by James Beauregard
Recently, I have been thinking about the
question of technology from the personalist perspective, having given
presentations in Madrid, Spain at the Spanish Personalist Association this past
May and most recently in York, England at the British Personalist Forum, my
first foray into the world of Skype presentation. A comment that I made on both
occasions was that personalism has typically not given extended consideration
to the issue of technology as it is lived in contemporary society.
During the 1920s, German Personalist
Romano Guardini traveled periodically back to the land of his birth in
northeastern Italy, and during his time at the Italian Great Lakes he composed
a series of letters, first published individually, then collected into the book
Letters from Lake Como. The letters are a reflection on both the
advancement of technology and the human condition. Living in industrialized
Germany as he had since a very young age, Guardini was struck again and again
by the comparatively rural and agrarian Italian countryside. Nevertheless,
technology was clearly making inroads and he noticed without a little dismay
the presence of factories that, in his opinion, marred the Italian skyline.
For Guardini, technology is both a
useful tool, but also something that separates us from the natural world. Early
in the book, he gives the example of a sailing ship, which he observed not
infrequently on Lake Como as an example of how sails harnessed the power of
nature; at the same time, he saw the beautiful lines of sailing vessels as, to
some extent, separating persons from
the natural world of water and wind – the bigger the ship, the greater the
separation. Ultimately, his view of technology is a positive, and he exhorts
the reader to rise to the occasion of our own abilities so that we remain their
master and not their servant.
The contemporary Czech philosopher
Erazim Kohák, in his book The Embers and
The Stars, also engages in a sustained reflection on the relationship
between ourselves and the technology we create.
While Guardini knew a world of radio and cinema, automobiles and trains,
Kohák wrote some five decades later, in a far more advanced technological
society. His book, published in the late 70s.
Thus, Kohak’s work predates the Internet of Things. Both authors,
however, speak to the danger of dehumanization that technology presents. Kohák, like Guardini before him, is quite
clear that technē is a fundamentally
human activity, one that has reduced many of the burdens carried by persons in
previous ages. At the same time, with
British Personalist John Macmurray, he traces the long philosophical process by
which Western societies’ root metaphors change. The medieval world, even with
its philosophical and theological focus on God, was more person centered. With the Renaissance and the beginnings of
the scientific revolution came new ways of thinking about persons and about
technology. While Macmurray employees as metaphors in a very practical manner,
Kohák is much more explicit about our metaphorical use of language; indeed, his
book proceeds largely through successive and recurrent metaphors.
Macmurray traced the development and
change in our root metaphors from the foundations of the scientific revolution,
beginning in the domain of physics, in which the foundational metaphor became
the material in the mechanical, matter and motion or as Kohák terms it, matter
propelled by blind force. The Newtonian vision still holds sway in many aspects
of the sciences today, and in the wider culture, at least in the way popular
thought is expressed. The organic or biological metaphor came to the center of
scientific and philosophical thought during the 19th-century, largely thanks to
the work of Charles Darwin. Biology became the root metaphor and human beings
are spoken of as organisms. The metaphor expanded into thinking about
community, and evolutionary concepts were brought into play not only to address
human evolution, but the evolution of societies as well.
These metaphors continue to hold
central place in biology and in contemporary evolutionary theory. If anything,
they have become more and more complex in recent decades. The study of
evolution, both of the human race and of societies has on the one hand been
enriched, though on the other limited, by advances in biology in the second
half of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st. Evolutionary thinking has
become multidisciplinary, and has encompassed the disciplines of population
genetics, epi-genetics, biochemistry, embryology, and the more recent advances of
Molecular genetics.
We start to run into problems,
though, when we sallow these metaphors to stand for our grasp of the whole of reality when in fact they are a
part. Useful in this context is
Husserl’s sense of regional ontologies, deliberately circumscribed world views
and methodologies in the specific sciences whose purpose is the generation of
knowledge and understanding about the way the world works. But there is a
problem here. Historically, however, the regional ontology of science has come
to be mistakenly seen as a general ontology, the parts mistaken for the
whole. One of Macmurray’s vital insights
came in tracing this development through the modern philosophical era, from the
mechanical to the organic, and to recognize that we had been stuck in the
metaphor of the organic since the 1800’s. Contemporary science continues to
attempt to explain persons from the bottom up, employing material and
biological metaphors and assuming they are sufficient to capture the whole of
what it means to be a person. The process, however, involves an inherent
contradiction. It is only as persons, as Macmurray recognized, that we can
speak of the organic and the material via a process of subtraction and
abstraction. Both Macmurray and Kohák understand that is only from the root
metaphor of persons, rather than matter and biology that we can understand
ourselves, others and the world.
Over the next few months, when it's
my turn in the BPF blog, I will be taking a closer look at Guardini’s
letters. He is read more in Europe than
in the English-speaking world, where he is a less appreciated personal list;
nevertheless, I think he has some insights to offer to us as we think about the
rapid advancement of technology and its impact on the human condition. I will
be taking a closer look in the months ahead at each of his "letters"
to see what we might glean from them in terms of our contemporary relationship
with technology, and to see how they might be brought into conversation with
more recent thinking and the philosophy of technology and with personal is him.
I invite you to join in the conversation.
James Beauregard is a practicing neuropsychologist and lecturer in the Psy.D. program at Rivier University, Nashua New Hampshire. His philosophical interests include European personalism and the conversation between it and Anglo-American personalism, philosophy of technology and the work of personalists John Macmurray, Juan Manuel Burgos and of, Erazim Kohák. He has coedited, with Simon "mad dog" Smith, the recent book, In the Sphere of the Personal (Vernon Press, 2016).