UNIT 3. Science, Technology, Society, and the Human Condition Lesson 1. Human Flourishing PDF

UNIT 3. Science, Technology, Society, and the Human Condition Lesson 1. Human Flourishing in Science and Technology (Week 9) Introduction: The progress of human civilizations throughout history mirrors the developm...

UNIT 3. Science, Technology, Society, and the Human Condition Lesson 1. Human Flourishing in Science and Technology (Week 9) Introduction: The progress of human civilizations throughout history mirrors the development of science and technology. The human person, as both the bearer and beneficiary of science and technology, flourishes and finds meaning in the world that he/she builds. In the person’s pursuit of the good life, he/she may unconsciously acquire, consume or destroy what the world has to offer. It is thus necessary to reflect on the things that truly matter. Science and technology must be taken as part of human life that merits reflective and – as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger says – meditative thinking. Science and technology, despite its methodical and technical nature, gives meaning to the life of a person making his/her way in the world. To be able to appreciate the fruits of science and technology, they must be examined not only for their function and instrumentality but also for their greater impact on humanity as a whole. The various gadgets, machines, appliances, and vehicles are all tools that make human lives easier because they serve as a means to an end. Their utility lies on providing people with a certain good, convenience, or knowledge. Meanwhile, medical research employs the best scientific and technological principles to come up with the cures for diseases and ways to prevent illnesses to ensure a good quality of life. 6 Physicsal Science Department  Learning Outcomes: At the end of this lesson the students must have, 1. discussed what technology reveals 2. examined modern technology and its role in human flourishing 3. explained the role of art in a technological world Activate your Prior Knowledge This time relate your prior knowledge to the lesson. Think about these questions: What do you think constitute human flourishing? Is our reverence to science justified? Explain. Were we successful so far in trying to tie down technology with what we conceive as human flourishing? 7 Physicsal Science Department  Acquire New Knowledge This part will present the ideas aligned with the objectives of the lesson. TECHNOLOGY AS MODE OF REVEALING Heidegger’s concern with technology is not limited to his writings that are explicitly dedicated to it, and a full appreciation of his views on technology requires some understanding of how the problem of technology fits into his broader philosophical project and phenomenological approach. (Phenomenology, for Heidegger, is a method that tries to let things show themselves in their own way, and not see them in advance through a technical or theoretical lens.) The most important argument in Being and Timethat is relevant for Heidegger’s later thinking about technology is that theoretical activities such as the natural sciences depend on views of time and space that narrow the understanding implicit in how we deal with the ordinary world of action and concern. We cannot construct meaningful distance and direction, or understand the opportunities for action, from science’s neutral, mathematical understanding of space and time. Indeed, this detached and “objective” scientific view of the world restricts our everyday understanding. Our ordinary use of things and our “concernful dealings” within the world are pathways to a more fundamental and more truthful understanding of man and being than the sciences provide; science flattens the richness of ordinary concern. By placing science back within the realm of experience from which it originates, and by examining the way our scientific understanding of time, space, and nature derives from our more fundamental experience of the world, Heidegger, together with his teacher Husserl and some of his students such as Jacob Klein and Alexandre Koyré, helped to establish new ways of thinking about the history and philosophy of science. Heidegger applies this understanding of experience in later writings that are focused explicitly on technology, where he goes beyond the traditional view of technology as machines and technical procedures. He instead tries to think through the essence of technology as a way in which we encounter entities generally, including nature, ourselves, and, indeed, everything. Heidegger’s most influential work on technology is the lecture “The Question Concerning Technology,” published in 1954, which was a revised version of part two of a four-part lecture series he delivered in Bremen in 1949 (his first public speaking appearance since the end of the war). These Bremen lectures have recently been translated into English, for the first time, by Andrew J. Mitchell. Introducing the Bremen lectures, Heidegger observes that because of technology, “all distances in time and space are shrinking” and “yet the hasty setting aside of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in a small amount of distance.” The lectures set out to examine what this nearness is that remains absent and is “even warded off by the restless removal of distances.” As we shall see, we have become almost incapable of experiencing this nearness, let alone understanding it, because all things increasingly present themselves to us as technological: we