The question concerning technology

In 1921 Czech playwright, Karel Čapek, premiered his science fiction play, R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots) in the city of Prague. The play, which incidentally gave us the English word ‘robot’, explores the threat modern technology poses to human life. It is a dystopian sci-fi drama with a now familiar plot, depicting a bleak vision in which human ingenuity creates artificial life that ends up out-smarting its creators and taking over the world.

It was no coincidence that R.U.R premiered amid the debris of the mechanical and chemical carnage of WW1. For Čapek, the play had a higher purpose than simply entertaining the public; R.U.R was a work of art drawing attention to the way in which modern mechanical technology can be used to dehumanise persons. In Čapek’s own words:

“I wished to write a comedy, partly of science, partly of truth. The odd inventor, Mr. Rossum (whose name translated into English signifies “Mr. Intellectual” or “Mr. Brain”), is a typical representative of the scientific materialism of the last century. His desire to create an artificial man — in the chemical and biological, not the mechanical sense — is inspired by a foolish and obstinate wish to prove God unnecessary and absurd. Young Rossum is the young scientist, untroubled by metaphysical ideas; scientific experiment to him is the road to industrial production. He is not concerned to prove but to manufacture… Those who think to master the industry are themselves mastered by it; Robots must be produced although they are a war industry, or rather because they are a war industry. The product of the human brain has escaped the control of human hands. This is the comedy of science.”¹

11 years after the premier of R.U.R in 1932, Aldus Huxley published his famous novel, Brave New World. Like R.U.R, Brave New World is a work of art critical of technology, but Huxley’s angle is different to Čapek’s. R.U.R presents the notion of humanity as essentially fixed in that there is still the potential for human solidarity in banding together to fight back against the robots (somewhat akin to Neo and the gang in The Matrix trilogy). By contrast, Huxley’s vision is one in which technology poses a threat to the very meaning of what it is to be a human being. The vision of Brave New World is bleak: the world is ruled by a small band of elites driven by pleasures and materialism; reproduction is genetically controlled, people are psychologically conditioned; no more institutions of family, education, or religion; no more basic human autonomy.

In short, Huxley’s concern is that technology empowers our illicit loves, pleasures, desires, and wants, undoing the significance and meaning of human life. So if human beings can be mass produced in controlled factories like any other car on the production line, then are humans really all that different from machines?

Despite these different angles, both dystopian ‘classics’ creatively capture the fears attending the explosion of modern technology in the 20th century. Each story portrays a disoriented humanity, spun dizzied by their careless pursuit of mastery over nature. The fear for Čapek is extrinsic, raising questions about survival when humans lose control and technology takes over the world ‘out there’; the fear for Huxley is intrinsic, raising questions about human morality when humans lose control and technology takes over the world ‘in here’.

In what follows, I will explore what I think is the common ‘fear’ of technology identified by both Čapek and Huxley, drawing upon the work of one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).

Martin Heidegger

There is no denying that Heidegger was a divisive thinker. I am sympathetic to complaints that he was a master obscurantist; in many respects, his philosophical ruminations can be summed in the words of one former oval office occupant: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” I am also sympathetic to the just criticism he has received in recent times for his reprehensible affiliation with Nazism and anti-semitism.² Such affiliations certainly warrant theological and moral protest. However, despite all of this, I think that Heidegger played an important role in his contributions to the philosophical approach known as ‘phenomenology’: a method of inquiry that stresses the importance of letting things appear as they are, all on their own, rather than seeing things through an unreflected and presupposed interpretive lens. Simply, phenomenology is a hermeneutic, or way of interpretation, that stresses the wisdom contained within lived experience.³

Like Čapek and Huxley, Heidegger has valuable insights concerning the threat technology poses to human life. For all, the provocation came from the destructive applications of technology: where the former artists opined in the aftermath of WW1, Heidegger’s philosophical reflection on technology came in his first public speaking engagement following WW2. And as a work of philosophy, Heidegger’s reflections can be read as something of a commentary on the fears expressed in R.U.R and Brave New World. Where these latter works express the ‘fruit’ of technological dangers, Heidegger gets to the ‘root’ by emphasising the more primordial issue of the possibility that modern technology is preventing us from experiencing the truth of ourselves, the world, and God.

