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Introduction

Based on a lifetime of careful investigation into the significance of human embodiment and technology, the work of Don Ihde has revolved around the central insight that technology represents an extension of human embodiment.

Intimately related to this central insight Ihde has elaborated on two important corollaries. The first, which has far-reaching ramifications both within and beyond the subdiscipline called “the philosophy of technology,” is that there is no “bodily-sensory perception that is without its socio-cultural dimension” (BT 133). The human body is not first an object or a subject, but a way of being-in-the-world inseparable from sociocultural contextualization.

Therefore the meaning of technology must also be grasped in terms of its sociocultural context.

Of course, introducing the dimension of the sociocultural introduces the imperative force of moral values and the human judgments that sus-tain values. Examining this dimension—the role of morality and justice in relation to embodiment and technology—is the central concern of the present paper.

Ihde’s second corollary already takes up this topic: the specific modification of the body’s essential sociocultural significance by its techno-logical extension provides no basis for either utopian or dystopian glosses of its value. The extension of the human body through technology is both quan-titative and qualitative, to be sure, but not such as to enable overarching blanket value judgments. These valuations of technology (or anything else for that matter) depend rather on metaphysical presuppositions that are necessar-ily external and untrue to a phenomenological-hermeneutic understanding of

the human embodiment of which technology is the extension. As a philoso-pher, Ihde wisely rejects all a priori totalizing interpretations.

Technology, whatever its contribution to human life, offers neither the universal panacea optimistically claimed by utopians nor the universal bane pessimistically declaimed by dystopians. True to the results of his earliest phenomenological investigations of perception, Ihde writes: “The possible uses [of technology] are always ambiguous and multi-stable” (BT 131). An-other concern of this paper is to contextualize and in this way to criticize, along with Ihde, the false dyad of utopianism and dystopianism in under-standing the significance of technology.

I am in complete agreement with Ihde on the points above: technology is an extension of human embodiment; human embodiment, and hence tech-nology, must be understood within sociocultural contexts; and finally, these contexts, and not the fantasy of a technology divorced from its proper fields of significance (body and world), provide the only legitimate grounds for the evaluations too broadly and hence illegitimately drawn by utopians and dystopians. Technology is “good” or “evil” as the human hand or foot are good or evil, or rather as human action, of which technology is an exten-sion, is good or evil. Putting aside the metaphysical presuppositions of utopians and dystopians, the human body and the technologies that extend it are neither good nor evil a priori. Technology is, in a word, instrumental.

Instruments can be used for good or evil, and are historically usually used for both.

Nevertheless, evaluation is as essential to the sociocultural context of human being-in-the-world as is the latter’s technological dimensions. Indeed, to go one step farther, the thesis of this paper is that evaluation is a more profound dimension of being-in-the-world than technological instrumentality.

Hence the latter must be grasped within an appreciation for the imperatives of the former. Despite their own evaluative zeal, it is precisely this, the pri-ority of ethics in sociocultural life, which the utopians and dystopians fail to recognize. The human world attains its “humanity” insofar as it always al-ready determines the meaning of “importance” as an ethical category. While both utopians and dystopians seem to value ethics, loudly crying “good” and

“evil,” in the end they overvalue it and misunderstand the ethical character of sociocultural life. And by misunderstanding the place of ethics they inadvert-ently do something terrible: they undermine the possibility of a genuine appreciation for its role in human affairs.

The thesis of this chapter is not, however, that technology is “value-free.” In one sense, divorced from all else, in its pure instrumentality, tech-nology is indeed value-free. But such is an analytical abstraction, essence divorced from existence. Technology is value-free in the way, as I have said, a hand is value-free. Technology, in other words, does not ultimately alter a

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human condition founded on ethical values because those values at once per-meate and transcend technology.¹ They are its condition and not its product.

The true philosophical issue with regard to technology is to probe and discern the specific manner in which technology, as an extension of the hu-man body, contributes to and modifies the root ethical constitution of huhu-man- human-ity. This question has become all the more pressing with recent advances in technology whereby technology now permeates our worldly being to an ex-tent, and in a manner hitherto almost unimaginable.