see them and treat them as what Heidegger calls a “standing reserve,” supplies in a storeroom, as it were, pieces of inventory to be ordered and conscripted, assembled and disassembled, set up and set aside. Everything approaches us merely as a source of energy or as something we must organize. We treat even human capabilities as though they were only means for technological 8 Physicsal Science Department  procedures, as when a worker becomes nothing but an instrument for production. Leaders and planners, along with the rest of us, are mere human resources to be arranged, rearranged, and disposed of. Each and every thing that presents itself technologically thereby loses its distinctive independence and form. We push aside, obscure, or simply cannot see, other possibilities. Common attempts to rectify this situation don’t solve the problem and instead are part of it. We tend to believe that technology is a means to our ends and a human activity under our control. But in truth we now conceive of means, ends, and ourselves as fungible and manipulable. Control and direction are technological control and direction. Our attempts to master technology still remain within its walls, reinforcing them. As Heidegger says in the third of his Bremen lectures, “all this opining concerning technology” — the common critique of technology that denounces its harmful effects, as well as the belief that technology is nothing but a blessing, and especially the view that technology is a neutral tool to be wielded either for good or evil — all of this only shows “how the dominance of the essence of technology orders into its plundering even and especially the human conceptions concerning technology.” This is because “with all these conceptions and valuations one is from the outset unwittingly in agreement that technology would be a means to an end.” This “instrumental” view of technology is correct, but it “does not show us technology’s essence.” It is correct because it sees something pertinent about technology, but it is essentially misleading and not true because it does not see how technology is a way that all entities, not merely machines and technical processes, now present themselves. Of course, were there no way out of technological thinking, Heidegger’s own standpoint, however sophisticated, would also be trapped within it. He attempts to show a way out — a way to think about technology that is not itself beholden to technology. This leads us into a realm that will be familiar to those acquainted with Heidegger’s work on “being,” the central issue in Being and Time and one that is also prominent in some of the Bremen lectures. The basic phenomenon that belongs together with being is truth, or “revealing,” which is the phenomenon Heidegger brings forward in his discussion in “The Question Concerning Technology.” Things can show or reveal themselves to us in different ways, and it is attention to this that will help us recognize that technology is itself one of these ways, but only one. Other kinds of revealing, and attention to the realm of truth and being as such, will allow us to “experience the technological within its own bounds.” Only then will “another whole realm for the essence of technology... open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth.” Placing ourselves back in this realm avoids the reduction of things and of ourselves to mere supplies and reserves. This step, however, does not guarantee that we will fully enter, live within, or experience this realm. Nor can we predict what technology’s fate or ours will be once we do experience it. We can at most say that older and more enduring ways of thought and experience might be reinvigorated and re-inspired. Heidegger believes his work to be preparatory, illuminating ways of being and of being human that are not merely technological. One way by which Heidegger believes he can enter this realm is by attending to the original meaning of crucial words and the phenomena they reveal. Original language — words that precede explicit philosophical, technological, and scientific thought and sometimes survive in colloquial speech — often shows what is true more 9 Physicsal Science Department  tellingly than modern speech does. (Some poets are for Heidegger better guides on the quest for truth than professional philosophers.) The two decisive languages, Heidegger thinks, are Greek and German; Greek because our philosophical heritage derives its terms from it (often in distorted form), and German, because its words can often be traced to an origin undistorted by philosophical reflection or by Latin interpretations of the Greek. (Some critics believe that Heidegger’s reliance on what they think are fanciful etymologies warps his understanding.) Much more worrisome, however, is that Heidegger’s thought, while promising a comprehensive view of the essence of technology, by virtue of its inclusiveness threatens to blur distinctions that are central to human concerns. Moreover, his emphasis on technology’s broad and uncanny scope ignores or occludes the importance and possibility of ethical and political choice. This twofold problem is most evident in the best-known passage from the second Bremen lecture: “Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of countries, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs.” From what standpoint could mechanized agriculture and the Nazis’ extermination camps be “in essence the same”? If there is such a standpoint, should it not be ignored or at least modified because it overlooks or trivializes the most significant matters of choice, in this case the ability to detect and deal with grave injustice? Whatever the full and subtle meaning of “in essence the same” is, Heidegger fails to address the difference in ethical weight between the two phenomena he compares, or to show a path for just political choice. While Heidegger purports to attend to concrete, ordinary experience, he does not consider seriously justice and injustice as fundamental aspects of this experience. Instead, Heidegger claims that what is “horrifying” is not any of technology’s particular harmful effects but “what transposes... all that is out of its previous essence” — that is to say, what is dangerous is that technology displaces beings from what they originally were, hindering our ability to experience them truly. 