The Bremen Lectures

As an application of his broad philosophical project laid out in Being and Time (1927), Heidegger delivered a four-part lecture series in Bremen in 1949⁴ – (1) “The Thing”, (2) “Positionality”, (3) “The Danger”, and (4) “The Turn” – part two of which he revised and published in what became a landmark essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954).⁵ To show the nuance of Heidegger’s concerns with technology, in contrast to the likes of Čapek and Huxley, it is perhaps easiest to walk briefly through his line of argumentation in the Bremen lectures.

In his first lecture, “The Thing”, Heidegger contemplates the utility of a jug, just an ordinary, everyday vessel for pouring liquid, to introduce us to his train of thought. On the one hand, a jug is just a thing that stands on its own as “a vessel; that which holds another in itself.”⁶ But a jug is also much more than this, says Heidegger. It is a giver of gifts revealing in the present what was formerly hidden, and it does so for both humans and divinities: as the jug gives to quench mortal thirst, so it gives to appeasing divine taste in acts of sacrament and consecration. In this way, the jug provides a way of recognising life in its fullness; a way of metaphorically understanding the presence of things which seem hidden to us in life. (These notions of ‘revealing’ and ‘presencing’ need to be understood within Heidegger’s broader phenomenological project outlined in Being and Time).

In his second lecture, “Positionality”, Heidegger draws a contrast between the jug, a pre-modern technology, and the essential nature of modern technological devices such as TVs. Where the pre-modern jug was a technology ‘revealing’ something hidden, the modern TV is a technology ‘concealing’ hidden truths about the world and the sacred, through calculation, codification and commodification. In other words, unlike premodern technology, modern technology has a way of making us view the world, ourselves and even God, in ways they were never intended to be: as means for an end rather than ends in themselves; as stockpiles to be counted, weighed, and exchanged as goods and services rather than things to be experienced, or even worshipped as sacred. In short: modern technology has cultivated an instrumentalised worldview that “pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces.”⁷

In “Positionality”, the nuance of Heidegger’s concerns with technology become clear (or I should say, clearer!) Unlike Čapek’s and Huxley’s concern with the use of technology, Heidegger’s focus concerns the essence of technology and how that poses a danger to human thinking.⁸ When ‘technological thinking’ takes sway, the idea comes to prevail that science and technology will supply all that is required for human life and flourishing. Indeed, that is the central thesis of his third lecture, “The Danger”. “World and positionality are the same,”⁹ writes Heidegger, which is to say, when such technological thinking comes to reign in the modern mind it becomes increasingly difficult to discern between what is an artefact of human creation and what is an artefact of nature, of God’s creation:

“[M]an, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.”¹⁰

This point is one also recognised by C. S. Lewis, who wrote in The Abolition of Man:

“What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument . . . Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car . . . Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.”¹¹

All of this is a self-perpetuating disaster for Heidegger. Seeing everything as a means for technical ends, humans no longer ask the kinds of questions most in need of answering.¹² Thus, the specifically human desire to know, uttered in ancient times by Aristotle,¹³ is reoriented in modern technological times, not toward the nature of things as they actually are in the totality of their being, but toward the part of their utility; not ‘being’, but ‘being-useful’; not ‘what is x’, but ‘how can we make x do y?’ It is a reorientation that is a disorientation, and the ethical implications are chilling, because it inclines people toward one another, not in an ‘I-thou’ mode of communion, but an ‘I-it’ mode of consumption. You are whatever I can get from you and vice-versa. The earth is there for our exploitation. God is there to salute and execute my every request.

