Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2009, 54, 3–17

Man in the age of technology

Umberto Galimberti, Milan, Italy

Abstract: This paper argues that technology is no longer merely a tool for man’s use
but has become the environment in which man undergoes modifications. The author
traces the role of technology from the Greeks to the present day. For the Greeks, Nature
was governed by necessity and therefore unchangeable whereas in the Judeo-Christian
tradition, nature was entrusted to man for him to dominate. Modern science studies
the world in order to manipulate and dominate nature through the use of technology
which has now become an end in itself, governing the solution of political problems and
confronting us with problems beyond our competence to resolve. The ethical impact of
technology has been to create a change from ‘acting’ which assumes responsibility for
one’s actions to ‘doing’ which is concerned only with the effective execution of a ‘job’
without concern for the wider consequences. It can no longer be argued that technology
is good or bad according to the use we make of it since technology now makes use of us
and thus transforms our ethics, social relationships and psychological being.

Key words: humanism, nature, Plato, politics, Prometheus, science, technology

1. We are all used to thinking of technology as a ‘tool’ at the disposition of

man but the fact is that this position has now been completely reversed. It is
technology that has become the ‘subject of history’ while man has become a
mere ‘functionary’ of his technological apparatuses.
If technology is the subject of history and man merely an obedient
functionary, then we can only admit that humanism is at an end and that the
humanistic categories that we have always used to read history are no longer
capable of interpreting the age of technology.
In a certain sense we could consider that technology is the very essence
of man. Man is the only living creature with no instincts and the traditional
definition of man as the ‘rational animal’ is substantially inaccurate as he lacks
that fundamental characteristic of all animals which is instinct. Instinct can be
defined as the pre-determined reaction to a stimulus. If a herbivore sees a piece
of meat it means nothing to it, but if it sees a bale of hay it immediately identifies
it as food and begins to eat. Man on the other hand is deprived of these rigid
responses to stimuli that we call instincts.
Freud himself, although he used the word Instinkt in his early works, soon
recognized the inadequacy of the term which was abandoned in favour of Trieb,
translated as drive in English, in the sense of a generic movement towards an

0021-8774/2009/5401/3 
C 2009, The Society of Analytical Psychology
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
4 Umberto Galimberti

object. Even the ‘sexual drive’ itself is so little instinctive that it is possible to
respond to a sexual stimulus in any manner of perverse ways—something that
appears to be impossible for animals. In the same way the sexual drive can be
‘sublimated’, diverted to non-sexual aims such as a work of art, a poem or a
musical composition, etc.
If man is deprived of instincts therefore, his very survival depends on his
capacity to develop his ‘technological’ skills and in this sense we could collocate
the birth of humanity in the moment in which the first anthropoid made use
of a stick to obtain a piece of fruit. If the technological dimension has allowed
man to overcome his lack of instincts, it is only through technology that man
has discovered the possibility of freedom.
Freedom is not a gift from heaven. Man is free because he is not rigidly
codified by instincts. We are only free because we are biologically undetermined
as opposed to animals whose behaviour is pre-determined from the moment of
birth to that of death.
The theory that man is deprived of instincts was first enunciated by Plato
in ‘Protagoras’ where he narrates how Zeus assigns Epimetheus (epi-metis, he
who thinks afterwards, and therefore he who is improvident, the unwary one)
with the task of attributing qualities (instincts) to all living creatures. By the
time he arrives at man Epimetheus has no qualities left as he has been too
liberal to start with. Zeus, moved by the fate of man, asks Epimetheus’ brother,
Prometheus (pro-metis, he who thinks before) to endow man with his own
quality of foresight or prevision.
Hobbes too maintains that while animals eat only when they are hungry, man
is famelicus famis futurae, he is hungry with his future hunger. Man does not
need to be hungry to search for food as he is able to anticipate that even when
he is full, the time will come when he will need food again. This is the essential
virtue of man: the capacity to anticipate.
Man therefore is born a ‘technological’ being from the very start. In a more
articulated way, we could say that the being we call man was born the day that
the anthropoids made their first technological gesture.
2. Even before the birth of philosophy, the Greeks had begun to reflect on the
problem of technology, as we can see from Aeschylus’s tragedy, Prometheus
Bound. It is an error to think of the Greek tragedies as theatrical representations
designed merely to make the audience laugh or cry. The Greeks were probably
the most serious people ever to walk the earth. When problems arose in the city,
they were represented in the theatre, that is to say they were collocated within
a sacred dimension. All Greek words that begin with the root theos (God, from
which the word Zeus is derived) such as theorema (theorem) or theatro (theatre)
contain within themselves a specific reference to the sacred.
In Aeschylus’s tragedy, Prometheus, the friend of men, consigns the gift
of fire to men to enable them to transform metal and create tools. He
gives men the capacity to calculate and to make previsions and thus in a
Man in the age of technology 5

