Looking at the Sun: Chapter Summary

Technology: A View from Personalism

Part 1

by James Beauregard

The question of technology is not one that has been frequently raised by personalism. This is perhaps understandable given personalism’s focus on the person is the central concept or metaphor for understanding the world. At the same time, technology surrounds us and penetrates our lives in numerous ways, making it a subject worthy of personalistic attention.

In the recently published book from the York conference of the British Personalist Association I contributed a chapter that considered the ways in which personalism historically has viewed the question of technology along with some thoughts about how it might be addressed in the future.

Personalist writings on technology are fairly scarce. One of the few personal lists to dedicate an entire work to technology was Romano Guardini, born in Italy but working in Germany throughout his career. He published a brief book called Letters from Lake Como: Explorations in Technology and the Human Race.  Guardini (1885-1968) was born in the city of Verona but his family emigrated to Germany when he was a year old, where he grew up, was educated and worked as an academic in several universities.

Lake Como is in the lakes region of northeastern Italy, and Guardini returned there periodically to visit family.  The tranquility of the countryside combined with the growing presence of technology caused him to reflect on technology’s place in human life. He published his reflections as a series of single articles during the years 1923 – 1925 and then collected them together to be published as a book in 1926. The context of his letters is important in a variety of ways. This was interwar Europe, in the wake of the first world war, during a period of relative peace and prosperity prior to the crash of the financial markets in 1929. Guardini was living and working in Germany, having emigrated there with his parents as a young child, and was experiencing the situation on the ground in a country that had lost the war and was struggling to pay reparations to the winning side, and that was simultaneously facing the rise of right-wing nationalist movements, including National Socialism.

Compared to Italy, Germany was a heavily industrialized country, making it inevitable that Guardini would notice the contrasts as he wandered the hills and the Great Lakes region of northern Italy. His reaction to growing industrialization across the north of Italy was a strong one. He wrote,

[H]ow can I put this to you? Look, what has already taken place up in the north I saw beginning here. I saw machines invading the land that had previously been the home of culture. I saw death over taking a life of infinite beauty, and I felt that this was not just an external loss that we could accept and remain who we were. Instead, a life, a life of supreme value that can arise only in the world that we have long since lost, was beginning to perish here, as well as in the north.[1]

At first sight, the letters may convey a jaundiced, pessimistic or negative view of technology, but in the end this is not the case. Guardini builds a case for how persons are to interact with technology, and ends on a positive note. The first, he deals with the issue of separation and alienation.  During one of his walks along Lake Como he observes a sailboat, which gives them pause to reflect. He sees the sailboat as a remarkable cultural achievement, harnessing the wind and moving quickly across the water, calling it "a primal work of human creativity” (pp 11-12).  At the same time, it symbolizes for him a sense of separation from direct contact with nature. The person sailing the ship is not in the water but above it, separated from the natural world by the wood of the ship. The separation becomes even more acute, he notes, when one thinks of larger and larger ships, steel ships, ocean liners etc. For Guardini, human culture is composed of the work of mind and spirit staying in close contact with nature.[2]  

Despite the sense of separation or alienation, Guardini ends his book on a positive note. He firmly believes that persons can rise to the occasion of new technologies, and meet their challenges. He locates technological development not in material machineries of technology, but in the human person, and rather than focusing on what might be lost, he challenges us to rise to the occasion of technological advancement, writing that technological advancement always has been and always will be "primarily an inner human process."[3]  Our task as persons, is not to fight against technology, not to be Luddites, but, rather, to confront their own creativity and our personhood in order to guide new technologies in the service of persons, rather than allowing persons to become victims of technology. While not explicit in his book, there is a sense that ethics ought to have primacy over technology as its ultimate guide.

This is not an obvious position, to be sure, and within the scientific and technology communities can sometimes be seen as a threat to independence and creativity. This vision to, though, is undergirded by a philosophy of technology that places technological development at the forefront and all other concerns secondary. It is worth asking, as personalists, how technology ought to be approached in the 21st century. Should technological development simply charge ahead, with ethics constantly running after it, or should an ethical vision be present at moments of inspiration, creation and development of new technologies?

---

[1] Guardini, R. Letters from Lake Como: Explorations in Technology and the Human Race, Trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids MI and Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994, 5 (Hereafter, Letters).

[2] Guardini, Letters,16

[3] Guardini, Letters, 80.

Looking at the Sun: Chapter Summary

Neither Here Nor There: 

Personalism, Poetry and Emmanuel Mounier’s Pluralist Society

by Benjamin Bâcle

Although born and bred a Catholic, Emmanuel Mounier did not think that truth and meaning could be easily grasped via the uncompromising adherence to a given dogma. Neither did he believe that they could be found in any other ‘absolute’ take on the world. What interested him more than anything was the person, as the nexus between mind and matter and the locus of an ever-expanding sense of wonder. What triggered this sense of wonder and transcendence, according to him, was precisely the particular, as embodied in other persons and other things: only they could hint at something else, something more, whereas absolutes and abstract entities could only hinder the dynamic of human knowledge, morals and love. 

By thus defining personhood in relation to its movement towards others and, more generally, the Other, Mounier made it possible to view the space between persons, or between persons and things, not merely as an unfortunate gap, but as something to be approached constructively, to be appreciated and even celebrated. This goes against a number of persistent current utilitarian trends in contemporary society: being constantly encouraged to bridge the gap that separates us from what we wish to be or to attain, we tend to reduce ‘happiness’ to the maximisation of unexamined pleasure – such as the external validation procured by fleeting popularity –, and we call ‘success’ the most obvious route to that happiness. This makes acquisitiveness the order of the day, whatever the cost to self or others.

