Technology and the Meaning of Life

What did Heidegger believe modern technology was?

It is the way in which the world appeals to us as a means and ends

Heidegger believed that technology is a

mode of revealing

Bringing-forth is not just about creation but about not concealing

• The way something comes into its own is the way way things go from concealed to unconcealed

Bringing-forth is grounded in

revealing

• Four modes are at play when making something.

• Technology is the way in which we reveal things about the world

What are the four modes Heidegger mentions?

• Causa Materialis (Material Cause): The matter or raw material out of which an object is made (e.g., the silver used to make a chalice).

• Causa Formalis (Formal Cause): The form or shape that the material enters (e.g., the specific shape or design of the chalice)

• Causa Finalis (Final Cause): The end, goal, or purpose for which the object is intended (e.g., the sacrificial rite the chalice is used for)

• Causa Efficiens (Efficient Cause): The maker or agent that brings about the effect, gathering the material, form, and purpose together (e.g., the silversmith)

[Heidegger] Essence vs Existence: What is different?

• To ask WHAT something is, is to ask about its essence.

  • Things have an unchanging essence, such as an underlying structure that helps something concrete come into being

  • Example quotes:

    • “The essence of Daesin lies in its existence.”

    • “Existence precedes essence.”

    • Existence and essence are the same

    • Timeless essence is not what is being unconcealed

[Heidegger] Through humans __ comes forward in the world

truth

[Heidegger] The word for revealing is

Entbergen

• Bergen means to shelter or conceal

• Ent means unconcealing

[Heidegger] Automated thinking assumes that

thinking is the production of a certain output

[Heidegger] Technology forces philosophical questions. What it means to be human is

to question and be open to questions

[Heidegger] Real thinking happens through

language that is extraordinary

• Trusth lies beyond language that is partly concealed to us

[Heidegger] What does it mean to bring something into exxistence?

Example: challace

• Bring the challace from absence to presence

  • This is what happens when you bring something into existence

[Marx] What is the central question in the Marx text?

How do we explain the paradox between the idea that machines have made things shorter vs the lived reality that machines made the work day more intense?

[Marx] “revolution in the instruments of labour”

There are three parts of the machine, the tool is the most important part, and the revolution began when that part became automated.

• For example: the power loom automates the process. All women have to do is just check the machine

• Can also think about the history of the computer

[Marx] “Like every other instrument for increasing the productivity of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other part, the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing.”

• Part of the day, the worker makes enough to sustain himself and the other part is for the boss/capitalist so that he can have surplus

• The value of a commodity comes from the socially believed amount of time it takes to create it

[Marx] When the entire family is brought in,

the wage is spread over the whole family

Does Marx think things are better or worse?

Everything is steps in the process

[Marx] The job of the capitalist is to

make money and make more money

[Marx] Prices of the commodities go down so

the wage goes down

[Marx] The distortion is that with machines, ideally life would get better but,

the opposite is true because labor increases and that is because we live under capitalism

[Marx] The General Formula of Capital

• MCM vs CMC

  • money → market → sell commodity

    • The only way you benefit from this is if you get more than what you made (MCM’)

    • The circulation of money as capital is an end itself

    • Labour is the only commodity that MCM’ applies

[Marx] Human capital creates

value beyone the machine. The machine is already priced in.

[Marx] labor is so special because

it can be exploited

[Marx] Labor is a process

between man and nature

[Marx] What it means to be human is to labor, capitalism…

exploits that and takes away the autonomy

[Marx] Freedom is to

realize you purpose in the materials, and capitalism ailenates this

[Marx] The main thing that makes labor special is the fact that

humans take what is given and make something new. We create beyond what we need, and have the satisfaction of making something.

[Weber] What is disenchantment?

We feel like we need to control everything. This is what we get from science, as we can figure out a means to an end. However, technology cannot give us the answer to the meaning of life or ultimate values

[Weber] “If you can’t man up and deal with the fact that there is no meaning, the church is wide open” (meaning)

When he stated that "the church is wide open," he meant that those who cannot face this "disenchanted" reality and require a comforting, ready-made sense of truth can easily return to religion

[Weber] You have to decide

which God you are going to serve

[Weber] The concept of enlightenment

• Dialectical → is it possible that a thing and its object are true?