certain sense, the rudiments of technological skill. At this point however, Zeus
intervenes as he has become frightened that men, through their technology,
will become more powerful than the gods themselves. Already in this passage,
the theme of the conflict between religion and science is evident. Through
science and technology man can obtain for himself that which once he
needed to pray to the gods for. Zeus punishes Prometheus by chaining him
to a rock where an eagle continually gnaws at his liver which miraculously
regenerates every evening in order to guarantee the never-ending nature of his
punishment.
We should always take myths seriously as they are never only stories, fables
or the inventions of fantasy. Myths always contain a kernel of science and
of knowledge. In the hypothesis that the liver is capable of regenerating, for
example, we can see the level of competence achieved by the doctors of the
school of Kos, who had already discovered a fundamental characteristic of the
liver for as we now know every three or four weeks the liver cells are completely
renewed. This myth therefore contains exact scientific notions.
To go back to Aeschylus’s story however, at a certain point the Chorus
asks Prometheus which is stronger, nature or technology. To understand the
significance of this question we need a profound knowledge of the nature of
Greek thought and we need to free ourselves of that Christian conception
of nature which permeates our own thinking whether we are believers or
not.
For Judaeo-Christian culture, nature is the product of the will of God which
created it and like all products of a will, nature has determined characteristics
but it could just as easily have others. Furthermore, this nature produced by
the will of God was given over to men so that they can exert power over it and
obtain sustenance from it. In Genesis, God gives to Adam dominion over all the
animals of the earth, the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky. Nature is thus
conceived of as the product of the will of God and consigned to the dominion
of man.
For the Greeks all this was literally unthinkable, since, for the Greeks, nature
was an unchangeable whole, governed by that most powerful of categories:
necessity (ananke). The laws of nature could never be modified. ‘This cosmos
which no God and no man created’, says Heraclitus, ‘always was, always is and
always will be unchangeable’ (fr.30). Not a product of will therefore that may
be like this but which could equally be like that and still less something over
which man can dominate. As Plato says: ‘Miserable man, do not think that this
cosmos was created for you. Rather you will be just only if you conform to the
universal harmony’ (The Laws, 903 c.).
All those therefore that believe that the Greeks—and Plato in particular—
anticipated Christian culture, either do not understand the Greeks or they do
not understand Christianity. There is an abyss between these two worlds. In the
Greek world men contemplated nature in order to understand its immutable
and constant laws and these laws lay at the heart of the principles through which
6 Umberto Galimberti

they ordered their cities and their souls. Nature was therefore the fundamental
point of reference both for politics and for that good government of the soul,
which today is the task of psychology.
In the Judaeo-Christian world, there was no contradiction between technol-
ogy and nature, for nature had been entrusted to man so that he could dominate
it. In the Greek world on the other hand, this contradiction was present in all its
force for if nature was immutable what would be the consequences if technology
were to succeed in bringing about change? The answer of Prometheus to the
Chorus is lapidary: ‘techne d’anankes asthenestera makro’; technology will
always be less powerful than necessity which binds nature to immutability and
to the regularity of its laws.
Sophocles too, in Antigone narrates that when the plough furrows the earth,
the earth closes back again after its passage, when the ship fends the waves, they
quickly return to a dreamy calm. Nature cannot violate the law of necessity
and technology can never overcome the laws of nature. This response of
Prometheus is correct however only because technology in the Greek age was
still rudimentary.
3. If we now jump 2,000 years and move from the age of Aeschylus to 1600, we
find men still cultivating their fields in exactly the same way as the Greeks had
done and we conclude therefore that very few innovations had taken place in the
field of technology. Despite the advent of Roman architecture and hydraulics,
men still continued to take advantage of natural inclinations and the sources of
energy that nature offered. In medicine too, drugs were not considered to cure
themselves but held merely to assist nature in the process of healing. In a word,
the ancient primacy of nature still held.
In 1600 however something absolutely new emerged: modern science. Men
such as Bacon, Descartes and Galileo no longer believed that it was necessary
to behave like the Greeks and merely contemplate nature in the attempt to
capture its laws. Instead they insisted that it was necessary to proceed in exactly
the opposite way: first by formulating hypotheses on nature, then by testing
these hypotheses through experiments and only then, if the experiments were
successful, were these hypotheses given the status of laws of nature. This way
of proceeding is the basis of so-called modern science.
Two centuries later Kant described this event as a ‘Copernican revolution’.
Previously men believed that the earth was the centre of the universe, but
Copernicus inverted the relationship between the earth and the sun and it was
now the sun which was the centre around which the earth revolved. Kant also
cited two Italians: Galileo and Torricelli. These scientists, said the philosopher
of Königsberg, behaved towards nature not as scholars content to follow the
footsteps of their teacher but as judges forcing the accused to answer their
questions. Nature had now become an accused who responded to the questions
posed by men. Only if the hypotheses formulated by men were confirmed, were
they adopted as ‘laws of nature’.
Man in the age of technology 7

We should be very clear on this point: the essence of humanism is science.

