philosophical essay on technology

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Our tools shape our selves

For bernard stiegler, a visionary philosopher of our digital age, technics is the defining feature of human experience.

by Bryan Norton   + BIO

It has become almost impossible to separate the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences. Reality is parsed through glowing screens, unending data feeds, biometric feedback loops, digital protheses and expanding networks that link our virtual selves to satellite arrays in geostationary orbit. Wristwatches interpret our physical condition by counting steps and heartbeats. Phones track how we spend our time online, map the geographic location of the places we visit and record our histories in digital archives. Social media platforms forge alliances and create new political possibilities. And vast wireless networks – connecting satellites, drones and ‘smart’ weapons – determine how the wars of our era are being waged. Our experiences of the world are soaked with digital technologies.

But for the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, one of the earliest and foremost theorists of our digital age, understanding the world requires us to move beyond the standard view of technology. Stiegler believed that technology is not just about the effects of digital tools and the ways that they impact our lives. It is not just about how devices are created and wielded by powerful organisations, nation-states or individuals. Our relationship with technology is about something deeper and more fundamental. It is about technics .

According to Stiegler, technics – the making and use of technology, in the broadest sense – is what makes us human. Our unique way of existing in the world, as distinct from other species, is defined by the experiences and knowledge our tools make possible, whether that is a state-of-the-art brain-computer interface such as Neuralink, or a prehistoric flint axe used to clear a forest. But don’t be mistaken: ‘technics’ is not simply another word for ‘technology’. As Martin Heidegger wrote in his essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954), which used the German term Technik instead of Technologie in the original title: the ‘essence of technology is by no means anything technological.’ This aligns with the history of the word: the etymology of ‘technics’ leads us back to something like the ancient Greek term for art – technē . The essence of technology, then, is not found in a device, such as the one you are using to read this essay. It is an open-ended creative process, a relationship with our tools and the world.

This is Stiegler’s legacy. Throughout his life, he took this idea of technics, first explored while he was imprisoned for armed robbery, further than anyone else. But his ideas have often been overlooked and misunderstood, even before he died in 2020. Today, they are more necessary than ever. How else can we learn to disentangle the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences? How else can we begin to grasp the history of our strange reality?

S tiegler’s path to becoming the pre-eminent philosopher of our digital age was anything but straightforward. He was born in Villebon-sur-Yvette, south of Paris, in 1952, during a period of affluence and rejuvenation in France that followed the devastation of the Second World War. By the time he was 16, Stiegler participated in the revolutionary wave of 1968 (he would later become a member of the Communist Party), when a radical uprising of students and workers forced the president Charles de Gaulle to seek temporary refuge across the border in West Germany. However, after a new election was called and the barricades were dismantled, Stiegler became disenchanted with traditional Marxism, as well as the political trends circulating in France at the time. The Left in France seemed helplessly torn between the postwar existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the anti-humanism of Louis Althusser. While Sartre insisted on humans’ creative capacity to shape their own destiny, Althusser argued that the pervasiveness of ideology in capitalist society had left us helplessly entrenched in systems of power beyond our control. Neither of these options satisfied Stiegler because neither could account for the rapid rise of a new historical force: electronic technology. By the 1970s and ’80s, Stiegler sensed that this new technology was redefining our relationship to ourselves, to the world, and to each other. To account for these new conditions, he believed the history of philosophy would have to be rewritten from the ground up, from the perspective of technics. Neither existentialism nor Marxism nor any other school of philosophy had come close to acknowledging the fundamental link between human existence and the evolutionary history of tools.

Stiegler describes his time in prison as one of radical self-exploration and philosophical experimentation

In the decade after 1968, Stiegler opened a jazz club in Toulouse that was shut down by the police a few years later for illegal prostitution. Desperate to make ends meet, Stiegler turned to robbing banks to pay off his debts and feed his family. In 1978, he was arrested for armed robbery and sentenced to five years in prison. A high-school dropout who was never comfortable in institutional settings, Stiegler requested his own cell when he first arrived in prison, and went on a hunger strike until it was granted. After the warden finally acquiesced, Stiegler began taking note of how his relationship to the outside world was mediated through reading and writing. This would be a crucial realisation. Through books, paper and pencils, he was able to interface with people and places beyond the prison walls.

It was during his time behind bars that Stiegler began to study philosophy more intently, devouring any books he could get his hands on. In his philosophical memoir Acting Out (2009), Stiegler describes his time in prison as one of radical self-exploration and philosophical experimentation. He read classic works of Greek philosophy, studied English and memorised modern poetry, but the book that really drew his attention was Plato’s Phaedrus. In this dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus, Plato outlines his concept of anamnesis , a theory of learning that states the acquisition of new knowledge is just a process of remembering what we once knew in a previous life. Caught in an endless cycle of death and rebirth, we forget what we know each time we are reborn. For Stiegler, this idea of learning as recollection would become less spiritual and more material: learning and memory are tied inextricably to technics. Through the tools we use – including books, writing, archives – we can store and preserve vast amounts of knowledge.

After an initial attempt at writing fiction in prison, Stiegler enrolled in a philosophy programme designed for inmates. While still serving his sentence, he finished a degree in philosophy and corresponded with prominent intellectuals such as the philosopher and translator Gérard Granel, who was a well-connected professor at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail (later known as the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès). Granel introduced Stiegler to some of the most prominent figures in philosophy at the time, including Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida . Lyotard would oversee Stiegler’s master’s thesis after his eventual release; Derrida would supervise his doctoral dissertation, completed in 1993, which was reworked and published a year later as the first volume in his Technics and Time series. With the help of these philosophers and their novel ideals, Stiegler began to reshape his earlier political commitment to Marxist materialism, seeking to account for the ways that new technologies shape the world.

B y the start of the 1970s, a growing number of philosophers and political theorists began calling into question the immediacy of our lived experience. The world around us was no longer seen by these thinkers as something that was simply given, as it had been for phenomenologists such as Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. The world instead presented itself as a built environment composed of things such as roads, power plants and houses, all made possible by political institutions, cultural practices and social norms. And so, reality also appeared to be a construction, not a given.

One of the French philosophers who interrogated the immediacy of reality most closely was Louis Althusser. In his essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ published in 1970, years before Stiegler was taught by him, Althusser suggests that ideology is not something that an individual believes in, but something that goes far beyond the scale of a single person, or even a community. Just as we unthinkingly turn around when we hear our name shouted from behind, ideology has a hold on us that is both automatic and unconscious – it seeps in from outside. Michel Foucault , a former student of Althusser at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, developed a theory of power that functions in a similar way. In Discipline and Punish (1975) and elsewhere, Foucault argues that social and political power is not concentrated in individuals but is produced by ‘discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions’. Foucault’s insight was to show how power shapes every facet of the world, from classroom interactions between a teacher and student to negotiations of a trade agreement between representatives of two different nations. From this perspective, power is constituted in and through material practices, rather than something possessed by individual subjects.

We don’t simply ‘use’ our digital tools – they enter and pharmacologically change us, like medicinal drugs

These are the foundations on which Stiegler assembled his idea of technics. Though he appreciated the ways that Foucault and Althusser had tried to account for technology, he remained dissatisfied by the lack of attention to particular types of technology – not to mention the fact that neither thinker had offered any real alternatives to the forms of power they described. In his book Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2008), Stiegler explains that he was able to move beyond Foucault with the help of his mentor Derrida’s concept of the pharmakon . In his essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (1972), Derrida began developing the idea as he explored how our ability to write can create and undermine (‘cure’ and ‘poison’) an individual subject’s sense of identity. For Derrida, the act of writing – itself a kind of technology – has a Janus-faced relationship to individual memory. Though it allows us to store knowledge and experience across vast periods of time, writing disincentivises us from practising our own mental capacity for recollection. The written word short-circuits the immediate connection between lived experience and internal memory. It ‘cures’ our cognitive limits, but also ‘poisons’ our cognition by limiting our abilities.

In the late 20th century, Stiegler began applying this idea to new media technologies, such as television, which led to the development of a concept he called pharmacology – an idea that suggests we don’t simply ‘use’ our digital tools. Instead, they enter and pharmacologically change us, like medicinal drugs. Today, we can take this analogy even further. The internet presents us with a massive archive of formatted, readily accessible information. Sites such as Wikipedia contain terabytes of knowledge, accumulated and passed down over millennia. At the same time, this exchange of unprecedented amounts of information enables the dissemination of an unprecedented amount of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and other harmful content. The digital is both a poison and a cure, as Derrida would say.

This kind of polyvalence led Stiegler to think more deliberately about technics rather than technology. For Stiegler, there are inherent risks in thinking in terms of the latter: the more ubiquitous that digital technologies become in our lives, the easier it is to forget that these tools are social products that have been constructed by our fellow humans. How we consume music, the paths we take to get from point A to point B , how we share ourselves with others, all of these aspects of daily life have been reshaped by new technologies and the humans that produce them. Yet we rarely stop to reflect on what this means for us. Stiegler believed this act of forgetting creates a deep crisis for all facets of human experience. By forgetting, we lose our all-important capacity to imagine alternative ways of living. The future appears limited, even predetermined, by new technology.

I n the English-speaking world, Stiegler is best known for his first book Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1994). In the first sentence, he highlights the vital link between our understanding of the technologies we use and our capacity to imagine the future. ‘The object of this work is technics,’ he writes, ‘apprehended as the horizon of all possibility to come and of all possibility of a future.’ He views our relationship with tools as the determining force for all future possibilities; technics is the defining feature of human experience, one that has been overlooked by philosophers from Plato and Aristotle down to the present. While René Descartes, Husserl and other thinkers asked important questions about consciousness and lived experience (phenomenology), and the nature of truth (metaphysics) or knowledge (epistemology), they failed to account for the ways that technologies help us find – or guide us toward – answers to these questions. In the history of philosophy, ‘Technics is the unthought,’ according to Stiegler.

To further stress the importance of technics, Stiegler turns to the creation myth told by the Greek poet Hesiod in Works and Days , written around 700 BCE . During the world’s creation, Zeus asks the Titan Epimetheus to distribute individual talents to each species. Epimetheus gives wings to birds so they can fly, and fins to fish so they can swim. By the time he gets to humans, however, Epimetheus has no talents left over. Epimetheus, whose name (according to Stiegler) means the ‘forgetful one’ in Greek, turns to his brother Prometheus for help. Prometheus then steals fire from the gods, presenting it to humans in place of a biological talent. Humans, once more, are born out of an act of forgetting, just like in Plato’s theory of anamnesis. The difference with Hesiod’s story is that technics here provides a material basis for human experience. Bereft of any physiological talents, Homo sapiens must survive by using tools, beginning with fire.

Factories, server farms and even psychotropic drugs possess the capacity to poison or cure our world

The pharmacology of technics, for Stiegler, presents opportunities for positive or negative relationships with tools. ‘But where the danger lies,’ writes the poet Friedrich Hölderlin in a quote Stiegler often turned to, ‘also grows the saving power.’ While Derrida focuses on the ability of the written word to subvert the sovereignty of the individual subject, Stiegler widens this understanding of pharmacology to include a variety of media and technologies. Not just writing, but factories, server farms and even psychotropic drugs possess the pharmacological capacity to poison or cure our world and, crucially, our understanding of it. Technological development can destroy our sense of ourselves as rational, coherent subjects, leading to widespread suffering and destruction. But tools can also provide us with a new sense of what it means to be human, leading to new modes of expression and cultural practices.

In Symbolic Misery, Volume 2: The Catastrophe of the Sensible (2015) , Stiegler considers the effect that new technologies, especially those accompanying industrialisation, have had on art and music. Industry, defined by mass production and standardisation, is often regarded as antithetical to artistic freedom and expression. But Stiegler urges us to take a closer look at art history to see how artists responded to industrialisation. In response to the standardising effects of new machinery, for example, Marcel Duchamp and other members of the 20th-century avant-garde used industrial tools to invent novel forms of creative expression. In the painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2 (1912), Duchamp employed the new temporal perspectives made possible by photography and cinema to paint a radically different kind of portrait. Inspired by the camera’s ability to capture movement, frame by frame, Duchamp paints a nude model who appears in multiple instants at once, like a series of time-lapse photographs superimposed onto each other. The image became an immediate sensation, an icon of modernity and the resulting entanglement of art and industrial technology.

Technical innovations are never without political and social implications for Stiegler. The phonograph, for example, may have standardised classical musical performances after its invention in the late 1800s, but it also contributed to the development of jazz, a genre that was popular among musicians who were barred from accessing the elite world of classical music. Thanks to the gramophone, Black musicians such as the pianist and composer Duke Ellington were able to learn their instruments by ear, without first learning to read musical notation. The phonograph’s industrialisation of musical performance paradoxically led to the free-flowing improvisation of jazz performers.

T echnics draws our attention to the world-making capabilities of our tools, while reminding us of the constructed nature of our technological reality. Stiegler’s capacious understanding of technics, encompassing everything from early agricultural tools to the television set, does not disregard new innovations, either. In 2006, Stiegler founded the Institute for Research and Innovation, an organisation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris devoted to exploring the impact digital technology has on contemporary society. Stiegler’s belief in the power of technology to shape the world around us has often led to the charge that he is a techno-determinist who believes the entire course of history is shaped by tools and machines. It’s true that Stiegler thinks technology defines who we are as humans, but this process does not always lock us into predetermined outcomes. Instead, it simultaneously provides us with a material horizon of possible experience. Stiegler’s theory of technics urges us to rethink the history of philosophy, art and politics in order that we might better understand how our world has been shaped by technology. And by acquiring this historical consciousness, he hopes that we will ultimately design better tools, using technology to improve our world in meaningful ways.

This doesn’t mean Stiegler is a techno-optimist, either, who blindly sees digital technology as a panacea for our problems. One particular concern he expresses about digital technology is its capacity to standardise the world we inhabit. Big data, for Stiegler, threatens to limit our sense of what is possible, rather than broadening our horizons and opening new opportunities for creative expression. Just as Hollywood films in the 20th century manufactured and distributed the ideology of consumer capitalism to the rest of the globe, Stiegler suggests that tech firms such as Google and Apple often disseminate values that are hidden from view. A potent example of this can be found in the first fully AI-judged beauty pageant. As discussed by the sociologist Ruha Benjamin in her book Race After Technology (2019), the developers of Beauty.AI advertised the contest as an opportunity for beauty to be judged in a way that was free of prejudice. What they found, however, was that the tool they had designed exhibited an overwhelming preference for white contestants.

The digital economy doesn’t always offer desirable alternatives as former ways of working and living are destroyed

In Automatic Society, Volume 1: The Future of Work (2016), Stiegler shows how big data can standardise our world by reorganising work and employment. Digital tools were first seen as a disruptive force that could break the monotonous rhythms of large industry, but the rise of flexible forms of employment in the gig economy has created a massive underclass. A new proletariat of Uber drivers and other precarious workers now labour under extremely unstable conditions. They are denied even the traditional protections of working-class employment. The digital economy doesn’t always offer desirable alternatives as former ways of working and living are destroyed.

A particularly pressing concern Stiegler took up before his untimely death in 2020 is the capacity of digital tools to surveil us. The rise of big tech firms such as Google and Amazon has meant the intrusion of surveillance tools into every aspect of our lives. Smart homes have round-the-clock video feeds, and marketing companies spend billions collecting data about everything we do online. In his last two books published in English, The Neganthropocene ( 2018 ) and The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism ( 2019 ), Stiegler suggests that the growth of widespread surveillance tools is at odds with the pharmacological promise of new technology. Though tracking tools can be useful by, for example, limiting the spread of harmful diseases, they are also used to deny us worlds of possible experience.

Technology, for better or worse, affects every aspect of our lives. Our very sense of who we are is shaped and reshaped by the tools we have at our disposal. The problem, for Stiegler, is that when we pay too much attention to our tools, rather than how they are developed and deployed, we fail to understand our reality. We become trapped, merely describing the technological world on its own terms and making it even harder to untangle the effects of digital technologies and our everyday experiences. By encouraging us to pay closer attention to this world-making capacity, with its potential to harm and heal, Stiegler is showing us what else is possible. There are other ways of living, of being, of evolving. It is technics, not technology, that will give the future its new face.

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University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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Heidegger on Technology

Aaron James Wendland, Chistopher Merwin, and Christos Hadjioannou (eds.), Heidegger on Technology ,  Routledge, 2019, 345pp., $150.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781138674615.

Reviewed by David R. Cerbone, West Virginia University

This volume comprises seventeen original papers by sixteen contributors (Aaron James Wendland, contributed two). As is to be expected, Heidegger's seminal essay, "The Question Concerning Technology" (hereafter QCT), [1] first published in 1954, serves as a touchstone for the volume, with many contributors dutifully rehearsing often overlapping interpretations of the constellation of key concepts Heidegger deploys there and in neighboring writings: Bestand (rendered as "standing-reserve" in William Lovitt's translation, but perhaps more perspicuously translated as simply "resource" or, as Mark A. Wrathall renders it, "stock" in the sense of the goods on hand); Gestell (for which Lovitt provides "enframing," but which could be rendered as "framework," or, as Wrathall suggests, "inventory," thereby complementing his rendering of Bestand as "stock," or even "im-position," as Daniel O. Dahlstrom offers); and what serves as an antidote of sorts to these two master concepts, Gelassenheit (often translated as "releasement," and connected with the idea of "letting be"). Also at issue in many essays is how to understand the "supreme danger" posed by technology, as well as the role thinking plays in addressing and alleviating that danger.

