Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

14 Calling to Account 207
set in a factory producing small machine parts, one imagines it to be peopled with
overalled figures checking the production line, oiling the moving parts and with,
somewhere in the background, the skilled craftsman working at the lathe. Fibbs’
romanticisation of this is a reflection of something other than the exploitation of
labour. In the 50 years since Pinter’s sketch was written, the changing forms technology
has assumed have realised new possibilities of the poetic. What is the nature
of these changes in technology, and how do they cast light on changes in language?
Here there is a bigger story to tell, and Heidegger’s story is bigger than most.
The common perception that Heidegger is anti-technology can readily be supported
by selective quotation from his various writings related to the topic, but this distorts
his position in significant respects. Heidegger takes technology to be one mode of
revealing of the world, and undoubtedly it is one that enables us to do remarkable
things, improving our lives in various respects. The problem with technology is
that, unlike other modes of revealing, it has the tendency to colonise other ways
of thought and being, ultimately to take over our lives as a whole. The modern
tendency to think of difficulties in terms of problems for which we should seek
technical solutions is evidence that this is so, and numerous examples of this could
be given. It lies behind the tendency to think of practical engagement in teaching
and learning, or, say, in social care, in terms of ‘interventions’. I do not propose
to expand on this here but rather to draw attention to the larger changes in thought
and being that Heidegger takes to be at stake, for these have a bearing on how we
understand and account for ourselves.
In what sense is technology a mode of revealing, and how does it push aside
other possibilities of thought? One feature of a technological understanding that
has frequently been highlighted is the way that it tends to amplify one aspect of
our perception of the world at the same time as it subdues or hides other modes of
awareness and thought. This can be seen easily with the example of the telescope.
The telescope brings near what is far away, but the nearness is dependent exclusively
upon the sense of sight, while the senses of hearing, touch and smell, which
might be fully involved in more immediate, holistic perception, are thereby rendered
more or less redundant. Thus, as some aspect of the world is revealed, other aspects
withdraw. That withdrawal affects the way that the world is for us. 3
Heidegger claims that it is necessary to understand what is at stake here in
relation to a change from the Greek to the Roman worlds, which is realised most
crucially in the difference between Greek and Latin. Thus, the Greek words physis
and hyle translate into the Latin natura and materia at the cost of a change at the
level of the metaphysical. The Latin prompts an understanding of the world in terms
of a lifeless array of material objects to which a thinking subject is juxtaposed. To
see the world in terms of physis, by contrast, was to see it as inherently dynamic
but also dependent for its coming to light on the logos of human beings within it.
The late paintings of Van Gogh, where the vehemence of the brush marks reveals
cornfield and tree and mountain and cloud swirling up in a dynamic unity, charged
with a kind of electrical intensity, perhaps convey something of this. But any sense
of the dynamic relation between human being and world implied by logos, any connotation
of the way, the Tao, comes to be displaced by a more disembodied and