Hey All,
We haven`t posted our episode from last night yet, but as you will find out when you listen to it, we got into a discussion about technology and whether or not technology presents a threat to an understanding of ourselves as human in relationship with the rest of nature or whether technology represents a legitimate human mode of living in the world. One of the discussions surrounded an appreciation of heat. On the one hand, without the aids of “higher” technology, we humans have to go out, cut wood, and start a fire. On the other hand, we go to work, make money, pay the bills and therefore have heat in our house. Listen to the podcast to see where the discussion went, but to whet your appetite, here is a quote from the author I mentioned throughout the podcast that I think will help our further reflection:
“There is…a difference between a participatory technology which lets the human meaning of a subject’s act stand out and the automated technology which conceals it, creating the illusion of autonomous functioning. Heating with one’s own wood may be no more “authentic” than central heating, but it offers a far clearer metaphor. Heating with wood is very much a participatory activity. In the year-long cycle, from flagging trees for culling to the rich glow of oak cinders of a winter’s night, the subject is constantly present and nature is directly present to him, both in the hardness and in the caressing softness of its reality. Felling, limbing, skidding, bucking, splitting, stacking, kindling and building a fire are all primordially, directly subject acts and experienced as such. There is nothing anonymous about the glow of the stove: its heat can be experienced primordially as a gift of the forest and of a person’s labor. Cleaning the chimneys and trimming the wicks, filling the lamps and kindling a light in the darkness, those are no less evidently a person’s acts, a person making light. In such a context, the place of the human in the cosmos stands out in unobscured clarity: the love which gives meaning to labor and the labor which makes love actual.
That love and that labor are no less present in an automatically lit and heated urban apartment. Here, no less than in a forest clearing, light and warmth of a winter’s night are not automatic. They, too, are the gifts of love and labor. Their sense, however, does not stand out: too many intermediate links intervene. An urban parent may tell his child with equal justification that he goes to work to give her warmth and light, but when that work is not splitting wood or trimming a wick, the claim, however justified, will remain abstract and theoretical, lacking all experiential force.”
Erazim Kohak, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, pg. 25