Abstract
No one doubts the radically transformative power of contemporary technologies and technoscientific practices over the material dimensions of our experience. Yet with the coming of all the exciting changes and the promise of ever better material conditions, what kinds of lives are we implicitly being encouraged to live? One would think that current philosophical studies of technology would make this a central question, and indeed, a few have done so. But many do not. Following the lead of thinkers who have made the so-called “empirical turn,” many demur, usually with some remarks about the question being too abstract and general—too likely to suck us into utopian or dystopian speculations—when what is called for are truly informative and “concrete” studies of what it is like to be with actual technologies. My paper considers the good life question—and the philosophical price one pays for not asking it—in light of Auguste Comte’s theory of the three stages of intellectual development. Comte’s depiction of the third, positive scientific stage is much less dated than one might assume. In fact, it is useful to think of our own era as arriving with a Comtean story attached, that is, a story of life in the “developed” world becoming ever better thanks to modern science and technology. Because this story now seems less deserving of the unqualified optimism Comte had about it, I argue that thinking of our own experience as permeated by Comte’s conception of third-stage life gives us a fresh way to consider our misgivings about this default position without either lapsing into utopian or dystopian speculation, or confining one’s focus to purely postphenomenological or pragmatic studies of technoscientific life as it now “appears.”
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Notes
As Thomson explains, more or less with Feenberg’s consent, Feenberg’s anti-essentialism is complex and focused mainly against Heidegger, whom he sees as making metaphysical generalizations about technology that attribute to it timeless essences, with “substantive” power over particular technologies that operates outside the possibility of human intervention, and thus forces us to think of all technologies “one-dimensionally,” as having the same necessary failings and thus deserving the same condemnation (Thomson 2005, 47–52). I agree with Thomson that Feenberg is wrong about Heidegger, but the point here is that none of these criticisms apply to Feenberg’s own critique of the predominantly undemocratic spirit of technological life. Indeed, he thinks Heidegger is largely right about present conditions and if his critique were de-metaphysicalized, the resulting idea, viz., that “Heideggerian essences are historical and dynamic is one that I would like to defend too on somewhat different grounds” (Feenberg 2006, 194).
Feenberg uses “meaningful” in a narrower sense than I do here. For him, technologies have both functionality (i.e., they are designed for something) and meaning (i.e., in the sense that their realization in a world of interests and beliefs may or may not have much to do with the original design) (Feenberg 2010, 174–78; Feenberg 1999, 202–207; also generally, Veak 2006). In any case, no rational criterion of functionality (e.g., efficiency) is ever enough to determine the meaning of a technology; rather, meaning “ultimately depends…on the ‘fit’ between devices and the interests and beliefs of the various social groups that influence the design process” (Feenberg 1999, 79). Regarding others who “generalize” like Feenberg, I would certainly add, e.g., Mitcham, who develops “historicophilosophical descriptions” of three ways of being-with technology “adapted” from Heidegger’s Being and Time (Mitcham 1994, 275–99, 277); Latour, who says our way of existing has never been “modern” (Latour 1993) and attempts to develop a sociology of “assemblages” (Latour 2005); Foucault, who distinguishes between “local inquiries that…risk letting ourselves be determined by more general structures of which we may well not be conscious” and his own historico-critical “ontology of ourselves,” which aspires to be at once both “the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them” (Rabinow 1984, 47, 49–50); and of course, Heideggerians like Thomson (2009), 146–66.