Humanism is not the art or literature that celebrates man; it is not the treatise
of Lorenzo Valla, ‘De dignitate hominis’. Science is the essence of humanism
because as Descartes states so lucidly, it is only through the discovery of the
scientific method that man becomes dominator et possessor mundi, dominator
and lord of the world. Men had discovered a method with which to read nature
and to organize it according to their projects. In the light of this consideration,
the separation between human and natural sciences seems somewhat ingenuous,
as it is modern science that has given man primacy over the natural
order.
At this point however it is necessary to make two distinctions. When we talk
about science we should not think in terms of something ‘pure’ with respect to
which technology is merely an application of science which can be good or bad,
depending on the use we make of it. This is a false belief as technology is the
very essence of science, not in the sense that without technology there would
be no scientific research, but in the sense that science studies the world not to
contemplate it but to manipulate and transform it. The scientific gaze already
implies a technological intention which characterizes, qualifies and directs it
towards manipulation. It is like a carpenter and a poet visiting a wood: when
they look at the trees they do not see the same thing for the carpenter from the
start sees only furniture.
The second distinction has to do with the relationship between religion and
science. It is perfectly true that, to refer back to the myth, there exists a conflict
between Zeus and Prometheus but this conflict is relative and is much less
important than the profound identity that exists between religion and science.
Science is the child of medieval theology and even if it claims to possess no
final aim and proceeds as though God does not exist, science is dripping with
theological metaphors. Theology divided up time into past, present and future
and attributed moral value to them: the past as the time of original sin was
considered evil; the present was seen as the possibility of redemption through
Christ and through good works; but only the future offered the promise of
salvation. Science too however thinks of time in theological terms, when it
conceptualizes the past as ignorance, the present as research and the future as
progress.
Bacon bears witness to the profound theological basis of science when in
the ‘Novum Organum’ he writes: ‘Science contributes to the redemption of
man’ (p. 52). Through science men can recover the original virtues that Adam
possessed before the Fall and alleviate the sufferings that are the consequence
of original sin. These sufferings are, as we all remember, pain (‘in sorrow thou
shall bring forth children’) and work (‘in the sweat of they face shall thou
eat bread’) (Gen. 3v.16 & 19). Science or if you prefer, techno-science, by
reducing the fatigue of work and the atrocity of pain contributes to redemption
and it is through this theological vision that science in the modern sense is
born.
8 Umberto Galimberti

Certainly, already in 1600 men had begun to imagine marvellous technolog-

ical cities as we can see from the great utopian works of the period, Bacon’s
‘The New Atlantis’, More’s ‘Utopia’ and Campanella’s ‘La Città del Sole’ but
these were simply fantastic projections for in reality men had still not begun to
apply technology and fields were still cultivated as in the age of the Greeks.
4. Let us now take a further jump of two hundred years and arrive at the
time of Hegel. In ‘The Science of Logic’ Hegel makes two statements that are
fundamental for the advent of the age of technology. The first is when he
suggests that in the future wealth will be determined not by the possession
of ‘goods’ but of the tools of production, as goods are consumed while tools
continue to produce new ‘goods’.
To those of us who have grown up in an industrial and then in a technological
world all this may seem somewhat obvious but in Hegel’s day this was far from
being the case. We have only to recollect that 40 years earlier Adam Smith in
his famous treatise, ‘The Wealth of Nations’ indicated the possession of goods
as the fundamental measure of wealth, and the revolutionary nature of Hegel’s
idea becomes clear.
The second and decisive consideration of Hegel is that when a phenomenon
changes quantitatively the change has to do not only with quantity but also
with quality and he gives a very simple example: if I take away one or two hairs
I am still a person with hair but if I remove all my hair then I am bald. Simply
increasing the quantity of a gesture produces a qualitative change.
Marx took Hegel’s theorem and applied it to economics. We are all used to
thinking of money as the means whereby we can realize certain aims such as
the satisfaction of needs and the production of goods. But said Marx, if money
is increased quantitatively to the point that it becomes the universal means by
which any need is satisfied and any type of goods produced, then money is no
longer simply a means to an end but it becomes an end in itself. The original ends
(satisfaction of needs and production of goods) are no longer ends but means
through which we obtain the final end, money, even if everyone continues to
think of money as a means.
This Marxist argument can be equally applied to technology. If technology
becomes the universal condition through which every aim is satisfied then
technology is no longer a means but the principal end through which every
other end can be reached.
Around fifteen years ago we witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Often—with a considerable dose of ingenuousness—this collapse is attributed
to ‘humanistic’ causes such as the material living conditions of the population
or the lack of civil or political freedom, but such historical collapses are never
attributable to humanistic causes.
In the early 1960s the technology of the Soviet Union was roughly equivalent
to that of its principal antagonist, American capitalism. In those years the Soviets
were even capable of putting satellites into orbit, something the Americans still
Man in the age of technology 9

