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Technology as world building

Anne Chapman
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 Ethics, Place and Environment, Vol. 7, No. 1–2, 59–72,
March/June 2004

Technology as World Building

ANNE CHAPMAN
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Original manuscript received, 20 August 2003

Revised manuscript received, 5 February 2004

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the question of ‘What is technology?’ in order to

develop a framework for the assessment and regulation of technology. I suggest that
technology is how we build our world, drawing on the distinctions between the world
and the earth, and between the human activities of labour, work and action, made by
Hannah Arendt. Arendt’s thought has a number of implications for how we should think
about and assess the world, and thus technology: the world should not be judged
instrumentally, but in terms of whether it provides a place for human action. A model
of a possible framework for technology assessment is provided by the UK planning
system.

Introduction
New technologies have long been a contentious issue. From the 18th-century riots
precipitated by the introduction of machinery into the textile industry, mass demonstra-
tions against nuclear power in the 1970s to the destruction of genetically modified crops
in the 1990s, people have protested against certain technological developments. In recent
decades such protests have generally been regarded as being about the risks associated
with a technology, and risk assessment has become the dominant framework within
which regulators consider technological developments. This is illustrated by the dis-
cussion of regulation in the UK government’s last White Paper on science and
technology (Department of Trade and Industry, 2000), which sees regulation as being a
matter of assessing, controlling and informing the consumer about the risks from new
technologies. While the concept of risks undoubtedly encompasses some of what
concerns people about certain technological developments, it is apparent from recent
debates about genetic engineering, where concerns about ‘playing god’ and the power of
multinationals have been as prevalent as concerns about potential harm, that the risk
assessment framework is too narrow. There is a need to develop an alternative, or
enlarged, framework for assessing and making decisions about technology.
Any system of assessment must have criteria against which the object of assessment
is judged. Risk assessment presupposes that the criterion which is of public concern is
whether physical harm is caused by the technology. What other criteria could there be

Anne Chapman, Centre for Philosophy, Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy, Lancaster
University, Lancaster LA1 4YG, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

1366-879X Print/1469-6703 On-line/04/010059-14  2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/1366879042000264778
 60 A. Chapman

for judging a technology? To answer this question one must have some concept of what
technology is, what it should be or what it is for. These matters are ones that philosophy
can address, and this paper is an attempt to do this—to give an answer to the question,
‘What is technology?’
This paper first summarises some previous philosophical thinking about technology. It
then proposes a view of technology as ‘world building’ which is informed by the work
of Hannah Arendt (1958, 1966, 1968). Finally, I indicate some implications of this view
for technology assessment and suggest a possible model for a system of technology
assessment and regulation.

Philosophical Accounts of Technology

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The word ‘technology’ is derived from the Greek words techne and logos. Techne is
commonly translated as art, craft or skill. Logos can be translated as word, or utterance,
but also as reason, or logic; thus, something with a logos is something that you can give
an account of. The terms techne and logos were first joined together by Aristotle, in his
treatise on rhetoric where it meant something like ‘the logos of the activity of the techne
of persuasion’ (Mitcham, 1994, p. 129). This use became embedded in the ancient world
with ‘technology’ coming to mean the study of grammar or rhetoric. It was not until the
late 16th century that the word came to have something like its present meaning,
resulting in a 1706 dictionary defining it as: ‘a Description of Arts, especially the
Mechanical’ (quoted in Mitcham, 1994, p. 130). The idea of technology as a study, or
description, of ‘the arts’ is taken up by philosophical accounts of technology which see
it principally as a form of knowledge. In some accounts it is simply knowledge of a
practical kind—of how to make and use things (Feibleman, 1972; Jarvie, 1972). In others
there is something systematic, scientific or objective about the knowledge that is
technology (Bunge, 1972; Ingold, 2000, p. 315), making technology a specifically
modern phenomenon.
The problem with regarding technology simply as a form of knowledge is that, like
other ‘-ology’ words, the meaning of technology has altered in the past half-century to
come to refer to the object of study, rather than the study itself. Thus whilst the 1944
Concise Oxford Dictionary gives two meanings of the word technology, namely ‘science
of the industrial arts’ and ‘ethnological study of development of arts’, the 1972
Chambers dictionary defines technology as ‘technical means and skills characteristic of
a particular civilisation, group, or period’. Now it is artefacts, not knowledge, that most
readily come to mind when the word technology is mentioned (Mitcham, 1994, p. 161).
However, it does not seem sufficient simply to say that technology denotes artefacts. Not
all artefacts are equally ‘technological’. At one end of the spectrum are works of art that
we simply gaze at,1 at the other end automatic machines that produce other artefacts.
This suggests that the degree to which an artefact is technological depends on the degree
to which it does things, or we can do useful things with it. The more an artefact can do
things without humans being involved (a machine as opposed to a hand tool) the more
we think of it as technology. Technology thus appears to be linked to doing—particularly
with doing that transforms or produces things—as well as to artefacts. Thus McGinn
(1978, p. 181) suggests that technology is ‘material product-making or object transform-
ing activity’, and Mitcham (1994, p. 1) notes that technology is ‘the making and using
of artefacts’.
While one could argue that there is nothing incorrect in such definitions, they fall short
for my purposes in that they lack normative force, because they do not give an account
of the meaning of technology in human life. Other definitions do indicate why we make
 Technology as World Building 61

