Technology: metaphors of "machine" and "mechanism" in the history of philosophical thought

Pluzhnikova Natalia Nikolaevna ORCID: 0000-0002-4143-1216 PhD in Philosophy Associate Professor; Department of Humanities; Moscow Polytechnic University 140050, Russia, Moscow region, village. Kraskovo, Shkolnaya str., 2/3, sq. 98 pluzhnikova@bk.ru

Saenko Natalya Ryafikovna ORCID: 0000-0002-9422-064X Doctor of Philosophy Professor; Department of Humanities; Moscow Polytechnic University Pavel Karchagin str., 22, Moscow, 107023, Russia rilke@list.ru

In the process of historical evolution, philosophical reflection on phenomena, processes and objects of external reality periodically revealed a certain attraction to mechanistic interpretations in the creation of explanatory models of objects with the ability not only to move in space, but also to independently control and determine the features of this process. Attempts to explain the inner nature and structure of such phenomena during the transition from objects, processes and phenomena of nature to the phenomenology of culture, for a number of reasons, mainly related to the general philosophical genesis of historically successive protoscientific and epistemological concepts, at these earliest stages increasingly evolved from religious and mythological interpretations (nature) to mechanical interpretations (culture).

This trend, with the increasing complexity of the emerging sphere of culture, science, and then the human technosphere, indicated an increasingly clearly formulated request not only for adaptation, but also for the integration of increasingly new ideas about technology and its impact on humans and society. In this context, we are talking about the relevance of studying the unified scientific and philosophical tradition of the concept of technology, which the human mind planned to continue to adhere to in the process of not only comprehending, but also creating a new one based naturally on the already existing foundation of knowledge.

However, the subsequent assessment of the features of the process of development of the world of cultural and scientific and technical achievements of man and society also drew attention to a number of difficulties that invariably arise in the course of this development due to the extreme mobility of the line between metaphorization and the implementation of historical reconstructions about technology as mechanistic representations of the latter in philosophical discourse, in language, and in human in practice, which, in essence, determined the relevance of this study.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the historical and philosophical discourse in the understanding and formation of the concept of technology in relation to modern trends in its development. The realization of this research goal is impossible without taking into account the peculiarities of the metaphorization of the concepts of "machine" and "mechanism" in the chronologically evolving scientific, philosophical and cultural-historical discourse of historical milestones of philosophical thought of various contents.

In antiquity, the question was raised directly or indirectly about the possibility of representing the process of cognition of the surrounding world through following the laws of natural development and subordination of this knowledge to the rules of logic and mathematics known at that time (the laws of numerical transformations and geometric patterns). This tendency, which persists and has never been brought to its logical conclusion, to search for the principles of interrelated and strict schematization and systematization, as the priority foundations for constructing images of the external world changing in space and time, was one of the most noticeable universalist tendencies within the foundations of future philosophical and then scientific epistemology ^[1]. The study of technology as a technology, the schematization of the description of reality originates from the time of the emergence of philosophy ^[2].

The earliest evidence of technology as a technology for defining sociocultural reality dates back to Ancient Greece. One of the early themes that sounds in the works of ancient philosophers is the thesis that technology learns from nature or imitates it ^{[3, pp. 325-326]} For example, according to Democritus, house building and weaving were first invented by imitating swallows and spiders building their nests and nets, respectively ^{[4; 5, c. 154]}.

Aristotle referred to this tradition, repeating the examples of Democritus, but he did not claim that technology can only imitate nature: "technology usually completes in some cases what nature cannot complete, and in others imitates nature" ^[6].

The second trend in the development of philosophical thought in understanding the concept of technology in ancient philosophy is the thesis that there is a fundamental ontological difference between natural things and artifacts. According to Aristotle ^[7], the former have their own principles of generation and movement within, whereas the latter, since they are artifacts, are generated only by external causes, namely human goals and forms in the human soul. Natural products (animals and their parts, plants and the four elements) move, grow, change and reproduce themselves by internal final causes; they are driven by the goals of nature. Artifacts, on the other hand, cannot reproduce themselves. Without human care and intervention, they disappear after a while, losing their artificial forms and decomposing into (natural) materials.