were unable to do and the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed impossible. By the
1980s however, the level of American technology had become vastly superior
to that of the Soviet Union and it had become clear that they were losing the
arms race. At that point, the collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable. As
Emanuele Severino notes in The Decline of Capitalism, if the end, communism,
could only be achieved through the means of technology, once its technology
failed, there was nothing left to shore up communism.
In the same way, if technology becomes the universal condition through
which all aims are satisfied, technology is no longer a means but an end
in itself that is desired by all for in its absence it becomes impossible to
achieve what are considered the true aims of society, whether they are universal
communism or global capitalism. All this has enormous consequences on the
anthropological level, but for brevity I will consider only the political and ethical
implications.
5. Politics was substantially invented by Plato and is therefore a somewhat
recent innovation. Before politics, there was only tyranny. Today however, as
Giacomo Marramao puts it in Dopo il Leviatano (After Leviathan), politics
resembles a deposed sovereign, useful for representation, for gathering in and
organizing affects, identities and social ties but irrelevant as far as any decision
making is concerned. This is because politics looks to economics to guide it
in its decisions, while economics in its turn is guided in its investments by the
availability of technological resources.
When it is said that we can only defend ourselves against the Chinese by
improving our technology through research it is as though we are recognizing
the primacy of technology over economics and the primacy of economics over
politics. Politics has become a representation of decision making, not the place
where decisions are made. This is extremely dangerous because, as Plato reminds
us, technology knows how to make things but not whether they should be made
in the first place and why they are made. From this, Plato derives the necessity
of that government of technology (basilike techne), that capacity to assign to
technology the purpose of its procedures, which is the true task of politics. The
problem is that today the position has been reversed and it is technology that
governs politics.
In fact the situation is even more dramatic as technology has subverted the
very structure of power which in the pre-technological age was represented by
a triangle with the decisional moment—the king’s will, the laws, power—at
the top, and at the base obedience or transgression, legitimacy or illegitimacy,
citizens or subjects.
Today technology no longer allows this type of representation of power as
it assigns power only to those who operate from within an apparatus. It only
needs ten air-traffic controllers to bring air traffic to a standstill whereas in
more traditional forms of strikes, around 80–90% of the work force had to lay
down their tools for a strike to be successful.
10 Umberto Galimberti

We are faced therefore with a completely new kind of power as technology

requires the coordination of all the sub-apparatuses if it is to function with
precision and efficiency. The interruption of even a tiny section of the apparatus
is sufficient to block the whole, and in this way, technology confers power to
all those who operate within the apparatus, a power that the Americans have
called ‘no-making power’.
In an age of technology the function of politics has become more that of
mediating rather than of decision making, as making decisions is no longer
compatible with the functionality of technology.
Although we all continue to believe in democracy, technology may well bring
about the end of democratic systems as we know them and indeed in a certain
sense, democracy no longer exists. Technology confronts us with problems
we are no longer competent to deal with even though we may be called on
to make decisions about these problems. We just have to think about the
problem of nuclear power stations, of genetically modified organisms or of the
recent referendum held in Italy about in-vitro fertilization. In all these examples
only doctors, nuclear scientists, geneticists or molecular biologists possess the
necessary competence to make rational decisions about such problems. The
ordinary citizen who is called on to decide can only judge on irrational grounds
such as ideology, political loyalties or the sympathy or persuasive capacity of
this or that politician or television commentator.
Plato would have defined this type of system, which we call tele-cracy
(television government), in terms of rhetoric or sophism. Of the 35 dialogues
that the Athenian philosopher has left us, ten are dedicated to the dangers
posed by rhetoricians or sophists who obtain consensus not through rational
arguments, not by striving to impart knowledge or by improving competence,
not by their capacity to construct an argument, but through their capacity
to stimulate affects, through the sophistication of their paralogisms, by their
appeals to authority, by their emotional persuasiveness.
For Plato, all such persons should be expelled from the city as no democratic
system could be born as long as such mystifiers of language and consensus
existed. When we say the power of the television risks destroying democracy
we are reposing the same problem raised by Plato in his discourse on rhetoric
and democracy, as technology forces us to deal with problems that require a
competence we do not possess.
The relationship between technology and ethics is equally problematic as
often technology poses problems that necessitate ‘moral’ decisions. But what
morality can deal with techno-scientific events? In the West we have known
three fundamental types of morality: Christian morality, secular morality and
the morality of responsibility.
Christian morality has had a long and glorious history and the whole
European legal system is based on it. It can be qualified as a morality of
intention in the sense that it is necessary to take into account the intentions
behind an action in any act of judgement. In judging any act of unlawful
Man in the age of technology 11

