Not only the machinery of technology and the work out of which it grew are being demeaned through the kind of consumption that is typically final and central today. There is a related degradation of commodities too. Normally earthbound people who take a charter flight to a distant country are visibly enthralled by the power and speed of the takeoff and openly appreciate the care they receive in flight. Yet there is scarcely more sullen and surly, if not sober, company than one composed of people who once more are jetting from here to there. A shower in the routine of technological life is a chore to be done along with brushing one’s teeth and taking the garbage out. But after a run through cold, wet, and muddy conditions, a shower is an ablution that heals and elevates.
The reform of technology that has been suggested so far would prune back the excesses of technology and restrict it to a supporting role. That suggestion does not stem from ill will toward technology but from the experience that there are forces that rightfully claim our engagement and truly grace our lives and from the concomitant experience that to procure these things technologically is to eviscerate them; finally, it springs from the experience that the joys that technology is able to furnish seem to have a parasitic and voracious character: they require as a contrast pretechnological limits and contours, and they seem to draw vitality from the firmness of pretechnological life by devouring and displacing it. But the focal things and practices that we have considered in Chapters 23 and 24 are not pretechnological, i.e., mere remnants of an earlier culture. Nor are they antitechnological, i.e., practices that defy or reject technology. Rather they unfold their significance in an affirmative and intelligent acceptance of technology. We may call them metatechnological things and practices. As such they provide an enduring counterposition to technology. They provide a contrast against which the experience of specifically technological liberty and prosperity remains alive and appreciated. Not only do focal concerns attain their proper splendor in the context of technology; the context of technology too is restored to the dignity of its original promise through the focal concerns at its center.
Let me make the point more concrete through examples first and more general reflections then. As has been hinted just now, if we inhabit a place faithfully and know its features and seasons from bodily appropriation, then to rise high above it and to leave it at an instant is to regain it in a larger and illuminating context. Doing bodily battle with the heat of the day and chill of night, with the steepness and hardness of the ground in hiking or running teaches one to marvel at the ease and assuredness of technological comforts.3 For one who practices a sport or plays an instrument, it is an inspiring and gratefully accepted experience to see the best perform on television. Given the counterweight of an engaging practice, televised performances need no brutality, carnal danger, promises of new records, or the spice of financial rewards for which the performers are made to fight.
Generally, the local and bodily intensity of focal engagements preserves our sensitivity for the wide-ranging and effortless way in which technology provides a context of security, comfort, and enlightenment. It also sharpens our sensitivity; engagement provides resonance for those commodities that represent and support excellence, and, finding no echo in the trivial and frivolous, it ignores banal commodities and helps to reduce them. So counterbalanced, technology can fulfill the promise of a new kind of freedom and richness. If our lives are centered in a focal concern, technology uniquely opens up the depth and extent of the world and allows us to be genuine world citizens. It frees us from the accidental limits of shortness of time, lack of equipment, or weakness of health so that we can turn to the great things of the world in their own right. It frees us for the genuine limits of our endurance, fortitude, and fidelity; and if we fail, we fail where we ought to fail and where we can hope to grow.
An important part of genuine world citizenship today is scientific and technological literacy. Here too one may hope that an appreciation of the force of technology, nourished by metatechnological practices, would inspire the attention and dedication that are needed to appropriate the scientific and engineering principles on which the technological machinery rests. Neither the resentful, if dutiful, service to the technological machinery that we discharge in labor nor the distracted pleasure of consumption are conducive to the study of technology. But the voluntary discipline that one exercises in a focal practice, the sustained appreciation of technology, and the desire to join the two in order to regain the cosmopolitan franchise may be helpful to the pursuit of scientific and technological education.
