03B – Technology and Human Ends: Human Beings as “Makers” or “Tool-Users”

Mumford, Lewis (1966). Tool-users vs. Homo sapiens and the megamachine.

Mumford concludes humans’ mid-twentieth-century commitment to the rationalism of science and technology – and to a vision of a future in which humans not only will have mastered nature but will have separated themselves from it as much as possible – is flawed and unbalanced in that it ignores the essence of human identity and organic life and exalts “technical and scientific progress” (Mumford, 2003, p. 344) with its promises of a chance at the god-like omniscience and omnipotence of the ruling elite or of a position with the cocoon-like comforts of the docile masses (Mumford, 2003, pp. 349-351). First of all, Mumford argues the notion of humans as differentiated by their capacities to create and use tools (or technology) due to hand and finger dexterity is incorrect (Mumford, 2003, pp. 345-346). According to Mumford, humans’ mental capacities as manifested in abstract, symbolic thought, language development and communication, autonomous and social activities, and varied human personalities are what differentiate the human species (Mumford, 2003, pp. 345-347). Mumford also argues, however, it is this abundance of mental capacity that can also drive humans to excess through “demonic promptings of the unconscious,” for instance the libertine excess of a privileged elite exempt from meaningful work or the destructive excess of political or commercial criminals exempt from meaningful prosecution (Mumford, 2003, p. 349).

In Mumford’s view, as an antidote to this propensity for excess, humans have created various means of maintaining balance, by directing surplus mental capacity and energy into “the primeval repetitive order of ritual,” into development of “the ultimate collective product, spoken language,” or into “the discipline of tool-making and tool-using” (Mumford, 2003, pp. 347-348). It is not with balanced, community-based antidotes to excess Mumford takes issue. Mumford takes issue with the antidote to excess embodied by the “megamachine,” an antidote that paradoxically reveals itself not as an antidote, but as a “monotechnics, devoted to the increase of power and wealth by the systematic organization of workaday activities in a rigidly mechanical pattern” for the enrichment of centralized authorities such as the Egyptian pharaohs and their religious, military, and secular nobilities. According to Mumford, this is when humans first became estranged from local, varied, meaningful work devoted to organic “growth and reproduction” and first became subject to “work at a single specialized task, segregated from other biological and social activities,” or in other words, subject to the massive organization, specialization, and mobilization of human resources (Mumford, 2003, p. 348).

In this scenario, most humans have become the unwitting components of a rather abstract machine controlled by a ruling elite with the machine’s primary purpose being the enrichment of that elite. Therefore, from Mumford’s perspective, this abstract machine is not an antidote to restrain humans’ excess, but is rather itself the most perverted expression of that excess, that is of the “delusions of omniscience and omnipotence” harbored in the surplus energy of the human mind. “The archetypal collective machine – the human model for all later specialized machines – the “Megamachine” (Mumford, 2003, p. 348) is for Mumford that which poses the most profound threat to the essence of humanity (Mumford, 2003, 350), especially since it has been vastly empowered by the compounding factors of the influence of the “mathematical and physical sciences upon technology” (Mumford, 2003, p. 344) and the “current scientific and educational ideology, which is now pressing to shift the locus of human activity from the organic environment, the social group, and the human personality to the Megamachine, considered as the ultimate expression of human intelligence” (Mumford, 2003, p. 350). In Mumford’s view, this “machine-centered metaphysics” should be forsaken and replaced with a balanced, life-centered metaphysics that is less centrally-controlled, less “coercive, totalitarian, and – in its direct human expression – compulsive and grimly irrational” (Mumford, 2003, p. 350).

03A – Heidegger on Technology

Heidegger, Martin (1954). The question concerning technology.

In the first paragraph of his essay, Heidegger states his purpose as to ask questions about technology (since questioning builds a way and “the way is thinking”) and thereby to “build a free relationship to” technology, where a “free relationship” is defined as a relationship that allows a person to grasp the “essence” of technology. Once a person grasps the essence of technology, that understanding will enable the person to “experience the technological within its own bounds.” Using what he considers the commonly accepted definition of technology as a “means and a human activity” as his point of departure, Heidegger embarks on a long argument about how although this definition may be “correct,” it is not “true” (Heidegger, 2003, pp. 253); and if it is not true, then a person whose understanding is limited to this definition only does not grasp the “essence” of technology and therefore does not have a free relationship to it. Heidegger points out that although the “essence” of something has since ancient times been understood to mean what a thing is, his notion of the “essence” of something requires that the “essence” be “true.” Since Heidegger has already stated he does not believe the commonly accepted “instrumental and anthropological definition of technology” to be “true,” he is obligated to explain why – and his explanation involves rationalizing how words and concepts, when considered a certain way, become other words and concepts that become other words and concepts until Heidegger has arrived at his destination, a destination where an “instrument” equals a “means” equals a cause equals one of the “four causes” known since at least Aristotle’s time equals “to be responsible for” equals “to reveal” equals “technology” as a “way of reveling” equals “truth.” At this destination, if one has followed Heidegger’s rationalizations and accepts them, then one is prepared for the next leg of the journey; and on this next leg, Heidegger promises “another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us” (Heidegger, 2003, pp. 253-255).

Heidegger guides us into and through this new realm by employing again a host of linguistic transformations (or etymologies or derivations, if one prefers) that begin with “the revealing” becoming “a challenging” (perhaps equivalent to “the will to mastery) with humans as the creators of “modern technology” based upon science and physics (as opposed to pre-scientific or artisanal technology) that “puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored” and used as a means toward some end that consists, essentially, of “driving on to the maximum yield at the minimum expense” (Heidegger, 2003, p. 256). It appears, then, that for Heidegger the realm of technology we have now entered presupposes an inexplicable force, but he does not call it an inexplicable force. Perhaps the inexplicable force is what at the beginning of his essay he calls a “will to mastery” that becomes “a revealing” that becomes “a challenging” that becomes an “enframing.” Heidegger admits his use of the term “enframing” is unique and he elaborates that it “means the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing reserve” (Heidegger, 2003, p. 258). Standing reserve here seems to mean to Heidegger what is commonly considered stored or surplus material or human resources that could be deployed to attain some objective. At this point in his essay, Heidegger proposes the “essence of modern technology starts man upon the way” of revealing that discloses to man how “the actual everywhere” is standing reserve – and, perhaps most important – Heidegger makes another linguistic leap (or draws another linguistic circle, so to speak) and introduces the term “destining” which he says is “the sending that gathers,” and apparently defines in different (but equally abstract) terms an aspect of what he earlier called the “enframing” (Heidegger, 2003, p. 260) and what I proposed may be called the inexplicable force. Heidegger never calls anything an inexplicable force, however, choosing rather to travel in what appear to be infinitely spiraling loops of terms conveniently defined by other terms Heidegger defined until the last term he defines is defined by the first term he defined and he arrives at the same place from which he departed. In this case, that place of departure is “the essence of technology” and that essence is “ambiguous” and “such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, i.e. of truth” (Heidegger, 2003, p. 263).