The History of Technology

Self-assertion and Modernity

Abstract

The objective of this work is to propose that technology is a historical phenomenon, based on social and intellectual assumptions. Hans Blumenberg's observations around a spiritual history of technology, which displace anthropological as well as scientist perspectives of technology, constitute a fundamental touchstone. Thus, Blumenberg places the emergence of technology in his analyses of the transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity, underlining how the concern for the theology of the creation of late scholastics is called into question and a new path opens that will consist of the self-affirmation of the human being. It is in this change of epoch that technology acquires a new status, previously unthinkable, as a way of self-affirmation of the human being. The spiritual history of technology discards, on the one hand, the history of inventors and inventions, and on the other hand denies the position that technology is a mere application of science. On the contrary, its “spiritual” imprint refers to the investigation of the historical assumptions that make such an emergency possible and the receptions/innovations that technology has produced.