Kierkegaard and the Question Concerning Technology ii Kierkegaard and the Question Concerning Technology Christopher B. Barnett BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Christopher B. Barnett, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xvi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Maria Rajka Cover image: View of Copenhagen, Denmark between ca. 1890 and 1900, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Photochrom Collection, [LC-DIG-ppmsc-05746] All rights reserved. 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Identifiers: LCCN 2019008162 (print) | LCCN 2019013542 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628926682 (ePub) | ISBN 9781628926699 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781628926668 (hardback: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Kierkegaard, S²ren, 1813-1855. | Technology. Classification: LCC B4377 (ebook) | LCC B4377 .B365 2019 (print) | DDC 198/.9–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019008162 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6289-2666-8 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2669-9 eBook: 978-1-6289-2668-2 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. And at the touch of Love everyone becomes a poet. Plato, Symposium FOR LUKE, CALEB, PAUL, AND MONICA GRACE vi Contents Preface viii Acknowledgments xvi Abbreviations for Kierkegaard’s Works xvii References to Kierkegaard’s Works xviii 1 A General History of Technology 1 2 Technology in Golden Age Denmark 13 3 Kierkegaard on the Rise of Technological Culture 27 4 Kierkegaard’s Analysis of Information Technology 63 5 From Hegel to Google: Kierkegaard and the Perils of “the System” 97 6 The Question Concerning Technology: Searching for Answers with Kierkegaard 113 Concluding (Untechnological?) Postscript 157 Notes 159 Works Cited 211 Index 227 Preface Overview of the philosophy of technology The philosophy of technology has grown steadily since its inception, although its development has hardly proceeded in linear fashion. Carl Mitcham traces the field’s origin at least as far back as Robert Boyle (1627–91) and Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who sought to understand the world in terms of the principles of mechanics.1 Yet, it was not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that the philosophy of technology as such began to emerge. A key thinker in this regard was Ernst Kapp (1808–96), who, like Karl Marx, sought to understand technology in terms of Left-Hegelian materialism. In fact, Kapp coined the phrase Philosophie der Technik,2 which became popular in Germanophone scholarship, particularly among those interested in what Mitcham calls “engineering-philosophy discussions.”3 Still, it would be another century before the term became commonplace outside of Germany.4 That is not to say, however, that the philosophy of technology lay dormant until the 1980s. On the contrary, the discipline had already pressed into the academic mainstream in the mid-twentieth century, albeit under the guise of phenomenology and existentialism—a point to which this study will return. Moreover, by the 1970s, “there began to be a proliferation of publications”5 on the subject, and this shift was followed by the formation of the Society for Philosophy and Technology in the United States. Monographs were soon to follow, including Langdon Winner’s Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (1977), Don Ihde’s Technics and Praxis: A Philosophy of Technology (1979), and Albert Borgmann’s Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984). At this stage, the philosophy of technology largely received its orientation from “six forefathers”: Martin Heidegger, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Hans Jonas, Günther Anders, and Arnold Gehlen.6 In this group, Heidegger loomed largest, not only due to his reputation as one of the seminal philosophers of the twentieth century but also due to his influence on subsequent thinkers concerned with technology, such as Borgmann, Hubert Dreyfus, and Andrew Feenberg. Though not exactly forming a “school,” these forefathers nevertheless held two basic traits in common: (i) a preoccupation with the “historical and transcendental conditions that made modern technology possible” and (ii) an ostensible, if not necessarily explicit, desire to “return to some prior, seemingly more harmonious and idyllic [relationship] . . . between nature and culture.”7 In other words, the philosophy of technology emerged as a discipline “interested in technology writ large,”8 placing particular emphasis on how technology has come to shape modern society, often in detrimental fashion. Over time, however, the forefathers of the philosophy of technology have exercised diminishing influence on their field. Ihde argues that the trend is now toward “a more Preface ix pragmatic, more empirical, and more concrete approach to technologies.”9 Such an approach, he adds, improves upon the work of Heidegger and his peers, precisely to the extent that it eschews metaphysical concerns about the “essence” of technology and, instead, attends to “the differing contexts and multidimensionalities of technologies.”10 Doubtless this change reflects, at least to some extent, the so-called “end of metaphysics,” which, in the postmodern, postindustrial West, underlies discourse in economics, education, and politics. But Ihde sees a shift in technology itself, which is increasingly moving away from “mega-machine industrial technologies” and toward “micro- processes that include nano-, info-, bio-, and genetic technologies.”11 The upshot, he suggests, is something new—namely, technological innovation that seems to resist the dystopian analyses characteristic of much early philosophy of technology. As Ihde puts it, “Philosophies of technology need to renew themselves constantly, just as the technologies themselves change.”12 Still, Ihde’s distinction between “older” and “newer” technologies not only points forward to the evolution of the philosophy of technology but also points backward to a fissure in the very foundation of the discipline. For the phrase “philosophy of technology” itself bears different meanings. On the one hand, when the words “of technology” are taken to indicate “the subject or agent,” the philosophy of technology might be seen as “an attempt by technologists or engineers to elaborate a technological philosophy.”13 On the other hand, when “of technology” is taken to indicate “a theme being dealt with,” the philosophy of technology is better understood as “an effort by scholars from the humanities . . . to take technology seriously as a theme for disciplined reflection.”14 For Mitcham, the former approach is “more pro-technology and analytic,”15 promoting a “general philosophical elaboration and social application of the engineering attitude toward the world.”16 In contrast, the latter approach is “more critical and interpretive,”17 often finding expression in “attempts to defend the fundamental idea of the primacy of the nontechnical.”18 With these distinctions in mind, Ihde’s claim that the philosophy of technology is leaving behind older metaphysical concerns seems shortsighted, if not downright erroneous. That is to say, Ihde is doubtless right that, at present, the engineering philosophy of technology is undergoing a resurgence, not least due to the cultural-cum- technological reasons adduced above. Nevertheless, whether or not this resurgence will last, or whether or not it is the best way to approach technology, remains an open question. After all, the so-called “humanities philosophy of technology” is grounded in the very rudiments of human experience—namely, the attempt to understand the nature and purpose of things “in sacred myth, in poetry, and in philosophic discourse.”19 It is hardly necessary, then, that technology be evaluated solely (or even primarily) in terms of its technical features, and it would seem self-evident that “non- or transtechnological perspectives”20 offer valuable ways of considering technology’s place in human society. Moreover, it may even be the case that non-technological thinking stands as a “balance to an over-rationalized, over-managed form of life that becomes distorted and oppressive precisely to the extent that it is unable to allow any other ‘take’ on reality than its own.”21 Indeed, might not Ihde’s call to move on from the ostensibly antiquated views of Heidegger (and others) be seen as an effort, however