The essays by Wrathall, Tobias Keiling, Bret W. Davis, Iain Thomson, and Susanne Claxton  stay squarely focused on these key concepts. But many of the others strike out in different directions from this zero-point of Heidegger's reflections on technology. Several contributions situate these reflections in relation to Heidegger's philosophy more generally, including his masterwork, Being and Time , written decades earlier. Christos Hadjioannou finds intimations of Heidegger's later critique of technology in his much earlier critique of Husserl's method of phenomenological reduction. Steven Crowell, in distinguishing phenomenological and historical strands of Heidegger's thoughts about technology, thereby reaches back to Heidegger's earlier and more self-consciously phenomenological work. Crowell reads Heidegger as committed to a broadly phenomenological method throughout his works and argues that an emphasis on this commitment allows for a kind of internal criticism of his more speculative historical theses. And Denis McManus, in his fascinating analysis of the "audit society" as exemplifying what Heidegger considered to be the dangers of Machenschaft (or "machination"), draws upon themes already present in Being and Time . Other essays situate Heidegger's later thoughts on technology in relation to other chapters in his philosophical development: Dahlstrom reads QCT in relation to Heidegger's essay, "On the Essence of Truth," first published in 1943 (and based upon a lecture from 1930), but which Heidegger returned to at intervals corresponding to formative moments in his thinking on technology, such as the Bremen lectures, that laid the ground for QCT and several other seminal essays from Heidegger's later period. [2] Andrew J. Mitchell provides a close examination of Heidegger's technology notebooks from the 1940s into the 1950s. While Heidegger famously cautions in QCT that the essence of technology "is by no means anything technological," [3] the notebooks reveal just how fine-grained Heidegger's attention was to the specifics of machine technology. In his first contribution, Wendland situates Heidegger's thoughts on technology in relation to his notorious engagement with National Socialism, arguing that his "enthusiasm" for the movement stemmed at least in part from "his belief that the Nazis represented a radical break from the Western tradition that begins with Greek metaphysics." (p. 149)

Other essays consider Heidegger's reflections on technology in relation to other philosophers: Wendland's first essay includes a consideration of Levinas, while his second examines Heidegger's claim that "science does not think" in relation to Thomas Kuhn's contrast between "normal" and "revolutionary" science, understood as the contrast between working within a given a paradigm and a paradigm shift. Julian Young considers the interplay between Heidegger and Habermas. While both are concerned with the dangers posed by technology, Young notes how their respective notions of a "free relation to technology" operate at different levels, so to speak. At issue for Habermas "is simply a relation between man and 'machine' in which the latter serves the former rather than vice versa." (p. 204) Young thus concludes that for Habermas, "all that is required to obviate the danger to human freedom posed by (system) technology is to ensure that it really does serve human interests." (p. 204) While it might appear that Heidegger's critique of the Frankfurt School approach to technology is a failure, Young locates a deeper concern in Heidegger with the threat of nihilism that Habermas' cosmopolitanism obscures: the "homelessness" of modernity can only be overcome by a kind of "dwelling" that recognizes the need for "homeland." Young notes the rise in contemporary politics of parties and movements that reject globalization in favor of more populist and provincial ideas. Although there is a tendency to dismiss such movements as right wing, neo-fascist, nativist, and the like (and sometimes rightly so), He suggests at the close of his paper that we should be sensitive to the underlying motivations for such otherwise dangerous and distressing views. As illustrating a need for homeland, the appearance of such movements mark an "occasion for, not scorn, but rather thought." (p. 207)

Several essays put Heidegger in conversation with other strands of 20 th and 21 st Century thinking. Michael E. Zimmerman considers Heidegger in relation to the "deep ecology" movement associated with Arne Naess and others, while Trish Glazebrook takes an "ecofeminist" approach that draws upon contemporary debates about sustainability. Taylor Carman considers Heidegger's views on technology in relation to quantum mechanics, detailing his engagement with Werner Heisenberg, whose lecture, "The Image of Nature in Modern Physics," was delivered at the Munich conference where Heidegger presented QCT. The final essay, by Rafael Winkler, brings together Heidegger and André Leroi-Gourhan, whose thoughts on "hominization" (the emergence of the human in natural history) and "graphism" (the ability and practice of making inscriptions) broach the possibility of "naturalizing" Heidegger's thinking.

The number and range of the contributions prevent detailed discussion of the many important and insightful ideas each of them raises. I want instead to highlight what I take to be some of the core themes informing many of the essays. In doing so, I also want to point to what strike me as tensions in Heidegger's critique of technology between what seems to be the "big picture" of Heidegger's view and many of the specific points the contributors frequently emphasize. These tensions also suggest serious limitations in terms of the ethical, political, and practical applicability of Heidegger's thinking on this front.

I want to focus primarily on a kind of "master thesis" that Wrathall offers, which begins, and thereby serves to frame, the volume as a whole. Central to the later Heidegger is a kind of historicist account of the understanding of being. [4] Wrathall refers to this as Heidegger's "universal and total grounds thesis" or UTGT, which he glosses as follows:

Within each historical (metaphysical) age, there is a particular understanding of being in terms of which entities show up and make sense. This understanding of being is universal, meaning it determines every entity as such. It is also total, meaning it also governs every way that entities can relate to and interact with each other. (p. 16)

In accordance with this thesis, the technological understanding of being is one such "universal and total" ground that determines entities in its own particular way: everything shows up and makes sense as what Heidegger calls Bestand (resources or stock) that can be ordered (and re-ordered) in ways that maximize efficiency and, as Wrathall puts it, keep our "options" open. This is the way things are primarily understood in the modern age, according to Heidegger.

The difficulty that concerns me has to do with squaring this kind of master thesis -- Heidegger's historicism -- with the kind of critical leverage many commentators read him as providing when it comes to the ways the technological understanding of being distorts or effaces what various kinds of entities really are . The question, in other words, is what that last phrase -- really are -- means when considered in conjunction with Heidegger's historicism. Consider what Wrathall says in the midst of a long footnote: "Each entity can show itself as what it 'really and actually' is only within the world (or perhaps set of worlds) that allows it to be." (p. 37) It is not clear to me whether the phrase, "really and actually," is in scare-quotes here to steer us away from reading it in an overly straightforward way.

Leaving that worry aside, the more serious one is that Wrathall's formulation risks emptiness or, barring that, begs the question. Regarding emptiness, his formulation can be read more fully as saying that "each entity can show itself as what it 'really and actually' is only within the world (or perhaps set of worlds) that allows it to be what it 'really and actually' is ." That seems unobjectionable, I suppose, but it also strikes me as fairly vacuous. What would save it from vacuity is providing a way of determining just which world (or set of worlds) that is in the case of various entities or kinds of entities. And here is where the question is begged, as a proponent of scientific realism, for example, will want to know why some other world (or set of worlds) offers more in the way of "allowance" than the natural sciences in terms of revealing what the entity really is. But even without resorting to scientific realism, which after all is a critical perspective external to Heidegger's own, it is not clear how to square such a claim to "really and actually" with the point of view that Heidegger himself seems to offer, at least according to several essays in this volume.

In both of his contributions, Wendland rehearses the broad contours of Heidegger's conception of the being of entities, whereby "the being of an entity is determined by a set of theoretical assumptions and practical norms that undergird a particular goal-directed activity." (p. 289) Using the example of silver in the second ( gold is the focal example in the first essay), Wendland notes the way what silver is has varied according to different understandings of being: for example, as a "sacred entity" according to a "given religious tradition," as "financial entity" within "certain economic system," and as "a physical entity with an atomic mass of 107.87" within "a specific physical theory." (p. 289) If we accept, as I'm inclined to think that we should, that Wendland is on strong interpretive ground here, then what becomes of his assertions about what an entity "really and actually" is? Take a lump -- or even a molded piece -- of silver: if its being -- what it is and that it is -- varies according to different "theoretical assumptions and practical norms" that correspond to different human-historical worlds , which one of those worlds "allows" the silver to be what it "really and actually" is? Each world "allows" it to be something different -- something sacred, something with exchange value, something with very specific physical properties, to use Wendland's three examples (but there could presumably be more) -- but which one of those is the silver's own ? Which way for silver to be belongs to the silver such that we can say about that way -- and that world (or set of worlds) -- that silver is there allowed to be what it "really and actually" is?

Wendland, for his part, singles out the technological mode of revealing -- Gestell (enframing) -- as reductive insofar as the techno-scientific understanding of being precludes "an openness to non-reductive ways of relating to entities." (p. 289) While there is something perhaps cold about the scientific perspective when it comes to silver and the like, as it is analyzed and categorized in ways amenable to quantitative treatment, the charge of being reductive presupposes that what is being omitted, i.e., what is characterized here as "non-reductive," in some way more genuinely belongs to what silver is.

I have already suggested that this claim is apt to appear question-begging. But further attention to the contours of Heidegger's views reveals a deeper problem here. As Wendland himself acknowledges, for Heidegger every cultural-historical understanding of being -- every normatively charged practical-theoretical way in which things are understood to be -- is both revealing and concealing. Every understanding leaves something obscured, such that it cannot be brought to presence from "within" that understanding. As Wendland notes, being has both "light" and "dark" sides, such that any given paradigm both reveals and conceals or obscures: "A physicist, for example, may know that silver has an atomic mass of 107.87, but at the same time she may be unaware of the metal's economic value or religious significance." (p. 285) Notice, though, that this is as true for the "given religious tradition" wherein silver is something sacred and the "economic system" wherein silver has a determinate exchange value. Each of those obscure something brought to presence by and in the other, but both in turn obscure what is revealed from the techno-scientific perspective. The question thus arises as to how it is that only the techno-scientific understanding is singled out as "reductive." Is it not any less reductive to say that what the silver is is something with a determinative exchange value or that what it is is something sacred? Thus when Wendland complains that "in modernity . . . we treat silver as a physical entity with an atomic mass of 107.87 and we dismiss religious, economic, and various other interpretations of it as irrelevant to our exercise of power," it is not clear why the charge does not apply equally to any of those other interpretations when that interpretation is the one that holds sway. (For example, the ways in which the sciences have been dismissed -- and scientists persecuted -- on religious grounds are nowhere considered.)

While I have singled out Wrathall and Wendland for expository purposes, other contributors are equally generous in helping themselves to notions that seem hard to square with Heidegger's fundamental historicism. We learn from various other contributors that Heidegger is concerned with the possibility of allowing "things to reveal themselves in accordance with their own possibilities " (Zimmerman, p. 214); that "other living beings appear in strong sustainability in terms of their unique, relational role in the ecosystem, i.e., as what they are rather than being reduced to resource " (Glazebrook, p. 250); that enframing "denies the possibility of intrinsic value , acknowledging only extrinsic value" (Claxton, p. 227); that "Heidegger thinks we need . . . to learn to attend to and creatively disclose the defining traits and unique capacities of all things, ourselves included ," so as "to begin bringing genuine meaning back into our historical world. (Thomson, p. 181); and that "any thought of an ultimate (ontological) context for understanding is always a distorting imposition on the genuine meaning of entities" (Keiling, p. 106). The question throughout concerns what these italicized phrases come to. What, for Heidegger, is "intrinsic value"? What are something's "own possibilities" as opposed to possibilities that are imposed? How are we to differentiate between "genuine" meaning and any second-rate, ersatz variety?

The problem here is that on Heidegger's view we are supposed to see the technological understanding of being as just one more way of understanding among others (one in a pageant of understandings of being starting with the Greeks) and that there is something distinctively distorting or dangerous about it in contrast to those prior to it. Since every understanding of being is both revealing and concealing, seeing the dangers of the technological understanding of being as bound up with technology's special power to distort or obscure what various entities "really and actually" are strikes me as difficult to sustain. And indeed, when Heidegger discusses what he takes to be the "supreme danger" of the technological understanding of being, it has little to do with these kinds of claims to distortion. What becomes especially obscured in the techno-scientific age is the distinctively human capacity for opening or constituting new historical-cultural worlds. This is so because of the all-encompassing character of the technological understanding of being's "enframing" of things as "resources." We, too, on this model are just more resources to be optimized, placed in the overarching inventory of everything on hand. While prior understandings of being have offered up their own conceptions of what it is to be human -- such as being created in the image of God, in the Medieval Christian understanding -- these have demonstrably allowed for the "sending" of new understandings. Heidegger's worry when it comes to the technological understanding is that what prior understandings of being have allowed will be effectively and finally foreclosed: "The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth." [5]

When Heidegger talks here about "a more original revealing" and "a more primal truth," his concern is not with what entities "really and actually are" but instead something more like an overcoming of the whole way of thinking that seeks to determine what entities really and actually are. Herein lies the importance of Gelassenheit as a releasement not just from the technological understanding of being, but from anything corresponding to Wrathall's UTGT. I take this to be what Wrathall means when he says that Heidegger's thinking involves "preparation for a whole new way of disclosing things -- one that is not subject to a universal and totalizing metaphysical ground." (p. 21)

To put it in Thomson's terms, the problem is not so much technology as it is ontotheology in general (hence Thomson's reading of Heidegger as promoting a kind of "ontological pluralism"). Keiling also recognizes Heidegger's aim as a movement away from any all-encompassing understanding of what is: "To relate to entities in thinking in such a way as to enable them is to accept and foster that plurality. If there is no final horizon, then this will include the different ways in which we can understand all there is." (p. 112) Heidegger's aim is thus to foster "a thinking that embraces the openness of ontological thinking." (p. 112) (Whether this thinking is still to be understood as ontological is itself at issue in Heidegger's Country Path Conversations , [6] another frequent touchstone of this collection.) And as Wendland points out, it is "the history of metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche [that] treats the being of entities as 'imperishable and eternal' and thereby 'drives out every other possibility of revealing'." (p. 159)

Notice, however, that if Heidegger's real concern with technology -- with the essence of technology -- lies here, then many of the familiar issues and anxieties associated with technology, including many rehearsed in this volume, are only tangentially related to Heidegger's critique. I cited -- and raised questions about -- Wendland's charge that by treating silver "as a physical entity with an atomic mass of 107.87," we are thereby dismissive of "other interpretations." Wendland continues by noting that "this dismissal is dangerous because it leads to the environmental degradation and human dislocation that typifies our age, and it simultaneously robs us of the possibility of interacting with nature in an alternative and sustainable way." (p. 296) While it may be -- and indeed very likely is -- true that our modern techno-scientific ways of engaging with the world have caused -- and continue to cause -- alarming and potentially catastrophic environmental degradation, from a Heideggerian perspective, that is only a kind of collateral damage at best (i.e., Wendland's "because" is not Heidegger's).

We might see this by entertaining the following counterfactual: suppose there were nothing environmentally harmful about an increase in carbon dioxide and that other known pollutants were similarly non-injurious to various ecosystems (they simply dissolved or disappeared). While I admit that this supposition borders on a kind of magical thinking, notice that it would leave in place Heidegger's concerns about the "supreme danger" of the technological understanding of being. While there may be affinities between Gelassenheit , understood as a way of "letting beings be," and ecologically-informed notions of sustainability (as, for example, Glazebrook argues in her piece), the connections do not strike me as being as direct as some of the essays want to suggest. There also remains the frustratingly passive and quietistic dimensions of Heidegger's later thinking about technology with its talk of "awaiting" and "preparing" for new "sendings." It is not clear how helpful such notions are if we are indeed on the brink of an environmental catastrophe. And his remarks about fostering a "free relation to technology" are remarkably thin, consisting of little more than the recommendation that "we let technical devices enter into our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside." [7] While there may be something commendable about such a stance, it still allows for the relentless innovation and production of ever more such devices and all that comes along with it. The problem here, as elsewhere in Heidegger's philosophy, is the studied cultivation of a kind of aloofness in his thinking, a preference for the heights of ontology as opposed to the messiness of what is merely ontical. In his first essay, Wendland recommends Levinas as a supplement to address "Heidegger's obliviousness to the concrete sufferings of individual human beings." (p. 168) My worry is that this "obliviousness" reaches much farther than even Wendland acknowledges and requires more than supplementation to correct. (On this score, I don't think Levinas understood himself to be supplementing Heidegger's ontology as much as subverting it in a far more radical way.) [8]

I close with what struck me while working through the volume as an unremarked irony of the kind of ontological pluralism Heidegger offers to counter the perils of technology in particular and ontotheology more generally. At several junctures in this volume, the limiting and reductive understanding of being that constitutes the essence of technology (and, really, any UTGT-type understanding) is contrasted with the "inexhaustible" character of being or nature, whereby being's limitless "excess" overflows the limited and constraining character of any particular understanding of being. The irony here lies in being's depiction as the most wondrous resource of all, whose offerings can be continually mined without fear of depletion. Perhaps it illustrates the tenacity of the technological understanding of being that Heidegger himself was in its thrall even while struggling to think from a perspective outside of it. Ironies aside, this volume is a valuable resource that I highly recommend for those wanting to learn more about, and engage critically with, Heidegger's philosophy of technology.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Thanks to Iain Thomson for comments and criticisms of a draft of this review.

