Philosophy of Technology

Abstract

Beginnings: My first experience of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) was at Northwestern University; the business meeting was trying to decide whether its name should be “the Society for Existential Philosophy and Phenomenology” or “the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy”—it spent nearly three hours with impassioned speeches made by many now departed mighty dead and others still here. I was a graduate student, just starting a dissertation on Paul Ricoeur, and I sat wondering where all this would lead. And we are now half a century later, with SPEP the second-largest philosophy group in America. The task for me is somehow to condense fifty years around a specific theme entailing technologies and their treatment by “Continental” philosophies. I will do this by doing time slices as related to a cast of characters, both individual and social. “SPEP” will be my corporate character for Continental philosophy; it is where its interests are expressed and indicated. Then as a primary individual character, I will refer to “Heidegger's ghost,” always and still a prominent figure and interpreter of Technology; here his death date, 1976, will stand for a watershed between what I will caricature as the Old Technologies and the New Technologies. I, myself, will be the narrator but also an actor, with my own three-decades-plus history in the philosophy of technology.I now turn to a few especially significant event markers: 1968. The first significant event marker, 1968 was the international year of student revolts. I was in Paris, along with many now retirement-cusp SPEP people, experiencing the “events of May.” Similar events reached from Tokyo to Berlin to Columbia and Kent State. Several academic but symptomatic results include the disappearance of tweed and ties but also titles—since then I am everywhere “Don” and rarely “Professor Ihde.” This was also the epitome of the organized protest march, become the standard to this day from Tiananmen Square to Tahrir Square, Egypt. The practices invented then have challenged and often enough, brought down regimes, and youthful democratization movements still repeat themselves.1976. Heidegger's death: he joins the mighty dead and remains today as “Heidegger's ghost.” Often cited as the founder of philosophy of technology, he remains almost the only figure of a cadre of European philosophers of the early twentieth century still discussed concerning technology. I use his death date as the watershed between the “Old” and “New” technologies. Heidegger divided his technologies in various ways, most often by contrasting old, largely handcraft technologies to “Modern” or industrial technologies. Stone bridges, jugs, peasant shoes, Greek temples, and his famous hammer stand out for the first; Rhine River dams, steel bridges, the atom bomb, death chambers, and modern agriculture are examples of the modern. Modern technologies are mass-produced, gigantic, and largely mechanical—in short, “industrial” of the sort so familiar early in the twentieth century. I stick to 1976 as my watershed, in spite of the fact that most of his late work on technology was done in the mid-1950s.1979. I list this date because it was the year several books were published that changed the interpretation of technologies for our era. Laboratory Life, by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1979), shifted the interpretation of both science and technology to a praxis-oriented and materially sensitive interpretation. Latour followed up with Science in Action (1987), in which instruments played crucial roles in producing scientific facts. The year 1979 was also when the analytic philosopher Mario Bunge, in “Five Buds of Techno-philosophy,” pronounced that while technologies ought to occupy philosophical attention, to date, he claimed, there had not been a single monograph on the philosophy of technology. But this was also the year of my own Technics and Praxis: A Philosophy of Technology (1979),