10 Physicsal Science Department  TECHNOLOGY AS POEISIS The very concepts of thinking (noein) and poetry (poiesis) to which Heidegger refers in this lecture are themselves un-Platonic. To be precise: they are pre-Platonic. Turning to the Pre- Socratic thinkers– in this case Parmenides and Heraclitus– Heidegger retrieves a notion of philosophical thinking supposedly more original than that of the tradition beginning with Plato and Aristotle, for whom thinking was adapted to the model of seeing. Heidegger furthermore retrieves in Sophoclean tragedy a concept of techne, or the 'know-how' corresponding to the activity of poiesis (Herstellen/Fabrication), that is more original than the Platonic-Aristotelian interpretation of this concept understood as a form of mimesis. By way of synthesis, Heidegger then tries to demonstrate the original kinship between the notions of poiesis and noein as they were originally conceived but which, with Plato and Aristotle, become no longer accessible. Let us now follow Heidegger’s understanding of technology more exactingly, relying on the Bremen lectures and “The Question Concerning Technology,” and beginning with four points of Heidegger’s critique (some of which we have already touched on). First, the essence of technology is not something we make; it is a mode of being, or of revealing. This means that technological things have their own novel kind of presence, endurance, and connections among parts and wholes. They have their own way of presenting themselves and the world in which they operate. The essence of technology is, for Heidegger, not the best or most characteristic instance of technology, nor is it a nebulous generality, a form or idea. Rather, to consider technology essentially is to see it as an event to which we belong: the structuring, ordering, and “requisitioning” of everything around us, and of ourselves. The second point is that technology even holds sway over beings that we do not normally think of as technological, such as gods and history. Third, the essence of technology as Heidegger discusses it is primarily a matter of modern and industrial technology. He is less concerned with the ancient and old tools and techniques that antedate modernity; the essence of technology is revealed in factories and industrial processes, not in hammers and plows. And fourth, for Heidegger, technology is not simply the practical application of natural science. Instead, modern natural science can understand nature in the characteristically scientific manner only because nature has already, in advance, come to light as a set of calculable, orderable forces — that is to say, technologically. Some concrete examples from Heidegger’s writings will help us develop these themes. When Heidegger says that technology reveals things to us as “standing reserve,” he means that everything is imposed upon or “challenged” to be an orderly resource for technical application, which in turn we take as a resource for further use, and so on interminably. For example, we challenge land to yield coal, treating the land as nothing but a coal reserve. The coal is then stored, “on call, ready to deliver the sun’s warmth that is stored in it,” which is then “challenged forth for heat, which in turn is ordered to deliver steam whose pressure turns the wheels that keep a factory running.” The factories are themselves challenged to produce tools “through which once again machines are set to work and maintained.” 11 Physicsal Science Department  The passive voice in this account indicates that these acts occur not primarily by our own doing; we belong to the activity. Technological conscriptions of things occur in a sense prior to our actual technical use of them, because things must be (and be seen as) already available resources in order for them to be used in this fashion. This availability makes planning for technical ends possible; it is the heart of what in the Sixties and Seventies was called the inescapable “system.” But these technical ends are never ends in themselves: “A success is that type of consequence that itself remains assigned to the yielding of further consequences.” This chain does not move toward anything that has its own presence, but, instead, “only enters into its circuit,” and is “regulating and securing” natural resources and energies in this never-ending fashion. Technology also replaces the familiar connection of parts to wholes; everything is just an exchangeable piece. For example, while a deer or a tree or a wine jug may “stand on its own” and have its own presence, an automobile does not: it is challenged “for a further conducting along, which itself sets in place the promotion of commerce.” Machines and other pieces of inventory