Technology and the Spirit

Technology and the Spirit

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Technology and t h e Spirit Ignacio L. Gotz

P1RAEGER

Westport, Connecticut London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gotz, Ignacio L. Technology and the spirit / Ignacio L. Gotz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-275-97346-8 (alk. paper) 1. Technology—Religious aspects. I. Title. BL265.T4G68 2001 291.1'75—dc21 2001032924 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2001 by Ignacio L. Gotz All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001032924 ISBN: 0-275-97346-8 First published in 2001 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

@r The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

"Nature . . . is the source of a technological way of being." Charles J. Sabatino

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Contents A cknowledgments

ix

Introduction

xi

1. The Problems of Technology

1

2. The Nature of Technology

21

3. Reflections on Technology

39

4. On Spirituality

51

5. Models of Redemption

63

6. Spirituality and the Material

79

7. Technology and Education

91

8. Some Dangers of Spirituality

101

Conclusion

117

Bibliography

123

Index

135

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Acknowledgments Some of the ideas developed in this book appeared originally in presentations and journal articles authored by me. Even though they have been extensively revised and dispersed throughout the book, I wish to give credit to the publications that featured them: to Educational Theory for "On Person, Technology, and Education"; to Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society for "Four Models of Redemptive Education and Technology" and "Spirituality and Teaching"; to Religious Education for "Spirituality and the Body"; and to Interchange for "On Technology." I have been meditating on these ideas for a long time, and it has been my good luck to have had editors who allowed me to present them. To all of them I owe a debt of gratitude. It has also been a pleasure to work with Dr. James T. Sabin, Director of Academic Research and Development at Greenwood Publishing Group. He and his editors have always been available to me when there were queries or when direction was needed. I have learned much from my friend Dr. Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, of the University of Haifa, and from Dr. Ivan Illich, of Perm State University. My friends Dr. Henry Johnson, of Perm State University, and Dr. Alven Nieman, of Notre Dame University, encouraged me to write. My wife, Katherine, was present at the birth of these ideas and she nurtured them just as she did our three daughters. To all of them my heartfelt thanks.

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Introduction We begin with pictures, one from the mystical writings of St. John of the Cross, his Spiritual Canticle', the other from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. In an ardent passage reminiscent of St. Augustine's quest, St. John of the Cross cries out to his Beloved: Where have you gone, belov'd, and left me sighing? Like the hart you fled, having wounded me; I ran out clamoring after you, but you were gone. He then turns to the fields, to the countryside, begging them to tell him if they have seen his Love. The world replies: A thousand graces sprinkling He sped hastily through these groves, And looking as he went, By his semblance alone, He left them in his beauty clothed.1 In a similar vein, T. S. Eliot paints a beautiful picture of a day in which, through the eyes of his imagination, he sees the blue skies shine reflected on an empty pond; then a cloud passes and sunlight vanishes and, with it, the gorgeous conjured up image.2 The purpose of this book is to argue that it is possible to spy the grandeur of God or of Being in the luscious colors of the world as well as in the dreary ones, to rediscover the beauty behind the clouds of the material stuff of field and grove, and that this applies equally to technology. It is a matter of being able to glimpse the sun we know is still shining behind the cloud. There is a third story: Genesis says that the world God created was good — says so explicitly of everything except the humans. The humans are a problem, and

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it is because of them that, in a fit of disgust, God unleashes the waters of the flood, almost in an effort to cleanse the good earth of the pesky pest he has visited upon it; for he acknowledges that humans are incorrigible from the start.3 After the flood, pleased by Noah's burnt offering, God promises never again to ravage the earth because of the humans. In their rush to damn the material world some people have claimed that while the world was created good, human disobedience turned it evil, so that the postdiluvian world is a "fallen" one, just as humans are. But the fact is that God never says the world is bad; even when he curses the ground for the man after his disobedience,4 it is not so much the ground as the man's labor that is cursed. It is as if God felt his world would have been wonderful without people. Finally, one must note that the first picture of God in Genesis is that of an artificer or craftsman who disdains not to fashion creatures out of the mud. Similarly, according to the Enuma Elish, Marduk made the world from the lower half of Tiamat's body, and in the Edda we read that Odin and his Aesir brothers created the earth from the massive bones of the slain giant Ymir. For Plato, it is an "artisan," or "artificer," or "craftsman" (8r||iioupY6<;) who makes the world in the image of the Forms,5 and in the Rigveda, Visvakarman is the divine expert, the master craftsman of the gods. None of these creators, it seems, thought ill of working with their hands. Moreover, for the Greeks, technology was divine. It was incarnated in the person of the god Hephaistos, Zeus's (or Hera's) son in charge of the Olympian factories. He was depicted as lame, always sweaty and soiled by the soot of the forge, but the esteem in which he was held was made clear by the fact that his wife was the divine Aphrodite, virgin goddess of love. Hephaistos's work could be wondrous to behold, as in the case of Achilles's armor, sculpted and forged by him at the request of the sea-nymph Thetis on whom Zeus had engendered the would-be destroyer of Troy. CONTRA TECHNOLOGY Opposition to technology has been romanticized in the past, some times with extraordinary effect. One of the first instances of the use of technology in the Bible ends up in failure: when Noah's descendants made bricks and began to build a city with a tower in Babel, God confused their languages so they could not understand each other and had to abandon the project.6 In Greece, Icarus was dashed to pieces for using technology with youthful recklessness, and Prometheus was punished, not so much for stealing fire from heaven as for giving it to mortals and teaching them arts and crafts. Aeschylus has Prometheus claim: For boons bestowed On mortal men I am straitened in these bonds. I sought the fount of fire in hollow reed Hid privily, a measureless resource For man, and mighty teacher of all arts.7 Similarly, among the Norse, the curse placed on the Ring by Alberich brought

Introduction

xiii

unhappiness and death to all who possessed it. In America, the Ballad of John Henry has preserved this opposition to technology. Whether legend or history, or both, John Henry was a thirty-year-old black man, six feet tall, and weighing 200 pounds, who worked as a "steel driver" with construction crews digging the Big Bend Tunnel in West Virginia around 1872. At the time, all the work was done by sheer human force, but the companies were beginning to introduce the steam drill, a new technology that threaten to replace the old methods. John Henry, the popular story goes, challenged the machine: John Henry on the right side, The steam drill on the left, "Before I'll let your steam drill beat me down, I'm gonna hammer my fool self to death."8 And so he did. He won but he died, some say on the spot, some a few days later. TECHNOLOGY AND THE SPIRIT There is no question here of divinizing technology or of exalting it beyond the mean. Neither is there a hidden purpose of using the spirit as a surreptitious way of bootlegging religion into the fray. No. Spirit comes first, so spirituality is basic. It is like breathing, an essential, indispensable thing. But some of us breathe heavily, some lightly, some deliberately, others unselfconsciously. There are many ways of breathing, just as there are many ways of being spiritual. Here is where religion comes in: it denotes the different ways of walking in the spirit; it sets aside the way some people have chosen to walk through their lives, and it names them to distinguish one from the others. Religion (from Latin ligare, to bind or tie) signifies the commitment we have made to ritualize our pursuit of the spirit. That it has appropriated to itself an air of priority is understandable but misleading: the great founders of religions were fundamentally spiritual people who lived their spirituality to the maximum and thereby inspired others to walk in their path. The realization that no one can really follow another's path leads perversely to the emphasis on externals and the rigidity of dogmas. The imitatio dei which is at the core of the imitatio Christi and the imitatio Prophetae becomes thus the imitatio regulae. Not without reason the Buddhist tradition counseled the rejection of anyone who claimed to be a spiritual leader: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!" A PERSONAL NOTE We often frame our ideologies out of the shards of our multiple experiences. There is reflection, of course, but reflection, even when enlarged through reading and discussion, is rooted in the experiences we have had at crucial moments in our lives. Plato shaped himself, undoubtedly, around the experience of Socrates's trial and death; Caesar was spurred to cross the Rubicon by his meditation before the bust of Alexander in Spain; Jesus was shaken by his experience of baptism at the hands of the Baptist, and Paul by being an accessory to the murder of Stephen;

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William James was turned around in the mountains and Wittgenstein in the trenches, and those experiences channeled their lives until the end of their days. I cannot claim experiences of this sort, but more years ago than I care to count, I found myself looking for a way to combine the riches of this world, which generous parents put at my disposal, with a sparse use of the world consonant with a willed poverty. The search became urgent after an experience with a German printing press, the most up-to-date of its kind at the time. I watched how it was assembled and stood by in awe as it was run for the first time. I stayed in front of it for hours, mesmerized, transfixed by its beauty, by the smooth and near silent turning of its gears, and by the care with which every detail had been planned, engineered, and executed. Years later I would understand with profound sympathy Henry Adams's description of the peasants' awe before the dynamos whirring at the Crystal Palace exhibition in England; but then I yearned to discover an intellectual way that would allow me to be poor in the midst of plenty and to pursue holiness without rejecting the world, even the technology that could fill me with such profound feelings of wonder. It was not long after that that I came upon Teilhard de Chardin's The Divine Milieu (1960), and I understood. Later came studies of the Bhagavadgita 's karmayoga and, again, I understood. Since then I have nurtured an invincible sense of the beauty and spirituality of the material world, including technology. This sense has been sharply jarred by the opposition I have encountered against technology among colleagues and spiritual people, people who I thought, naively, should have known better, but who have lined up against technology in both articles and speech, to condemn and exorcize it, as if the demon was in it and not, perhaps, in our own hearts. This is the origin of and impetus for this book. It is an effort to show, by argument and story, what perhaps cannot be shown except through experience. But an effort must be made, I believe, because the world of technology is all around us and it continues to grow and expand in ever greater detail and magnificence. With Teilhard I feel that it is up to us to make sure that this milieu in which we exist — and which he aptly termed "divine" — does not become for us a stranglehold but, on the contrary, another way to the spirit. CONCLUSION To conclude: this book does not attempt to construct a philosophy of technology. It may be true, as many have maintained, that we have not yet developed a holistic approach to technology that would have allowed us to deal comfortably with it and ground on it our pursuit of happiness and the good life.9 It may be true, too, that one reason why we have failed to construct a cohesive philosophical approach to technology is the fact that the field of philosophy itself is fractured into many tendencies and points of view. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Reality is not exhausted by one philosophical perspective. Moreover, one reason for the diversity of philosophical views may be that, in technology, we are dealing with a fundamental dimension of what it means to be human and not just with a particular epiphenomenon somehow

Introduction

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peripheral to the human enterprise. Be that as it may, my concern is not the creation of a philosophical synthesis but the enabling of a philosophical task, namely, that of finding a way to integrate technology into our spiritual lives. This latter task is narrower in scope than the former and it may, in some way, be a prerequisite to it. In the chapters that follow, then, I will first deal with the problems of technology, restated in my own words (Chapter 1). Then I will inquire about the nature of technology in an effort to clarify the concept (Chapter 2). This will be followed by one set of reflections (Chapter 3) intended as an example of ways in which technology can be spiritualized. Chapter 4 will attempt to describe what is meant by "spirit," and it will also highlight ways in which we "sin" against the spirit. Chapter 5 will contain an exposition of several models one might use in order to achieve a spiritualization of technology. Chapter 6 will attempt an overview of ways by which we already spiritualize matter without even noticing it. Chapter 7 will explore the role of education in the spiritualization of technology, and Chapter 8 will describe perils that lurk behind the very pursuit of spirit. A Conclusion will round up the various points and arguments. NOTES 1. My own translation. For another version, see St. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, transl. and ed. E. Allison Peers (New York: Doubleday, 1961), pp. 42-43. 2. See T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets, "Burnt Norton," I, in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1952), p. 118. 3. Genesis 8:21. 4. Genesis 3:17. 5. Plato, Timaeus, 28D. 6. Genesis 11:3-9. James L. Kugel, The Bible as It Was (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 123-130. 7. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 107-113, G. M. Cookson, transl., in The Great Books of the Western World, Robert M. Hutchins, ed. (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), Vol. 5, p. 41. 8. For a discussion of the origin and the different versions of the ballad, see Richard M. Dorson, "The Ballad of John Henry," in An American Primer, Daniel J. Boorstin, ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), Vol. 1, pp. 437^445. 9. Eric Higgs, et ah, eds., Technology and the Good Life? (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 2.

