Scholars have detected hostility to technology in Daoist thought. But is this a problem with any machine or only some applications of some machines by some people? I show that the problem is not with machines per se but with the people who introduce them, or more exactly with their knowledge. It is not knowledge as such that causes the disorder Laozi and Zhuangzi associate with machines; it is confused, disordered knowledgesuperficial, inadequate, unsubtle, and artless. In other words the problem is not with machines but with the ethics of engineering and the government of technology. The Daoist argument does not devalue machines or knowledge of them; instead, it sets a new goal, defining an alternative ideal-alternative to techniques held hostage to despotic ideas about efficiency and profit.Keywords Daoism . Technology . Knowledge Scholars have detected hostility to technology in Daoist thought. Joseph Needham finds what he calls an "anti-technology complex," "an ambivalent attitude to those techniques which the society of force and dominance could use for its own ends" (Needham 1956: 125; see also Schipper 1993: 197). Machines make things happen that would not happen ziran 自然, by themselves, through a natural development of circumstances. That sounds like a calamity. We should not try to make things happen. We need instead to become adept at letting things happen and going with the flow. The problem with machines is the disequilibrium they introduce, the surplus of rigid yang 陽 energy, which destroys the vital balance people need with the environment, all for the mechanical advantage machines give the few who control their output.The skills that matter to a balanced life do not use tools or machines. By relying on such contrivances, we forget the most important skill of all: knowing how to keep our balance and nourish our vitality. A tool or machine is an adventitious imposition. It is visibly constructed, artificial, forcibly imposed against the grain of ziran process. Machines rip the Dao (2010) 9:151-160
The forms and specific situations of the government of men by one another in a given society are multiple; they are superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another. (Foucault [SP, 224])According to a commonplace in the critical discussion of Foucault's later work, he is supposed to have decided to take up Nietzsche's interpretation of power as Wille zur Macht, ‘will to power.’ For instance, Habermas believes he has criticized Foucault when he says, ‘Nietzsche’s authority, from which this [Foucault’s] utterly unsociological concept of power is borrowed, is not enough to justify its systematic usage.’ Charles Taylor finds in Nietzsche ‘a doctrine which Foucault seems to have made his own,’ viz., that ‘there is no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature, that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life.
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