Ernst SchraubeRelated papers
HEIDEGGER AND MARX ON TECHNOLOGY
Mabini Review, 2013
Contemporary human life is critical. The entire human world is faced with challenges universal in nature, such as global ecological issues that situates our crucial bearing in the world, the unending social conflict in every part of the earth that suggests inherent human incapacity to create a society defined by a sense of humanity, principles of justice, and genuine peace, in effect questioning the nature and development of social formation and transformation, and a global political economy that describes and prescribes the dynamics of productive forces and relations of production given the existing neocapitalist paradigm of social progress primarily characterized by alienation and money fetish. Moreover, such human world allows for incommensurable comprehensive doctrines and conflicting perspectives to thrive and flourish. Such pluralism is exemplified by various philosophical interpretations of the world, moral beliefs in various moral situations, and religious views that serve as basis of one's world view constituting one's human action. Reality, in this case, is no longer univariate. One‟s conceptions and principles are being challenged by other critical perspectives. One‟s moral identity as a subjectivity is challenged by one‟s social identity. His rationality poses and de-poses social reality. Contemporary human life is in the age of technology. Human life cannot be imagined without things, tools, and machines. Technology has become the extension of man. It sets apart all human activities. Human work is always conceived with it. Technology constitutes human life. Human civilization is said to be progressing because of the innovation and development of machines that assist human work. The human world is a world of machines. Technology, as an extension of human nature, becomes human exteriority. Technology assumes as a form of human fetishism. The whole world is enframed by technology. Contemporary human life is in the age of neocapitalism. Neocapitalism advocates the use of technology in all social, political, economic, and cultural institutions to broaden the distribution of shared benefits and burdens in the society. Technology becomes a medium of regulation and restriction, an instrumentality of human flourishing, and an agency of effective governance and management. Hence, technology becomes everywhere. It constitutes man's way of life. Technology shapes human existence. The problem in technology arises when technology as instrumentality of human life shapes human thinking; when human reason loses its control of technology to the extent that technology controls reason. Technology becomes not a human endeavor; man in a sense becomes an activity of technology. The paper then intends to advance the idea that the machines, as technology in the neocapitalist mode of production, are the full realization, the height or climax, of Enframing, as a result of alienation, which can only be resolved through creative labor, by way of meditative thinking, as the dialectics and revelation of Dasein.
BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE ARTICLES » WHAT HEIDEGGER CAN TEACH US ABOUT OUR TECHNOLOGICAL MOMENT
Brownstone Institute
Heidegger's influential essay, 'The question concerning technology', was a radical critique of modern, 20th-centry technology - as opposed to ancient technology - and is presented here in necessarily summary format, as backdrop to the currently hegemonic form of technology, which is termed '(bio)technical programming'. Heidegger's distinction between technology and its 'essence', which he termed 'Enframing', is explained by comparing the latter to the 'theocentric' conception of the world during the Christian middle ages, which comprised the fundamental assumption of God as Creator to approach any question or problem about society, nature or culture. Similarly, in the 20th century the centrality of technology as the reduction of everything - nature as well as society - to a 'standing reserve', or a repository of resources, cannot be denied, and formed the presupposition of any attempt at answering questions or solving problems. One of its effects was, Heidegger argued, to undermine what he called 'letting-be' (Gelassenheit), that is, allowing things and living creatures, including humans, to 'be' themselves. By comparison contemporary technology, or '(bio)technical programming', goes much further. It does not merely reduce things to a 'standing reserve', but 'programmes' things in various ways through assessing and predictive algorithms, or worse, at a biological level by 'invading' their biotic being with a view to altering it. The most extreme manifestation of this has been highlighted by a whistleblower who has produced evidence of mRNA (pseudo-) 'vaccines' being nanoscale bioweapons which programme, and hence alter, the very evolution of human beings by introducing non-human DNA into their bodies. (Heidegger would turn in his grave.) This, it is argued, calls for the most resolute resistance possible to the agents (ir-)responsible for such a monstrous assault on our being-human.
