The Question Concerning Technology

A Japanese reply

Tiago Mesquita Carvalho

University of Porto

pp. 159-187

in: Laura Langone & Alexandra Ilieva (eds), Dynamic Encounters Between Buddhism and the West, East Asian Journal of Philosophy 3 (1), 2024.

Abstract

This paper explores the common idea that Japanese Buddhism presents conceptual resources for an alternative understanding of the challenges of the Anthropocene. Using Heidegger’s thought, I examine how Japanese Buddhism envisages the relationship between human beings and nature and its bearing on how technology is conceived. The idea that a whole culture’s commendable or reprehensible environmental performance can be entirely inferred from its metaphysical background should be dismissed. Japan is a case in point given its ruinous environmental history. I nevertheless accept that comparative studies are relevant as the Japanese art of gardens is an example of a focal practice able to co-exist with technology while revealing nature as it is itself and not as a resource. In this way one may overcome the West’s Frankenstein syndrome by which technology is seen as something beyond control, but also has implications on how man-made disasters can be taken as natural events.