Spirit of Technicity

Discussion

Mary Harrington on Heidegger's concept:

"What are we doing when we enclose something, and re-order it to market society? I name-dropped Heidegger above and want to round off this little interlude or detour by offering his term “enframing” as a means of deepening that understanding. In The Question Concerning Technology Heidegger argued that the essence of technology is not a set of tools, techniques, or machines but a mindset or way of looking at the world. Specifically it is that mindset in which we encounter everything in the world not in the fulness of its being but in terms of its instrumental value, as ordered for use. Heidegger specifically characterises this as a type of epistemological violence: a “challenging-forth” that forces whatever we encounter to reveal to us only those of its aspects which are useful to us and standing ready for our further employment to some end. The world is thus evacuated of its own nature and becoming, and appears instead as an inert “standing-reserve”, whose only function is to be ready to hand.

Heidegger grounds his analysis with a reference to Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes, suggesting that the specific epistemological move, that enables the instrumental character of technology, has its origin in a distortion or dis-ordering of our understanding of the four causes, and hence of causality as such. For Aristotle, “causality” was understood not sequential terms but as multiple dimensions of the way in which something comes to be.

“The four causes are the ways, all belonging at once to each other, of being responsible for something else.”

As well as the material and efficient cause (roughly, the stuff, and the force that acts on it) Aristotle understood things have a “formal” and a “final” cause, which is to say its nature and purpose. But we have, Heidegger suggests, collapsed causality almost entirely into efficient cause - as when a snooker cue “causes” a ball to ping across the table.

Elaborating on Heidegger’s analysis, we can note that historically this occurred in the early seventeenth century. It was, in fact, one of the most significant changes to take place at the inception of modernity: the discarding of formal and final cause as obstacles to scientific inquiry. One of the most famous proponents of this metaphysical narrowing came from Francis Bacon, in Novum Organum, written 1620. The only worthwhile telos for anything was now, in Bacon’s words “the relief of man’s estate”.

My gloss on what Heidegger calls enframing is this collapse of causality. The re-ordering of everything such that it appears both without its intrinsic nature, denatured, and abstracted from the ends to which it is naturally directed. This is the central epistemological move that enables all of what we now gesture at while mumbling about “modernity”.

What Charles Taylor called “disenchantment” or secularisation can be seen as this gradual refashioning of the world, through the 18th and 19th centuries, as standing-reserve. It’s no longer formed of substances with a nature and directedness, whose ultimate ground is God. Rather it’s a set of inert resources to be mined, used, “developed”. We see this in the retreat of God first into Cartesian dualism, then God as “divine watchmaker”, and finally simply as gone, as first noted by Nietzsche in his parable of the madman who cries out that God is dead because “we have killed him.”

Over the course of secularisation, in Sources of the Self Taylor also tracks the transformation of what the medieval philosophers would have called the “soul”, in the Thomist sense I sketched above, as it loses that link to the transcendent and becomes the secular “self”. But even over the course of this trajectory the “self” still largely retained enough of that older Christian connotation of transcendence, of the imago dei, to hold out against the encroaching tide of technologization. But as the philosopher Carl Trueman points out (in a forthcoming book, The Desecration of Man) what Nietzsche’s madman has realised is that without God there are no longer any given limits on anything. There are no longer any barriers on what we can do, or to whom. And the thing about seeing the world as standing-reserve, as resources to mine, is that eventually you exhaust a resource and need to move onto the next. You’re always on the lookout for new seams to tap. Eventually that was going to come for the last taboo; enframing humans."

(https://www.maryharrington.co.uk/p/feminism-and-identity-in-the-transhuman)