Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
bodily understanding of an “equipmental context”—for example, a
craftsperson's workshop or a factory floor—where every item of equip-
ment is related to every other through a complex set of meanings teleo-
logically ordered by the potential uses of the artifacts to be produced.
While this setting and the larger world to which it belongs vary over
time and from place to place, Heidegger's historical understanding of
the being of work and the materials utilized in it differs quite markedly
from Marx's historical materialism. As Heidegger remarks in
The Basic
Problems of Phenomenology
, a work that overlaps
Being and Time
,
“Productive comportment is not limited just to the producible and the
produced but harbors within itself a remarkable breadth of possibility
for understanding the being of beings.”
26
Implicit in this ontological
approach to technology is a critique of Marx's materialist account of
productive praxis as incapable in the end of overcoming the world alien-
ation that had become Cartesianism's main legacy.
27
Very simply, what
Heidegger offers—and what Marx was unable to deliver—is a satis-
factory explanation of and alternative to dualism, which Heidegger
eventually accomplishes by tracing Cartesianism's origins to the volun-
tarism identified by Lynn White as the defining character Western
Christianity and, in Heidegger's view, Western philosophy culminating
in Nietzsche.
In a much later essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,”
Heidegger addresses the mode of revealment unique to modern technol-
ogy and rejects the widely held belief that technology is merely an instru-
ment subject to human control.
28
Indeed, to restrict one's analysis of any
kind of technology to a calculus of simple means and ends is to over-
look the complex and subtle ways in which it can and does change the
way we perceive and value the world. Against this instrumental concep-
tion, which presupposes that machines and technical processes are
neutral tools whose goodness is solely a function of the virtue of their
users, Heidegger argues that in every technology, craft or industrial, high-
tech or low-tech, there occurs a historically conditioned mode of reveal-
ing or truth, which in the case of the modern technological age sets up
and challenges nature to yield its energy sources to be stored for later
human use. It is this challenging character that distinguishes modern
technology from its predecessors, which in stark contrast “bring forth”
artifacts without assaulting things and radically altering natural
