Abstract
We live in an age where our existence has been remarkably shaped by technology. However, as contemporary thinkers have elucidated, technology is not a mere sum of our tools. At a more profound level, technology forms an instrumental context that frames our relation to the world and to ourselves. Everything thereupon tends to appear merely as a means to an end. Countering the instrumentalistic tendencies of global technologization, this paper would like to ponder on the meaning of technology beyond mere tools. The core influence of this study is the thought of Martin Heidegger (18891976) which reveals that both technology and art stem from ancient techne, our basic way to reveal reality through embodied praxis. However, 2500 years of Western intellectual history has rendered the instrumental meaning of techne – that is, the way we understand technology today as practical utilization of science – becomes far more dominant than the artistic or poetic one. It is the aim of this literary study to elucidate Heidegger’s dense phenomenological inquiry which reveals the dual meaning of techne: techne as technology and techne as art. Recovery of the forgotten poetic meaning of techne is crucial to counter instrumentalism that pervades art in our techno-scientific age.
Highlights
Nowadays, most of our lives take place in engineered environments, powered by electricity, equipped with lighting and water supply systems, air conditioners, audio-visual devices and so forth
Under the urge of constant renewal while the modern art itself was heavily saturated with form-driven specimens, one of the most possible breakthrough pointed out by Arthur Danto was achieved through a staunch conceptual approach, initiated by artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol with their found objects art
Contemporary installations are still echoing what the 1960s conceptual artist Sol LeWitt said about the art of his cohort: “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair
Summary
Most of our lives take place in engineered environments, powered by electricity, equipped with lighting and water supply systems, air conditioners, audio-visual devices and so forth. The first discussion in this paper is of Heidegger’s phenomenology, which revealed our basic constitution as being-in-the-world instead of subject vis-à-vis object.
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