Mounier’s philosophy points to a way out of our obsessive quest for external signs of success – whether material or symbolic – in the hope of maximising our happiness and existence, a quest which amounts to little more than repeatedly attempting to seize one’s own shadow. The solution may lie in the development of a poetical attitude towards oneself and the world, whereby all gaps, separations and distances find themselves populated, shaped and coloured by an infinitely adaptable set of meanings, sharing the same positively disposed agnosticism, the same ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge has it. In this context, beauty and fulfilment would be found in the very places where they are supposed to be lacking, and the exploitation of Man by Man, for the sake of unrestrained acquisition, would soon prove futile and progressively dwindle.    

This, of course, is completely idealistic. But the main problem here is, how to foster such a poetical attitude without, at the same time, crushing it? The very nature of this attitude is to be individual, idiosyncratic, personal: trying to promote it on a large scale is bound to be counterproductive. Mounier was particularly wary of industrial-like takes on creativity and fulfilment, both in a state-controlled environment such as the Soviet Union and in a corporate environment such as the capitalist West: ‘If art must serve, it must serve freely.’ Still, by promoting dialogue and understanding between artists and their contemporaries, Mounier suggests that there may be a possibility to incite individuals to exert their compassion, their receptive skills and their talents, in their own way and at their own pace.

The challenge, here, is to avoid forcing a single vision of what is worthwhile on everyone, while still encouraging a certain way of being. This is the conundrum faced by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty (1859). The beginning of a solution can be found in Matthew Arnold’s promotion of ‘Culture’, understood, not as a fixed bloc of knowledge and expertise, but as an ever-expanding and fulfilling curiosity – ‘not [as] a having and a resting, but [as] a growing and a becoming.’ French poet André Miguel, in The Poetical Man (L’Homme Poétique), helps get a better sense of what Arnold (often misinterpreted as putting forward an elitist view of Culture) may have meant by that. Miguel advocates a poetical ‘way of life’ whereby the individual becomes infinitely fluid and adaptable to the infinitely variable circumstances of his or her existence, with an eye for the ‘in-between-ness’ of things as a way out from their reification, towards a freedom which is never granted. The poetical man or woman is one to whom the ever-changing beauty and unlikeliness is constantly revealed, whose consciousness is constantly sharpened by this engagement, and who manages to express him or herself truly in the process. This may sound like yet another variation of the same old self-help themes which fill the ‘esoteric literature’ sections of all contemporary bookshops, big and small. But the difference is in the refusal of any reified form of wisdom: poetry, like Arnold’s Culture, does not ‘rest.’ It is forever solicited, forever responsive, in a myriad of unpredictable ways. It can never be contained in a given formula.

This last statement raises the question of the relation between poetry – as defined here – and religion. If religion be conceived of as a dynamic process unhindered by fixed rituals, it is completely compatible with poetry as I understand it. Problems arise, however, when the need for certainty tends to take precedence. Poetry, in my view, thrives on uncertainty. It can only be re-awakened by its own fallibility. Certainty, on the contrary, plays on the illusion, denounced by Mounier, that the transcendental can be apprehended and as it were owned directly. Hope itself, in this context, becomes formalised, and ultimately almost inevitably faked. The only way to preserve what can be preserved of hope is to prepare for its accidental irruption. It is to be as poetical as possible, without ever thinking of oneself as decidedly such.      

Looking at the Sun: Chapter Summary

Euthanasia: A Persons-In-Relations Perspective

by David Treanor

The demographic profile of many western democratic nations has altered significantly and trends that have emerged in Australia are a pertinent example of the life expectancy of the ordinary person. Death is a universal human experience regardless of our longevity and at some point in time any person may receive a diagnosis of a terminal illness regardless of their capabilities, gender, ethnicity, chronological age or geographical location. What occurs for a person when s/he receives a diagnosis of a terminal illness? It might depend upon the nature of the diagnosis and how much pain and suffering the person might experience, it might depend upon the advice of medical professionals, of our views of death and belief or indeed what health care resources are available and if they are available to the person.

One aspect of our lives that might be capable of competing with this all-pervasive information is our philiai. This chapter explores the persons-in-relation personalism of John Macmurray through an end of life narrative that challenges the preference utilitarian’s focus on interest orientated decision-making emphasising instead humanness, philia and value as more important criteria. A phenomenological hermeneutic approach is taken to challenge contemporary thinking around issues of humanness and value. It focuses on two key characteristics of philia – goodwill and reciprocity and exams their symbiotic interaction with virtues like: generosity, graciousness, gentleness and kindness as an alternative portrait to humanness. This chapter concludes by suggesting the dimension that most appropriately gives value to a human life is the sphere of personal relations: how we mutually care, regard, interact with each other, where people belong, contribute and flourish as a human community.

Looking at the Sun: Chapter Summary

Presencing the Writer: 

Immanence and Ecstatic Communion in A Clockwork Orange and Naked

by Torgeir Fjeld

Is there any sense to the claim that there is an author to whom we are characters in a story that unfolds as we live our lives? A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess/Stanley Kubrick) and Naked (Mike Leigh) examine this issue differently. While Alex (A Clockwork Orange), literally meets the author only to mutilate and disobey him, Johnny (Naked) gets intimate with an instance that seemingly represents his father only to reject and disregard him. In our essay, we examine these works in light of the narratological instance of the writer, which is considered as immanent to the work and yet absent from it. The reader's task is to make this instance present, and in these characters' approach to the writer an ethical world of responsibility, duty, and virtue is made meaningful. By presencing the writer, we can experience what playwright Jon Fosse has referred to as an ecstatic communion with works of art.

http://torgeirfjeld.com/