Utopias and Dystopias

Something of the transcendence demanded by the above question seems to be preserved in Heidegger’s teaching that “the essence of technology is not technological,” namely, the idea that technology can only be understood in a nontechnological way.² Nevertheless, Heidegger undermines his own effort to understand technology by locating it within what remains, contrary to his own claims, a metaphysically totalizing context. Returning, as he believes, to a strand of thinking initiated in Western culture by the pre-Socratics, for Heidegger the root of significance, and hence the true ground of technology, is not the imperative of the ethical but rather a quite different imperative deriving from the essential. That the essential underlies the ethical is the earliest theme, it seems to me, which runs through and characterizes the entire work and career of Heidegger. This is less surprising when we consider that it is also a core theme that runs through most of Western philosophy.

By “essence” Heidegger does not intend to mean something abstract, intellectual, or ethereal. Rather, he means the concrete epochal dispensations (“worlds”) of being, whereby being is understood dynamically. Being both withdraws and “gives” itself in such a way as to fundamentally determine the root meaning—the “spirit,” as Hegel called it—of an entire historical period.

So, for example, the “essence” of the medieval period of Europe was, for Heidegger, a being-in-the-world that was theological, determined throughout, permeated in all its particulars, by relationship to the God of Christianity.

Being manifest itself, came into “essence,” in the medieval period theologi-cally. In the “ontological difference” between withdrawal and manifestation of meaning, which is a dynamic rather than a static absence and a presence, being as essence at once determines and transcends its particular epochal manifestations. To think or be in the medieval period was, wittingly or not, to think or be theologically. Though the later Heidegger will eschew the very term “being,” because he thinks it overloaded with preconceptions, he will continue to maintain that underlying essential epochs there remains an inex-haustible and primordial fund of significance. The ultimate source, let us call

it, is at once what has been, what is, and what will be, the “temporalizing”

or “historicizing” ongoing creation of historically manifest worlds. Heidegger concern, as a thinker, is to preserve the openness, the fruitfulness, the “gen-erosity” of this ultimate source of meaning, to be its mouthpiece.

Within this encompassing philosophical framework, for Heidegger the role of technology is twofold. First, in our present world, being’s essential manifestation today is precisely the “epoch of technology.” Technology rep-resents the fundamental character, the essence, the spirit, of our epoch of being’s ongoing revelation of meaning. Therefore technology permeates all the particulars of our world, determining in its own special way the meaning of meaning, what counts as meaningful and what counts as insignificant.

Technology is the very temper of our times, what “goes without saying.”

But what specifically is the distinctive characteristic that orders and permeates our epoch as technological in essence? Heidegger’s answer is purely negative. The essence of technology is the conversion of all reality into means without ends. Worse yet, technology represents the endless conversion of all ends into means without ends. As such, because it makes our age one without proper ends and because it therefore also occludes the very possibility of hearkening to being as ultimate source, it is the “greatest danger.” The phi-losopher—Heidegger—is the guardian of the ultimate source, while technol-ogy is the unsurpassable foreclosure of any future novel revelations or dispensations of epochal being. Technology is the opening of being that shuts down being as openness. Ours is the age of technology, but the essence of technology is to be the final age. This final age without finality blocks any future ages. Technology is the essence that ends the dynamism of its own emergence; hence it is also the anti-essence par excellence: a never-ending, ever-increasing efficiency for the sake of efficiency alone—the greatest danger.

Obviously Heidegger takes a strong dystopian view of technology. His dystopianism is a deep one because instead of complaining about this or that technological problem (e.g., pollution, global warming, identity theft), it contextualizes and demonizes technology within a vast philosophy of historical revelation. Technology is the greatest danger because Heidegger’s interest, given his interpretation of philosophy as openness to “ontological difference,” is to remain open and to keep the world open to the questioning-poetic-thinking that alone remains attentive to future revelations of essential being.

