Páll Skúlason: The Moral Aspect of Technology

 The curious keynote address of Páll Skúlason from 2005 about the nature of technology posed some questions about technology that are now really common place to the students of continental philosophy of the 20^th century and not only from that now already classical and almost impenetrable text of Heidegger. The career of technology as a topic of philosophical interest isn´t new and in fact it goes back all the ways to Plato and the Greek philosophers.  The word wasn´t invented either during the industrial revolution and most likely wasn´t used then for technology implies some kind of wisdom that is not merely know-how but as in the case of the sciences, a system that opens a universal channel to understand the world. However the case of technology should be different than that of the exact sciences, because technology as an Aristotelian τεχνη is produced by means of work; for the Greeks our capacity to be in the world, our worldliness, is defined by the works of men –it is the assurance of immortality, to leave something behind and this is of course different from the labor that assures mere survival. Technology was conceived as an artifact and certainly it constituted a luxury in the early modern age. The technical was then confused with the technological, the former referring only to a methodological procedure and the latter involving a whole range of technical, intellectual and moral aspects. Technology (tæki in Icelandic and Technik in German) did not appear in the literatures of Europe until the early 20^th century but my intuition says that the confusion started to surface with the advertisements of the most representative technical and technological devise of the modern age –the daguerreotype and then later the photographic camera, although these advertisements sold a product that seemed more of an all-miraculous philosophical stone than an actual technical handle. The cameras certainly performed a technical procedure but were certainly technological –the appearance of the camera changed for good the course not only of pictorial art but of social history and in the long term of human experience and knowledge. The relationship between the appearance of the camera and the rise of the internet is certainly technological but at the same time the relationship between the earliest operating systems in the late 1970’s and the latest Mac and Windows all-might high-performance system is merely a technical advance. Technology in the meaning assigned by Plato might refer to what we would call today fine or plastic arts and as for the scientific measurements performed by earlier ancient scientists they didn’t call their devises technological but following the historical coherence, first magical or divine and only later scientific. Complying with the rule, all the words in Indo-European languages coined to mean technology other than technology (as in both the Icelandic and German cases) were actually coined as a render of the words “technique” and “technical”, either from internal or external sources.Interesting enough for my discussion, Páll Skúlason points out that the first printed occurrence in icelandic of tækni runs as follows: „Science and technology do not consider the nature of the human individual, they are impersonal“. We will not go into the dichotomy between technology and science and the universal character the scientific disciplines earned for themselves specially during that same 19th century that retrieved technology and that the sciences earned more than anything not with the prestige of Newtonian physics and modern mathematics but with the struggle of social and historical sciences to be actually legitimate sciences, best examples in mind could be linguistics and anthropology. Anyway the everyday man has come to understand technology in terms of practical tasks and methods, and in this point Páll Skúlason coincides with almost every thinker concerned with the subject: Arendt, Adorno, Jonas, Heidegger, Anders, etc. The technical mode in which modern technology appears is pre-defined, a priori categories in the same manner that Kant would define the relationship between thought and truth. The technical mode of thinking in general –according to the Icelandic philosopher, does not ask about the objectives of human activities (and therefore of human interests –the Popperian remark is mine) but rather about methods to achieve specific results; the results in turn are supposedly given beforehand, that is, they are based on an expectation that is not utopian but pragmatic. However, our author contention is that the technological way of thinking requires, and calls for, definitions of objectives and I think this is somewhat misleading, because I feel there´s a disgression between the functional aspect of technology (technical procedure) and the conceptual aspects of technology (moral and intellectual). I can illustrate my point speaking about Martin Heidegger, perhaps one of the most technological men of the 20th century living for over half a century deep inside the German black forest and wasn´t likely to have been much in touch with the technical advances of the age other than the telephone and the typewriter. Not that the Nazis didn´t indulge in the most advanced technical gadgets imaginable for the epoch in question, but that didn´t seem to trouble the ambition of our Herr Professor for pure thought and truth. Technical as a procedure in philosophy is hardly ever applicable even when facing the most rigid sensualist systems of metaphysics and epistemology and if anything the term has to be correctly associated with utilitarianism rather than with technology. According to Heidegger, technology is a „delivery“ in the Greek sense of „λυομαι“ because it releases something truthfully or at least some kind of truth, precisely because technology as any –logy is a „λογος”. For Heidegger, technology is an interpreter of the earth, of the dwelling place; technology is what is present in the work of art. Accordingly when he criticized modernity as the “age of the world-image” he didn’t offer a critique of the technological aspects of modern life but rather to the endless expansion of its technical capacities and its correlation with the growth of bourgeois society and the omnivorous capitalist models that transformed the technological virtues of art into technical performances and abilities meant to entertain the masses. As elite-minded as this might sound, this is as far as the theory goes and it is enlightening precisely because it clears some of the fog in between techniques, technical and technologies.  