Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Technology, Modernity, and Democracy: Essays by Andrew Feenberg (Reinventing Critical Theory)

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Technology, Modernity, and Democracy Essays By Andrew Feenberg, Eduardo Beira Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.Copyright © 2018 Eduardo Beira and Andrew Feenberg All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-78660-719-5 Contents Preface Eduardo Beira, vii, Introduction Andrew Feenberg, 1, PART I: PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY, 1 Encountering Technology, 13, 2 Ten Paradoxes of Technology, 37, 3 What Is Philosophy of Technology?, 55, PART II: TECHNICAL CITIZENSHIP, 4 Technoscience and Democracy, 67, 5 Agency and Citizenship in a Technological Society, 81, 6 Function and Meaning: The Double Aspects of Technology, 95, PART III: HEIDEGGER AND MARCUSE, 7 Heidegger and Marcuse: On Reification and Concrete Philosophy, 117, 8 The Politics of Meaning: Modernity, Technology, and Rationality, 127, Notes, 147, References, 151, Proper Name Index, 157, Concept Index, 159, CHAPTER 1 Encountering Technology1 STARTING AT THE BEGINNING In this talk, I would like to introduce myself and describe some of the background to the development of my approach to the study of technology. I was born in New York City during World War II. My father was a prominent theoretical physicist who studied quantum mechanics in Germany and returned to the United States where he participated in the revolutionary scientific developments of the 1930s and 1940s. I grew up surrounded by scientists and their apparatuses. Cyclotrons and nuclear reactors were part of my childhood. I have fond memories of visiting "the lab" where the glassblower made toys for me and where later I worked for a summer as a "computer," entering mysterious numbers into an adding machine. I am a rare student of science and technology who was actually raised on the subject. This gives me a somewhat different perspective than the currently fashionable emphasis on the ordinariness of scientific research. I have always known that science was a human activity — it went on in my house — and yet the scientists I knew believed science to be significantly different from most other human activities. Recent attempts to iron out the differences with a relativistic epistemology seem quite artificial and unconvincing. Science is surely not "pure," but relativism is essentially irrelevant, not much different from the claim that Bach's music is relative to his time. The point is obvious and gives rise to interesting research, but it is ultimately trivial: the music remains, irreducible to the circumstances of its creation. Scientific truths have a similar status as products of supreme crafts that transcend the ordinary events from which they arise. On a less elevated note, science, especially experimental science, involves a great deal of technical cleverness. Perhaps this is why throughout my childhood I was encouraged to be clever. I was sent to carpentry school as a small boy and learned to make little tables and wastebaskets under the direction of a very stern old carpenter. Innocently enacting an outdated cliché, I took apart clocks and machines and learned to handle chemicals, use a microscope, make a crystal radio, and suchlike. On a visit to Hiroshima, I was shocked by the realization that the atom bomb that had destroyed the city was a product of the very cleverness I was encouraged to develop as a boy, applied by brilliant scientists and engineers. Truly, cleverness is the greatest human power, but not the greatest achievement. After the war, Hans Bethe bemoaned the fact that he and his colleagues at Los Alamos had been clever rather than wise. The course of twentieth-century technological advance certainly proves him right. By the time I reached college, I was mainly interested in literature and philosophy. The writings of René Girard and Gabriel Marcel had a tremendous influence on me. I studied Husserl, Heidegger, and Western Marxism. This was the early 1960s and the United States still lay under the pall of McCarthyism. The oppressive social and pol