Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry by Albert Borgmann

Author:Albert Borgmann [Borgmann, Albert]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2009-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

PART 3

The Reform of Technology

Focal things and practices can empower us to propose and perhaps to enact a reform of technology. These things and practices are therefore at the center of Part 3 which leads up to the focal concerns and then derives measures of reform from them. The first step is to connect the concern to reform with the openings for reform that have appeared in Part 2. This is the task of Chapter 20. Its major point is that a fruitful reform of technology must be one of the device paradigm and cannot allow itself to be confined within the framework of technology. And to undertake a consequential reform, one must find an appropriate kind of discourse. It must be a speaking that avoids the liabilities of those moral arguments and attempts at social reform that are patterned by technology. Instead it must be guided by a matter of final concern. Chapter 21 considers these difficulties and seeks to explain the proper discourse of reform, namely, deictic discourse, whose necessity has been stressed throughout this study.

Deictic discourse is about something that addresses us in its own right and constitutes a center by which we can orient ourselves. On this continent, nature in its pristine state is the clearest and most eminent instance of such a thing. In Chapter 22 I try to show how the wilderness has inspired deictic discourse and how, when we speak about the wilderness appropriately, we can say that it constitutes a focal concern and a fruitful counterforce to technology. In Chapter 23 I go on to develop the notion of a focal thing more generally in an effort to point out that focal concerns can prosper in the daily context of technology. But they can do so only if we grant them an assured place through a focal practice. I take running and the culture of the table as instances of such a practice. In Chapter 24 I pause to consider difficulties with focal concerns and alternatives to them. Having disposed of these problems more or less, I proceed to spell out concrete measures of reform for the personal and private realm, for the tradition of excellence, and for the family.

The final and most recalcitrant problem for a reform of technology out of a focal concern is the question whether we can extend the reform constructively to the national community. This is the problem of Chapter 25. The key difficulty is to recognize that such an extension can only come to pass through a philosophically informed restructuring of the economy. More precisely, it is a matter of recognizing and developing tendencies that are assuming shape even now. They announce themselves in the distinctions between the standard of living and the quality of life, between the centralized and highly automated industry on the one side and the local, labor-intensive economy on the other. The philosophy of technology allows us to see these and related issues in a principled and hopeful way. Such a hopeful vision can be joined with the initial hope of the promise of technology.

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