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1

The Problems of Technology Not long ago, the announcement of a conference on "Technology and the Rest of Culture" at The New School for Social Research stated unequivocally that "recent changes in information science, audio-visual media, and telecommunications have left us in a world dramatically different from the one inhabited by previous generations."1 The announcement went on to describe the concerns of the conference, among which I note the following: How and why did the concept of technology emerge? What are its precursors? What are its different meanings? What are its critiques? How do changing technologies and technologic metaphors transform visions of the past, the present, and the future?2 How have technological innovations changed the ways in which we know, learn, teach, and communicate? What are the likely cultural and social consequences of the major advances in communication technology? How does technology affect our sense of community? How does it affect our system of democracy, our system of free expression, and our system of law? How does technology affect our imagination, our art, our writing? And so forth. It would seem that most of the relevant questions about technology have already been asked, and undoubtedly some have been answered. But there may still be something left for me to say on the subject and to suggest, not so much how technology might affect us all, but, rather, how we might learn to deal with technology in more humane, spiritual and constructive ways than we have heretofore. This is the purpose of the present book. My hope is that it may contribute, however slightly, to a spiritualization of technology that may help assuage the fears many harbor against it.

SOME PROBLEMS OF TECHNOLOGY In truth, there seems to be some cause for concern. To begin with, there is a great deal of misunderstanding of technology. Often, this misunderstanding causes

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Technology and the Spirit

fear, and this fear can, in turn, lead to demonization. Walt Disney's Fantasia had a segment, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," staged against the background of Paul Dukas's music of the same title. In Disney's version, the young apprentice conjures up by magic a host of brooms to help him in his chores, but when the helpers acquire, as it were, a life of their own, he lacks the formula to stop them, and he would have drowned had not the old sorcerer suddenly reappeared. This segment has been taken as a cautionary tale about what happens when we unleash powers we do not know how to control. The same can be said of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Even though the story can be read at a number of levels, and even though it lends itself to multiple ideological interpretations, one surely is apparent, and it is this: the creature, originally benign and friendly, is eventually forced to become brutal and, even, murderous, by the horror its visage inspires. The creature is not initially a monster; it becomes one in the process and, clearly, as the result of being demonized. One could say similarly that in many quarters, organizations, and cults, technology is feared because the leaders have spoken of it in ways that diabolize it. TECHNOLOGY AND GENDER Many today see the development of technology, especially the internet, as an opportunity for women to come into the field on an equal footing with men,3 and it may be, indeed, that such equalization will take place. But this approach, it seems to me, misses the whole point of the problem of technology. True, men have been — and still are — in control of most technologies, but the main problem, as I see it, is not a matter of control. One of the first technologies, weaving, seems to have been a woman's domain, but war was man's, and so, apparently, was building. Slowly, most technologies came under the control of men. The few that continued to be in women's hands, such as healing, passed into masculine control when medicine was drawn to the universities and the practice of curing began to require certification. A woman who "knew" how to cure without having gone to medical school was an anomaly, and since the source of her knowledge could not be readily identified, the devil was invoked to fill the vacuum. Such a woman became a "wicca," a "knower," a witch. Since then, and until modern times, most technologies have been in the hands of men. It is understandable, then, that the hoped-for democratization of technology should create questions of power and control which involve old female-male antagonisms; but our questioning has to go beyond these surface problems, important as they are. Feminists have a point when they strive to control cyberspace: often the appearance of new technologies has tended to enslave rather than free women. The invention of agriculture led to their being confined to the house; warfare certainly was not kind to women, who were often the excuse and always among the victims of war: Helen herself, "the face that launched a thousand ships," ended up hanged and torn to pieces by rival women in Rhodes; the Industrial Revolution entered into an unholy alliance with the Church to control women's wombs, the producers of the workers for industry and of the soldiers for war: the opposition to abortion and contraception is not purely religious and ethical, it is also economic.

The Problems of Technology

3

But the appropriation of cyberspace by women would not be a liberating move except in appearance, giving women an illusion, and even a false sense of power, because the goal is not the continued strife of women against men but the realization of the humanness of both and the consequent sharing of everything including technology. Marx had to deal with a similar situation when, in the early stages of the ideological development of communism, some men decided that, if everything was to be held in common, women, too, would belong to them: capitalistic habits of thought do not die easily. Marx had to write specifically to this issue, making clear that such misguided thoughts reflected the extent to which people were alienated from themselves and from each other. He went as far as to suggest that the relationship between men and women is a barometer of the relationship among people in general: where women are objectified, discriminated against, and valued less than men, all people, generally, are employed unfairly and only to the advantage of the capitalist. He wrote: In the relationship with woman, as the prey and the handmaid of communal lust, is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself; for the secret of this relationship finds its unequivocal, incontestable, open and revealed expression in the relation of man to woman and in the way in which the direct and natural species relationship is conceived. The immediate, natural and necessary relation of human being to human being is also the relation of man to woman.A The point, for Marx, was that men and women are equally human and should deal with each other as human and approach everything from this perspective. What I am suggesting is that technology is not intrinsically gendered, and that once we have grasped our fundamental human equality, it can be for us another realm to conquer together, not one to fight over like children over a favorite toy. COMPUTERS AND CHILDREN For many of us who try to think about technology fear overshadows wonder.5 This seems to be the case especially when the technology we think about is computers and the place for this technology is the school. A recent spate of books by the best known child psychologists and schooling experts have taken a stance against the introduction of children to computers at an early age, and popular magazines like U.S. News & World Report, have summarized their findings and warned the general public of the dangers lurking around their PCs. There is no question that the pressure to expose children to the technology of computers has been great and that there has been a rush to use without considering the effects of the use on the children themselves. A similar lack of care attended the use of television in years past, and while a debate raged about the quality of the programming, few paid serious attention to what the medium itself was doing to young viewers. Today, college teachers bemoan the fact that their students have short attention spans (usually about ten minutes, the length of a program segment), cannot take notes, and expect the classroom to be an entertainment center. These behaviors are not the result of programming but of the kind of medium television

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is. According to McLuhan, "any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the way media work on environments."6 So the first thing to bear in mind regarding the use of computers in school or in the home is that the medium is more important than the message. While we should critique programming, we should pay more attention to the medium computers are and inquire into its effects on children. Two, we should realize that there is no neutral stance here. Environs condition with or without computers, and conditioning produces effects. If we do not like the effects of a particular medium on children, we should not place them in it. The technical organization of a school or classroom (or home) represents, of course, a point of view — even a moral point of view. But this point of view is not ipso facto "bad" or deleterious to children, or immoral. For example, having pupils begin each school day by playing a graceful melody on recorders is a use of technology which is at once life-enhancing and beautiful, not because of the technology itself, but because of the use to which it is put and the medium that is created with it. The question to ask must always be, What do we want the children's behaviors to be? Depending on the answer, we can set up media which will produce those effects. Three, we must understand that doing away with computers is not the only alternative. This is an option dictated by an ethic of renunciation, but one can also choose to rule oneself according to an ethic of right use. According to a Gospel story, when a rich young man queried Jesus about the way to perfection and was told to sell everything, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow Jesus, he walked away sad, for the prospect of complete renunciation was too much for him.7 Another alternative, however, would have been right use: employ what you have — and yourself— in the service of others, a lesson the great philanthropists seem to have learned and practiced. The same attitude must be extended to computers and their use in the classroom and in the home. It is not a matter of rejecting these machines which are products of our ingenuity and our hard work but of using them appropriately according to specific goals set for ourselves and our children. Four, we must remember that a situation similar to our present quandary has long obtained regarding the beginning of reading. Reading is a marvelous skill that opens up for us enormous vistas to be explored in the comfort of our favorite chairs. But reading is not an unmixed blessing: it is a medium, and like all media, it has effects, some of which are not to be deemed good automatically. The judgment of enjoyment and expansion made above was based on the contents of books, not on books as a medium. For example, reading is sequential. To get the meaning of a story one must begin at the top of a page and move one's eyes from left to right, line by line, until one reaches the bottom of the page, go to the next page, and so on. It may take several pages before a meaningful description or account is completed. On the other hand, living is much more simultaneous than that. In reading, this simultaneity can be recovered only after the sequential tracing of events, one after the other, has given us a vicarious account of the situation. The question, then, is, When are children ready to have at least some of their experiences altered and changed from simultaneous to sequential? And the answer is that they are ready at different ages even though the schools insist on teaching all children to read at the

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same age (and some parents push reading on their children at younger and younger ages). Is there any wonder that some children will resist this effort simply because they are not ready? Moreover, pushing children to read before they are ready is not without effects, some of which are "bad." Children pushed to read too early may later reject the book or misbehave, in a desperate effort to recover their lost childhood. Rousseau has left us an unforgettable example of this. In the Entile he shouts, "I hate books!" and in the Confessions he gives the reason: his father forced him to read at a very early age.8 John Stuart Mill, too, was pushed by his father to read at a very young age. By the time he was eight years old, he had read Aesop's Fables in the original Greek, which he began to study at age three. This was the lightest of his readings. The heavier stuff included Xenophon's Anabasis, Cyropaedia, and Memorabilia, the whole of Herodotus, some Lucian, some of the accounts of Diogenes Laertius, some speeches of Isocrates, and six dialogues of Plato.9 He read, besides, Hume, Gibbon, the historians Millar, Burnet, Watson, Robertson, Hooker, Plutarch, as well as accounts ofjourneys to various parts of the globe. Also Robinson Crusoe, Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, and some more pedestrian tales. At eight he began the study of Latin and of geometry, Euclid's Elements being his main text for the latter. To these he added the Iliad (in Pope's translation), the Odyssey, some plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes; Thucydides, Demosthenes, Aischines, and the Rhetoric of Aristotle. Soon followed the Bucolics of Virgil, the Aeneid, most of Horace, Phaedrus, Sallust, Ovid, Terence, Lucretius, and some of Cicero's speeches. At the age of twelve he began to study Aristotelian logic, both in the original and in the Scholastic commentaries. This was followed by studies of contemporary political economy, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Later on he would study French, psychology, chemistry, botany, and Roman law. No wonder that, at the age of twenty, John felt that the wonderful education he had received in his youth had given him a sort of artificial knowledge, all pre-packaged and dispensed by his father. He thought of himself as "a mere reasoning machine,"10 and he resented the thought. A crisis ensued, as a result of which he set out to re-educate himself, beginning with the reading of Wordsworth, for he was determined now to include the cultivation of feelings in his transformation. It may be that, in the matter of computers and children, we must ask the question that experts have taught us to ask with regard to reading: When is a child ready to deal with computers? The answer can only be given individually, though the schools will continue to homogenize all children and ignore what is best for each. In the home, this must be the paramount question, and wise parents will know how to answer it and, also, how to resist the pressure "to keep up with the Joneses." Five, there appears to be no solid reason why computers could not be viewed as toys — sophisticated toys, perhaps, but still toys. Computers have generally been pushed on children, especially in the school, as tools of learning, and many of the software programs written for children parade themselves as aids to learning. Many teachers and parents introduce children to computers in order to give them a head start on the road to learning, feeling that, in a competitive world, it is never too

