For the contemporary thinker, the implications of technology are of the utmost importance. It is undeniable that today technology emerges to the foreground of our experience of the world to such an extent that it threatens to subsume everything else. If sensationalist prophecy and sectarian violence abound, it is because we react, legitimately, with fear and outrage to a technologically induced crisis at the foundations of our world systems. The planet speeds forward toward catastrophe with such inevitability that today the sensation of being on the verge of the end of some kind of epoch hangs strongly in the air for every worldview.
On the one hand, we live in a time when the earth and all of the life which inhabits it might dissolve into oblivion in a radioactive holocaust. Then again, the helplessly rapid collapse of the planet’s ecosystems might deteriorate so quickly that we become too impoverished to support the complex economic systems which make nuclear war plausible in the first place. At any rate, the truths and values which make human life worth living become so impossible to believe amidst the epistemological self-unraveling of science, art, and philosophy that humanity may just lose the will to go on altogether.
On the other hand, the linking together of all cultures into a decentralized network of information exchange threatens to topple traditional systems of economic and social domination. The super-empowerment of the individual through technical augmentation promises the power of self-expression to an extent never before imagined. Increasingly unfettered access to new wealths of information and experience is probably poising humanity for a leap into a novelty-generating metaversal realm of unity with all digitally represented information.
In any case, the equilibrium of natural ecological systems, of which we have only a distant collective memory, slides wildly out of control as the artificial infrastructures of society augment the derailment in catastrophic resonance. The world is being brought to a point of crisis in its very foundations such that its continuance is necessarily conditioned by essential change.
If it was the case that technology was merely an isolated fixture within the context of our society and our personal views, then the situation, albeit threatening, would already admit of some hope simply by nature of having been recognized as problematic. But this would require some metaphysical grounding on which to support ourselves under the pressure of technology, some set of values to which technology could be referred. We can recoil aghast at the calamity and destruction of the planet or at, what’s worse, our absentminded, whimpering submission to the castration of our wild hot-blooded race by hunchback inducing cubicle farms and conventional “lobotomy factory” school systems, but it will only grow more acute as long as we blindly think of ourselves as the masters of technology - of our values as the context for technology - and push forward with technological solutions to these problems.
The truth is that the situation is the other way around. Technology is the context in which human action takes place. It has taken root so deeply and spread so widely that, in a substantial way, it has become the determining essence of the environment we call the world. As such, technology is no longer a mere tool, but a milieu. Understood in its full range of philosophical meaning, the word milieu denotes what is of unique importance to a given age, i.e. the question posed by that age to which it is allotted man to address himself if he wishes to find meaningful existence.
In a sense, the question is the same in every age. That is: what ought I to do? Sentiment is and has been, whenever it has existence as such, meaningless without some authentically motivated corresponding action. Every knowing implies some act of doing. This doing, we call praxis.
What is unique about the contemporary thinker’s formulation of this question - what ought I to do - is that it is asked with respect to the technological milieu. Thus the question of the age is: what ought I to do in response to the technological milieu?
But praxis is the application of knowledge. Thus the first task of the contemporary thinker is to apprehend the truth about the technological milieu. However, any real knowledge of the technological milieu must be sought after from outside of a paradigm akin to that of technology. In other words, any successful critique of technology must be grounded in some stable referent which is external to the technological system.
It is on account of this necessity that I have selected Jacques Ellul and Martin Heidegger as two different lenses though which to focus the question of praxis in the context the technological milieu. Both of these thinkers approach this question having acknowledged the need for a critique grounded externally to the technological milieu. As both authors observe, this approach is by no means standard in the predominate culture of the west around the middle of the 20th century, and it is arguably no better now.
Jacques Ellul was a French polymath known most notably for his contributions to sociology, theology, and political theory. With respect to technological milieu, he claims that technology is deterministically progressing towards a totalitarian system of efficiency (Technique) over and against human values, and that, as totalitarian, it can only be overcome by an act of total anarchic freedom, which can only originate from the transcendent God of Christianity.
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his influence both on the existentialist movement and the study of phenomenology, though his thought very much resists categorization of this kind. In an attempt to glimpse past the superficial shell of the technological phenomena, he asks in what way technology is a danger with respect to Being. He concludes that technology is the manifestation of a metaphysical framework which originates is the epochal concealing of the coming to presence of Being itself. In response to this, reflection on the essence of technology as this concealing is the way necessary to prevent Being’s further concealment.
Heidegger, through his peculiar way of posing the question, helps the patient reader to peer into the metaphysical foundations of technology with the lofty solemnity appropriate to a phenomena which threatens to change the essence of man’s relationship to the very Being of beings, and in doing so brings into clarity an insight the profundity of which is akin to the experience of the spiritual. Ellul, on the other hand, brings the question into focus sociologically, and in doing so demonstrates the powerful explanatory capacity of the theory of Technique with respect to the causes of disharmony in society. It is here, with Ellul’s analysis, that we begin.
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