Modern Applied Scientific Discipline As Well As The Sacred

A summary of:
Szerszynski, B. (2005). Nature, Technology together with the Sacred: Religion together with Spirituality inwards the Modern World. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford.
Chapter 4: Modern Technology together with the Sacred

It is facile to say, “technology is our novel religion.” This is non exactly accurate. But modern social club has attached really of import meanings to the evolution of technology, which are of import to understand. We teach but about clues to the evolution of this important inwards the etymology of the discussion itself.

Technologousi, used upward to the twelfth Century, connoted “reasoning subordinated to arts and crafts together with artfulness” (55). This changed amongst the Reformation (and Puritanism inwards particular), which brought amongst it a “new emphasis on reducing the arts to universal, univocal methodological principles – on finding the logos of techne itself, the scientific discipline that defines all the arts, together with thence overcoming the recalcitrance of affair together with making it subservient to logos”… together with then… “Technologia, together with its synonym technometria, emerged equally Latin damage inwards the piece of job of the sixteenth-century French Protestant rhetorician Peter Ramus, who used them inwards the to a greater extent than modern feel of ‘the logos of the relations amid all technai. But it was the eighteenth century, for event inwards the piece of job of Johann Beckamann, that the concept of applied scientific discipline equally ‘a functional description of the procedure of production’ emerges inwards its recognizably modern feel (Mitcham, 1994; 128-31)” (55-6).

The of import signal for agreement the important of applied scientific discipline inwards the modern basis is this:
“It was exclusively amongst the collapse of the sacred into the empirical world, the shift from an ordering of social club according to the transcendent axis to a biopolitical, immanent ordering of the social, together with began to institute things inwards the basis equally Heidegger’s ‘standing-reserve’. The ultimate purpose of social club was no longer to praise of the creator but the reproduction of itself; numerous sciences together with technologies emerged to render the knowledges necessary to ensure the continuation together with optimization of the life process. The final vestiges of classical together with Christian meanings inwards the technological sublime were all but swept away. Technology became measured against neither quotidian nor supernal human needs together with interests, but against its own, technical criteria. Technology became the mensurate of human being – became autonomous, became sublime” (64).

For the residuum of this post, I’m going to inartfully glue but about skillful passages that relate to other industrial plant inwards my literature review.

1. I e'er endeavour to relate my inquiry dorsum to Foucault – non but because it’s a fun game, but because I sympathise Foucault’s interpretation of how ability operates: “In the modern period, past times contrast, the biological becomes seen equally a self-sufficient trend of existence; what modern ability administers is no longer ‘legal subjects’ but ‘living beings’ (Foucault, 1979: 142-3). And inwards such societies applied scientific discipline alters radically from the forms it took inwards pre-modern times. Technology becomes systematized, amongst an explosion inwards the orbit together with buy of technique, together with its harnessing to the destination of shaping together with optimizing life itself” (59).

2. This passage relates good to what Vowell was talking close inwards The Wordy Shipmates: “The sublime thence became a primal figure for the self-understanding of American, able non exclusively to underscore the ‘lofty materialism’ of the Jeffersonian vision of government…, but also to combine a feel of the unique grandeur of the vast natural landscape of the novel province amongst a celebration of the human capacity to transform the same landscape. Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 really specific ‘technological sublime’, exalting the ability to dominate nature, provided a new, non-denominational civil faith to unite a pluralistic patch through awestruck moments of Durkheimian collective effervescence inwards forepart of world technological projects such equally bridges together with skyscrapers, together with after atom bombs together with rocket launches” (61).

3. And this theme keeps coming back, the thought that nosotros convey stopped scream for “why” questions: “Technologies grated this cast of sublimity advance without whatsoever awareness of questions of purpose which prevarication exterior their ain agency of framing the world; questions similar ‘why?’ paw inwards the air, amongst no expectation of an answer (Szerszynski, 2003a)” (63).