From: "Richard" <rcarlson@…>
Date: Thu Mar 10, 2005 2:07 pm
Subject: promise & peril of technology

Regards science and technology:

Perhaps, among major western philosophers and phenomenologist none have thought more about technology and its implications as has Martin Heidegger. In his view technology opened itself to diametric polarities or promise and peril. While perceiving the assault to our feeling life and our ability to care for the things of the world, he condemned technology as a vehicle of fascist propaganda, military domination, and the hyper capitalist enterprise of power and subjugation, and difficult for any of us not to participate in.

However, Heidegger non-the-less still perceived that technology could retain the promise given to it in the original Greeks term: techne, especially as it was wedded to the term poesis (artistic creativity, meaning making) Creativity renders transparent our shared ontology with the world of our own productions, with the world of things.

There is an optimistic way to think about technology and the future. In fact, the origin of the meaning of the word technology betrays it to be an instrument which facilitates the manifestation of "the truth and beauty". The root of technology in Greek is "techne". The term was once synonymous with art as well technique. In fact, ideally techne was considered the vehicle by which truth manifested beauty. Techne was entwined with Poesis. Technology was the vehicle which revealed the artistic aspiration for truth and beauty "Once there was a time when the bringing forth of the true into the beautiful was called techne".. Once that revealing that brings forth truth into the splendor of radiant appearing also was called techne" (Heidegger, 1977)

When one thinks about technology as unveiling of truth in integral yoga, think again about the skillful use of the technology of photography in the photographs of Sri Aurobindo taken by Cartier-Bresson. There you have it, in transcending simulation the Cartier-Bresson photographs have become technological revelation!

Technology can prove revelatory as a vehicle for the force of truth and can enhance and extend human life itself. It has improved the quality of life for most of the world. Even those left out of the technological gold rush, who are on the other side of the digital divide, are beneficiaries in some manner or other of the wonders of technology. The extension of life expectancy made possible by such advances in medicine as the small pox and polio vaccines, or the cures it has made available for dysentery, malaria, influenza and a host of other ailments which have beset humankind from its inception are just some testaments to the miraculous advances of science.

Sri Aurobindo has written that the human mind can aid the evolution of consciousness on the surface or in relation to its history on earth, - the surface evolution is distinguished from the timeless evolution of the soul through rebirth -. He also wrote: "and in sum Science has already enlarged for good the intellectual horizons of the race and raised, sharpened and intensified powerfully the general intellectual capacity of mankind. (HC 1972).

However, Sri Aurobindo was also a keen observer of society and economics and was well aware of the hidden agendas which could drive scientific research. He knew that science is a production of culture and not solely a dispassionate enterprise. He termed that usage of science driven by the motivations of economic self-aggrandizement as a recurrent form of "barbarism", which in earlier epochs had manifested in the rule of physical force and power of the conquering nomadic clan

Science which is funded by the marketplace with its lust for profit, or by the military interest who view a substantial portion of the worlds population solely as use value for body counts, gives rise to economic barbarism. Science as vehicle for the vital manifestation of the asuric force has beset humanity with the plague of technologies which threaten its own existence. The will to power intent on insuring its domination fetishes technology, be it the metallurgy of the sword in days gone by, or the nanotechnology of the agent of bio-terror yet to come. The will to power quite naturally manifest itself in a will to technology.

In the following passage Sri Aurobindo defines the cultural phenomena as a new type of barbarism: "Science pursuing its cold and even way has made discoveries which have served on one side a practical humanitarianism, on the other supplied monstrous weapons to egoism and mutual destruction; it has made possible a gigantic efficiency of organization which has been used on one side for the economic and social amelioration of the nations and on the other for turning each into a colossal battering-ram of aggression, ruin and slaughter. It has given rise on the one side to a large rationalistic and altruistic humanitarianism, on the other it has justified a godless egoism, vitalism, vulgar will to power and success" (HC 1972).

Rich