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early to get started. At the same time, many, if not most of the objections to the introduction of children to computers at an early age have to do with the imposition of such heterotelic aims on the children's use of computers. However, nothing prevents us from viewing computers as toys. When we do this, the orientation immediately changes. Computers, then, are not seen as aids to social and psychological development and computer programs are not introduced as personality building experiences or the newest pedagogical tools. This happens because play, when it is allowed to be truly play, has no ulterior purpose beyond the sole enjoyment of the activity for its own sake. Play, according to R. F. Dearden, "is a non-serious and self-contained activity which we engage in just for the satisfaction involved in it."11 Play is realized as games, of course, as long as the games retain their autotelic character. Similarly, toys cease to be mere objects and become toys as soon, and as long as they are internally related to play by the player. The objective reality of the toy is not the primary consideration here, but what the player's imagination makes it be. As Dearden explains, a hammer may be the father's "tool" at one moment and the son's "toy" the next; the objective quality of the hammer does not change, only the child's imagination which turns it into a toy.12 A participant in a study of toys, Tony Bindloss, put it this way: "the real quality that makes a toy a toy is an unreal one, and is derived from the quality of play itself. All toys . . . become 'make-believe' objects as soon as they are picked off the shelf." And another one, Garth Evans, explained, "Anything is a toy if I choose to describe what I am doing with it as play."13 It is obvious that computers, just as any object in the world, can become toys for those who play with them. And is it too far fetched to suggest this is one way in which computers may be introduced to children (at the appropriate age) without the deleterious effects bemoaned by critics? Six, it is important that children learn to "play" with computers at an early age, according to their readiness, because the play attitude is one of the most important ways of dealing with the technological world in which computers have assumed such an important role. I am not saying that the child should have in mind this objective, for this would destroy the very nature of what play is; but that a byproduct of play is familiarity with the toys and that as long as play remains play this familiarity may be a welcome consequence. Children who have played with computers may not find it too difficult as adults to spiritualize the technology with which they live. CHEMICAL NEMESIS In the realm of disability we have come to understand the need for prostheses and other instrumentalities. In ancient times crutches were introduced for the lame, and not so long ago eyeglasses made their appearance to correct poor sight, and dentures made it possible for the old to chew. Today we accept wheelchairs, hearing aids, artificial limbs, and the like, and the only question seems to be, how much better we can make these products of technology that help us overcome our handicaps. But in the realm of medication we seem to harbor strange views and practice

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a sort of "pharmacological Calvinism," as Kramer calls it,14 that privileges pain over its absence and prefers the natural state over what it considers to be artificial. For many people, the use of medication remains taboo, especially in certain circumstances, such as in the case of attention deficits in children and depression in adults. Some even proscribe the use of chemotherapy in cancer, and a few would rather endure a migraine than take any medicine to combat it. The rationale given is the refusal to put something "unnatural" into their bodies under the erroneous view that chemicals are foreign to us. The Greeks already knew that chewing willow leaves or drinking a potion of boiled willow leaves had an analgesic effect. They did not know that the chemical was salicylic acid, now synthesized and the main ingredient in aspirin; and they knew that covering wounds with certain molds was antiseptic, though they knew nothing about penicillin; and, of course, they knew of the power of alcohol to alter mood and lessen mental pain — the words of Teiresias ring true: Two things there are that hold first rank among men, the goddess Demeter, that is, the earth, call her which name thou please; she it is that feedeth men with solid food; and as her counterpart came this god, the son of Semele, who discovered the juice of the grape and introduced it to mankind, stilling thereby each grief that mortals suffer from;15 but it would not have occurred to them to reject such nostrums because they were "unnatural." In the Middle Ages the great dramatist, musician, and mystic, Hildegaard von Bingen (1098-1179) was also an herbalist — someone who knew the effects of herbs on sundry human maladies — and she actually published a treatise on the practice. The point here is not to draw a history of medical technology (for this is what medication is) but to indicate that the rejection of medication as unnatural is comparatively recent and reflects, not a considered medical position, but an ideology that somehow refuses to see the role of chemicals in our bodies and the importance of our bodies to our sense of self. There is nothing we do that does not involve chemicals. The communication among centers of the brain takes place through chemicals in the synapses, and everything ends up coursing through the brain. There are chemicals in the muscles, in the digestive and reproductive systems, in the oxygenation of the blood, and so on, and it is obvious that given the vagaries of genetics and conception, the optimal amounts of certain chemicals in the human body will vary from individual to individual, so that it makes sense to talk about a normal or optimal amount as well as of deficiencies. Why should it be acceptable to dress warmly in cold weather, as humans have done for thousands of years to compensate for the body's heat deficiency, and not take medication to compensate for a lack of serotonin or of insulin? We correct deficient eyes and crooked teeth but will not increase the chemicals that help the young child attend to school. The only plausible explanation for this is an ideology that refuses to accept the materiality of the self implied by the human body, for chemicals are as much a part of us as is technology.

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Technology and the Spirit

AMBIGUITY OF TECHNOLOGY Recently, G. Roger Sell16 questioned some of the hidden assumptions behind much of our use of technology and pointed out the fact that the very term technology is ambiguous; but while politicians, scientists and educators puzzle over meaning, others accuse educators of dragging their feet in the implementation of technological advances. Thus, McLuhan could write a few years ago: old.

Our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the

These are difficult times because we are witnessing a clash of cataclysmic proportions between two great technologies. We approach the new with the psychological conditioning and sensory responses of the old. This clash naturally occurs in transitional periods.... The youth of today are not permitted to approach the traditional heritage of mankind through the door of technological awareness. This only possible door for them is slammed in their faces by a rear-view-mirror society.. .. It is a matter of the greatest urgency that our educational institutions realize that we now have civil war among these environments created by media other than the printed word. The classroom is now in a vital struggle for survival with the immensely persuasive "outside" world created by new informational media. Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery — to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.17 But what are the schools to inculcate? Another kind of hegemony? Should the computer replace the book? I shall maintain that the threat of technology is not in the tool but in the users of the tool. There is no "inbuilt self-subversion" in technology.18 Everything created or generated has collateral effects: the fall of a baby's rattle has repercussions in Mars, and one tiny infant born is one more pair of lungs spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The question is, how do we handle these effects? As Heidegger wrote years ago, the question of technology is not a technological question; it is a question for us humans to consider and solve in and among ourselves as we explore new and different ways for us to be in the world. A case in point is the Sydney, Australia, Olympics. Advances in technology have made the broadcast of the events entertaining and exciting. Why, then, must the flow of the opening ceremonies be broken up every ten or fifteen minutes for commercials and the like? Why must a soccer game in which there are no natural breaks except for the half time be tampered with by advertisements? Technology itself is not responsible for this: other countries, including far poorer ones, have found ways to preserve the continuity of the game by broadcasting transparent advertisements on the boarders of the television screen. Why can we not do this? Obviously because we are not willing, because the business culture that has taken over our lives has no concern for the artistic experience or, for that matter, for sports: the Games are used as everything else is used, to make money. The Games are seen as just another opportunity to enhance income. The human dimension of the Games is lost and nobody cares, and even if someone did, how could a few concerned human beings fight against the business juggernaut?

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THE MEDIUM AND THE "MASSAGE" There is also the persistent problem of the distinction between the medium and the message, form and content. Failure to keep this distinction in mind can be deadly. For example, great amounts of energy have been spent researching the effects of violence and sex portrayed on television programs on the minds and lives of the young, yet no consensus has emerged. Now, a generation later, we speak of the short attention span of our college students, their passivity in the classroom, their inability to take notes, all of which are largely attributable to the kind of medium television is, not to the content of the programming, and we remember wistfully McLuhan's claim that "societies have been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication."19 THE LURE OF TECHNOLOGY And then, there is the lure of technology. Already in 1900, when Henry Adams visited the Paris World Fair, he saw at the Palais des Machines men and women staring at the huge dynamos purring quietly, churning electricity. The people's sense of awe was reflected in their faces — and it was the same worshipful awe Adams had seen mirrored in the faces of the pious at the shrines of the Virgin Mary scattered throughout Europe. The cult of the dynamo, he thought, might some day replace the cult of the Virgin.20 However, as others have pointed out, the danger of such a shift is not inherent in the machine but in us. As Rene Dubos put it years ago, The dangers of technology . . . come . . . from man's acceptance that he must conform to technological imperatives instead of continuing to strive for true human values. The demon to be exorcized is not in technology, but in those men — the immense majority of us — who are more interested in things than in conditions suitable for the development of human potentialities.21 It is not that technology lulls us or dupes us into sloth and illusion, but that some of us use technology to lull others of us into not noticing what needs to be noticed and into not questioning what needs to be questioned. THE TRANSCENDENCE OF TECHNOLOGY Conversely, for others, technology conjures up a world totally beyond their understanding. They are like the young couple described by Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, who ride their shining cruising bike across the country. But they know nothing about the inner workings of the engine; they do not understand the machine. Therefore they are its slaves: if it breaks down they cannot repair it; if it overheats, they do not understand why, nor know what to do about it. They portend the fate of the simple folks in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (the Eloi), who were driven to their deaths by a technology they no longer understood or could control. For them technology had become dysfunctional.22 This may be one reason why the worship of technology looms as a danger probably closer than we care to think about.23 Well known is the worshipful awe

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of the dynamo (mentioned above) described by Henry Adams, but older examples of associations between religion and technology are not hard to find. The ancient Sumerians were performing medical procedures 6,000 years ago — the instruments have been found there as well as (more recently) at Epidauros, where the shrine of Asklepios was located together with a famous hospital. The Egyptians practiced mummification, which is a technological procedure, and so did the ancient Peruvians even earlier than the Egyptians; and all these practices were somehow connected with religious beliefs in the afterlife. Observatories were constructed in Sumeria as well as in ancient India, where more recent examples such as the Yantarmantar may be seen in Delhi. Sun dials, spear points, knives, shoes, ships, woven linens, copper chisels, writing styluses, papyrus, cooking utensils and earthenware, ornamental beads, paintings on the walls of ancient caves, sculptures, even fire, were all elements in a developing technology, and they, as well as many other items were connected in one way or another to the gods and were, in some sense, sacred. Prometheus brought the divine fire to humans — for which deed he was punished; Isis introduced the arts to Egypt, and her husband, Osiris, brought in agriculture; mummification was in the hands of priests; weaving and the loom were introduced to the Greeks by Athena; the Bible and the Qu 'ran were dictated by God; Achilles's splendid armor was the gift of Hephaistos; Demeter gave grain to humans and Dionysus wine, the one to make life possible, the other to make it bearable;24 and so on. The point is that, from time immemorial, technologies have been connected with the sacred probably because they, or their use, inspired awe among the people, or because its use had to be curtailed or controlled by some early, incipient capitalists: the awe the pyramids inspire is similar to the awe before a Lamberghinni that sells for upwards of $100,000. Richard Stivers has explored areas that have been tinged by technology and have taken up to themselves tokens of magical powers thereby uttering silent (and not-so-silent!) calls to worship.25 Among these are language ("technobabble," slogans, cliches), the media, statistics (percents are incantatory numbers), advertising (with promises like, "Everything goes better with Coke!"), therapy and self-help programs, management and organization (committees as covens), and so forth; but Stivers's brilliant analyzes are flawed by his misunderstanding of irrationality and the sacred and by his neglect of superstition, a matter I shall take up in Chapter 8. In speaking about the worship of technology I do not mean simply the transfer or application to technology of attitudes that were originally connected with religion. Writing about work many years ago, Harvey Cox explained how the job presented "a striking example of how we allow residual religious meanings to cling to an activity long after its authentic function has been secularized.. . . The bells moved from the monastery to the tower of City Hall. The chimes now called not cloistered monks but worldly monks to the disciplined toil which became first the Puritan and later the secular substitute for religious devotion."26 Cox is, of course correct in his appraisal, but I have in mind more specifically the quasi-religious awe that informs those present at the launch of space rockets; the reverential care we take of machines as if they were the sacred vessels of some religious cult; the way we revere scientists and the cognoscenti in matters of science and technology; the