The report identifies four issues—first, “embeddedness,” by which they mean that since converging technologies tend to form a complex and invisible infrastructure for human actions, the very existence of this infrastructure makes it difficult to see how it affects the basic character of the actions themselves; second, “unlimited reach,” the idea being that hoping every problem has a technological fix can make us complacent and excessively optimistic (e.g., why push for clean water if water treatment plants can always be improved?); third, a tendency to transform the idea of “engineering for the mind and body” into the much more reductive idea of the “engineering of the mind and body” (e.g., think of the engineering fantasies of strong AI, or the slipperiness of the idea of human “enhancement”); and fourth, proliferation of so many specifically targeted technological successes, in the aggregate, often produces more generally problematic social results (as, e.g., when medicine increases longevity to the point of overwhelming the welfare system, or increased economic efficiency causes greater unemployment and a general de-skilling of the workplace). In the end, the authors are willing to assume (!) that current technologies taken one at a time might, in the main, be driven by benevolent agendas, in order to highlight more forcefully how, when individual technologies converge, they do in fact collectively and more radically “pose threats to culture and tradition, to human integrity and autonomy, perhaps to political and economic stability” (3).
Agenda items considered include a wide-ranging collection of policy-setting recommendations, covering everything from organizing communities of multilevel, overlapping planning institutions, to support for interdisciplinary research, regional educational policy initiatives, social/ethical guidelines about military vs. civilian research programs, and intellectual property rights (Nordmann, et al. 2004, 4–6, 52–55).
The best account of being-in-the-world as being-placed, or placement, is Casey (2009, esp. 317–48). So long as we assume with Kant that space is ontologically prior to place and emplacement, and that general knowledge precedes knowledge of specifics, it is easy to imagine ourselves as pure thinkers, floating in the general atmosphere of the universal and trans-specific, inheriting nothing and made determinate by nothing. The truth, as Casey argues, is the reverse (320).
See esp. Ihde (2010). Criticisms of Ihde have come from fellow postphenomenologists as well as others though they are usually directed against his relative neglect of sociopolitical issues, not (as here) his increasingly exclusive stress on concreteness and materiality. Among such postphenomenologists are Selinger (2009, 120–25; Selinger 2006, 89–107) and Verbeek (2011, chapter 4); for others, see the Human Studies reviews of Verbeek (2003, 225–61); Feenberg (2010, especially chapters 4 and 7); and Misa (2008). My own criticisms of Ihde, in this essay and elsewhere, are focused on his, shall we say, creative reading of Heidegger, and on the price postphenomenology must pay for mistakenly insisting on a forced option between a concrete technoscience and “abstract” philosophies of technology in general (Scharff 2006; Scharff 2010a; and Scharff, forthcoming).
The point I am pursuing here is about Comte’s honesty, not the precise nature of his positivism. At the very least, to be a positivist has generally meant (a) to embrace some species of scientism (viz., that all genuine knowledge is obtained by combining empirical observation and logical reasoning in a manner best exemplified by the natural sciences); (b) conceive scientific practice primarily in terms of its procedures for confirming theoretical claims; (c) at least stress and maybe insist upon a fundamentally secular and technoscientifically progressive attitude; and (d) redefine all remaining issues still deemed legitimate but not directly scientific (e.g., ethical, sociopolitical, aesthetic, and engineering questions) as dependent on scientific findings and “the scientific view of the world.” What is interesting about Comte, however, is that he still thinks these general commitments need to be historico-critically defended by anyone who wants to be a positivist. Most later positivists, and especially the twentieth century logical empiricists, assumed that all of this is too obvious to need defense, and as a result these commitments have survived quite nicely among many philosophers who see themselves as postpositivists simply because they reject the specific program the later positivists built upon all this obviousness (Scharff 2010a, 458–60; 2002b, 6–11). Regarding the rejected program itself, it might well have been enough to cause a reincarnated Comte to deny he was a positivist (Pickering 1993, 693–97).
Comte (1830–42). Cours de philosophie positive. I: 1–2 (partial English, 1988, 1), hereafter Cours; Comte (1851–54) Système de politique positive, 77 (English, 1875–77, 547), hereafter Système; and Comte (1844) Discours sur l’esprit positif (English, 1903), hereafter Discours. In both cases, I cite the French first, followed by the English translation, if available.
