Outline for the First Discussion in the Introduction to Philosophy of Technology

Instructions:

1. Every student enrolled in the course must prepare carefully in light of the lecture notes and assigned readings, and take an active part in discussion. This discussion class is also a quiz, and the grade will account for 20% of the final course grade. Anyone absent will receive a score of 0. Anyone who attends class but does not speak will receive a score of 0.

2. Audit students are welcome to prepare carefully and participate actively in discussion.

3. Every question should be prepared seriously, but questions in which one has greater interest and for which one has a stronger knowledge base may be given priority. Everyone should give a total presentation of about five minutes on one or several questions that they have prepared especially well (this is the main basis for grading). One should also be prepared for the other questions and have one’s own views, so as not to be thrown into a fluster if called on to answer, but there is no need for a long-winded exposition.

4. All discussion of all questions must be grounded in the theories of Marx, Marcuse, Ellul, and Mumford, so that what is said has substance and a basis in evidence.

Questions:

1. What is technology? What does it mean, what might it mean, and why should we pay attention to the issue of technology?

2. Is technology neutral? Is it value-free?

3. Do modernity, modern people, and modern technology share a common essence, or are they not intrinsically related? If there is such a common essence, what is it?

4. Have modern people and modern technology fallen into a predicament? If not, why not? If so, how can one get out of it?

The first question: what is technology? It seems that Marcuse, Ellul, and Mumford all did not give a clear definition of technology, and that is as it should be. Rap said it well: “As soon as one tries to define the word ‘technology,’ one discovers that to abandon the term’s vagueness is to reduce the complexity of the problem improperly, thereby erasing the complexity of the object under study.”

That is indeed so. Is not the insistence on precise conceptual definition, on drawing boundaries around a topic, and so on, itself a certain kind of one-dimensional way of thinking? So the question of what technology is is bound to be impossible to explain clearly; if it were explained clearly, that would actually be bad.

Of course, however, an interpretation of what technology is is certainly necessary, and what is especially important is to discuss what technology means. When one says “what technology means,” one always has to say “what technology means for XX.” This question is bound to involve discussion of the reciprocal relations between technology and human beings, nature, reason, civilization, science, and so forth.

When one chooses different “XX” in discussing what technology means to it, the question of “what technology is” will also take on different forms. For example, when discussing what technology means for human existence, we can regard technology as the externalization of human essence or as the “ontological difference” of being human; when discussing what technology means for nature, we can regard technology and nature as a pair of mutually exclusive categories, or else regard technology as the medium between human beings and nature; when discussing what technology means for civilization, we can say that technology is the carrier of culture or the organizational form of society as a whole; when discussing what technology means for science, we can say that technology is applied science, or that science is theoretical technology, or that the two should be independent of each other, and so on.

Why should we pay attention to the issue of technology? Because the issue of technology is everywhere. When we care about those categories opposed to technology—such as asking what human beings are, what nature is, what culture is, what science is, and so on—in the end we are forced to trace the question back to technology. We can sense that among the various problems perplexing modern humanity, there is some class of problems entangled within them. We might as well call such a class of problems technological problems, or problems of modernity.

The second question: is technology value-free? One view is that technology is a “double-edged sword,” which is actually quite apt. The metaphor of the “double-edged sword” has three layers of meaning: first, technology is value-neutral; a good person wields the sword to uphold justice, a bad person wields the sword to gain wealth and take lives, and the sword itself is neither good nor bad; second, technology bears a certain value-charge, it is dangerous, and while it may play a good role, it may also at any moment turn against its master; third, technology not only carries values, but provides values: when what I hold in my hand is a sword, what I think of as “good” is this sword successfully piercing the enemy, and what I can think of as “bad” is this sword injuring me myself. The standard of what is good and what is bad is in fact supplied by technology.

In fact, if we probe further: what does the so-called “value” we are discussing actually mean? Originally, the word value was used only in the economic field; its becoming a core concept in ethics is actually quite recent, certainly no earlier than the second half of the nineteenth century. In other words, value ethics is a product of the technological age! Before that, the ancient Greeks spoke of “virtue,” and Kant spoke of “imperatives”; ethics did not talk about value.

The etymology of value is “that which is worth” and “that which has force.” Leaving aside for the moment the relationship between “having force” and technological rationality. Moving from talking about something being “worth it” to talking about something “having value” is by no means merely a change in wording or tone; rather, it abstracts “value” as something objective (such as matter or universals) out of concrete things and situations—just as saying that something “is burning,” to saying that a certain kind of substance “is combustible,” and then to saying that it “contains phlogiston,” are obviously utterly different. Every step in the extension from “is” to “is” to “has” is not easy at all, and such extensions are often wrong, as in the case of the phlogiston theory. Similarly, to speak of some event or thing as “worth it” does not mean that one must acknowledge that there is some general “value” within these things.

But modern ethics seems to have accepted “value” without the slightest hesitation. And such modern ethics, with value as its theme, is at the same time “normative ethics,” almost embodying everything that Ellul’s technological system or Marcuse’s one-dimensional man says about technology—norm, order, rigor, precision, quantification, effectiveness, control, operationalism, and the severing of is and ought…

Space is limited, so let me go straight to the fourth question: there is nothing much to say about falling into a predicament. How does one get out of it?

