Can Continental Philosophy Deal with the New Technologies?

Beginnings: My first experience of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) was at Northwestern University; the business meeting was trying to decide whether its name should be “the Society for Existential Philosophy and Phenomenology” or “the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy”—it spent nearly three hours with impassioned speeches made by many now departed mighty dead and others still here. I was a graduate student, just starting a dissertation on Paul Ricoeur, and I sat wondering where all this would lead. And we are now half a century later, with SPEP the second-largest philosophy group in America. The task for me is somehow to condense fifty years around a specific theme entailing technologies and their treatment by “Continental” philosophies. I will do this by doing time slices as related to a cast of characters, both individual and social. “SPEP” will be my corporate character for Continental philosophy; it is where its interests are expressed and indicated. Then as a primary individual character, I will refer to “Heidegger’s ghost,” always and still a prominent figure and interpreter of Technology; here his death date, 1976, will stand for a watershed between what I will caricature as the Old Technologies and the New Technologies. I, myself, will be the narrator but also an actor, with my own three-decades-plus history in the philosophy of technology.

Time Slice One: The Sixties

• • Exciting and dramatic times: civil rights marches with dogs in Selma, bombs in Birmingham; the beginnings of protest against American engagement in Vietnam; the Cold War still in full engagement; the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

• • Technologies of the times include military technologies spawning fear of nuclear holocaust, with children hiding under desks during the Cuban Missile Crisis, B-52s flying nonstop “Doctor Strangelove” missions, and napalm and Agent Orange bombings; agricultural technologies, with vast armies of multiple wheat combines combing equally vast corporate farms; industrial technologies, coal-fired iron smelters belching acid into the rain clouds; and transportation technologies, with the Interstate Highway system, grinding to a halt at commute times, turning the Long Island Expressway into the world’s longest “parking lot.” In short: megatechnologies, mass technologies, and even in entertainment there is commercialized television and for youth, the loud rage of rock concerts.

• • Meanwhile in academia, in philosophy, positivism was still very much alive; analytic or Anglo-American philosophy dominated the universities and the professional societies. But the undergraduates were often, instead, busy reading existentialism, with Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard discussed in coffeehouses and beer halls. Heidegger was just being discovered, an existential/sometimes religious Heidegger. Bill Richardson’s From Phenomenology to Thought, introducing Heidegger, was published in 1963.

• • SPEP, with phenomenology trumping existentialism in its title, saw itself as a minoritarian challenge to the extant dominance of linguistic logicism. SPEP gradually became the umbrella society for a wide variety of “Continental” philosophies, as is now the case.

• • If SPEP began to challenge sixties professional philosophy externally, internally positivism was also being challenged. Its dominant form was undergoing a different set of challenges, which related to the notion of science itself. This was the era of the positivist/antipositivist controversies (there was not yet what could be called a parallel or related philosophy of technology subdiscipline). For those of you too young to remember, or not even yet born, it should be noted that for many positivists and some analysts, philosophy of science was all that was needed for philosophy. Philosophy of science equaled philosophy. Metaphysics, aesthetics, and whole areas of traditional philosophy were to be abandoned or regarded as “nonsense.” This version of philosophy-science, however, was met by Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, to become the twentieth-century’s most cited book, along with his kin, Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Feyerabend, who collectively were depicting a very different science, discontinuous, historical, using technologies (instruments), no longer simply a logo-linguistic, propositional theory machine.

• • What of technology, particularly for Continentals? For those dominating philosophy of science, technologies are merely “applied science,” derived and dependent upon science. But again in academia...