The Third Path That Can Be Chosen—An Interpretation of Feenberg’s Philosophy of Technology
Introduction
American philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg is a representative of contemporary Western Marxist philosophy of technology. His critical theory of technology seeks to open up a “third path” in philosophy of technology—Feenberg hopes to carve out a new route between the traditional optimism and pessimism about technology, inheriting the critique and reflection on modern technology found in the Frankfurt School, Heidegger, Ellul, and other pessimists, while also retaining something of the utopian ideal found in Marx and in theorists of technology as a tool. Feenberg believes that he will “preserve the strengths of both theories while opening up the prospect of fundamental change.”[①]
Feenberg’s critical theory of technology digests and makes use of many intellectual resources—Marx, Heidegger, Marcuse, Habermas, Foucault, the sociology of scientific knowledge, and so on. It is hard to summarize or survey his thought comprehensively in a short space. This article merely hopes, from my own perspective, to interpret some of the more inspiring points in Feenberg’s philosophy of technology. Some of the discussion below may not fully match Feenberg’s original intent, but rather reflects my own understanding of a third path in philosophy of technology that goes beyond optimism and pessimism.
“Choice” Makes Human Beings Human
The “choice” and “redesign” of technology, and hence of modernity, are the goals toward which Feenberg’s entire critical theory of technology is aimed. He says: “Must human beings submit to the harsh logic of the machine? Or can technology be fundamentally redesigned so that it serves its creators better? This is the ultimate question concerning the future of industrial civilization.”[②]
Feenberg’s emphasis on “choice” is the key difference between him and both technological optimism and technological pessimism. In Feenberg’s view, both optimists and pessimists evade or deny the possibility that human beings can “choose” technology—“Although the instrumental theory and the substantive theory of technology differ in many ways, both take the attitude of ‘take it or leave it’ toward technology. On the one hand, if technology is merely an instrument and has nothing to do with values, then the design of technology is not a political issue; what needs to be discussed is only the scope and efficiency of technological application. On the other hand, if technology is a means of domination over culture, then we are doomed either to drive technology toward dystopia or to retreat to a more primitive way of life. In either case, we cannot change technology: in all theories, technology is a fate. Reason in technological form lies beyond human intervention or correction.”[③]
Traditional optimists and pessimists alike think that technological development does not depend on human choice and is wholly deterministic; the only future that technological development will produce is, for the optimists, a good one, while for the pessimists it is a bad one. But neither believes that human beings can choose their own future—“Determinists claim that there are no such alternative choices, and believe that technological progress always leads to the same results everywhere.”[④]
Feenberg opposes the blind optimism of theorists of technological neutrality. Like the pessimists, he thinks modern technology is “dangerous,” and that it will lead humanity toward a sorrowful future—if people cannot find effective means of resistance in time.
So what should we do in the face of dangerous modern technology? The theorists of technological substantivism have not pointed people in any direction. Either they unrealistically escape by adopting an attitude that negates all the achievements of civilization, indulging in irrationalism or romantic fantasies of “going back to the primitives”; or, like the Frankfurt School, they are overfocused on critique and evade discussion of how reconstruction should proceed—they inherited only Marx as the “skeptic who doubts everything,” not the Marx as revolutionary who emphasized that “the point is to change the world.”
The question “What should we do?” is not the same as the “operationalism” criticized by Marcuse—because the answer we hope for need not be a clearly defined set of procedures; we may simply want hints about what we are able to do. Nor does believing that “human beings can make choices” amount to anthropocentrism. Even if we take a step back and say that technology is indeed an irresistible “fate,” and that technology is not created by human beings but instead shapes human beings, so what? Does that mean we can no longer speak of our own “choices”? For example, if we believe in a deterministic worldview, if we believe that human beings are nothing but animals or even nothing but a heap of atoms, do we thereby lose the right to speak of free will? This way of thinking is still reductionist in nature. In fact, even if spirit can ultimately be “reduced” to material phenomena (or if matter determines spirit), that does not mean spirit is “merely” material phenomena, still less that ethical issues can be reduced to physics. Similarly, even if technology determines culture, technology is not a human creation, or the fate of technology cannot be escaped, none of this can cancel the question of “how ought we to choose?”
Human beings possess the capacity for “choice,” and this capacity is fundamental to human beings as rational beings. Only by affirming the capacity to choose can we understand and discuss human “reason.” (This article does not discuss whether animals possess the capacity to choose; in fact, examinations of the rational capacity of human beings or animals are always carried out in forms similar to “multiple-choice questions.” The capacity to choose is, after all, the mark of reason.) Of course, many technological pessimists even deny or reject reason itself, which is something Feenberg opposes even more strongly; more on that below.