and use artefacts: to extend our capabilities (Schon, 1967, p. 1); to bring about
improvements to nature so that it can better provide what we need (Ortega y Gasset,
1972); or to create new possibilities to give us more choices, opportunities and thus
freedom (Mesthene, 1972).
These essentially positive accounts of what technology is are countered by the darker,
more pessimistic accounts of Heidegger (1954) and Ellul (1964). Heidegger thought the
essence of technology to be that it frames things (including humans) as ‘standing
reserve’, as stock piles of raw material for the enhancement of human power (Heidegger,
1954). In Heidegger’s account, modern technology is contrasted with traditional crafts
and techniques: the silversmith ‘brings-forth’ (poiesis) the silver chalice, by carefully
considering and gathering together the matter, form and telos of the chalice, whereas
modern technology ‘sets upon’ nature, in the sense of challenging it to yield some
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general thing, such as energy, that is then transformed, stored and distributed (Heidegger,
1954). This idea of modern technology as providing one general thing is taken up by
Albert Borgmann (1984) in his concept of the device paradigm: the device is the general
pattern followed by modern technology, it provides one thing (such as warmth)—a
commodity because it is a quantifiable amount of a general substance or material, not a
specific, unique thing, and it is provided in a ‘commodious way’ that does not require
our physical engagement (Borgmann, 1984, p. 42).
Ellul’s (1964, p. 85) major work, The Technological Society, portrays technological
development as a matter of the ‘anonymous accretion of conditions’, a purely causal
process not subject to human control, and therefore inimical to human freedom. This
idea that technological change follows its own logic, unaffected by economic, political
or social factors—an idea that is perhaps a modern popular myth, as well as being
propounded by Ellul—has been undermined by sociologists of the sociology of science
tradition who have studied technological innovation. These studies have emphasised the
contingent nature of technological development and the role of ‘relevant social groups’
in determining the development of technologies (Bijker, 1993, 1995; Kline and Pinch,
1999).
However, Ellul’s (1964) The Technological Society did provoke debate, including an
important critique and response by Langdon Winner (1977), Autonomous Technology.
Winner (1977) argued that technological change is better described by the notion of drift
than determinism. It is not ‘a law-bound process grinding to an inevitable conclusion’,
but ‘a variety of currents of innovation moving in a number of directions toward highly
uncertain destinations’ (Winner, 1977, p. 88). Although we consciously and deliberately
choose to use particular technologies, these decisions relate only to their immediate
benefits, not to their wider consequences. New technologies have ‘lives of their own’:
they find applications undreamt of by their inventors, call forth new inventions and open
up new possibilities, which people may respond to in various ways. These responses in
their turn lead to changes in patterns of travel and social interactions, demands for new
infrastructure or the closure of industries. The result may be a radical change to social
structure. In a later work Winner (1986, p. 49) argued that technology is political
because it decides many of the issues that have traditionally been thought to be the
prerogative of political decision making: whether power is dispersed or centralised; the
best size for units of social organisation; and what constitutes authority. Technology
structures and orders human life and activity.
Recent writers on technology (Sclove, 1995; Feenberg, 1999) can be seen as taking
up Winner’s basic ideas to argue for more democratic control over technology. Sclove
(1995) calls technologies social structures and Feenberg (1999) terms them contingent
social products, but both acknowledge that they are generally not recognised as such.
 62 A. Chapman

Making this recognition would involve subjecting technology to the democratic decision
making that we currently apply to non-technological social structures, such as laws and
political institutions.