I think Marx, Marcuse, Ellul, and Mumford each offer a different path:

Marx initiated the revolutionary route. Marx believed that the economic base determines the superstructure, and that different productive forces and relations of production sustain different social formations and even ideologies. If we do not regard technology merely as “science and technology,” but also regard social systems and relations of production as “technology,” then we find that Marx was in fact trying to launch a technological revolution. He realized that the crises of capitalism in economy, culture, and morality, as well as the exploitation suffered by workers, were fundamentally technological problems—problems of an incompatibility between relations of production and productive forces. Thus, although Marx devoted his life to concern for workers’ misery and social injustice, he was not concerned with questions such as ethics. He also mentioned that communism would by no means engage in moral preaching. What he cared about was overcoming the crisis through changes in the technological domain; specifically, in the capitalist era, that meant launching a social revolution.

Marcuse, by contrast, focused on criticism. On the one hand, he did not offer a way to overcome the predicament; on the other hand, he was not claiming that human beings were “helpless” before technology. What he emphasized was that one simply should not persist in seeking a “solution.” For only those who have despair can have hope. The “way out” he offers is not to look for a way out, and to obtain hope in despair. In addition, Feenberg says that Marcuse represents a kind of “technological aesthetics,” and mentions that Marcuse believed there could be some new technology activated by art, by the irrational, and by feminists; this indeed fits Marcuse’s line of thought.

Ellul appears to be wholly pessimistic. But I saw an article (1008-3758(2005)04-0247-0) saying that domestic understanding of Ellul mainly comes through the two books The Technological Society and The Technological System and the article “The Technological Order,” which is obviously too limited a perspective for Ellul, who produced 43 books and more than 1,000 articles. Particularly noteworthy is that Ellul was a theologian, and his reflections on technology were undoubtedly from the standpoint of a believer. Ellul himself once said: what he opposed was faith in technology, not technology itself. Clearly, when Ellul ruled out one possible force after another that might restrain technology, what he ultimately sought was a way out through religion and faith. Chinese people often do not quite
think highly of religious theology. When Ellul says that only Christianity can save humanity, our understanding is that Ellul pessimistically believes humanity is beyond saving; this is obviously a misunderstanding.

Mumford chose to seek a way out in humanistic culture, overcoming the technological predicament with the light of human nature. Mumford believed that mind and culture play a निर्ण决ifying role in technological development. Western technology basically all came from other civilizations, but why did the age of technology arise only in the West? Mumford pointed out that this was because only in the West was there a corresponding cultural foundation. In fact, we often make this same argument ourselves. For example, we often complain: why did the gunpowder invented by the Chinese only know how to be used for fireworks? Why did the compass made by the Chinese only know how to be used for geomancy? What this really means is that humanistic factors determine technological development. Taking a step back, even if we adopt technological determinism and say that culture is determined by technology, since the relationship between the two is so close, our guidance of culture can certainly in turn guide the development of technology—just as when we say that a person’s handwriting is influenced by his character, conversely, practicing calligraphy can also cultivate one’s moral character. In short, regardless of who determines whom among institution, culture, faith, and technology, the fact is that they are tightly entangled together. No matter where the final root of the problem lies, and no matter in which field one launches an effort, one may still be able to contribute to finally getting out of the predicament of modernity as a whole.

April 12, 2007

Latest Comments
  
Gu Chu

2007-04-12 22:04:34 http://epr.ycool.com/ [Reply]

Today’s discussion was a bit underperforming. The key thing is that beforehand I had basically written down all the lines of thought—I feel that if I don’t write a speech draft, I will inevitably panic inside, but once I finish the draft too early, I feel reassured, set the draft aside, and after a couple of days I forget all the lines of thought that I had considered at the time but did not write down… Perhaps in the future it would be better to write only an outline…
As for the so-called route I myself proposed for getting out of the predicament, the fifth route, actually that was because I got a bit muddled in my thinking. Originally, I was talking about the solution of religion or religious-style dissemination based on the monastery effect mentioned by Neil Postman. At that time I had not yet thought of Ellul’s theology; later I realized Ellul’s religious route, and then my route could have been merged into Ellul’s. But when I spoke on the spot, my thinking was muddled, and I forgot which route I was actually talking about.
Whitehead said that humanity’s future will depend on people’s understanding of the relationship between science and religion. I think the issue of religion is quite important for humankind, and it is also an issue I have always paid very close attention to. The route I originally thought of was the path of religion. Modern technological civilization (at least to a very large extent) comes from Christianity. Christianity is one of the sources of modern predicaments; where one falls, one must rise again from there. Religion and faith are the field in which one can most accomplish something.
The influence of religion has always been quite enormous from beginning to end, something Chinese people often find hard to understand, just as we may be surprised that as many as 80 or 90 percent of people in the United States today still believe in God, and that the religiously conservative forces among scientists are no smaller than those in the general population, and so on these statistics

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.