“When we represent technology to ourselves as an array of neutral instruments, invented by human beings and under human control, we are expressing a kind of common sense, but it is a common sense from within the very technology we are attempting to represent. The novelness of our novelties is being minimized. We are led to forget that modern destiny permeates our representations of the world and ourselves. The coming to be of technology has required changes in what we think is good, what we think good is, how we conceive sanity and madness, justice and injustice, rationality and irrationality, beauty and ugliness.

“Indeed there is novelty in how we now conceive novelness itself. That changed conception of novelness also obviously entails a change in the traditional account of an openness to the whole, and therefore a quite new content to the word ‘philosophy.’ A road or a sparrow, a child or the passing of time come to us through that destiny. To put the matter crudely: when we represent technology to ourselves through its own common sense we think of ourselves as picking and choosing in a supermarket, rather than within the analogy of the package deal. We have bought a package deal of far more fundamental novelness than simply a set of instruments under our control. It is a destiny which enfolds us in its own conceptions of instrumentality, neutrality and purposiveness. It is in this sense that it has been truthfully said; technology is the ontology of the age. Western peoples (and perhaps soon all peoples) take themselves as subject confronting otherness as objects — objects lying as raw material at the disposal of knowing and making subjects. Unless we comprehend the package deal we obscure from ourselves the central difficulty in our present destiny: we apprehend our destiny by forms of thought which are themselves the very core of that destiny.

“The result of this is that when we are deliberating in any practical situation our judgement acts rather like a mirror, which throws back the very metaphysic of the technology which we are supposed to be deliberating about in detail. The outcome is almost inevitably a decision for further technological development. For example, we can see this in the recent public discussions concerning research into the recombinations made possible by the discovery of the structure of DNA. The victory of those espousing the development of such research was not based simply on the power of the community of scientists to guarantee their freedom under the banner of Robert Oppenheimer’s bon mot about experiment: ‘when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.’ It was rather that those (both inside and outside the scientific community) who were troubled about the possibilities in such research could not pass beyond the language of immediate dangers in expressing their concern. Once the scientists showed how the immediate threats could be met, the case was closed. The opponents of the research could not pass beyond the language of specifiable dangers, because any possible long range intimations of deprivation of human good could not be expressed in the ontology they shared with their opponents. The ontology expressed in such terms as ‘the ascent of life,’ ‘human beings making their own future,’ ‘the progress of knowledge,’ or ‘the necessity of interfering with nature for human good’ could not be used against itself. But there is not other language available which does not seem to be the irrational refusal of the truths of scientific discovery.

“Any deliberate ‘no’ to particular researches requires thinking the truth of the distinction made in the old adage a posse ad esse non valet consequentia (I take this to mean: just because something can be, it does not follow that it should be). But the account of existence which arises from the modern co-penetration of knowing and making exalts the possible above what is. It has undermined our ability to think that there could be knowledge of what is in terms of which the justice of every possible action could be judged in advance of any possible future. It is not feasible here (and who indeed is capable of that task?) to spell out in detail how in and through modern science and philosophy, or even in and through the poor remnants of theology (which may be called German theology), the possible is exalted above what is. However, the matter can be put simply: if we hold in our minds the two statements, A posse ad esse non valet consequentia and ‘When you see something that is technically sweet you go ahead and do it,’ and when you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success — then is there any doubt which statement is congruent with the sense of our own creativity as knowers and makers?

“Consequently, for those who affirm that the justice or injustice of some actions can be known in advance of the necessities of time and of the calculation of means, there is a pressing need to understand our technological destiny from principles more comprehensive than its own. This need lifts us up to ask about the great western experiment in a more than piecemeal way. It pushes us to try to understand its meaning in terms of some openness to the whole which is not simply sustenance for the further realization of that experiment. But the exigency of our need for understanding must not blind us to the tightening circle in which we find ourselves. We are called to understand technological civilization just when its very realization has radically put in question the possibility that there could be any such understanding.”

— from “Thinking about Technology,” in Technology and Justice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1986). A pdf copy of the essay may be downloaded here.

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