José Ortega y Gasset

Ortega y Gasset's Meditation on Technique, delivered as lectures in Buenos Aires in 1939, opens with an observation that cuts against both classical and Enlightenment accounts: the human being is the only animal for whom existence is a problem. A bear does not deliberate over what a bear should be; it simply is one. The human, by contrast, has needs — not just biological necessities but a program, a conception of a good life — that exceed what nature has given. Technology, for Ortega, is not a response to scarcity but the act of constructing a 'supernature': a second environment built over the natural one in accordance with an imagined form of human existence. The origin of technology is therefore the origin of the human project itself.

Ortega distinguishes three phases of technical development: the chance techniques of pre-human and primitive humanity (fire, the cutting edge); the craft techniques of traditional societies in which the artisan and the technique are inseparable, the craftsman being defined by the skill he possesses; and the modern techniques of the engineer, in which method is abstracted from any particular object and can generate any device on demand. In the third phase, technology appears unlimited — and this, for Ortega, produces a characteristic modern crisis: humans are so occupied with the means of living that they lose the sense of what living is for. The origin of technology lies in the human impulse to exceed the given; its contemporary danger is that this excess becomes self-referential, serving only more technical production.