So I think that what we should do... to confront properly the threat of ecological catastrophe... is not all this New Age stuff... to break out of this technological manipulative mold... and to found our roots in nature, but, on the contrary, to cut off even more these roots in nature. We need more alienation from our life-world, from our, as it were, spontaneous nature. We should become more artificial. We should develop, I think, a much more terrifying new abstract materialism, a kind of a mathematical universe where there is nothing. There are just formulas, technical forms and so on. And the difficult thing is to find poetry, spirituality, in this dimension... to recreate - if not beauty - then aesthetic dimension... in things like this - in trash itself.
That's the true love of the world. Because what is love? Love is not idealization. Every true lover knows that if you really love a woman or a man, that you don't idealize him or her. Love means that you accept a person... with all its failures, stupidities, ugly points. And nonetheless, the person's absolute for you; everything that makes life worth living. But you see perfection in imperfection itself. And that's how we should learn to love the world. True ecologist loves all this [gesturing to a heap of garbage].
— Slavoj Žižek (adapted from the documentary Examined Life)
From out of each respective thinker’s paradigm, each is incompatible with other. Though they do admit of substantial overlap, they are both self-contained and distinct. But as it is only ever anyone’s task to be his own self, I will attempt here to give a short explanation of technology from out of my paradigm, integrating, probably not without some tentative level of incoherency, a lesson learned from both Heidegger and Ellul.
Technology signifies the larger phenomenon of a change deep in the structure of man’s engagement with the world at a phenomenal level, which translates into degeneration at every level of man’s existence. It degenerates at the individual level, in the almost strangled limitation on his sheer perception of (the infinitely novel stream of) phenomena down to nothing but the instrumental (except for those infrequent moments of spontaneous childlike ecstasy). It degenerates at the socio-cultural level, in the widespread streamlining of institutional operations such that the only wisdom of which civilization is the harbinger becomes how to decrease input with respect to output of… decrease of input. In this situation man as we know him, or rather, as that which we are willing to acknowledge as a man, steadily passes away.
Furthermore this phenomenon is not a static defect, a mere albatross. Rather, it propels itself toward some kind of completion, toward a realization of the full intensity of its qualities. Its essential quality is the normative structuring of objectified reality in the mode of the rational of efficiency. The realization of the full intensity of this quality seems to imply the totalitarian subjugation of all man, society, and culture to rationalization. Whether it will even stop here is questionable. The technological phenomenon originates in something greater and more primal than man and his actions, and so may ultimately even entail the rationalization of dimensions of existence to which he is not privy.
Because of this totalitarian trajectory, the surmounting of the degeneration of man’s existence which technology signifies must in some sense also originate in something external to the realm wherein technology is preeminent, which means external to man, society, culture, and maybe even the dimension to which they belong, ontologically or otherwise. To be external to it means to be the context in which it happens; the reference frame for the evaluation of its qualities; the absolute for its relativities. It means to “transcend” the realm of technology in the sense of transcending the reach rationalization.
Ellul understood that man cannot reach - in his actions - beyond the horizon of technology’s preeminence, and was therefore very much right in his instinct that salvation from it must come from something utterly beyond him, something qualitatively superior to him – the transcendent God.
But Heidegger understood that man can reach - in his thinking - beyond the horizon of technology’s preeminence, and therefore rightly believed that in order to let Being open itself to man, man must first invite it to do so through the cultivation of real thinking, i.e. supra-technological thinking.
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Whether God is superior to Being or vice versa seems to be of little consequence with respect to serving as a reference point – a ground – for a praxis in response to the technological milieu if in either case the ground of this praxis transcends the milieu, as both God and Being do. For it is precisely this quality of transcendence itself which has the power to propel things beyond themselves into new selves, and therefore to propel humanity beyond the technological milieu into some greater existence, be it the Kingdom or some “higher essence”. The external referent must only be absolute with respect to the technological milieu – not absolutely absolute.
By virtue of the fact that something transcends man and his milieu, its only phenomenological reality is as the howling void of an unknown. But this negativity is what gives it its intriguing, magnetic perplexity and draws man up to its mystery. Indeed, this mystery is what gives it its saving power. Kierkegaard, writing as the idealist Anti-Climicus, notes,
What can truly be said to draw to itself must be something higher, more noble, which draws the lower to itself – that is, truly to draw to itself is to draw upward, not to draw downward. When the lower draws the higher to itself, it does not draw, it draws downward, it deceives. (Practice In Christianity, p.159)
To draw to itself is to be higher because truly to “draw” means: to invite, to present an opportunity for that which is drawn to - if it has appetite for transcendence - propel itself freely of its own choice towards the inviter. Only that which invites in a way so as to extend this opportunity for choice is high because only that which participates in choice is high. Therefore the high must be a mystery because it is only through being a mystery that that which is high can extend an opportunity that which is in lowliness to freely volunteer its thoughts and questions toward the high. And it is only through the free choice of volunteering a thought at what is in highness that that which is in lowliness can illuminate, which is at the same to time to say, manifest, its inner highness – in being – and therefore becoming – high.