Cours 1, 63/38; Système 1, 1–7, 321, 701-705/1-5, 257, 566–70. See also Discours, 45/72. In the Système, Comte goes still further, adding a third idea to the slogan. From the improvement of our natural and interpersonal circumstances, there will eventually arise a similar improvement in our affective life, and self-centeredness will begin to give way to universal and benevolent “love”—because although “we grow tired of thinking, and even of acting; we never tire of loving” (Système 1, 1/1).
“[I]t is experience alone that has enabled us to estimate our abilities rightly, and, if man had not commenced by overestimating his forces, these would never have been able to acquire all the development of which they are capable” (Cours 1, 10/5).
Comte actually admires the act of believing faith for its felt intensity, its preoccupation with the concrete and experiential, and its way of informing the whole of one’s life. For these reasons, he admires fetishism above any other theological outlook. Indeed, the spirit of fetishism is as central to his conception of positivist culture as of the positive spirit. Grange (1996) calls the grand subjective synthesis of reason and feeling toward which our age aspires a “new fetishism” (17–19). No amount of scientific progress will ever produce an “objective” or absolute synthesis, either of the natural or social order. Our sense of the unity of nature and social harmony will always remain “subjective” or “fictional”; and it is in fetishism that we find the purest expression of both the struggle to “subordinate the subjective to the objective”—and the recognition of the “fundamental preponderance of the heart over the intellect” which mature positivism is finally in a position to appreciate fully (Système 3, 82–122/68–101, quoted from 121/100 and 120/99).
In the early excitement of formulating nontheological theories about nature, the sense that these theories actually represent nature is strong. However, as intellectual ties with theology grow more remote and “feeble,” the nominalistic character of these new theories becomes glaringly obvious. Eventually these naturalistic theories, repeatedly refined and nuanced by incessant logical analysis, become “so empty through overly subtle qualification that all right-minded persons consider them to be only the abstract names of the [natural] phenomena in question” (Cours 1, 14/8).
For Comte, a metaphysical thinker is pretty much anyone whose mind tends to remain made up, even when the facts say otherwise. Armed with this definition, we might be tempted to search in Comte’s writings for specific persons he opposes, but this would miss the main point. For him, the focus should remain on the kind of philosophizing metaphysics is, not who practices it. Metaphysical thinkers are in “transition” from theology to science, at once struggling to rationally overcome their obedient and immature tendency to privilege all sorts of nonlogical beliefs and feelings, and yet precisely because of this effort not yet in a position to appreciate that the one source to which reason must rightfully listen is “observation.” Hence, most persons Comte actually names are ultimately given a dual interpretation. Descartes, for example, is clearly a metaphysician in grounding natural knowledge in certain innate ideas, but he is also a protoscientist in emphasizing the need for an educated mind to always follow an “order of reasons” (where that order is no longer just mathematical, but is also eventually bound to “discover causes by their effects”). And the French Encyclopaedists are clearly committed to impossibly abstract ideas of republican government, but they are also defenders of an independent rationality that both opposed the ancient régime and paved the way for the Revolution. Perhaps, for understandable reasons, the one person Comte presents in a way significantly imbalanced in the direction of his nonpractical dimension is his mentor, St. Simon (Pickering 1997, 15–20; 1993, 186–99).
Indeed, the mind’s coming to see this point by living through the limitations of metaphysical thinking is precisely the “transient utility” of this stage: “In its radical inconsistency…[the metaphysical] spirit retains all the basic precepts of any theological system, but in a way that increasingly deprives them of the power and stability which is indispensable for their effective authority. Bringing this about is, in fact, the chief transient utility of metaphysics; for although the old [theological] regimen had long been a progressive force in human evolution…it inevitably reached a point of wholly inappropriate prolongation and threatened to perpetuate the stage of infancy that at one time it so happily guided” (Discours, 15/10; also 35-40/53-64).
