9. See Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York, 1962), pp. 95–107, 163–68, 210–24.
10. See Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p 80.
11. See Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 163–82. Heidegger alludes to the turn from the Bedingungen to the Dinge on p. 179 of the original, “Das Ding,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen, 1959). He alludes to the turn from technology to (focal) things in “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York, 1977), p. 43.
12. See Heidegger, “The Thing.”
13. See M. F. K. Fisher, The Cooking of Provincial France (New York, 1968), p. 50.
14. Though there are seeds for a reform of technology to be found in Heidegger as I want to show, Heidegger insists that “philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. Only a god can save us.” See “Only a God Can Save Us: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger,” trans. Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo, Philosophy Today 20 (1976): 277.
15. I am not concerned to establish or defend the claim that my account of Heidegger or my development of his views are authoritative. It is merely a matter here of acknowledging a debt.
16. See Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” p. 43; Langdon Winner makes a similar point in “The Political Philosophy of Alternative Technology,” in Technology and Man’s Future, ed. Albert H. Teich, 3d ed. (New York, 1981), pp. 369–73.
17. See Heidegger, “The Thing,” pp. 180–82.
18. The need of complementing Heidegger’s notion of the thing with the notion of practice was brought home to me by Hubert L. Dreyfus’s essay, “Holism and Hermeneutics,” Review of Metaphysics 34 (1980): 22–23.
19. See Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 152–53.
20. Ibid., pp. 148–49.
21. Georg Trakl, quoted by Heidegger in “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 194–95 (I have taken some liberty with Hofstadter’s translation).
22. See Norman Maclean, A River Runs through It and Other Stories (Chicago, 1976). Only the first of the three stories instructs the reader about fly fishing.
23. See Colin Fletcher, The Complete Walker (New York, 1971).
24. Ibid., p. 9.
25. See Roger B. Swain, Earthly Pleasures: Tales from a Biologist’s Garden (New York, 1981).
26. Here are a few more: Wendell Berry, Farming: A Handbook (New York, 1969); Stephen Kiesling, The Shell Game: Reflections on Rowing and the Pursuit of Excellence (New York, 1982); John Richard Young, Schooling for Young Riders (Norman, Okla., 1970); W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis (New York, 1973); Ruedi Bear, Pianta Su: Ski Like the Best (Boston, 1976). Such books must be sharply distinguished from those that promise to teach accomplishments without effort and in no time. The latter kind of book is technological in intent and fraudulent in fact.
27. See Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (Garden City, N.Y., 1969); and George Sheehan, Running and Being: The Total Experience (New York, 1978).
28. See Sheehan, pp. 211–20 and elsewhere.
29. See Capon, pp. 167–181.
30. See my “Mind, Body, and World,” Philosophical Forum 8 (1976): 76–79. The intentional ambiguity of commodities has been discussed in Chapter 10.
31. See Capon, pp. 176–77.
32. See Sheehan, p. 127.
33. On the unity of achievement and enjoyment, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind., 1981), p. 184.
34. See my “Mind, Body, and World,” pp. 68–86.
35. See Peter Wood, “Seeing New York on the Run,” New York Times Magazine, 7 October 1979; Alexandra Penney, “Health and Grooming: Shaping Up the Corporate Image,” ibid.
36. See New York Times Magazine, 3 August 1980, pp. 20–21.
37. See Wood, p. 112.
38. See Sheehan, pp. 211–17.
39. See Wood, p. 116.
40. See Sheehan, pp. 221–31 and passim.
41. There is substantial anthropological evidence to show that running has been a profound focal practice in certain pretechnological cultures. I am unable to discuss it here. Nor have I discussed the problem, here and elsewhere touched upon, of technology and religion. The present study, I believe, has important implications for that issue, but to draw them out would require more space and circumspection than are available now. I have made attempts to provide an explication in “Christianity and the Cultural Center of Gravity,” Listening 18 (1983): 93–102; and in “Prospects for the Theology of Technology,” Theology and Technology, ed. Carl Mitcham and Jim Grote (Lanham, Md., 1984), pp. 305–22.
