Are tools part of us or foreign to us?

Whether technology extends the human body and mind or stands against them.

Direction Both
Span 1755–1945
Questions 2
Works 12
Languages French, English, German

  1. Q37Should tools used to perform bodily functions be understood as parts of the human body?

    Yes3

    • 1877Kapp, Outlines of a Philosophy of Technology

      Tools and machines are unconscious projections of the body's organs, with the hand as the model for all tools, so technology is the body carried outward.

    • 1911Henry et al., Sensory Disturbances from Cerebral Lesions

      Anything that takes part in the conscious movement of the body is added to the body schema; a woman's sense of location may extend to the feather in her hat.

    • 1945Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

      The blind man's cane stops being an object in his hand and becomes an extension of his bodily reach; habit incorporates the tool into the body schema.

    No2

    • 1867Marx, Capital, Volume I

      In handicraft the worker uses a tool; in the factory the machine uses the worker, who becomes its living appendage.

    • 1907Bergson, Creative Evolution

      Instinct uses organized instruments that are part of the body, while intelligence makes inorganic tools that stay separate from it and can be varied without limit; this separateness defines homo faber.

    Both1

    • 1872Butler, Erewhon

      An Erewhonian writer argues that machines are 'extra-corporeal limbs' and man a 'machinate mammal'; the Book's main author rejects this as a way of hiding the machines' growing independence.

  2. Q38When a person accomplishes something through a machine, should the machine's power count as that person's capability?

    Yes3

    • 1836Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

      Man is weak in himself but a tool-using animal: 'without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all.'

    • 1870Emerson, Civilization

      People are strong by borrowing the might of the elements; steam, gravity and electricity do their work, so a person should 'hitch his wagon to a star'.

    • 1930Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

      With his auxiliary organs man has become 'a kind of prosthetic God', but the organs have not grown onto him, give him trouble, and have not made him happy.

    No3

    • 1755Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

      The savage's body is his only instrument and is stronger for it; had he an axe, a sling or a horse he would lose the strength and speed he now has.

    • 1841Emerson, Self-Reliance

      'The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet'; each gain in equipment is a loss of the person's own strength and skill.

    • 1854Thoreau, Walden

      Thoreau contrasts a mobile, self-providing life with settled dependence and says that people have become the tools of their tools. The passage addresses dependence more directly than attribution of technical capability.