Arthur Kroker’s “The Will to Technology”
I just finished reading the above book for the third time. The book speaks about the present, the 21st century, in terms of the work of Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger (how Kroker managed to not include Hegel, particularly with Heidegger’s constant use of the term “the fourfold”, and Marx’s massive reliance on Hegel, is beyond me). It remains an interesting work, however, and worth a read, even if this review is somewhat critical.
Kroker is correct that the science most prevalent in the 20th century is that of biology rather than physics, and the most controversial technology therefore bio-technology. Kroker, like much of the public not actually versed in the technology part of bio-technology, jumps to the assumption that the small successes (such as bio-engineering bacteria to produce insulin) indicate that large scale human bio-engineering is ‘just around the corner’. The reality is far different — having just completed a short stint at a firm involved with Google in producing a genome variant search engine that meets all the security and identity management requirements that each genetic database owner puts on their data, we’re not even at the point where a reasonably simple search for a given genome variant can be accomplished.
Biology itself is in much the same state as physics in 1900 when Planck first called for a quantum theory — there’s a strong sense that our past biology is overly simplistic, but not a clear path forward.
The human genome project has taught us plenty of things, but the most important of those is that most genes or gene combinations are interpreted dynamically in some way based on the environment, and since we know neither the meaning of most of the genetic code, nor how the interpreter works, and we have no Rosetta Stone to give us a clue to either, bio-engineering at the human level is going to remain relatively simplistic for some time. We’re not in the bionic age quite yet, though Kroker appears to believe we are. There are genes that map directly to phenotypes, such as eye colour, but that appears to be largely true only in phenotypes that are relatively unimportant, again such as eye colour, which makes little difference to anyone other than cosmeticians.
I won’t go into the number of more important predictions made by Heidegger in particular that Kroker is apparently completely oblivious to, despite many of them having already come to pass in the short time since his death in 1976, or in danger of coming to pass imminently. However omissions such as the identity of the ‘last god’; the ‘thin wall’ that separates our pure imagination (as in dreams) with our experience of reality; and the notion of Being as change are somewhat unforgivable. Of course, that takes us back to the omission of Hegel and the light Hegel’s work shines on the three thinkers Kroker does deal with.
Kroker seems to miss that for Heidegger technology is a ‘destining’, i.e. a dispensation of Being itself (and in some senses the most overt manifestation of Being in postmodern times), and therefore not something to be either for or against, but something one needs to discover a “free relation” to. This destining subverts the title of the work itself, in that technology as a dispensation of Being has nothing to do with will in Nietzsche’s sense, where will to power reverts almost immediately to will to will, since power is only the ability to will more.
He also skims over the important notion of the ontological transparency of technology, i.e. given an iPhone, nearly anyone can see almost immediately how it could be better, how it doesn’t (yet) quite substitute for the essence of technology, though we do use specific technological artifacts of that kind in substitution for technology as a whole in our daily speech without thinking much if anything about it. The same cannot be said when we look at a tree or a horse, for instance.
The book is written in a fast-paced style apparently intended to get average readers interested in the work of these thinkers and how it both affects and is affected by events in the world since their work was written. In some ways it works, in others it seems to cause Kroker to skim over some of the most crucial concepts.
His treatment of profound boredom though, as explicated by Heidegger in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and its relation to the basic attunement or mood of modern technological life, is one of the best sections of the book, where Kroker does examine the concept in depth, and is probably sufficiently worthwhile in itself to make the entire book worth your time.
