citizens into harmony with each other through persuasion or compulsion and by making them share with each other the benefits that each class can confer on the community.5 The law produces such peo-ple in the city, not in order to allow them to turn in whatever direction they want, but to make use of them to bind the city together.

That’s true, I had forgotten.Observe, then, Glaucon, that we won’t be doing an

injustice to those who’ve become philosophers in our city and that what we’ll say to them, when we compel them to guard and care for the others, will be just. We’ll say: “When people like you come to be in other cities, they’re justi-fied in not sharing in their city’s labors, for they’ve grown there spontaneously, against the will of the constitution. And what grows of its own accord and owes no debt for its upbringing has justice on its side when it isn’t keen to pay anyone for that upbringing. But we’ve made you kings in our city and leaders of the swarm, as it were, both for yourselves and for the rest of the city. You’re better and more completely educated than the others and are better able to share in both types of life.6 Therefore each of you in turn must go down to live in the common dwelling place of the others and grow accustomed to seeing in the dark. When you are used to it, you’ll see vastly better than the people there. And because you’ve seen the truth about fine, just, and good things, you’ll know each image for what it is and also that of which it is the image. Thus, for you and for us, the city will be governed, not like the majority of cities nowadays, by people who fight over shadows and struggle against one another in order to rule – as if that were a great good – but by people who are awake rather than dreaming,7 for the truth is surely this: A city whose prospective rulers are least eager to rule must of necessity be most free from civil war, whereas a city with the opposite kind of rulers is governed in the opposite way.”

Absolutely.Then do you think that those we’ve nurtured will

disobey us and refuse to share the labors of the city, each in turn, while living the greater part of their time with one another in the pure realm?

It isn’t possible, for we’ll be giving just orders to just people. Each of them will certainly go to rule as to

something compulsory, however, which is exactly the opposite of what’s done by those who now rule in each city. This is how it is. If you can find a way of life that’s better than ruling for the prospective rulers, your well-governed city will become a possibility, for only in it will the truly rich rule – not those who are rich in gold but those who are rich in the wealth that the happy must have, namely, a good and rational life. But if beggars hun-gry for private goods go into public life, thinking that the good is there for the seizing, then the well-governed city is impossible, for then ruling is something fought over, and this civil and domestic war destroys these people and the rest of the city as well.

That’s very true.Can you name any life that despises political rule

besides that of the true philosopher?No, by god, I can’t.But surely it is those who are not lovers of ruling who

must rule, for if they don’t, the lovers of it, who are rivals, will fight over it.

Of course.Then who will you compel to become guardians of

the city, if not those who have the best understanding of what matters for good government and who have other honors than political ones, and a better life as well?

No one.Do you want us to consider now how such people

will come to be in our city and how – just as some are said to have gone up from Hades to the gods – we’ll lead them up to the light?

[…]Then it would be appropriate, Glaucon, to legislate this

subject for those who are going to share in the highest offices in the city and to persuade them to turn to calcu-lation and take it up, not as laymen do, but staying with it until they reach the study of the natures of the numbers by means of understanding itself, nor like tradesmen and retailers, for the sake of buying and selling, but for the sake of war and for ease in turning the soul around, away from becoming and towards truth and being.

Well put.Moreover, it strikes me, now that it has been

mentioned, how sophisticated the subject of calculation is and in how many ways it is useful for our purposes, provided that one practices it for the sake of knowing rather than trading.

How is it useful?In the very way we were talking about. It leads the

soul forcibly upward and compels it to discuss the

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