are not parts of self-standing wholes, but arrive piece by piece. These pieces do share themselves with others in a sort of unity, but they are isolated, “shattered,” and confined to a “circuit of orderability.” The isolated pieces, moreover, are uniform and exchangeable. We can replace one piece of standing reserve with another. By contrast, “My hand... is not a piece of me. I myself am entirely in each gesture of the hand, every single time.” Human beings too are now exchangeable pieces. A forester “is today positioned by the lumber industry. Whether he knows it or not, he is in his own way a piece of inventory in the cellulose stock” delivered to newspapers and magazines. These in turn, as Heidegger puts it in “The Question Concerning Technology,” “set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set configuration of opinion becomes available on demand.” Similarly, radio and its employees belong to the standing reserve of the public sphere; everything in the public sphere is ordered “for anyone and everyone without distinction.” Even the radio listener, whom we are nowadays accustomed to thinking of as a free consumer of mass media — after all, he “is entirely free to turn the device on and off” — is actually still confined in the technological system of producing public opinion. “Indeed, he is only free in the sense that each time he must free himself from the coercive insistence of the public sphere that nevertheless ineluctably persists.” But the essence of technology does not just affect things and people. It “attacks everything that is: Nature and history, humans, and divinities.” When theologians on occasion cite the beauty of atomic physics or the subtleties of quantum mechanics as evidence for the existence of God, they have, Heidegger says, placed God “into the realm of the orderable.” God becomes technologized. (Heidegger’s word for the essence of technology is Gestell. While the translator of the Bremen lectures, Andrew Mitchell, renders it as “positionality,” William Lovitt, the translator of “The Question Concerning Technology” in 1977 chose the term “enframing.” It almost goes without saying that neither term can bring out all the nuances that Heidegger has in mind.) The heart of the matter for Heidegger is thus not in any particular machine, process, or resource, but rather in the “challenging”: the way the essence of technology operates on our understanding of all matters and on the presence of those matters themselves — the all-pervasive way we confront (and are confronted by) the 12 Physicsal Science Department  technological world. Everything encountered technologically is exploited for some technical use. It is important to note, as suggested earlier, that when Heidegger speaks of technology’s essence in terms of challenging or positionality, he speaks of modern technology, and excludes traditional arts and tools that we might in some sense consider technological. For instance, the people who cross the Rhine by walking over a simple bridge might also seem to be using the bridge to challenge the river, making it a piece in an endless chain of use. But Heidegger argues that the bridge in fact allows the river to be itself, to stand within its own flow and form. By contrast, a hydroelectric plant and its dams and structures transform the river into just one more element in an energy-producing sequence. Similarly, the traditional activities of peasants do not “challenge the farmland.” Rather, they protect the crops, leaving them “to the discretion of the growing forces,” whereas “agriculture is now a mechanized food industry.” Modern machines are therefore not merely more developed, or self-propelled, versions of old tools such as water or spinning wheels. Technology’s essence “has already from the outset abolished all those places where the spinning wheel and water mill previously stood.” Heidegger is not concerned with the elusive question of precisely dating the origin of modern technology, a question that some think important in order to understand it. But he does claim that well before the rise of industrial mechanization in the eighteenth century, technology’s essence was already in place. “It first of all lit up the region within which the invention of something like power-producing machines could at all be sought out and attempted.” We cannot capture the essence of technology by describing the makeup of a machine, for “every construction of every machine already moves within the essential space of technology.” Even if the essence of technology does not originate in the rise of mechanization, can we at least show how it follows from the way we apprehend nature? After all, Heidegger says, the essence of technology “begins its reign” when modern natural science is born in the early seventeenth century. But in fact we cannot show this because in Heidegger’s view the relationship between science and technology is the reverse of how we usually think it to be; natural forces and materials belong to technology, rather than the other way around. It was technological thinking that first understood nature in such a way that nature could be challenged to unlock its forces and energy. The challenge preceded the unlocking; the essence of technology is thus prior to natural science. “Modern technology is not applied natural science, far more is modern natural science the application of the essence of technology.” Nature is therefore “the fundamental piece of inventory of the technological standing reserve — and nothing else.” Given this view of technology, it follows that any scientific account obscures the essential being of many things, including their nearness. So when Heidegger discusses technology and nearness, he assures us that he is not simply repeating the cliché that technology makes the world smaller. “What is decisive,” he writes, “is not that the distances are diminishing with the help of technology, but rather that nearness remains outstanding.” In order to experience nearness, we must encounter things in their truth. And no matter how much we believe that science will let us “encounter the actual in its actuality,” science only offers us representations of things. It “only ever encounters that which its manner of representation has previously admitted as a possible object for itself.” 