Rodrigo Braga's Public Library

Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition (1958) and other writings, continues the philosophical effort to restore a sense of wonder at the very fact of modern technology, at the relation to reality that modern technology stands for.

Again, it is not resentment at nature's scarcity, but at its sheer otherness that drives the project of modern technology, which is the project of mastery and domination.

In such essays as "The Age of the World Picture" (1938), "The Question Concerning Technology" (1949-50), and "Science and Reflection" (1954) (all three in Heidegger, 1977), Heidegger finds the origin of modern technology in Western metaphysics.

Modern technology is, to repeat our phrase, a certain relation to nature or reality or the world; it is therefore not merely the inevitable application of that immense scientific knowledge that grows once humanity is rid of communal or religious superstition and repression.

We can say that if religious anxiety helps to account for the emergence of capitalism in the West, something like it may help to account for the emergence of modern technology in the West; and, furthermore, something like it may help to account for the distinctive rationalism of the West from the Greeks onwards.

I suggest that Protestant anxiety, now present with us in the form of a secular work ethic, is just one manifestation of a general anger at the world that seems to exist in the West much more than elsewhere, and from the Greeks onwards. I do not say that anger at the world is the only passion or drive or motive that underlies modern technology--the technology of production and destruction. But it is one of the few main elements.

Weber locates the source of modern rational irrationality in the Protestant idea of work as a calling, the practice of work as worldly asceticism.

Greed exists everywhere, Weber says, but the rational and methodical pursuit of profit is the essence of capitalism, and distinctive to it.

What I wish to propose is that in distinct contrast with, or in explicit and sharp opposition to Marxism, a number of German thinkers as well as a number of earlier American writers have thought they glimpsed rational method in the service of something not always distinguishable from madness.

"criminal means once tolerated are soon preferred.... Justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext, and perfidy and murder the end"

The modern West, best seen as the creator of modern technology, is not only distinctive, it is anomalous in comparison to the rest of the world; and the anomaly is stupendous and perhaps monstrous.

Weber's

What holds Weber, Heidegger, and Arendt together is their inclination to regard modern technology as stemming from the passions and drives and motives of excess or extremism, not from resourceful practicality.

a fact worthy of meditation that, in its origin, modern technology is not a human-species-wide phenomenon, but a distinctively Western one.

arx is not exactly saying that modern technology was fated to happen.

He is saying, however, that modern technology, propelled by the self-interested profit-seeking of the entrepreneurial class, has served the imperatives of the mission of keeping life going, and until recently has done so better, more fully and efficiently, than any conceivable alternative.

Marxism's insistence on the role played by individual and class economic self-interest explains something about the persistent use made of technology by modern capitalism, but next to nothing about the mentality of its emergence.

What are these premises that provide the key to understanding historical change? Marx gives three (Marx and Engels, 1978 [1848], pp. 155-57). The first is that in order to live and go on living, human beings must engage in some kind of labor.

In its current meaning, it names the means or methods used to help people move from place to place, communicate, produce, construct, create, fabricate, but also destroy; to observe, to calculate, and to think.

Technology is thus made up of all kinds of equipment--tools, machines, and devices--that assist the work of human muscles, senses, and brains, and thus the realization of human purposes and ends.