Technology, Interrupted

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).