13 Physicsal Science Department  An example from the second lecture illustrates what Heidegger means. Scientifically speaking, the distance between a house and the tree in front of it can be measured neutrally: it is thirty feet. But in our everyday lives, that distance is not as neutral, not as abstract. Instead, the distance is an aspect of our concern with the tree and the house: the experience of walking, of seeing the tree’s shape grow larger as I come closer, and of the growing separation from the home as I walk away from it. In the scientific account, “distance appears to be first achieved in an opposition” between viewer and object. By becoming indifferent to things as they concern us, by representing both the distance and the object as simple but useful mathematical entities or philosophical ideas, we lose our truest experience of nearness and distance. QUESTIONING AS THE PIETY OF THOUGHT In the mind of philosopher, Martin Heidegger, questioning was not anything without thinking. Thus in his view, a questioner is not a dissenter; rather they are listening. All questioning, he believed, gets started from initial listening, that which precedes and guides the questioner. Following this point, Heidegger delves into the spiritual, the pious, and the holy. His thoughts concerns the piety of thinking itself. What, Heidegger pondered, does it mean to objectify? He saw this social phenomenon in regarding living things as objects; objectifying them for use, as a thing. What does it mean to think? In his view, thinking in some instances is not objectifying; it's instead an expression of a being which wills itself to be. For example, if all thinking were objective, then the creation of art would be meaningless because it derives from personal thought which 'shows itself' in the work. Thus it is non-objective. On the other hand, we, by this view, can accept that thinking about the natural world and the sciences engages in objectivity. Thinking is "whatever shows itself however it shows itself." It is the opposite of hiding, concealment. Heidegger also then concerns himself with the meaning of speaking. What does it mean to speak? He asks all these deceptively simple questions and arrives at some startling answers. In speaking Heidegger insists one might use words as a tool to enforce the manipulation of others by words; one also may use words as humans do to "open up the world for them, to make a dwelling place in the world." Finally another question Heidegger poses is that of thinking as a form of speaking. "Is all thinking a form of speaking and is all speaking a form of thinking? What does it mean to 'talk to yourself?" And he warns as early as the 1920s that scientific ways of thinking, objective speaking, threatens to overwhelm all other imaging in the world today. There are in his mind different needs in speaking and thinking, a piety of thinking for Heidegger is perhaps 'compliant to the covering and uncovering of truth.' ENFRAMING WAY OF REVEALING IN MODERN TECHNOLOGY Is technology good or calamitous? Do we control the development of technology or does it control us? It never fails to amaze me how few technology professionals ever approach these questions. Perhaps it is our desire to avoid 14 Physicsal Science Department  cognitive dissonance related to our work. Perhaps it is simple intellectual dishonesty or cowardice. It could also simply be that criticism of technology is not easy to come by for us - nowhere in the traditional canon of blogs, books, and papers is an engagement with these questions easily found. It is for this reason that I'd like to propose a series of articles in which I'll share the thoughts of influential critics of technology by outlining their basic arguments in an accessible fashion with some of my own commentary attached. In the end the judgment is, of course, yours. Martin Heidegger was the philosopher of Being. His magnum opus, Being and Time, sought to re-examine what the meaning of the word is is and what human beings must be like such that questions regarding their own existence are even possible for them. He was incredibly influential in the 20th century and his thought inspired existentialism, phenomenology, and deconstruction. His critique of technology, originally written in 1955, was also quite influential and inspired many ecological thinkers. The argument begins from the instrumental definition of technology - technology is a means to an end - and, after a thorough deconstruction of the inadequacies of such a definition, works to uncover what is new about modern technology that makes it so destructive and potentially dangerous. Heidegger tells us that there are two ways for things to be brought forth into existence. The first, physis, is through capacities already contained