The thesis that there is a fundamental difference between man-made products and natural substances determined the subsequent definition of the concept of technology in the history of philosophical thought. For example, in the Middle Ages Avicenna criticized alchemy on the grounds that it would never be able to produce "authentic" substances ^{[8, p. 147]}.

Aristotle's doctrine of the four causes — material, formal, effective and final — can be considered as a valuable contribution to the philosophy of technology, defining technology as a set of artifacts artificially created by people in the course of their activities, which reflects the idea of the conflict of matter and form. In this regard, the famous mental paradox "Theseus's ship" about the material structure of an object and its transformation over time was introduced into modern philosophy by Hobbes as a demonstration of the conflict between the unity of matter and the unity of form. American researcher David Wiggins considers it even a defining characteristic of artifacts ^{[9, p. 89]}.

Technology in antiquity was also understood as art. Having its own and self-sufficient aesthetic dimension, the dominant harmony of external visible forms and visual images in the art and architecture of antiquity, in fact, performed the function of symbolism of the leading edge ("facade"), behind which there was a constant and often painful search for unity of material and ideal in the form of harmonization of visualized (structure) and practically applied (functionalization) content the same images and forms. Moreover, solving these often extremely difficult tasks, a person, as a cultural subject, sought to draw his inspiration from the harmonization of images of the outside world of a natural nature, without ignoring himself, as a result of which later ideas arose about the human body, about society, as a form of cohabitation of people having their own structure and organization, and then about the world as a whole – as a "machine" ^[10]. It is also noteworthy that in its subsequent historical genesis, this kind of image of technology as a "machine" of reality was further strengthened during the transition from antiquity to the early European Middle Ages. However, further, during the transition from the latter to the Renaissance and to the New Age, this situation has changed profoundly and significantly.

The reference to the formation of the concept of technology as an appeal to the metaphor of "machines" manifested itself most vividly in the philosophy of J. Lametri. In the philosophy of J. Lametri considers society as a machine, and the role of technology is that technology becomes a form of expression of human power ^[11]. The philosopher's technique absolutizes all reality, giving it a mechanized structure. The philosopher argued that all thoughts, feelings and actions are explained by physical processes in the human body. At the same time, the mechanism of the human body is able to start independently and maintain working condition.

The development of capitalism at the turn of the XVI – XVII centuries in Europe for the first time in the history of mankind turned science into a real productive force and made scientific activity economically profitable, at least in certain respects, which previous historical periods of the development of science simply could not even approach. However, at the same time, the peak growth of the applied role of science and the immediate introduction of its real achievements into everyday life and the economy presented fundamentally new requirements for the accuracy and validity of the results of scientific research, which could not but affect the new, largely updated compared with the Middle Ages, the status of Modern science as real and a fully functioning social institution, effectively and productively integrated into the social space of European society of the XVI – XVII centuries. Precise mechanics, optics, hydraulics become those areas of scientific search and research of the new, within which the first models of verification of theoretical scientific constructions arise and consolidate not only scientific, but also general social practice, thereby the distance between scientific practice and theory (and vice versa) are being reduced, and these disciplines of "new" physics themselves form, in essence, the ideal of classical Modern science.

By the turn of the XVII – XVIII centuries, the scientific community was accumulating more and more questions about scientific models of explaining reality and the corresponding picture of the world, which is based on the mechanistic determinism of Newton – Laplace, since the transition from static mathematical models and constructions to dynamics, primarily to thermodynamics, reveals a number of inconsistencies that refute exclusivity the claims of deterministic classical mechanics to absolute universalism in the world of science. The discovery of the first and second principles of thermodynamics reveals significant discrepancies in the results of the described physical reality with previous mechanistic interpretations, the application of which is unable to explain such discrepancies.