The entire “46th Lesson,” or lecture, in Cours 4 (1–233) spells out how the theoretical development of “social physics”—the term replaced thereafter by “sociology” starting near the end of this lesson (200)—will issue in a “positive politics” that serves as a guide for social reorganization along secular and progressive lines. The whole enterprise will require the use of two methods that are typically seen as “antagonistic” but which really need to be coordinated, viz., an “objective method” for studying both human beings and nature which starts from the simplest natural phenomena and develops physical and social sciences, and a “subjective method” that “starts from man” and determines how best to “synthesize” all the objectively obtained knowledge, not intellectually but practically, for the betterment of the human condition (for summary and numerous citations, see Pickering 2009b, 165–66). See also, Système 1 (4/xii, 420, 444); Pickering (2009b, 159–245); and Wernick (2001, 27–36).
To put this another way: Comte’s focus is on the usefulness of science to human affairs, not just the usefulness of the methods and theories of science in finding and verifying “representative” propositions about the external world. He is thus much closer than his progeny to the demand of today’s social and cultural studies of science movement, viz., that science be considered first and foremost as a human practice (and thus to be viewed in relation to other human practices, not as the authoritative outlook that stands in judgment of them). See Scharff (2002a; and Scharff 2002b, 105–109).
Comte was amused by prescientific thinkers repackaging their beliefs in “scientific” constructs in a futile effort to sustain their authority. Where we have creation science and parapsychology, Comte had a pseudo-“psychology” that claimed scientific knowledge of the mind’s relation to god, based on an “interior” version of the “external” observation used in other sciences (Cours 1, 34–40/20–23; Cours 3, 774–76).
In general, Comte shares with every “positivist” the view that all knowledge rests on “observation,” but his conception of observation bears little resemblance to the narrow empiricist picture developed in the twentieth century (Cours 1, 5, 8, 34/2, 4–5, 8, 20). “Observation” has for its “objects” everything from stars and molecules to language and social customs—in a word, anything and everything that can, albeit under ever improving technical conditions, actually be encountered. The problem with “experience” as it is understood in prescientific times is not that it failed to adhere to a formalized Humean empiricism but that it is often a sloppy combination of observation plus felt, imagined, or dogmatically assumed extras (Scharff 2002b, 30–34). Moreover, the last thing that an abstract, metaphysical mind that is just emerging into maturity needs to hear is that there is one abstract and formal version of the “method” by which nature is “measured” (Scharff 2010b, 452–56). In one place, Comte even calls the mind’s turn toward observation in disillusion with metaphysics a “radicalization of fetishism” because it tries to recapture in mature form the experiential concreteness of the primitive mind’s urge to theorize (Système 4, 204/180).
Comte was always uncomfortable about the negative and oppositional character of atheism. In this, it is too metaphysical. One should be cautious, however, about giving Comte too much credit in this direction. What he actually wrote about the arts is fundamentally “moralistic and utilitarian,” for mostly the arts are praised for building character, quickening one’s spiritual appreciation for Humanity, and deepening social and interpersonal bounds. His model often appears to be ancient Greek polytheism (Pickering 1993, 638–41).
Although I cannot develop the point here, Comte’s conception of social peace rests on his accounts of the static and dynamic features of the “external” (i.e., cosmic and biological) orders, and so is much more ontologically weighted in the direction of order than sociality. Given that our earliest conceptions of the order of nature reflect practical understanding rather than abstract reasoning, all the theoretical models in our later scientific view of the world depend on the felt sense of this practical understanding (Système 2, 51ff/36ff.). It is easy to see how the imagery of the development of scientific knowledge thus informs Comte’s conception of social reorganization, too, so that social order is thought to be achieved by the subordination of individual activity to the collective method by which “true unity” is known, and progress towards this knowledge evokes ever greater feelings of social cohesion and affection. The problem, as Wernick observes, is that given the way Comte sets this up, his notion of the social—as something allegedly more communal than just the necessary socialization of individuals to an internalized commitment to group progress—seems to be undermined and hollowed out by his very presentation of what this is supposed to mean (Wernick 2005, 120–25, 214–20). The implication is, of course, that nineteenth century conceptions of community often trade on analogies with a “scientific community” that is really not “social.” Do we inherit this pseudo-communal political positivism, along with its scientistic epistemology?