What, in conclusion, is the likelihood of a vigorous and visible reform of technology? Or more generally, what will likely be the fate of technology? There is one point that I want to insist on and another that I feel easy about. I want to insist that the destiny of the focal things, the one thing that matters should one emerge at length, is the fulcrum of change. We should measure the significance of the developments about us by the degree to which focal concerns are beginning to flourish openly or continue to live in hiding. All other changes will be variants of technological concerns. Not that the latter are unimportant. The ultimate calamity would be the complete destruction of technology; it would be the eradication of all hope. The preservation and improvement of technology, however, is a penultimate success at best. But I am not anxious about whether focal concerns will in fact prosper. One would rightly be nervous about the possibility that a great thing may fail accidentally, that the kingdom may be lost for want of a nail. But our focal concern will languish or prosper for essential reasons. I hope it will prevail, and it sustains my hope.
Notes
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1. The preparatory stages of my arguments are evident from my essays listed below. Their material is incorporated in this volume.
“Technology and Reality,” Man and World 4 (1971):59–69.
“Orientation in Technology,” Philosophy Today 16 (1972):135–47.
“Functionalism in Science and Technology,” in Proceedings of the XVth World Congress of Philosophy (Sofia, Bulgaria, 1973–75), 6:31–36.
“Mind, Body, and World,” Philosophical Forum 8 (1976):68–86.
“The Explanation of Technology,” Research in Philosophy and Technology 1 (1978):99–118.
“Freedom and Determinism in a Technological Setting,” Research in Philosophy and Technology 2 (1979):79–90.
“Should Montana Share Its Coal? Technology and Public Policy,” Research in Philosophy and Technology 3 (1980):287–311.
Review of William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique, Man and World 13 (1980):458–65.
Review of Don Ihde, Techniques and Praxis, Philosophical Topics 12 (1982): 190–94.
Review of Edward G. Ballard, Man and Technology and of Donald M. Borchert and David Stewart, eds., Being Human in a Technological Age, Man and World 15 (1982):107–15.
“Technology and Nature in Europe and America,” in International Dimensions of the Environmental Crisis, ed. Richard N. Barrett (Boulder, Colo., 1982), pp. 3–20.
“The Good Life and Appropriate Technology,” Research in Philosophy and Technology 6 (1983):11–19.
“Technology and Democracy,” Research in Philisophy and Technology 7 (1984):21l–28.
CHAPTER 1
1. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 10, chapters 7 and 8. I will also use “theory” to designate the enterprise of working out such a final vision.
2. On this phenomenon see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York, 1962), pp. 210–24.
3. The founder of this approach is Immanuel Kant. A more recent monument of it is The Linguistic Turn, ed. Richard Rorty (Chicago, 1967).
CHAPTER 2
1. Carl Mitcham begins his survey of “Types of Technology” by distinguishing this sense as the narrow and engineering sense from the broad social science sense. See Research in Philosophy and Technology 1 (1978):229–31. Further discussion of Mitcham’s survey in Chapter 3 below.
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2. Charles Suskind’s Understanding Technology (Baltimore, 1973) is guided by this sense and an example of the very tentative orientation such a sense provides.
3. In this vein W. Norris Clarke has wondered “what detailed or precise contributions philosophers as such can make to the problem of technology.” See his “Reflections on the 15th World Congress of Philosophy,” International Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1974):117. See my “Orientation in Technology,” Philosophy Today 16 (1972):135–36. Arguments for the need of philosophy of technology along with a survey of approaches has been provided by Marx W. Wartofsky in “Philosophy of Technology,” in Current Research in Philosophy of Science, ed. Peter D. Asquith and Henry E. Kyburg, Jr. (East Lansing, Mich., 1979), pp. 171–84.
4. Such as “the space age,” “the postindustrial society,” “the atomic age,” “future shock,” “the technetronic age,” “the new industrial state,” and others.
5. A comprehensive study of this position has been provided by Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1977). See also his remarks on typologies of technology, pp. 176–77.
6. See Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey, “Introduction: Technology as a Philosophical Problem,” in Philosophy and Technology, ed. Mitcham and Mackey (New York, 1972), pp. 5–7; Donald W. Shriver, Jr., “Man and His Machines: Four Angles of Vision,” Technology and Culture 13 (1972):534–38.
