Posts Tagged ‘Kant’
“Men have become the tools of their tools”*…
Visionary philosopher Bernard Stiegler argued that it’s not our technology that makes humans special; rather, it’s our relationship with that technology. Bryan Norton explains…
It has become almost impossible to separate the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences. Reality is parsed through glowing screens, unending data feeds, biometric feedback loops, digital protheses and expanding networks that link our virtual selves to satellite arrays in geostationary orbit. Wristwatches interpret our physical condition by counting steps and heartbeats. Phones track how we spend our time online, map the geographic location of the places we visit and record our histories in digital archives. Social media platforms forge alliances and create new political possibilities. And vast wireless networks – connecting satellites, drones and ‘smart’ weapons – determine how the wars of our era are being waged. Our experiences of the world are soaked with digital technologies.
But for the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, one of the earliest and foremost theorists of our digital age, understanding the world requires us to move beyond the standard view of technology. Stiegler believed that technology is not just about the effects of digital tools and the ways that they impact our lives. It is not just about how devices are created and wielded by powerful organisations, nation-states or individuals. Our relationship with technology is about something deeper and more fundamental. It is about technics.
According to Stiegler, technics – the making and use of technology, in the broadest sense – is what makes us human. Our unique way of existing in the world, as distinct from other species, is defined by the experiences and knowledge our tools make possible, whether that is a state-of-the-art brain-computer interface such as Neuralink, or a prehistoric flint axe used to clear a forest. But don’t be mistaken: ‘technics’ is not simply another word for ‘technology’. As Martin Heidegger wrote in his essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954), which used the German term Technik instead of Technologie in the original title: the ‘essence of technology is by no means anything technological.’ This aligns with the history of the word: the etymology of ‘technics’ leads us back to something like the ancient Greek term for art – technē. The essence of technology, then, is not found in a device, such as the one you are using to read this essay. It is an open-ended creative process, a relationship with our tools and the world.
This is Stiegler’s legacy. Throughout his life, he took this idea of technics, first explored while he was imprisoned for armed robbery, further than anyone else. But his ideas have often been overlooked and misunderstood, even before he died in 2020. Today, they are more necessary than ever. How else can we learn to disentangle the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences? How else can we begin to grasp the history of our strange reality?…
[Norton unspools Stiegler’s remarkable life and the development of his thought…]
… Technology, for better or worse, affects every aspect of our lives. Our very sense of who we are is shaped and reshaped by the tools we have at our disposal. The problem, for Stiegler, is that when we pay too much attention to our tools, rather than how they are developed and deployed, we fail to understand our reality. We become trapped, merely describing the technological world on its own terms and making it even harder to untangle the effects of digital technologies and our everyday experiences. By encouraging us to pay closer attention to this world-making capacity, with its potential to harm and heal, Stiegler is showing us what else is possible. There are other ways of living, of being, of evolving. It is technics, not technology, that will give the future its new face…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Our tools shape our selves,” from @br_norton in @aeonmag.
Compare and contrast: Kevin Kelly‘s What Technology Wants
* Henry David Thoreau
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As we own up, we might send phenomenological birthday greetings to Immanuel Kant; he was born on this date in 1724. One of the central figures of modern philosophy, Kant is remembered primarily for his efforts to unite reason with experience (e.g., Critique of Pure Reason [Kritik der reinen Vernunft], 1781), and for his work on ethics (e.g., Metaphysics of Morals [Die Metaphysik der Sitten], 1797) and aesthetics (e.g., Critique of Judgment [Kritik der Urteilskraft], 1790).
But Kant made important contributions to mathematics and astronomy. For example: his argument that mathematical truths are a form of synthetic a priori knowledge was cited by Einstein as an important early influence on his work. And his description of the Milky Way as a lens-shaped collection of stars that represented only one of many “island universes,” was later shown to be accurate by Herschel.
Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, at all times also as an end, and not only as a means.
“One cries because one is sad. For example, I cry because others are stupid, and that makes me sad.”*…
From our friends at The Pudding, a case study in Chinese censorship: Manyun Zou watched the first 100 episodes of The Big Bang Theory that stream in the U.S. and on the Chinese streaming site Youku, side by side, and tracked 206 missing scenes from the Youku version…
Growing up in China, I had a blast watching American TV shows. They not only helped me learn English, but also introduced me to fresh perspectives and worldviews. The Big Bang Theory was among my favorites.
I quickly became a fan of the sitcom when it was officially introduced in China on a video streaming website in 2011. But when I rewatched the show in 2022 on Youku, a Chinese video streaming website backed by e-commerce giant Alibaba, I couldn’t help but notice weird jumps, pauses, and disconnected canned laughter…
What happened to the show?
To understand that, we have to back up a bit. This change can be traced to a sudden political decision in 2014. According to the state-owned media outlet Xinhua, streaming platforms received a private notification from regulators to remind them of one key rule:
“imported American and British TV shows must be ‘reviewed and approved by officials before streaming to the public.’”