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meticulous purifications we follow before touching a computer mother board. Aldous Huxley's satirical calendar based on "the year of our Ford" (A. F.),27 may appear funny on first reading, but it has proven to be prophetic. NECROPHILIA A similar problem, perhaps more extreme, is the matter of necrophilia — not the pathological type or sexual necrophilia, but the one that can be described as a kind of character; in Fromm's words, "as the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion 'to tear apart living structures.' "28 According to Fromm, a major manifestation of this type of necrophilia is the readiness to solve every problem by force or violence. As examples, he mentions the Queen, in Alice in Wonderland, whose ready answer was always, "Off with their heads!" Also, in the famous case before King Solomon, the prostitute who was ready to have the living infant killed rather than surrender it to the real mother; and one could cite the instance of Alexander the Great "solving" the problem of the Gordian Knot by sundering it with his sword. Another characteristic of necrophilia is a morbid interest in the past, with an almost pathological inability to live in the present and look forward to the future. There is a certain antiquarian tendency here, a willingness to let oneself be ruled by things, by rules — that is, by dead matter. Similarly, there is the readiness to replace living things with dead ones, like fields and forests with parking lots and highways; the love people cherish toward their cars; the almost fanatic itch to take photos — "snapshots": Fromm finds the term significant; the fascination with gadgets; and so forth, to the point that interest in artifacts of one sort or another ends up replacing the interest in what is alive and vibrant. In view of all this, Fromm asks pertinently: Is necrophilia really characteristic for man in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States and in other equally highly developed capitalist or state capitalist societies? After all, he argues, we are not interested in feces or corpses and we are almost phobic about dirt. But, says Fromm, we have turned our attention away from the living to the dead, from seeing to the snapshot, from hearing to the hi fi, from love to sex and from sex to mere performance. Our world has become a collection of lifeless gadgets; we survive on synthetic foods eaten in a hurry in fast food establishments decorated with artificial plants and flowers; we drive to these places in shining machines, whose workings we hardly understand, over miles and miles of cement or asphalt strips that crisscross our environs; and what is left of this magnificent natural landscape we pollute with poisonous gases and effluents, oblivious of or uncaring for the consequences. Fromm concludes: Never before in history has man been willing to sacrifice all life to the Moloch —

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Technology and the Spirit his own and that of all his descendants. It makes little difference whether he does it intentionally or not. If he had no knowledge of the possible danger, he might be acquitted from responsibility. But it is the necrophilous element in his character that prevents him from making use of the knowledge he has.29

THE QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP There are also many socio-economic concerns associated with the ownership of technology. Today many point out the inequalities that are likely to ensue as the result of some countries, or segments within them, owning some technologies or more sophisticated and expensive forms of them that the less fortunate would not be able to acquire. While this question is being raised now with regard to computers and the general access to the internet, this is not a new problem. To give an example, rich countries have for long had access to more expensive and efficient armaments than poor countries, and the same can be said with regard to medical technologies, general machinery, automobiles, communication systems, and the like. Nobody worries about the inequalities created by our sophisticated weaponry. In fact, those countries who have "the bomb" are bent on keeping all other countries from acquiring it and placing it in their arsenal. World social inequality does not seem to bother them in this respect. Further, in the field of war, for example, technologically advanced armies have generally had an edge over others, though never a guarantee: the ancient Israelites were often able to defeat the more technologically advanced Philistine armies by the use of the simple technology of the sling — the main example of which was David's defeat of Goliath. On the other hand, without the simple technology of the stirrup, introduced to Europe by Muslim traders in the ninth century, the whole era of the mounted knight would not have come to pass. TECHNOLOGY AND PURITY And then, there are the purists who would like to exclude all contact with the mechanical and material, especially among young children, and who therefore condemn the use of computers and other technologies fearful of their effects on young souls. Some even frown upon comparisons between human organs and machines and are scandalized by language that compares the heart to a pump and the brain to a computer. Hermann Hesse expressed this sentiment, which he himself had at one time had, and ridiculed it in Steppenwolf In a drugged dream, Harry Haller confronts Mozart who has turned on a radio, and the loudspeaker blares, "Munich on the air. Concerto Grosso in F Major by Handel." Harry Haller complains: "My God . . . what are you doing Mozart? Do you really mean to inflict this mess on me and yourself, this triumph of our day, the last victorious weapon in the war of extermination against art? Must this be, Mozart?" Laughing his "cold and eerie" laughter, Mozart replies: "Please, no pathos, my friend! Anyway, did you observe the ritardando? . . . Do you hear the basses? They stride like gods. And let this inspiration of old Handel penetrate your restless heart and give it peace. Just listen, you poor creature. . . . Pay attention and you will learn something. . . . Listen well. You have need of

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it. And now you hear not only a Handel who, disfigured by radio, is, all the same, in this most ghastly of disguises still divine; you hear as well and you observe . . . a most admirable symbol of all life. When you listen to radio you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine.... All life is so, my child, and we must let it be so; and if we are not asses, laugh at it. It little becomes people like you to be critics of radio or of life either. Better learn to listen first!"30 Part of the purists' opposition to technology stems from people's feelings of isolation and estrangement in the industrial world, feelings which were experienced in ancient times by the Gnostics. These feelings appear today more strongly among the followers of contemporary revivals of Gnosticism, such as Anthroposophists. Many feel, like Pascal, that they are cast away, abandoned, forlorn, in this infinite immensity of space that does not acknowledge them.31 As Camus would later put it, "If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he would be reconciled."32 Nature's grandeur seems too much for them, not so for nature, which cannot sense it. With the Gnostics of old these modern iconoclasts feel that, deprived of the venerability with which all sideric piety up to then had invested it, but still in possession of the prominent and representative position it had acquired, this stellar firmament becomes now the symbol of all that is terrifying to man in the towering factness of the universe. Under this pitiless sky, which no longer inspires worshipful confidence, man becomes conscious of his utter forlorness, of his being not so much a part of, but unaccountably placed in and exposed to, the enveloping system.33 But there is more. Hans Jonas has explained brilliantly the crisis of individual meaning experienced by the Greeks at the end of the classical period and, in more recent times, by many modern people in similar circumstances. The soldiers of Ulysses of Ithaca's army knew their leader and, in turn, were known by him by name; after all, these small armies hailed from small towns or regions where everybody generally knew everybody else. In subsequent centuries, the polls served as the same context for the individual's sense of self. Being an Athenian, for example, gave one an identity that was both personal and social and that could be maintained throughout the ancient world. But the expansion that followed Alexander's conquests diluted this /?<9//s-rooted identity, for the Athenian of the Hellenistic age was a very small part in a much larger whole. The advent of the Roman Empire, while vastly extending the perimeters of the context, decreased the value of the individual further still. The proliferation of religious sects mostly rooted in geographical provenance or linguistic similarity during the early centuries of the Empire bear witness to an almost desperate search for self-meaning in a world increasingly bent on denying it. Such feelings of alienation became widespread even after the advent of Christianity; witness the increasing identification of everything immoral and undesirable with "the world" (an expression that becomes technical), and the flight from this "world" which becomes evident in the astonishing monastic movement of the fourth and fifth centuries. Without this background it is impossible to

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understand how thousands upon thousands of people left the cities and flocked to the deserts in an almost desperate search for "salvation." This sense of estrangement is depicted beautifully in the Gnostic "Hymn of the Pearl."34 A royal son is sent by his parents to Egypt, a symbol of the material world, to search for the Pearl, the soul lost in this world. The young prince succumbs to the need to belong and eventually loses himself and becomes like the others. He is rescued by a special letter sent by his parents, recovers the Pearl and makes his way back to the kingdom of his Father, thus attaining salvation. The parable carries enormous meaning for those lost in "the world." Nihilism, moral relativism, and a certain acosmism are all, undoubtedly, the results of the social and ideological transformations highlighted above. But another loss, more pertinent to my purposes here, is the dulling of the powers of spiritual perception by which the ancients were able to discern the divine in the midst of ordinary things. Socrates could spy the beautiful soul in the gorgeous body of Charmides, but Plotinus, five hundred years later, will seem, according to Porphyry, to be ashamed of having a body. Because of this change, renunciation will become the order of the day and Christian asceticism will be proclaimed as the best way to heaven. Further dismemberments down the centuries — the Crusades, the Reformation, the Age of Reason, the Industrial Revolution, the Revolt of the Masses — will simply exacerbate the loss of self and the misgivings about the material world beyond whose surface most people will be unable to peer. Spinoza's deus sive natura ("god or nature") will be dismissed as crass pantheism. Marx will still deplore the alienation from nature, but Heidegger will ignore it altogether, for what remains for him after the positivistic treatment of nature by science is, according to Jonas, the "there" of bare nature, there to be looked at outside the relevance of the existential situation and of practical concern. It is being, as it were, stripped and alienated to the mode of neutral object. This is the status left to "nature" — a deficient mode of reality — and the relation in which it is so objectified is a deficient mode of existence, its defection from the futurity of care into the spurious present of mere onlooking curiosity.35

However, to his credit, Heidegger manages to discern in technology what he seems incapable of envisioning in nature. This type of mistrust of nature and the material, coupled with an inability to see through it to the divine nature beyond, characterizes most of the purists' rejection of matter. But one interesting thing about these purists is that they pick and choose their technologies; or, perhaps more accurately, they inveigh against certain technologies without realizing they are using technologies which themselves were suspect when first introduced. The pencil is a piece of technology, and so is the quill, as was the stylus, and people who condemned typing failed to see that writing with a fountain pen was itself an exercise of technology. CYBERFEMINISM At the ideological level (as was pointed out above), there is danger of turning

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technology into something it is not — with the best of intentions, but in often misguided ways that envision technology, especially cyberspace, as the new dawn of feminism,36 or of equality, or of true democracy. A certain utopianism creeps into a lot of contemporary technobabble. But, as Ilan Gur-Ze'ev has shown, "Cyberfeminism . . . is part of the system that has to be overcome and not a radical alternative."37 This system, to my mind, is not just the socio-economic one in which most humans languish today, but, more importantly, the quasi-system in our hearts which compels us to use technology for devious and anti-human purposes. The system to be overcome is the unspirirual one that grounds much of our contemporary business and technical world. Thus, it is "the disregard of the call of the totally Other . . . [and] the absence of the messianic moment," as Gur-Ze'ev says,38 that turn technology into an alienating, objectifying, obfuscating, and manipulative instrumentality. This is not to deny that there are problems of control, access, censorship, etc. It is simply to indicate that even the satisfactory solution of all these problems would not eliminate technology, and that therefore the question of technology would still remain. This claim is similar to the one Sartre made in Being and Nothingness, in the section on "Existential Psychoanalysis," where he sought an irreducible39 source of human anxiety beyond all the tractable neuroses and psychoses, and he found it in the fact that we are human. Similarly, the problem of technology cannot be "solved" because what technology is is an integral dimension of what we are. As I shall explain later, for us to know anything is to know how it is, and this is techne, the basis of technology. Paraphrasing a famous Pogo dictum, in technology we have met the problem, and it is us. TECHNOLOGY AND THE SELF Sherry Turkle has made the case, developed earlier by McLuhan, that technology has lured us to seek and find our identities in the context of artifacts: "we catch sight of our images in the mirror of the machine," she writes,40 "we reconstruct our identities on the other side of the looking glass."41 We even fall in love with our images reflected in the mirror of the machine as Narcissus did of old when he fell in love with his own reflection in the pond. The question, then, is how to establish our identity in the world of "virtual reality" which surrounds us. What is the difference, one might ask, between the self in the "Holodeck" and the self in the deck? And yet, is the task today really that different from what it has always been? For centuries we have sought our identities in ecstatic experiences — that is, experiences beyond the self — in masked balls, ritual dances, theater, and even through the readings of novels. And such a search has not been easier in the past — witness the myriad accounts of self-discovery extant in all cultures of the world, as if the search itself were worth recounting regardless of outcome. Turkle argues that perhaps "we have become accustomed to opaque technology,"*2 technology that hinders our efforts to see through it into the luminescent realm of Being. But this has been the thousand-year-old complaint of Indian religious mysticism even