within the entity itself - the example he gives is a flower bursting into bloom. The second, contained along with physis in the Greek word poiesis, is through another entity - for example, a chalice through the craftsman or a painting through the artist. Technology primarily concerns itself with the latter, and modern technology does so in a particular fashion that "sets upon nature" and "challenges forth the energies of nature" [Heidegger]. This challenging and setting upon causes us to order the entities in our world in such a way that they are always standing ready to be put to use - for example, the blender is always ready to blend or the airplane on the runway is always prepared to take off. This challenging relationship with nature also means that it is no longer viewed ecologically - as something that we have a symbiotic relationship to - but instead as the "chief storehouse of the standing energy reserve" to be set upon, unlocked, transformed, stored, distributed, and redistributed [Heidegger]. Heidegger does not think that we are exercising our free will when we attempt to go at nature in this way, but instead that a particular mode of revealing entities and understanding our relationship to them has got hold of us here since setting upon, unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and redistributing are all different methods of revelation. He calls this mode of revelation Enframing (Ge-stell in German) as it emphasizes ordering over all else. Enframing represents an extreme danger. It opens the possibility for humans to forget their own essence as beings uniquely capable of revealing the world in different ways - as beings capable of revealing ever new ways of being. More and more it causes humans to see themselves exclusively as orderers and everything, including themselves, as orderable. Despite the bleak outlook on the future of Enframing, Heidegger saw a "saving power" contained within it as well. That saving power was its potential to clearly reveal to us our own essence as well as the essence of Enframing, and 15 Physicsal Science Department  thereby to avoid our being enslaved to a single mode of revealing. The essay concludes with his call to the arts to help reveal to humanity in general the insanity of Enframing and our fundamental essence as human beings. HUMAN PERSON SWALLOWED BY TECHNOLOGY A close examination of man’s knowledge and practice of science and technology shows that none is intrinsically totally good or bad. Rather it is their applications for the purpose of problem solving that make them either good or bad, just or unjust in relation to man’s total wellbeing, now and especially, in the future. In this section let us reflect on some of the problems created for man by his advances in the physical, chemical and biological sciences and technologies. Before this, let us look at man’s general attitude towards materialism, which we consider to be the bedrock of the mad surge in the pursuit of all possible aspects of science and technology, so named. It is an accepted fact that today the results of scientific and technological studies have impacted greatly in almost all the nations of the world. The impact, I believe, will be more felt in the scientifically and industrially advanced economies of the world, like Europe and America than in the developing economies, such as the African nations and other Third World economies. Among the general claims of the positive contributions of science and technology to man’s life is that of mass production of material goods, including food and services for man. This is typical of the industrialized economies where agricultural technology, especially genetic technology, has made it possible for man to produce more genetically modified seeds than the immediate food needs of their national population growth. The same advances have been witnessed in manufacturing nations. In managerial services, scientific knowledge and technological applications, have also promoted improved skills, resulting in higher and improved services. But while it cannot be doubted that science and technology have improved the levels of material production of goods and services – qualitatively and quantitatively – for man’s consumption and wellbeing, the advancements in these fields have infringed greatly upon the dignity of man by institutionalizing materialism. The explanation is that science and technology in history have tended to elevate and emphasize only the material aspect of the human life while neglecting his very personality which is superior and higher and, therefore, demands respect. The result is that; “the man of the scientific and technological culture becomes a truncated man – a half-man, even worse than a half-man – a man of the inferior-half-a-matter-man” (Nwoko, 1992:112). The contemporary man becomes so lured into believing that all there is, is nothing over and above matter. Thus for him, the primary goods are material values, which through technology are elevated and promoted, while the spiritual personality and value of man become elusive and subordinate to matter. Understood in this context, human problems are erroneously understood to be essentially material and therefore must require only material solutions. This may be reduced to the doctrine of “scientific and technological materialism”, which is propagated jealously, especially, by the Western capitalist economies within the context of today‟s globalized economy, which defines the material wealth of any nation in terms of 16 Physicsal Science