Technology, Interrupted

We tend to think of technology as a way of producing this or that. Simple technologies produce obvious results: a match produces fire. More complicated technologies, such as computers, also produce things, though sometimes it is less obvious what they produce. Our messages may get lost in ether space, but that metaphor is a recognition that I produced something using my computer, namely whatever it was that got lost. There are good reasons to understand technology in terms of production. The 20th-century German philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), argued however that technology is less a matter of production than it is a matter of revealing: technology reveals something as this or that. Aristotle (384-422 B.C.E.) gives us an example through which we can understand technology as essentially revealing: The craftsperson produces the chalice. And he or she does that by revealing what is in silver and in this particular social context through smelting and pounding and carving and polishing. Through the work of the craftsperson, the chalice appears. It is revealed. But, Heidegger argues, modernism has shown us that technology goes further than it might have seemed to in ancient times. It not only reveals things like the chalice, the ends of production. It also reveals the world itself in a particular way, namely as powers in reserve waiting to be ordered (unlocked, transformed, stored up, distributed, switched about). It reveals things in the world as good for something or other and ready to be used for that something. The match reveals sulfur and wood as good for making fire. The computer reveals the intangibility of my message, and to do that it reveals electricity as good for writing and sending complex messages almost instantaneously. The river is a reserve of raw power, a power that is given the order of a reserve by the dam. From that reserve the dam's turbines produce electricity that is circulated in a distribution system, another reserve. My computer draws on that system and uses the switching properties of electricity to perform a variety of acts. It too is a reserve, a potentiality to be used in the circulation of powers, each one more thing that is good for producing some other thing. Each a link in a continuing chain of production. Not only the tools, but also the acts done with those tools, such as the messages sent through my computer, are part of circulating powers of production, such as work management and arranging for conferences. My department and the conferences I take part in are both products of production and parts of further productions. And so on, with each production from a reserve showing itself as a reserve for the next thing to be produced: everything is always good for something, something else. This understanding of the world as powers in reserve for use in a circulation of production isn't the result of some perversity on our part. It isn't a defect in our psyche, something to be changed by a change of attitude or psychological or social therapy. Understanding the world as a resource to be used to produce other things and acts, things and acts that themselves then become a further resource, is a genuine way in which the world reveals itself. In our lives within the world, we find the world that way: we don't impose on the world its ability to be a storehouse of circulating powers. Rather, the world presents itself to us with that character. In fact, it presents itself to us as if its "natural" state is to be a storehouse, to be a reserve of resources. That appearance of the world is unavoidable. It is a fact with which we must live. The problem is that the more we live in the technological world—the world revealed as powers in reserve to be manipulated for production—the less we are able to see the world and the things we encounter in it in any other way. In a world reduced to a resource, the multiple ways in which things can show themselves (their truth we could say) are reduced to one: things as reserve. The truth of technology covers over any other truth of the world. In that case things cease to be unique things, becoming instead merely entities replaceable for one another in the circulation of production. Each thing comes to be defined merely as a good for something else. The pen with which I love to write, the mug from which (as a former-coffee-drinking convert to Mormonism) I drink my roasted barley, the flowers in my garden—all would lose their identity as individual things and become merely one more thing like another, useful as cogs for producing notes, or holding my drink, or decorating my home. And those notes, my drink, and the act of decorating my home would themselves be merely further cogs in the production machine, a machine that takes up everything as a resource for production but has no telos beyond continued production. The further problem is that if ever the things that appear were to concern us only as powers in reserve, then human beings themselves would also appear only as things in reserve. We would join the rest of the world as something to be held in reserve and ordered in chains of cause and effect in order to produce something. Perhaps that something would be material. We might be assembly line workers. Perhaps that something would be social. We might be good citizens of the putatively perfect state. In any case we would cease to be human. The problem of technology, then, is two-fold: on the one hand, the world presents itself technologically; on the other hand, the more