[1] The English translation can be found in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays , translated by W. Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). All citations will be to this edition.

[2] See Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures , translated by Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).

[3] QCT, p. 4.

[4] See Fredrik Westerlund's forthcoming Heidegger and the Problem of Phenomena (London: Bloomsbury, 2020) for a careful examination of the tensions in Heidegger's thought generated by his commitments to both phenomenology and a broadly historicist thesis regarding the understanding of being.

[5] QCT, p. 28.

[6] See Country Path Conversations , translated by Bret W. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), especially p. 90, where the Scholar states that "in the relation between open-region and releasement, if it is still a relation at all, can be thought of neither as ontic nor as ontological." (p. 90)

[7] Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking , translated by J. M. Anderson and E. H. Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 54. Note that the original title of this work is Gelassenheit .

[8] See, for example, his "Is Ontology Fundamental?" in Basic Philosophical Writings , edited by A. Peperzak, S. Critchley, and R. Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

Philosophy of Technology

If philosophy is the attempt “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”, as Sellars (1962) put it, philosophy should not ignore technology. It is largely by technology that contemporary society hangs together. It is hugely important not only as an economic force but also as a cultural force. During the last two centuries, much philosophy of technology has been concerned with the impact of technology on society. Mitcham (1994) calls this type of philosophy of technology ‘humanities philosophy of technology’ because it is continuous with social science and the humanities. In addition to this, there is also a branch of the philosophy of technology that is concerned with technology in itself. This entry focuses on the latter branch of the philosophy of technology, which seeks continuity with the philosophy of science rather than social science and the humanities. The approach is analytic; other approaches are possible, but will not be discussed.

The entry starts with a brief historical overview, then presents an introduction to the modern philosophy of technology, and ends with a discussion of the societal and ethical aspects of technology. This discussion takes into consideration the development of technology as a process originating within and guided by the practice of engineering, by standards on which only limited societal control is exercised, as well as the consequences for society of its implementation, resulting from processes upon which only limited control can be exercised.

1.1. The Greeks

1.2. later developments, 1.3. recent developments, 2.1. introduction: philosophy of technology and philosophy of science, 2.2. the relationship between technology and science, 2.3. the centrality of design to technology, 2.4. methodological issues: design as decision making, 2.5. metaphysical issues: the status and characteristics of artifacts, 2.6. other topics, 3.1. the development of the ethics of technology, 3.2. approaches in the ethics of technology, 3.3. some recurrent themes in the ethics of technology, other internet resources, related entries, 1. historical developments.

Philosophical reflection on technology is about as old as philosophy itself. It started in ancient Greece. There are four prominent themes.

One early theme is the thesis that technology learns from or imitates nature (Plato, Laws X 899a ff.). According to Democritus, for example, house-building and weaving were first invented by imitating swallows and spiders building their nests and nets, respectively (fr D154; perhaps the oldest extant source for the exemplary role of nature is Herakleitos fr D112). Aristotle referred to this tradition by repeating Democritus' examples, but he did not maintain that technology can only imitate nature: “generally art in some cases completes what nature cannot bring to a finish, and in others imitates nature” ( Physics II.8, 199a15; see also Physics II.2, and see Schummer 2001 for discussion).

A second theme is the thesis that there is a fundamental ontological distinction between natural things and artifacts. According to Aristotle, Physics II.1, the former have their principles of generation and motion inside, whereas the latter, insofar as they are artifacts, are generated only by outward causes, namely human aims and forms in the human soul. Natural products (animals and their parts, plants, and the four elements) move, grow, change, and reproduce themselves by inner final causes; they are driven by purposes of nature. Artifacts, on the other hand, cannot reproduce themselves. Without human care and intervention, they vanish after some time by losing their artificial forms and decomposing into (natural) materials. For instance, if a wooden bed is buried, it decomposes to earth or changes back into its botanical nature by putting forth a shoot. The thesis that there is a fundamental difference between man-made products and natural substances had a long-lasting influence. In the Middle Ages, Avicenna criticized alchemy on the ground that it can never produce ‘genuine’ substances. Even today, some still maintain that there is a difference between, for example, natural and synthetic vitamin C.

Aristotle's doctrine of the four causes—material, formal, efficient and final—can be regarded as a third early contribution to the philosophy of technology. Aristotle explained this doctrine by referring to technical artifacts such as houses and statues ( Physics II.3).

A final point that deserves mentioning is the extensive employment of technological images by Plato and Aristotle. In his Timaeus , Plato described the world as the work of an Artisan, the Demiurge. His account of the details of creation is full of images drawn from carpentry, weaving, modelling, metallurgy, and agricultural technology. Aristotle used comparisons drawn from the arts and crafts to illustrate how final causes are at work in natural processes. Despite their criticism of the life led by merely human artisans, both Plato and Aristotle found technological imagery indispensable for expressing their belief in the rational design of the universe (Lloyd 1973: 61).

Although there was much technological progress in the Roman empire and during the Middle Ages, philosophical reflection on technology did not grow at a corresponding rate. Comprehensive works such as Vitruvius' De Architectura (first century BC) and Agricola's De re metallica (1556) paid much attention to practical aspects of technology but little to philosophy.

In the realm of scholastic philosophy, there was an emergent appreciation for the mechanical arts. They were generally considered to be born of—and limited to—the mimicry of nature. This view became challenged when alchemy was introduced in the Latin West around the mid-twelfth century. Some alchemical writers such as Roger Bacon were willing to argue that human art, even if it learned by imitating natural processes, could successfully reproduce natural products or even surpass them. The result was a philosophy of technology in which human art was raised to a level of appreciation difficult to find in other writings until the Renaissance. However, the last three decades of the thirteenth century witnessed an increasingly hostile attitude by religious authorities toward alchemy that culminated eventually in the denunciation Contra alchymistas , written by the inquisitor Nicholas Eymeric in 1396 (Newman 1989, 2004).

The Renaissance led to a greater appreciation of human beings and their creative efforts, including technology. As a result, philosophical reflection on technology and its impact on society increased. Francis Bacon is generally regarded as the first modern author to put forward such reflection. His view, expressed in his fantasy New Atlantis (1627), was overwhelmingly positive. This positive attitude lasted well into the nineteenth century, incorporating the first half-century of the industrial revolution. Karl Marx did not condemn the steam engine or the spinning mill for the vices of the bourgeois mode of production and believed that ongoing technological innovation would support the more blissful stages of socialism and communism of the future (see Bimber 1990 for a recent discussion of different views on the role of technology in Marx's theory of historical development).

A turning point in the appreciation of technology as a socio-cultural phenomenon is marked by Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) written under the influence of the Industrial Revolution and Darwin's Origin of Species . This book gave an account of a fictional country where all machines are banned and the possession of a machine or the attempt to build one is a capital crime, ever since the population was convinced by an argument that ongoing technical improvements are likely to lead to a ‘race’ of machines that will replace mankind as the dominant species on earth.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century a critical attitude predominated in philosophy. The representatives of this attitude were, overwhelmingly, schooled in the humanities or the social sciences and had virtually no first-hand knowledge of engineering practice. Whereas Bacon wrote extensively on the method of science and conducted physical experiments himself, Butler was a clergyman. The author of the first text in which the term ‘philosophy of technology’ occurred, Ernst Kapp's Eine Philosophie der Technik (1877), was a philologist and historian. Most of the authors who reflected critically on technology and its socio-cultural role during the twentieth century were philosophers of a general outlook (Heidegger, Jonas, Gehlen, Anders, Feenberg), had a background in one of the other humanities or in social science, like law (Ellul), political science (Winner) or literary studies (Borgmann). Carl Mitcham (1994) has called this type of philosophy of technology ‘humanities philosophy of technology’. It can be interpreted as exercising continuing influence in the field known as ‘Science and Technology Studies (STS)’, which studies how social, political, and cultural values affect scientific research and technological innovation, and how these in turn affect society, politics, and culture. For those interested in the humanities philosophy of technology, Mitcham's books provide an excellent overview.

Since the 1960s, a form of the philosophy of technology has been developing that can be regarded as an alternative to the humanities philosophy of technology. It has gained momentum in the past 10 or 15 years, and it is now becoming the dominant form of philosophy of technology. This form of the philosophy of technology may be called ‘analytic’. It is not so much concerned with the relations between technology and society as with technology itself. It does not see technology as a ‘black box’, but as a phenomenon that deserves study. It regards technology as a practice, basically the practice of engineering. It analyzes this practice, its goals, its concepts and its methods, and it relates these issues to various themes from philosophy. The following discussion will be concerned with this form of the philosophy of technology.

2. Analytic Philosophy of Technology

Few practices in our society are as closely related as science and technology. Experimental science is nowadays crucially dependent on technology for the realization of its research settings and for the creation of circumstances in which a phenomenon will become observable. Theoretical research within technology has come to be often indistinguishable from theoretical research in science, making engineering science largely continuous with ‘ordinary’ science. This is a relatively recent development, not more than a century old, and is responsible for great differences between modern technology and traditional, craft-like techniques. The educational training that aspiring scientists and engineers receive starts off being largely identical and only gradually diverges into a science or engineering curriculum. It might therefore be thought that there are equally strong resemblances between the philosophy of science and the philosophy of technology. Almost the contrary is true, however. Ever since the scientific revolution of, primarily, the seventeenth century, characterized by its two major innovations, the experimental method and the mathematical articulation of scientific theories, philosophical reflection on science has concentrated on the method by which scientific knowledge is generated, on the reasons for thinking scientific theories to be true, and on the nature of evidence and the reasons for accepting one theory and rejecting another. Hardly ever have philosophers of science posed questions that did not have the community of scientists, their concerns, their aims, their intuitions, their arguments and choices, as the primary target. The philosophy of technology, in contrast, has traditionally largely ignored the community of engineers and has almost exclusively dealt with the place of technology in, and its meaning for, human society, human culture, and human existence, in terms of Sellarsian broadness.

To say that this is understandable because science affects society only through technology will not do. Right from the start of the scientific revolution, science affected human culture and thought fundamentally and directly, not with a detour through technology, and the same is true for later developments such as relativity, atomic physics and quantum mechanics, the theory of evolution, genetics, biochemistry, and the increasingly unified scientific world view overall. Philosophers of science seem to leave questions addressing this side of things gladly to other philosophical disciplines, or to historical studies.

A major difference between the historical development of modern technology as compared to modern science, which can at least partly explain this situation, is that science emerged in the seventeenth century from philosophy itself. The answers that Galileo, Huygens, Newton, and others gave, by which they initiated the alliance of empiricism and mathematical description that is so characteristic for modern science, were answers to questions that had belonged to the core business of philosophy since antiquity. Science, therefore, kept the attention of philosophers. Philosophy of science is a transformation of epistemology in the light of the emergence of science. The foundational issues—the reality of atoms, the status of causality and probability, questions of space and time, the nature of the quantum world—that were so lively discussed during the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century are an illustration of this close relationship between scientists and philosophers. No such intimacy has ever existed between those same philosophers and technicians; their worlds still barely touch. To be sure, a case can be made for a similar continuity between central questions in philosophy, having to do with human action and practical rationality, and the way technology approaches and systematizes the solution of practical problems. This continuity appears only by hindsight, however, and dimly, as the historical development is at most a slow approach in the direction of these philosophical thoughts on action and rationality, not away from them as its place of birth. Significantly it is only the academic outsider Ellul who has, in his idiosyncratic way, recognized in technology the emergent single dominant way of answering all questions concerning human action, comparable to science as the single dominant way of answering all questions concerning human knowledge (Ellul 1964). Ellul, however, does not merely give as his interpretation that technology can be the sum total of rational action, he also deplores the hold it has on modern society due to its forcing all aspects of human life within the mould of a single narrowed-down criterion of rationality: maximum efficiency. In this respect Ellul is not an outsider but entirely typical for an approach to the philosophy of technology that has dominated the debate during the twentieth century. This approach is openly critical of technology: it tends to have a negative judgment, all things considered, of the way technology has affected human society and culture, or it concentrates on the negative effects of technology on human society and culture. This does not necessarily mean that technology itself is pointed out as the direct cause of these negative developments. In the case of Heidegger, in particular, the paramount position of technology in modern society is a symptom of something more fundamental, namely a wrongheaded attitude towards Being which has been in the making for almost 25 centuries. It is therefore questionable whether Heidegger should be considered as a philosopher of technology, although within the traditional view he is considered to be among the most important ones.

The close relationship between the practices of science and technology may easily keep the important differences between the two from view. The predominant position of science in the philosophical perspective did not easily lead to a recognition that technology merited special attention for involving issues that did not emerge in science. This situation is often presented, perhaps somewhat dramatized, as coming down to a claim that technology is ‘merely’ applied science.

A questioning of the relation between science and technology was the central issue in one of the earliest discussions among analytic philosophers of technology. In 1966, in a special issue of the journal Technology and Culture , Henryk Skolimowski argued that technology is something quite different from science (Skolimowski 1966). As he phrased it, science concerns itself with what is , whereas technology concerns itself with what is to be . A few years later, in his well-known book The sciences of the artificial (1969), Herbert Simon emphasized this important distinction in almost the same words, stating that the scientist is concerned with how things are but the engineer with how things ought to be. Although it is difficult to imagine that earlier philosophers of science were blind to this difference in orientation, their inclination, in particular in the tradition of logical empiricism, to view knowledge as a system of statements may have led to a conviction that in technology no knowledge claims play a role that cannot also be found in science, and that therefore the study of technology poses no new challenges and holds no surprises regarding the interests of analytic philosophy.

In the same issue of Technology and Culture , Mario Bunge (1966) defended the view that technology is applied science, but in a subtle way that does justice to the differences between science and technology. Bunge acknowledges that technology is about action, but an action heavily underpinned by theory—that is what distinguishes technology from the arts and crafts and puts it on a par with science. According to Bunge, theories in technology come in two types: substantive theories, which provide knowledge about the object of action, and operative theories, which are concerned with action itself. The substantive theories of technology are indeed largely applications of scientific theories. The operative theories, in contrast, are not preceded by scientific theories but are born in applied research itself. Still, as Bunge claims, operative theories show a dependency on science in that in such theories the method of science is employed. This includes such features as modeling and idealization, the use of theoretical concepts and abstractions, and the modification of theories by the absorption of empirical data through prediction and retrodiction.

In his comment on Skolimowski's paper in Technology and Culture , Ian Jarvie (1966) proposed as important questions for a philosophy of technology an inquiry into the epistemological status of technological statements and the way technological statements are to be demarcated from scientific statements. This suggests a thorough investigation of the various forms of knowledge occurring in either practice, in particular, since scientific knowledge has already been so extensively studied, of the forms of knowledge that are characteristic of technology and are lacking, or of much less prominence, in science. A distinction between ‘knowing that’—traditional propositional knowledge—and ‘knowing how’—non-articulated and even impossible-to-articulate knowledge—had been introduced by Gilbert Ryle (1949) in a different context. The notion of ‘knowing how’ was taken up by Michael Polanyi under the name of tacit knowledge and made a central characteristic of technology (Polanyi 1958). However, emphasizing too much the role of unarticulated knowledge, of ‘rules of thumb’ as they are often called, easily underplays the importance of rational methods in technology. The following two sections take up the role of rational methods in technology. An emphasis on tacit knowledge may also be ill-fit for distinguishing the practices of science and technology because the role of tacit knowledge in science may well be more important than current philosophy of science acknowledges, for example in concluding causal relationships on the basis of empirical evidence. This was also an important theme in the writings of Thomas Kuhn on scientific theory-change (Kuhn 1962).

To claim, with Skolimowski and Simon, that technology is about what is to be or what ought to be rather than what is may serve to distinguish it from science but will hardly make it understandable why so much philosophical reflection has taken the form of socio-cultural criticism. Technology is a continuous attempt to bring the world closer to the way it is to be. Whereas science aims to understand the world as it is, technology aims to change the world. These are abstractions, of course. Unlike scientists, however, who are considered personally motivated in their attempts at describing and understanding the world, engineers are considered, not in the least by engineers themselves, as undertaking their attempts to change the world as a service to the public. The ideas on what is to be or what ought to be are seen as originating outside of technology itself; engineers then take it upon themselves to realize these ideas. This view is the source for the widely spread picture of technology as being instrumental , as delivering instruments that will be used ‘elsewhere’. This view involves a considerable distortion of reality. Many engineers are intrinsically motivated to change the world; they are their own best customers. The same is true for most industrial companies, particularly in a market economy. As a result, much technological development is ‘technology-driven’.