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before technology was widespread; the Greeks often failed to see the divinity because it camouflaged itself in the garb of ordinary people; and angels have forever been disguising themselves as humans in order to achieve God's purposes. The medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde had already adumbrated this not-sonew malaise. To begin with, the lovers did not love each other out of their own free will but as the result of a potion they had drunk. Not merely that, but as Paul Zweig remarks, they were more in love with the image they had of their love that with each other. Gottfried von Strassburg writes specifically how "each was clear as a mirror to the other,"43 but mirror obviously only reflect the looker's face while hiding that of the lover. Thomas of Britain, whose version of the legend is earlier (ca. 1170 or 1185) than that of Gottfried, includes an episode in which Tristan, having vanquished a giant in battle, commands him and his assistants to sculpt life-like statues of Isolde and enshrine them in a Hall of Mirrors hollowed out of a mountain. There he confines himself whenever his passion drives him to distraction; there he clasps in his arms and kisses the lifeless image of Isolde, recalling delights of their great love, pretending to be with her but knowing, as he must, that Isolde is absent no matter how present her image may be.44 From this perspective technology may have simply added another medium in whose shiny surface we may be lured to fall in love with reflections of ourselves, but this is not a new occurrence. TECHNOLOGY AND HAPPINESS One of the problems of technology has been the promises and expectations that have been built upon technology and the failure of technology to deliver. Countless international world fairs have dazzled visitors with the vision of a bright and rich future built upon technological advances, but when those futures became present, the expectations were far from being realized. This has been the experience with just about every technological improvement, every new medicine, every new dvice: our lives will be radically altered and we will know happiness as it has never been known before. But have these promises been kept? There is an obvious answer to this question: our lives are, indeed, better because vaccines against polio and chicken pox have been invented. Automobiles, airplanes, electric shavers, computers, and many other devices make our lives easier by facilitating the tasks we perform with them, but all this does not necessarily mean we are happier. There may be ways of being happy in the midst of gadgets,45 but such happiness is difficult to achieve and requires keen philosophical understanding of the problems created by the proliferation of things. Another part of this problem is the fact that it is not up to technology to create happiness but to us. If technology has not fulfilled the promises made by us in its name, the failure is surely due to us, the promise breakers. THE SCAPEGOAT Finally, there are those who blame just about all current ills on the advances of technology. In one of his books Ellul has written that "what produces enthusiasm for computers is not that they are useful and efficient but that they give the illusion of being intelligent."46 However, to anyone familiar with computers, this is hardly

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the case. Computers do nothing of the kind: we do when we speak of them anthropomorphically, as in the recent chess match between "Big Blue" and Grand Master Kasparov. Confronted with inflated claims about any and all aspects of technology, we should remind ourselves of the old warning, caveat emptor. Still, the view behind Ellul's characterization of computers underlies a great deal of the contemporary criticisms of technology. What we often criticize when we criticize technology, is a contemporary psychological (and philosophical, perhaps, and definitely industrial) way of looking at the world. This view is permeated by a mechanistic conception of reality.47 That this way of looking at the world has arisen through the use of technology does not make technology itself damnable, any more than the way of looking at this world as a vale of tears and a road to heaven makes Christianity, the instigator of this view, damnable. One could, indeed, grant that technology has exacerbated some latent tendencies in us, but it is not evident that technology is the cause of what the tendencies, once actualized, have wrought.48 I am not arguing that technology is neutral, either ethically or politically, but that the destructive and alienating effects we blame technology for have their roots in the use to which we put technology and in the ways we employ it, not in technology itself. One may argue, as Marcuse did,49 that there is an evil tendency in technology by virtue of its method, which is the scientific method; but this is tantamount to saying that there is a danger implicit in every actualization of human potential. Even pure self-consciousness is always threatened by solipsism, and love often turns into self-centeredness and even selfishness. Ellul contends that the dazzling achievements of technology have created an impression of well-being and progress which hides the human losses we have endured at the hands of technology. He terms this the "technological bluff," but there is no "technological bluff here in the sense meant by Ellul50 any more than there is a human nature bluff. I mean, technical activity is not something alien to us: it is what we are, how we are. That the world has misused technology does not negate technology's roots in us. There have always been people who misused their organs, hands, eyes, head, legs; cruel people, conniving people, nosey, manipulative people. Such misuses do not make human nature evil. The so-called bluff of technology is neither better nor worse than any bluff we make without it. The serpent's bluff in paradise was bad enough, and there was no technology in it. On the other hand, without adequate awareness, anything is a bluff. What makes us often march in unison like automatons is not a technological bluff, but any bluff.51 Schooling is a bluff, as Ivan Illich has shown; religion is a bluff, as Feuerbach and Marx have shown. It is the fact that we bluff that ought to concern us. Using Ellul's own argument, the real bluff consists in making us fear a technological bluff and not our own hearts. In one of the most frightening parables of modern times, Lord of the Flies, the children were bluffed into thinking there was a beast abroad on the island. Only the mystic, Simon, intuited that the beast was not something that could be hunted and killed, but that the beast was in the children's own hearts, and that this was the reason why there was no go.52

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The danger of technology is neither more nor less than the danger of any use we make of ourselves. We do not need technology to do evil. The ancient parables teach us this well. Enkidu, the legendary creature of the Epic of Gilgamesh, lost paradise for making love to a whore for a week, and Adam and Eve simply ate a forbidden fruit. The losses incurred were far greater than any fraud perpetrated by today's scientists. Cain killed Abel with a donkey's jaw bone: one can hardly get more "natural" than that — or more evil. That "know how" has taken on an ultimate value53 is not due to technology itself but to us. "Knowing how" (techne) is one of our ways of knowing, one of our modes of being in the world. That we have allowed ourselves to become unbalanced, or addicted to one mode at the expense of the others, is not the fault of the mode but of ourselves. CONCLUSION One of the derivations of the name "amazon" is from "a-" (no) + "-mazon" (breast), according to a legend that the amazons lopped off one breast so as better to stretch the bow, whose string might otherwise hit one breast. The derivation is, perhaps, more a legend than a fact, but if it were true, it would be an example of human subordination to technology at an early age — like Chinese women binding their feet to fit into their dainty shoes, or St. Ignatius Loyola having his broken and reset leg broken again so that he could wear a gentleman soldier's boot. We know such perversions when we see them at a distance; we must make the effort to see them when they stare us in the face. The problems of technology, real as they are, are our problems, problems of our own creation. We should not blame technology for what is in our hearts; rather, we should strive to purify ourselves that we may approach the world, technology included, with a pure heart. When Isaiah declared his readiness to preach the word of God an angel flew to him with a red hot coal and touched his lips to cleanse them.54 We need to be seraphim to ourselves. NOTES 1. See also Gary Cross and Rick Szostak, Technology and American Society (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995) and Katherine Cavanaugh, "Virtual College," Newsday, Sunday, October 27, 1996. 2. It is not just technological metaphors that affect our visions of ourselves: biological metaphors affect the way we view technology. A case in point: early ways of viewing the telegraph and its development were influenced by our understanding of our nervous system. 3. Among many such, see Jane Kenway and Helen Nixon, "Cyberfeminisms, Cyberliteracies, and Educational Cyberspheres," Educational Theory 49:4 (Fall, 1999): 457- 474. 4. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Third Manuscript, page XXXIX, in Karl Marx: Early Writings, T. B. Bottomore, transl. and ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Paperbacks, 1964), p. 154. 5. P. Hans Sun, "Notes on how to begin to think about technology in a theological way," in Theology and Technology, Carl Mitcham and Jim Grote, eds. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), p. 171.

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6. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), p. 26. Also, Ignacio L. Gotz, "On Children and Television," The Elementary School Journal 75: 7 (April, 1975): 415-418. 7. Matthew 19: 21. Also Luke 10: 25-28 and Mark 12: 28-34. See P. Hans Sun, "Notes," p. 188. 8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Book III, 4; The Emile of Jean Jacques Rousseau, William Boyd, transl. and ed. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1965), p. 83; The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Book I (New York: The Modern Library, s. a.), pp. 6-7. 9. John Smart Mill, Autobiography (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1937), I, pp. 9-10. 10. Ibid., IV, p. 71. 11. R. F. Dearden, "The Concept of Play," in The Concept of Education, R. S. Peters, ed. (New York: Humanities Press, 1967), p. 84. Also Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), Ch. 1. 12. Dearden, "The Concept of Play," p. 77. 13. Frank and Theresa Caplan, The Power of Play (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973), p. 310. 14. Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac (New York: Viking, 1993), p. 275. In Chapter 9, Kramer does a creditable job of analyzing the medical points of view and the ethical implications of the use of mood altering drugs in the treatment of mood and other disorders. My discussion here concerns the more radical position that would eliminate all chemical medications no matter what their salutary effects might be. 15. Euripides, The Bacchae, 275. 16. G. Roger Sell, "Challenges in Using Technology for the Improvement of Undergraduate Education," Teaching Excellence 8:2 (1996-1997): 1-2. 17. McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium is the Massage, pp. 94-95, 100. 18. Paul Standish, "Only Connect: Computer Literacy from Heidegger to Cyberfeminism," Educational Theory 49: 4 (Fall 1999): 428. 19. McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium is the Massage, p. 8. Ignacio L. Gotz, "On Children and Television," The Elementary School Journal, LXXV, No.7 (April, 1975): 415-418. 20. Henry Adams, "The Dynamo and the Virgin," in The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams (New York: The Modern Library, 1931). 21. Rene Dubos, "Man and His Environment," New York University Quarterly 11:4 (Summer, 1971): 6. This is one point, also, of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (New York: Dell, 1972). The "monster," at a crucial moment, tells Dr. Frankenstein, "You are my creator, but I am your master" (p. 168). The fear (and the warning) appears in movies such as "Jurassic Park" and, as was mentioned above, in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," and in the legend of the Golem. See John Schwartz, "Finding High-tech Truths in a 400-year-old Tale," The Washington Post, Monday, February 10, 1997, F21. 22. See Robert K. Merton, "Bureaucratic Structure and Personality," in Man Alone, ed. Eric and Mary Josephson (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), pp. 125-126. Obviously, ethical questions arise here that need to be addressed. 23. See Richard Stivers's provocative study, Technology as Magic (New York: Continuum, 1999). 24. Euripides, Bacchae, 250 ff. 25. Stivers, Technology as Magic. 26. Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan, 1965), pp. 182, 185; Daniel Callahan, ed. The Secular City Debate (New York: Macmillan, 1967); Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner's, 1958).

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27. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Bantam, 1958). 28. Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973), p. 332, quoting the definition by H. von Hentig. 29. Ibid., pp. 350-351. 30. Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., 1963), pp. 212-213. 31. Blaise Pascal, Pensees, T. S. Eliot, transl. (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1958), #206. 32. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Vintage, 1955), p. 13. 33. Hans Jonas, "Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism," in The Allure of Gnosticism, Robert A. Segal, ed. (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), p. 123; also "Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism," in his The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). 34. Full text in Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, pp. 113-116. 35. Jonas, "Gnosticism," p. 132. 36. Calling the internet "feminine" simpliciter, as Sadie Plant does in "Das Net ist weiblich," , ignores the transcendental character of the feminine that manifests itself historically, from The Epic ofGilgamesh to the concluding lines of Goethe's Faust. 37. Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, "Cyberfeminism and Education in the Era of the Exile of the Spirit," Educational Theory 49: 4 (Fall, 1999): 437. 38. Ibid., p. 448. 39. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), p. 686. 40. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 9. 41. Ibid., p. 177. 42. Ibid., p. 23. 43. Gottfried von Strassburg, "Tristan and Isolt," in Medieval Romances, Roger Sherman Loomis and Laura Hibbard Loomis, eds. (New York: The Modern Library, 1957), p. 162. 44. Paul Zweig, The Heresy ofSelf-Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 77. 45. Ignacio L. Gotz, Conceptions of Happiness (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995), pp. 21-24. 46. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Bluff (Grand Rapids, ML: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1990), p. 321. 47. See Barrington Moore, Jr., Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 134. 48. Ibid., p. 136. 49. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 166. 50. Ellul, The Technological Bluff. 51. Ibid., p. 411. 52. " 'Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!' said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter.'You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? Close, close, close! I'm the reason why it's no go? Why things are what they are?' " William Golding, Lord of the Flies (New York: The Putnam Publishing Group, 1954), p. 130. 53. Robert K. Merton, in his introduction to Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. vi. 54. Isaiah 6: 6-7.