The World and Technology

The everyday word that best encompasses that which orders and structures human life
is the word ‘world’. Thus Winner (1986, p. 13) suggests that the question we should ask
of technology is ‘what kind of world are we making’, and Graham (1999, p. 55) that
‘improvements’ brought by technology are only improvements in so far as they make for
a better world. I propose that we should think of technology as ‘world building’. I use
the term ‘building’ rather than ‘making’ because it suggests that what is made is
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something that we inhabit, rather than simply use, and that it endures, probably beyond
the lifetime of the builders. Buildings, rather than machines, are the paradigm techno-
logical products, and architects, rather than engineers, the ultimate technologists. If a
‘definition’ is needed I suggest the following two (two seem to be needed as technology
is not a word that is used in just one, simple way):
• technology is how we add things to the world;
• technology is the things that we have added to the world that we use.
The ‘how’ in the first definition includes techniques, knowledge, skills and processes, as
well as tools and machines. The ‘things’ are material things, restricting technology to
material artefacts, in line with everyday understanding. These definitions contain the
combination of doing and artefact that seems to be integral to our everyday understand-
ing of technology, but, as will become apparent, the concept of the world provides a
normative aspect.
We live in a world with a great many artefacts. However, I am not claiming that ‘the
world’ consists only of artefacts. Using Sclove’s (1995, p. 23) terminology, the non-tech-
nological social structures of laws, political and economic institutions, languages and
systems of cultural beliefs are also part of the world. Like technology they provide ‘a
framework for public order that will endure over many generations’ (Winner, 1986,
p. 29).
A philosopher in whose work ‘the world’ is a key concept is Hannah Arendt. While
not claiming that the view of technology presented here was her view of technology, I
do consider that her thoughts provide many insights for thinking about the world and
how we should judge it, and thus, by extension, how we should assess and make
decisions about technology. However, understanding these insights requires grasping
some key concepts in Arendt’s thought. Of particular relevance are two of the many sets
of distinctions she makes: that between the human activities of labour, work and action
and that between the world and the earth. I therefore give an account of these distinctions
before explaining the implications of some of Arendt’s thought for technology assess-
ment.

Labour, Work and Action

Labour, work and action are the three types of human activity that make up the vita
activa, ‘human life in so far as it is actively engaged in doing something’, which was
the subject of Arendt’s major work, The Human Condition (Arendt, 1958, p. 22).
We labour because we are living, embodied beings. Labour consists of all the repeated
tasks of daily life—growing food, cooking, washing up, cleaning—to which there is no
 Technology as World Building 63

beginning or end. If labour ‘produces’ anything at all, it is something that, like food, is
consumed almost as soon as it is produced. In contrast, work produces durable
things—tables, chairs, buildings—that together form the world we inhabit. We may use
the things of the world made by work, and this use may wear them out, but unlike the
food that we consume this destruction is incidental; it is not an inherent feature of what
these things are intended for. The durability of what work produces means that work has
a definite end, in the thing made, as well as a clear beginning.
A person can labour or work alone as well as with others. Action, though, always
requires the presence of others, who, like the actor, are unique human beings. Action is
our capacity, which derives from our uniqueness, to do something new, something that
could not have been expected from what has happened before, that reveals who we are
and that once done cannot be undone. Others may then act in response to our action,
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creating a process that is boundless and unpredictable: unlike work, action has no
predictable end; it is simply beginning.
A standard objection to attempts to distinguish in this way between different types of
human activity is that any one activity can be seen as exemplifying more than one type.
Thus building a fence is work in that it produces a durable end product, but it may also
be action if it is done to fulfil a promise to a neighbour. Arendt talks of activities as
‘coinciding’: the craftsman works in the sense that he fabricates a product, but labours
in the sense that he makes the product repeatedly in order to earn a living, so ‘his
working coincides with his labouring’ (Arendt, 1958, p. 143). I suggest that rather than
categorising human activities in a way that puts each activity into a different box, we
should think of Arendt as offering different descriptions. That a single activity may have
many different descriptions was one of the points made by Elizabeth Anscombe (1957),
in her essay Intention. The same one activity may, for example, be described as ‘sawing
a plank’, ‘sawing oak’, ‘sawing one of Smith’s planks’, ‘making a squeaky noise with
the saw’, ‘making a great deal of sawdust’ and so on (Anscombe, 1957, p. 11). These
different descriptions of what is being done differ according to which circumstances they
incorporate, and thus what conditions must be met for them to be valid (Anscombe,
1957, p. 46). The most basic description—‘I am moving my arm’—does not require that
there be a saw or a plank of wood. For ‘I am sawing one of Smith’s planks’ to be a
correct description of what I am doing I must be holding a saw and moving it in the right
way against a piece of wood, and that piece of wood must belong to Smith. This
relationship between descriptions and conditions explains what Arendt means when she
talks of labour, work and action as each corresponding to a particular condition of human
existence (Arendt, 1958, pp. 7–8). Life is the condition of labour because life as a
biological process of cyclical movement is the circumstance which descriptions of
activities as labour incorporate: activities can only be described as labour because we are
living beings, in the same way as other animals. The world is the condition of work
because the existence of a durable, stable world, built and inhabited by human beings,
is implicit in descriptions of activities as work. Plurality is the condition of human action
because a description of something as action presupposes the presence of other people,
each of whom, while being the same as a biological being, is unique as a person and can
act in response. Because they are conditions of our activities, life, the world and human
plurality condition us. We are ‘conditioned beings’ (Arendt, 1958, p. 9), but these
conditions ‘can never “explain” what we are or answer the question of who we are for
the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely’ (Arendt, 1958, p. 11).
In her prologue to The Human Condition Arendt says she proposes to ‘think what we
are doing’ (Arendt, 1958, p. 5). Her categories of labour, work and action are basic types
of descriptions of ‘what we are doing’, more than one of which may apply in any one
 64 A. Chapman

