Highway Bridges and Feasts

Borgmann and Heidegger both understand technology as a way of coping with people and things that reveals them. Both thinkers also claim that technological coping could devastate not only our environment and communal ties but more importantly the historical, world-opening being that has defined Westerners since the Greeks. Both think that this devastation can be prevented by attending to the practices for coping with simple things such as family meals and footbridges. But, contrary to Borgmann, Heidegger claims further that, alongside simple things, we can affirm technological things. For Borgmann, technological devices inhibit skillful interaction with them and therefore prevent our being sensitive to ourselves as world disclosers. For Heidegger, so long as we can still relate to non-technological things, we can affirm relations with technological things because we can maintain both our technological and the non-technological ways of world disclosing.