2

The Nature of Technology It is the purpose of this chapter to explore the nature of technology. This exploration is needed because the term is used today in a variety of contexts and often with a variety of meanings, some of which are pertinent while others are hardly conducive to intelligent discussion. The term "technology" comes from the Greek word Texvr] (techne), which is essentially similar in meaning to the Latin word ars. Both designated practical activities involving knowledge as well as manipulation of some sort. Thus medicine was Texvr] as much as painting or oratory or teaching. The implication of beauty or artistry that commonly attaches to our use of the term "art" today was not at all present then. Hence the need to clarify the meaning. Against this brief historical comment it may be possible to build a certain understanding of where the real problem of technology lies and what might be the paths toward a solution. THE NATURE OF TECHNOLOGY There are two kinds of things in the world, those produced directly by nature and those produced by humans. In other words, there are natural things and there are made things. Technology applies principally to the realm of made things. As stated above, technology comes from techne (ic^vr)), which means "know how." Techne means making, but making that knows what it is extracting from reality beyond what is already there either naturally or because it was previously made. Zeno defined techne as the habit of making a way for Being to exist1 — that is, to be present in ways different from the actual natural ones. Nietzsche called it "the complement and consummation of existence,"2 and for obvious reasons: think how much richer the world is because of rugs, statues, books, and songs. Heidegger defined it as "the sapient embodiment of being,"3 for obviously a made thing is and it has been made with knowledge. Thus, of its very nature, the made thing retains a link to the reality in which it is rooted in much the same way as a wooden statue

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Technology and the Spirit

retains its connection to the original piece of wood. Technology is the collective term we use to designate the instrumentalities we create in order to actualize the made world. Techne conveys the sense of making plus an awareness of what the making entails both in terms of use and, especially, in terms of provenance or foundation. Fundamentally such making is a revelation of reality. Moreover, at a further place in time, the revelation remains partly unrealized if it is not used. But this particular instrumentality which is technology need not be used in a crass way: it must be used as artists use their tools, with knowledge and care and not merely as tools. Only then is technology truly constituted as a revelation of reality. Tools, then, are not the whole of what technology is. Tools are singularly adapted to one purpose; because of the specificity of their function they "draw our senses into a dance that endlessly reiterates itself without variations."* But they are at best parts of a whole, dancers in a corps de ballet, items in the collectivity we term technology. Moreover, from a subjective point of view, techne is the concretization of the human capacity for poiesis (that is, creation or making). To create is to bring forth vision, or the glimpsed potential lurking in the shadows of the unrealized, into reality. "Every passage from non-being to being is poiesis, bringing forth," said Plato.5 And Heidegger, more clearly: "to create is to cause something to emerge as a thing that has been brought forth."6 To create is to make the made world be. In so far as creation makes a thing be, it causes an emergence of Being. Thus, making is a revelation, an uncovering (a — letheia, the Greek word for truth), an unconcealing of reality or Being. Making is truth-making. As Heidegger put it, "The essence of truth is the truth [= disclosure] of being" (das Wesen der Wahrheit ist die Wahrheit des Wesens).7 In this sense technology is the made enlargement or extension of the human potential for disclosing or unconcealing reality. This applies to all makings, whether in the realm of medicine (curing), of fine arts (poetry, painting, dance, music, sculpture), or of manufacture. As I said above, the distinction between the beautiful (fine arts) and the practical or useful is recent and misleading. The salvation of technology will come largely through its reunification with art, when we shall be able to appreciate the beauty of the machine. Potential does not exist truly by itself; it exists only in its exercise. Things exist, as well as the instrumentalities (that is, technology) we have made to assist us. One captures the essence of a thing by making it, by making it present, by rescuing it from the obscure flux of Being; similarly, one captures the essence of technology by using it. The essence of technology is to be a dimension of the disclosure of Being through which the real everywhere becomes constituted as a made revelation, calling us, waiting for us to receive it as an unconcealment.8 If all this is so, then the real question of technology is not in technology itself, in its mechanisms or its materiality, but in that its essence is mysterious in so far as it both is and enables a disclosure of reality that may arise and overwhelm us with its power, beauty, and immediacy. One need only think of a nuclear explosion or the bursting forth in sound of a symphonic chorus to grasp the import of this statement. According to Heidegger,

The Nature of Technology

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everything, then, depends upon this: that we ponder this arising and that we, recollecting, watch over it. How can this happen? Above all, through our catching sight of what comes to presence in technology, instead of merely gaping at the technological. So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain transfixed in the will to master it.9 These are important words. They go to the core of what this book is about. It is not about the control of the internet, or the monopoly of computer operating systems; it is not about the atom bomb or the production of atomic energy; it is not about automobiles, cameras, cinemas, cell phones, and other similar items in our technological shop. This book is about how reality, Being, the universe, comes to be manipulated by our puny hands into all these marvels of ingenuity and artistry. It is about the wonder of it all. Truth is no abstract label that gets plastered on to a thing as nominalists once maintained: it is the concrete uncovering of Being's specific potential for being made, which, in turn, grounds the thing's essence as a made thing. Obviously, in being made Being unconceals itself, much as, in allowing ourselves to be named, and in responding to our names when called, we allow ourselves to be identified or revealed. Such a concrete unconcealment in a made thing represents the trust reality has in us that its unconcealedness will be adequately maintained in and by the made thing. It also represents reality's "willingness" to be forever associated with a making — for from then on it will shine forth as made. There is great cause for marvel here, that the revelation (uncovering = truth) of reality should take place in and through human making. It is a matter for wonder that truth should come to be under one's hands, as the result of one's endeavors, as Christ is believed by Christians to become present in the hands of a priest as he utters the mystical words of consecration. This wonder, again, must not be left in the abstract. Rather, it must concretize itself in the use we make of the made thing as a thing made in which Being unconceals itself. It is essential that this use take place in order for truth to continue as unconcealment of reality. This applies also to technology. All making activity gives concrete substance to our being human. We are what we make or create (poieo). To be human is to live poetically, that is, makingly. "Song is existence," says Rilke;10 "poetically man dwells on this earth," says Holderlin.11 Technologically we lead most of our human lives. In this sense, to be human is to be a poet. Therefore, according to Heidegger, because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art.12 But if technology is not just tools, why are we so drawn to our instruments? I said above that technology is the concrete enlargement of the human capacity to create. It is the medium of our creativeness. McLuhan explains: All media are extensions of some human faculty — psychic or physical. The

24

Technology and the Spirit wheel is an extension of the foot; the book is an extension of the eye; clothing, an extension of the skin; electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system. ... The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act — the way we perceive the world.13

McLuhan interprets the myth of Narcissus as suggestive of a contemporary problem. Narcissus did not fall in love with himself, as the saying goes, but with an extension of himself, his image mirrored in the water. "The point of this myth," says McLuhan, "is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves."14 Infatuated like Narcissus with the image mirrored on the surface of the water, we forget the depths. This is one reason why computers so fascinate us: they are extensions of our brains, and in seeing them work we dimly glimpse the silent workings of our own minds and we forget that they are made}5 Here is the danger implicit in extensions of human faculties: one may fall in love with them, and in doing so one may forget what they unconceal. And one may even assume their nature: Der Mensch ist was er isst, said Feuerbach; and Blake, in Jerusalem, implied that people become what they behold. The Psalmist put it bluntly: idolatry makes people like their idols: "Like them shall their makers become!"16 The artist is the one who is aware of the danger. "The artist," says McLuhan, "is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness."17 DREAMS OF KNOW-HOW We have a tendency to see in human evolution only the development of the physical characteristics of our ancestors: cranial capacity, bipedality, posture, and the like. But there is another development that is just as important — in fact, even more profoundly so. This is the development of the human capacity for symbolic communication and understanding. As Loren Eiseley put it, at the same time that they were evolving physically, humans were "becoming something the world had never seen before — a dream animal — living at least partially within a secret universe of [their] own creation and sharing that secret universe in [their] heads with other, similar heads."18 A recent discovery in Ethiopia has placed the use of tools by an as yet uncatalogued species of our genus Homo around 2.6 million years ago.19 The significance of this find for the question of technology is not so much that tools were used at such an early age in the development of our species as that such tools were manufactured. As tools became more diversified and complex, brain size doubled and the canine teeth became smaller, for their use was being supplanted by the tools.20 This would seem to indicate that the kind of knowing that was aborning was at least partially instrumental — we could say technological — because the basic problems of tool making were intellectual rather than motor:21 they involved knowledge of what the tool was good for based on experience. The dream processes behind our expanding foreheads were, in some ways, dreams of know-

The Nature of Technology

25

how.22 Early technology was not exclusively concerned with mastery of the environment and survival, but also with quasi-decorative modifications of the human body for sexual emphasis (circumcision and subincision), self-expression (ear and nose rings, necklaces, tattoos) or group identification (body paint and dress). Evidence comes from as early as the Mousterian culture some 125,000 years ago.23 Then, 45,000 years ago we have artistic carvings, the paintings in the caves of Lascaux, Altamira, Nerja and Chauvet, and the extraordinary so-called Venus figurines — all of which involved technology.,24 Therefore the modern claim of some nature lovers, that technology has supplanted the old milieu of nature25 is both false and misleading, for technology was always there. The same falsehood attends the claim that traditional values existed before the rise of technology and that technology has undermined, or is undermining, such values. Traditional values neither arose without technology nor functioned independently of it, but were intricately woven with it though not necessarily in an explicit fashion. Technology served life, not just work. For example, values such as life-long marital fidelity which arose as the result of the first human settlements in the Zagros Mountains east of Mesopotamia and in Syria implicated technologies of construction and agriculture, much as the values associated with earlier nomadic living (such as serial monogamy) implicated the technologies of hunting, gathering, saddling, clothing, and fire making.26 There is no human past in which technology was not in some way involved in the formation and practice of moralities. Moreover, though we often forget it, civilizations have often had to confront the moral problem of human subordination to the reigning instrumentalities. This is not just a modern problem: the same happened, for example, during the building of the pyramids in Egypt and the Great Wall of China, and in the production lines of American car factories during the 1920s and 1930s. THE SPACE OF TECHNOLOGY What is it in our evolutionary development that made technology possible? According to Ortega y Gasset, human self-awareness means we are never adequately subsumed by our circumstances: we can always decide how to respond to them, how to occupy them. The mental distance that exists between ourselves and our circumstances allows us the luxury of mentation, and it is in this mental respite from the material and its needs, in this "space" between mind and nature, that technology is born. Because we do not have to respond immediately to the exigencies of the environment, we can create tools to ameliorate our fate in it, to expedite our use of it, to tame and dominate it, even to luxuriate in it in action or in thought. But technology is not merely, or even primarily, a utilitarian human answer to need and circumstance: for as long as the carving of tools has existed, so has the carving of necklace beads. In Ortega's words, "it seems that, from the very beginning, the concept of 'human necessity' comprises indiscriminately what is objectively necessary and what is objectively superfluous."27 This is easy to see because essentially there is no difference between thinking to understand and