instance. Under each description different norms, attitudes and types of reasoning are
appropriate. Instrumental reasoning is appropriate in work, because there is an end to
work, the finished product, but such reasoning is not appropriate in action and labour,
neither of which have a clear end. Where activities coincide—as when we work to earn
our living (so it is also labouring)—then the requirements of both activities must be met.
One of the dissatisfactions of modern life is that so many jobs by which people earn their
living do not seem to produce any lasting products (so they do not give the satisfaction
of having contributed to the world that is to be obtained by work), while at the same time
it is difficult to earn a living producing things that are worthy additions to the world.

The World and the Earth

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The earth is the natural environment in which we live, as other animals do. On the earth
there is constant cyclical movement: new generations replace previous ones in recurring
cycles in which everything stays the same. Everything stays the same because the
uniqueness of individuals is irrelevant. As far as the earth is concerned it no more
matters that the individual people alive now are different from those alive 100 years ago,
than that the ants I find in my garden this year are different individuals from the ones
that were there last year. From the perspective of the earth we are all simply members
of a species, just as other animals are (Canovan, 1992, p. 106).
While we live, biologically speaking, on the earth, as human individuals we inhabit
a world which is the product of human work. It is only from the perspective of the
human-constructed world that individuals are born, live and die, and human life can be
regarded as a linear movement (Arendt, 1958, p. 97).
The world is always to some extent public in that, unlike private thoughts and
sensations, it can be perceived by others as well as by ourselves. Arendt (1958, p. 53)
speaks of the things of the world as lying between us, both separating us from and
relating us to others, ‘as a table is located between those who sit around it: the world,
like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time’. Those who sit around
the table each have a different perspective on that table, and Arendt (1958, p. 50) argues
that it is the presence of these different perspectives—on a world which retains its
identity when seen from different locations—that assures us of the reality of the world
and of ourselves.
The world is related to action in that action always takes place in the world and is
often about the world. The deeds and words of action constitute an intangible, but still
real, in between—the web of human relationships—that overlies the tangible, objective
reality of the world. Because it overlies the world, the forms that can be taken by the
web of human relationships must depend on what the world is like.
There is a somewhat antagonistic relationship between the world and the earth. The
cyclical movements of the earth—of life—pervade the world, and unless it is cared for
by the labour of cleaning, repair and maintenance, life ‘uses up’ the durability of the
world, returning worldly things to the cycle of the earth (Arendt, 1958, p. 96). Thus the
chair becomes wood and the wood decays and returns to the soil (Arendt, 1958, p. 137).
On the other hand the process of fabrication involves doing violence to the earth—of
interrupting its cyclical processes to provide the material (wood, iron or stone) with
which to build a world (Arendt, 1958, p. 139). One of the claims of the environment
movement—whose organisations include ones with names such as ‘Earth First!’ and
‘Friends of the Earth’—is that this violence is now endangering the very existence of the
cyclical processes of the earth, and therefore our life as a species. The scale and manner
of our interventions in cyclical processes now threaten to destabilise those processes, so
 Technology as World Building 65

that rather than being returned, after our intervention, to their former state by feedback
mechanisms, ecological systems are tipped over into a new state, that new state often
being one that does not support the way of life of the human community living within
the ecosystem (see Commoner, 1971, p. 35). Paradoxically, the cause of our increased
violence is our failure to build and care for a durable world in which a truly human life
can be lived.
Arendt (1958) tends to focus much more on the world than she does on the earth, and
her assertion that only the ‘world of human artifice’, not the natural earth, can really be
a home for human beings seems to reverse the Romantic evaluation of the ‘natural’ as
better than the ‘artificial’. However, she should not be taken to mean that the earth is not
important, or that we should replace the natural by the artificial. On the contrary she
points out that life itself—our biological existence as members of a species—is not
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sustained by the world, but by the earth (Arendt, 1958, p. 2). The exploration of space
(Arendt was writing at a time when the first satellite had been put into orbit) and the
‘attempt to create life in the test tube’, i.e. in vitro fertilisation, are, for Arendt, attempts
to escape from the earth, to make life ‘artificial’. She does not applaud these attempts,
but says they are ‘possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given,
a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking)’ (Arendt, 1958, pp. 2–3). ‘The earth is the
very quintessence of the human condition’ (Arendt, 1958, p. 2), so a truly artificial
life—where we had really replaced the given earth with a world we had made—would
be a radical change to the human condition. If achieved, ‘Neither labor nor work nor
action nor, indeed, thought as we know it would then make sense any longer’ (Arendt,
1958, p. 10) because one of the basic conditions of our current understanding of
them—life as something given, not by other human beings, but ‘from nowhere’—would
have been abolished.

