A Perspective for Relativizing Science and Technology

Naoto Arakane (Senior Assistant Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Liberal Arts)

Science and technology elucidate and control various mechanisms through scientific methods. Through constant improvement, they create more convenient things, establish more comfortable and efficient systems, and organize our lives. However, as a wide variety of technologies come to surround our entire lives, are we not ourselves being rushed by their efficiency and driven into a state of restlessness?

For example, there was a philosopher named Martin Heidegger. He believed that the essence of technology—what makes technology what it is—lies in the very relationship between us humans and "Being" in our time (not individual beings or entities, but the "Being" itself when we say that individual beings or entities "are"). He explains this relationship with the term "Enframing" (Gestell). Since the modern era, the relationship between us humans and "Being" has established a way of the world called "Enframing." Under its dominance, humans can only perceive the world as a calculable and usable "standing-reserve" (Bestand) and can only relate to that world by challenging it forth as potentially useful resources and materials. And we humans, too, are challenged forth to challenge the world in this way—this is how Heidegger thinks.

This "Enframing" is the very essence of technology, and modern natural science and modern historical science, which objectify nature and history as something calculable and usable, are also seen as one of the concretizations of the modern relationship between humans and Being. Furthermore, this relationship of ours with Being is but a single scene in the long "history of Being," and it is said that it has the potential to transform into something completely different with the changing of the times.

Is such a discussion abstract and meaningless? Is it unscientific? Rather, does not the very attitude of dismissing the abstract (the incalculable and unusable) as meaningless prove the dominance of "Enframing"?

In fact, I find it more meaningful not to question the rightness or wrongness of Heidegger's thought, but rather to be astonished by the unique perspective and the grand scale that is opened up within it. This is because I believe it is important to respect science, technology, and scientific knowledge to the fullest, while at the same time sensing the possibility of a perspective that relativizes them. I hope that those involved in science, in particular, will sometimes engage with philosophical speculation.

Photo 1: At Yagami Campus with third- and fourth-year students taking the general education course "Science and Philosophy" at the Faculty of Science and Technology.

Photo 2: *Heidegger Complete Works*, Vol. 79, "Bremen and Freiburg Lectures," translated by Ichiro Mori, Sōbunsha, 2003, p. 79.

Photo 3: The offices of faculty members belonging to the Department of Foreign Languages and Liberal Arts at the Faculty of Science and Technology are mainly located in the Raiosha building on the Hiyoshi Campus.