When I anticipated receiving the book in the mail, Technology
and the Good Life? held great promise. However, as I began
reading the book, the promise faded, as the particularity of the
book overcame the generality promised by the title. The book is
a collection of papers dealing with the works of Albert Borgmann.
An evocative title, likely arising from marketing decisions, had
become a series of essays originating from a workshop. Because
I was unfamiliar with Borgmann’s work, and who told me I needed
to be, what good was the book to me? Of course, such is the fate
of edited books that deal with specific writers: they tend to
appeal to people already engaged with the writers, and even then
only those who are following the debates in academic journals.

But my disappointment was somewhat transitory. The editors and
authors did their work well. The introduction to the book offered
a useful summary of Borgmann’s writings. At times, the collection
reads like an encyclopedic accumulation of different intellectual
perspectives – Andrew Light representing the reformed Nietzscheans,
Carl Mitchum representing the Aristotelians, and Larry Hickman
representing the Pragmatists. There is very little repetition
between the essays – each of them assume at least a basic understanding
of Borgmann’s key concepts, which was offered in the introduction.
Also, the references between the different essays were often insightful.
Even without being familiar with the main texts being analysed,
the essays became engaging.

As the editors ask in the introduction, "Are we allowing
time for a genuinely good life?" (page 1) This is not a question
that is directly addressed in the essays. In fact, one of the
surprising absences in the work is a concern for what the good
life is or how it can be determined. There are clearly different
kinds of lifestyles – technological, luddite, craftsperson, consumer
– but the relative value of each lifestyle is not addressed in
any detail, and the criteria, such as they are, for favoring one
over another, often involve either nostalgia for a less technological
place in history or simply self-evidence.

To be fair, determining the good life is not the goal of the book.
Instead, the point is to engage with the relationship between
technology and humanity – "to give technology the quality
of reflection it deserves" (page 2). But debates over the
good life cannot be so easily excluded from the discussions.

The essays apply Borgmann’s writings to specific fields or connecting
them to other fields in philosophy. Borgmann’s discussion of technology
is connected to Heidegger, and so the vocabulary stresses materiality,
situatedness, and authenticity in contrast to superficiality,
abstraction, and consumerism. There was, unfortunately, little
attempt to step back from Borgmann’s writings to consider his
assumptions about history, humanity, and the cosmos.

The core of the book is Borgmann’s distinction between things
and devices, and in particular the loss of "focal things"
in modern technological society. As the editors describe the concept,
a focal thing, "is not an isolated entity; it exists as a
material center in a complicated network of human relationships
and relationships to its natural and cultural setting" (page
23) These things once produced a centering, a stability, and an
authentic connection with the cosmos. What technology does, Borgmann
argues, is to substitute focal things with devices, which are
designed to perform specific tasks very effectively. The drive
towards usefulness, however, has reduced our devotion to community,
to excellence, and to the world. Because of technology, because
of the focus on devices that perform specific functions, people
accomplish much more now than they did before. But one of the
costs is that the devices separate us from the things we were
once directly connected to. We no longer have fireplaces, we have
central heating systems.

One of the important topics that is confusing in the book is whether
the main contrast in Borgmann (and in the commentators) is between
modern technology and an earlier kind of technology, or between
technological objects (devices) and a world of found objects (things).
Is the goal to escape technology’s impact on us, or to adapt technology
to other purposes.? This question is significant because it marks
the primary moral divide in the collection. Does the good life
involve no technology or only specific kinds of technology?

The answer provided by Borgmann and his commentators is equivocal,
at times suggesting that people ought to relate to technology
differently and that they ought to replace technology with older
forms of life. Borgmann’s general goal, shared with many of the
writers included in this book, is the "retrieval of things"
or "the redemption of physical reality" (page 333).
But the response to our alienated situation, somewhat vaguely
articulated, may involve either a renunciation or a reform. What
is valuable about Borgmann’s goals here is that the problem is
not about how effective people are at doing things. The problem
is existential: devices associated with technology take away our
connectedness to the world and, by implication, to each other.

One assumption throughout the essays is that the primary distinction
between things and devices can be determined prior to considering
the historical situations in which the objects exist. Few of the
authors in the collection attempt to historicize technologies
– suggesting, for instance, that a device at one period can be
an object in another. There is also no discussion of the possibilities
of relativism (cultural, perceptual, contextual). Instead, the
designation of "thing" or "device" applies
to objects outside of context in which they exist, as an essential
aspect of their existence. Fires are focal things, central heating
systems are devices. Thus the question can focus on whether central
heating systems contribute to the good life. One aspect of the
debate that falls out of the discussion, however, is the role
of history, society, and human agency in conditioning (or creating)
how the technology becomes part of human life. Rather, the essays
both depend on and affirm two contrasting systems of objects,
in which the deep interaction with things is replaced with the
bleak simplicity of devices.

The one example of human interaction with technology that is considered
in the book is the discussion of Teletel, the French computer
network considered by Andrew Feenberg. The system was initially
developed for government and business communication, but quickly
became the largest singles bar in the country. At the very least,
people can adapt the explicit functions of the device to other
purposes. For Borgmann, this is articulated in terms of primary
and secondary instrumentalization. Devices never become things,
but their functionality can increase in response to human adaptation.
Objects offer essential qualities, and human action can offer
mere accidents. While these accidental properties may change the
functions, however, for Borgmann the good life does not involve
the multiplication of devices or functions, it involves the move
from devices to things (things which, presumably, are not understood
in functional terms).

In short, the premise of the book is that what has been lost in
the technological world is the ability to distinguish between
the good life and the easy life, or between wealth and affluence,
and it is this distinction that becomes richer through the discussions
in the essays.

But I’m still not happy about the title.

© 2001 Brian Richardson

Brian Richardson recently
completed his Political Science dissertation at the University
of Hawaii, on the voyages of Captain Cook and 19th century understandings
of empire. He is now researching the morality of reading in a
digitizing world, focusing in particular on key moral arguments
from the history of western philosophy.

Categories: Philosophical, Ethics

Tags: Mental Health Policy and Advocacy