Be that as it may, technology is a practice focused on the creation of artifacts and, of increasing importance, artifact-based services. The design process , the structured process leading toward that goal, forms the core of the practice of technology. The design process is commonly represented as consisting of a series of translational steps. In the first step the needs or wishes of the customer are translated into a list of functional requirements , which defines the design task. The functional requirements specify as precisely as possible what the device to be designed must be able to do. This step is required because customers usually focus on just one or two features and are unable to articulate the requirements that are necessary to support the functionality they desire. This is all the more true if the needs of the customer are ‘deduced’ from market developments. In the second step the functional requirements are translated into design specifications, which the exact physical parameters of crucial components by which the functional requirements are going to be met. In the third and final step, the design parameters are combined and amended such that a blueprint of the device results. The blueprint contains all the details that must be known for the manufacture of the device and can be considered as the end result of a design process, rather than a finished copy. Actual copies of a device play a role only as prototypes for the purpose of testing. Prototyping and testing presupposes that the sequence of steps making up the design process can and will often contain iterations, leading to revisions of the design parameters and/or the functional requirements. For a general discussion of the structure of design processes, see, e.g., Suh (2001).

Certainly for mass-produced items, the manufacture of a product is not considered part of the design phase. Still, the manufacturing process is often reflected in the functional requirements of a device, for example in putting restrictions on the number of different components of which the device consists. Ease of maintenance is often a functional requirement as well. An important modern development is that the complete life cycle of an artifact is now considered to be the designing engineer's concern, up till the final stages of the recycling and disposal of its components and materials, and the functional requirements of any device should reflect this.

An important input for the design process is scientific knowledge: knowledge about the behavior of components and the materials they are composed of in specific circumstances. This is the point where science is applied. However, much of this knowledge is not directly available from the sciences, since it often concerns exact behavior in very specific circumstances. This scientific knowledge is therefore often generated within technology, by the engineering sciences. The sort of knowledge involved in engineering design is of a broader character, however. In his book What engineers know and how they know it (Vincenti 1990), the aeronautical engineer Walter Vincenti gave a six-fold categorization of engineering design knowledge (leaving aside production and operation as the other two basic constituents of engineering practice). Vincenti distinguishes

• Fundamental design concepts, including primarily the operational principle and the normal configuration of a particular device;
• Criteria and specifications;
• Theoretical tools;
• Quantitative data;
• Practical considerations;
• Design instrumentalities.

The fourth category concerns the quantitative knowledge just referred to, and the third the theoretical tools used to acquire it. These two categories can be assumed to match Bunge's notion of substantive technological theories. The status of the remaining four categories is much less clear, however, partly because they are less familiar, or not at all, from the well-explored context of science. Of these categories, Vincenti claims that they represent prescriptive forms of knowledge rather than descriptive ones. Here, the activity of design introduces an element of normativity, which is absent from scientific knowledge. Take such a basic notion as ‘operational principle’, which refers to the way in which the function of a device is realized, or, in short, how it works. This is still a purely descriptive notion. Subsequently, however, it plays a role in arguments that seek to prescribe a course of action to someone who has a goal that could be realized by the operation of such a device. At this stage, the issue changes from a descriptive to a prescriptive or normative one. Although the notion of ‘operational principle’—a term that seems to originate with Polanyi (1958)—is central to engineering design, no single clear-cut definition of it seems to exist. The issue of disentangling descriptive from prescriptive aspects in an analysis of the technical action and its constituents is therefore a task that has hardly begun.

This task requires a clear view on the extent and scope of technology. If one follows Joseph Pitt in his book Thinking about technology (1999) and defines technology broadly as ‘humanity at work’, then to distinguish between technological action and action in general becomes difficult, and the study of technological action must absorb all descriptive and normative theories of action, including the theory of practical rationality, and much of theoretical economics in its wake. There have indeed been attempts at such an encompassing account of human action, for example Tadeusz Kotarbinski's Praxiology (1965), but a perspective of such generality makes it difficult to arrive at results of sufficient depth. It would be a challenge for philosophy to specify the differences among action forms and the reasoning grounding them in, to single out three prominent practices, technology, organization and management, and economics.

Design is an activity that is subject to rational scrutiny but in which creativity is considered to play an important role as well. Since design is a form of action, a structured series of decisions to proceed in one way rather than another, the form of rationality that is relevant to it is practical rationality, the rationality incorporating the criteria on how to act, given particular circumstances. This suggests a clear division of labor between the part to be played by rational scrutiny and the part to be played by creativity. Theories of rational action generally conceive their problem situation as one involving a choice among various course of action open to the agent. Rationality then concerns the question how to decide among given options, whereas creativity concerns the generation of these options. This distinction is similar to the distinction between the context of justification and the context of discovery in science. The suggestion that is associated with this distinction, however, that rational scrutiny only applies in the context of justification, is difficult to uphold for technological design. If the initial creative phase of option generation is conducted sloppily, the result of the design task can hardly be satisfactory. Unlike the case of science, where the practical consequences of entertaining a particular theory are not taken into consideration, the context of discovery in technology is governed by severe constraints of time and money, and an analysis of the problem how best to proceed certainly seems in order. There has been little philosophical work done in this direction.

The ideas of Herbert Simon on bounded rationality (see, e.g., Simon 1982) are relevant here, since decisions on when to stop generating options and when to stop gathering information about these options and the consequences when they are adopted are crucial in decision making if informational overload and calculative intractability are to be avoided, but it has proved difficult to further develop Simon's ideas on bounded rationality. Another notion that is relevant here is means-ends reasoning. In order to be of any help here, theories of means-ends reasoning should then concern not just the evaluation of given means with respect to their ability to achieve given ends, but also the generation or construction of means for given ends. Such theories, however, are not yet available; for a proposal on how to develop means-ends reasoning in the context of technical artifacts, see (Hughes, Kroes and Zwart 2007). In the practice of technology, alternative proposals for the realization of particular functions are usually taken from ‘catalogs’ of existing and proven realizations. These catalogs are extended by ongoing research in technology rather than under the urge of particular design tasks.

When engineering design is conceived as a process of decision making, governed by considerations of practical rationality, the next step is to specify these considerations. Almost all theories of practical rationality conceive of it as a reasoning process where a match between beliefs and desires or goals is sought. The desires or goals are represented by their value or utility for the decision maker, and the decision maker's problem is to choose an action that realizes a situation that has maximal value or utility among all the situations that could be realized. If there is uncertainty concerning he situations that will be realized by a particular action, then the problem is conceived as aiming for maximal expected value or utility. Now the instrumental perspective on technology implies that the value that is at issue in the design process viewed as a process of rational decision making is not the value of the artefacts that are created. Those values are the domain of the users of the technology so created. They are supposed to be represented in the functional requirements defining the design task. Instead the value to be maximized is the extent to which a particular design meets the functional requirements defining the design task. It is in this sense that engineers share an overall perspective on engineering design as an exercise in optimization . But although optimization is a value-orientated notion, it is not itself a value driving engineering design.

The functional requirements that define most design problems do not prescribe explicitly what should be optimized; usually they set levels to be attained minimally. It is then up to the engineer to choose how far to go beyond meeting the requirements in this minimal sense. Efficiency , in energy consumption and use of materials first of all, is then often a prime value. Under the pressure of society, other values have come to be incorporated, in particular safety and, more recently, sustainability . Sometimes it is claimed that what engineers aim to maximize is just one factor, namely market success. Market success, however, can only be assessed after the fact. The engineer's maximization effort will instead be directed at what are considered the predictors of market success. Meeting the functional requirements and being relatively efficient and safe are plausible candidates as such predictors, but additional methods, informed by market research, may introduce additional factors or may lead to a hierarchy among the factors.

Choosing that design option that maximally meets all the functional requirements originating with the prospective user and all other considerations and criteria that are taken to be relevant, then becomes the practical decision-making problem to solve in a particular engineering-design task. This creates several methodological problems. Most important of these is that the engineer is facing a multi-criteria decision problem. The various requirements come with their own operationalizations in terms of design parameters and measurement procedures for assessing their performance. This results in a number of rank orders or quantitative scales which represent the various options out of which a choice is to be made. The task is to come up with a final score in which all these results are ‘adequately’ represented, such that the option that scores best can be considered the optimal solution to the design problem. Engineers describe this situation as one where trade-offs have to be made: in judging the merit of one option relative to other options, a relative bad performance on one criterion can be balanced by a relatively good performance on another criterion. An important problem is whether a rational method for doing this can be formulated. It has been argued (Franssen 2005) that this problem is structurally similar to the well-known problem of social choice, for which Kenneth Arrow proved his notorious impossibility theorem in 1950, implying that no general rational solution method can be found for this problem. This poses serious problems for the claim of engineers that their designs are optimal solutions, since Arrow's theorem implies that in a multi-criteria problem the notion of ‘optimal’ cannot be rigorously defined.

Another problem for the decision-making view of engineering design is that in modern technology almost all design is done by teams. Such teams are composed of experts from many different disciplines. Since each discipline has its own theories, its own models of interdependencies, its own assessment criteria, and so forth, such that they must be considered as inhabitants of different object worlds , as Louis Bucciarelli (1994) phrases it. The different team members are, therefore, likely to disagree on the relative rankings and evaluations of the various design options under discussion. Agreement on one option as the overall best one can here be even less arrived at by an algorithmic method exemplifying engineering rationality. Instead, models of social interaction, such as bargaining and strategic thinking, are relevant here. An example of such an approach to an (abstract) design problem is (Franssen and Buciarelli 2004).

To look in this way at technological design as a decision-making process is to view it normatively from the point of view of practical or instrumental rationality. At the same time it is descriptive in that it is a description of how engineering methodology generally presents the issue how to solve design problems. From that somewhat higher perspective there is room for all kinds of normative questions that are not addressed here, such as whether the functional requirements defining a design problem can be seen as an adequate representation of the values of the prospective users of an artifact or a technology, or by which methods values such as safety and sustainability can best be elicited and represented in the design process. These issues will be taken up in Section 3.

Another issue of central concern to internal philosophy of technology is the status and the character of artifacts. Artifacts are man-made objects: they have an author (see Hilpinen, article ‘artifact’). The artifacts that are of relevance to technology are, in particular, made to serve a purpose. This excludes, within the set of all man-made objects, on the one hand byproducts and waste products and on the other hand works of art. Byproducts and waste products result from an intentional act to make something but just not precisely, although the author at work may be well aware of their creation. Works of art result from an intention directed at their creation (although in exceptional cases of conceptual art, this directedness may involve many intermediate steps) but it is contested whether artists include in their intentions concerning their work an intention that the work serves some purpose. A further discussion of this aspect belongs to the philosophy of art. An interesting general account has been presented by Dipert (1993).

Technical artifacts, then, are made to serve some purpose, generally to be used for something or to act as a component in a larger artifact, which in its turn is either something to be used or again a component. Whether end product or component, an artifact is ‘for something’, and what it is for is called the artifact's function . Several researchers have emphasized that an adequate description of artifacts must refer both to their status as tangible physical objects and to the intentions of the people engaged with them. Kroes and Meijers (2006) have dubbed this view ‘the dual nature of technical artifacts’. They suggest that the two aspects are ‘tied up’, so to speak, in the notion of artifact function. This gives rise to several problems. One, which will be passed over quickly because little philosophical work seems to have been done concerning it, is that structure and function mutually constrain each other, but the constraining is only partial. It is unclear whether a general account of this relation is possible and what problems need to be solved to arrive there. There may be interesting connections with the issue of multiple realizability in the philosophy of mind and with accounts of reduction in science, but these have not yet been explored.

It is equally problematic whether a unified account of the notion of function as such is possible, but this issue has received considerably more philosophical attention. The notion of function is of paramount importance for characterizing artifacts, but the notion is used much more widely. The notion of an artifact's function seems to refer necessarily to human intentions. Function is also a key concept in biology, however, where no intentionality plays a role, and it is a key concept in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, where it is crucial in grounding intentionality in non-intentional, structural and physical properties. Up till now there is no accepted general account of function that covers both the intentionality-based notion of artifact function and the non-intentional notion of biological function—not to speak of other areas where the concept plays a role, such as the social sciences. The most comprehensive theory, that has the ambition to account for the biological notion, cognitive notion and the intentional notion, is Ruth Millikan's (Millikan 1984); for criticisms and replies, see Preston (1998, 2003), Millikan (1999) and Houkes & Vermaas (2003). The collection of essays edited by Ariew, Cummins and Perlman (2002) presents a recent introduction to the general topic of defining the notion of function in general, although the emphasis is, as is generally the case in the literature on function, on biological functions.

Against the view that the notion of functions refers necessarily to intentionality at least in the case of artifacts, it could be argued that even there, when discussing the functions of the components of a larger device and their interrelations, the intentional ‘side’ of these functions is of secondary importance only. This, however, would be to ignore the possibility of the malfunctioning of such components. This notion seems to be definable only in terms of a mismatch between actual behavior and intended behavior. The notion of malfunction also sharpens an ambiguity in the general reference to intentions when characterizing technical artifacts. These artifacts usually engage many people, and the intentions of these people may not all pull in the same direction. A major distinction can be drawn between the intentions of the actual user of an artifact for a particular purpose and the intentions of the artifact's designer. Since an artifact may be used for a purpose different from the one for which its designer intended it to be used, and since people may also use natural objects for some purpose or other, one is invited to allow that artifacts can have multiple functions, or to enforce a hierarchy among all relevant intentions in determining the function of an artifact, or to introduce a classification of functions in terms of the sorts of determining intentions. In the latter case, which is a sort of middle way between the two other options, one commonly distinguishes between the proper function of an artifact as the one intended by its designer and the accidental function of the artifact as the one given to it by some user on private considerations. Accidental use can become so common, however, that the original function drops out of memory.

Closely related to this issue to what extent use and design determine the function of an artifact is the problem of characterizing artifact kinds. It may seem that we use functions to classify artifacts: an object is a knife because it has the function of cutting, or more precisely, of enabling us to cut. It is hardly recognized, however, that the link between function and kind-membership is not that straightforward. The basic kinds in technology are, for example, ‘knife’, ‘airplane’ and ‘piston’. The members of these kinds have been designed in order to be used to cut something with, to transport something through the air and to generate mechanical movement through thermodynamic expansion. However, one cannot create a particular kind of artifact just by designing something with the intention that it be used for some particular purpose: a member of the kind so created must actually be useful for that purpose. Despite innumerable design attempts and claims, the perpetual motion machine is not a kind of artifact. A kind like ‘knife’ is defined, therefore, not only by the intention of the designer of each of its members that it be useful for cutting but also by an operational principle known to these designers, and on which they based their design. This is, in a different setting, also defended by Thomasson, who in her characterization of what she in general calls an artifactual kind says that such a kind is defined by the designer's intention to make something of that kind, by a substantive idea that the designer has of how this can be achieved, and by his or her largely successful achievement of it (Thomasson 2003, 2007). Qua sorts of kinds in which artifacts can be grouped, a distinction must therefore be made between a kind like ‘knife’ and a corresponding but different kind ‘cutter’. A ‘knife’ indicates a particular way a ‘cutter’ can be made. One can also cut, however, with a thread or line, a welding torch, a water jet, and undoubtedly by other sorts of means that have not yet been thought of. A ‘cutter’ is an example of what could be looked upon as a truly functional kind. As such, it is subject to the conflict between use and design: one could mean by ‘cutter’ anything than can be used for cutting or anything that has been designed to be used for cutting, by the application of  whatever operational principle, presently known or unknown.

This distinction between artifact kinds and functional kinds is relevant for the status of such kinds in comparison to other notions of kinds. Philosophy of science has emphasized that the concept of natural kind, such as exemplified by ‘water’ or ‘atom’, lies at the basis of science. On the other hand it is generally taken for granted that there are no regularities that all knives or airplanes or pistons answer to. This, however, is loosely based on considerations of multiple realizability that apply only to functional kinds, not to artifact kinds. Artifact kinds share an operational principle that gives then some commonality in physical features, and this commonality becomes stronger once a particular artifact kind is subdivided into narrower kinds. Since these kinds are specified in terms of physical and geometrical parameters, they are much closer to the natural kinds of science, in that they support law-like regularities; see for a defense of this position (Soavi 2008).

3. Ethical and Social Aspects of Technology

It was not until the twentieth century that the development of the ethics of technology as a systematic and more or less independent subdiscipline of philosophy started. This late development may seem surprising given the large impact that technology has had on society, especially since the industrial revolution.

A plausible reason for this late development of ethics of technology is the instrumental perspective on technology that was mentioned in Section 2.2. This perspective implies, basically, a positive ethical assessment of technology: technology increases the possibilities and capabilities of humans, which seems in general desirable. Of course, since antiquity, it has been recognized that the new capabilities may be put to bad use or lead to human hubris . Often, however, these undesirable consequences are attributed to the users of technology, rather than the technology itself, or its developers. This vision is known as the instrumental vision of technology resulting in the so-called neutrality thesis. The neutrality thesis holds that technology is a neutral instrument that can be put to good or bad use by its users. During the twentieth century, this neutrality thesis met with severe critique, most prominently by Heidegger and Ellul, who have been mentioned in this context in Section 2.0, but also by philosophers from the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas).