This is why in my account of his third stage, I do not distinguish sharply between science and technology. In Comte’s vision, the two activities ultimately come to facilitate each other for the sake of pursuing the same goal under ever-changing circumstances.
In addition to Feenberg, see, e.g., Beck, who sees trouble in our becoming ever more modern, not postmodern. Effective social planning, with its cost–benefit analysis and mathematical calculations of risk avoidance and compensation, have become empty fictions. Every innovation now seems to bring greater unexpected and dangerous consequences, no matter the intention. In fact, it seems as if every course of action risks globally threatening, incalculable consequences that we must be forever trying to prevent because once actualized, they cannot be fixed. But Beck is no dystopian; for him the culprit is nationalism and free-market capitalism, and the answer is an “alternative modernity” (Beck 2009).
In his later works, Heidegger increasingly distinguishes between his way of philosophizing (as “thinking” or sometimes “meditative thinking”) and that of the dominant Western tradition (as cognizing or “representing”). So, e.g., in one famous passage, he asserts that scientists (and, we may add, philosophers who fancy their activity as science-like) do not “think”—meaning, not that they are stupid, but that in their role as scientists (or scientific philosophers) their focus is on doing empirical research and systematic conceptualization of an objectively knowable world (and the analysis of the “method” for doing this), and everything I just put in italics—the whole mode of being-in-the-world called “knowing” and the whole general ontological way of understanding what is really real for knowers, viz., object-being—is not only left reflectively unconsidered but hidden under the confidence that they have, after all, started in an unbiased way by embracing a universal “(but silently objectivistic and cognitive) method” for justifying what they do (Heidegger 1968, 8). The distinction itself goes back to Heidegger’s attempt after 1919 to develop a way of philosophizing that speaks in “formally indicative” concepts that keep what is thought-worthy in mind, instead of following the usual course of conceptually comprehending everything and thereafter analyzing what has been captured in the concepts rather than remembering the way of being and our being related to whatever is thus conceptualized (see, e.g., Kisiel 2008, 41–67). My point here is that Heideggerian thinking has to do with an experiential/ontological “place” out of which both formal indications and representative concepts arise, and our “place” is not (and indeed never was) pretechnological. Such a place obviously cannot be thought—though we can imagine it, consider it as a logical possibility, perhaps even build a whole “philosophical” career out of arguing what it would be like.
Feenberg (2010) notes that technoscientific utopians always falsely assume that controlling modern technologies is basically no different from handling traditional tools; dystopians typically ignore the fact that “once inside the machine, human beings…gain new powers…to change the system that dominates them” by, for example, using devices in ways never planned by design (61).
“What makes the study of ancient technology such a Herculean task are the nature of our data, the temporal scales at which we work, and the likelihood that many prehistoric technologies have no modern analog. Clearly, different ontologies lead researchers to emphasize different processes, ask different questions of the archeological record, and use decidedly different analytic ‘techniques’. This plethora of ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies is likely necessary to grapple with such a complicated and multi-faceted subject” (Dobres 2010, 110).
We technologists, says Lanier, “make up extensions of your being, like remote eyes and ears (webcams and mobile phones) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search for online). These become the structures by which you connect to the world and other people…[and that] can change how you conceive of yourself and the world. We tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience, not indirectly, through argument. It takes only a tiny group of engineers to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed” (Lanier 2010, 5–6). When can we expect concrete technoscience studies to address the italicized philosophical topics?
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Scharff, R.C. Empirical Technoscience Studies in a Comtean World: Too Much Concreteness?. Philos. Technol. 25, 153–177 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-011-0047-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-011-0047-2