Shortly thereafter, The Big Bang Theory was among a handful of imported shows pulled from Chinese websites. Audiences were only left with a black screen and a line: “video has been removed due to policy reasons.”
When these shows resurfaced, they were full of these weird jumps, signaling that scenes were removed during censorship because someone somewhere thought it would be inappropriate or illegal to stream such content.
So the question has to be asked: what kind of content has been removed, and why?
To find out, I compared 100 episodes of the original version of The Big Bang Theory with the edited Youku version to understand what was cut out and decipher the logic behind the decision…
A fascinating look at what Chinese censors fear: “The Big [Censored] Theory,” from @Manyun_Zou in @puddingviz.
* “Sheldon,” The Big Bang Theory, “The Gorilla Experiment” (Season 3, Episode 10)
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As we contemplate censorship, we might spare a thought for Immanuel Kant; he died on this date in 1804. One of the central figures of modern philosophy, Kant is remembered primarily for his efforts to unite reason with experience (e.g., Critique of Pure Reason [Kritik der reinen Vernunft], 1781), and for his work on ethics (e.g., Metaphysics of Morals [Die Metaphysik der Sitten], 1797) and aesthetics (e.g., Critique of Judgment [Kritik der Urteilskraft], 1790). But he made important contributions to mathematics and astronomy as well; for example: Kant’s argument that mathematical truths are a form of synthetic a priori knowledge was cited by Einstein as an important early influence on his work. And his description of the Milky Way as a lens-shaped collection of stars that represented only one of many “island universes,” was later shown to be accurate by Herschel.
Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, at all times also as an end, and not only as a means.
“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life”*…
Your correspondent is headed into another period of turbulence– travel, talk, meetings– this one, a little longer than the last; so (Roughly) Daily is about to go into another hiatus. Regular service should resume on or around October 8.
If only it were so easy… There is always a demand for more jobs. But what makes a job good? Tyler Re suggests that Kant has an answer…
Work is no longer working for us. Or, for most of us anyway. Citing lack of pay and promotion, more people are quitting their jobs now than at any time in the past 20 years. This is no surprise, considering that ‘real wages’ – the average hourly rate adjusted for inflation – for non-managers just three years ago was the same as it was in the early 1970s. At the same time, the increasing prominence of gig work has turned work from a steady ‘climb’ of the ladder into a precarious ‘hustle.’
…
The United States Department of Labor identifies a ‘good job’ as one with fair hiring practices, comprehensive benefits, formal equality of opportunity, job security and a culture in which workers are valued. In a similar UK report on the modern labour market called ‘Good Work’ (2017), Matthew Taylor and his colleagues emphasise workplace rights and fair treatment, opportunities for promotion, and ‘good reward schemes’. Finally, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights has two sections on work. They cite the free choice of employment and organization, fair and equal pay, and sufficient leisure time as rights of workers.
What all three of these accounts have in common is that they focus on features of jobs – the agreement you make with your boss to perform labour – rather than on the labour itself. The fairness of your boss, the length of your contract, the growth of your career – these specify nothing about the quality of the labour you perform. And yet it is the labour itself that we spend all day doing. The most tedious and unpleasant work could still pay a high salary, but we might not want to call such work ‘good’. (Only a brief mention is made in the Taylor report – which totals more than 100 pages – of the idea that workers ought to have some autonomy in how they perform their job, or that work ought not be tedious or repetitive.) This is not to say that the extrinsic aspects of work like pay and benefits are unimportant; of course, a good job is one that pays enough. But what about work’s intrinsic goods? Is there anything about the process of working itself that we ought to include in our list of criteria, or should we all be content with a life of high-paying drudgery?
Philosophers try to answer this question by giving a definition of work. Since definitions tell us what is essential or intrinsic to a thing, a definition of work would tell us whether there is anything intrinsic to work that we want our good jobs to promote. The most common definition of work in Western thought, found in nearly every period with recorded writing on the subject, is that work is inherently disagreeable and instrumentally valuable. It is disagreeable because it is an expenditure of energy (contrast this with leisure), and it is instrumentally valuable because we care only about the products of our labour, not the process of labouring itself. On this view, work has little to recommend it, and we would do better to minimise our time spent doing it. A theory of work based on this definition would probably say that good jobs pay a lot (in exchange for work’s disagreeableness) and are performed for as little time as possible.
But this is not the only definition at our disposal. Tucked away in two inconspicuous paragraphs of his book about beauty, the Critique of Judgment (1790), is Immanuel Kant’s definition of work. In a section called ‘On Art in General’, Kant gives a definition of art (Kunst in German) as a subset of our more general capacity for ‘skill’ or ‘craft’ (note that Kant’s definition should not be limited to the fine arts like poetry or painting, which is schöne Künste in German, which he addresses in the following section of the book). In other words, Kant defines art as a particular kind of skilled labour. Kant’s definition of art as skilled labour will direct us to the intrinsic features of work that we ought to include in our conception of good jobs…
Read on: “Freedom at Work,” in @aeonmag.