Martin Heidegger on Science and Technology: It's Implication to the Society
therefore, the men of science and technology should not produce things that will bring progress to man. But today people are slaves to things they produce one cannot think well again without using calculator or cell phone, one cannot spell English words correctly without the aid of computer. We are now annihilated human beings. In this work, I wish to make us aware of certain elements which might prove destructive to our society, if they are not properly guarded against in our bid to reach the apex of science and technology. Our method is textual analysis, a critical look at the original tools of Heidegger and the commentaries written on an aim by other books authors to know the effects of science and technology in our society.
The Parochialism of Intellectual History: The Case of Günther Anders
The name of Günther Anders, who was one of the first philosophers to try to contend with the meaning of Being, ethics, and philosophy in the atomic age, was absent from Anglo-Saxon discourse during his own lifetime and has continued to be so since his death in 1992. He frequently wrote about the Holocaust and Hiroshima, about evil, the Vietnam War, Heidegger and the effects of technology, and its inherent destructive potential. However, the bulk of his writings has not yet been translated into English, and the studies that focus on him in the United States pale by comparison with those on other thinkers of his time. The reason he was marginalized is not only a matter of style or circumstances but also of language, location, and historical contextçit is embedded in the text and content of his writings, which placed Auschwitz alongside Hiroshima and located signs of totalitarianism in the West as well. The purpose of this study is twofold: to locate Anders alongside other German-Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century and to provide an answer to the question of why historians, philosophers, and many scholars in the humanities and the social sciences in the United States have ignored his existence for so long.
Heidegger's Critique of Science and Technology and Its Implications for Humanity
AKSUJA: Akwa Ibom State University Journal of Arts, volume 5, number 1, 2024
There is no doubt that the contemporary society in which we live is one typically noted for technoscientific progress. The level which the contemporary man has reached concerning scientific cum technological developments is quite amazing. Unfortunately, there has been a basic tension between the awareness of the "limit to growth" and the idea of "continuous progress" in science and technology. Behind these great ideas and discoveries is an awful desire to drag humanity to the precipices of nothingness and meaninglessness. Science and technology has gone too excess such that it has moved from pro-man to contra-man. While some scholars attribute this ugly scenario to negligence of moral sense of science and technology by modern man, Heidegger in inquiring into the mood-basis of modern technology however appeals to the Greek understanding of techne which connotes a 'bringing forth' and maintains that technology itself is not good or bad, rather the problem lies with technological thinking which has become the only form of thinking. Using expository, analytical and critical methods of Philosophical research, this work attempts to expose and critically analyse Heidegger's critique of science and technology and its implications for the being of man. The paper agrees with Heidegger that although technological advancements are quintessential for the growth of every society as it helps man to develop and facilitate life, yet many scientific inventions/creations endanger and degrade the being of man. Hence their excesses should be checkmated.
Helmut Schweizer – The Chain Reaction of Thought and Action
w/k - Zwischen Wissenschaft & Kunst, 2020
I n what follows we shall be questioning concerning technology. Questioning builds a way. We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the way, and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics. The way is a way of thinking. All ways of thinking, more or less perceptibly, lead through language in a manner that is extraordinary. We shall be questioning concerning technology, and in so doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology. 1 When we can respond to this essence, we shall be able to experience the technological within its own bounds. Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology. When we are seeking the essence of "tree," we have to become aware that That which pervades every tree, as tree, is not itself a tree that can be encountered among all the other trees. Likewise, the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, 2 to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology. According to ancient doctrine, the essence of a thing is considered to be what the thing is. We ask the question concerning technology when we ask what it is. Everyone knows the two statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together. For to posit ends and procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity. The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to
Schraube, E. (2005). Anders, Günther. In Carl Mitcham (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics (pp. 67-68). Farmington Hills: Macmillan.
A N D E RS , G ÜN T HE R
boundaries, and recommends a role for AAAS in preserving the freedom of scientists and in encouraging scientists
to address the broad social implications of their work.
Johnson, David. (1999). ‘‘From Denial to Action: Academic
and Scientific Societies Grapple with Misconduct.’’ In
Perspectives on Scholarly Misconduct in the Sciences, ed.
