Pragmatism, Transcendental Arguments, and the Technological

Abstract

When Heidegger remarked, close to the beginning of his famous essay, “The Question concerning Technology,”¹ that “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological [or, perhaps better, ‘technical’] ,”² he imposed an obligation — doubtless a fair one — on all who might attempt to answer, to characterize technology in terms of man’s ultimate relationship to reality. That burden is a heavy one but not altogether unwelcome: initially at least, because it seems to insure the least partisan and most comprehensive approach to the issue one can imagine, and because it permits us to focus the question through Heidegger’s important and original perception without betraying any support for Heidegger’s own rather extraordinary account; and ultimately, because it permits us to come to grips in an efficient way with a more plausible theory of technology, in fact a theory opposed to Heidegger’s, more congruent with alternative conceptions (favored elsewhere within philosophical reflection) of man’s relation to reality, less tendentious, and more manageable with regard to the developing record of Western speculation.