As the brief overview above illustrates the scope and agenda for ethics of technology to a large extend depends on how technology is conceptualized. The second half of the twentieth century has witnessed a richer variety of conceptualizations of technology that move beyond the conceptualization of technology as a neutral tool, as a world view or as a historical necessity. This includes conceptualizations of technology as a political phenomenon (Winner, Feenberg, Sclove), as a social activity (Latour, Callon, Bijker and others in the area of science and technology studies), as a cultural phenomenon (Ihde, Borgmann), as a professional activity (engineering ethics, e.g., Davis), and as a cognitive activity (Bunge, Vincenti). Despite this diversity, the development in the second half of the twentieth century is characterized by two general trends. One is a move away from technological determinism and the assumption that technology develops autonomously to an emphasis on choices in technological development. The other is a move away from ethical reflection on technology as such to ethical reflection of specific technologies and to specific phases in the development of technology. Both trends together have resulted in an enormous increase in the number and scope of ethical questions that are asked about technology. The developments also imply that ethics of technology is to be adequately empirically informed, not only about the exact consequences of specific technologies but also about the actions of engineers and the process of technological development. This has also opened the way to the involvement of other disciplines in ethical reflections on technology, such as Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Technology Assessment (TA).

Not only is the ethics of technology characterized by a diversity of approaches, it might even be doubted whether something like a subdiscipline of ethics of technology, in the sense of a community of scholars working on a common set of problems, exists. The scholars studying ethical issues in technology have diverse backgrounds (e.g., philosophy, STS, TA, law, political science) and they do not always consider themselves (primarily) ethicists of technology. Moreover, there is limited interaction and discussion between different strands in the ethics of technology, like the ethics of engineering, the ethics of specific technologies (such as computer ethics) and approaches that remain primarily inspired by the traditional philosophy of technology. To give the reader an overview of the field, three basic approaches or strands that might be distinguished in the ethics of technology will be discussed.

3.2.1. Cultural and political approaches

Both cultural and political approaches build on the traditional philosophy and ethics of technology of the first half of the twentieth century. Whereas cultural approaches conceive of technology as a cultural phenomenon that influences our perception of the world, political approaches conceive of technology as a political phenomenon, i.e. as a phenomenon that is ruled by and embodies institutional power relations between people.

Cultural approaches are often phenomenological in nature or at least position themselves in relation to phenomenology as post-phenomenology. Examples of philosophers in this tradition are Don Ihde, Albert Borgmann, Peter-Paul Verbeek and Evan Selinger (e.g., Borgmann 1984; Ihde 1990; Verbeek 2005). The approaches are usually influenced by developments in STS, especially the idea that technologies contain a script that influences not only people's perception of the world but also human behavior, and the idea of the absence of a fundamental distinction between humans and non-humans, including technological artifacts (Akrich 1992; Latour 1992; Latour 1993; Ihde and Selinger 2003). The combination of both ideas have let to the claim that technology has (moral) agency.

Political approaches to technology go back to Marx, who assumed that the material structure of production in society, in which technology is obviously a major factor, determined the economic and social structure of that society. Similarly, Langdon Winner has argued that technologies can embody specific forms of power and authority (Winner 1980). According to him, some technologies are inherently normative in the sense that they require or are strongly compatible with certain social and political relations. Railroads, for example, seem to require a certain authoritative management structure. In other cases, technologies may be political due to the particular way they have been designed. Some political approaches to technology are inspired by (American) pragmatism and, to a lesser extent, discourse ethics. A number of philosophers, for example, have pleaded for a democratization of technological development and the inclusion of ordinary people in the shaping of technology (Winner 1983; Sclove 1995; Feenberg 1999).

Although political approaches have obviously ethical ramifications, many philosophers who have adopted such approaches do not engage in explicit ethical reflection on technology. An interesting recent exception, and an attempt to consolidate a number of recent developments and to articulate them into a more general account of what an ethics of technology should look like, is the volume Pragmatist Ethics for a Technological Culture (Keulartz et al . 2002). In this volume, the authors plea for a revival of the pragmatist tradition in moral philosophy because it is better fit to deal with a number of moral issues in technology. Instead of focusing on how to reach and justify normative judgments about technology, a pragmatist ethics focuses on how to recognize and trace moral problems in the first place. Moreover, the process of dealing with these problems is considered more important than the outcome.

3.2.2. Engineering ethics

Engineering ethics is a relatively new field of education and research. It started off in the 1980s in the United States, merely as an educational effort. Engineering ethics is concerned with ‘the actions and decisions made by persons, individually or collectively, who belong to the profession of engineering’ (Baum 1980: 1). According to this approach, engineering is a profession, in the same way as medicine is a profession.

Although there is no agreement on how a profession exactly should be defined, the following characteristics are often mentioned:

• The use of specialized knowledge and skills that require a long period of study.
• The occupational group has a monopoly on the carrying out of the occupation.
• The assessment of whether the professional work is carried out in a competent way is done, and can only be done, by colleague professionals.

Typical ethical issues that are discussed in engineering ethics are professional obligations of engineers as exemplified in, for example, codes of ethics of engineers, the role of engineers versus managers, competence, honesty, whistle-blowing, concern for safety and conflicts of interest (Davis 2005; Martin and Schinzinger 2005; Harris, Pritchard, and Rabins 2008).

Recently, a number of authors have pleaded for broadening the traditional scope of engineering ethics (e.g., Herkert 2001). This call for a broader approach derives from two concerns. One concern is that the traditional micro-ethical approach in engineering ethics tends to take the contexts in which engineers have to work for given, while major ethical issues pertain to how this context is ‘organized’. It is one thing to deliberate whether an engineer should blow the whistle or not in a specific situation, it is quite another thing to deliberate whether cases of whistle-blowing could be largely avoided by better procedures, organizational structures and laws. Another concern is that the traditional micro-ethical focus tends to neglect issues relating to the impact of technology on society or issues relating to decisions about technology. Broadening the scope of engineering ethics would then, among others, imply more attention for such issues as sustainability and social justice.

3.2.3. Ethics of specific technologies

The last decades have witnessed an increase in ethical inquiries into specific technologies. One of the most visible new fields is probably computer ethics (e.g., Johnson 2001; Weckert 2007; Van den Hoven and Weckert 2008), but biotechnology has spurred dedicated ethical investigations as well (e.g., Morris 2006; Thompson 2007). Also more traditional fields like architecture and urban planning have attracted specific ethical attention (Fox 2000). More recently, nanotechnology and so-called converging technologies have led to the establishment of what is called nanoethics (Allhoff et al. 2007). Apart from this, there has been a debate over the ethics of nuclear deterrence (Finnis et al . 1988).

Obviously the establishment of such new fields of ethical reflection is a response to social and technological developments. Still, the question can be asked whether the social demand is best met by establishing new fields of applied ethics. This issue is in fact regularly discussed as new fields emerge. Several authors have, for example argued that there is no need for nanoethics because nanotechnology does not raise any really new ethical issues (e.g., Grunwald 2005). The alleged absence of newness here is supported by the claim that the ethical issues raised by nanotechnology are a variation on, and sometimes an intensification of, existing ethical issues, but hardly really new, and by the claim that these issues can be dealt with the existing theories and concepts from moral philosophy. For an earlier, similar discussion concerning the supposed new character of ethical issues in computer ethics, see (Maner 1996).

The new fields of ethical reflection are often characterized as applied ethics, that is, as applications of theories, normative standards, concepts and methods developed in moral philosophy. For each of these elements, however, application is usually not straightforward but requires a further development or revision. This is the case because general moral standards, concepts and methods are often not specific enough to be applicable in any direct sense to specific moral problems. ‘Application’ therefore often leads to new insights which might well result in the reformulation or at least refinement of existing normative standards, concepts and methods. In some cases, ethical issues in a specific field might require new standards, concepts or methods. Beauchamp and Childress for example have proposed a number of general ethical principles for biomedical ethics (Beauchamp and Childress 2001). These principles are more specific than general normative standards, but still so general and abstract that they apply to different issues in biomedical ethics. In computer ethics, existing moral concepts relating to for example privacy and ownership has been redefined and adapted to deal with issues which are typical for the computer age (Johnson 2003). New fields of ethical application might also require new methods for, for example, discerning ethical issues that take into account relevant empirical facts about these fields, like the fact that technological research & development usually takes place in networks of people rather than by individuals (Zwart et al . 2006).

The above suggests that different fields of ethical reflection on specific technologies might well raise their own philosophical and ethical issues. Even if this is true, it is not clear whether this justifies the development of separate subfields or even subdisciplines. It might well be argued that a lot can be learned from interaction and discussion between these fields and a fruitful interaction with the two other strands discussed above (cultural and political approaches and engineering ethics). Currently, such interaction in many cases seems absent, although there are of course exceptions.

We now turn to the description of some themes in the ethics of technology. We focus on a number of general themes that provide an illustration of general issues in the ethics of technology and the way these are treated.

3.3.1. Neutrality versus moral agency

One important general theme in the ethics of technology is the question whether technology is value-laden. Some authors have maintained that technology is value-neutral, in the sense that technology is just a neutral means to an end, and accordingly can be put to good or bad use (e.g., Pitt 2000). This view might have some plausibility in as far as technology is considered to be just a bare physical structure. Most philosophers of technology, however, agree that technological development is a goal-oriented process and that technological artifacts by definition have certain functions, so that they can be used for certain goals but not, or far more difficulty or less effectively, for other goals. This conceptual connection between technological artifacts, functions and goals makes it hard to maintain that technology is value-neutral. Even if this point is granted, the value-ladenness of technology can be construed in a host of different ways. Some authors have maintained that technology can have moral agency. This claim suggests that technologies can autonomously and freely ‘act’ in a moral sense and can be held morally responsible for their actions.

The debate whether technologies can have moral agency is most vivid in computer ethics, because (future) computers and artificial agents behave more like humans than other technologies do (Bechtel 1985; Snapper 1985; Dennett 1997; Floridi and Sanders 2004). Still the claim that technologies can have moral agency is also made more generally (Latour 1992; Verbeek 2005). Typically, the authors who claim that technologies (can) have moral agency often redefine the notion of agency, and its connection to human will and freedom (e.g., Latour 1993; Floridi and Sanders 2004). A disadvantage of this strategy is that it tends to blur the morally relevant distinctions between people and technological artifacts. More generally, the claim that technologies have moral agency sometimes seems to have become shorthand for claiming that technology is morally relevant. This, however, overlooks the fact technologies can be value-laden in other ways than by having moral agency. One might, for example, claim that technology enables (or even invites) and constrains (or even inhibits) certain human actions and the attainment of certain human goals and therefore is to some extent value-laden, without claiming moral agency for technological artifacts.

3.3.2. Responsibility

Responsibility has always been a central theme in the ethics of technology. The traditional philosophy and ethics of technology, however, tended to discuss responsibility in rather general terms and were rather pessimistic about the possibility of engineers to assume responsibility for the technologies they developed. Ellul, for example, has characterized engineers as the high priests of technology, who cherish technology but cannot steer it.

In engineering ethics, the responsibility of engineers is often discussed in relation to code of ethics that articulate specific responsibilities of engineers. Such codes of ethics stress three types of responsibilities of engineers: 1) conducting the profession with integrity and honesty and in a competent way, 2) responsibilities towards employers and clients and 3) responsibility towards the public and society. With respect to the latter, most US codes of ethics maintain that engineers ‘should hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public’.

One may wonder what the grounds are for the responsibilities that are listed in codes of ethics. A possible answer is suggested by Davis (1998): engineers are subject to special moral standards to which other people are not subject because engineering is a profession.

Another possible explanation is that ethical codes do not constitute a contract among professionals, but a contract between a profession and the rest of society. According to this explanation, such a contract would be worthwhile for professionals because in exchange to serving a moral ideal, the profession receives several privileges, such as status, a monopoly on carrying the occupation and good salaries.

A third explanation is that the codes of ethics as such are not morally binding but that they express moral responsibilities that are grounded otherwise. One may, for example, ground the responsibility of engineers by applying general philosophical notions of responsibility. Typical conditions for responsibility mentioned in the literature on responsibility include (e.g., Fischer and Ravizza 1993):

• The responsible actor is an intentional agent concerning the action;
• The action, resulting in the outcome, was voluntary ;
• The actor knew , or could have known, the outcome;
• The action of the actor contributed causally to the outcome; and
• The causally contributory action was in some way faulty , i.e. the actor can be blamed for the contributory action.

Some of these conditions are hard to meet in engineering practice (Nissenbaum 1996; Swierstra and Jelsma 2006). For example, engineers may feel compelled to act in a certain way due to hierarchical or market constraints, so that the second condition is not fulfilled. Negative consequences may be very hard or impossible to predict beforehand, so that the third condition is not met. Also the causality condition is often hard to meet due to the long chain from research and development of a technology till use and the many people involved in this chain.

If the traditional philosophical notion of responsibility is applied to engineering and technology it might well turn out that nobody is responsible for certain undesirable consequences of technology. This seems an undesirable result, not only because the social consequences of technology are often considerable, but also because it is often the case that negative consequences could have been prevented if certain precautions had been taken or certain people had cooperated better. One could basically react in two ways to this outcome. One reaction is to retain largely the classical notion of responsibility and to identify current barriers to responsibility and then devise strategies for overcoming these barriers (cf. the entry on Computing and Moral Responsibility in this Encyclopedia). The other reaction is to plea for a new notion of responsibility. Some authors, for example, have pleaded for a notion of responsibility in engineering that is more like the legal notion of strict liability, in which the conditions for being responsible are seriously weakened (e.g., Zandvoort 2000). Other authors have criticized the traditional notion of responsibility for being backward-looking and too much focused on blame (Ladd 1991). An alternative might be sought in a notion of responsibility that is based on virtue ethics. Also the notion of collective responsibility might offer an alternative (see, e.g., May and Hoffman 1991). It remains to be seen, however, to what extent such alternative notions are both philosophically and morally tenable and help to overcome the current problems with responsibility in engineering practice.

3.3.3. Design

In the last decades, increasingly attention is paid not only to ethical issues that arise during the use of a technology, but also during the design phase. An important consideration behind this development is the thought that during the design phase technologies, and their social consequences, are still malleable while during the use phase technologies are more or less given and negative social consequences may be harder to avoid or positive effects harder to achieve. Although the design phase is regularly identified as an ethically relevant phase of technological development, there is remarkably little in-depth research on ethics in design. One reason might be that many studies in engineering ethics tend to focus on disasters and choices and dilemmas that are obviously ethical while the ethical issues in design are often more subtle, more difficult to recognize and arise on a day-to-day basis (see, e.g., Lloyd and Busby 2003).

Van Gorp and Van de Poel (2001) distinguish five choices in design processes that are potentially ethically relevant: 1) the formulation of goals, design criteria and requirements and their operationalization, 2) the choice of alternatives to be investigated during a design process and the selection among those alternatives at a later stage in the process, 3) the assessment of trade-offs between design criteria (given particular alternatives) and decisions about the acceptability of particular trade-offs, 4) assessment of risks and unintended or unforeseen effects and decisions about the acceptability or desirability of these and 5) the assessment of scripts and political and social visions that are (implicitly) inherent in a design and decisions about the desirability of these scripts. Van Gorp (2005) has shown that the type of ethical issues that arise in design and the way they are dealt with depends on the type of design process: in normal, incremental design, engineers usually have recourse to existing normative frameworks in engineering practice, while such frameworks are absent or difficult to apply in radical, innovative design.

As was mentioned in section 2.4, design is not only a cognitive process but also a social process in which different individuals and groups are involved and in which negotiation plays an important role (Bucciarelli 1994). The social nature of design raises a range of ethical issues like: Who is to be involved in the design process? How are decisions to be made in a morally acceptable way? How to allocate responsibilities between the various participants (Devon and Van de Poel 2004)?

In computer ethics, an approach known as Value Sensitive Design has been developed to explicitly address the ethical nature of design. Value Sensitive Design aims at integrating values of ethical importance in a systematic way in engineering design (Friedman and Kahn 2003). The approach combines conceptual, empirical and technical investigations.

3.3.4. Technological risks

The risks of technology are one of the traditional ethical concerns in the ethics of technology. Risk is usually defined as the product of the probability of an undesired event and the effect of that event, although there are also other definitions around (Hansson 2004b). In general it seems desirable to keep technological risks as small as possible. The larger the risk, the larger either the likeliness or the impact of an undesirable event is. Risk reduction therefore is an important goal in technological development and engineering codes of ethics often attribute a responsibility to engineers in reducing risks and designing safe products. Still, risk reduction is not always feasible or desirable. It is sometimes not feasible, because there are no absolutely safe products and technologies. But even if risk reduction is feasible it may not be desirable from a moral point of view. Reducing risk often comes at a cost. Safer products may be more difficult to use, more expensive or less sustainable. So sooner or later, one is confronted with the question: what is safe enough? What makes a risk (un)acceptable?

The process of dealing with risks is often divided into three stages: risk assessment, risk evaluation and risk management. Of these, the second is most obviously ethically relevant. However, also risk assessment involves value judgments, for example about what risks should be assessed in the first place (Shrader-Frechette 1991). An important, and morally relevant, issue is also the degree of evidence that is needed to establish a risk. In establishing a risk on the basis of a body of empirical data one might make two kinds of mistakes. One can establish a risk when there is actually none (type I error) or one can mistakenly conclude that there is no risk while there actually is a risk (type II error). Science traditionally aims at avoiding type I errors. Several authors have argued that in the specific context of risk assessment it is often more important to avoid type II errors (Cranor 1990; Shrader-Frechette 1991). The reason for this is that risk assessment not just aims at establishing scientific truth but has a practical aim, i.e. to provide the knowledge on basis of which decisions can be made about whether it is desirable to reduce or avoid certain technological risks in order to protect users or the public.