killing it is necessary to determine if the act was intentional and premeditated

(what the Americans call first degree murder), if the act was intentional but
not premeditated (murder in the second degree) or if it was unintentional
(manslaughter). In every case it is the category of intention, which implies
the investigation of the person’s awareness of his actions, which determines the
morality of any behaviour.
The ethics of intention is however not much use in an age of technology. Faced
with a technological event whose effects may well be devastating, it matters very
little whether we know or not the intentions of those who produced the event.
In the case of the atomic bomb for example what concerns us is its destructive
potential, not the intentions of Fermi and his colleagues who developed the
project. Then we have secular morality which for brevity we could sum up
in the elegant proposition of Kant: ‘Man must always be treated as an end,
never as a means’. This too is a morality of intentions but Kant constructs it
on purely rational grounds, independently of any theological considerations
and we can therefore define it as secular morality. This type of morality has
never been realized inasmuch as man—in our culture especially—is justified
in his existence only if he functions in some capacity, only if he produces. If
we consider an immigrant for example: the fact that he exists and has vital
needs to satisfy does not legitimize his presence in our country which is only
recognized if he participates in production. In this sense Marx anticipated with
extraordinary lucidity the condition of man in the age of technology. His only
error if you like, was to underestimate the extent of the problem.
And yet, even if men were treated as ends and not as means, there would
still be limits to the efficacy of this type of morality. What does it mean exactly
to say that man must be treated as an end in himself? That everything else is
merely a means to an end. In an age of technology, is the air we breathe a means
or an end to be protected? Is water a means or an end to be conserved? Are
animals and plants means or ends to be safeguarded?
Neither Christian nor secular morality has ever taken responsibility for nature
as in previous ages, it was unnecessary. Men were still relatively few and nature
was more than able to satisfy the needs of the population. Today however
the population has grown to the point that nature itself is threatened but we
have no ethical tools with which to protect and defend nature. Even if the
legal means are present, the idea that pollution is a crime is still foreign to our
collective consciousness. Everyone accepts that rape is an immoral act but how
many people see pollution in these terms? Secular morality is just not up to
confronting the effects of technology.
In 1910 Max Weber theorized a different kind of morality, the morality of
responsibility (Verantwortungsethik), an idea that was taken up again in the
1980s by a pupil of Heidegger, Hans Jonas. Weber reversed the old idea of
morality when he stressed that what we need to take into account are not
the intentions of acts but their effects. He qualifies this proposition however
by adding, ‘as long as these effects are foreseeable’. Unfortunately the essential
12 Umberto Galimberti

characteristic of technology is that its effects are unpredictable. The mentality of

