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Thinking Technology, Thinking Nature

The notion that technology is a mere tool at our disposal has become commonplace over the past one hundred years. According to this view technical devices can be explained as means that are used for good or evil, the enhancement or destruction of life. The power is in the hands of the users. Some philosophers have traced this anthropological view back to the disembodied rational subject of modernity. For this subject rationality is the legitimating grounds for treating man and nature as mere objects, the precondition for the proliferation of technological production. In his latest book, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History, Andrew Feenberg argues against this utilitarian approach to technology and proposes an alternative rationality that will facilitate our shaping of the technological world in accordance with life affirming values. The promise of the book is that the revival of critical reason will lead to a creative reconstruction of our technological world, a reconstruction that aims, with Marcuse, at the ‘‘pacification of existence’’ rather than the destructive perpetuation, through technological means, of the ‘‘struggle for existence.’’ Feenberg’s alternative is grounded in a phenomenological reading of the later Marcuse’s call for the ‘‘aesthetic liberation’’ of the