dual nature of artifact

As has been argued by figures as diverse as Lewis Mumford, Günther Anders, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Langdon Winner, Jean Baudriallard, and Bruno Latour, a defining feature of our historical age is the dramatic increase in artifacts. Artifacts now engage the human sensorium and predominate in human experience to an extent unprecedented in history. It is perhaps no accident that a phrase such as "the dual natures of" has shifted from its traditional theological moorings, where it named the fundamental problem of attempting to think the dual nature of the god-man, Christ, to the philosophical effort to think the dual nature of artifacts. In a world in which many cultural commentators have suggested religion has been replaced by technology, this shift is both symptomatic and appropriate.

Moreover although the Delft project to think this contemporary dual natures problem gives itself primarily an analytic lineage, the question of the artifact is one that, for instance, Martin Heidegger returned to on a number of occasions. In Being and Time (1927) there is the well-known phenomenological analysis of equipment or tools. Later there is the book What Is a Thing? (1962) and the essays on "Das Ding," "Die Technik," and "Das Kunstwerk."

Carl Mitcham