scientists is not finalistic but procedural in the sense that one scientist can study a
molecule for twenty years while another, for no aim and for no reason, will study
another for fifteen years. Only if the combination of these competences produces
something that is anthropologically advantageous, will all this study be of any
use.
Of course, ‘anthropologically advantageous’ principally means ‘economically
advantageous’. If the opposite was true we would have already cured the
malaria and the AIDS epidemics that afflict the population of Africa. This has
not happened because the primary aim of techno-science is its own maximum
development, not the production of benefits for man. The proof of this is in the
continual financing of research into nuclear weapons. In the world of today the
nuclear powers already have the potential to destroy the world ten thousand
times over but this fact does not bring about any interruption in the research to
perfect the atomic bomb. We are at the level of absurdity but it is exactly this
that demonstrates the true nature of the techno-scientific apparatus whose only
scope is its own development.
Furthermore no power controls science because no government possesses
sufficient scientific competence to be able to exert such a control. Specialization
has reached such a level that there now exists in the United States ‘popular’
scientific journals for physicists which aim to divulge to scientist A what
scientist B is doing in a language that is sufficiently simple to permit
understanding. If this is the level of specialization who can possibly control this
field?
Nevertheless we are still not quite in the age where technology has completely
taken over. Economics still controls science in the sense that only those
researches which promise an immediate economic benefit are financed but it
will not be long before science frees itself from these limits because science is
the highest form of rationality achieved by man.
Economics which used to be the highest form of rationality is giving way to
technology as economics is still affected by human passions. The passion for
money is irrational from the point of view of the functionality and optimization
of the relationship between means and ends. In this sense, we can refer to
economics as a ‘humanistic’ science which still conditions that non-humanistic
competence which is technology.
6. The Second World War can be considered as the threshold which ushered
in the age of technology. Certainly a technological society existed before this
event as technology was already functioning massively in the 19th century and
its potential was continually developed by various wars. Nevertheless during
the 2nd World War the development of technology was such that it brought
about an unprecedented anthropological mutation. The way of thinking that
took form in those years became the dominant paradigm for all of us who live
in the age of technology.
Man in the age of technology 13

Gunter Anders, the German philosopher who fled to America to escape

Nazi persecution, was convinced of this. When he found work in one of the
Ford factories he made the following comment: ‘I learned from Heidegger,
my professor, that man was the “shepherd of being” but it seems to me
today that I have become the “shepherd of machines” which possess a
competence, an intelligence that is so superior to my own that I feel a
certain “Promethean shame” when I am confronted by the performance of
machines’.
According to Anders, a persecuted Jew, the Nazi age brought about a radical
change in mentality that was even more tragic than the extermination of six
million Jews. Here Anders is referring to the passage from acting to pure and
simple doing. I act when I carry out certain actions as part of an aim but
I do when I limit myself to simply carrying out my task, independently of
its aims which I usually do not know and for which, even if I do know,
I am not however responsible. During the Nuremberg Trials, just as in the
Eichmann trial, when the generals were questioned about their responsibility
for their actions, the response that they gave was always the same: ‘I was just
carrying out orders’. In a technological age we could consider this response
perfectly correct. It is for this reason that Anders compares Nazism to a
‘provincial theatre’ in which the Nazis rehearsed the possible effects of an
age of technology in which there is a passage from acting to doing, from
the assumption of responsibility for the effects of one’s actions to the simple
consideration of whether the execution of the required task is good or bad (pure
doing).
Gitta Sereny in her 170 interviews with Franz Stangl, the commander of
Treblinka, more or less kept on repeating the same question: how could he
kill 5,000 people every day and above all what did he feel. Stangl just did not
understand the significance of the question and continued to monotonously
repeat that it was simply a question that every day 3,000 people arrived and
they had to be eliminated by 3 o’clock in the afternoon as the next day another
2,000 people would arrive. Once it was ascertained that the method invented
by Wirth worked, it became irreversible. As far as Stangl was concerned it was
simply, ‘my “job” (Arbeit) to carry it out’.
Gunter Anders also wrote a 60 page letter to the pilot who had dropped the
bomb on Hiroshima in order to understand from where he got the force and
the motivation to drop an atomic bomb on a population that he had never seen
and never met, knowing full well the effects that it would have had. The pilot
did not answer the letter directly but in a later interview, when he was asked
what he could have replied to Anders his response was: ‘Nothing, that was my
job’. In other words he considered himself a good pilot because he knew how
and when to push the right button. All that was asked of him was technological
competence and that was his only responsibility.
The word ‘job’ which has such positive connotations is very dangerous in
an age of technology because it limits responsibility to the efficient execution
14 Umberto Galimberti

of orders in which responsibility is only towards one’s superiors without any

thought as to the effects of one’s actions.
If we were to visit a factory that produces land mines how should we call
the people that work there: ‘workers’ or ‘delinquents’? We need to be able to
decide, to be able to give a definition in some way. Perhaps it would be more
opportune to call them ‘workers’ as we can be sure that if they were offered
a job in a food processing factory at twice the salary, they would jump at
the chance. In this case too we are confronted with a substantial indifference
to the final purpose of a ‘job’. Twenty years ago when an Italian bank was
implicated in the scandal of supplying arms to Saddam, were those who worked
in the bank guilty? Evidently not. And were the people guilty who worked
for or who owned shares in the American telephone company that we know
was involved in the coup in Chile? Once again the only possible response is
no.
When we invest in the Stock Exchange are we responsible for the final ends
of the company in which we are financing? No, because technology obliges
us to deal only with that small sector that covers the relationship between the
investment and the relative gain. Our responsibility finishes there. This is the
age of technology as the President of the United States reminds us every time
he tells us that we will remain in Iraq until the ‘job’ is finished, as though
he was simply a functionary with no final responsibility for what is really
happening.

