Understanding Technology in Modern Culture: methodological reconstruction of philosophical approaches

Popkova Natal'ya Vladimirovna professor of the Department of Philosophy, History and Social Studies at Bryansk State Technical University 241035, Russia, Bryansk Region, Bryansk, str. Bulvar 50-Letiya Oktyabrya, 7 npopkova12@rambler.ru Other publications by this author

Problem statement: the purpose of the philosophical analysis of technology and the multiplicity of philosophical approachesModern society is often defined as technogenic: not only material production, but also spiritual — the creation, dissemination and assimilation of spiritual values — is permeated with technology.

Awareness of the place of technology in our culture and our worldview is necessary for understanding the current state of humanity. As with other ideological issues, philosophy deals with this, in this case, its direction, the philosophy of technology.

It began to take shape at the end of the nineteenth century, together with the philosophy of language and the philosophy of the unconscious: during the transition to non-classical philosophizing, it became obvious that the results of human activity are not his obedient tools and obey their own laws. The aim of this philosophical direction was to understand technical reality in order to harmonize its relations with the socio-cultural environment and nature. Today, the philosophy of technology has taken shape, according to V. G. Gorokhov, into an independent discipline, the importance of which is becoming more obvious: as new technologies appear, "within the scientific and technical community there is a need and even a need to comprehend the processes that these technologies continue in our society, both positive and negative" ^{[2, p. 11]}. The fear is expressed that today it is no longer a man who constructs machines, but "a machine constructs, sets, defines a person (a person is a cog, a part, a mechanism)" ^{[10, p. 138]}. Philosophers ask with concern: "The leitmotif of the philosophy of technology, and, apparently, of any discourse about it, is the question of its reverse effect on man... Is it not the case that the technique projects me, and not I — the technique?" [Ibid., p. 145]

The non-philosophical, "common sense" attitude to technology considers it an obedient instrument of human activity. The conclusions drawn on this basis fluctuate between two extremes — technicism (or technical optimism praising technological progress) and anti-technicism (or technical pessimism cursing it). Both directions proceed from the fact that it is possible for a person to consciously influence all parameters of technical reality, and the facts of inconsistency of the plan and the result (for example, man-made disasters) are considered as mistakes (or the evil will) of individual people. These extremes are not suitable to become a theoretical basis for the implemented environmental protection programs. Such views on technology, called by philosophers a naturalistic or instrumental approach, are outdated: according to V. M. Rozin, they are "mechanistic, if not contradictory in conceptual terms," giving only the illusion of explanation. After the scientific and technological revolution, it is necessary to understand technology as a manifestation of intellectual and socio-cultural processes ^{[9, p. 180]}, in contrast to the "scientific and engineering" picture of the world, in which it was believed that technology "does not affect a person, because it is his means" [Ibid., p. 192-194].

Nevertheless, the approaches proposed by philosophy to the analysis of technology also do not add up to a single picture of the formation and functioning of technical reality. Even a single definition of the category "technique" has not been developed ^[3]. Such discrepancies in the case when the researcher is required not only a theoretical model of the object under study, but also practical recommendations, suggests that the crystallization and methodological design of philosophical approaches have not yet been completed. Different ideal objects are meant by technology, different methods of analysis and interpretation of facts are used; the lack of reflexivity of discourses used in discussing technogenic problems leads to contradictory conclusions about the situation of humanity, as well as opposite recipes for solving global problems of our time.

In order for the philosophy of technology not to be reduced to the enumeration of individual concepts, it is necessary to pay special attention to its methodological foundations. Numerous studies have been devoted to this problem ^{[6; 8; 15, etc.]}, noting that the existence of various ways of considering technology leads, on the basis of a single empirical material, to the formulation of various laws of the functioning of technical reality and the identification of contradictory prospects for its development. Therefore, it is necessary to systematize the concepts of technology developed by philosophy (including the articulation of unconscious ideas), formulate the underlying implicit assumptions and methodological principles, in a word, outline the main coordinates of the problem field within which the formulation of the question of the essence of technology makes sense.