7. See Samuel C. Florman, “In Praise of Technology,” Harper’s Magazine 251 (November 1975):53–72.
8. See William Leiss, “The Social Consequences of Technological Progress: Critical Comments on Recent Theories,” Canadian Public Administration 13 (1970):248–53.
9. See Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York, 1964), pp. 18–22.
10. See Mitcham and Mackey, “Jacques Ellul and the Technological Society,” Philosophy Today 15 (1971):102–21.
11. According to Ellul’s explicit framework, the power and peculiarity of modern technique become apparent in the analyses of the encounter between the technical phenomenon and society (pp. 61–64). That framework stipulates society as an independent force that interacts with technology. But in the actual analyses, society appears as an entirely passive partner in the interaction with technique. See Mitcham and Mackey, “Jacques Ellul,” pp. 107–10.
12. See Ellul, p. 20.
13. Ibid., pp. xxv, 21, 133–47, 171–77, 263–66, 388. See Mitcham and Mackey, “Jacques Ellul,” pp. 111–12.
14. See Ellul, pp. 79–147.
15. See Florman, “In Praise of Technology” and Mitcham and Mackey’s list of reviews of Ellul in “Jacques Ellul,” p. 120, n. 5.
16. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 2d ed. (Boston, 1972). See Ellul, pp. 183–227 and 248–318.
17. Winner’s book (n. 5 above) is important in elaborating the force of Ellul’s position through a comprehensive and circumspective analysis of consonant and competing findings by other authors.
18. See Mitcham and Mackey, “Introduction,” pp. 4–5.
19. Ibid., pp. 2–4.
20. See Shriver, pp. 532–34.
21. This issue and the following ones are examined in detail in Chapters 13–16 below.
22. See Leiss, “The Social Consequences.”
23. See Shriver, pp. 538–41.
24. See Paul T. Durbin, “Technology and Values: A Philosopher’s Perspective,” Technology and Culture 13 (1972):556–76.
25. See Shriver, pp. 541–47. An example is Victor C. Ferkiss, Technological Man: The Myth and the Reality (New York, 1969).
CHAPTER 3
1. See n. 1 of Chapter 2. In “Philosophy of Technology” (A Guide to the Culture of Science, Technology, and Medicine, ed. Paul T. Durbin [New York, 1980], pp. 282–363), Mitcham has further elaborated the significance of his typology and used it to review the pertinent literature. This article presents the best survey of the field to date.
2. See Langdon Winner’s review in Science 102 (October 6, 1978):44–45.
3. See Mitcham, “Types of Technology,” p. 232.
4. Ibid.
5. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958).
6. See Mitcham, “Types of Technology,” pp. 233, 234, and n. 11 on p. 271. On p. 232 he speaks of “a structural and/or phenomenological analysis.” What phenomenologists, at one important level of investigation, are concerned with are éide or essences.
7. See Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York, 1964), p. 43; Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (New York, 1977), pp. 14–31; William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (New York, 1972).
8. See Mitcham, “Philosophy and the History of Technology,” in The History and Philosophy of Technology, ed. George Bugliarello (Urbana, Ill., 1979), 163–201.
9. See Mitcham, “Types of Technology,” p. 233.
10. Ibid., p. 242.
11. Ibid., p. 258.
12. Ibid., p. 260.
13. Ibid., p. 259. Technology-as-volition is also important as a focus of traditional scholarship. See Mitcham and Jim Grote, “Philosophy of Technology,” in Encyclopedia of Bioethics, ed. Warren T. Reich (New York, 1978), p. 1620.
CHAPTER 4
1. See G. Ray Funkhouser, “Public Understanding of Science: The Data We Have,” in Workshop on “Goals and Methods of Assessing the Public’s Understanding of Science” (University Park, Pa., 1973), pp. 11–18; Amitai Etzioni and Clyde Nunn, “The Public Appreciation of Science in Contemporary America,” Daedalus 103, no. 3 (Summer 1974):201; L. John Martin, “Science and the Successful Society,” Public Opinion 4 (June/July 1981):19 and 55.
