Is the way Technology is advancing really “rational-and-desirable”? (A Critique)
A project by Emily Saladin-Crosse. 3rd year, Philosophical studies. Newcastle university, 2021.
[Item Image]
[key words: introjection, consumption of mediated, de-sublimated product and information; deciphering true and false needs; nothing radically new, increasingly; mediated learning…]
“Dear Guests,
As of 2021, we ask for your help for a critical approach to modern-day technology. To bring you up to date… The new “phenomenological playground” is the internet. Via the phone/ screens we consume products: are “fed” information, images, videos, short and long pieces of information all the time, on the news, social media, etc. Every single thing is at arm’s length (literally), just a *click* away: information, product, print, photo, … everything beautiful and ugly, available and accessible. Art, replicated, multiplied, “free”. Same with porn, and fighting. Surveillance is invasive and “normalised”. For instance, online, we give in quite voluntarily to different forms of surveillance, because it looks rational and desirable and it looks like we have choice. In fact, we are recognised as workers and consumers by Tech. The image shown is the one I utilise to demonstrate/ illustrate parts of the multi-layered problem of deciphering true and false needs which poses perhaps more and more of a problem than before because of technological tendencies towards infinity.
‘Everything is functioning’- says Heidegger, but also: ‘All our relationships have become merely technical ones.’ (Der Spiegel Interview, published after his death, 1976). Today, the values of the Enlightenment bombarded with items according to technological interests instead of our own. This is no longer “rational” to Marcuse in his critique of the Enlightenment ‘One-Dimensional Man’ (1964).
It is valuable to look into ideas such Tech reproducing 1-Dimensional thought in individuals and society as a consequence of “introjection” from the outside (a psychoanalytic notion to be examined). Technology and mediated learning would cause a problem for 18th century Rousseau, but the modern-day Rousseau-inspired educational theorists: we hold on to the idea of an analytic over synthetic approach to education. Whether there are true or false needs at all, is also a question to address.
The writing is in the form of a dialogue, online. This is how the forum proceeds:
ACT 0: Positions.
ACT I: The Paradox of Technology.
ACT II: Deciphering True and False Needs.
ACT III: More critique.
Tag: phenomonology
From its roots, phenomenology has tended towards an anthropocentric view of the world. This much is true in as far as we think of the phenomenological subject as a solely human entitlement which cannot be transplanted onto other modes of being such as that of the animal or vegetal realms.
Plants in themselves have been reduced, in the past, to objects for the human subject both in our experience of them directly (Husserl, for example, talks of trees in Ideas I, only referring to them as objects in their own right), and in their material advantages to us as commodities and resources.
Goethe made a step towards understanding the world of plants in and of themselves in his philosophical application of botanical orientated scientific, observational study. In his Metamorphosis of Plants, he explains how the elemental life force, striving or ‘conatus’ of plants is the basis for vegetal ontology and is akin to a sort of rationality in plants.
Michael Marder recognizes how plants present a specific challenge to western philosophy, especially phenomenology, and, in his book, Plant Thinking, problematizes the reductionary relation between the human world and that of vegetal being.
Human and plant interactions in the world are ontologically estranged from one another which necessarily calls us into an ethical state of being with regards to Nature as a unifying concept. The ecopsychological application of the Buddhist world view of Ahimsa and dependent origination allows a different reading of ontological alterity within Nature to that of Marder.
In this study we shall look at the temporal character of vegetal ontology as a route for acceptance of plant life as a conceptual authority in and of itself. By informing a critique of Marder’s revolutionary ethical stance towards vegetal being with a meditative contemplation of the world around us, based in Zen Buddhism; I hope to show how human’s experience of the world can benefit from understanding plant’s interaction with the world. I shall also consider how this change in perspective to our relationship with plants and their being-in-the-world could have a positive outcome in terms of conservation and environmental ethics.
Phenomenology urges closer scrutiny of our experiences. A phenomenological approach to mental disorder concerns an acute study the patient’s experience; its conditions and its structure. My objective is to gain insight into the refined and perplexed experiences of the Schizophrenic mind. Philosophy has traditionally been concerned with issues of subjectivity and the first-person. In order to facilitate a dialogue between philosophy and psychopathology I will be referencing specialists in the field such as Dan Zahavi, Karl Jaspers and Christopher Frith.