Substantiation of the need for methodological reconstruction of philosophical approaches

So, the main purpose of research in the field of philosophy of technology is to determine the conditions for its management — the systematic purposeful impact of people on technical reality. The evaluation of the proposed programs of global impact on technical reality should be preceded by structuring the amorphous field of statements in this area and articulation of the proposed philosophical approaches: presentation of the underlying discourses, their comparison and identification of possible contradictions; analysis of concepts used to designate the technogenic world, justification of the boundaries of their application, etc. As a form of objectification of rationality, depending on the specific According to the socio-cultural tradition, each discourse underlying a certain philosophical approach has its own advantages and limitations. The correctness of the research depends not only on the detailed development of these approaches (in order to achieve their logical consistency and compliance with empirical data), but also on their correct use: understanding which tasks can be solved on the basis of specific assumptions, and when a change of discourse is required ^[3]. Therefore, consideration of philosophical approaches should be accompanied by their methodological reconstruction (if the ontological and epistemological prerequisites are not explicitly stated).

The proposed research method (accompanied by articulation and structuring of the highlighted concepts) is opposite to the inductive generalization of the philosophical views of different authors. Unfortunately, a number of researchers in this field do not observe the methodological rigor of constructions: implied assumptions are not formulated openly, definitions of concepts (even such as "nature", "artificial", etc.) are not given explicitly. The lack of reflexivity of the discourses used in the discussion of technology leads to the fact that it takes place at an uncritical level: methodological vagueness is responsible for a large proportion of contradictions and ambiguities in philosophical research. Instead of tracking aspects of the understanding of technology by individual researchers (and finding out which philosopher works within which approach), it is proposed to outline the semantic field of possible concepts.

According to the method of selecting the object of research, the following approaches to the analysis of technology (already proposed or possible) may exist ^[3]:

elementary — the degree of generality achieved by different technical complexes is not considered sufficient for positioning technology as a separate object of research, therefore the possibility of its philosophical analysis is rejected (this approach is noted only for methodological purposes, because it actually excludes the subject of philosophy of technology);

object — analyzes the actual technique as an invariant of various technical and man-made objects, revealing their common properties and development trends;

contextual — considers technology as a set of products of technical activity and sources of man-made impacts on other structures identified according to various criteria (therefore, this approach is implemented as a set of concepts, depending on what exactly is opposed to technology).

It is obvious that the object approach coincides with a naturalistic or instrumental understanding of technology: its implicit background is the idea that the ontological basis of technical reality is people's mental impulses that set the main parameters of their technical activity. In accordance with the intellectual and spiritual context of the industrial era (in which the philosophy of technology was born), the main cause of technological progress was considered to be the intervention of a person seeking to facilitate his existence. But the twentieth century has already shown that technologies tend to autonomize: having begun to function to maintain their ever-increasing complexity, they lose the meanings that originally gave rise to them. Researchers working on the basis of a naturalistic understanding of technology aim to restore people's control over it, put forward contradictory social projects and, after unsuccessful attempts to implement the proposed strategies, come to the conclusion about the inevitable degradation of nature and man. Therefore, the analytical possibilities of the instrumental interpretation of technology have been exhausted, and its philosophical research within the framework of this discourse is useless. It is possible to develop other approaches to the study of technology based on other theoretical and methodological principles — primarily rethinking the traditional concepts of nature, technology, humanity. These approaches will make it possible to propose new global programs and new types of social action based on new models of technology.

