"A critical history of technology would show how little any of the
inventions of the eighteenth century are the work of a single individual.
As yet such a book does not exist. Darwin has directed attention to the
history of natural technology, i.e. the formation of the organs of plants
and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining
their life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in
society, of organs that are the material basis of every particular
organization of society, deserve equal attention? And would not such a
history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs
from natural history in that we have made the former, but not the latter?
Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process
of the reproduction of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process
of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental
conceptions that flow from those relations. Even a history of religion
that is written in abstraction from this material basis is uncritical. It
is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly kernel of
the misty creations of religion than to do the opposite, i.e. to develop
from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have been
apotheosized. The latter method is the only materialist, and therefore the
only scientific one. The weaknesses of the abstract materialism of natural
science, a materialism which excludes the historical process, are
immediately evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions expressed
by its spokesmen whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own
speciality." (Marx, Capital, p. 493 fn. 4)
================
Martin Packer
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
Duquesne University
Pittsburgh PA 15282
(412) 396-4852
fax: (412) 396-5197
packer who-is-at duq3.cc.duq.edu
http://www.duq.edu/liberalarts/psychology/packer.html