  • Same process and some discovery = life AND death

  • Mythic cualities are coming out of enlightenment itself

  • The truth is something that is hard to grasp

• Weber argued that the Enlightenment’s push toward scientific and intellectual progress stripped the world of its mystery, magic, and spiritual meaning.

Adono/Horkheimer on Horroscopes

They are similar to enlightenment in that it is trying to find meaning (connects to the idea of totalitarianism)

Adono/Horkheimer on Enlightenment

• It helps to control and dispel myths

  • Bacon wanted a happy match between mind and nature of things, and enlightenment promises to close this gap

Adono/Horkheimer believe that we try to impose ourselves on

nature.

[Adono/Horkheimer] Dialectic of enlightenment

holding two things in opposition together. Englightnement was supposed to make thigns better, but instead it brough death

[Adono/Horkheimer] Myth is

enlightenment

• For example, anthropomorphism is when people attribute human-like qualities to nature

[Adono/Horkheimer] enlightenment reverts to myth

For example, Antropic’s mythos

[Adono/Horkheimer] is the end of enlightnment when it amputates the incommensurable?

• Enlightenment makes everything we see reality

• Kant believe that we already have a given human framework

[Adono/Horkheimer] How did we go from enlightnment to the Holocaust?

• Enlightenment is mytical fear amplified

• Heidegger’s critique about enframing comes into play. Once you have this lens you can turn it towards people at the object

  • If I can assimilate ideas I have into a concept I have

    • Example of sandy hook being thought of as a senseless tragedy, one that is not comprehendible. We reach for the concept and have it made, but we don’t need to do anything further

How is Adono’s quote/ way of thinking related to violence?

• As this impulse spreads, it becoems possibke for people to kill others if it serves their ends

• There is still something left over, and that is truth (something that is incomprehensible)

[Adono/Horkheimer] THE CULTURE INDUSTRY

• We all think that we are individuals and see a close-up of someone on screen and connect that with individuality

• The industry takes things so central to humanity and makes them a cliche

  • Example: Taylor Swift and heartbreak songs

• Art from the industry confirms the world as it is, but good art takes you out of that

  • The industry reproduces what works

    • The goal of this is to turn your brain off so that you don’t think critically about your conditions and return to work

[Arendt] Action includes plurality and natality

Natality: we have the capacity to enact new and unpredictable action

Plurality: Action is inherently plural; you are put into a web of human decisions

• When we act out of freedom, we cannot predict the consequences

[Arendt] We create tools and technolgy ___ our existence

conditions

[Arendt] Freedom is in how

we interact with others and with the conditions

• freedom is not an isolated, internal state of mind or the "liberty" to simply do as you please. Instead, it is an active, external practice of speech and action that only exists in the public realm when we interact with others under the condition of plurality.

Arendt goes against the Marxist idea that

the revolution is brewing/has been in the works because of conditions

What is the story with chapter one of The Human Condition?

She talks a lot about the Greeks and Action, and how they were a society of laborers

• The action is needed to bring your life meaning

• Christianity makes the switch from action to labor

What is Arendt’s view on technology?

an ambivalent force that frees humans from biological necessity but threatens to replace meaningful political action with mindless consumerism. She warned that an automated, tech-driven society risks reducing individuals to passive consumers and thoughtless operators who no longer understand the machines they rely on.

[Arendt] Sputnik, telescope, what do these mean?

• You can have truth without meaning, for example the idea that the sun used to revole around us and not us around the sun.

• Immortality is important → though our lives are limited, we can extend it through our works. This is the highest good. We need to recover the way Greeks thought about action

[Arendt] Ancient Greece had the idea of the Vita activa and the vita contemplativa

• The vita activa is the idea of Labor, work, and action

• The vita contemplativa is the contemplative life, or the life of the mind

• Arendt believed that the Vita activa became devalued and secondary to the vita contemplativa

• The story is:

  • First: it was Vita activa/vita contemplativa

  • Second: vita contemplativa/Vita activa

  • Now: Vita activa/vita contemplativa

[Arendt] The discussion about the contemplative life has overshadowed the discussion about

work and labor

[Arendt] Why is immortality worth defending?