2. See Etzioni and Nunn, pp. 195–96.
3. See Todd R. La Porte and Daniel Metlay, “Technology Observed: Attitudes of a Wary Public,” Science, 188 (April 11, 1975):121–27; Nicholas Wade, “Contrary to Fears, Public is High on Science,” Science 199 (March 31, 1978):1421.
4. See Funkhouser, pp. 18–31; La Porte and Metlay, p. 122; Wade, pp. 1420–21; Etzioni and Nunn, pp. 191–95; Nunn, “Is There a Crisis of Confidence in Science?” Science 198 (December 9, 1977):995; Martin, p. 17.
5. Funkhouser, p. 24; Etzioni and Nunn, pp. 196–97.
6. See Clyde Z. Nunn, John Kosa, and Joel J. Alpert, “Causal Locus of Illness and Adaptation to Family Disruptions,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 7 (1968):210–18. Note also this summary provided by Daniel Yankelovich:
In 1970, 30% of the public believed that “everything has a logical scientific explanation”; another 42% said they used to believe that all the mysteries of life would eventually be explained by science but now believed that some things could only be understood in a non-rational way; 28% said they believed that life as we know it is controlled by “strange and mysterious forces that decide our fate.” It is interesting to note the direction of the changes that have occurred in these perspectives within the last decade. There has been a modest reduction in the size of the group believing that everything has a logical scientific explanation (30% to 27%), while the group of people saying they used to believe that the mysteries of life would eventually be explained by science, but no longer do, grew from 42% to 48%.
In “Changing Public Attitudes to Science and the Quality of Life,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 7 (Spring 1982):25.
7. Such an equipoise is not unlike John Rawls’s “reflective equilibrium.” See A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 20–21, 48–51.
8. See Yankelovich, New Rules (Toronto, 1982), p. 52; and “Changing Public Attitudes,” pp. 23 and 26–27.
CHAPTER 5
1. See H. J. Phaff, M. W. Miller, and E. M. Mark, The Life of Yeasts (Cambridge, Mass., 1966).
2. Ibid., p. 2.
3. See M. A. Amerine and M. A. Joslyn, Table Wines: The Technology of Their Production, 2d ed. (Berkeley, Calif., 1970), p. 177.
4. See Phaff et al., p. 4; Amerin
e and Joslyn, pp. 177–78.
5. See Phaff et al., pp. 4–5.
6. Ibid., pp. 5–6; and Amerine and Joslyn, pp. 178–80.
7. See Phaff et al., pp. 5–6; Amerine and Joslyn, p. 178 n. 2.
8. In the fourth book of Metaphysics.
9. In the transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason.
10. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 321–32; Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, Book 2, chapters 11 and 12 and throughout the Analytics.
11. See Carl G. Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York, 1965), pp. 331–496.
12. This explanation sketch is problematic in at least two ways. (1) The second premise contains more than is required for a deduction, namely, something like a bridge law or a redescription of the explanandum, and the latter are imperfect at best since must is more than a sugar solution. (2) The conclusion suffers from similar problems since wine is more than a mixture of water and alcohol and more than must in which (part of) the sugar has been converted into alcohol. Some of these problems will be addressed in the following chapter.
13. See Michael Friedman, “Explanation and Scientific Understanding,” Journal of Philosophy 71 (1974):16–19.
14. See Ernan McMullin, “Structural Explanation,” American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978):147.
CHAPTER 6
1. Such an event will always only violate, or fall outside of, some of the laws of nature as they are presently known. If it violated them all at once, it could not be understood or experienced by us in any sense.
2. For surveys of this controversy see Rudolph H. Weingartner, “The Quarrel about Historical Explanation [1961],” Philosophical Problems of Science and Technology, ed. Alex C. Michalos (Boston, 1974), pp. 165–80; and Howard Cohen, “Das Verstehen and Historical Knowledge,” American Philosophical Quarterly 10 (1973):299–306.
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