The Roles of Nature and Technology in Human History - Essay Example

of the of the Nature and Technology This essay aims to broaden the concept of human history by reconsidering the roles of nature and technology in it. Behind this reconsideration stands the conviction that recent history and theory have vitiated the traditional construals of nature and technology as outsider and handmaiden, respectively, to history. More specifically, the essay sketches the expanded conception of the roles of nature and technology in history that follows from a philosophical social ontology that does not dichotomize nature and society. History has long been, and is still today, widely construed as the realm and course of past human activity. This means that historians study human actions, what determines actions, and what actions bring about. What determines action has usually been considered to be mental phenomena such as beliefs, hopes, and desires, whereas what results from human activity has typically been taken to be artifacts and further activity. The focus of history, as a result, has emphatically been human beings. Apart from environmental determinists and historical ecologists or environmentalists of various stripes, nature has largely been ignored. Technology, moreover, has been almost universally construed as a means for furthering human ends, as artifacts people produce, together with the skills and knowledge these artifacts require and engender, so as to facilitate their lives. According to this way of thinking, technology, unlike nature, is part of history. It is so because it shapes, facilitates, and is brought about by human activity. Whatever is part of history has a history. On the standard line of thinking, consequently, there is a history of technology but not of nature. The history of technology is simply that slice of the total realm of human activity that is tied to technology. In addition to technological objects, this slice includes the actions that generate, use, or result from technology, the knowledge and skills technology requires and engenders, and, it should be added, the complexes of these matters that are given such designations as computer networks, assembly line manufacturing, medical practices, and scientific investigation. Nature, by contrast, is not, on the standard view, part of human history. Hence, it has no history. Or rather, any conception of nature as a historical entity or realm-such as those of Whitehead, Alexander, and contemporary biological evolutionary theory-works with an expanded notion of history that does not attribute to generic history any particular connection to humans and human history (for example, history as events in time, as development, or as contingency). On these wider conceptions, the history of nature simply is, or pertains to, the temporal course or development of nature. There is no history of nature as something peculiarly related to humans and their history. At best, nature and its history form a backdrop against which (human) history takes place. A variety of developments has begun to chip away at the hegemony of this general conception of (human) history. Most centrally, its subversion is part of the general reconsideration currently underway of the relationship between society and nature. It has become tenuous, theoretically, to construe this relationship either reductionistically or oppositionally. This development, in turn, challenges the opposition between history and nature that is a facet of the venerable concept of history and that parallels, and maybe depends on, the society-nature opposition. (Mitcham, 233) It should be stressed that activity remains crucial to history on this expanded conception of its domain. In the first place, actions, as the moments of practices, are absolutely central to practice-arrangement nexuses. More deeply, one condition of the existence of history qua the development of the social site (or, for that matter, qua the course of activity) is the historicity of the individual lives bound up with it. By the historicity of an individual life I mean the past being part of someone's present-for instance, that earlier events, someone's own previous actions, and extant artifacts and built structures determine or condition present activity. I am claiming, consequently, that one condition of practice-arrangement nexuses taking a course is that the activity-streams of the individuals involved in the nexuses are conditioned by the past. In other words, the condition of the existence of objective history is the historicity of human action. (Davison, 121) This reconceptualization of history has implications for the roles of nature and technology in history. Consider, first, nature. What, to begin with, is nature By "nature" I mean any thing, process, or event, or any aspect of a thing, process, or event, that exists, happens, or changes not as a result of human activity; in other words, nature includes that which is not under the control of, or shaped by, human activity. To the extent that existence, occurrence, or transformation observe laws or principles, a thing, process, or event is natural when its existence, occurrence, or alteration are subject to laws and principles that are not of human making. (O'Brien, 14) This definition of nature descends from Aristotle's concept of a natural entity as an entity that obeys principles of motion rooted in its inner nature. Aristotle contrasts such entities with craft objects, whose principles of development (change) are imposed upon them through human activity. My definition diverges from Aristotle's in two principal ways: first, it jettisons the notion of essence (telos, form) and is noncommittal about the source or location of the principles or particulars responsible for change; second, it widens the domain of nature beyond substances to include any aspect of entities, including artifacts and social entities, whose being, occurrence, or transformation is not under human control or subjected to human determination. These divergences imply that objects cannot be cleanly partitioned into such familiarly prominent classes as natural and artifactual, and that entities of any sort can have natural aspects. Although a house, for instance, is both a human artifact