Relation to technology

For Descartes, the new science has a practical end: to yield techniques, mechanical arts, and a medicine that would prolong life and relieve the human condition. This optimism in the transformative power of applied knowledge anticipates techno-optimism, though it never forms an explicit thesis about technology as such.

Discourse on Method, VI

The Encyclopédie performs an unprecedented gesture: bringing the mechanical arts, the trades and the machines into knowledge, on an equal footing with the sciences. Technology is here no mere convenience but a vehicle of emancipation, which lifts man out of misery and need and extends his dominion over nature. Heirs to Bacon's programme, the Enlightenment ties the progress of the arts to the progress of enlightenment: mastering nature and instructing men go together.

Diderot and d'Alembert, Encyclopédie, art. "Art" · Bacon, Novum Organum

Our knowledge of nature does not reach real essences, but it is enough for what matters to us: the conduct of life and the conveniences we can draw from things. Locke sees in the useful arts, grounded in experience and natural history, the true benefit of natural philosophy. To show what labour and improvement add to the land, he contrasts the king of a large territory in America with an English day-labourer, who is better fed, housed and clothed.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, 12, §10-12 · Second Treatise of Government, ch. V, §41

Marx holds the development of the productive forces to be the motor of historical progress: machinery and large-scale industry create the material conditions for a society of abundance freed from want. Yet under capital, that same machinery intensifies exploitation and alienation: the optimism bears on technology freed from capitalist relations, not on technology as such.

Marx, Capital, vol. I, chapter on machinery and modern industry · Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)

In the "Teleology", the tool displays the cunning of reason, which uses the properties of things to accomplish its ends: through its permanence, "the plough is more honourable than are immediately the enjoyments procured by it". In civil society, however, the division of labour makes activity ever more abstract and mechanical, until the machine can take the human being's place. Poverty belongs to the contradictory dynamics of that society and the distribution of its wealth, not to the machine as such: Hegel prizes the rational power of means while analysing their social conditions.

Science of Logic, Subjective Logic, "Teleology" · Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §198 and §243-245

The development of the productive forces, machinery included, is the motor of history and the material condition of emancipation: large-scale industry creates the means of a society of abundance. Yet under capitalism the machine enslaves the worker and intensifies his exploitation. Marx is thus neither technophobic nor naively optimistic: technology liberates according to the social relations that command it, hence a nuanced optimism.

Capital, vol. I, ch. 15 (machinery and large-scale industry) · Manifesto of the Communist Party, ch. 1 (the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie and of industry)

In Kant's account of history, "unsocial sociability" drives the development of human talents and skills: without this antagonism, human beings would have remained as good-natured as the sheep they tend. Kant sees this as genuine but morally incomplete progress: "We are cultivated to a high degree by art and science. We are civilised to the point of excess in all kinds of social courtesies and proprieties. But we are still a long way from the point where we could consider ourselves morally mature." Skill supplies means for all kinds of ends; it says nothing of their worth.

Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784), fourth and seventh propositions (tr. H. B. Nisbet, Kant: Political Writings) · Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, II (imperatives of skill)

Mill expects much from the progress of the industrial arts, but doubts that it has yet served those who work: "it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being". They have enabled a larger population to live the same life of drudgery, allowed more manufacturers to make fortunes, and increased the comforts of the middle classes. Their benefit therefore depends on institutions, distribution and ends: with just institutions and population growth guided by foresight, inventions could at last have their legitimate effect, that of abridging labour.

Principles of Political Economy, IV, ch. 6, §2

Written in reply to Haldane's Daedalus, which promised happiness through biology, Icarus turns the image around: science confers power, and power serves the ends already held by those who receive it. A new technique therefore improves nothing by itself; it amplifies, and if the dominant passions are rivalry and domination, it simply makes them more efficient. Russell remains a partisan of science and refuses any turning back: what he asks for is not less power but a change of ends, which makes him an uneasy instrumentalist rather than a critic of technology.

Icarus, or the Future of Science (1924) · The Scientific Outlook (1931) · The Impact of Science on Society (1952)

A primitivist distrust runs through Taoism: contrivances and machines breed the calculating mind and corrupt simplicity. Zhuangzi tells of the old gardener who refuses a water-raising machine, fearing that whoever keeps a machine in his heart loses his native purity; Laozi dreams of a small country where, though tools exist, none would be used.

Zhuangzi, ch. 12 (Heaven and Earth) · Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 80

An old gardener refuses the water-drawing machine he is offered: "whoever uses machines acquires a machine heart," and loses the native purity of the spirit. Zhuangzi's distrust bears not on the tool itself, which he gladly wields in his artisan parables, but on the calculating mind and the cunning the instrument breeds at the expense of the natural. This critique of the "machine heart" ranks him, like Laozi, among the distant ancestors of techno-criticism, but from the inner self rather than the political order.

Zhuangzi, ch. 12 (the gardener and the machine)

Without thematising technology for its own sake, Husserl prepares its critique: the Galilean mathematisation of nature breeds a "technicisation" of knowledge, in which one manipulates formulae and procedures whose originary meaning has been forgotten, emptied of the intuition that grounded them. This denunciation of a knowledge become pure operative calculation, cut off from its lived ground, foreshadows the techno-criticism Heidegger will radicalise. A cautious position, drawn from the diagnosis of the Crisis rather than from an explicit philosophy of technology.

The Crisis of the European Sciences, §9

The arts and inventions, from metalworking to weaving and seafaring, were born of need and experience, and Lucretius describes them without any nostalgia for the savage state. But he sees in them no march toward happiness: the discovery of gold and metals armed war, and luxury inflames the empty desires that nature does not demand. Material progress leaves untouched, indeed worsens, the trouble of soul that philosophy alone soothes, hence a clear reservation about what techniques truly bring.

On the Nature of Things, V, 1241-1457 (metals, war, luxury and the ambivalent progress of the arts)

In "Of Cannibals", Montaigne rejects the claim that human artifice surpasses nature, our great and powerful mother: our interventions, he argues, debase what they claim to improve. In "Of Coaches", he credits the peoples of the New World with industry and judgement, challenging Europe's claim to overall superiority: weapons and horses helped bring about the devastation he laments, "so many cities razed, so many nations exterminated… for the traffic in pearls and pepper". This critique of presumption and use places him a little beyond instrumentalism, without any general condemnation of the arts.

Essays, I, 31 ("Of Cannibals") · Essays, III, 6 ("Of Coaches")