Comparing Jonas's Work To The Heideggerian Approach To Technology

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Society and technology have long had an interesting and dynamic relationship, one that has become only more complicated as we transitioned into a new age of modern technology. Hans Jonas illustrates how it is useful to separate and characterize the formal dynamic aspect and the substantive aspect of advancements. Comparing Jonas’s work to the Heideggerian approach to technology further reveals critical facets of the relationship that could otherwise be overlooked. Additionally, the distinction between determinism and free will is a crucial for understanding Jonas’s philosophy. Jonas introduces the formal dynamic side of technology “as a continuing collective enterprise” with its own patterns of progression (Jonas 34). He is concerned with characterizing modern technology by formally distinguishing from all other forms that came previously, and one way he does this is by explaining how modern advancements have become more about a …show more content…

Using Aristotle’s philosophy, he separates technology into the object that humans use and the purposes that they serve to fulfill. In the beginning of the industrial age, modern processes changed not the object itself but how it was produced, increasing the speed and method. Jonas uses the example of steam engines and the process of mining and distributing coal to explain how modern technologies have increased humanity’s drain of natural resources (Jonas 38). My personal example of where this is certainly true comes from how society expends fossil fuels to extract more and how destructive this process has become toward nature. As he describes the substantive nature of technology, Jonas provides a rather unorthodox historical account of how the material perspective differs from the formal

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