Risk evaluation is carried out in a number of ways (see, e.g., Shrader-Frechette 1985). One possible approach is to judge the acceptability of risks by comparing them to other risks or to certain standards. One could, for example, compare technological risks with naturally occurring risks. This approach, however, runs the danger of committing a naturalistic fallacy: naturally occurring risks may (sometimes) be unavoidable but that does not necessarily make them morally acceptable. More generally, it is often dubious to judge the acceptability of the risk of technology A by comparing it to the risk of technology B if A and B are not alternatives in a decision (For this and other fallacies in reasoning about risks, see Hansson 2004a).

A second approach to risk evaluation is risk-cost benefit analysis, which is based on weighing the risks against the benefits of an activity. Different decision criteria can be applied if a (risk) cost benefit analysis is carried out (Kneese, Ben-David, and Schulze 1983). According to Hansson (2003: 306), usually the following criterion is applied: ‘... a risk is acceptable if and only if the total benefits that the exposure gives rise to outweigh the total risks, measured as the probability-weighted disutility of outcomes’.

A third approach is to base risk acceptance on the consent of people who suffer the risks after informing them about these risks (informed consent). A problem of this approach is that technological risks usually affect a large number of people at once. Informed consent may therefore lead to a ‘society of stalemates’ (Hansson 2003: 300).

Several authors have proposed alternatives to the traditional approaches of risk evaluation on the basis of philosophical and ethical arguments. Shrader-Frechette (1991) has proposed a number of reforms in risk assessment and evaluation procedures on the basis of a philosophical criticism of current practices. Roeser (2006) argues for a role of emotions in judging the acceptability of risks. Hansson has proposed the following alternative principle for risk evaluation: ‘Exposure of a person to a risk is acceptable if and only if this exposure is part of an equitable social system of risk-taking that works to her advantage’ (Hansson 2003: 305). Hansson's proposal introduces a number of moral considerations in risk evaluation that are traditionally not addressed or only marginally addressed. These are the consideration whether individuals profit from a risky activity and the consideration whether the distribution of risks and benefits is fair.

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Aristotle, Special Topics: causality | artifact | Bacon, Francis | computer and information ethics | computing: and moral responsibility | -->information technology: and moral values --> | moral responsibility | responsibility: collective | risk

Acknowledgment

The SEP Editors would like to thank Carl Mitcham for his helpful comments on, and suggestions for, this entry. We'd also like to thank Gintautas Miliauskas (Vilnius University) for carefully proofreading the text and suggesting numerous improvements.

Understanding Heidegger on Technology

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was perhaps the most divisive philosopher of the twentieth century. Many hold him to be the most original and important thinker of his era. Others spurn him as an obscurantist and a charlatan, while still others see his reprehensible affiliation with the Nazis as a reason to ignore or reject his thinking altogether. But Heidegger’s undoubted influence on contemporary philosophy and his unique insight into the place of technology in modern life make him a thinker worthy of careful study.

In his landmark book Being and Time (1927), Heidegger made the bold claim that Western thought from Plato onward had forgotten or ignored the fundamental question of what it means for something to b e — to be present for us prior to any philosophical or scientific analysis. He sought to clarify throughout his work how, since the rise of Greek philosophy, Western civilization had been on a trajectory toward nihilism, and he believed that the contemporary cultural and intellectual crisis — our decline toward nihilism — was intimately linked to this forgetting of being. Only a rediscovery of being and the realm in which it is revealed might save modern man.

In his later writings on technology, which mainly concern us in this essay, Heidegger draws attention to technology’s place in bringing about our decline by constricting our experience of things as they are. He argues that we now view nature, and increasingly human beings too, only technologically — that is, we see nature and people only as raw material for technical operations. Heidegger seeks to illuminate this phenomenon and to find a way of thinking by which we might be saved from its controlling power, to which, he believes, modern civilization both in the communist East and the democratic West has been shackled. We might escape this bondage, Heidegger argues, not by rejecting technology, but by perceiving its danger.

Heidegger’s Life and Influence

T he son of a sexton, Martin Heidegger was born in southern Germany in 1889 and was schooled for the priesthood from an early age. He began his training as a seminary student, but then concentrated increasingly on philosophy, natural science, and mathematics, receiving a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Freiburg. Shortly after the end of the Great War (in which he served briefly near its conclusion), he started his teaching career at Freiburg in 1919 as the assistant to Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Heidegger’s courses soon became popular among Germany’s students. In 1923 he began to teach at the University of Marburg, and then took Husserl’s post at Freiburg after Husserl retired from active teaching in 1928. The publication of Being and Time in 1927 had sealed his reputation in Europe as a significant thinker.

Heidegger’s influence is indicated in part by the reputation of those who studied under him and who respected his intellectual force. Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Jonas, Jacob Klein, Karl Löwith, and Leo Strauss all took classes with Heidegger. Among these students, even those who broke from Heidegger’s teachings understood him to be the deepest thinker of his time. Although he became recognized as the leading figure of existentialism, he distanced himself from the existentialism of philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre. In Heidegger’s view, they turned his unique thought about man’s being in the world into yet another nihilistic assertion of the dominance of human beings over all things. He insisted that terms such as anxiety, care, resoluteness, and authenticity, which had become famous through Being and Time , were for him elements of the “ openness of being ” in which we find ourselves, not psychological characteristics or descriptions of human willfulness, as some existentialists understood them.

Heidegger’s intellectual reputation in the United States preceded much direct acquaintance with his work because of the prominence of existentialism and the influence of his students, several of whom had fled Germany for the United States long before translators began producing English editions of his important works. ( Being and Time was first translated in 1962.) Arendt in particular, who had immigrated to America in the early 1940s, encouraged the introduction of her teacher’s work into the United States. Heidegger’s most popular if indirect significance was during existentialism’s heyday from the end of the Second World War until its nearly simultaneous apotheosis and collapse on the hazy streets of San Francisco. Late Sixties Be-Ins — mass gatherings in celebration of American counterculture — appropriated existentialist themes; Heidegger’s intellectual rigor had been turned into mush, but it was still more or less recognizably Heideggerian mush. Herbert Marcuse, a hero to the more intellectual among the Sixties gaggle, was an early student of Heidegger’s, and his books such as Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man owe something to him, if more to Freud and, especially, Marx.

After the 1960s, Heidegger’s intellectual radicalism became increasingly domesticated by the American academy, where wild spirits so often go to die a lingering bourgeois death. His works were translated, taught, and transformed into theses fit for tenure-committee review. Still, Heidegger’s influence among American philosophy professors has remained limited (although not entirely negligible), since most of them are, as Nietzsche might say, essentially gastroenterologists with a theoretical bent. Heidegger became more influential, though usually indirectly, for the ways artists and architects talk about their work — no one can conjure a “built space” quite as well as Heidegger does, for instance in his essay “ Building Dwelling Thinking .” And much of Heidegger can also be heard in the deconstructionist lingo of literary “theory” that over the past forty years has nearly killed literature. The result is that “Heidegger” is now a minor academic industry in many American humanities departments, even as he remains relatively unappreciated by most professional philosophers.

But Heidegger’s influence is not only limited by the lack of respect most of our philosophy professors have toward his work. More troubling for many both within and outside the academy is Heidegger’s affiliation with the Nazis before and during the Second World War. His mentor Edmund Husserl was dismissed from the University of Freiburg in 1933 because of his Jewish background. Heidegger became rector of the university in that same year, and joined the Nazi party, of which he remained a member until the end of the war. Even though he resigned the rectorship after less than a year and distanced himself from the party not long after joining, he never publicly denounced the party nor publicly regretted his membership. ( He is said to have once remarked privately to a student that his political involvement with the Nazis was “the greatest stupidity of his life.”) After the war, on the recommendation of erstwhile friends such as Karl Jaspers, he was banned by the Allied forces from teaching until 1951.

For obvious reasons, some of Heidegger’s friends and followers have, from the end of the war to the present day, obfuscated the relationship between Heidegger’s thought and his politics. They are surely aided in this by Heidegger’s masterful ambiguity — for him it really does depend on what the meaning of the word “is” is. His admirers do not want his work to be ignored preemptively because of his affiliation with the Nazis. Heidegger, after all, was not Hitler’s confidant, or an architect of the war and the extermination camps, but a thinker who engaged in several shameful actions toward Jews, and for a time supported the Nazis publicly, and thought he could lead the regime intellectually.

This matter has come under renewed attention with the recent release of Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks,” which are a kind of philosophical diary he kept in the 1930s and 1940s and whose contents fill a six-hundred-page volume. In his will, Heidegger had requested that these notebooks not be published until after the rest of his extensive work was released. The notebooks’ editor, Peter Trawny, reports that they contain hostile references to “world Jewry” that indicate “that anti-Semitism tied in to his philosophy.” Careful study of these notebooks will be required to determine whether they in fact provide new evidence of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism and affiliation with the Nazis that is even more damning than what is already widely known. No one who has examined Heidegger is surprised by what has been reported. But the question still remains whether Heidegger’s thought and politics are intrinsically linked, or whether, as his apologists would have it, his thought is no more (and in fact, less) related to his politics than it is to his interest in soccer and skiing. In truth, it would be surprising if the connection between the philosophy and the political beliefs and actions of a thinker of Heidegger’s rank were simply random.

In fact, Heidegger’s association with the Nazis was far from accidental. One of his infamous remarks on politics was a statement about the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism that he made in a 1935 lecture course. In a 1953 republication of that speech as Introduction to Metaphysics , Heidegger appended a parenthetical clarification, which he claimed was written but not delivered in 1935, of what he believed that “inner truth and greatness” to be: “the encounter between global technology and modern humanity.” Some scholars, taking the added comment as a criticism of the Nazis, point to Heidegger’s explanation, following the speech’s publication, that the meaning of the original comment would have been clear to anyone who understood the speech correctly. But perhaps we should not be surprised to find a thinker so worried about “global technology” affiliating with the Nazi Party in the first place. The Nazis were opposed to the two dominant forms of government of the day that Heidegger associated with “global technology,” communism and democracy. In another of Heidegger’s infamous political remarks, made in that same 1935 lecture, he claimed that “Russia and America, seen metaphysically, are both the same: the same hopeless frenzy of enchained technology and of the rootless organization of the average man.” The Nazi’s rhetoric about “blood and soil” and the mythology of an ancient, wise, and virtuous German Volk might also have appealed to someone concerned with the homogenizing consequences of globalization and technology. More broadly, Heidegger’s thought always was and remained illiberal, tending to encompass all matters, philosophy and politics among them, in a single perspective, ignoring the freedom of most people to act independently. The ways in which liberal democracies promote excellence and useful competition were not among the political ideas to which Heidegger’s thought was open. His totalizing, illiberal thought made his joining the Nazis much more likely than his condemning them.

The study of Heidegger is both dangerous and difficult — the way he is taught today threatens to obscure his thought’s connection to his politics while at the same time transforming his work into fodder for the aimless curiosity of the academic industry. Heidegger would not be surprised to discover that he is now part of the problem that he meant to address. But if, as Heidegger hoped, his works are to help us understand the challenges technology presents, we must study him both carefully and cautiously — carefully, to appreciate the depth and complexity of his thought, and cautiously, in light of his association with the Nazis.

Technology as Revealing

Heidegger’s concern with technology is not limited to his writings that are explicitly dedicated to it, and a full appreciation of his views on technology requires some understanding of how the problem of technology fits into his broader philosophical project and phenomenological approach. (Phenomenology, for Heidegger, is a method that tries to let things show themselves in their own way, and not see them in advance through a technical or theoretical lens.) The most important argument in Being and Time that is relevant for Heidegger’s later thinking about technology is that theoretical activities such as the natural sciences depend on views of time and space that narrow the understanding implicit in how we deal with the ordinary world of action and concern. We cannot construct meaningful distance and direction, or understand the opportunities for action, from science’s neutral, mathematical understanding of space and time. Indeed, this detached and “objective” scientific view of the world restricts our everyday understanding. Our ordinary use of things and our “concernful dealings” within the world are pathways to a more fundamental and more truthful understanding of man and being than the sciences provide; science flattens the richness of ordinary concern. By placing science back within the realm of experience from which it originates, and by examining the way our scientific understanding of time, space, and nature derives from our more fundamental experience of the world, Heidegger, together with his teacher Husserl and some of his students such as Jacob Klein and Alexandre Koyré, helped to establish new ways of thinking about the history and philosophy of science.

Heidegger applies this understanding of experience in later writings that are focused explicitly on technology, where he goes beyond the traditional view of technology as machines and technical procedures. He instead tries to think through the essence of technology as a way in which we encounter entities generally, including nature, ourselves, and, indeed, everything. Heidegger’s most influential work on technology is the lecture “The Question Concerning Technology,” published in 1954, which was a revised version of part two of a four-part lecture series he delivered in Bremen in 1949 (his first public speaking appearance since the end of the war). These Bremen lectures have recently been translated into English , for the first time, by Andrew J. Mitchell.

Introducing the Bremen lectures, Heidegger observes that because of technology, “all distances in time and space are shrinking” and “yet the hasty setting aside of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in a small amount of distance.” The lectures set out to examine what this nearness is that remains absent and is “even warded off by the restless removal of distances.” As we shall see, we have become almost incapable of experiencing this nearness, let alone understanding it, because all things increasingly present themselves to us as technological: we see them and treat them as what Heidegger calls a “standing reserve,” supplies in a storeroom, as it were, pieces of inventory to be ordered and conscripted, assembled and disassembled, set up and set aside. Everything approaches us merely as a source of energy or as something we must organize. We treat even human capabilities as though they were only means for technological procedures, as when a worker becomes nothing but an instrument for production. Leaders and planners, along with the rest of us, are mere human resources to be arranged, rearranged, and disposed of. Each and every thing that presents itself technologically thereby loses its distinctive independence and form. We push aside, obscure, or simply cannot see, other possibilities.

Common attempts to rectify this situation don’t solve the problem and instead are part of it. We tend to believe that technology is a means to our ends and a human activity under our control. But in truth we now conceive of means, ends, and ourselves as fungible and manipulable. Control and direction are technological control and direction. Our attempts to master technology still remain within its walls, reinforcing them. As Heidegger says in the third of his Bremen lectures, “all this opining concerning technology” — the common critique of technology that denounces its harmful effects, as well as the belief that technology is nothing but a blessing, and especially the view that technology is a neutral tool to be wielded either for good or evil — all of this only shows “how the dominance of the essence of technology orders into its plundering even and especially the human conceptions concerning technology.” This is because “with all these conceptions and valuations one is from the outset unwittingly in agreement that technology would be a means to an end.” This “instrumental” view of technology is correct, but it “does not show us technology’s essence.” It is correct because it sees something pertinent about technology, but it is essentially misleading and not true because it does not see how technology is a way that all entities, not merely machines and technical processes, now present themselves.

Of course, were there no way out of technological thinking, Heidegger’s own standpoint, however sophisticated, would also be trapped within it. He attempts to show a way out — a way to think about technology that is not itself beholden to technology. This leads us into a realm that will be familiar to those acquainted with Heidegger’s work on “being,” the central issue in Being and Time and one that is also prominent in some of the Bremen lectures. The basic phenomenon that belongs together with being is truth, or “revealing,” which is the phenomenon Heidegger brings forward in his discussion in “The Question Concerning Technology.” Things can show or reveal themselves to us in different ways, and it is attention to this that will help us recognize that technology is itself one of these ways, but only one. Other kinds of revealing, and attention to the realm of truth and being as such, will allow us to “experience the technological within its own bounds.”

Only then will “another whole realm for the essence of technology … open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth.” Placing ourselves back in this realm avoids the reduction of things and of ourselves to mere supplies and reserves. This step, however, does not guarantee that we will fully enter, live within, or experience this realm. Nor can we predict what technology’s fate or ours will be once we do experience it. We can at most say that older and more enduring ways of thought and experience might be reinvigorated and re-inspired. Heidegger believes his work to be preparatory, illuminating ways of being and of being human that are not merely technological.

One way by which Heidegger believes he can enter this realm is by attending to the original meaning of crucial words and the phenomena they reveal. Original language — words that precede explicit philosophical, technological, and scientific thought and sometimes survive in colloquial speech — often shows what is true more tellingly than modern speech does. (Some poets are for Heidegger better guides on the quest for truth than professional philosophers.) The two decisive languages, Heidegger thinks, are Greek and German; Greek because our philosophical heritage derives its terms from it (often in distorted form), and German, because its words can often be traced to an origin undistorted by philosophical reflection or by Latin interpretations of the Greek. (Some critics believe that Heidegger’s reliance on what they think are fanciful etymologies warps his understanding.)

