I wasn&#x27;t familiar with Dreyfus&#x27; work. Thanks.<p>Recently I noticed a parallel between Antoine de Saint-Exupery&#x27;s comments on technology and Heidegger&#x27;s notions of presentness-at-hand and readiness-to-hand. It&#x27;s in his essay &quot;The Tool&quot;, which also includes the famous line about perfection being achieved when there is &quot;nothing left to take away.&quot;<p>Saint-Exupery has a profoundly romantic attitude to technology: I&#x27;m not sure about the order of publication but it is a fact that Heidegger applauded Saint-Exupery&#x27;s Petit Prince, and apparently Sartre felt the two men&#x27;s philosophies were related.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wesjones.com&#x2F;wind%20sand%20stars&#x2F;wind%20sand%20stars%20-%2003%20-%20the%20tool.xml" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wesjones.com&#x2F;wind%20sand%20stars&#x2F;wind%20sand%20st...</a><p>(Apparently the controls of the Lockheed Lightning, the aircraft type in which Saint-Exupery died, were too complex for his taste, turning the pilot into an &quot;accountant&quot; rather than receding from conscious attention, as the primitive instruments of earlier, simpler planes had. Saint-Exupery clearly saw the purpose of &quot;the tool&quot; as facilitating his experience (and responding to his personal &quot;authority&quot;) as a free spirit of the air, without much thought given to the constraining military command hierarchy or the pilot&#x27;s job of killing.)