Philosphy of Technology - Robert C. Sharff
Three Ways of Being-With Technology
Carl Mitcham
45
In any serious discussion of issues associated with
technology and humanity there readily arises a general
question about the primary member in this relationship.
On the one hand, it is difficult to deny that we exercise
some choice over the kinds of technics with which we
live – that is, that we control technology. On the other, it
is equally difficult to deny that technics exert profound
influences on the ways we live – that is, structure our
existence. We build our buildings, Winston Churchill
once remarked (apropos a proposal for a new Parliament
uilding), then our buildings build us. But which comes
first, logically if not temporally, the builder or the build-
ings? Which is primary, humanity or technology?
This is, of course, a chicken-and-egg question, one
not subject to any straightforward or unqualified answer.
But it is not therefore insignificant, nor is it enough to
propose as some kind of synthesis that there is simply a
mutual relationship between the two, that humanity and
technology are always found together. Mutual relation-
ship is not some one thing; mutual relationships take
many different forms. There are, for instance, mutualities
of parent and child, of husband and wife, of citizens, and
so forth. Humanity and technology can be found
together in more than one way. Rather than argue the
primacy of one or the other factor or the cliché of
mutuality in the humanity-technology relationship, I
propose to outline three forms the relationship itself can
take, three ways of being-with technology.
To speak of three ways of being-with technology is
necessarily to bo
ow and adapt a category from Martin
Heidegger’s Being and Time XXXXXXXXXXin a manner that deserves
some acknowledgment. In his seminal work Heidegger
proposes to develop a new understanding of being human
y taking the primordial human condition, being-in-the-
world, and subjecting this given to what he calls an
existential analysis. The analysis proceeds by way of eluci-
dating three equiprimordial aspects of this condition of
eing human: the world within which the human finds itself,
the being-in relationship, and the being who is in the relation-
ship – all as a means of approaching what, for Heidegger, is
the fundamental question, the meaning of Being.
The fundamental question need not, on this occasion,
concern us. What does concern us is the central place of
technics in Heidegger’s analysis and the disclosure of
eing-with as one of its central features. For Heidegger
the worldhood of the world, as he calls it, comes into view
through technical engagements, which reveal a network
of equipment and artifacts ready-to-hand for manipula-
tion, and other human beings likewise so engaged. These
others are neither just technically ready-to-hand (like
tools) nor even scientifically present-at-hand (like natural
objects); on the contrary, they are like the very human
eing who notices them in that “they are there too, and there
with it.”1
The being-with relationship thus disclosed through
technical engagements is, for Heidegger, primarily
Carl Mitcham, “Three Ways of Being-With Technology,” in From Artifact to Habitat: Studies in the Critical Engagement of Technology, Research in
Technology Series 3 (Bethlehem, PA: LeHigh University Press, 1990), pp. 31–59. Reprinted by permission of Associated University Presses.
Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: An Anthology, Second Edition. Edited by Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
524 carl mitcham
social in character; it refers to the social character of
the world that comes to light through technical prac-
tice. Such a world is not composed solely of tools and
artifacts, but of tools used with others, and artifacts
elonging to others. Technical engagements are not
just technical but have an immediately and intimately
social dimension. Indeed, this is all so immediate that
it requires some labored stepping back even to recog-
nize and state – the processes of distancing and articu-
lation that are in part precisely what philosophy is all
about.
The present attempt to step back and examine vari-
ous ways of being-with technology rather than being-
with others (through technology) takes off from but
does not proceed in the same manner as Heidegger’s
social analysis of the They and the problem of authen-
ticity in the technological world. For Heidegger, being-
with refers to an immediate personal presence in
technics. Social being-with can manifest itself, however,
not just on the level of immediate or existential pres-
ence but also in ideas. Indeed, the social world is as
much, if not more, a world of ideas as of persons.
Persons hold ideas and interact with others and with
things on the basis of them. These ideas can even
enclose the realm of technics – that is, become a lan-
guage or logos of technics, a “technology.”
The idea of being-with technology presupposes
this “logical” encompassing of technics by a society
and its philosophical or protophilosophical articula-
tion. For many people, however, the ideas that guide
their lives may not be held with conscious awareness
or full articulation. They often take the form of myth.