Technology is not only blind to its own true origin in the generosity of the ultimate source, but in its unbounded willfulness it is essentially blind to its own blindness. Its form of blindness is thus incurable. It is endless con-struction, insatiable development of human command and control. In an id-iosyncratic and even perverse way, Heidegger will label this willfulness

“humanism,” and proceed, notoriously (i.e., oblivious to the monstrous and

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disastrous anti-humanism of the Nazis), to attack it. The technical discourse of technology, concerned exclusively with speed and efficiency, is endlessly superficial because, so Heidegger argues, it is endlessly merely human. Its discourse avoids any deep questioning because, caught up in an endlessly instrumental reasoning, it is what Heidegger in Being and Time called the chatter of “das Man,” the “they.” From the noisy wasteland of mass produc-tion and mass consumpproduc-tion, from a ceaseless blitz of advertising, publicity, and passing fame, from unending demolition and construction, from ever more refined intrusions into privacy, only an oracle (“a god”), only a genuine thinker (Heidegger, surprise!), he who is somehow still attuned to the ulti-mate source, can save us. Woe, woe, bereft and abandoned are we, toys are us. Heidegger’s is a deep, baleful, almost apocalyptic dystopianism.

Heidegger’s thought has been criticized many times in many ways for a number of related problems: the a priori character of its underlying meta-physics of ontological difference and the latter’s alleged “generosity” (which, as Levinas remarks, also “gave us the Holocaust”); the abstractness of its philosophical framing of the question of historical epochs, and, more particu-larly, its reductive flattening of significant differences in technological issues;

its selective blindness and complicity, despite its own appeal to history, to important concrete events of its own time, most obviously Nazism and the Holocaust; its own unacknowledged and contradictory subjectivist and con-trolling interests, as manifest in its cult-doctrine of salvation through “great thinkers,” of which the most recent is clearly Heidegger himself; the again unacknowledged and contradictory naturalism of its derivation of “ought”

from “is”; its typical “Germanic ” philosophical-idealist anthropology, that is, its projection of human spirit onto being; and much else. I believe that all these criticisms hit the mark. The main point, here, however, is simply to invoke Heidegger’s ontology as a recent and widely disseminated dystopian framing of the issues raised by modern advances in science and technology.

As Ihde has made us acutely aware, however, Heidegger’s dissatisfaction with modern technology stems from his assumption of a decontextualized attitude of nostalgic romanticism (PP 103–115) based on the unacknowledged con-struction of a myth of lost pretechnological ages of harmony. As such, and paradoxically contrary to its own self-interpretation, Heidegger’s account remains a willful subjectivist dialectical partner and reflection of the techno-logical age it invents to criticize.

In fact, technology has always been part of the human landscape, from chipped stones, from plows and altars, to trains, super-highways, telephones and computer generated virtual realities. Each technology involves gains and losses. To build a temple is to create a quarry or deforest a wood. To gather here is to separate there. The issue in understanding technology is not to

deride it as such, which is equivalent to deriding the human condition as such (which is a theological rather than a philosophical position), but to grasp and then evaluate what is peculiar about its contemporary manifestations in our time of modern science.

Utopians, in contrast to dystopians, envision in technology a marvelous solution to perennial human problems, ameliorating or eliminating the suffer-ings of illness, deformity, hunger, aging, natural disaster, crime, poverty, war, inequity, boredom, death, and all the woes that have plagued a hitherto primi-tive and unenlightened humanity. Such wide-eyed optimism regarding technology’s potential contribution to human affairs arose with the general European enthusiasm that surrounded the rise of modern science. Far before such twentieth-century horrors as mass murder, the totalitarian state, and nuclear meltdown, the threats facing an earlier humanity originated primarily from the natural environment: floods, earthquakes, plagues, wild animals, starvation, and the like. Combining the new-found Renaissance respect for worldliness with an appreciation for the amazing new empirical discoveries of modern science (e.g., the astronomical reckonings of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and above all Newton), utopians envisioned a world no longer misled and disordered by the superstitions of religion, but one reconstructed and controlled according to the enlightened logic of verifiable scientific knowl-edge. Only through an enlightened political and social application of the new-found knowledge of modern science, would a genuine rather than a merely fancied human redemption become actualized. Modern science, along with the technologies that both made it possible and that it made possible, would open a new era of human amelioration and perfection on earth.