7. Heidegger was one of the first to comprehend the true nature of the age of
technology, possibly because of his affiliation with the Nazi ideology. After
having seen the consequences of that ‘provincial theatre’ of which Anders
speaks, he writes:

What is really disturbing is not that technology has taken over the world and
transformed it. It is infinitely more disturbing that man is in no way ready for this
radical change in the world. It is infinitely more disturbing that we are still not capable
of arriving, through the mediation of thought, at an adequate confrontation with what
is really emerging in our world.
(Gelassenheit, 1959)

Today we have at our disposition only that kind of thought that Heidegger
calls ‘calculating’ thought (Denken als Rechnen), thought that is able only
to add up sums, to think in terms of what is useful and advantageous, to
operate in that brief space which separates means from ends in order to optimize
the relationship between effort and cost. Beauty too becomes involved in this
mechanism as even a work of art is considered such only when it enters into
the market, when it is given a monetary value. The work of art would seem to
have no value in itself if it is not ‘marketable’ and therefore ‘calculable’. In this
way we no longer identify the ‘beautiful’, the ‘good’, the ‘just’, the ‘virtuous’,
the ‘holy’, the ‘true’.
Man in the age of technology 15

There are still a few free thoughts around but they have become merely a
pastime, something to engage in the weekend and they have no effect on the
real world where everything circles around utility and the optimization of the
relationship between means and ends.
Technology radically changes the way we think as, even if machines have been
invented by man, they now contain an objectification of human intelligence
that is superior to the competence of single individuals. The memory of a
computer is vastly superior to our memories, even if it is a ‘stupid’ memory.
Using computers modifies our thinking, transforming it from ‘problem-solving’
thinking to ‘binary’ thinking which follows the scheme 1/0 and renders us able
only to say yes, no or at best, ‘I do not know’.
It is not by chance that human thinking began to evolve when we were able
to overcome this kind of imposition. Primitive thought was based on binomial
oppositions: light and dark; day and night; earth and sky. At the beginning of
our history there were only two parameters but then we began to think in more
problem-solving and complex ways. Today however this kind of thinking has
once again imploded into the binary logic which we can find in quiz shows and
in multiple-choice examinations.
The objection that technology is good or bad according to the use we make
of it is no longer valid, because what modifies us is not whether it is used well
or badly but the very fact that we use it at all. Using technology transforms us.
Talking to our friends in a chat room signifies changing the modalities of our
relationships because there are enormous differences between talking in a chat
room and talking to someone face to face. If our children watch television for
four hours or more every day, it is inevitable that their way of thinking and
feeling will be modified independently of whether the programmes are good or
bad. It is the length of exposure that counts.
Even our feelings are being significantly altered. Our psyche responds to the
surrounding environment (Um-welt) into which we were born and in which
we cultivate our relationships, but what happens when the media brings us
into contact with the whole world (Welt) and how can we cope with this? If my
brother dies I cry, if my neighbour dies I go to the funeral, if I am told that every
second 8 children in the world die, I am sorry but this becomes merely a statistic
for me: I no longer react when I am presented with events that go beyond my
capacity for emotional perception. The ‘too large’ leaves me indifferent and
in order not to become aware of my impotence to change things, I prefer to
repress the information. Not even emotionally are we up to the level of the
‘technological’ event.
Once again we are forced to realize that technology is not a means at the
disposition of man but the environment in which man undergoes modifications.
Technology represents an absolutely new and perhaps irreversible historical
moment in which the question is no longer ‘what can we do with technology?’
but ‘what will technology do to us?’
16 Umberto Galimberti

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Cet article avance l’idée que la technologie n’est plus un simple outil au service de
l’homme mais qu’elle est devenue un environnement au sein duquel l’homme subit des
modifications. L’auteur retrace le rôle de la technologie de l’Antiquité grecque à nos
jours. En Grèce antique, la nature était gouvernée par la nécessité et donc immuable,
tandis que dans la tradition judéo-chrétienne, la nature était confiée à l’homme pour qu’il
la maı̂trise. La science moderne étudie le monde dans le but de manipuler et de maı̂triser
la nature au moyen de la technologie, devenue une fin en soi, régissant la politique et
ses conflits et nous confrontant à des problèmes bien au-delà de nos compétences à les
résoudre. L’impact éthique de la technologie a été de provoquer une transformation de
l’« agir », qui impliquait la responsabilité de nos actes, en un « faire » qui ne se soucie
que de l’efficacité de l’exécution d’un « job », sans considération des conséquences à
une plus vaste échelle. Il n’est plus possible de soutenir l’idée que la technologie est
bonne ou mauvaise selon l’usage qu’on en fait car la technologie à présent fait usage
de nous, transformant par là-même notre éthique, nos relations sociales et notre être
psychologique.

