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

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)

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)

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)