Labor and technology

Summary

Dominique Pagani approaches work and technology through Hegel. There the tool is the rational middle term between the worker and nature: it makes work last and passes on what history has acquired. Work negates the negation that nature exerts on man and produces a world. It is also through work that the slave, shaped by the fear of death, frees himself from the master1. He contrasts Ulysses the ingenious, who schemes in his head, with Daedalus the engineer, a slave who transforms reality. He links Daedalus to the cunning of reason, to Marx's architect and to Brecht's poem about the masons. In the 1803 Philosophy of Spirit, the tool is bound up with language, mediation and death. For him, praxis does not serve need: it serves the infinite desire of a being who knows itself to be finite2. In a later interview, drawing on Trần Đức Thảo, he distinguishes the tool from the animal instrument. He goes back to Rousseau's Emile and its manual trade, then criticises Heidegger's thinking on technology, ecologism and degrowth3.

1. 1Hegel on the Beach 4/52 Feb 2016
2. 2#5.2 ter Questions, following workshop #5.2 (Facebook Live)6 Dec 2018
3. 3Praxis and psyche27 Mar 2023

Introduction produced automatically from the 4 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.