Abstract
How may nonmoderns provide an answer to the hegemony of technology ? We need to understand the essence of technology in order for any exit from modernity to become plausible. In “The Question Concerning Technology”, Martin Heidegger’s classic study of technology, cultural specifics are completely absent. It examines only one form of techné, namely the Western format originating in the heritage of ancient Greece. We may correct Heidegger’s Eurocentrism with a pluralist approach to the consideration of technology. Cultural anthropologist Philippe Descola has distinguished four types of ontologies: animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism. The Western-style approach that separates nature and culture - which Descola calls “naturalism” - is merely a late exception in history. Descola sees multinaturalism, the pluralism of concepts of nature, as a possible exit from modernity. Philosopher of technology Yuk Hui, reflecting upon Heidegger’s conception of technology and Descola’s nonmodern multinaturalist experiment, proposes a third way out of modernity: cosmotechnics. According to Hui’s stance, technology takes many forms, and may be reintegrated into a moral cosmology. A nonmodern approach would not entail a conservative return to tradition, but rather a selective re-actualization of traditions, on new scales and within novel contexts. The Anthropocene era gives this experiment special relevance, for now the question of technology has become a problem with planetary stakes.
Presenters
Adam LovaszPostdoctoral Researcher, Philosophy Institute, ELTE University, Budapest, Hungary
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Cosmology, Nonmodernism, Philosophy of Technology, Ontology