we encounter it that way, the more we and the world are in danger of disappearing. It is not difficult to see the danger of a completely technologized world looming ahead of us, but the answer is not an anti-technology. No government candidate or program, whether conservative or liberal, can undo this threat. No mythical power wielded by a super hero come to save us will do the job. Nor will a return in our lederhosen to the primeval forest or organic farm rid us of the danger. Indeed, the attempt to undo the danger of technology with an anti-technology (perhaps some as-yet unimagined invention, often some older but now outmoded technology) is not anti-technological at all. It is just one more technological move, governed by the same understanding of the world: a storehouse of manipulable, interchangeable entities ready to be used to produce another interchangeable entity. In an anti-technology, the choice of tools and powers is different, but the world still appears as technological. Heidegger says that the aesthetic offers a revelation of the world that can break the march of technology without resorting to anti-technology. To use a word that is lately fashionable in French philosophy, art interrupts technology. In the aesthetic the world appears as something more than a storehouse of powers available for production. The painting shows us color that has no further purpose than its own appearing. The painting is, strictly speaking, good for nothing. In other words, it is not what it is merely in virtue of the fact that it is good for producing something else. But surely a religious attitude toward the world is as interruptive of modern technology as are poetry and art. Heidegger insists on the beautiful as the savior of the true. Those of us with religious sensibilities are probably willing to agree with that insistence, but not on the limitation that Heidegger seems, implicitly, to impose. In religious experience the world appears as ultimately beyond our control because it comes before that control. We find ourselves in an already existing world, already given by God. As a gift of God the world is irreducible merely to a storehouse of powers. Even when it is a reserve, it is also a gift. Appearing as a gift, the world shows itself as coming from somewhere else. It bears the mark of something more than itself. And if it appears with that mark of something more, then it cannot at the same time appear as merely a reserve waiting to be used. In common Mormon understanding, not only is the world God's gift to us, but at some level the things of the world also give themselves to us. If the thing is not only a gift of God, but a giving of itself, then things have their own power to appear to us within the divine gift of creation. That power is prior to any power of the world to reveal the things within it as standing in a reserve waiting to be used. It is the power of the thing to appear, but to appear as something other than what is good for something, to appear as good for nothing. Of course, in Abrahamic religions and western philosophy other persons also give themselves to us, and in doing so they especially appear as more than technological. Philosophers from Plato (329-347 B.C.E.) to Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) and Jean-Luc Marion (1946- ) have thought about this "more than." They have often disagreed about its particulars, but they have seldom disagreed that human beings cannot be understood merely technologically. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) expressed this by saying that we should always treat other persons as not only means, but also ends. In the terms I have been using, he tells us that human beings are ultimately good for nothing, goods in themselves. Others may disagree with his formulation or his arguments for it, but rarely with the thought that imbues it. In Judaism and Christianity the biblical story of Adam and Eve teaches us the "more than" of humanity without the technical terminology of philosophy. Genesis reports God saying of them, "Behold the man is become as one of us" ( Gen. 3:22 ). Human beings have the same ontological status as those in God's council. We transcend a world of mere resource. Whatever else is true of us, we are also made in God's image ( Gen. 1:27 ). When the world reveals itself as God's creation, when something reveals itself as uniquely itself, when I encounter another person as both other than me and a person, my experience of the world as merely technological is interrupted. By showing us a God beyond our mortal world, religion makes all these revelations possible. Perhaps put too simplistically, Heidegger's answer to the problem of technology is the beautiful. If we can be saved, the beautiful will save us from a world that threatens to annihilate humanity, whether by nuclear burst, by environmental disaster, by turning us all into things in reserve for use in circulating powers, or by some combination of those possibilities. But Jews and Christians reply that it isn't only the beautiful that can interrupt the truth of technology to reveal a prior, deeper truth. Salvation from technological disaster comes in the conjunction of the true, the beautiful, and the good—types of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. Grace , that which is good for nothing but itself, is the word that Heidegger has overlooked but that we must remember, not merely by keeping it in mind, but by instantiating the recognition of its appearance in the world through our lives as God's children.