After reading the attached file, NO OUTSIDE SOURCE…
Reflect also on the piece by Mitchum. How does Mitchumcharacterize different attitudes and approaches to technology?What sorts of relationships with technology have you observed in society in your experience? Which of the approaches the Mitchumdiscusses most appeal to you? Explain. Also, conclude with a philosophical question designed to open up further discussion.
Philosphy of Technology - Robert C. Sharff Three Ways of Being-With Technology Carl Mitcham 45 In any serious discussion of issues associated with technology and humanity there readily arises a general question about the primary member in this relationship. On the one hand, it is difficult to deny that we exercise some choice over the kinds of technics with which we live – that is, that we control technology. On the other, it is equally difficult to deny that technics exert profound influences on the ways we live – that is, structure our existence. We build our buildings, Winston Churchill once remarked (apropos a proposal for a new Parliament building), then our buildings build us. But which comes first, logically if not temporally, the builder or the build- ings? Which is primary, humanity or technology? This is, of course, a chicken-and-egg question, one not subject to any straightforward or unqualified answer. But it is not therefore insignificant, nor is it enough to propose as some kind of synthesis that there is simply a mutual relationship between the two, that humanity and technology are always found together. Mutual relation- ship is not some one thing; mutual relationships take many different forms. There are, for instance, mutualities of parent and child, of husband and wife, of citizens, and so forth. Humanity and technology can be found together in more than one way. Rather than argue the primacy of one or the other factor or the cliché of mutuality in the humanity-technology relationship, I propose to outline three forms the relationship itself can take, three ways of being-with technology. To speak of three ways of being-with technology is necessarily to borrow and adapt a category from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) in a manner that deserves some acknowledgment. In his seminal work Heidegger proposes to develop a new understanding of being human by taking the primordial human condition, being-in-the- world, and subjecting this given to what he calls an existential analysis. The analysis proceeds by way of eluci- dating three equiprimordial aspects of this condition of being human: the world within which the human finds itself, the being-in relationship, and the being who is in the relation- ship – all as a means of approaching what, for Heidegger, is the fundamental question, the meaning of Being. The fundamental question need not, on this occasion, concern us. What does concern us is the central place of technics in Heidegger’s analysis and the disclosure of being-with as one of its central features. For Heidegger the worldhood of the world, as he calls it, comes into view through technical engagements, which reveal a network of equipment and artifacts ready-to-hand for manipula- tion, and other human beings likewise so engaged. These others are neither just technically ready-to-hand (like tools) nor even scientifically present-at-hand (like natural objects); on the contrary, they are like the very human being who notices them in that “they are there too, and there with it.”1 The being-with relationship thus disclosed through technical engagements is, for Heidegger, primarily Carl Mitcham, “Three Ways of Being-With Technology,” in From Artifact to Habitat: Studies in the Critical Engagement of Technology, Research in Technology Series 3 (Bethlehem, PA: LeHigh University Press, 1990), pp. 31–59. Reprinted by permission of Associated University Presses. Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: An Anthology, Second Edition. Edited by Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 524 carl mitcham social in character; it refers to the social character of the world that comes to light through technical prac- tice. Such a world is not composed solely of tools and artifacts, but of tools used with others, and artifacts belonging to others. Technical engagements are not just technical but have an immediately and intimately social dimension. Indeed, this is all so immediate that it requires some labored stepping back even to recog- nize and state – the processes of distancing and articu- lation that are in part precisely what philosophy is all about. The present attempt to step back and examine vari- ous ways of being-with technology rather than being- with others (through technology) takes off from but does not proceed in the same manner as Heidegger’s social analysis of the They and the problem of authen- ticity in the technological world. For Heidegger, being- with refers to an immediate personal presence in technics. Social being-with can manifest itself, however, not just on the level of immediate or existential pres- ence but also in ideas. Indeed, the social world is as much, if not more, a world of ideas as of persons. Persons hold ideas and interact with others and with things on the basis of them. These ideas can even enclose the realm of technics – that is, become a lan- guage or logos of technics, a “technology.” The idea of being-with technology presupposes this “logical” encompassing of technics by a society and its philosophical or protophilosophical articula- tion. For many people, however, the ideas that guide their lives may not be held with conscious awareness or full articulation. They often take the form of myth. Philosophical argument and discussion then intro- duces into such a world of ideas a kind of break or rupture with the immediately given. This break or rupture need not require the rejection or abandoning of that given, but it will entail the bringing of that given into fuller consciousness or awareness – from which it must be accepted (or rejected) in a new way or on new grounds. Against this background, then, I propose to develop historico-philosophical descriptions, necessarily some- what truncated, of three alternative ways of being-with technology. The first is what may be called ancient skepticism; the second, Renaissance and Enlightenment optimism; and the third, romantic ambiguity or uneasi- ness. Even in the somewhat simplified form of ideal types in which they will be presented here, consideration of the issues that divide these three ways of being-with technology may perhaps illuminate the difficulties we face in trying to live with modern technology and its manifest problems. Ancient Skepticism The original articulation of a relationship between humanity and technics, an articulation that is in its earliest forms coeval with the appearance of recorded history, can be stated boldly as “technology is bad but necessary” or, perhaps more carefully, as “technology (that is, the study of technics) is necessary but dangerous.” The idea is hinted at by a plethora of archaic myths, such as the story of the Tower of Babel or the myths of Prometheus, Hephaestos, or Daedalus and Icarus. Certainly the transi- tion from hunting and gathering to the domestication of animals and plants introduced a profound and profoundly disturbing transition into culture. Technics, according to these myths, although to some extent required by humanity and thus on occasion a cause for legitimate celebration,2 easily turn against the human by severing it from some larger reality – a severing that can be manifest in a failure of faith or shift of the will, a refusal to rely on or trust God or the gods, whether manifested in nature or in providence.3 Ethical arguments in support of this distrust or uneasi- ness about technical activities can be detected in the ear- liest strata of Western philosophy. According to the Greek historian Xenophon, for instance, his teacher Socrates (469–399 b.c.) considered farming, the least technical of the arts, to be the most philosophical of occupations. Although the earth “provides the good things most abundantly, farming does not yield them up to softness but … produces a kind of manliness … . Moreover, the earth, being a goddess, teaches justice to those who are able to learn” (Oeconomicus 5.4 and 12). This idea of agri- culture as the most virtuous of the arts, one in which human technical action tends to be kept within proper limits, is repeated by representatives of the philosophical tradition as diverse as Plato,4 Aristotle,5 St. Thomas Aquinas,6 and Thomas Jefferson. 7 Elsewhere Xenophon notes Socrates’ distinction between questions about whether to perform an action and how to perform it, along with another distinction between scientific or technological questions concerning the laws of nature and ethical or political questions about what is right and wrong, good and bad, pious and impious, just and unjust. In elaborating on the first distinction, Socrates 525three ways of being-with technology stresses that human beings must determine for themselves how to perform their actions – that they can take lessons in “construction (tektonikos), forging metal, agriculture, ruling human beings, and … calculation, economics, and military strategy,” and therefore should not depend on the gods for help in “counting, measuring, or weighing”; the ultimate consequences of their technical actions are nonetheless hidden. His initial example is even taken from agriculture: the man who knows how to plant a field does not know whether he will reap the harvest. Thus whether we should employ our technical powers is a subject about which we must rely on guidance from the gods.8 At the same time, with regard to the second distinction, Socrates argues that because of the supreme importance of ethical and political issues, human beings should not allow themselves to become preoccupied with scientific and technological pursuits. In the intellectual autobiography attributed to him in the Phaedo, for instance, Socrates relates how he turned away from natural science because of the cosmological and moral confusion it tended to engender.9 In the Memorabilia it is similarly said of Socrates that He did not like others to discuss the nature of all things, nor did he speculate on the “cosmos” of the sophists or the necessities of the heavens, but he declared that those who worried about such matters were foolish. And first he would ask whether such persons became involved with these prob- lems because they believed that their knowledge of human things was complete or whether they thought they were obligated to neglect human things to speculate on divine things. (Memorabilia