Enthralled by modern science, “progressive” European thinkers—one thinks of Fourier, Comte, Saint-Simon, Marx, Bakunin, among others—have constructed more or less elaborate articulations of a desired future society organized according to purely scientific principles. Even the founder of con-temporary phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, who is rarely thought of as a social thinker, concluded his philosophical career opposing the rising Euro-pean fascism of the 1930s with his saving vision of a rigorously and com-pletely scientific humanity. If a god can no longer save us from science, science can save us from God. In every case, however, the utopian vision of technology mistakes the contribution of an important part of the human project, its scientific-technical component, for the whole of that project. Just as the dystopian vision underestimates the role of technology in humanity’s past, and therefore exaggerates its impact on the present and foreseeable future, the utopian vision overestimates the role of technology in humanity’s future, and therefore diminishes the positive role of the nontechnological in humanity’s past, present, and future.

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Quantity and Quality: Scientism and Romanticism

Another illuminating way to understand the conflicts and distortions gener-ated by the opposed interpretations and evaluations of modern science and technology is to recognize what is gained and what is lost in the initial motivation and driving force of philosophy conceived of as science. To put the matter as succinctly and boldly as possible (and therefore also to put aside a variety of legitimate qualifications), we can say that philosophy begins as the overcoming of creative imagination in the name of objective knowledge.

As “mere” opinion (doxa) must give way to knowledge (episteme), so, too, all “mere fanciful” myth must give way to reason. What is too often forgotten in this project, forgotten precisely because of the intellectual gains and achieve-ments of this very project, is that “opinion” and “knowledge,” “myth” and

“reason,” arise at the same time, each the dialectical partner of the other. The opinions to be corrected by knowledge are precisely the opinions whose insufficiency are first insisted upon and revealed by standards appropriate to knowledge. So, too, the inadequacy of myth derives from the adequacy of reason. The “failure” of particularity derives from the elevation of universal-ity. What is deemed “inauthentic” depends on what counts as “authentic.”

The Socratic project of philosophy, originating in a time of social and political upheaval and uncertainty in ancient Greece, demands nothing less than a radical regrounding of human discourse and life upon reason. The sage, the oracle, the poet, the rhetorician, and the tyrant (whether demagogue or aristocrat) as well, are to give way to the scientist. One would no longer

“merely” do the good (out of filial piety, religious obligation, adherence to tradition, etc.), one would first have to know the good, and only the good known would be truly good. Only the life of reason—the philosophical life—

would be the true life, authentic life. Knowing would now and henceforth be the ground of being. All else would become superstition, ignorance, näiveté, immaturity, if not malice and machination.

Here is not the place to elaborate a history of Western intellectual devel-opment. Suffice to say of the origins of philosophy, of a life guided by knowledge, that it finds its principle in Parmenides’ identification of being with thinking, and of thinking with the strictures of a formal logic (principles of noncontradiction and excluded middle), organized by Aristotle in a manner authoritative for two thousand years. The culmination of this approach came with Kant and/or Hegel (Marx), for whom the real—whether determined by an ongoing representational project as with Kant or through an immanent dialect as with Hegel (Marx)—was that which was rational, and only the rational could qualify as real. What is too often overlooked, however, is that between Parmenides and Kant/Hegel, the notion of reason itself underwent a

drastic revision, usually called “Cartesian.” With the rise of modern science (and technology) a rationality modeled on mathematical analysis, deductive logic, and efficient causality substituted itself for a reason, which, though oriented by epistemology, was nevertheless always conceived far more broadly.

The reduction of reason to conformity to the quantitative approach of modern

The reduction of reason to conformity to the quantitative approach of modern