42. See M. F. K. Fisher, pp. 9–31.
43. For what social and empirical basis there is to this question see Chapter 24.
44. Some therapists advise lying down till these stirrings go away.
45. See John Rawls, “Two Concepts of Rules,” Philosophical Review 64 (1955): 3–32.
46. Conversely, it is one thing to break a practice and quite another to omit a particular action. For we define ourselves and our lives in our practices; hence to break a practice is to jeopardize one’s identity while omitting a particular action is relatively inconsequential.
47. See Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the beginning of Book Two in particular.
48. See MacIntyre, p. 175.
49. Ibid., pp. 175–77.
50. Ibid., p. 176.
51. See Rawls, p. 25.
CHAPTER 24
1. See George Sheehan, Running and Being (New York, 1978), p. 102.
2. See Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen,” in Werke, ed. Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel (Stuttgart, 1960–64), 1:64–69.
3. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 520–29.
4. Ibid., p. 426.
5. Ibid., p. 429.
6. Ibid., p. 427.
7. Ibid., p. 554.
8. Ibid., p. 552.
9. See Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb (Garden City, N.Y., 1969), pp. 182–91; and Sheehan, pp. 238–40.
10. See Aaron Latham, “Video Games Star War,” New York Times Magazine, 25 October 1981; “Invasion of the Video Creatures,” Newsweek, 16 November 1981, pp. 90–94; “Games That Play People,” Time, 18 January 1982, pp. 50–58.
11. See Time, p. 56.
12. How can there be technological engagement if technology is defined as disengaging? The answer is that technology in this essay is defined according to the device paradigm, and so defined it becomes disengaging primarily (a) in consumption and (b) in the mature phase after it has taken the ironical turn. Hence the possibility of technological engagement suggests that technology could achieve an alternative maturity.
There is already technological engagement in the sense that certain activities essentially depend on technological products as alpine skiing or bicycle racing do. But note that the technological devices do not procure but mediate engagement. The engagement is finally with slopes, snow conditions, courses, turns, etc. And there is full and skilled bodily engagement too.
13. See Newsweek, 16 November 1981, p. 94.
14. Ibid., p. 90.
15. Along similar lines one could show that running is more excellent than exercising with a Nautilus.
16. See Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine (Boston, 1981).
17. Remember Daniel Bell’s remark, referred to in Chapter 19 (see n. 32 there), that the computer is the “thing” in which the postindustrial society is coming to be symbolized. For a treatise in support of the thesis, see Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York, 1979).
18. Engagement, too, taken as a formal notion or as a concept of a certain sort of worldlessly conceived human existence, fails as a guide to enduring excellence. But un
derstood as a term that recollects and anticipates the human response to focal things, it is a helpful vocable, and I will continue so to use it.
19. Aristotle’s Principle is not so dependent on complexity since it is balanced by the rightful assumption and careful explication of a definite and articulate world. See Chapter 6 above.
20. Rawls attempts to control the empirical world by admitting it into the design of the just society in an orderly sequence of four stages (see A Theory of Justice, pp. 195–201). This procedure does succeed in occluding the good life of focal things and practices. The apparent opening, so Rawls hopes, will be filled with the good life that springs from rationality, the Aristotelian Principle, and social union. But as we saw, the hope is not fulfilled. Instead, as argued in Chapter 14, the technological society emerges as the only possible but unacknowledged realization of Rawls’s just society. One might argue, incidentally, that technology is not only an indispensable aid but also a guide for Rawls’s theory which is designed to make justice available in the technological sense. I believe, however, that, appearances to the contrary, the formidable machinery of Rawls’s theory bespeaks a commitment to fairness, openness, and compassion primarily and secondarily, at most, to technology.