Implications for Technology Assessment

Arendt’s (1958) thought has a number of implications for how we should think about and
assess technology: first, it suggests that there are clear limits to the appropriateness of
instrumental reasoning; second, she suggests how, and using what criteria, we should
made judgements about the world created and constituted by technology; third, she
suggests that technology which ‘acts into nature’ creates a new type of uncertainty; and
fourth, that technological change should preserve the stability of the world.

The Limits of Instrumentality

On my first definition of technology, as ‘how we add things to the world’, then
technology is how we work. Work is done to produce an end product, and can be judged
in terms of that end product. Instrumental reasoning is entirely appropriate: thus the idea
that technology is merely means to ends.
However, Arendt (1958, p. 158) is clear that instrumental reasoning should not be
applied to the end product of work, the world. Applying instrumental reasoning to the
world results in an anthropocentric utilitarianism in which the only ‘end in itself’ is
human life (Arendt, 1958, p. 155). Work is then done in the mode of labouring, because
it is done for the sake of life rather than for the sake of the world, and because it ceases
to have a beginning and an end,2 each end simply being a means to some further end.
The world itself is ‘consumed’ in this process—constantly transformed by labour and
consumption in the ‘pseudo-natural’ process of economic growth.3 That we now work in
the mode of labouring, as Arendt (1958) claims is borne out by the prevalent idea that
 66 A. Chapman

we ‘consume’ items such as cars, furniture and televisions. In reality, of course, we do

not consume these things like we consume food, but rather they become waste, and much
of our modern waste, consisting as it does of unnatural materials, cannot even be
‘consumed’ by the natural processes of the earth, as the waste we used to produce was.
That the production of waste is vital to the modern economy was a sure sign for Arendt
that we are moving towards a labouring/consuming society (Arendt, 1958, p. 134).
The end products of work that we are least likely to judge instrumentally are works
of art. Architecture is allied to art, so even though we use buildings, it is easy to make
the case that functional, instrumental concerns should not be the sole motivators in the
design of buildings. A good building is one that provides a home for the human activities
that will go on there, and that is beautiful. Less obviously, products of work that are
instrumental in the making of further products—tools and machines—also form part of
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the world that people inhabit: the large spinning and weaving machines introduced
during the industrial revolution constituted a very different world for the people that
worked them from the preceding hand looms and spinning wheels. Qua technology,
machines and tools should be judged instrumentally—in terms of how well they serve
the end of producing a further end product—but qua world, a totally different sort of
judgement needs to be made.

Judging the World

How should the world be judged? There are two answers that Arendt (1958) gives. One
is that it should be judged as to whether it is ‘a place fit for action and speech’ (Arendt,
1958, p. 173). Only such a place can be a home for men and women during their life
on earth. Action and speech take place between people, each of whom is unique, and
because of this uniqueness have the capacity to do something new and unexpected, that
reveals who they are. A world fit for action and speech must thus provide places for
genuine human interaction—interaction that does not follow a set script, where people
are themselves rather than performing roles, that in consequence is not entirely
predictable.
One strand of criticism of modern technology is that it requires people to behave in
a predictable, disciplined way that rules out genuine action. Writing about electric
mixers, cars and televisions Wolfgang Sachs (1992, p. 14) says:
‘Co-ordination and scheduling, training and discipline, not just energy are the elixir
of life for these exceedingly compliant devices. They appear helpful and labour-sav-
ing, yet call for the predictable performance of many people in distant places; the
tools only function insofar as people themselves turn into tools’.
For some technologies, nuclear power being the prime example, the consequences of
people acting other than how the system supposes that they will act—of failing to follow
protocols, falsifying safety checks or hijacking planes—are potentially very great. One
objection made in the 1970s to the widespread use of nuclear power was that it would
require a police state—the state would have to take powers to prevent people acting
unexpectedly (see Flood (1974) on this argument against the development of a UK
fast-breeder reactor programme). On this critique, what is wrong with nuclear power is
not directly associated with the risks of release of radioactive material, but that it would
result in a world where action and speech have to be suppressed.
On a more mundane level, the use of certain technologies can significantly affect
patterns of social interaction, and thus everyday opportunities for action and speech. For
example, car commuting and reliance on television for entertainment are both implicated
 Technology as World Building 67