It is a riddle, but as he is guessing the riddle, what dwells within him is disclosed by the way he guesses. The contradiction confronts him with a choice, and as he is choosing, together with what he chooses, he himself is disclosed. (p.127)
Only that which propels itself higher towards the invitation of transcendence freely of its own choice can become of a higher essence. To be high is to draw the high towards itself in communion with the highness that draws.
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For this reason, when addressing ourselves to the phenomenon of the degenerative limitation on man’s existence which technology signifies, we must think on it with devout carefulness, question after it with authentic humility. In short, try to experience what the world is when it is as this degenerative limitation in order to understand what it means that the world comes into being in such a way. Because, to be openly receptive to the meaning of the experience of the world as degenerative is to invite it to show itself, to present an opportunity for it to propel itself toward our invitation, to transcend the chrysalis of metaphysics, technology and every department of Reason - which are the deceivers that deceive highness into being drawn downwards. It is to commune with the highness that draws itself toward itself when it draws toward highness itself. This all means: it is the praxis required to manifest the highness required to transcend ourselves – which is precisely the antidote to the degeneration of existence which technology signifies.
Thus I agree with Heidegger when he declares “questioning is the piety of thought” (QT p.35), for it is only through questioning that man can in his highness draw the highness of the world into communion with him towards highness itself.
A possible deception in formulating a praxical response to the technological milieu is to make the mistake of the “religious ecologist” viz. to believe that the natural state of nature is a perfectly balanced stasis of harmonious relationships; that man’s normative structuring first through thought then through art & craft uniquely introduced disharmony and degeneration; and that in response we ought to discontinue technological behavior (whether or not it is essential to man) and commence some form of behavior which harmonizes with the “natural” order.
In truth this perspective itself participates in the normative structuring of nature by demanding in advance that it come into phenomenological appearance as a perfectly balanced harmony. It falsely exonerates nature of its implication in the disharmony of the technological milieu by locating it in man qua over/against nature. Really, technological society and the metaphysical men which compose it are nature. The same natural processes which lifted the tetrapods onto shore 380 million years ago dropped fissure material on Hiroshima at supercritical mass while Ellul was writing Technological Society. One can say that man is responsible for this latter event, but then to say he is responsible for an offense against nature makes it untrue – it is a natural outworking of the same environmental dynamics that everything in the world is subject to; ones arguably predominately disharmonious.
A truly receptive, truly questioning, truly inviting response to the technological milieu must apprehend the experience of the rationalization of everything without predetermining it in advance to be merely the work of the devil. Rather it must carefully seek the experience of its essence – the essence of rust and the concrete, the two-dimensional glow of computer screens, the sterile planes of anonymous hallways administrating the tumbling streams of plastic trash. These are the revelation that God has uttered to us – that which most demands to be addressed in solemn reflection.
The world of the future will likely not be verdant or edenic. Even the best possible outcome of the technological crises is not a reversion back to what we erroneously imagine to be the paradisiacal world of plants and animal consciousness. Technology will remain in the materiel out of which Dasein or the Kingdom is synthesized – it will remain in the world the same way the arrogant mistakes of an adolescent remain in the adult man: physically indelible but learned from, contextualized, integrated, and transformed.
What the adult world will look like is impossible to know. But it is probably wishful thinking to hope even for it to remain filled with mechanization, bureaucratization, normalization; wishful to hope that it is in these things that we are given the task to discern God’s artistry, and consequently to become enraptured fearful astonishment at him, and consequently to be drawn to his highness. Žižek probably has it closer when he imagines a “terrifying new abstract materialism, a kind of a mathematical universe where there is nothing. There are just formulas, technical forms and so on.” – a world of purely technological pure consciousness. To fail to anticipate this is to take seriously neither Ellul’s perception of the totalitarian quality of Technique nor Heidegger’s insight into its depth of psychological ingression.
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Whether or not this happens is in no way up to man. This world-phase is determined from out of something higher and more primal. But whether or not this abstractly materialistic universe is the obliteration of existence, and thereby a true ecological catastrophe, depends entirely on man - not absolutely, but inasmuch as the absolute accomplishes itself through man.
It depends on whether he can, as Ellul says, mutate into one who “can use techniques and at the same time not be used by them, assimilated by, or subordinated to them” (What I Believe, p.66) That is, on whether or not he can accomplish the iconoclasm of these technical forms through grounding himself in something more absolute and therefore love them for what they are rather than idealize them into what they are not.
This depends on whether he will be attentively receptive - though careful thinking and humble questioning - to the experience of these technical forms so as to apprehend what it means that the world comes into being in such a degenerate way:
Which depends on whether he will in his highness draw to himself the highness in technology that draws towards highness itself redoubling both his and technology’s self into mutually interpenetrating self-transcendence.
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