Positionality: Disorientation and Danger

To my mind, Heidegger’s “Positionality” provides philosophical mooring to the sense of disorientation expressed by the likes of Čapek and Huxley, and “The Danger”, likewise, to the threat of inevitable destruction. In the words of Marshall McLuhan, the underlying issue is that “we become what we behold… We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.”¹⁴ Or in the equally perceptive words of Henry Thoreau, “Men have become the tool of their tools.”¹⁵ Heidegger had expressed similar sentiments in the opening line of his Bremen Lectures:

“All distances in time and space are shrinking. Places that a person previously reached after weeks and months on the road are now reached by airplane overnight. What a person previously received news of only after years, if at all, is now experienced hourly over the radio in no time. The germination and flourishing of plants that remained concealed through the seasons, film now exhibits publicly in a single minute. Film shows the distant cities of the most ancient cultures as if they stood at this very moment amidst today’s street traffic. Beyond this, film further attests to what it shows by simultaneously displaying the recording apparatus itself at work along with the humans who serve it. The pinnacle of all such removals of distance is achieved by television, which will soon race through and dominate the entire scaffolding and commotion of commerce.”¹⁶

Time is obliterated in a merely visual world where images are re-presentations of the real things subjected to controls which can pause, fast-forward and rewind reality. Space, too, is destroyed. Have you ever stood in on the sidewalk of a bustling inner-city street and looked directly up the side of a high-rise? Did you find yourself feeling a little giddy at the sight? Well, that kind of uneasiness reflects technological ‘disorientation’. And for those of us living here and now in the age of the internet, it is a fact that the monolith of software and information structures dwarf the material constraints of high-rise steel and reinforced concrete in the industrial age. Take your smart phone as an example. You can call, text, surf the net, watch YouTube, Face Time, and a host of other things with a device that fits in your palm, that you can take anywhere and access at any time – even in the comfort of your own bed. In the thought of Heidegger, scrolling through a smart phone in the wee hours of the morning when we should be sleeping is like taking the nausea and disorientation of looking up at a high-rise building to bed. Technology is at war with human sensibility in that it offers a substitute for our sense-ability.

And what ensues when space and time are gone? Voyeurism is no longer taboo, because what becomes of privacy if the ‘far’ is always ‘near’? No one can go unnoticed. What becomes of education and work if growth under the sustained stress on mind and muscle is removed? Take the impressiveness of a TV display, or the even more impressive virtual reality headset as further examples to the smart phone. These devices supplement full embodied sense-experience of the dynamic lived and breathed for two of the five senses: audio and visual. In an information age, the world is a world of icons, symbols, re-presentations of reality more than reality itself. We are so busy taking pictures of landscapes to view later that we fail to view them fully with all of our other senses, to feel, hear, taste and smell them. Our obsession with preserving one small actually misrepresentative visual part of them prevents us from living them, from being embodied and fully present with them. Originally, photographs we considered supplements to reality, freezing a moment in space and time of an experience that we could later reflect upon. Now, we post a few images on social media but are left bereft of ‘sense memory’ of the experience because the supplement has become the substitute; the vibrant dynamism of lived existence replaced by a frozen snapshot stuck in a quasi-timelessness analogous to the timelessness of conceptual knowledge itself. Face-to-face conversations are now face to screen, face to filter, face to Bitmoji’s and emoticon’s – all shadows and types of lost embodied and interpersonal relatedness bringing entirely new as-yet unexplored terrains of social anonymity and ambivalence; an ambivalence consequent from the morally neutral technology from which it has sprung. Gone are the times of war where men confronted their enemy face-to-face in bloody comradeship binding both victor and the vanquished in a tale of mutual tragedy. Now the abstract killer obliterates an entire village with the click of a mouse from an armchair adjacent a half-eaten salad sandwich and a lukewarm cup of instant coffee, white with one. Of course, ‘doing’ and ‘watching’ are distinct, but that distinction is becoming increasingly blurred and perhaps nowhere is this more obvious than in the domain of sex. When personality is narrowed to the body, objectification is the result, and with every objectification comes a retreat from the real, which is embodied (i.e., within a narrative), to a position of scrutiny over that which is abstracted from its concrete position and preyed upon as a mere object. The epistemic attitude is basically, ‘I need to get outside of reality in order to see reality clearly’ – I need to have a God’s Eye View. Of course, the concern is not with objectification per se; objectification is necessary if we are to live and flourish. The issue is when the limits of the object become blurred. Freedom of sexual expression arose, in part, against the oppression of socio-cultural and religious oppression, but tragically ‘sexual expression’ has turned into the very thing it arose in opposition to insofar as humanity has turned the sexual into a thing which stands outside of our interior subjectivity. Instead of becoming sexual, we have transformed sex into an exterior thing which is exploited and, in the process, degraded, resulting – ironically – in a civilisation that is the most sexless in all of history as objectification of the real permits ‘the other’ to exist as a mechanical partner, such that even the most intimate of relations within the natural order are now removed and reduced to the distant and abstract, to the visual consciousness of a dim back-lit screen.¹⁷