Philosophical argument and discussion then intro-
duces into such a world of ideas a kind of
eak or
upture with the immediately given. This
eak or
upture need not require the rejection or abandoning
of that given, but it will entail the
inging of that
given into fuller consciousness or awareness – from
which it must be accepted (or rejected) in a new way
or on new grounds.
Against this background, then, I propose to develop
historico-philosophical descriptions, necessarily some-
what truncated, of three alternative ways of being-with
technology. The first is what may be called ancient
skepticism; the second, Renaissance and Enlightenment
optimism; and the third, romantic ambiguity or uneasi-
ness. Even in the somewhat simplified form of ideal
types in which they will be presented here, consideration
of the issues that divide these three ways of being-with
technology may perhaps illuminate the difficulties we
face in trying to live with modern technology and its
manifest problems.
Ancient Skepticism
The original articulation of a relationship between
humanity and technics, an articulation that is in its earliest
forms coeval with the appearance of recorded history, can
e stated boldly as “technology is bad but necessary” or,
perhaps more carefully, as “technology (that is, the study
of technics) is necessary but dangerous.” The idea is
hinted at by a plethora of archaic myths, such as the story
of the Tower of Babel or the myths of Prometheus,
Hephaestos, or Daedalus and Icarus. Certainly the transi-
tion from hunting and gathering to the domestication of
animals and plants introduced a profound and profoundly
distu
ing transition into culture. Technics, according to
these myths, although to some extent required by humanity
and thus on occasion a cause for legitimate cele
ation,2
easily turn against the human by severing it from some
larger reality – a severing that can be manifest in a failure
of faith or shift of the will, a refusal to rely on or trust
God or the gods, whether manifested in nature or in
providence.3
Ethical arguments in support of this distrust or uneasi-
ness about technical activities can be detected in the ear-
liest strata of Western philosophy. According to the Greek
historian Xenophon, for instance, his teacher Socrates
(469–399 b.c.) considered farming, the least technical of
the arts, to be the most philosophical of occupations.
Although the earth “provides the good things most
abundantly, farming does not yield them up to softness
ut … produces a kind of manliness … . Moreover, the
earth, being a goddess, teaches justice to those who are
able to learn” (Oeconomicus 5.4 and 12). This idea of agri-
culture as the most virtuous of the arts, one in which
human technical action tends to be kept within proper
limits, is repeated by representatives of the philosophical
tradition as diverse as Plato,4 Aristotle,5 St. Thomas
Aquinas,6 and Thomas Jefferson. 7
Elsewhere Xenophon notes Socrates’ distinction
etween questions about whether to perform an action and
how to perform it, along with another distinction between
scientific or technological questions concerning the laws of
nature and ethical or political questions about what is right
and wrong, good and bad, pious and impious, just and
unjust. In elaborating on the first distinction, Socrates
525three ways of being-with technology
stresses that human beings must determine for themselves
how to perform their actions – that they can take lessons in
“construction (tektonikos), forging metal, agriculture, ruling
human beings, and … calculation, economics, and military
strategy,” and therefore should not depend on the gods for
help in “counting, measuring, or weighing”; the ultimate
consequences of their technical actions are nonetheless
hidden. His initial example is even taken from agriculture:
the man who knows how to plant a field does not know
whether he will reap the harvest. Thus whether we should
employ our technical powers is a subject about which we
must rely on guidance from the gods.8
At the same time, with regard to the second distinction,
Socrates argues that because of the supreme importance of
ethical and political issues, human beings should not allow
themselves to become preoccupied with scientific and
technological pursuits. In the intellectual autobiography
attributed to him in the Phaedo, for instance, Socrates
elates how he turned away from natural science because
of the cosmological and moral confusion it tended
to engender.9 In the Memorabilia it is similarly said of
Socrates that
He did not like others to discuss the nature of all things, nor
did he speculate on the “cosmos” of the sophists or the
necessities of the heavens, but he declared that those who
wo
ied about such matters were foolish. And first he would
ask whether such persons became involved with these prob-
lems because they believed that their knowledge of human
things was complete or whether they thought they were
obligated to neglect human things to speculate on divine
things. (Memorabilia