1st Edition
Turning Toward Technology A Glimpse into the Asian Paradigm
We live in an age when the dominant technologically utilitarian worldview is undergoing a transformation. To increase our awareness of this change, Turning Toward Technology introduces readers to the possibility of an alternative technological worldview by examining foundational concepts to Asian thought.
The early Eastern philosophical treatment of technology was not ethical, but ontological, exhibiting sensitivity to how human existence was defined and determined in its relation to technology and to reality as a whole. Within the Eastern cultural orientation, technological development was guided by a singular aesthetic sensibility to the useful, the good, the beautiful, the true, and the holy. Instead of controlling the shape of future technology by systems of rational management, George Teschner and Alessandro Tomasi recommend a view of technology that arises from questioning fundamental assumptions within Western culture about knowledge, reality, and human nature.
Turning Toward Technology aims to stimulate awareness of an alternative technological paradigm, and thus a different mode of social action that can establish an optimistic future for global civilization.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Turning Toward
Paradigmatic Thinking
The Technological Paradigm and the Turning
Two Different Methodologies
Turning Toward: The Asian Paradigm
1 The Western Technological Paradigm
The Paradigmatic Critic
Useful and Efficient Above All
Nostalgia for a Lost Agency
The Vanishing Telos
A Technological Middle Path
2 Cook Ting Uses a Bladeless Knife
Cook Ting's Knife
The Simplicity of the Technological Mind
The Use of the Useless
The Technological The
Intimacy and Embodiment
The Hinge of the Technological Way
3 Bow and Arrow without the Archer
Arjuna's Technological Crisis
The Karma Yoga of Technology
Technological Action and Its Eternal Witness
Sacrificial Action
Agent-less Technology
Lost the Archer: Found the Warrior
4 The Lucky Leader
Political Fortuna
The Rule of the Technocrat
Confucianism: The Value of Natural Ease
Taoism: Walking without Touching the Ground
The Lucky Natural Intimate Leader
5 nyat as Technological Intimacy
The Standpoint of nyat
The Epistemological Way
The Ontological Way
The Mystical Way
Technological Power
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Alessandro Tomasi