What is it ‘to be’ in such a world? That is Heidegger’s question, and I would answer in a single word: sub-human. Technological disorientation is destructive because it is ultimately dehumanising. The issue is not one of ‘East’ vs. West’; it’s a modern vs. premodern one. To be human in a modern world augmented by technology is something of a disembodied existence; it is as though human beings have become characters without a story, without a narrative that has a past, a present and a future, which is one way of articulating the cliché of the modern ‘crisis of identity’. As we become less aware of our origins and ultimate destinies, we lose sight of where we are ‘now’ in the present.

Exploiting Heidegger’s Silence

So what can we say by way of response? How are we to escape this technological incarceration of modern thinking? In his final lecture, “The Turn”, Heidegger suggests that the saviour comes from the place of the danger. By becoming aware of the truth that technology traps our thinking, we can move to overcome it by turning away from it. Ever ambiguous, Heidegger does not articulate what this ‘truth’ is, save hints in the opposite direction of science, namely the arts (a direction which was subsequently pursued by postmodern thinkers such as Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and Paul-Michel Foucault). But Heidegger’s reticence provides an opening for a theological proposal of the salvation he seeks.

Reading through Heidegger’s Bremen Lectures, my mind was taken to two separate stories in the Bible concerning the nation of Babylon. The first is the well-known Tower of Babel saga found in Genesis 11:1-9, where we read of a people seeking to make a name for themselves by using their intelligence to build a tower that reaches to the heavens. For their hubris, “the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city.” (Gen. 1:8). The other lesser-known story is found centuries later in the same land, with King Nebuchadnezzar who upon standing atop the roof of his palace looks out over the city of Babylon boldly declaring: “‘Is this not Babylon the great, which I myself have built as a royal residence by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty?’” (Dan. 4:30). For his hubris, we read in the verses which follow of how the old king went mad. In both cases we see instances where profound confusion attends self-idolisation in response to human creative achievement. The moral is clear: the higher one stands on the building of their own strength, the greater their fall. Mankind, attempting to play at God, is self-defeating: “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before stumbling.” (Prov. 16:18).

Where Čapek and Huxley capture our imaginations by inviting us to consider the potential fruit of humanity’s careless pursuit of technological mastery, Heidegger traces the illicit fruit back to its poisoned root in the head and heart of humans – and that is why I appreciate his contribution on the subject. The problem is not technology per se, because technology cannot be controlled by prudence from within technology itself. A bulldozer, like an iPhone, is an inherently neutral instrument in need of an intelligent being to enact their will and decide how to use it. In this, technology thus presents to us both a burden and a promise. Feats of technological ingenuity are truly awe-inspiring, but we fall grossly short of the reflective mark if we suppose the ‘wonder’ of technology begins and ends with the limited space between our ears. The wonder of technology points back to the wonder of human intelligence, and the wonder of human intelligence points back to the Creator of human intelligence.

