Why do today’s tech elites believe that the world is theirs to transform? In a new essay in The Ideas Letter, I return to the work of the twentieth-century German philosopher Hans Blumenberg to answer this question.
In his essays on Nature and Technology from the 1940s and 1950s, Blumenberg traces the ambition to alter reality by means of science and technology back to the early modern philosophy of experimentalism, and even further back, to Medieval theology.
The techno-scientific ambition to create a brand new reality echoes Christian ideas of a Second Creation, in which humans overcome their alienation from nature by constructing an artificial world—a history that can help to illuminate the grandiose promises surrounding AI and other transformative technologies.
Blumenberg also shows how this investment in the creation of a second nature is intimately connected with the drive to destroy first nature. As such, his work can help us understand that the world-destroying powers of modern technologies does not derive from their physical properties alone, but equally from an influential set of metaphysical ideas that can be traced back to Medieval times.
Finally, Blumenberg’s work reveals what’s at stake politically: in transferring autonomy from nature and society to technology, the contemporary tech revolution threatens the institutions and collective arrangements that allow people and communities to govern themselves (see the issue Introduction)
Image credit: Soldiers watch an atomic bomb test explosion in Yucca Flat, Nevada, on February 18, 1955. © Bettmann/Getty