Much more worrisome, however, is that Heidegger’s thought, while promising a comprehensive view of the essence of technology, by virtue of its inclusiveness threatens to blur distinctions that are central to human concerns. Moreover, his emphasis on technology’s broad and uncanny scope ignores or occludes the importance and possibility of ethical and political choice. This twofold problem is most evident in the best-known passage from the second Bremen lecture: “Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of countries, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs.” From what standpoint could mechanized agriculture and the Nazis’ extermination camps be “in essence the same”? If there is such a standpoint, should it not be ignored or at least modified because it overlooks or trivializes the most significant matters of choice, in this case the ability to detect and deal with grave injustice? Whatever the full and subtle meaning of “in essence the same” is, Heidegger fails to address the difference in ethical weight between the two phenomena he compares, or to show a path for just political choice. While Heidegger purports to attend to concrete, ordinary experience, he does not consider seriously justice and injustice as fundamental aspects of this experience. Instead, Heidegger claims that what is “horrifying” is not any of technology’s particular harmful effects but “what transposes … all that is out of its previous essence” — that is to say, what is dangerous is that technology displaces beings from what they originally were, hindering our ability to experience them truly.

What Is the Essence of Technology?

Let us now follow Heidegger’s understanding of technology more exactingly, relying on the Bremen lectures and “The Question Concerning Technology,” and beginning with four points of Heidegger’s critique (some of which we have already touched on).

First , the essence of technology is not something we make; it is a mode of being, or of revealing. This means that technological things have their own novel kind of presence, endurance, and connections among parts and wholes. They have their own way of presenting themselves and the world in which they operate. The essence of technology is, for Heidegger, not the best or most characteristic instance of technology, nor is it a nebulous generality, a form or idea. Rather, to consider technology essentially is to see it as an event to which we belong: the structuring, ordering, and “requisitioning” of everything around us, and of ourselves. The second point is that technology even holds sway over beings that we do not normally think of as technological, such as gods and history. Third , the essence of technology as Heidegger discusses it is primarily a matter of modern and industrial technology. He is less concerned with the ancient and old tools and techniques that antedate modernity; the essence of technology is revealed in factories and industrial processes, not in hammers and plows. And fourth , for Heidegger, technology is not simply the practical application of natural science. Instead, modern natural science can understand nature in the characteristically scientific manner only because nature has already, in advance, come to light as a set of calculable, orderable forces — that is to say, technologically.

Some concrete examples from Heidegger’s writings will help us develop these themes. When Heidegger says that technology reveals things to us as “standing reserve,” he means that everything is imposed upon or “challenged” to be an orderly resource for technical application, which in turn we take as a resource for further use, and so on interminably. For example, we challenge land to yield coal, treating the land as nothing but a coal reserve. The coal is then stored, “on call, ready to deliver the sun’s warmth that is stored in it,” which is then “challenged forth for heat, which in turn is ordered to deliver steam whose pressure turns the wheels that keep a factory running.” The factories are themselves challenged to produce tools “through which once again machines are set to work and maintained.”

The passive voice in this account indicates that these acts occur not primarily by our own doing; we belong to the activity. Technological conscriptions of things occur in a sense prior to our actual technical use of them, because things must be (and be seen as) already available resources in order for them to be used in this fashion. This availability makes planning for technical ends possible; it is the heart of what in the Sixties and Seventies was called the inescapable “system.” But these technical ends are never ends in themselves: “A success is that type of consequence that itself remains assigned to the yielding of further consequences.” This chain does not move toward anything that has its own presence, but, instead, “only enters into its circuit,” and is “regulating and securing” natural resources and energies in this never-ending fashion.

Technology also replaces the familiar connection of parts to wholes; everything is just an exchangeable piece. For example, while a deer or a tree or a wine jug may “stand on its own” and have its own presence, an automobile does not: it is challenged “for a further conducting along, which itself sets in place the promotion of commerce.” Machines and other pieces of inventory are not parts of self-standing wholes, but arrive piece by piece. These pieces do share themselves with others in a sort of unity, but they are isolated, “shattered,” and confined to a “circuit of orderability.” The isolated pieces, moreover, are uniform and exchangeable. We can replace one piece of standing reserve with another. By contrast, “My hand … is not a piece of me. I myself am entirely in each gesture of the hand, every single time.”

Human beings too are now exchangeable pieces. A forester “is today positioned by the lumber industry. Whether he knows it or not, he is in his own way a piece of inventory in the cellulose stock” delivered to newspapers and magazines. These in turn, as Heidegger puts it in “The Question Concerning Technology,” “set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set configuration of opinion becomes available on demand.” Similarly, radio and its employees belong to the standing reserve of the public sphere; everything in the public sphere is ordered “for anyone and everyone without distinction.” Even the radio listener, whom we are nowadays accustomed to thinking of as a free consumer of mass media — after all, he “is entirely free to turn the device on and off” — is actually still confined in the technological system of producing public opinion. “Indeed, he is only free in the sense that each time he must free himself from the coercive insistence of the public sphere that nevertheless ineluctably persists.”

But the essence of technology does not just affect things and people. It “attacks everything that is: Nature and history, humans, and divinities.” When theologians on occasion cite the beauty of atomic physics or the subtleties of quantum mechanics as evidence for the existence of God, they have, Heidegger says, placed God “into the realm of the orderable.” God becomes technologized. (Heidegger’s word for the essence of technology is Gestell . While the translator of the Bremen lectures, Andrew Mitchell, renders it as “positionality,” William Lovitt, the translator of “The Question Concerning Technology” in 1977 chose the term “enframing.” It almost goes without saying that neither term can bring out all the nuances that Heidegger has in mind.)

The heart of the matter for Heidegger is thus not in any particular machine, process, or resource, but rather in the “challenging”: the way the essence of technology operates on our understanding of all matters and on the presence of those matters themselves — the all-pervasive way we confront (and are confronted by) the technological world. Everything encountered technologically is exploited for some technical use. It is important to note, as suggested earlier, that when Heidegger speaks of technology’s essence in terms of challenging or positionality, he speaks of modern technology, and excludes traditional arts and tools that we might in some sense consider technological. For instance, the people who cross the Rhine by walking over a simple bridge might also seem to be using the bridge to challenge the river, making it a piece in an endless chain of use. But Heidegger argues that the bridge in fact allows the river to be itself, to stand within its own flow and form. By contrast, a hydroelectric plant and its dams and structures transform the river into just one more element in an energy-producing sequence. Similarly, the traditional activities of peasants do not “challenge the farmland.” Rather, they protect the crops, leaving them “to the discretion of the growing forces,” whereas “agriculture is now a mechanized food industry.”

Modern machines are therefore not merely more developed, or self-propelled, versions of old tools such as water or spinning wheels. Technology’s essence “has already from the outset abolished all those places where the spinning wheel and water mill previously stood.” Heidegger is not concerned with the elusive question of precisely dating the origin of modern technology, a question that some think important in order to understand it. But he does claim that well before the rise of industrial mechanization in the eighteenth century, technology’s essence was already in place. “It first of all lit up the region within which the invention of something like power-producing machines could at all be sought out and attempted.” We cannot capture the essence of technology by describing the makeup of a machine, for “every construction of every machine already moves within the essential space of technology.”

Even if the essence of technology does not originate in the rise of mechanization, can we at least show how it follows from the way we apprehend nature? After all, Heidegger says, the essence of technology “begins its reign” when modern natural science is born in the early seventeenth century. But in fact we cannot show this because in Heidegger’s view the relationship between science and technology is the reverse of how we usually think it to be; natural forces and materials belong to technology, rather than the other way around. It was technological thinking that first understood nature in such a way that nature could be challenged to unlock its forces and energy. The challenge preceded the unlocking; the essence of technology is thus prior to natural science. “Modern technology is not applied natural science, far more is modern natural science the application of the essence of technology.” Nature is therefore “the fundamental piece of inventory of the technological standing reserve — and nothing else.”

Given this view of technology, it follows that any scientific account obscures the essential being of many things, including their nearness. So when Heidegger discusses technology and nearness, he assures us that he is not simply repeating the cliché that technology makes the world smaller. “What is decisive,” he writes, “is not that the distances are diminishing with the help of technology, but rather that nearness remains outstanding.” In order to experience nearness, we must encounter things in their truth. And no matter how much we believe that science will let us “encounter the actual in its actuality,” science only offers us representations of things. It “only ever encounters that which its manner of representation has previously admitted as a possible object for itself.”

An example from the second lecture illustrates what Heidegger means. Scientifically speaking, the distance between a house and the tree in front of it can be measured neutrally: it is thirty feet. But in our everyday lives, that distance is not as neutral, not as abstract. Instead, the distance is an aspect of our concern with the tree and the house: the experience of walking, of seeing the tree’s shape grow larger as I come closer, and of the growing separation from the home as I walk away from it. In the scientific account, “distance appears to be first achieved in an opposition” between viewer and object. By becoming indifferent to things as they concern us, by representing both the distance and the object as simple but useful mathematical entities or philosophical ideas, we lose our truest experience of nearness and distance.

Turning To and Away from Danger

It is becoming clear by now that in order to understand the essence of technology we must also understand things non-technologically; we must enter the realm where things can show themselves to us truthfully in a manner not limited to the technological. But technology is such a domineering force that it all but eliminates our ability to experience this realm. The possibility of understanding the interrelated, meaningful, practical involvements with our surroundings that Heidegger describes is almost obliterated. The danger is that technology’s domination fully darkens and makes us forget our understanding of ourselves as the beings who can stand within this realm.

The third Bremen lecture lays out just how severe the problem is. While we have already seen how the essence of technology prevents us from encountering the reality of the world, now Heidegger points out that technology has become the world (“world and positionality are the same”). Technology reigns, and we therefore forget being altogether and our own essential freedom — we no longer even realize the world we have lost. Ways of experiencing distance and time other than through the ever more precise neutral measuring with rulers and clocks become lost to us; they no longer seem to be types of knowing at all but are at most vague poetic representations. While many other critics of technology point to obvious dangers associated with it, Heidegger emphasizes a different kind of threat: the possibility that it may prevent us from experiencing “the call of a more primal truth.” The problem is not just that technology makes it harder for us to access that realm, but that it makes us altogether forget that the realm exists.

Yet, Heidegger argues, recognizing this danger allows us to glimpse and then respond to what is forgotten. The understanding of man’s essence as openness to this realm and of technology as only one way in which things can reveal themselves is the guide for keeping technology within its proper bounds. Early in the fourth and last Bremen lecture, Heidegger asks if the danger of technology means “that the human is powerless against technology and delivered over to it for better or worse.” No, he says. The question, however, is not how one should act with regard to technology — the question that seems to be “always closest and solely urgent” — but how we should think , for technology “can never be overcome,” we are never its master. Proper thinking and speaking, on the other hand, allow us to be ourselves and to reveal being. “Language is … never merely the expression of thinking, feeling, and willing. Language is the inceptual dimension within which the human essence is first capable of corresponding to being.” It is through language, by a way of thinking, that “we first learn to dwell in the realm” of being.

The thought that opens up the possibility of a “turn” away from technology and toward its essential realm is the realization of its danger. Heidegger quotes the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin: “But where the danger is, there grows also what saves.” By illuminating this danger, Heidegger’s path of thinking is a guide for turning away from it. The turn brings us to a place in which the truth of being becomes visible as if by a flash of lightning. This flash does not just illuminate the truth of being, it also illuminates us: we are “caught sight of in the insight.” As our own essence comes to light, if we disavow “human stubbornness” and cast ourselves “before this insight,” so too does the essence of technology come to light.

The Way of Nature and Poetry

A closer look at “The Question Concerning Technology” and some of the ways it adds to the Bremen lectures will help us further to clarify Heidegger’s view. In the Bremen lectures, Heidegger focuses on the contrast between entities seen as pieces in an endless technological chain on the one hand, and “things” that reveal being by bringing to light the rich interplay between gods and humans, earth and sky on the other. His example of such a “thing” in the first lecture is a wine jug used for sacrificial libation: The full jug gathers in itself the earth’s nutrients, rain, sunshine, human festivities, and the gift to the gods. All of these together help us understand what the wine jug is. In “The Question Concerning Technology,” it is products understood in a certain way that Heidegger contrasts with technology’s revealing. Drawing on Aristotle’s account of formal, final, material, and efficient causes, Heidegger argues that both nature ( physis ) and art ( poiesis ) are ways of “bringing-forth” — of unconcealing that which is concealed. What is natural is self-producing, self-arising, self-illuminating, not what can be calculated in order to become a formless resource. Poetry also brings things to presence. Heidegger explains that the Greek word techne , from which “technology” derives, at one time also meant the “bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful” and “the poiesis of the fine arts.”

In contrast to Heidegger’s notion of a thing or of revealing stands the kind of objectivity for which our natural sciences strive. But in spite of what Heidegger himself borrows from Greek thought, he emphasizes that there is a link between modern technology and classic philosophy because of Plato’s understanding of being as permanent presence. For Plato, the “idea” of a thing — what it is — is its enduring look, which “is not and never will be perceivable with physical eyes” and cannot be experienced with the other senses either. This attention to what is purely present in contemplation, Heidegger argues, ultimately leads us to forget the being of things, what is brought forth, and the world of human concern.

Heidegger’s brief sketches in these lectures suggest powerful alternatives to technological understanding that help us to recognize its limits. In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger’s hope is to “prepare a free relationship to [technology]. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology.” It is not the case “that technology is the fate of our age, where ‘fate’ means the inevitableness of an unalterable course.” Experiencing technology as a kind — but only one kind — of revealing, and seeing man’s essential place as one that is open to different kinds of revealing frees us from “the stultified compulsion to push on blindly with technology or, what comes to the same, to rebel helplessly against it and curse it as the work of the devil.” Indeed, Heidegger says at the end of the lecture, our examining or questioning of the essence of technology and other kinds of revealing is “the piety of thought.” By this questioning we may be saved from technology’s rule.

Meaning and Mortality

Heidegger’s discussions offer several useful directions for dealing with technology, even if one disagrees with elements of his analysis. Consider his view of distance, where he differentiates neutral measured distance and geometrical shape from the spaces and distances with which we concern ourselves day by day. Someone thousands of miles away can be immediately present to one’s feelings and thoughts. Two tables may have identical size, yet each may be too big or small for comfortable, practical, or beautiful use. Heidegger’s understanding of the importance of space changes somewhat in his works, but what matters for us is his insistence that our understanding of the spaces in which we live is neither inferior nor reducible to a neutral, technical, scientific understanding of space. This is also true of time, direction, and similar matters. Perhaps most profoundly, Heidegger attempts to make visible an understanding of what is present, enduring, and essential that differs from a notion of the eternal based on time understood narrowly and neutrally. Heidegger’s alternatives provide ways to clarify the irreducibility of our experience to what we can capture technologically, or through natural science. One example of this irreducibility is Aristotle’s virtue, which acts in light of the right time, the right place, and the right amount, not in terms of measures that are abstracted from experience. Ordinary human ways of understanding are not mere folk opinion that is subservient to science, as some might say; they offer an account of how things are that can be true in its own way.

A second direction that Heidegger gives us for properly situating technology is his novel understanding of human being. For Heidegger, the traits that make us human are connected to our openness to being and to what can be revealed, to our standing in a clearing where things can approach us meaningfully. One feature of this understanding is that Heidegger pays attention to the place of moods as well as of reason in allowing things to be intelligible. Another feature is his concern for the unity in meaning in what is and is not, in presence and absence. For instance, an absent friend impresses on us the possibility of friendship as much as one who stands before us.

Central to Heidegger’s understanding of human being is the importance of death and dying in our understanding of our independence and wholeness. The importance of dying governs his choice of one of the examples he uses in the second Bremen lecture to clarify the difference between technology and ordinary concern:

The carpenter produces a table, but also a coffin…. [He] does not complete a box for a corpse. The coffin is from the outset placed in a privileged spot of the farmhouse where the dead peasant still lingers. There, a coffin is still called a “death-tree.” The death of the deceased flourishes in it. This flourishing determines the house and farmstead, the ones who dwell there, their kin, and the neighborhood. Everything is otherwise in the motorized burial industry of the big city. Here no death-trees are produced.

The significance of mortality fits together with Heidegger’s thought about reverence and gods. Gratitude, thankfulness, and restraint are proper responses to knowing ourselves as beings who are mortal. Heidegger does not have in mind dignity in a conventional moral or Christian sense. Rather, he has in view the inviolability of being human and of things as they can be revealed. Reestablishing the experience of reverence is central for limiting the control of technological thinking.

The Necessity of Making Distinctions

Heidegger’s arguments about technology also raise several difficulties. Most pressingly, he obscures the grounds for ranking what we may choose, and thus for choice itself. How exactly are the death camps different from, and more horrible than, mechanized agriculture, if they are “in essence” the same? How can we understand technology to be powerful but not so rigidly encompassing as to eclipse possibilities for ethical action?

Heidegger’s analysis of technology has something in common with what the early modern thinkers — from Machiavelli through Locke and beyond — who first established the link between modern science and practical life, considered to be radical in their endeavors: the importance of truth merely as effectiveness, of nature as conquerable, of energy and force as tools for control. In contrast to Heidegger, however, for these thinkers such views are tied to a larger argument about happiness and what is good. Now, these early modern views of science and practical life — and alternative views, such as those expressed in classical thought — seem to be the true grounds for understanding the dominance of technology, and also for our ability to limit this dominance. The question we must ask is what Heidegger adds to the discussion of these thinkers, if they account for the realm of openness, revealing, and significance that Heidegger appears to have discovered, while affording grounds for moral ranking and prudential judgment absent in Heidegger.