To my mind there is no better way to account for human intelligence and will than in an intelligent and willing Creator: God. And I don’t believe ‘from human intelligence to God’ is as gigantic a leap as some would say. In every instance, analysis is the explication of what is already present before us in nature back to its cause(s), and we have already seen what happens when the illusion gives rise to the final delusion that the world is a house of mirrors reflecting only human ingenuity. The artists are onto something, which is why art can sometimes be ugly. Huxley’s final depiction of Savage on the final page of Brave New World is tragically prophetic: hanging lifeless from the roof of his stairwell with feet rotating like “like two unhurried compass needles…”¹⁸ Savage is a portrait of the gloomy end to which self-assurance leads in its search for orientation. Death is the only north in a world where men and women are gods-unto-themselves.

But we need not content ourselves with an obvious problem. Where idolatry is a fool professing to be wise (Rom. 1:22), worship is “reason returned” (Dan. 4:34) in admission of the revelation of God. Human life, intelligence, and morality, are not developed in vitro, but in vivo. This much we can learn from dystopian fiction. And the hope of the promises offered by Christianity is that the One true and living God rescues His people out of treacherous danger. This God, infinite and without limit, engaged in self-disclosure in time and space by revealing Himself in the first-century person of Jesus. The incarnation told in the Gospels of Scripture is like an open secret whose message of liberty could not be more relevant for those of us living in the modern technological age. God is as He has always been – free – and the invitation He offers to you and I is that we join Him in freedom from the bondage of the lie of absolute self-assurance which is disorienting and self-destructive.

1. Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (1920), trans. Paul Selver and Nigel Playfair (Mineola, NY.: Dover Pub. Inc., 2001). Available online at: https://public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/sf/r.u.r.html.
2. For an overview of Martin Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks), see: Richard Wolin, “National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks” (summer, 2014). Available online at: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/993/national-socialism-world-jewry-and-the-history-of-being-heideggers-black-notebooks/.
3. Although we are so to speak “primordially” familiar with these phenomena, conscious reflection tends to misconstrue, cover up, or disguise them. “The entity which in every case we ourselves are, is ontologically that which is farthest… The ontology which is directed towards this entity is denied an appropriate basis… The layingbare of Dasein’s primordial Being must rather be wrested from Dasein” in Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York, NY.: State University of New York Press, 1996), 287/311 (see also 31/36). In essence, Heidegger’s Being and Time is an analysis of realism: its origins limitations, dangers and cures. Only when realism is ‘taken of the philosophical shelf’ and analysed phenomenologically can people hope to achieve authenticity. It is not difficult to see how this was instrumental in the later postmodern thought of Foucault, Derrida, and company.
4. For the first time, the Bremen lectures have recently been translated into English by Andrew J. Mitchell. See Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, 2012).
5. See: Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York, NY.: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1977).
6. Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 5.
7. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 21.
8. Note: Heidegger’s word for the essence of technology is the German, Gestell. Across the various translations, Mitchell translates Gestell to the English “positionality”, while Lovitt translates it as “enframing”. It goes without saying that neither English terms capture the nuances of Heidegger’s original Gestell.
9. Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 49.
10. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 27.
11. C. S. Lewis, Reflections on Education With Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools, (New York, NY.: Harper Collins, 2001), 55, 58, 64.
12. Indeed, this seems just to eb the point of Jürgen Habermas, for instance, says that, “Philosophy can no longer refer to the whole of the world, of nature, of history, of society, in the sense of a totalizing knowledge. Theoretical surrogates for worldviews have been devalued, not only by the factual advance of empirical science but even more by the reflective consciousness accompanying it”, and further that “philosophical thought… has surrendered the relation to totality”. Jürgen Habermas, “Reason and the Rationalization of Society: Philosophical Discourse of Modernity”, available online at: http://efficiency.weareint.io/reason.
13. Aristotle, Met. I(A), 1, 980a22-980a27.
14. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 1994), XXI.
15. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 150th anniversary ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 37.
16. Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 3.
17. See: Frederick D. Wilhelmsen and Jane Bret, “Machines”, The Georgia Review, vol. 23, no. 4 (Winter 1969): 460-483.
18. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York, NY.: RosettaBooks, 2000), e-book.