and a social phenomenon, the physical properties of its construction materials, according to which it bears weight, withstands blows, liquefies under certain conditions, and the like, are facts of nature. Even such entities as synthetic polymers, whose molecular structure is the result of human ingenuity, evince natural properties such as bonding possibilities and catastrophic behaviors under extreme temperatures or pressures. (Davison, 123) The contrast term to "natural" is "artifactual." An artifact is an entity whose existence results from intentional human activity and that is subject to principles of organization or change bestowed on it by such activity. Just as artifacts can have natural aspects, natural objects-for example, just about any extant forest can have artifactual features. (O'Brien, 16) Entities also exist whose mix of natural and artifactual aspects is so profound or confounding that they are equally natural and artifactual. Examples are bottled milk, sexual desire, certain genetically-altered life forms, and English gardens. The terms of the nature-artifact distinction are not mutually exclusive. Both these positions are monistic reductionisms. Whereas naturalism construes society as a part of nature and seeks to understand society on the basis of the principles governing nature, constructivism construes nature as a product of society and aims to understand nature by reference to features of social life. Espying pervasive intertwinings, interminglings, amalgamations, and interactions between natural and social phenomena, these theories call for and sometimes supply fresh conceptualizations of the society-nature interface. Examples of this general approach can be found in diverse disciplines, from ecology, through sociology and anthropology, to history. However, in challenging the long-standing Western theoretical practice of segregating society from nature, interactionist approaches unwittingly uphold a key conceptual move that underlies such segregations: the separation of society from nature, the idea that theoretical work should begin from the presumption that society and nature are substantially, and not just analytically, distinct. This idea engenders the strategy of combating the reductive tendencies of both scientistic thoughts and its humanistic-social theoretical contrabands through an assumed prior division and active rejoining of things, properties, and forces social and natural. The cyborg, as both an entity and figure of thought, is emblematic here. Another familiar example is landscape. Part social and part nature, these entities combine and thereby do not reduce society and nature. Although this combining strategy thwarts the thorough and unambiguous division of relevant objects into distinctly social and distinctly natural ones, and in this way "blurs the boundary" between the social and natural, it at once upholds this boundary by treating ambiguous objects as combinations of entities, properties, and forces that have been cleanly separated into distinct realms. Instead of either X or Y, the logic is now X plus Y. (Winner, 115) It is just as pernicious to conceive of society (or social entities, properties, or forces) as something substantially distinct from nature (or natural entities, properties, and forces) as it is to reduce society to nature. Human action and coexistence were born both amid and from nature, and they have remained inseparable from it ever since. Human action, for instance, has always been effected via the subsystems of a natural object, namely, the human body; indeed, it is the molar activity of this natural object. No matter how much bodily systems (for example, the muscular or hormonal systems) are molded as a result of the embeddedness of individuals in social contexts, that and how human activity is the molar activity of this physical object always rests on natural properties of that object. As a result, nature mediates all face-to-face interactions among humans and, in conjunction with the physical properties of technology, all interactions among people. Nonartifactual objects such as animals, plants, and climatic or geological phenomena, furthermore, have always been integral to human coexistence. Society cannot be rigidly separated from the realm of nature. Latour advocates abandoning the conceptual distinction between nature and society. Although this position is not persuasive (the terms remain useful in comprehending human existence), he is right that the distinction must not be transformed into a dualism; that is to say, the distinction must not be reified into two distinct, non-overlapping realms-even if it is added that the two realms interact or combine. (Mitcham, 236) Technological entities are sometimes produced to have symbolic or expressive value; prominent examples include flags and the Statue of Liberty. Noninstrumental practices (such as rituals) also sometimes develop around technological objects. A good example is the development of family rituals centered on television coincident with its mass introduction in the 1950s. Indeed, technological objects can be generally characterized as humanly produced material objects of value with which people engage. Winner has captured the interwovenness of life and technology by appropriating Wittgenstein's suggestive turn of phrase "form of life" and describing technology as a form of life. These two ways of thinking concur with the present account in rejecting any analysis of technology as mere instrumentality and in pointing out how technologies and human lives are mutually embedded, enabling, and determining. References Davison, A. Technology and the Contested Meanings of Sustainability (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). 121-123 Mitcham, C. Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 233-236 O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Broadway; Reprint edition (December 29, 1998)-14-19 Rothenberg, D. Hand's End: Technology and the Limits of Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 328-323 White, L. "Energy and the Evolution of Culture," in his The Science of Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1949), 363-393; Winner, L. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 111-117 Read More