in Robert Putnam’s (2000) study of the collapse of civic participation in the USA. The
car and the television are both technologies of the private sphere: the television because
it keeps people at home, increasingly watching alone; the car because it means that even
when people go out they do not encounter others while travelling. Designing urban areas
on the basis that people travel by car results in a spatially fragmented world, where one
frequently lives in one suburb, works in another and shops in a third. People spend more
and more time ‘shuttling alone in metal boxes among the vertices of [their] private
triangles’ (Putnam, 2000, p. 212).
The second answer that Arendt (1968) gives as to how we should judge the world is
given in her thoughts on judgement. Arendt saw Kant’s (1952) Critique of Judgement—a
work on aesthetic judgement—as containing a political philosophy. Politics, for Arendt,
is about the world (Arendt, 1968, p. 251) so her insistence that a work on aesthetic
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judgement says something about how we should make political judgements suggests
perhaps that there are parallels between how we should judge the world and the way that
we judge art. Arendt certainly says that what the world is to look like and what kinds
of things are to appear in it are matters of political decision (Arendt, 1968, p. 223), and
that things appear as beautiful or ugly, not as merely functional, useful things (Arendt,
1958, p. 173). Thus political judgements about the world have, at the very least, a
component of aesthetic judgement.
However, Kant’s Critique of Judgement is also a political philosophy for Arendt
because in it Kant (1952, p. 82) argues that judgements of aesthetic taste depend for their
validity on potential agreement with others: on being able to put oneself in the place
occupied by others, and take into consideration their as well as one’s own perspective,
on the world that one shares with them. Whereas logic and reason depend only on
agreement with oneself, on being self-consistent, judgements of taste need the presence
of others. Like politics, taste is a matter of opinion, which seeks to persuade others, not
a matter of facts which compel agreement. Judgements of taste are also ‘disinterested’:
‘neither the life interests of the individual nor the moral interests of the self are
involved here. For judgements of taste, the world is the primary thing, not man,
neither man’s life nor his self’ (Arendt, 1968, p. 222).
In this we have the essence of Arendt’s view of politics: it requires the presence of
others because politics is action, not work, and it is concerned for the world, not the
private interests of individuals—neither their economic interests nor their interests in
their own moral goodness.

Uncertainty of Acting into Nature

For Arendt (1968) the factory production line turned work into labour—a process
without beginning or end. Certain modern technologies have turned it into action. The
human capacity for action is a capacity to begin a new process, one that is boundless and
unpredictable and that once done cannot be undone. Arendt says that this capacity,
previously only employed in the realm of human affairs, has begun to be employed in
nature: we ‘act into nature’ by starting ‘natural’ processes of our own. In this sense we
can now ‘make nature’ as we ‘make history’ (Arendt, 1968, p. 58). In acting into nature
we carry the unpredictability characteristic of human affairs into the realm of nature,
which previously we thought of as being ‘ruled by inexorable laws’ (Arendt, 1968,
p. 61). Arendt does not go into great details as to which particular modern technologies
she thinks ‘act into nature’ but she provides the one clear example of ‘the splitting of
the atom’ (Arendt, 1968, p. 60). She acknowledges that the consequences of any
 68 A. Chapman

fabrication process are unpredictable, in the sense that once the end product of
fabrication is incorporated into the human world its use and eventual ‘history’ can never
be entirely predicted. For this reason ‘even the fabricator remains at the same time an
acting being, who starts processes wherever he goes and with whatever he does’ (Arendt,
1968, p. 60). Nonetheless, she thinks the latest stage in technology, which we have
reached ‘only with the nuclear discoveries, …where the natural processes which take
place would never have existed without direct interference of human action’ goes far
beyond the pre-modern age ‘when wind and water were used to substitute for and
multiply human forces’ and the industrial age ‘with its steam engine and internal-com-
bustion motor, where natural forces were imitated and utilized as man-made means of
production’ (Arendt, 1968, p. 58).
The distinction Arendt (1968) is making seems to be between the initiation of a
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process in the world—involving artefacts and human beings—and the initiation of a

‘natural process’. The idea of a natural process started by human beings no doubt seems
a contradiction in terms to those whose definition of the natural is what takes place
without human interference. However, I think Arendt is pointing to a change in our
relationship with the earth that certain new technologies bring about. The earth has
always been the source of the material out of which the human world is constructed, but
the construction of the world did not affect the basic natural processes of the earth—pro-
cesses that were always liable to reclaim that material, and so destroy the durability of
the world, unless they were kept at bay by the labour of cleaning and maintenance.
However, the new elements created by nuclear fission, the new chemicals we can make
by chemical synthesis and perhaps the new living organisms possible with genetic
engineering are foreign to these processes. The first two at least are new matter, not
merely new forms.4 Their incorporation into the processes of the earth are in effect the
starting of new natural processes. These new processes mean that nature can no longer
be relied upon to behave in the same way as it did in the past.5
Unlike action in the sphere of human affairs, acting into nature does not reveal who
the actor is, nor does it establish human relationships. Although Arendt is often taken to
be praising action, she does also emphasise its dangers: the boundlessness and unpre-
dictability of the processes it starts means that ‘the capacity to act is the most dangerous
of all human abilities and possibilities’ (Arendt, 1968, p. 63). In the realm of human
affairs we can limit unpredictability by making promises, binding each other to future
actions, and can curtail the boundlessness of action by forgiveness, which interrupts the
processes set in train by someone’s action, thus releasing them from the consequences
of what they have done (Arendt, 1958, pp. 236–247). When it comes to the unpre-
dictability and boundlessness of the processes we start by acting into nature, these
remedies are not available (Arendt, 1958, p. 238).

