Abstract
Trish Glazebrook and Dana Belu both think I spend too much time criticizing the Cartesianism that both empirical and transcendental philosophies of technology quite obviously oppose. They argue that I would have been better off if I had instead considered how these two philosophies “converge on the thesis of crisis” in technoscientific life (Glazebrook) and/or “made wider use of Feenberg’s work” (Belu). While I am sympathetic to both Glazebrook’s thesis and Feenberg’s work, I argue that their recommendations raise precisely the “pre-philosophical” issue I discuss in my paper. The issue, addressed directly by both Nietzsche and the young Heidegger, is how such recommendations can be carried forward as productive, life-driven articulations of our current needs in technoscientific times and not just become two more in a long string of chosen (and thus very Cartesian) “turns” in a history of philosophical “positions.”
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Notes
Just to be clear about the technocratic social theory this acronym hides: A “STEM” educational curriculum—i.e., one that is centered on “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—is typically silent (or impatiently dismissive) about “the humanities,” conceives interdisciplinarity as a feature entirely internal to the four favored disciplines, and approaches the very idea of knowledge by looking toward what one can do with it.
At least this is so in the opening sections of Nietzsche (1983) [UM2], which are my focus here. In Sect. 4, the mood changes dramatically, and the authentic possibility of living historically is now contrasted with an ever-worsening series of “overdoses” of history that allegedly mark the expected developmental path for those educated in light of nineteenth century German pedagogy.
In German, Stimmung can refer either to someone who has it or to an atmosphere in which people operate according to it.
Brackets original. I leave for another day the question of whether we live in a “new” geological age—one claimed to be chemically and geologically distinctive, named after the species that named it, that is already widely employed in cultural and political theory as an overarching measure of global meaning, even though there is no agreement about its starting point among those who accept the label, and the very idea is still hotly disputed and without official sanction among actual scientists.
Belu says that when Feenberg enlists his instrumentalization theory and conception of the technosystem to critically analyze this situation, he situates himself “at the intersection of critical constructivism and phenomenology.” Fair enough, but “where” is that? Understanding why this “situating” cannot be a “rational choice” needs more explicit treatment.
The very idea of a position “free from all standpoints…is itself something historical…not a chimerical in-itself outside of time” (Heidegger 1999, 64).
References
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Scharff, R.C. Before One Takes Empirical or Transcendental Positions. Found Sci 27, 417–425 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09744-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09744-3