21. See Rawls, p. 554.
22. On the general rise and decline of the car as a symbol of success, see Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down (Toronto, 1982), pp. 36–39.
23. Although these technological instruments are translucent relative to the world and so permit engagement with the world, they still possess an opaque machinery that mediates engagement but is not itself experienced either directly or through social mediation. See also the remarks in n. 12 above.
24. See “Who Is the American Runner?” Runner’s World 15 (December 1980): 36–42.
25. The statistical empirical evidence will be considered in the next chapter.
26. Capon’s book is the most impressive document of such discriminating use of technology.
27. A point that is emphatically made by E. F. Schumacher in Small Is Beautiful (New York, 1973) and in Good Work (New York, 1979); by Duane Elgin in Voluntary Simplicity (New York, 1981); and by Yankelovich in New Rules.
28. See Roger Rosenblatt, “The Sad Truth about Big Spenders,” Time, 8 December 1980, pp. 84 and 89.
29. On the confusions that beset romanticism in its opposition to technology, see Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1963), pp. 285–303.
30. See Daniel J. Boorstin, Democracy and Its Discontents (New York, 1975), pp. 12–25.
31. See Elgin, pp. 251–71. In believing that the mass of complex technical information poses a mortal threat to bureaucracies, Elgin, it seems to me, indulges in the unwarranted pessimism of the optimists.
32. Ibid., p. 71.
CHAPTER 25
1. Sometimes I will use “legality” to mean legal system and at other times to mean, in the more common sense, set of conditions that something must meet to be legal or a law. Similarly for “morality.’ This ambiguity is harmless since the context resolves it. More important, the ambiguity, as is apparent from prior remarks, corresponds to a gradation from the abstract (the values of justice) to the concrete (the practices and institutions in which justice eminently comes to pass) and does not indicate an equivocation. The legality-morality distinction overlaps with that between the constitutional or just society on the one hand and the good society on the other. See Chapter 14 above.
2. For a dissenting and critical view, see Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Knowledge and Politics (New York, 1976), pp. 83–103.
3. See Irving Kristol, “Pornography, Obscenity, and the Case for Censorship,” in Philosophy of Law, ed. Joel Feinberg and Hyman Gross (Encino, Calif., 1975), p. 169.
4. There are traces of this argument in Kristol also on pp. 165 and 168–69.
5. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 195–99 and 258–65.
6. To capture this inconsistency, Erhard Eppler has distinguished between a conservatism of values and a conservatism of (economic) structures. See his Wege aus der Gefahr (Reinbeck, 1981), pp. 101–6, where he also discusses similar findings of other authors.
7. See John Kenneth Galbraith, “Poverty and the Way People Behave,” in Economics, Peace, and Laughter (New York, 1972), pp. 168–69.
8. So quotations on the covers of the paperback edition inform us. See Lester C. Thurow, The Zero-Sum Society: Distribution and the Possibilities for Economic Change (Middlesex, 1981).
9. Thurow, p. 120; see also p. 197. For discussion, see William Leiss, The Limits to Satisfaction (Toronto, 1976), pp. 24–27.
10. See Warren Johnson, Muddling toward Frugality (Boulder, Colo., 1979), pp. 32–38 where references to further sources can be found.
11. See Jürgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology,’” in Toward a Rational Society, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, 1970), pp. 94–95; Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York, 1964), pp. 23–42; Carl Mitcham, “Philosophy of Technology,” A Guide to the Culture of Science, Technology, and Medicine, ed. Paul T. Durbin (New York, 1980), pp. 309–10.
12. On simplicity as a condition for reform, see Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity (New York, 1981), p. 37.
13. See Studs Terkel, American Dreams: Lost and Found (New York, 1981).
14. See Elgin, pp. 129–31. A willing acceptance of simplicity is the attitude closest to the reform here proposed though even it is not unambiguously one of focal concern. There are other indications of a popular desire for basic reform though these indications and the accounts given of them are uneasily located on the line that divides reforms within and of the framework of technology. See especially Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules (Toronto, 1982); and the success of such books in Europe as Niels I. Meyer, K. Helveg Petersen, and Villy Sorensen, Revolt from the Centre, trans. from the Danish by Christine Hauch (Lawrence, Mass., 1981); and Eppler’s book cited in n. 6 above.