The Stability of the World

One of the features of modern technology is the rapid pace of its development. Should
this change be welcomed, or is technological change in itself destabilising? Arendt
(1966) provides a way of approaching this issue: rather than thinking about the rate of
change of technology, we need to think about the effect that technological change may
or may not have on the stability of the world.
Arendt (1966) constantly emphasises the importance of the stability of the world that
comes from the durability of the end products of work. A stable world is contrasted with
the ceaseless movement inherent in totalitarianism (see Arendt, 1966). The fact that
things made by work outlast the process of making, indeed may outlast the life of their
 Technology as World Building 69

makers, means that, once made, they are independent of their makers. From this
independence arises their ‘objectivity’, which consists in their ability to withstand or
‘stand against’ the needs and wants of their makers and users (Arendt, 1958, p. 137). To
be a home the world must be able to ‘resist the consuming life process of the people
dwelling in it, and thus outlast them’ (Arendt, 1968, p. 210).
The stability of the world also seems to be important for the stability of the identity
of individuals: ‘men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their
sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table’
(Arendt, 1958, p. 137). Few of us now spend our lives with the same chairs and tables,
but, perhaps for this reason, the few objects that we do have throughout our lives often
take on a special personal significance. Objects are repositories of personal and cultural
memories and memory is closely linked to identity.
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This emphasis on stability can appear to be a conservative opposition to change.

However, in her essay The Crisis in Education, Arendt (1968, pp. 173–196) claims that
a conservative attitude that simply accepts the world as it is and seeks to preserve the
status quo in fact leads to the destruction of the world. The world is ‘made by mortal
hands’ and therefore ‘wears out’. ‘To preserve the world against the mortality of its
creators and inhabitants it must be constantly set right anew’ (Arendt, 1968, p. 192). Her
point here seems to be not simply that the world wears out because of the decay caused
by life pervading the world, but that each new generation of people must alter it—must
create it anew—so that it is a fit home for them, as opposed to their forebears. From the
standpoint of the new generation the world is always ‘superannuated and close to
destruction’ (Arendt, 1968, p. 193).
We thus have the paradox that to save the world from being as mortal as its
inhabitants—from passing away as they do—there must be change. A similar point has
been made by Kate Rawles and Alan Holland (1994) in a discussion of the aims of
conservation: they distinguish between ‘keeping things as they are’ and ‘making them
last’ and argue that because change and development are endemic features of social and
biological systems simply preserving things as they are may not make them last (Rawles
and Holland, 1994, p. 5). Thus, if the world is to last there need to be changes, but how
do we judge which changes will make the world last, and thus preserve its stability, and
which changes destroy its stability?
Rawles and Holland (1994, p. 37) propose that conservation is about ‘negotiating the
transition from past to future in such a way as to secure the transfer of maximum
significance’. Features that do not, or no longer have significance, do not need to be
preserved, and significance can be transferred by creating something new, which
nonetheless has historical continuity with what went before. That historical continuity
may have been the sort of thing that Arendt (1968, p. 178) had in mind as a solution to
her paradox is suggested by her remark referring to the American revolution: that it was
a basic American experience that ‘a new order can be founded…with full consciousness
of a historical continuum’. Change in the world thus preserves the stability of the world
if it continues the story of the past into the future in a meaningful way.

A Possible Framework for Technology Assessment

The view of technology put forward here suggests a much broader framework for
technology assessment than that provided by risk assessment. In so far as technology
creates and constitutes the world that we inhabit it should be judged as to whether it
brings about a beautiful, stable world that provides a place for human action. The
stability and durability of the world are important for human identity, but also have
 70 A. Chapman

