mechanical-time
The chapter links the concept of automatism to the measurement and experience of mechanical, repetitive time, exemplified by clocks as early successful automatons.
2 chapters across 1 book
The Failure of Technology (1946)Friedrich Georg Jünger
This chapter explores the pervasive rise of automatons in technology, highlighting how technological progress is marked by increasing automation in work processes and products. It discusses the psychological and cultural unease provoked by machines that mimic life through repetitive mechanical functions, tracing this tension back to historical automata and philosophical ideas about life and time. The chapter sets the stage for further examination of how concepts of time relate to technological automatism.
This chapter contrasts seventeenth-century philosophies of harmony and balance with the nineteenth-century philosophy of will, culminating in Nietzsche's concept of the will to power. It argues that the mechanized state and technological progress, while harnessing elemental forces, ultimately provoke destructive regressions and threaten human freedom by imposing mechanical time and equality. The chapter warns that technology, as an instrument of destruction, intensifies human anxiety and alienation, revealing the limits and dangers of mechanistic thinking and the overvaluation of will.