15. See Duane Elgin, quoting Louis Harris on p. 128.
16. This view is supported by Yankelovich, p. 174. But I am not sure that regarding this dividedness one should, as Yankelovich does, place people’s wholehearted alliance on the side of a high and rising standard of living.
17. See Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 71–83; and Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy (Oxford, 1976), pp. 173–74. The reasoning that leads one to support a collective affirmation and cooperative action is always balanced, if not outweighed, by a calculation that counsels one to prefer individual advantage. Game theory explores the settings, structures, and strategies of this problem. For discussion and references, see Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 542–43 and n. 118 on p. 742. I want to urge that the unhappy tension between the calculus of social and individual advantage can be overcome through enthusiasm and sympathy. See also Rawls, pp. 240 and 267–70.
18. On the tie between collective affirmation (“final acceptance” as he calls it) and reform, see Warren Johnson, p. 157. An interesting study of the rise of a collective affirmation and a reform of technology is Noel Perrin’s Giving Up the Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword (Boston, 1979).
19. See E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful (New York, 1973), p. 260; see his Good Work (New York, 1979), p. 126.
20. Quoted by Duane Elgin on p. 128.
21. See Lowdon Wingo, “The Quality of Life: Toward a Microeconomic Definition,” Urban Studies 10 (1973): 4 n. 2, see also p. 7.
22. The truly rich can buy many of the elements of the quality of life except one: genuine membership and respect in a community. Ordinary folk have some individual choice in the quality of life through mobility
23. See John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York, 1958), pp. 199–200.
24. Following Hirsch, we have seen in Chapter 18 (see n. 35 there) that the GNP is a dubious measure of social prosperity. Acco
rdingly, Thurow (p. 5) refuses to identify per capita GNP with the standard of living. Still, the behavior of most mainstream economists and politicians regarding the GNP allows one to hold to the suggested synonymy.
25. See John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose (Boston, 1973), pp. 43–44.
26. Ibid., p. 44.
27. Ibid., p. 41.
28. That Galbraith accepts the technological specification of liberal democracy is most evident in Chapter 23 of Economics (pp. 233–40). That his acceptance is not uncritical is clear from pp. 225–26.
29. See Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Technology and Culture 5 (1964): 2. See also Carroll Pursell, “The American Ideal of a Democratic Technology,” in The Technological Imagination, ed. Teresa De Lauretis et al. (Madison, Wis., 1980), pp. 11–25.
30. For discussion, see Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 121–36.
31. See Mumford, pp. 2–3.
32. See Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1963 [first published in 1934]), pp. 410–17.
33. Ibid., p. 414.
34. Ibid., p. 411. Empirical support has been gathered by Ruth Tenne and Bilha Mannheim in “The Effect of the Level of Production Technology on Workers’ Orientations and Responses to the Work Situation,” in Work and Technology, ed. Marie R. Haug and Jacques Dofny (London, 1977), pp. 61–79.
35. See Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” p. 8.
36. Elgin and Schumacher talk about such people, and so does Peter N. Gillingham, “The Making of Good Work” in Schumacher’s Good Work, pp. 147–218.
37. I do not want to imply that the two-sector economy will solve the problem of the degradation or lack of work completely or quickly. It provides a long-term and hopeful goal. Meanwhile, the government should, as Thurow urges on pp. 203–6, take immediate measures to deal with the lack of work.
38. See Galbraith, Economics, p. 223.
39. See Mumford’s suggestions in Technics, p. 415; and Elgin’s on p. 287.
40. We should use regulations that directly influence prices rather than aim at definite quantities and assignments in the production of goods. See Thurow, pp. 150–51.
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