John M. Braxton. Columbus: Ohio State University
Press.
Teich, Albert H. (2002). ‘‘AAAS and Public Policy: Speaking Softly and Carrying a Medium-Sized Stick.’’ Technology in Society 24: 167–178.
I N TE RN E T R ES O U R C ES
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
(1946). AAAS Constitution. Available from http://archives.aaas.org/docs/documents.php?doc_id=406.
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
(2002). Mission. Available from http://www.aaas.org/
about.
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Archives. Available from http://archives.aaas.org.
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility.
Available from http://www.aaas.org/spp/sfrl/committees/
csfr.
American Association for the Advancement of Science. Program of Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion. Available from http://www.aaas.org/spp/dser.
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Science and Human Rights Program. Available from
http://shr.aaas.org.
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. Available
from http://www.aaas.org/about/awards/Freedom.shtml.
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Scientific Freedom, Responsibility and Law Program.
Available from http://www.aaas.org/spp/sfrl.
A N D E R S , G Ü NTHER
Philosopher of technology Günther Anders (1902–
1992), who was born in the city of Breslau (then a part of
Germany) on July 12, developed a unique moral critique
of modern technology. He studied psychology, history of
art, and philosophy at the universities of Hamburg and
Berlin, and, as a student of Edmund Husserl, received his
Ph.D. from the university of Freiburg in 1923. Anders’s
escape from Nazi Germany in 1933, his exile in North
America, and, most importantly, the events of Auschwitz
and Hiroshima, formed the experiential background to
his thought. He returned to Europe in 1950 and lived in
Vienna until his death on December 17.
Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics
Anders’s philosophy exemplifies that tradition of
critical and enlightened thought that engages with the
world and the concrete problems of its time, seeking to
ground human actions and the necessity of morality and
ethics from within actual historical conditions. Anders’s
extensive body of work analyzes the changes to which
human beings, both individually and collectively, are
subject in a technological world. In the early period of
his development, he undertook socio-political analyses
of human practice (e.g., studies on fascism and unemployment), while writing poems, philosophical novels,
and other books on philosophy, literature, and art.
Concern with the world is such a strong feature of
Anders’s philosophical identity that, for him, theoretical
analysis and practical engagement are inextricably
linked. He was one of the first intellectuals who warned
against the Nazis and he took part in the resistance
against Hitler and fascism. Later he was an active antiVietnam War protester, and an initiator of the antinuclear and environmental movements. But as much as
he was a political activist, he nonetheless recognized the
vital role of theory in an increasingly scientific and
technological world, and, in reversing Karl Marx’s
famous formulation, he emphasized: ‘‘It is not enough to
change the world, we do this anyway. And it mostly
happens without our efforts, regardless. What we have
to do is to interpret these changes so we in turn can
change the changes, so that the world doesn’t go on
changing without us—and does not ultimately become a
world without us’’ (Anders 2002b [1980], p. 5).
Anders regarded the destruction of Hiroshima as
year one of a new era, and as the event that crystallized
a newly acquired human capacity for self-destruction.
This step into a future continually threatened with its
own finality represented for him a radically new context
for human action, demanding a new ethics. Anders confronted this changed global reality, and from this point
on concentrated his efforts on thinking through the new
moral situation and elucidating the relationship
between human beings and technology.
Human activity, through its development of technology, had begun to overreach itself in a fatal way.
Because human faculties such as emotion, perception,
or even the ability to assume responsibility, are relatively circumscribed when compared to the capacity to
create new things, human beings are now faced, he says,
with a Promethean discrepancy between the world of
technology and human abilities to visualize it. The
divide is primarily attributable both to the accelerated
pace of technological development, and to the enormous complexity of the created things and their effects.
67
ANDROIDS
In this paradoxical situation, whereby humans are smaller
than themselves, Anders sees the basic dilemma of
the twenty-first century, a dilemma that can only be
resolved by a moral imagination reconnecting production
and visualization, creation and representation.