But technology isn‘t exclusively a referrence to art as we know it, for it is clear to Hegel already that the nature of art would step out of the figurative forms and blend into the symbolic taste and experience of everyday life and alas! Then modern art was born altogether with both the technological and the technical capabilities that nowadays we know as design. Modern art would mean for Hegel the same that modern philosophy would –the presupposition that all presuppositions might be at some point abandoned and most modernist and surrealist literary trends from Joyce to Schulz bear witness to this. It is when technology becomes technical that we start to labor at it and to produce artefacts with the wisdom of technology only in order to satisfy technical and therefure purely methodological needs. Technology has to bear a systematic but theoretical relation to the laws of the universe, to the same extent that do the arts and sciences. The propositions of technology are meant to be completely relational but the technical possibilities that enable it limit them to ask questions about what we can do with technology knowing the answer in advance or at least knowing that a negative answer is not related to the nature of technology but rather to the scarcity or abundance of available resources. Then again we‘re faced with the question of the technological and the technical: It is technological to travel with Virgin Galactic to the outer sphere of the earth since 2011 at the price of 200.000 dollars while building a climated glacier under roof in Dubai, however spectacular, is merely technical because the function it delivers doesn‘t provide any truth about the world but rather recreates an experience in some place which is either impossible or implausible. Because the technical is methodological it doesn‘t attain qualitative changes in the world and this is the reason why technology always wins, because technology is a narrative and not a procedure and in fact it is a narrative so authentically modern from the viewpoint of transforming the technical into the experience of technology that it is together with history, the strongest bind of human experience, and accordingly, one even more dangerous than historical mementoes, this happens because technology happens in the realm of the technical and not in the realm of the real. Technology can forget, all too often the internet does even though at the same time it remembers all human history. Technical is only an aspect of presentation and representation (to paraphrase the German „Darstellung“ and „Vorstellung“) whereas technology is a human process in so far as it shapes the earth in order to create not the world (which is entirely historical) but the environment, the German „Umwelt“ recreates this so well as a sort „Almost world“ so much as the Icelandic „Umhverfing“ (coined by Páll Skúlason) refers to both the shaping of the environment and the transformation of nature, none of which can be interpreted as technical a priori. Reality is bound to change historically even when technology is immune to these changes, examples could be the fact that Aristotle knew what a place was but not what space is, even though he was an astronomer too or the fact that in the early Germanic languages such as Old Icelandic and Gothic there was no nominal difference between home and world –how un-Christian could this be! There´s a creative relationship between nature and technology, with technology human beings shape the whole universe or their wishes and desires about how they want to live in this universe even if it might be impossible, and this is absolutely no technical procedure. As an art and as a human expression –continues Páll Skúlason, technology can´t be restricted to the technical values that assess its achievements, so as not to fall into the ridicule of „technologism“ (ever heard of scientism as a derogatory term?) –that unilateral emphasis on practical and therefore technical knowledge, technology should be an open possibility to deliver more truth and more knowledge and not just a means to produce comfortable ignorance as it’s been the case with most young people today. The pursuit of this kind of happiness encouraged by an omnivorous modernity of technical possibilities and endless financial resources can only mean the utter abandonment of the perennial truths of life (and here I’m not speaking as in the old dogmatic philosophy but more in the style of the simplest aesthetic experience) that are lost in the process of accumulation typical of technical knowledge. Our writer gets it completely right, technologism is not even technological and it bears no relationship with technology. Lastly one must never forget that technology is morally neutral because it doesn’t remember our history and this is something that the 20^th century learnt the hardest way. Technology must add value, and this is what the most prestigious companies in the business of luxury have known for so long: No object could be pricier or scarcer than that which offers in the opinion of the moment the wisdom of the ages, and sometimes this wisdom is nothing but simple beauty, a “back to basics” attitude or just the thought of happiness, ever anew. Technology is wrapped in moral opinions but this is something that I might only explore another day when I’ll find the time to speak of Páll´s ethics of nature. In the beginning the thinkers concerned with technology were divided into two large groups, those technology groupies who awaited the cyborg era and rejoiced with pleasure in every technical advancement and the other group that just lamented the lost simplicity of this earthly paraside. Both were wrong and so far and we´re not right either. Well, perhaps the i-Pad holds the eternal secrets of mankind.