Physis and Techne
La tecnología como expresión cultural surge del cruce entre acción, reflexión y diseño, más allá de la simple oposición entre lo natural y lo artificial.
The preceding considerations refer to the realm of the artificial, a term commonly applied to everything that is not “natural.” In other words, artificial refers to what is made by humans, beyond their biologically conditioned activities, such as feeding on what they find and reproducing. In this sense, one definition of Technology is “the science of the artificial.” Indeed, in Greek techne means both technique and art, encompassing everything artificial in opposition to physis, the natural, and to logos, the word, explanation, and discourse, as well as to praxis, everyday action, which involves the artificial in a philosophically more naïve way. This task is neither obvious nor simple, since technology is intimately interwoven with all other aspects of culture. For this reason, technique and art were not historically distinguished. This identification persisted until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The first great Enlightenment compendium of all human knowledge, Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, classified what we now call techniques as “mechanical arts.” Today, however, a distinction is often drawn between technological objects in the strict sense and other kinds of artificial objects, such as works of art, objects of worship, social categories, and values.
Here the aim is merely to outline this issue as an area for debate. On the one hand, it has already been noted that all artificial objects share a basic characteristic, as they derive from the human capacity for reflection on action and from instrumental action itself. On the other hand, turning Technology into an all-encompassing category by equating it with the totality of the artificial risks leading to a technocratic interpretation of human existence. In an era marked by a dangerous predominance of Technology over most other human values, it is worth recalling Lewis Mumford’s observation that what most defines the human species is not so much making or constructing objects as thinking and reflecting. For him, the human being is прежде all Homo sapiens and only secondarily Homo faber.
In light of Mumford’s technological pessimism, this opposition reflects a longstanding tension between a postmodern position—epitomized by the opening of the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word”—and the modern attitude expressed in the phrase Goethe places in the mouth of Faust, the paradigmatic figure of modernity: “In the beginning was the Action.” This is a false opposition. As already noted, what characterizes the human condition is reflection upon action, or reflective action. Goethe has Faust claim to have achieved a synthesis of thought and action, using the mind to transform the world. A technologist expresses it this way: “Those who think must act, and those who act must think; that is what Technology is about.”
At the same time, Mumford’s view, which places thought above action in ethical terms, cannot be accepted without qualification. Never before has action been so extensively reflected upon as in our century. At the same time, action has never been exercised on such a scale, nor has it had consequences as broad and universal as those we now experience. This is the core issue of the debate: ensuring that reflection on consequences is capable of setting limits on action.
The relationship between Technology and broader concepts of human existence, such as culture, calls for particularly careful analysis. Archaeologists studying the remains of extinct civilizations encounter only material objects; cultures are characterized and defined by their tools and material traces. Yet these objects do not exhaust or fully identify culture itself. Technological objects are a form of materialization or expression of culture. They are also expressions of our own culture, even though, as will be discussed later, there are technological objects whose “being in the world” is not material.
Looking around us, we can easily classify most objects—using the term in a very broad sense—into natural and artificial, into “born” and “made,” as Kevin Kelly suggests. Emeralds formed by growth are clearly distinct from manufactured objects. However, when we attempt to draw a sharp boundary between the natural and the artificial, ambiguities arise. The collision of two stones is a natural event, but when humans control that collision for their own purposes, it becomes a technological action. Since the Neolithic Revolution, living beings have been redefined as food. Crops grown in fields do not grow in what we would intuitively call a natural manner; they are planted in rows, irrigated by artificial systems, and supplied with nutrients without which they would not thrive as they do. In fruit cultivation, trees are pruned in ways that facilitate harvesting. And what kind of entity is an organization such as a firm? With the exception of tribal organizations—spontaneous and ancient forms of social organization—it seems evident that organizations are artificial objects, generally created by design and for an explicit purpose. Yet anyone who has tried to create or manage a human organization knows that the artificiality of a social entity differs fundamentally from that of a mechanism. Organizations share many attributes with living beings. Using Kelly’s metaphor, organizations are “made” but then grow as if they had been “born,” and they resist being managed like machines, as is fortunately demonstrated by the failure of totalitarian societies.