The object approach was based on the classical scientific picture of the world, in which nature and technology were perceived as separate wholes that are only in external contact, and man (more precisely, his consciousness) — as the only source of technical objects that determines the results of their functioning. The concepts created on the basis of these principles were based on the opposition of the global concepts of nature, humanity and technology. On the contrary, contextual approaches recognize the limitations of such theoretical models and analyze the interaction between the realities that these concepts reflect. Due to the fact that today the analysis of biospheric, social and anthropological global processes is the most relevant, three variants of the contextual approach that require priority development can be distinguished: socio-natural (considering technology as a spiritual phenomenon that determines the measure of human freedom), socio-technological (considering technology as a social phenomenon, and industrial and social technologies as varieties of practices generated by a single communication environment) and biotechnological (considering technology as a natural phenomenon, the next stage of a single process of macroevolution).

Let's analyze the basic principles and possibilities of these approaches.

Biotechnological approach to technology analysisCurrently, the concept of global evolutionism dominates in science, postulating the natural emergence and development of all objects and systems, from the Universe to human society: evolution leads to the consistent appearance of fundamental levels of the organization of matter, complicating their structures.

But if the universe is a self—developing system with a vector of growth and complexity, then man as the creator of the artificial world is not a "rebellious son of nature" destroying its harmony with his activity, but a continuer of the general trend of biological life transforming the inanimate matter of the planet ^{[4; 13; 14; 17]}. This conclusion logically follows from this paradigm and leads to the ideological justification of the technical transformation of nature. Everything that unfolds in the Universe is generated by a single process of complication of systems (even if intelligent beings are the intermediate cause), and a technical change in nature is just a kind of biogenic current of atoms that has increased the speed and scale (accelerating the processing of natural resources and increasing its scale). On this basis, the principles of the biotechnological approach are formulated, in which technical reality is considered as a self-organizing system, where the leading role is played not by external influences (purposeful human activity), but by adaptive processes aimed at solving problems arising during the interaction of its elements. This approach, exploring both natural and technical systems as a field of action of impersonal, objective laws (and eliminating the subjective factor from the processes of their development), sees the deployment of the potential of the biosphere in the technosphere.

Technology — man-made means and methods of transforming material objects and obtaining substances that cannot be reproduced in an extra-technical way. Technological progress is a technoevolution governed by the laws of nature; an objective process, the pace of which is subjective (since the self—organization of the technical global system has not yet been achieved and the formation of the artificial intelligence controlling it has not been completed), but its tendency is obvious. In the early stages of development, the implementation of technological processes required the inclusion of human physical forces as intermediates; after the industrial revolution, processes that do not require his muscular energy begin to prevail. Finally, today it is possible to fix the dominance of stable chains of technological interactions that do not include a person even as a managing link.

In addition, since the formation of technical reality occurs after the formation of the biosphere and humanity, the paradigm of evolutionism is forced to see in it a higher evolutionary level. But evolution is inextricably linked with involution: if a system increases its organization by increasing diversity, then some of its subsystems regress, reducing the degree of order. The involution of subsystems is a natural element of self—regulation of a more extensive system. This leads to the conclusion: the development of humanity inevitably comes at the expense of nature, and the development of technology — at the expense of humanity. At first, humanity (as a subsystem of the biosphere) reached a high level of development of such progressive characteristics as self-organization, self-regulation, self-renewal. But today technology has all the signs of the next level of organization of matter — more capable of expansion and accelerated processing of information: it increases its interconnectedness and interdependence, increasing its autonomy from the external environment.

It is suggested that the modern era is the transition of the evolutionary potential from humanity to technology. The globalization of humanity forms the structural similarity of the brain and the central nervous system that is missing in the technosphere: the connections between local technical complexes are beginning to outweigh the contradictions between them. From this point of view, modern global problems can be interpreted as the degradation of biological life and the human mind functioning on its basis, which have exhausted the evolutionary potential. Social progress seems to be a means to deploy technical reality — technological renewal is accelerating, but its social regulation is weakening, cultural and moral norms lag behind new trends. Unification and standardization of the personal principle, its suppression by mass social processes can be regarded as a sign that the self-development of humanity is no longer supported by the laws of evolution: the biosphere and humanity have fulfilled their task and are turning into elements of the technosphere, within which the preservation and increment of information will occur in a non-biological way.