Indeed, one might ask (despite Heidegger’s objection to the question) whence technology arises in its essence. Is the way that beings present themselves to us meaningful only in Heidegger’s sense, or can an account be given for this meaning that at the same time allows and even demands moral choice and openness to being beyond what Heidegger allows? Because matters appear to us technologically in a way that seems tied to choices we make based on particular views of happiness, of the good, and of the sacred (all of which are at least to some extent subject to rational discussion), isn’t it true that everything technological can be judged, disputed, evaluated, and ranked? Is our understanding of happiness, of the good, and of the sacred truly subservient to a prior understanding of entities as technological, or is it instead interspersed and coeval with it, or even prior to it?

We see in Heidegger’s other works instances where he amalgamates radical differences, similar to if less grotesque than comparing death camps and mechanized agriculture, such as his claim that America and communist Russia are “metaphysically” the same, both equally dominated by technology and the “rootless organization of the average man.” This claim again indicates how Heidegger’s view of metaphysical identity can distort significant differences, and how to attend to and choose among them. Things that present themselves technologically in Heidegger’s sense seem so controlled by a pervasive unified horizon that the possibility of our grasping and ranking these differences — whether from within a technological understanding or from outside — remains obscure. In response, we might suggest that the distortion and the overreaching that make elements of technology questionable are in fact visible within technological activity itself because of the larger political and ordered world to which it belongs. This is not a causally reductive relation, but a descriptive and organizing one. To experience technology is also to experience its limits. We recognize the gulf between death camps and mechanized agriculture, and the difference in kind between Soviet tyranny and American freedom, despite seeming similarities with respect to the place of technology, because these belong to larger wholes about which we can judge. Perhaps the key to understanding technology and to guiding it is, despite Heidegger’s animadversions, precisely to wonder about the ordinary question of how to use technology well, not piece by piece to serve isolated desires, but as part of a whole way of life.

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Philosophy and the Mirror of Technology: Technology as Part of Nature

In this second to last piece of the Philosophy and the Mirror of Technology series, I frame the final interview to be published in June in the context of my exploration of the evolving relationship among science, philosophy, and faith. 

The final interview, in which Brian Leiter will explore Nietzsche’s fatalism, was prompted by Sean Kelly’s two-part essay published in this series, The Genealogy of Redemption in the Western Tradition . Sean’s piece highlighted that science and technology are reshaping philosophical debate and that a technological form of being represents an existential risk.  His case for a new way of thinking about authenticity in the modern age led me to reach out to Brian who has written extensively on Nietzsche. Before touching on his Essentialism, and delving further in next month, let me situate the line of inquiry in the thread of this series. Specifically, how I conclude that we should construe technology as a part of nature.

I began with an exploration of Michael Della Rocca’s latest book, The Parmenidean Ascent , which challenges the foundation of philosophy with a deeply skeptical view of nature without individuation. An uncompromising commitment to the Principle of Sufficient Reason leads to an undifferentiated vision of a world, without distinctions or multiplicity. A thesis throughout my series is that the latest advances in modern physics and technology reflect this strict Rationalism.

Specifically, I first made the case that quantum AI echoes Spinoza , suggesting that the introduction of quantum materials transform computing in a way that reflects Spinoza’s discredited notion of Parallelism. I suggest that the way it revolutionizes certain calculations represents a kind of Parallelism in practice. The doctrine posits no interaction or causal relationship between the mind and the body. Neither the mental nor the physical are reducible to the other, as they are two attributes of the same divine substance. I similarly suggest that there is no direct relationship between the introduction of superposition through quantum materials (proxy for body) and the radically enhanced computational results of quantum AI (proxy for mind). What takes conventional computers hundreds of years can be accomplished virtually immediately, with the introduction of quantum uncertainty. The radical transformation of AI, with no correlation between superposition and nearly instantaneous solutions, invigorates Spinoza and highlights how technology deserves further philosophical attention.

In this vein, I then discussed how the theory of non-locality similarly reflects an absolute form of Monism. Modern physics now suggests that spacetime not only warps, but we are losing the ability to ascribe locations, with no definitive view about what is where. The notion of space itself is becoming incoherent. As relational notions lose their meaning, the upshot is there is actually no such thing as place or distance. 

With physicists sounding like Spinoza, I then discussed how the modern simulation argument takes on a different character. Believing the world is an elaborate computer program, and consciousness can be simulated, reflects the same philosophical archetype.  The upshot is that people who are open to the simulation argument should entertain a strict Rationalism, and these new interpretations of nature blur distinctions across science, philosophy, and faith.

Sean’s essay is accordingly paradigmatic because it highlights the inescapable implications of the advance of science and technology. Tracing salvation in the Western tradition, he suggests that we can’t be freed, acquired, or mastered to be truly authentic. What constitutes The Proper Dignity of Human Being , the title of his forthcoming book, is a complementarity with the world. “A world whose significance simultaneously governs our action and is grounded in it.” 

Sean suggests that the notion of mastery is especially dangerous, as he explores technology’s connections to banal forms of evil in Arendt’s example of its absolute form in the concentration camps—where control of the self leads to existential danger. He contends that we need a new interpretation of authenticity for our moment in history, with the aim to understand the dignity of our existence.

Sean’s insight that our authentic dignity does not lie in our unfettered autonomy or mastery, leads me to the final interview with Brian Leiter. Particularly, to explore what it means to be rooted in our world. How, contrary to the Enlightenment notion that our human essence in entirely based on spontaneity, our freedom is not the basis for redemption. To the extent Sean used Nietzsche as an exemplar of mastery, I wanted to explore how his unique form of determinism could bolster the case for reconsidering human freedom.

In fact, it would be fairer to characterize Nietzsche’s view as a kind of fatalism. To understand his unique naturalism, next month I will explore the holistic case in Brian’s Nietzsche on Morality , with the core takeaway being that Nietzsche’s determinism is best understood as an Essentialism. Brian uses the powerful example of a plant. We can cultivate and nurture it, but, ultimately, it will bear its unique fruit. In this sense, Nietzsche is aligned with Sean’s case, where autonomy is not the foundation of our authenticity—and indeed we should embrace our fatality (Eternal Recurrence, etc.). At the same time, our ennoblement is a kind of cultivation. For Nietzsche, this is a higher form of man—but the essential point, in the context of Sean’s essay, is that our authentic dignity is not a form of self-actualization, but how we are embedded in the world and influence our destiny. 

Finally, to frame this insight as I complete this series on the import of technology, I would like to revisit my qualms about the simulation argument and contention that technology should be understood as part of nature. I suggested that its proponents are correct in appreciating the importance of technology’s ascendance—as I believe that quantum AI invigorates Spinoza. However, they are absolutely wrong in equating virtual reality with the world, effectively extracting existence into a kind of absolute objectivity. Rather, I contend that, through a Spinozist lens, technology (including virtual reality) should be viewed as sui generis and part of nature. By way of analogy, it should be construed as an attribute or dimension of nature, similar to thought and extension. As such, it is necessary—in the broad sense of Spinoza’s Necessitarianism—but viewed in a more nuanced manner, reflected in Nietzsche’s Essentialism. 

Technology is necessary as part of nature, but we have “free will” and its trajectory is not fixed. We are cultivating and nurturing the plant, so to speak, shaping its form and purpose. Technology is therefore more than a mirror reflecting science and philosophy. We should consider it as part of our essence—bound to produce and sculpt it. As I discussed in my polemic for the Common Good , we are losing control of the algorithms and our cultural and economic landscape is suffering from ubiquitous technological forces. As it changes our nature and world, we must orient and constrain technology to manage its existential risks.

• Charlie Taben

Charlie Taben graduated from Middlebury College  in 1983 with a BA in philosophy and has been a financial services executive for nearly 40 years.  He studied at  Harvard University during his junior year and says one of the highlights of his life was taking John Rawls’ class.  Today, Charlie remains engaged with the discipline, focusing on Spinoza, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer. He also performs volunteer work for the Philosophical Society of England and is currently seeking to incorporate practical philosophical digital content into US corporate wellness programs. You can find Charlie on Twitter @gbglax .

• Brian Leiter
• Editor: Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen
• Essentialism
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Michael Della Rocca
• Nietzsche on Morality
• Philosophy and the Mirror of Technology
• Philosophy of Technology
• The Genealogy of Redemption in the Western Tradition
• The Parmenidean Ascent

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Heidegger on the essence of technology: What is technology, really?

Defining technology, according to heidegger.

‘Technology’ is one of those words that’s so commonplace, yet it’s hard to define. Computers and smart devices are technologies, but so are books and notepads. Indeed, the definition of technology may span from simple tools and utensils (hammers and spoons) to powerful machines and media (car factories and artificial intelligence). How are we to say what technology is precisely? Enter Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger on the “essence” of modern technology

In his essay “ The Question Concerning Technology ,” Heidegger asks, what is the “essence” of technology? Directing that question at modern technology, especially powerful machines, he gives the following answer: “enframing.” Let’s unpack the meaning of that word.

Heidegger on “enframing”

For Heidegger, “enframing” [ Gestell in German] is using technology to turn nature into a resource for efficient use. Modern technology, says Heidegger, lets us isolate nature and treat it as a “standing reserve” [ Bestand ]—that is, a resource to be stored for later utility. As an example, he gives the hydroelectric plant, which isolates a river and transforms it into a power source.

In the enigmatic words of Heidegger, this isolation and transformation “sets upon nature … in the sense of challenging it.”

This setting-upon that challenges forth the energies of nature is an expediting [ Fordern ], and in two ways. It expedites in that it unlocks and exposes. Yet that expediting is always itself directed from the beginning toward furthering something else, i.e., toward driving on the maximum yield at the minimum expense.

Whoa, say what? Told you he was difficult to read. Allow me to translate.

Essentially, Heiddeger is telling us technology is not just a thing. It’s how we relate to the world. Thus, it’s no surprise that different technologies are, in effect, different ways of relating to reality. In particular, modern technologies—namely, powerful machines—are expedient ways of conquering the world, because they objectify nature and turn it into a resource that can be quantified, calculated, and rationed.

In short, we go from seeing nature as the phenomena we’re a part of…

…to seeing it as natural resources for everyday business.

That’s the essence of modern technology: using powerful machines to turn everything into a consumable or disposable resource.

From natural to human resources

Now, if that critique sounds radical, it’s worth mentioning Heidegger was no hippie. (Quite the opposite, but that’s another story.) There’s nothing necessarily wrong with using technology to “enframe” nature this way. After all, civilization requires resources to survive. However, there’s a danger when we take this line of reasoning too far. For instance, we may use technology to enframe ourselves. Says Heidegger,

As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall;  that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve.

In other words, once we take enframing to an extreme, we may use technology to turn one another into “human resources” (which is, of course, how we refer to workers now, as opposed to the more dignified term “personnel”). At this point, we may feel like disengaged, powerless cogs in a machine. Since that feeling of disengagement is not uncommon in high-tech workplaces today (according to Gallup ), I suspect Heidegger would have appreciated the movie Office Space .

Rethinking technology

What if some of us object to technology turning us into human resources? Fortunately, there’s an alternative. Instead of seeing technology as the means to turn everything (including ourselves) into resources, we can see technology as art.

Technology as art

Ultimately, Heidegger wanted to revive an earlier understanding of technology. According to Heidegger, understanding technology as enframing—turning everything into a consumable or disposable resource—ignores a more holistic understanding of technology. As he points out, technology , etymologically speaking, means artistic skill or craftsmanship (from the ancient Greek word techne , from which we also get the words technique  and technics ):

techne is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts.

Technology as a relationship

Therefore, Heidegger suggests, if we see technology as art, we come across a valuable insight. As an art, technology is more than a thing. It’s a relationship as well—an aesthetic and ethical way of relating to nature and society.

If that insight is right, then as we use technology to extract resources, we should also make sure we’re not inflicting damage in the process—for instance, on the environment (dumping pollution) or upon each other (treating workers like cogs in machines).

As a philosopher, what Heidegger was implying is that, at the end of the day, we can’t separate technology from human values. And really, that’s what the philosophy of technology is all about.

Think Heidegger was onto something? Feel free to leave a comment below, or explore more Technology and Culture articles on this site.

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3 thoughts on “Heidegger on the essence of technology: What is technology, really?”

Great summary, thank you.

I believe Heidegger’s “enframing” idea fits perfectly the Big Tech paradigm: Google and Facebook have developed a technology that turns human experience (rather than labor) into a raw material to be captured, packaged and sold for profit. Typically without the individuals’ (our) consent. From this angle, mankind looks indeed like a “standing reserve: a pasture that the AI masters can appropriate, ring-fence and exploit at will.

Thanks, that’s an excellent point! Certainly, your application of Heidegger’s “enframing” to Big Tech is entirely appropriate today. I’m reminded of the acclaimed book ‘Surveillance Capitalism,’ in which author Shoshana Zuboff uses the term “behavioral surplus” to describe how Big Tech companies (for example, many social media platforms) collect personal data from people’s online experience as a resource and commodity for sale (for example, everyone’s likes, preferences, comments, messages, scrolling times, geographic locations, etc.). No doubt, one of the major challenges facing us right now is figuring out how to reform these digital technologies to prevent unintended (and unethical) consequences.

Yes Heidegger was onto something. Despite being a redneck nationalist from a rural, agricultural, upbringing he’s a thinker of value. His fears of us becoming the “standing reserve” are actually coming home to roost in the internet age. I echo the above comments and immediately thought of Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism.

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Critical Essays on Bernard Stiegler: Philosophy, Technology, Education

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Over the past decade, Joff P. N. Bradley has carefully considered Bernard Stiegler’s influence on political philosophy, technology, and the philosophy of education. Driven by the belief that across various humanities subjects Stiegler’s nuanced philosophy will emerge as a dominant force in the coming decades, this compendium offers a comprehensive examination of Stiegler’s ideas and their impact on contemporary thought. Immerse yourself in this insightful exploration of Stiegler’s enduring intellectual legacy.

Joff P. N. Bradley is Professor of English and Philosophy at Teikyo University, Tokyo, Japan. Joff co-wrote A Pedagogy of Cinema and has coedited books on Bernard Stiegler and the philosophy of education, Deleuze and Buddhism, utopia, French thought, transversality, Japanese education, and animation. He published his monograph Schizoanalysis and Asia: Deleuze, Guattari and Postmedia in 2022 and with Alex Taek-Gwang Lee and Manoj NY released Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Postmedia in 2023. His recent book Deleuze, Guattari, and Global Ecologies of Language Learning (2023), which also has a strong focus on French philosophy, follows his second iteration of Bernard Stiegler and the Philosophy of Education.

"Joff P. N. Bradley's work is more than timely, it is urgent, because it addresses a crisis that is developing all around us in contemporary homes and educational institutions, a crisis of ill-being that weighs on young people. Bradley shows in this stimulating and compelling book how Bernard Stiegler's philosophy diagnoses and addresses modern challenges and helps us to transform disarray into new modes of orienting oneself in the contemporary digital world. I warmly recommend it to disoriented educators, confused inhabitants of the contemporary world, and to experienced readers of Stiegler, who will enjoy the concrete turn that Stiegler's thinking takes here."

Dr Susanna Lindberg Professor of Continental Philosophy, Leiden University, the Netherlands.

"Joff P. N. Bradley, an esteemed scholar with a profound understanding of Bernard Stiegler's thinking, introduces here a compelling collection of essays examining Stiegler's distinctive language and concepts. From recent explorations in contemporary French philosophy and therein the profound implications for the philosophy of education, and always grounded in Stiegler's spirit of invention, Bradley imaginatively rethinks education, while engaging in a thoughtful consideration of crucial social and ecological issues."

Dr Anna Kouppanou The Cyprus Pedagogical Institute, Cyprus.

"Professor Bradley's book is a welcome addition to the literature on one of the most important figures of continental philosophy in the 21st century. The collection of essays is an exploration of Stiegler's philosophy and its bearing on education. Bradley adeptly addresses the challenges faced by educationalists in dealing with digital technologies and social media, particularly in their efforts to capture the attention of young people."

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"For Bernard Stiegler, education and intergenerational human relationships are extremely important philosophical topics, and education must be radically rethought if we are to create a sustainable society in which people care for each other. In this ecosophical and ecological light, this volume deals with a wide range of topics, including Stiegler's philosophy, the philosophies of Hegel and Deleuze, George Orwell's novels, transhumanism, and smart cities in South Korea. From this multifaceted perspective, the author gets to the heart of the contemporary educational crisis."

Dr Sunji Lee Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, Hosei University, Japan

"Thoughtful and highly instructive at this critical juncture, especially in its precise and concrete demonstration of how Stiegler's pharmacological approach allows us to articulate the (new) existential experiences and challenges posed by digital technologies and industries in today's education. Poignantly and accurately, it reminds us of our responsibility in caring for the (new) generations."

Jan Masschelein Professor of Philosophy of Education, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium

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