implications for the earth, as building the world always involves doing some violence to
the earth. The more durable the world the less it will need continually to be rebuilt, and
thus the less violence will be done to the earth. We also need to recognise that
technologies that start new processes in nature create uncertainty of a type that we do
not have the capacity to deal with. Finally, in that decisions about technology are
decisions about the world, they are essentially political. This means that they cannot be
made simply by appeal to scientific knowledge and truth, but should be made through
the exchange of opinions amongst people who have different perspectives on the world.
If we should think of technology as ‘world building’, we should perhaps look to how
we regulate the construction of buildings for a possible model of technology assessment.
In Britain there are two ways in which we control what can be built where: by the system
of building regulations and by the planning system. The first sets out technical standards
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for the construction of buildings, so that they are well-built structurally, safe and well
insulated. Similar systems of standards exist in many areas of technology—though they
may be voluntary, rather than mandatory, in that in some product areas it is quite legal
to market products that do not conform to the standards. Meeting such standards is
generally a clear-cut issue of passing or failing specified tests, with minimum room for
judgement and discretion. Standards are currently sometimes used to promote technology
that accords with certain political objectives, such as energy efficiency, and there may
be scope for standards to incorporate other concerns which relate to the nature of the
world a technology brings into being.
However, the building regulations or standards approach is limited in scope to features
that can be easily quantified and measured. In contrast, the planning system allows a
much wider range of considerations to be taken into account, and has mechanisms to
enable public participation and debate. In Britain decisions about individual develop-
ments are overseen or made by local committees of elected politicians on the basis of
policies contained in national and regional guidance and in local plans. These policies
and plans are formulated after public consultation and in the latter two cases only
finalised after public inquiries, or ‘examinations’ before independent inspectors. The
overall purpose of the planning system is to regulate the ‘development and use of land
in the public interest’ (Department of the Environment, 1997, paragraph 39), and
arguments must be made on the basis of whether something is in the public interest, not
on the basis of effects on the private interests of individuals or businesses.6 It is
recognised in planning that many of these arguments are matters of opinion and there is
discretion in interpretation of policy, provided that interpretation is reasonable and takes
into account all relevant facts.
What I think a system of technology assessment should take from planning is not the
idea of a comprehensive plan for redevelopment, made by experts on the basis of
collected data and predicted ‘needs’ (the view of planning in the 1950s—see Taylor,
1998). Neither is it the idea of ‘trend planning’, in which development plans simply
allocate land for development to meet ‘needs’ predicted on the basis of past development
activity (Pickvance, 1977).7 Rather it is that decisions about the public world are to be
made by a public system of rational debate, where what counts are the arguments made
and reasons given, and where a wide range of different sort of arguments can be made,
provided they are related to what the public world should be like, not to private interests.
The emphasis in planning on arguments and reasons means that planning theorists (e.g.
Forester, 1989; Healey, 1997) have been particularly interested in Habermas’s theory of
communicative action, a theory that was developed from Arendt’s concept of action
(Habermas, 1977; Canovan, 1983). Recent ideas about collaborative planning argue that
planning should be made more inclusive of different knowledges and perspectives.
 Technology as World Building 71

Rather than being merely a site of conflict, local planning has the potential to build the
capacity for collaboration amongst people from diverse cultures who share a common
local environment. That is, discussions about the future of what people in our fragmented
society do share—the spaces and places of their local environments, their common
world—have the potential to create a political community (Healey, 1997). My argument
is that because much of the world that we inhabit together is constructed through and
constituted by technology, technology assessment has similar potential to reinvigorate
political life and systems of governance.

Acknowledgements
Previous versions of this paper were presented at a seminar at the Institute for
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Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy, Lancaster University, and at the Society for
Philosophy and Technology Conference at Park City, UT, in July 2003. I am grateful for
the comments and suggestions received on those occasions.
My research has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board.

Notes
1. One could argue that works of art may be ‘used⬘—for educational purposes for example. We can,
nonetheless, distinguish between works of art and items produced primarily for their utility, and the latter
are more technological than the former.
2. Technology, not just mental attitude, is involved here: the factory production line turned work into a process
without beginning or end (Arendt, 1958, p. 149).
3. The ideas of ‘growth’ and of automatic processes (machines which work ‘automatically’ as well as the idea
of an economy that is ‘self-regulating’ (Polanyi, 1944) and thus automatic) come from life and biological
processes.
4. This point is made by Hans Jonas when he says that with chemical technology ‘Artificiality enters the heart
of matter’ (Jonas, 1974, p. 77). The difference between mechanical and chemical technology is ‘in the depth
of man’s intervention in the working of nature. In the chemical stage, man does more than construct
machinery from natural materials and use natural forces as sources of power. In chemistry he changes the
substances of nature and even comes to synthesize substances which nature never knew’ (Jonas, 1974, p. 77,
emphasis in original).
5. For example the process within the upper atmosphere started when human-created chlorofluorocarbons were
introduced into it, leading to the thinning of the layer of ozone which absorbs much of the ultra-violet
component of the sun’s rays. This means that exposure of the skin and eyes to sunlight is now far more
likely to lead to skin cancer and eye cateracts than it was in the past: nature (in this case the sunshine) can
no longer be relied upon to have the same effects as it did in the past.
6. The ‘amenity’ of private and commercial properties, and whether new developments would cause noise or
other nuisance, can be considered, but not direct consideration of private economic interests, for example
whether a company will go out of business if it does not receive planning permission.
7. There has recently been a significant shift away from this approach to planning: see for example the 2003
Regional Planning Guidance for the North West of England, which explicitly does not provide for the
continuation of past trends in housing development.

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