Department  economic growth, while concealing the exploitation and inequity that characterize participation in global economic race. The explanation is that there is glaring imbalance and inequity in global economic venture. It is bait thrown, most especially, to the developing and the Third World economies, described by the purveyors of global economy, as “those that need economic growth”. Of course, this is still a neo- colonial strategy by the purveyors of global economy and their governments to sustain their foreign domination of, especially, African and other Third World nations. The whole venture of global economy boils down, in this perspective, to economic dishonesty exhibited by the political and economic world “super-powers” over the developing economies with the hidden view of subjugation which is basically an infringement of human right at the international arena. It would be false to believe that Europe and America are ignorant of the negative chain effects of such a violation. Rather, they are blinded by their uncritical pursuit of materialism. In such a circumstance, the crucial question is: where does the hope of the economically disadvantaged nations lie in globalized economy, which indeed, has also greatly affected global politics and decision making? The problems of man as a consumer of scientific and technological products in relationship to his destiny as a “person” can be interpreted not only as the question of morality of “right appetite” but also as that of “human right”, which Nwoko (1992) has tried to link to his notion of “right reason” of man, to the extent that a genuine and right human choice is to be judged from the standpoint of its conformity with “right appetite” (144). Understood from this perspective, a good human choice should be determined by how much, a person’s choice corresponds to his human rationality – a choice guided by the dictates of critical thinking or reason. Regrettably, the modern man, in his pursuit of scientific and technological progress does not seem to be guided, most of the time, by the dictates of reason. The result is that he, most of the time, commits errors and is even, sometimes in a dilemma in choosing what to produce as well as what to consume. Thus, if man, the consumer of scientific and technological products, must focus on his rational end in life, then he must be prudential in making choices. He must cultivate the “virtue of prudence” described as “the virtue that ensures that man will easily select the right means in order to perform acts that will lead to his end as man” (Grindel, 1964:194). The simple inference is that the grip of materialism, and hence, of consumerism assumes a negative sway in the individual person when his or her desires are not guided by right reason in his application and use of scientific knowledge and technological goods and services towards the realization of his or her ultimate end. Thus unless humans cultivate only the right appetite, the uncritical urge for materialism, promoted by science and technology, will continue to cloud their mind, creating a barrier for the full realization of their rational ends. In order to make the best out of his world, man must therefore, be dispassionate in his pursuits of materialism because his nature and needs, as humans, go beyond the demands of materialism. This is so because humans are credited with “right appetite” only when their desires for material goods and services are in conformity with their rational nature. This is why Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher, said, “man know thy self”. 17 Physicsal Science Department  ART AS A WAY OUT OF ENFRAMING This sub-lesson made use of the article entitled: ART vs Design: Saving power vs enframing, or A Thing of the Past vs World-Making by Mark Titmarsh and Cameron Tonkinwise. This lesson will present the first of the dialogue only, please read the rest of the information on the above stated article. The paper is a dialogue—or, a slice of ongoing dialogue; a kind of fight in progress—between the authors. Some background material: 1. Mark is a practicing artist. Cameron is a design theorist. Mark is committed to the significance of art, Cameron to the significance of design. 2. Mark and Cameron were, for a long time, colleagues in a design school. Design is a relatively recent profession and not yet a discipline. Design schools tend to be either the technical, commercial embarrassments of art colleges, or the soft, aesthetic embarrassments of technology institutes. Because of its precarious emergent status, design has a defensive enmity with art. 3. What brings Mark and Cameron together, and puts them in dispute, is Heidegger and post- Heideggerian thinking. Both Mark and Cameron find in Heidegger a relational post-aesthetics of “making think-work”1 that clarifies and furthers their attempts to respond to the dominion of technological metaphysics. It is just that Mark believes that this ‘remembering-clearing’ lies on the art side of the art/technology divide whereas Cameron believes that it lies on the technology side. The following dialogue is a vehicle for us to propose some of the ideas that we are working on. For Mark, this is making expanded paintings, for Cameron, making engaging things. Apart from the pragmatic institutional issues hinted at above, what is at stake in our debate? Perhaps everything; that is to say, if you believe Heidegger, at stake is the future of human beings in the face of technology’s cessation of history. The issue that always troubles