Abstract

The Reflective Relationship between Society and Technique The pervasiveness of the technique is at the center of the modern and contemporary debate, in philosophy and social sciences. Heidegger, Jünger, Hillmann, Severino, Luhmann, Bauman, Beck, Donati: are some of the most illustrious intellectuals who have reflected on the subject, reaching the conclusion that the technique takes on a substitute function of religion. For the man of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, technique loses its instrumental nature and becomes the purpose of all his actions. The instrumental rationality, in an attempt to produce certainties, determines its opposite: concentration camps (where to contain lives considered dysfunctional, programming their elimination), techno-social engineering (where to trace the data of the individual to rearrange the “social” under the sign of a consumerist or revolutionary thought), techno-religious terrorism (where man becomes an “instrument” of death embedded in the technologies that make him “kamikaze-explosive”). The technique, as a tool used to put a brake on becoming through the forecasting capacity, is transformed into the ultimate end of man. The monotheism of forecast formulas implies anxiety-inducing imprisonment, total control of data and people. Is there an alternative? It is necessary to start from the origin of the cause: the knowledge used as a remedy for the inevitability of becoming. We need to find a path that can overcome the human tendency to exercise control, to reconstruct an ethics that considers the relationship without hierarchies between human beings and their becoming.