As we can see, the resulting model adequately reflects the trends of the modern era — the ecological and anthropological crisis. Proceeding from the paradigm of global evolutionism, it is necessary to recognize a technogenic society as a natural stage of global evolution, consisting in the concentration of evolutionary potential at the level of technical reality (on a planetary scale) due to the involution of objects of previous levels — biological and social. Of course, agreement with such theses will lead to revolutionary ideological transformations: the generally accepted views on the place of man in the biosphere and the global programs of his activities will have to be changed. But the controversy with the claims of the biotechnological approach will also be useful for solving the main question of philosophy — about the essence of man and the meaning of his life.

Sociotechnological approach to the analysis of technologyFor a long time, an individual was considered a subject of technical activity; his needs, consciousness, will were considered as the main reasons for the implementation of technologies and the creation of technical complexes.

But by the end of the twentieth century, the technogenic transformation of society became obvious. When "creating large sociotechnical systems that significantly change the living conditions of society and affect its social structure," V. V. Cheshev showed, there was a need to take into account the interaction of technical reality "with society as a systemic whole" ^{[11, p. 108]}. As V. G. Gorokhov notes, today "it turns out that the embodiment of technology in economic and social structures is sometimes more important and more complicated than its development, construction and implementation" ^{[1, pp. 112-113]}. We can say after V. M. Rozin that "technology in a broad sense can be interpreted as the implementation of both technical and social projects" ^{[7, p. 148]}. All this leads to the recognition of the subject-object duality of technology, which depends on humanity, but is not a product of the activity of an individual. Purposeful human action is a condition for the existence of technical reality, but it precedes the activity of each person and (along with the social structures and institutions that provide it) constitutes its necessary condition. This thesis becomes the basis of a sociotechnological approach to the analysis of technology, the purpose of which is to consider it as one of the social practices, to identify the dependence of technology on society.

The sociotechnological approach forms the understanding of technology as a set of tools implemented in the given socio-cultural conditions (created to meet the needs recognized by society and used according to social norms) and socio-cultural codes of working with natural reality (through its processing by technical practices into artificial) ^[5]. Seeing in technology a kind of social structures (not dependent on human consciousness, but forming it in the course of socialization), this approach reduces the development of technical reality not to the personal will of people, but to the self-development of the social field. The choice of institutional forms and conditions in which technical action takes place does not belong to the individual, but to society; therefore, as a reification of socio-economic relations, technology is subordinate to society, and as a source of technogenic values and meanings, it forms public consciousness.

The sociotechnological approach, first of all, explains the relative autonomy of technology from the will of man: man-made disasters are of the same nature as social conflicts. The modern civilizational crisis is caused by the fact that technology expressing social relations is alienated from the will of people (as well as the social processes that gave rise to it). The development of technology and the expansion of the technical reality generated by it is considered here as a natural process, each stage of which was generated by social needs. The vector of evolution of technogenic society is an increasing transformation of the natural environment (understood as spontaneous) into an artificial one (rationally regulated). This is a universal principle of modern society: it is based on the presumption of mechanical regulation of everything a person deals with. The growth of industrial expansion into nature is programmed by the mentality of a technogenic society and is brought up during socialization. The attitude to the technical transformation of nature, the choice between preserving traditions and introducing innovations — all this is the result not of a person's personal desire, but of the prevailing social norms at the moment. It is considered necessary to technologize not only nature, but also human life (as an increase in its rationalization, manageability, controllability). As a result, this control slips out of human hands: anonymous technical practices turn the subject into an element of technology, including an element of the social machine and the technogenic discourse anchored by it.

The conscious motive of technological progress is the satisfaction of new human needs, and the real goal is the reproduction of a technogenic society: social mechanisms reduce the effectiveness of environmental appeals and encourage consumption growth. A person is unable to control technology because it is the creation of a society, not an individual; the cause of technogenic problems is the alienated state of social reality. Therefore, the purpose of social projects created on the basis of a sociotechnological approach is to improve technical reality by harmonizing and humanizing society.