In his two-volume major work Die Antiquiertheit des
Menschen (The Obsolescence of Human Beings) (2002a,
2002b), Anders develops the project moral imagination
using a specific thing-cognizant approach. Because he
realizes that acting has shifted (of course through human
action) from the province of humans to the sphere of
work and products, and that the created things are not
simply neutral means to an end, but in fact represent
incarnated or reified actions, he places the question of
morality primarily in the realm of the things themselves.
Therefore he is less concerned with listening to the
voice of the heart (or examining the social processes of
making or use), than with articulating the mute principles of work and the secret maxims of products, and
trying to imagine how these embedded precepts are
changing human beings and the fabric of daily life.
Anders’s work constitutes a new form of practical reason
that attempts to reconnect modern technology to its
human origins. ‘‘Have only those things,’’ he formulates
as a new categorical imperative, ‘‘whose inherent action
maxims could become maxims for your own actions’’
(Anders 2002a [1956], p. 298).
ERNST SCHRAUBE
SEE ALS O Arendt, Hannah; Atomic Bomb; German Per-
spectives; Weapons of Mass Destruction.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anders, Günther. (1960). Franz Kafka, trans. A. Steer, and A.
K. Thorlby. New York: Hillary House. A critical philosophical interpretation of the writings of Franz Kafka; the original German version appeared 1951 under the title ‘‘Kafka,
pro und contra: die Prozessunterlagen.’’ Munich: Beck.
Anders, Günther. (1962). ‘‘Theses for the Atomic Age.’’
Massachusetts Review 3: 493–505.
Anders, Günther. (1989 [1962–]). Burning Conscience: The
Case of the Hiroshima Pilot, Claude Eatherly, Told in his
Letters to Günther Anders. New York: Paragon House. An
influential dialogue on the moral situation in the atomic
age; translated into more than 50 languages. The chapter
‘‘Commandments in the Atomic Age’’ appeared 1972 in
Philosophy and Technology: Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Technology, eds. Carl Mitchum and Robert
Mackey. New York: Free Press.
Anders, Günther. (2002a [1956]). Die Antiquiertheit des
Menschen, Band 1: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten
industriellen Revolution [The obsolescence of human beings,
68
volume 1: The soul in the age of the second industrial
revolution]. Munich: Beck. First volume of Anders’s major
work. A precise and thoughtful philosophical critique on
how modern technologies are changing individual and
social life; unfortunately, still not available in English.
Anders, Günther. (2002b [1980]). Die Antiquiertheit des
Menschen, Band 2: Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution [The obsolescence of
human beings, volume 2: The destruction of life in the age
of the third industrial revolution]. Munich: Beck. Second
volume of Anders’s major work; unfortunately, still not
available in English.
ANDROIDS
Androids are mechanical, or otherwise artificial, creations in the shape of humans. They have long been a
staple of science fiction. From the clockwork persons of
myth to Isaac Asimov’s humanoid robots, to Star Wars’s
C-3PO, and to Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, imagined mechanical persons have enabled people to reflect upon what it means to be human.
The real world of androids is substantially more
mundane than their appearance in science fiction.
Although there exists a long history of clockwork automata and other mechanical imitations of persons, these
have never been more than theatrical curiosities. The
creation of more ambitious androids has had to await
advances in robotics. Until the 1990s, the problems
involved in creating a robot that could walk on two legs
prevented robots from taking humanoid form. Yet if
robotics technology continues to improve, then it seems
likely that robots shaped like and perhaps even behaving like human beings will be manufactured within the
twenty-first century.
For the purpose of considering the ethical issues they
may raise, androids can be divided into three classes:
Those that are merely clever imitations of human beings,
hypothetical fully-fledged ‘‘artificial persons,’’ and—in
between—intelligent artifacts whose capacities are insufficient to qualify them as moral persons.
Existing androids are at most clever imitations of people, incapable of thought or independent behavior, and
consequently raise a limited range of ethical questions.
The use of animatronics in educational and recreational
contexts raises questions about the ethics of representation and communication akin to those treated in media
ethics. A more interesting set of questions concerns the
ethics of human/android relations. Even clever imitations
of human beings may be capable of a sufficient range of
Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics
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