A Research On Andrew Feenberg's Thought Of Democratic Design Of Technology

The development of modern technology has been promoting the rapid progress of human society.It has been providing powerful tools for human to transform nature and improving the quality of human life.Meanwhile,modern technology also has been bringing potential threats to the natural environment,human life and dignity.And thus people have been acting suspicion and fear for technology,which requires us have critical philosophical reflection on technology.Currently,China is suffering from various of negative effects which has caused by technology.Consequently,how to get rid of the predicament created by technology has become a practical problem which is necessary to be solved.Andrew Feenberg's thought of democratic design of technology is based on such situation created by technology.The thought of democratic design of technology was born in the context of empirical turn of technological philosophy.On the basis of criticizing and inheriting the thoughts of Marx,Marcuse and Heidegger,and applied the methodology of social constructivism to turn the former simple criticism to refactor techniques,tried to point out a benign development path of technology for human.This article suggests that the instrumentalization theory as the rationality basis of the thought of democratic design of technology,which shows that technology can have a variety of development directions in the process of combining with social factors."Technical code" reveals that social factors,as interests and values hidden in technology,which is playing a leading role in technology.And it provides an internal basis for the democratic control of technology.Technological democratization is the operating mechanism of democratic design of technology,and it requires the transformation ofview of rationality.The political struggle of technology on the micro-level as the manifestation of democratic design of technology is more accord with the present base of reality.Feenberg put forward the technical politicalization at the level of sociology,indicating that the marginalized group has the potential of resistance,and they can regain the rejected interests and social value laden for technology.Feenberg changed the binary opposition between the theory of technology as tool and the theory of technology as substance.And his thought is a kind of sublation for the predecessors' thoughts.This article analyzes the various ways of participating in the process of democratic design of technology,which puts forward by Feenberg.And this article sums up the advantages and disadvantages it embodies.Faced with the two major problems,including that the lack of enthusiasm for participating in design and the block created by hegemonic power,Feenberg only proposed a macroscopic countermeasure to construct "responsibility culture" environment and did not giving a specific path to achieve.In addition,there are some limitations in the thought of democratic design of technology for controlling technology.This article suggests that La Tour's "theory of translation " and Verbeek's thought of "Materializing Morality" can complement and perfect it.Combined with China's empirical cases,we found that the development patterns of China's technology field has been based on the “Western model” for a long time,and it has presented the tendency of technocracy.Including the design concept that take economic interest as the core has led to the lack of the social value of technology.Researching and criticizing Feenberg's thought of democratic design of technology can provide us the reference value for promoting China's technical practice route back on track,breaking the antithesis between human beings and technology,going out of the predicament created by technology,and constructing the perspective of harmonious technology.