Socio-natural approach to the analysis of technology

The described approaches to the analysis of technology reflected its objective characteristics determined by natural and social factors, and eliminated the subjective factor. But considering a person as an involuntary participant in global processes, one cannot ignore his personal beginning and creative potential. It is impossible to deny the liberating influence of technological progress: for example, the gradual humanization of society.

One can analyze the technique as a consequence of the spiritual necessity of liberation from limitations. The connection of technical activity with the human activity principle has been repeatedly noted by philosophers, although they usually attributed it to the lowest level of needs, seeing technology as a means to improve the material side of life. Technology creates opportunities that far exceed the natural abilities of man ^{[12, p. 85]}, and not only in the field of production. H.Poser suggests considering the technique in the perspective of "technical actions", which are understood as "methodical operations through which a person creatively transforms available natural materials and energies" ^{[16, p. 17-18]}. Technologies began to be considered, according to the correct remark of V. G. Gorokhov, as a "constantly reproducible scheme of activity" ^{[1, p. 121]}, and they entered into the life of a man of a technogenic society as part of his forces and skills, including those aimed at spiritual and creative goals. Today, we can say with good reason: "The concept of "technology" is applicable to any kind of human activity ... Technology is a representation of the process of activity, during which its source material is transformed into a result, a product" [Ibid., p. 123]. Any goals — from material production to friendly communication — are realized in a post-industrial society with the help of technical means; technology makes a person more free than his ancestors were. And the weakening of human exploitation by man (which deprived the conflict of labor and capital of leadership among the causes of social conflicts), and the increase in life expectancy, and the victory over many diseases are the undoubted results of technological progress, which freed man from many coercive factors.

For the socio—natural approach, technology is a philosophical category reflecting the measure of human freedom from external constraints, implemented through the implementation of artificial processes that increase the effectiveness of natural processes. This includes industrial technologies, information, and even spiritual practices. Technology is everywhere where we transform the elements — natural, social, instinctive; everywhere where we improve reality by overcoming limitations and realizing our goals. This is a positive result of technological progress, no matter how many negative consequences it has. Where do the negative consequences of the technologization of human life come from? Technology helps a person to overcome the limitations imposed by nature or society, but the person himself is their creation. Therefore, resisting external compulsion, he fights with himself.

Here is the main contradiction of technology, revealed precisely by the socio–natural approach: a person, being a socio-natural being, transforms these aspects of his essence, not always understanding the consequences of technological changes. Wherever we see a desire to increase the efficiency of any process (natural or social, even implemented with the help of technologies of previous levels), we meet with technical intelligence. What we call the autonomy of technology or its escape from the control of the creator, in fact, is the resistance of the material, causing consequences not predicted by the technical mind.

The socio-natural approach analyzes nature and human society (generating technology) as steps of a single ladder of evolution, seeing the common function of all technical objects as mediation between the natural environment and people. Technological progress here is the adaptation of mankind to the objective laws of the external environment (natural and social); civilizational crises are considered as manifestations of the conflict between the regularity and spontaneity of the results of human activity caused by their ontological duality. The technology created as a result of the technical mediation of an increasingly large area of people's lives, as it becomes more complex, naturally goes out of control of humanity. This approach is free from the extremes of technopessimism, which curses technology for the "enslavement" of man, but shows the need to draw boundaries between justified interference in natural processes and transformation that threatens the destruction of socio-natural human essence.

ConclusionsTechnology is the realization of the human activity essence that has reached global scales; it is multidimensional, like a person, contradictory and requires taking into account many data in the analysis.

It is possible to create various philosophical approaches that explore technology as an important factor of the modern era and reflect different aspects of its comprehensive impact on society and culture. Considering the technical activity of man and the man-made impact on people, the philosophical analysis of technology makes a significant contribution to solving the global problems of our time, identifying their causes and calling for the humanization of society, to increase the moral potential of modern culture.