Dieser Artikel hypostasiert, daß Technologie nicht länger lediglich ein Werkzeug zum
Gebrauch durch den Menschen ist, sondern zum Bedingungsumfeld geworden ist, in
dem der Mensch Veränderungen unterworfen wird. Der Autor verfolgt die Rolle der
Technologie von den Griechen bis zum heutigen Tag. Für die Griechen galt die Natur
als von Notwendigkeit bestimmt und deshalb unveränderbar während in der jüdisch-
christlichen Tradition die Natur als dem Menschen anvertraut angesehen wird, damit
dieser sie beherrsche. Moderne Wissenschaften untersuchen die Welt in der Absicht, die
Natur durch technische Eingriffe zu manipulieren und zu beherrschen, was nun sein
immanentes Ende findet beim Versuch, etwa politische Probleme zu beeinflussen. Wir
sind erkennbar mit Problemen konfrontiert, die außerhalb unserer Lösungsmöglichkeiten
liegen. Die ethischen Auswirkungen der Technologie haben einen Wandel geschaffen von
‘handeln’, was Verantwortlichkeit für die Handlungen beinhaltet, zu ‘tun’, was lediglich
der erfolgreichen Ausführung eines ‘Jobs’ verpflichtet ist ohne Rücksichten auf weitere
Konsequenzen. Es kann nicht länger darüber argumentiert werden, ob Technologie gut
oder schlecht ist im Hinblick auf das, wofür wir sie benutzen, da Technologie inzwischen
uns benutzt und dadurch unsere Ethik, unsere sozialen Beziehungen und unser seelisches
Sein verändert.

In questo lavoro si sostiene che la tecnologia non è più un semplice strumento nelle mani
dell’uomo, ma è divenuto l’ambiente nel quale l’uomo subisce modificazioni. L’autore
traccia il ruolo della tecnologia dai Greci ai giorni attuali. Per i Greci la Natura era
governata dalla necessità e quindi non modificabile, mentre nella tradizione Giudeo-
Cristiana la natura era affidata all’uomo, perché lui la dominasse. Le scienze attuali
studiano il mondo per poter manipolare e dominare la natura attraverso l’uso della
tecnologia che ora è divenuta un fine in se stessa, governando la soluzione dei problemi
politici e ponendoci davanti a problemi troppo al di sopra delle nostre competenze perché
Man in the age of technology 17

li si possa risolvere. L’impatto della tecnologia sull’etica ha creato uno spostamento da

un ‘agire’, dove ci si assumono le responsabilità delle proprie azioni, a un ‘fare’ che
riguarda solo l’esecuzione effettiva di un ‘lavoro’ senza riguardo per conseguenze più
ampie. Non si può più sostenere che la tecnologia è buona o cattiva a seconda dell’uso
che ne facciamo, perché ora è la tecnologia che fa uso di noi e trasforma cosı̀ la nostra
etica, le nostre relazioni sociali e il nostro essere psicologico.

En este trabajo se argumenta que la tecnologı́a ya nos es solo la herramienta para uso
del hombre sin que se ha convertido en el Medio Ambiente en el cual los humanos
se desenvuelven. El Autor sigue la ruta del papel de la tecnologı́a desde los Griegos
hasta el presente. Para los Griegos, la Naturaleza estaba gobernada por la necesidad
y pr tanto inmodificable, mientras que la tradición Judeo-Cristiana, la Naturaleza fue
confiada al Hombre par que la dominara. La ciencia moderna estudia al mundo para
poder manipular y ordenar a la Naturaleza a través del uso de la tecnologı́a la cual ahora
se ha convertido en un fin en sı́ misma, gobernando la solución de problemas polı́ticos
y confrontándonos con problemas que superan nuestra competencia para resolverlos.
El impacto ético de la tecnologı́a ha sido el de crear un cambio entre ‘actuar’ que
connota responsabilidad pos nuestras acciones a ‘haciendo’ que solo tiene que ver con la
ejecución efectiva de un ‘trabajo’ sin preocuparnos por sus mas amplias consecuencias.
No podemos seguir discutiendo si la tecnologı́a es buena o es mala de acuerdo con el
uso que le demos ya que ella ahora hace uso de nosotros y por tanto transforma nuestra
ética, relaciones sociales y ser psicológico.