* Mark Twain
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As we center satisfaction, we might recall that on this date in 1908, at the at the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit, “Model T 001”– the first production Model T– rolled off the line. Generally regarded as the first mass-produced/mass-affordable automobile, it made car travel available to middle-class Americans– and became the avatar of assembly-line production and the type of jobs that it produces.
(On May 26, 1927, Henry Ford watched the 15 millionth Model T Ford roll off the assembly line at his factory in Highland Park, Michigan.)
“You shouldn’t rely on what you believe to be true. You might be mistaken. Everything can be questioned, everything doubted. The best option, then, is to keep an open mind.”*…
The ancient Sceptics– often called Pyrrhonists after Pyrrho, the ancient Greek master Sceptic who lived in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE– used doubt as a way of investigating the world. As Mahdi Ranaee explains, later thinkers undermined even that possibility…
Ask any philosopher what scepticism is, and you will receive as many different answers as people you’ve asked. Some of them take it to be showing that we cannot have any knowledge – of, say, the external world – and some of them take it to be even more radical in showing that we cannot have any reasonable beliefs. In the interests of getting a handle on the varieties of scepticism, one can locate four different milestones of sceptical thought in the history of Western philosophy. These four milestones start with the least threatening of them, Pyrrhonian skepticism, and continue by Cartesian and Kantian scepticisms to the Wittgensteinian moment in which even our intention to act is put in question…
Fascinating: “Known unknowables,” in @aeonmag.
* Pyrrho (as paraphrased by Nigel Warburton)
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As we question questioning, we might spare a thought for a not-so-sceptical thinker, Thomas Carlyle; he died on this date in 1881. A Victorian polymath, he was an accomplished philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, translator, historian, mathematician, and teacher. While he was an enormously popular lecturer in his time, and his contributions to mathematics earned him eponymous fame (the Carlyle circle), he may be best remembered as a historian (and champion of the “Great Man” theory of history)… and as the coiner of phrases like “the dismal science” (to describe economics).
While not adhering to any formal religion, Carlyle asserted the importance of belief and developed his own philosophy of religion. He preached “Natural Supernaturalism,” the idea that all things are “Clothes” which at once reveal and conceal the divine, that “a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one,” and that duty, work and silence are essential. He attacked utilitarianism as mere atheism and egoism; instead taking a medievalist tack, postulating the Great Man theory, a philosophy of history which argues that history is shaped by exceptional individuals. (Indeed his thinking, which extended to a critique of democracy and an argument for “Heroarchy (Government of Heroes),” was appropriated and perverted by Nazi thinkers in Germany.
Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution, a three volume work that assured his fame as a historian, was finished in 1836 but not published until 1837 because John Stuart Mill’s maid mistook the manuscript of Volume One for kindling. The setback prompted Carlyle to compare himself to a man who has “nearly killed himself accomplishing zero.” But he re-wrote the first volume from scratch.
“A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.” – Thomas Carlyle
“Wherever I found a library, I immediately felt at home”*…
The nation’s smallest library (now closed), Hartland Four Corners, Vt., 1994. “At the time I made this photograph, its entire collection of 70 boxes of books had been sold to a local used-book dealer for $125.”
In celebration of National Library Week, (Roughly) Daily is revisiting photographer Robert Dawson…
There are over 17,000 public libraries in this country. Since I began the project in 1994, I have photographed hundreds of libraries in 48 states. From Alaska to Florida, New England to the West Coast, the photographs reveal a vibrant, essential, yet threatened system.
A public library can mean different things to different people. For me, the library offers our best example of the public commons. For many, the library upholds the 19th-century belief that the future of democracy is contingent upon an educated citizenry. For others, the library simply means free access to the Internet, or a warm place to take shelter, a chance for an education, or the endless possibilities that jump to life in your imagination the moment you open the cover of a book…
Library, Death Valley National Park, Calif., 2009. “This remote library in a trailer is the only library for hundreds of miles.”
See more at American Library, peruse Dawson’s The Public Library: A Photographic Essay, and visit his site.
And while physical libraries are closed for the time being, don’t forget “7 digital libraries you can visit from your couch“– and the mother of all online library resources, the Internet Archive.
* Charles Simic
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As we check it out, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Immanuel Kant; he was born on this date in 1724. One of the central figures of modern philosophy, Kant is remembered primarily for his efforts to unite reason with experience (e.g., Critique of Pure Reason [Kritik der reinen Vernunft], 1781), and for his work on ethics (e.g., Metaphysics of Morals [Die Metaphysik der Sitten], 1797) and aesthetics (e.g., Critique of Judgment [Kritik der Urteilskraft], 1790). But he made important contributions to mathematics and astronomy as well; for example: Kant’s argument that mathematical truths are a form of synthetic a priori knowledge was cited by Einstein as an important early influence on his work. And his description of the Milky Way as a lens-shaped collection of stars that represented only one of many “island universes,” was later shown to be accurate by Herschel.
There is … only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
– Chapter 11, Metaphysics of Morals
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