Daily Inspiration Quote by Leon Kass

Kass is trying to rescue “the technical” from the innocuous world of gadgets and reroute it into the realm of character. By insisting it’s “not just the machinery,” he’s pushing back against the comforting myth that technology is neutral hardware we can pick up or put down at will. The sharper claim is the second sentence: the technical is a disposition to life. That’s a moral psychology argument disguised as a definition.

The line works because it flips the usual hierarchy. We assume tools express our values; Kass suggests tools train our values. A “technical disposition” means approaching the world as a set of solvable problems, friction to be minimized, outcomes to be optimized. It’s the mindset that prefers control to contemplation, efficiency to meaning, and treats limits less as occasions for wisdom than as engineering challenges. Subtext: even when we’re not holding a device, we can still be living technologically.

Context matters here. Kass is a bioethicist associated with public debates about biotechnology, reproduction, and human enhancement, often warning that what we can do outpaces what we should do. Read against that backdrop, “disposition” is a quiet alarm: the real risk isn’t one alarming invention, but a creeping posture that makes every human experience eligible for redesign. Aging becomes a defect, children become projects, the body becomes an upgrade path.

It’s an educator’s formulation, too: the classroom question isn’t simply how to teach technology, but how to teach students not to let a technical worldview colonize everything they love.