26

Technology and the Spirit

thinking to do, until praxis begins. Historically, the same minds that produced spears painted the walls of the caves at Lascaux. Moreover, there is a sense in which the "space of technology" is filled primarily by the unnecessary, the superfluous, or what is necessary not just for living but for better living. For obviously, if technology achieved only what animals achieve without technology — mere existence — it would simply duplicate existence. This is not the case. Humans want more life, better life, happiness and fulfillment, whether through the skinning of a goat or by painting lions on the walls of a cave. "Humans," Ortega says, "are animals for whom only the superfluous is necessary."28 The Greek flaw (as we shall see later) consisted in the failure to realize that, a parte subjecti, all creation is superfluous and unnecessary, for it takes place in the space between necessity and human life. To quote Ortega once more, "technology is the production of the superfluous, today as in the paleolithic age."29 The distinction between the heterotelic and the autotelic is in the imaginative intention and the action it prompts. Because animals and things have no distance from their physical essence, they are what they are, nothing else; but because humans are not identical with their essence, they appear as a kind of "project" to be actualized through technology. "Our life is pure task," writes Ortega,30 one of whose concomitants is contemplation. Now, without technology there could be no task, and without task human life could not exist. This is why, as Ortega puts it, "human life begins where technology begins."31 If there was a contemporary problem with technology, therefore, it would be the inability "to wish our own selves because we have no clear vision of a self to be realized, we only have pseudo-wishes, ghosts of desires without sincerity and vigor . . . we lack imagination for inventing the plots of our lives.32 THE MEANING OF TECHNE The use of the brain within the human space, for making tools or building castles in the air, is properly techne (T8xvr|), and the understanding of it, its logos (Aoyog), is technology. Aristotle defines techne as "capacity to make involving a true course of reasoning" (\xexa Aoyou).33 Techne is not mere production, since it involves knowledge of universals; it aims not just at usefulness in a narrow sense, but at satisfaction; for example, in the making of musical instruments and the creation of paintings and ornaments. Further, as Heidegger remarks, "technology does not go back to the Texvr] of the Greeks in name only but derives historically and essentially from Texvr) as a mode of aA/r|0e\3eiv [aletheuein], a mode, that is, of rendering beings manifest."34 Again: "Texvrj denotes rather a mode of knowing. To know means to have seen"35 or to have envisaged possibilities. The connotation of "making" in technology is there only subsequent to the "having seen" or imagined something to be implemented ad extra. Making is rendered possible by the fact that one has seen,36 a fact, in turn, rendered possible by the space of appearance. Put differently, "it is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that Te^vr] ls a bringing forth."37

The Nature of Technology

27

The main point here is that techne is fundamentally an activity of revealing what has been envisaged, and so technology is essentially a mode of revealing.38 Noein (voeiv, to know), legein (Aeyeiv, to apprehend, to gather, as in "I gather that . . ."; colligere), and techne (le^vr), manufacturing what has been envisaged) designate modes of Being's appearance through humans?** As in our own age, however, it happened that among the Greeks the mechanical dimension of techne, the manufacture, began to gain preeminence. And understandably; for what the Greeks of the classical period wrought in architecture, literature and the arts in general still dazzles us. In fact, it became modish to make fun of philosophers as mere thinkers, as is clear from the comedies of Aristophanes and from the story of the Thracian maid who ridiculed Thales for falling into a hole while walking absorbed in the contemplation of the clouds.40 To counter this, Plato and Aristotle made an effort to rescue thinking from an incipient subordination to acting and making, a subordination they saw as compromising the thinking of poetry and art.41 They also sought to privilege thinking for its own sake over against practical thinking; and in this they were correct, for contemplation, the space between ourselves and our circumstances, is at least temporally prior to tool making.42 But the definition of "pure thinking" arrived at then was produced in a contrarian context that rendered it impossible to obtain a true picture of thinking in itself and of its role in human affairs. Being, as Heidegger points out, is the element of thinking (as of everything that is). But historically, when thinking has slipped out of its element (when it has shifted its emphasis) it has tended to replace its loss by procuring for itself validity in the fruits of techne.43 It was in this context that the definition of humans as "thinking animals" (C&ov Aoyov exov) came into existence, and Aristotle proclaimed the defining human function as "an activity of soul implying reason" Ojjuxfjg evepyeioc Kata Adyov).44 This definition would have profound consequences for our understanding of the human person. It goes without saying that part of the effort to highlight contemplation over action was prompted by the pejorative connotation that was beginning to be attached to action under the influence of Persian dualism. Action, as physical, was seen as participation in the evil choice of Ahriman.45 One of our major tasks today is to rescue the pristine meaning of techne as revealing from the infatuation with manufacture. Still, Jaeger maintains that techne meant for the Greeks a practice based on well established knowledge and that therefore it came very close to theory (pure knowledge for its own sake), except that techne was always directed at some practice. Given this understanding Jaeger is correct in reminding us that the ultimate aim of Plato's search for perfect knowledge was practical, namely, knowing how to rule justly.46 This is, of course, true, but one must remember that beyond the science of statecraft lay the personal development of the seeker, which was to be enjoyed in the acme of pure, ardorous contemplation described by Diotima. That this became the goal par excellence may be seen in the fact that the generations after Plato understood his doctrine to be primarily of a contemplative nature, and that this emphasis was preserved in the writings and the practice of the Neo-Platonists culminating in the work of Plotinus. One must remember, too, that after his failure in Syracuse, Plato seems to have

28

Technology and the Spirit

tempered his enthusiasm for a political society based on inner development. His writing of Laws late in his life, with its emphasis on the role of law, an external coercive, to achieve the goals of society, would seem to prove this point. But if the inner development of the perfect knowledge advocated in the Republic was to be modified, or even substituted by the external rule of law, what role remained there for contemplation? Here, too, it seems likely that the tendency to sidestep the practical was emphasized and the interest in pure rationality and contemplation for its own sake came to the fore. One could add to the circumstances enhancing this move to theory the failure of the Athenian political machine to contain Philip and, then, Alexander, and the eventual dismemberment of the city states during the Hellenistic period following the death of the latter. A HISTORICAL ASIDE More than a hundred years ago, in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche presented the view that the then prevalent picture of the ancient Greeks as rational, balanced, and philosophically adept was only partially correct. Amidst their classicism, the proportional dimensions of the Parthenon, the clear lines of their statuary, and the conceptual sophistication of their philosophy, one could detect a powerful irrational dimension which had given rise to tragedy and continued to appear in festival, ritual, sport, and theater. Nietzsche did not support his view with the typical scholarly apparatus. This was done later by Jane Harrison in Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1908) and Themis (1912), and by Francis M. Cornford in From Religion to Philosophy (1912), culminating with E. R. Dodds's The Greeks and the Irrational (1951). As a result, our picture of Greek society and of the mentality that prevailed in it has been profoundly altered. Admitting a development from the mystical and mythical to the conceptual, we have been forced to acknowledge that the Greek intellectual temperament combined all these elements, and that the alleged exclusivity of rationality as a distinguishing mark was more a reflection of our own perceptions than of the real state of affairs. Thus E. R. Dodds quoted approvingly the opinion of Levy-Bruhl that "dans tout esprit humain, quel qu'en soit le developpement intellectuel, subsiste un fond inderacinable de mentalite primitive,"47 and he added the query, "Why should we attribute to the ancient Greeks an immunity from 'primitive' modes of thought which we do not find in any society open to our direct observation?"48 What I am trying to show is that the emphasis on rationality presumed to have been distinctive of the ancient Greeks was not what we often make it out to be, a surge of undiluted intellectualism in the wake of which the human person was adequately defined as rational. While intellectuality did surge, it did not obliterate older emphases on the non-rational and the mystical; as Cornford put it, "the advent of this spirit [of rational inquiry] did not mean a sudden and complete breach with the older ways of thought."49 The reason is that the newer and the older ways of thought represent, even today, "two permanent needs of human nature, and characterize two familiar types of human temperament,"50 namely, the scientific and the mystical, or the rational and the spiritual. At the time, reason took the place of Zeus,51 as Cornford put it, but the function remained the same: to make distinctions

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and to order the universe. The picture of the human that emerges, then, is much more complex than Aristotle's famous definition would lead us to believe. The Athenians, for example, according to Demosthenes, were quick to speak but slow to act52; in fact, he saw them as indolent and incapable of concerted action,53 seemingly bent only on wandering through the public places asking, "What's the latest?"54 And yet we know from history that at times they were able to act forcefully and decisively as they did against the Persians. More specifically with regard to abstract thinking, William Ivins has found evidence that, as they progressed, the Greeks were aware of the difficulties attending their older, more concrete ways of thought, and that this led them to emphasize conceptual and abstract thinking. In a brilliant analysis of several passages from Pliny the Elder's Historia Naturalis,55 he writes: The Greek botanists realized the necessity of visual statements to give their verbal statements intelligibility. They tried to use pictures for the purpose, but their only ways of making pictures were such that they were utterly unable to repeat their visual statements wholly and exactly. The result was such a distortion at the hands of the successive copyists that the copies became not a help but an obstacle to the clarification and the making precise of their verbal descriptions. And so the Greek botanists gave up trying to use illustrations in their treatises and tried to get along as best they could with words. But, with words alone, they were unable to describe their plants in such a way that they could be recognized — for the same things bore different names in different places and the same names meant different things in different places. So, finally, the Greek botanists gave up even trying to describe their plants in words, and contented themselves by giving all the names they knew for each plant and then told what human ailments it was good for. In other words, there was a complete breakdown of scientific description and analysis once it was confined to words without demonstrative pictures.56 The conclusion Ivins reaches, that the Greeks "built a good deal of their philosophy about this incompetence of theirs,"57 may be exaggerated, but there is little doubt that the exclusivity of the rational view of the person in Greek and later philosophy is manque. CLASSICAL AND MODERN DEFINITIONS OF THE PERSON For the Greeks, the shades of the dead in the underworld did not lose the features that identified and distinguished them in life, a belief that passed on into the Christian faith about the afterlife. The obvious distinction between actor and mask was obliterated so that when the mortal mask was shed, the actor was still identifiable by reference to the mask, which thus became synonymous with the person. Not so in India, where the distinction between actor and mask, doer and deed, was retained, and dire warnings were uttered against the mistake, linguistic and psychological, of confusing the doer with the deed.58 In a general way, "person" — a Latin term borrowed from theater; namely, the mask through (per-) which the actor sounds (-sonat) — came to describe the appearance of a human being, to which was attached an individuality consisting of,

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in Cornford's words, "the unique world of inner and outer experience"59 peculiar to each. Philosophically, the Greeks used instead the term hypokeimenon (i)TTOK6i|Li8VG)v, suppositum, substratum, hypostasis) in an ontological way, to mean a subject, that is, an entity which could not be predicated of anything else, but to which predicates could be referred.60 In addition, the subject was deemed rational to distinguish it from non-rational animals; it was deemed singular or individual, complete in itself; fundamentally unshareable or incommunicable and de facto not shared; all of which was incorporated in the definition of Boethius (ca. 475-525), "a person is an individual substance of a rational nature."61 This definition was justified and adopted by Aquinas62 and Kant6,3 and it remained standard until modern times. Between the end of the Middle Ages and the rise of psychology some definitions appeared which combined the classical view with the emerging empiricism that pervades later psychological definitions. Such, for example, was the one given by Locke: We must consider what person stands for;— which, I think, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to me, essential to it.64 Today, personality is often conceived as the dynamic epiphany of the person;65 it is conscience, selfhood, memory (as in Wolff), and the like; and more often than not it is a mere epiphenomenon which either stands for the person or leaves the person behind as an unreachable noumenon.66 Typically Magda Arnold defines personality as "the patterned totality of human potentialities, activities, and habits, uniquely organized by the person in the active pursuit of his self-ideal, and revealed in his behavior."67 Contemporary psychology, from Freud to the present, has concentrated on personality rather than on the person. When the term "person" is used, other meanings are intended. These include internal elements as well as their manifestations and bear a strong resemblance to what in ancient times was called "character." Brilliant theorists have studied the formation of personality from infancy on, and have sought to understand the mechanisms governing the inner exchanges between inborn tendencies, experiences, social constraints, and traumas. While these researchers have arrived at certain generalizations, the emphasis has been primarily on the factors that contribute to the make-up of the individual.68 It should be noted that the rise of empiricism in England paralleled the rise of a mechanistic view of nature and of the person within it, encouraged largely by the writings of Francis Bacon and Descartes. While initially this view was welcome because of the success of science and the new perspectives revealed by the work of Newton, objections to it were raised early on, and a mistrust began to grow after the dire effects of the industrial revolution on the quality of life were felt. Much of life became — and still is — mechanized and, as a consequence, alienated, a condition

