Comparing Martin Heidegger’s and Ali Shariati’s Views of Technology

As one of the most prominent thinkers of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger has made fundamental criticisms of the subjectivism of the modern world. He critically examines the 2,500-year history of the West as a manifestation of metaphysical rationality. Heidegger contrasts with the Cartesian and Kantian calculus thinking, the profound thinking based on the metaphysics of the carpenter. Heidegger believes that with Descartes as the creator of the paradigm of modernity, subjectivism is spreading in the world. One of the inevitable consequences of the supremacy of subjectivism is the dominance of technological rationality over the world. For Heidegger, technology is not a mere tool; instead, it is a special kind of development and way of thinking that imposes its possessive and calculating logic on everything and everyone. In other words, in the paradigm of knowledge of the modern foundation, existence is manifested technologically, which has created a special kind of rationality called technological rationality. The premise of this article is based on the fact that although Ali Shariati, as a critic of the modern world, criticizes scientism and mechanism, his critique of technology and mechanism is more political and sociological. Also, like Heidegger, he never could critique the philosophical, theological, and ontological subjectivism and technological rationality of the modern world.