Technology is everywhere, and any means used to limit technology is itself still some kind of “more subtle technological control”[⑤]. What power can human beings possibly have to extricate themselves from the domain of technology?—The various capacities human beings possess, even the capacity to communicate and think through language, can all be called “technology.” But what makes human beings human is not only technical capacity; what is crucial is the capacity to “choose,” that is, “freedom,” which is even harder to call a technology.
Feenberg denies that what human beings are can be understood independently of technology. In this respect, Feenberg opposes the “commonsense assumption” of technological instrumentalism: “The subject of action—for example, the worker or the state—can be defined independently of their means,” Feenberg points out, “from another perspective, the agent is the means of its own action.”[⑥]In other words, technology is not a neutral means standing outside human beings; it is something that makes human beings human. Yet what is even more crucial is that human essence is “nothing”—or rather, human essence is open; people can choose what they are, and this capacity to choose distinguishes human beings from natural things.
Feenberg says: “In choosing our technology, we become what we are, and this in turn shapes our future choices. Today’s acts of choice have already been permeated by technology, and therefore cannot be understood in the sense of free ‘use’ proposed by instrumental theory. Even so, critical theory denies that modernity can be definitively fixed once and for all by our atomistic, authoritarian, and consumerist culture. The choice of civilization is not determined by autonomous technology, but can be influenced by human action.”[⑦]Here we see that Feenberg’s emphasis on “choice” rests on his understanding of human nature: that we are capable of making choices—this is not an inference drawn from empirical observation, but the most basic presupposition about human beings as human beings.
The emphasis on “choice” and the pursuit of the unity of “necessity and freedom” are also things Marx upheld. This inclination is visible even in Marx’s essays from his secondary-school years— in Marx’s German composition of August 12, 1835, “Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession,” Marx on the one hand acknowledges that a person’s thoughts, like one’s relations in society, “have already begun in some measure to determine themselves before we are able to decide them”[⑧]. But he more strongly emphasizes the vital significance of “choice” for human beings: “Choice is a very great distinction of man from the rest of creation, but at the same time it is an act that can destroy the whole life of a man, ruin all his plans, and make him unhappy.”[⑨]
Here I want to discuss another question—isn’t the substantivist theory of technology that denies or evades “choice” just value-neutral theory? Yet just as one can hardly discuss ethical questions without free will, if there is no “choice,” where does the problem of “value” come from?
Only when we can speak of deciding on a certain action is it possible to ask whether choosing to do so is good or bad. Just as in a society in which there is no “exchange” that can be chosen—meaning, that is, people may have choices about what they exchange for what, how much they exchange, and how they exchange it—where all goods are ready at hand, no (economic) value problem will arise; if we have never had the possibility of choosing in the first place, why should we think about value problems?
Feenberg repeatedly emphasizes that modernity and modern technology are not “ready-made” or necessary. Here we might as well reflect on this strange question: why do those who believe in ready-made outcomes and determinism still so matter-of-factly discuss the issue of technological value? Why can value be abstractly discussed apart from choice? I think that one profound effect technological rationality has had on ethics is the abstraction and essentialization of “value,” and the forgetting of “choice.” Just as in economics, “value” originally arises from concrete, real activities of production, use, and exchange, but capitalism turns value into a symbol, thereby detaching it from concrete activities. “Money,” as the symbolic marker of value, is no longer merely a medium of exchange; it becomes the aim of exchange, becomes value itself. Similarly, in ethics, value also detaches itself from relations and situations and becomes the intrinsic essence of each and every thing. People move ever farther away from those “choice” problems with concrete situations, and instead reduce questions of choice to nothing more than the calculation and weighing of pure and abstract values! If we want to go beyond technological rationality, we should first get out of our excessive fixation on “value” and let the question of “choice” return to our field of vision.
A Different Kind of Reason
As noted above, Feenberg is dissatisfied with the irrationalism of technological pessimists who retreat into romanticism. He thinks that this escape into irrationalism is not only an unrealistic fantasy and an excessively drastic negation of human civilization, but also related to a one-sided understanding of what “reason” is.
Feenberg seeks to reconstruct “another modernity.” He points out that if we adopt a certain understanding of modernity—modernization is Westernization or Americanization[Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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