180037 SE Danger, care, responsibility (2012S)

The seminar seeks to investigate the possible foundations of a specific ethics of technology that cannot rely on an already existing normative definition of man. Technology is not one field for ethical action that can be deduced from a universal norm of acting and willing because the use of technology as artificial extension and modification of the very nature of man any ethical foundation has to rely on is itself a profound reason for the failure of any normative definition of man.
This logical aporia is expressed by the problem of >danger< that is essentially adherent to technology. >Danger< as the indecisive and indecidable ethical value of technology lies at the very root where ethics and technology meet but also cancel each other out.
The seminar starts with taking a look at Martin Heideggers canonical investigation of technology and danger (>Gefahr<) in .>Die Frage nach der Technik> (1953), but does not halt at Heidegger's aligning of >danger< to a >Seinsgeschick< which does not allow for any ethical attitude or action apart from >Gelassenheit<, e.g. a strategy of non-involvement.
Furthermore >Danger< is connected to problems of temporaneity as they are addressed by Bernard Stieglers treatment of >Sorge<).
Already in the seventies Hans Jonas addressed the question of anticipation and planning that are implied by any technical activity or behavior as instrumental preoccupation of the future. Jonas referred this question to the concept of >responsibility< that has to be one of the leading ethical terms in any society dominated by technology.
Finally the heavy weight of responsibility and its aporias of anticipating a future that is always in danger of being made impossible by the very technologies that seeks to create it has to be balanced out by the complementary concept of >List< (cunning). Cunning has seen a profound treatment as major term of the philosophy of history from Kant to Hegel, but has – surprisingly – not been elaborated in the philosophy of technology, even though cunning can be understood almost as a synonym of technology itself.
We can, however, extrapolate an inter-textual theory of cunning in various writings of Walter Benjamin; the outline of a philosophy of technology that re-connects the question of cunning to the question of the political use of technology that is always in danger of ambivalence – technology, according to Benjamin, is always being caught between mythical violence and political emancipation.
A society that tends to convert all its problems into technical problems falls prey to the very means of its own organization. A society being held hostage by its own technology has to take full responsibility for this state of affairs. Technology is not guilty of a specific state of society, it is no fatality of being (>Seinsgeschick<), it is dangerous. The very tendency of a technological and technocratic society to idolize technology only in order to demonize it when something goes wrong is in itself an ethical, not a technical problem.