If you don’t what is left to you?

[Arendt] The thing we valued in the vita activa is [1] and we have forgotten about [2]

1. labor

2. action and work

What is the heirarchy of the vita activa according to Arendt?

Action → Work → Labor

[Arendt] Labor vs work

Labor is like making your bed in the morning, whereas work is when we have an idea and bring that thing into being

• Most everything is work, but given the conditions most things are now labor

  • The emphasis on work is conditional on society

  • Labor has no means and ends

[Arendt] Technology goes from

transforming nature to being a continuous process

• It is not the body’s movement, but the movement of the machine that controls

[Arendt] Homo faber

We build tools to erect a world, not to help others. The consequence is that we get so caught up in machine that we get caught in the labor process

[Arendt] Sputnik and the archamedian point present the idea of escaping the earth

• The telescope challenges the naked eye perception; we can no longer trust our senses, as they are given

• Descartes → We can only trust our internal mind/reality

  • This connects to Sputnik, and the idea of flight from the Earth

  • What is wrong with this, according to Arendt?

    • This is a fleeing from the conditions that condition us. The earth is the quintessence of the human condition

Foucault gave a new understanding of

power.

• The old model of power invovles levitation and thomas hobbs

• Foucault argues that freedom still comes from this old model of power

• We need particular technologies to make people feel powerful

What does Foucault say is constantly intentioned?

Power and relationships

• Power and relationships can shift

• Power is psychological, there is no outside to power

• Power is in everything

[Foucault] Power does not just come from the top, but it is

inbetween, international, and everywhere

• We do power everywhere

[Foucault] Power is more than a contract/transaction and should be viewed

in a positive manner

• Power is not something that prohibits; it produces us

  • We know power through discipline

    • We see Arendt here: we have been conditioned

    • We make power, and it produces us

    • There is no power that exists that doesn’t condition us

[Foucault] Carson tells us that the things we make up end up

killing us. The line between the body and the conditions is porous

• Focuses on punishment because that is where power is most visible

[Foucault] What is the contrast between the opening pages and what comes after?

• Punishment is equally incidious but less public

  • The story of punishment becoming “more humane”

  • The peopticon is woven into so many areas of life → exams, clinics, etc.

[Foucault] How did we go from power as a spectacle of torture to disciplinary power?

• “it is largely as a force of production…”

• The rise of capitalism creates the need for more efficent discipline

[Foucault] Idea of the soul and Body

• Punishment was encacted on teh body, and now punishment is enacted on the soul

• The soul becomes the prison of the body

  • This is because that is where power works

    • The prison is the most visible expression of power, and it bleeds out into society

[Foucault] PANOPTICON

• you cannot see the guard, so you dont know if you are being watched or not. So you interalize the discipline

• the panopticon is efficent

• vs God, this has an economic end

• The panopticon is not a metaphor: “power situation of which they are the bearers”

What are the dualisms that Harroway mentions in her text?

• Human and machine

• Male and female

• Human and animal

Why is Harroway’s argument ironic?

She writes this as a response to socialists/feminists that feel the need to establish an identity for a movement. The cyborg represents intersectionality and a being

• Our dependence on machines is an opportunity to rethink these boundaries

• If we face the machine reality, we would realize that we are cyborg/hybrid creatures

What is the lesson in Donna Harroway’s text?

Human, natural, self sufficent/ technology,machines, artificial, assisted. The line (the slash) is the product of social forces (Foucault).

• We are all cyborgs because of the way we came into the world as a mix of technology and nature

Sophie Lewis Reading Notes

• Surrogacy is more than the DNA that goes into it

  • Modern surrogacy has a labor contract

  • The opportunity here is recognizing that surrogacy is labor

  • Surrogacy exposes the fact that the nuclear family is not self-sustaining and requires outsourced labor

• Surrogacy for her is like Heidegger’s saving power