The Illusion of Technique

What if there is only one world, not two?  Not “objectivity” and “subjectivity,” but just one thing, existence itself?  What some people call “Being.” 

OK, a big question, and not one we can just barge right into.  So, let’s get some help from my favorite book. 

“The Illusion of Technique”

In 1979, my wife bought me a book called The Illusion of Technique, by William Barrett. She thought it looked interesting.  She was very right; it changed my life.

For many years, I made the students in my Social Ethics class read this book.  Not an easy task!  It is long and dense.  Many students thought it had the enlightening qualities of a paving brick.  But I assigned it, nonetheless.  Each semester, two or three students were able to gain from it what I did, and that seemed a good return on the effort I demanded of the class.  Then, it went out of print.  I considered excerpting it, but could never really find key passages that would teach what Barrett had to teach.  So, I lectured on the book’s contents, instead.

William Barrett was an interesting character.  A literary editor, a philosopher, a historian of ideas, a thoughtful popularizer of complex intellectual matter.  (He introduced Zen Buddhism into the US.)  A one-time Marxist, later a devout Catholic.  His most famous book is Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy.  Written in 1962, it is still in print and used in colleges across the country as an excellent introduction to its topic.

In 1979, he published The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization.  It is an “intellectual history,” a history of ideas, how they developed and how they interrelate.  He wanted to investigate the ideas that brought forth the potential for moral free will in humans.

The book is divided into three parts: Technique, Being and Freedom.  What follows isn’t a completely faithful review of the book, but more of a restatement and exploration of the themes Barrett presents.
   
Technique

In the first part of the book, Barrett is interested in the quest of Ludwig Wittgenstein to find an intellectual home.  Wittgenstein was an early-20th Century European who wanted to pursue the life of the mind.  He cast around for the best place to do this, and landed with Bertram Russell in Cambridge.  Russell was, at that time, working on a monumental project, to be able to reduce all human truths to abstract theorems.  (We now call this practice Natural Logic.)  Only by eliminating the ambiguity of ordinary language, Russell believed, could you find ways to characterize important human truths through irrefutable logic.  This, we are led to believe, was a fitting project for Wittgenstein to help with.

We can hear echos of our earlier discussions here.  What Russell wanted to do was eliminate the uncertainty that is so obviously a part of conversation in common vernacular.  How can we know, for sure, that something is true, if our only way to express such proofs is through our inherently uncertain everyday language?  But, thinks Russell, if we can strip away the ambiguity,  by using p’s and q’s instead, and just deal with the underlying abstract truth of statements made, we will have access to The Truth, unarguable and final.  What a grand exploit!

The truth is in the ambiguity

But this idea, that all human experience can be successfully abstracted to p’s and q’s, and that all of  the truths that are revealed by human experience can be tested and evaluated by mathematically-precise logic, proved unsatisfying to Wittgenstein.  He began to think that the important truths that humans could know could not be extracted from the ambiguity, that the truths might very well be in the ambiguity itself! 

That is an amazing idea, isn’t it, that far from truth being something we distill from our experiences, by boiling off all of the impurities of our everyday lives, that truth might exist inside of, maybe even because of the complexity and ambiguity of our experiences.  Not so hard to understand – would your feelings for a loved one survive this kind of harsh stripping away of your experiences of that loved one?  Or is the truth of your feelings bound up in and inseparable from all of those experiences? 

Wittgenstein argued that, instead of using abstractions like p’s and q’s, serious philosophy should turn to the words themselves, becoming a major part of what we have come to call “the Linguistic Turn” in Western Philosophy.  Open any text on what today is referred to as “analytic philosophy,” the style of philosophical inquiry taught at most American universities, and you will find Wittgenstein all through it.

Barrett finds this an extraordinary moment.  Here were two of the greatest minds of their culture at odds about the very nature of truth-seeking and the validity of truth statements.  On the one hand was Russell, who believed, had faith, in the perfectibility of his enterprise, nothing less than the ability to express, irrefutably, the sum of all human truths.  On the other was Wittgenstein, who saw that there was a level of uncertainty that was inescapable in our search for truths, that powerful truths might only be found by diving into, not avoiding, the ambiguity of how we express those truths. 

Mystery

Barrett uses this moment to raise the issue of “Mystery,” the region of the unknowable.  (Mystery is a concept we will be coming back to over and over again in these postings.)  What Russell believed was that all things were knowable, given sufficient inquiry.  Hence, no Mystery.  Everything was, ultimately knowable, nothing was “unknowable.” 

Wittgenstein accepted the limits of inquiry and yet still searched for truth among the uncertainty.  The notion of Mystery doesn’t make truth-seeking impossible.  It just makes it more complicated, and us less sure of our results.  We have already seen the implications of this uncertainty inside the Box.

If you bought into the concept of imperfectibility in the earlier posting, you are kind of stuck accepting the notion of mystery.  After all, it seems logical that if human endeavor is not a perfectible enterprise, then there ought to be limits to what we can know for sure.  Let me remind you of the temptation to hear “we can’t know everything” as “we can’t know anything.”  Of course, we have proved that we can know an astonishing amount about the truths of science and human relationships.  We are great at knowing things.  Mystery merely says that we can’t know everything.

Russell did not accept the notion of mystery.  The idea that something worth knowing was beyond human ability to actually know was unthinkable to him.  To Russell, all things were, ultimately, knowable.

What an extraordinary thing for Russell to believe was possible.  Yet, this acceptance of perfectibility is widespread in American culture.  Today, our elected representatives keep promising us the complete solutions to our problems.  All you have to do is blah, blah, blah, and everything will be perfect.  We explored this in two of the earliest postings, on the limits of measurement.

But this must be a relatively recent phenomenon.  Our ancient ancestors, struggling with hard lives and imminent danger, were happy to survive, thrilled to thrive, but hardly expecting to achieve perfection.  Somewhere between then and now, we started believing in the promise, the illusion of our techniques. Where, asks Barrett, did Russell get this amazing assumption, that all knowledge could be expressed perfectly in an abstract language?