readers of Heidegger on technology is: if the essence of technology is its totalising nature, how are we to respond? If all causal reactions to technology remain technological, what is to be done? We begin with the assumption that Heidegger is misinterpreted when cast as an apologist for acquiescence, a quasi-spiritual giving in to, or waiting for the end of, techno-being. For example, when Heidegger risks this sort of rhetoric around the term Gelassenheit, such ‘releasement’ requires much effort—one must be active in becoming passive. Less extreme, but more common, is Heidegger’s valorisation of thinking itself as a response to techno-being, in particular, the sort of thinking associated with questioning. As is often noted, the opening line of his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” italicises the verb ‘questioning’: “In what follows we shall be questioning concerning technology. Questioning builds the way” (Heidegger 1977, 3). And the essay concludes, The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought. (Heidegger 1977, 35) However, on these occasions, Heidegger’s concern is still for a thinking that is ‘in action’. Such questioning is not a removed, inactive contemplation, but rather an 18 Physicsal Science Department  engaged responsiveness. It is, as we will argue, very much with and of the process of making. This is precisely Heidegger’s point; he aims to retrieve a form of making— of thoughtful making, of making thoughtful—that is no longer merely technological. He does not deny the activism of technology, but finds within it more authentic forms of revelatory action. This is why the closing sentences from “The Question Concerning Technology” previously cited occur in the context of a discussion of art. Let us cite this passage at length, because it is the concern of the following debate: Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art. But certainly only if reflection on art, for its part, does not shift its eyes to the constellation of truth after which we are questioning. Thus questioning, we bear witness to thecrisis that in our sheer preoccupation with technology we do not yet experience the coming to presence of technology, that in our sheer aesthetic-mindedness we no longer guard and preserve the coming to presence of art. Yet the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes. (Heidegger 1977, 35) The appropriate response to technology is therefore not just philosophising, but thinking in and around the making of that which we call art. According to Heidegger’s analysis, such making think-work appears to be a non-technological way of negotiating technology. To return to our debate, we, the authors, are interested in how literally Heidegger should be read here. Does ‘art’ mean Art, works for the institution of art, or the arts of Design, products for the economy of design? Which of these is less unthinking in its making, which is more thoughtful or thought provoking? Moreover, which is the more appropriate action in response to technology, which is nearer the potential for swaying the way of the world and therefore more able to accomplish a turn in our experience of being? What is at issue in this debate between Mark (hereafter M) and Cameron (hereafter C) over Heidegger—for this paper, and for the debate about practice- based research in which it is taking place—is the role and nature of making Heidegger is calling for a considered analysis of the artefactual outcome, the finished artwork or design product, or is it a critical reflection on the process of making? If the outcome is an artwork for interpretative reception rather than a design for enactive use, how does this affect the question worthiness of the process of making? For, surely, if the process of making is a type of research, a way of discovering knowledge, then it is thoughtful in a way that ignorant technology dangerously is not. Such research-ly making reveals exactly what technology conceals. To work out how making is a bringing-to-knowledge identifies not just why there should be a validation of practice-based research but also, in the context of Heidegger, identifies a non-technological form of making. This is why we are fighting over which form of making—art or design—is the most significant, as research, and as the saving power within the eclipsing empire of technology. C: What is most common in Heidegger’s range of articulations of what is to be done is the constellation of techne, poiesis, physis, and aletheia. The essence of technology derives from its origin in the ancient Greek sense of techne, the know-how associated with poiesis, which Heidegger believes is a mode of revealing, aletheia, compatible with the model for revelation, physis. 19 Physicsal Science Department  This is, in some ways, the first half of “The Question Concerning Technology”; poiesis is the four ways of occasioning... [that] let what is not yet present arrive into presencing... It is of utmost importance that we think bringing- forth in its full scope and at the same time in the sense in which the Greeks thought it... Physis also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing forth, poiesis. Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense... The Greeks have the word aletheia for revealing... Techne is a mode of aletheueuin... Technology is a mode of revealing... And yet the revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis. The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging. (Heidegger 1977, 10–14) 20 Physicsal Science Department