Paradoxically, the age of Enlightenment, starting from the early English Enlightenment of the XVI – XVII centuries, posed more general philosophical questions to man and mankind than scientific ones. Less subject to the tutelage of medieval scholastics, compared with natural science disciplines, mathematics approached this time with significantly greater potential, whereas new scientific discoveries occurring at that time, almost one after another, formed and indicated the demand for an increasing expansion and universalization of the mathematical methodology of science, thereby laying the foundations for the mathematization of natural science as one of the characteristic for the development of science at that time trends.

Thus, the increase in the volume of mathematical calculations related to the innovative activities of natural scientists of Modern times, on the one hand, and the successes of mechanics, including the theory of mechanisms and machines, on the other, gradually raised the question of evaluating the very possibility of creating a "computing machine" ^[12] capable of at a high level the complexity and volume of calculations to replace a person in this routine area of science development. Since this problem had at least two sides, all the same later turned out to be the initialization of the process of debunking the ideologeme of the human mind as the pinnacle of divine creation. For the first time in the history of science, a single and integral person was functionally and operationally equated to the totality of "man plus machine" – and this was terminologically unsafe, since, in fact, a new anthropological perspective arose and established itself, within which this kind of repositioning directly indicated the possibility of replacing man with a machine. This formed a certain conceptual framework for the subsequent transition from metaphor to practice, and from the natural to the artificial, which is able to replace this natural quite productively within this kind of practice.

This was followed by a number of conceptual partly shifts – partly substitutions in the choice of internal semantic preferences in the dictionary of first scientific and then general philosophical discourse, which created fundamentally new, previously impossible conditions for the transition from understanding the human mind as a machine to an incomparably more complex understanding of the structure of the universe as also a kind of machine within the framework of fundamentally new views on this world order, which arose in the total deterministic space of classical mechanics based on the results of scientific works by Newton - Laplace–Leibniz, and a number of other outstanding thinkers of that time ^[13]. God the creator had previously acquired the status of a "Great Watchmaker", canonically impossible for him, who, as it were, "wound up" this entire universal mechanism regularly so that the movement inside it, as well as inside any other mechanism, was carried out constantly and was not interrupted for a moment, since failure to fulfill this condition destroyed the basic postulates of classical mechanics and denounced her own axiomatics ^[14]. This protective position eventually led to the identification within scientific and then mass consciousness of the image of the world around a person with the image of a huge mechanism, a kind of "technical matrix" of the XVII – XVIII centuries. The scientific justification of the truth of views on which immediately transferred it from the status of a metaphor to the status of an explanatory model convenient for human understanding, meaningfully the well-founded and verifiable science of that time.

Not only European culture, but also the entire civilization of the Old World, over time, increasingly moved away from following the primacy of "pure science" towards pragmatics and functionalization in the formation of the concept of "technology" – and thereby became more and more technocratic, i.e. "machine". It is quite obvious that this side of the being of the "new" European man was increasingly isolated from idealism and from the problems of classical European philosophy associated with it, not only in the field of ontology, but also epistemology – and after that, the building of new axiological preferences. So, in particular, this new European man was able to overcome the deep crisis of European culture at the turn of the XIX – XX centuries with much less cost, since for him there was no problem of the loss of the former deity and the "twilight" that followed (in the terminology of F.Nietzsche), because he already had his new deity – and this deity was created by himself ^[15]. Thus, this "new technocratic European man" fulfilled the function of god–building, over the problems of which, for example, religious Russian philosophy was working so much and variously at the same time - and even was able to realize all this in such a way as to embody the superhuman ideal of F.Nietzsche, however, in a specific image of a "Great Technocrat" or "Great Engineer", who then becomes almost indistinguishable from the image of the "Great Architect of the Universe" of world Freemasonry. The deity created by the new European man was a machine in the broadest sense of the word. The new European man sacredly and truly believed in what he was creating not as a metaphor, but as a very real reality – as a fundamentally new being, gaining its new, independent and separate ontological status in the totality and pragmatism of this faith.

This new trend in the mass consciousness of European society at the turn of the XIX – XX centuries, experiencing a deep cultural crisis due to the loss of the foundations of the former axiology and therefore desperately and everywhere seeking new ideals that can replace the lost ideals, acquires such strength and power that it is reflected even in the artistic culture of that time. One can treat such world cinema masterpieces in completely different ways, such as F. Lang's "Metropolis" or Chaplin's "New Times", however, neither professional critics nor the mass audience have the slightest doubt that a person, a "natural" person, as a mass and generalized character of both these films, as well as the world surrounding this previously "natural" person, are losing out to the new world of machines, to which the authority to organize the life of society and to manage it is irreversibly transferred. The symbolic trigger is purposefully overturned by the directors of both these films – and it is no longer a machine or a mechanism that becomes metaphors in the rapidly disappearing "pre-machine" world of the former man – the man himself becomes a metaphor – a kind of "like-a-machine" in the nascent new world of machines in the function of one or another mechanical appendage to it.

The multidimensional nature of the visualization of the process of massaging this "appendage" on the cinema screen in front of the viewer's eyes raises the question of the genre belonging to both of these films – are they only dystopia "in its purest form"? A modern person voluntarily gets behind the wheel of a car today, or at the keyboard of a computer, forms his own image inside virtual reality himself and voluntarily and operates with it there as skillfully as in real reality. A person changes with time and with the surrounding culture in the technocratic world, acquiring a new status of an operator, user (and partly creator) of a particular technical device – and thereby converges with the technosphere functionally and operationally on the basis of its own internal laws, which are only to a certain extent based on the laws of functioning and development nature, society, and man.

From an epistemological point of view, this kind of convergence is impossible only as a purely physical interaction of objects, in the preposition of this interaction there should always be the possibility of implication into a new reality of certain significant aspects of human existence – its anthropic constants, which can be used by the human mind and body to create such a conditional model of the latter, the purpose of which is adaptation a "natural" person, and which could function effectively and purposefully within the space of such an artificially created reality. In fact, all these are new "machine" roles that modern man, driven by the dynamics of the technosphere, voluntarily tries on himself inside a continuously changing and evolving reality.

The information culture of post-industrial society, treating a person as a unit equally belonging to both the biological world and the technical and technological world, is based on multiple patterns of machine-anthropic analogization, the roots of which go back to the historical genesis of the anatomy and physiology of the human body, the physiology of its higher nervous activity, etc. The works of I. I. Mechnikov and I. P. Pavlov's work on the physiology of the higher nervous activity of man, on the theory of adaptation and practice of research on the reflex activity of the human body marked the beginning of cybernetic interpretations of the higher nervous activity of man, followed by functional analogies between the activity of his central nervous system and the work of modern computer technology ^[16].

The emergence of modern communication culture and its main brainchild – the digital space of virtual reality – actually marked the completion of the cognitive revolution, which, like any other revolution in general, raised the question of the new actual status of its main participant and main driving force – man, now considered in an operational and functional way as a complex open convergent type system, exchanging matter, energy and information with the outside world, either as an object of the biosphere, or as a subject of the technosphere. These anthropological aspects are repeatedly pointed out in his research by the famous Russian scientist V.A. Kutyrev ^{[17, 18, 19]}, and the use of modeling methods can cause very interesting effects of studying the concept of technology ^[20] This most modern (of all known to philosophy and human culture) dualism allows you to correct one of the basic principles of modern philosophy of science – the anthropic principle is in the direction of those obvious changes, which are not only a witness, but also a creator, the fate of a modern person.

The conclusions reached by the authors of this study include the following conclusions:

1. The genesis of the concept of technology was associated with the understanding of technology as technology, but technology in ancient thought was a broader concept, denoting the totality of artificial human activity represented in technology (specific objects, images) as a means of defining reality.

2. The "supporting structure" of the concept of technology in Western European culture are the metaphors of "machine" and "mechanism", which laid the foundations for understanding man in a post-industrial society.

3. Modern culture can be considered as a technical and technological reality that continues the reconstruction of the metaphor of the "machine" that has developed in the history of philosophical thought.