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which has become increasingly apparent and whose destructive effects linger.69 Moreover, present conditions have been aided and abetted by a rampant patriarchalism. No wonder that technology is held responsible for many of the ills of society, both social and psychological. But to blame technology for evils produced by a misleading mechanistic view of the person that encouraged the mechanization of life is ludicrous. RE-ORIENTING THE PERSON It should be clear that part of the modern mistrust of technology rests largely on the one-sided emphasis of the definition of the person as rational, the classical Greek (and, later, Christian70) preference for the contemplative over the practical, and the flawed views of nature and the body as mechanical. There are other factors, of course, such as an enduring Gnostic view of matter as evil (or, at least, inferior to spirit71), and a reigning patriarchalism, but these have been studied in depth before. Still, like the Gnostics, many today think that technology, not the alienation consequent upon it, must be overcome. The first thing to note is that a pure, non-material intellectuality does not adequately define the person. Aquinas was somewhat aware of this when he peremptorily declared, "My soul is not me" (Anima mea non est ego).72 There is also a problem with the definition's overlooking the body and, generally, the physical dimension of existence. This is the more glaring because from an evolutionary point of view we find evidence of intellectuality only in concrete, physical expressions such as tools, necklaces, and paintings in the caves. In a sense, though we have tended to ignore it, we are as much know-how itself as we are "pure" mind; we are ratio et manus ("mind and hand"73), as the ancients put it. We can do nary a thing without the instrumentality of our own bodies and their extensions in the world: pencils, shoes, cars and telephones. One must also bear in mind that the classical Greek emphasis on theoretical knowing (that is, contemplative, since 0eopi(eiv means to contemplate), was largely a reaction against the practicality introduced in Greece generally by the sophists. Their aim was to teach "the art of politics" (TTOAITIKT) x£%vx\).1A The sophists taught a certain preference for the practical use of knowledge, preferring practical results over truth. In some way they were the pragmatists of their day. They counseled their pupils "to achieve success in public life rather than in theoretical speculation."75 In Marrou's words, theirs "was a purely practical aim: the 'wisdom' and 'valour' which Protagoras and his colleagues provided for their disciples were utilitarian and pragmatic, and they were judged by their concrete effectiveness."76 Accordingly, their achievements were more rhetorical than philosophical, more in the tradition of Isocrates than in that of Plato and Aristotle, and it is understandable that the latter would differ in their approach. In fact, as Marrou indicates, Socrates represents a "reaction" to the pragmatism of the sophists, for he "asserted the transcendent claims of truth."77 Therefore the theoretical emphasis must be seen in a context in which the maintenance of a balance between theory and practice was the ideal. To do justice to these ideas, then, the classical definition of the person must be

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corrected so as to manifest, first, the dynamic and evolving character of its intellectual nature; second, the fact that individual humans are not merely shaped by nature but concretely shape themselves by their own actions; third, besides the somewhat invisible rationality that supposedly defines the human person, one would have to insist equally on the materiality of existence, for without this the individuality of actions, speech, and thoughts, would remain unseen and even unsuspected.78 It is this materiality that has prompted Hannah Arendt to assert that "human life . . . is engaged in a constant process of reification."79 For this very reason Aristotle was led to distinguish between zoe (Ccor), pure animal life) and bios (Piog) which, he said, "somehow is a kind of praxis."*0 This third corrective to the traditional definition of person has been expounded by Paul Ricoeur. Person, he says, involves "a single referent possessing two series of predicates: physical predicates and mental predicates."81 In fact, the bodily dimension is, in some way, primary because mental events (the next best candidate) are private and therefore non-visible in themselves; they are secondary to bodily ones. Thus the person appears as that very particular or individual entity to which both mental and physical predicates are attributed, whether in the case of oneself or of another, predicates which cannot be attributed to the body alone.82 Finally, a fourth corrective to the classical definition would insist that an essential attribute of persons is that they permit the concrete epiphany of Being (as (J)i5ai<;) by concretizing what they have seen in contemplation; that is, that it is characteristic of persons to reveal Being concretely through technology.83 It is important to note that a major part of what is being rejected in the classical definition of human nature and the human person is not so much a definition per genus et differentiam as any definition of the human which would in any way imply that a static defining is possible. Also, it is not so much that defining humans as animals lowers them84; it is that placing them in any scale diminishes them.85 THE PERSON AND TECHNOLOGY I have tried to show how technology is inextricably entwined with the evolution of the human person. It is not just that the contemporary human situation cannot be understood except in relation to technology, but that the human condition itself cannot be understood except in this relation.86 Lack of knowledge of the role of technology in human evolution, the concerns of Greek philosophers, and the modern mechanization of life, made for the formation of a view of the person and of technology which were at odds with each other. The traditional Aristotelian conception led to a view of technology as a human arrangement of tools that were to be means to other human ends, never ends in themselves, and therefore never ultimately necessary. Such tools were extrinsic to human nature (which was conceived almost exclusively in mental terms), and to the raw materials from which they were made, since the ends were superimposed on them by the human mind; and their value depended on that of the ends to which they were means.87 Today, the complex interrelations of our societies in economic, political, and social terms renders such a conception of technology problematical.88 Moreover, as Hans Jonas has said, "the modern discovery that knowing nature

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requires coming to grips with nature . . . has permanently corrected Aristotle's 'contemplative' view of theory."89 By exposing the roots of this instrumental conception of technology it becomes possible for us to change it. According to Hood, "only by overcoming a purely instrumental conception of technology can we ever hope to understand it"90 and to relish its applications. CONCLUSION Technology is basically how humans care about the Being of (technical as well as natural) beings. This has been the case since the earliest human beginnings, for without technology (as explained above) we humans would not have come to be.91 Technics (the making of tools, etc.) has allowed humans to survive and create a safe place to exist, a fact preserved in the myth of the theft of the Olympian fire by Prometheus. Today technology comprises the total patterned and structured arrangements of such technics, the making of products, the relation to nature and society, and the conceptualizations of theoretical science — ontic structures (according to Heidegger) which make up the conditions of human existence. However, at a deeper ontological level, technology is how we release (allow, let) Being ex-sist in the assigned instrumentalities we create,92 which can then be used and encountered. In this fashion the human concern for the Being of all beings is actualized concretely while retaining an openness to the mystery of Being that remains forever inexhaustible. Viewing technology in this way destroys the antagonism between the human and the technical, the spiritual and the material, and provides for us, as Heidegger put it, "a new ground and foundation upon which we can stand and endure in the world of technology without being imperiled by it."93 NOTES l.Zeno, Stoic. 1,20. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (New York: Vintage, 1967), Lecture 3, p. 43. 3. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (New York: Doubleday, 1961), p. 142. 4. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), p. 64. 5. Plato, Symposium, 205B. 6. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 60. 7. Martin Heidegger, "On the Essence of Truth," in Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 140. 8. The Greeks saw the earth as blossoming forth, as an emergence of Being. This emergence they calledphysis, which comes fromphyein (4>ueiv), to [ give] birth. The order of the cosmos and the balance imposed by logos shine forth as beauty. Beauty is the shining forth of the logos that is physics. Hence, says Heidegger, "for the Greeks on [being] and kalon [beauty] meant the same thing (presence was pure radiance)" (An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 111). It follows that to deal with one of these categories is to deal with the others. 9. Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," in Basic Writings, p. 314. 10. Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1942), Part I, 3, p. 21.

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11. Friedrich Holderlin, Werke (Berlin: Propylaen-Verlag, 1914), VI, p. 25, line 32. 12. Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," p. 317. 13. McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium is the Massage, pp. 26-41. 14. Ibid., p. 41. 15. Young Augustine, in search of God, was tempted to make nature divine. He asked the whole of nature, "Are you God?" and nature answered, "No, but He made me" (Confessions X. 9).

16.^^115:8.

17. McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 65. 18. Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (New York: Vintage, 1957), p. 120. 19. Shanti Menon, "Hominid Hardware," Discover 18 (May, 1997): 34. Placing the dawn of technology this early in evolution undermines Ellul's theory of the three milieus. See Jacques Ellul, What I Believe (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), and Stivers, Technology as Magic, Chapter 1. 20. See S. L. Washburn and Ruth Moore, Ape into Human (2nd ed.; Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1980), pp. 166-167, 123. In the human brain, the area for hand skills is very large, far larger than in any ape, with the thumb occupying a disproportionate space. 21. Ibid., p. 74. 22. Without the data we possess today, Marx and Engels had already concluded that "the first historical act of these individuals distinguishing them from animals is not that they think, but that they begin to produce their means of subsistence." The German Ideology I. 2, in Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976), Vol. 5, p. 31. See also Engels, "The part played by labour in the transition from ape to man [1876]," in Marx & Engels, Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1972). Also Eiseley, The Immense Journey, Chapter 8. 23. See Lewis Mumford, "Technics and the Nature of Man," in Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey, eds., Philosophy and Technology (New York: The Free Press, 1983), p. 81. 24. John E. Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); Pablo Solo de Zaldivar Yebenes, La Cueva de Nerja (Granada: Foundation of the Cave of Nerja, 1977); Jean-Marie Chauvet et al., Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1996). 25. See Jacques Ellul, "The Technological Order," in Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey, eds., Philosophy and Technology (New York: The Free Press, 1983), p. 86. I also take as exaggerated some of the claims of Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous. 26. See Helen E. Fisher, Anatomy of Love (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992). 27. Jose Ortega y Gasset, Ensimismamiento y Alteracion [1939], "Meditation de la tecnica," II, in Obras Completas (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1970), Vol. 5, p. 327. 28. Ibid., p. 329. 29. Ibid., p. 329. There is a difference a parte rei: some things are means, others are ends, but human intentionality can wipe out the difference: what for some is work, for others is enjoyment. 30. Ibid., V, p. 341. The phrase reappears in Sartre. 31. Ibid., p. 342. 32. Ibid., p. 344. 33. Nic. Ethic. VI, 4 [1140a 10]. Also Metaph. VII, 7-9. 34. Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," in Basic Writings, p. 220. In Greek Afj0r| means oblivion, forgetfulness. 35. Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 59. 36. In Being and Technology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), John Loscerbo remarks: "The Te%vii;ri<; cannot and does not draw from his own resources, but rather in activity is sustained by what 'has been seen' " (p. 25).

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37. Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," p. 295. 38. Ibid., p. 295. Zeno (StoicA, 20) defined le^vr] as e£i<; 66ono\T\iiKe, "the habit of making a way [for Being to exist]." 39. Phyein (c|)ueiv (to [give] birth) connotes Being's (Nature's) self-revealing (natura naturans) at the natural level. 40. See Plato Theaetetus, 174A. 41. Plato's rationale here is not unlike that used to justify his understanding of art. See J. Tate, " 'Imitation' in Plato's Republic" Classical Quarterly 22 (1928) and "Plato and 'Imitation,' " Classical Quarterly 26 (1932); W. J. Verdenius, "Plato's Doctrine of Artistic Imitation," in Plato, ed. Gregory Vlastos (New York: Anchor Books, 1971); and Whitney J. Oates, Plato's View of Art (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972). 42. The receptive, feminine and imaginative dimension, thus, is prior and constitutive. See Ignacio L. Gotz, "Education and Masculine/Feminine Consciousness," Educational Theory, 36: 1 (Winter, 1986): 23-32. 43. Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," in Basic Writings, pp. 194, 197. 44. Nic. Ethic. I, 7 [1098a 8]. On the resulting intellectualistic view of the person, see Frederick A. Olafson, Principles and Persons (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), Ch.l. 45. See Ruhi Afnan, Zoroaster's Influence on Anaxagoras, The Greek Tragedians, and Socrates (New York: Philosophical Library, 1969). 46. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1943), Vol. 2, pp. 129-130. 47. "In every human spirit, whatever its intellectual development, there remains an ineradicable substratum of primitive mentality." E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), p. viii. 48. Ibid. 49. Francis M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), p. v. 50. Ibid., p.vi. 51. Ibid., p. 36. 52. Demosthenes, Second Philippic, in Orations of Demosthenes, Thomas Leland, transl. (New York: The Colonial Press, 1900), p. 93. 53. Ibid., Fourth Philippic, p. 156. 54. Ibid., First Philippic, p. 9. 55. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, W. H. S. Jones, transl. & ed. (London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1956), Book 25, Chapters 4, 5, and 10. 56. William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 15. 57. Ibid., p. 13. 58. Bhagavadgitd 3: 27 and 18: 24. See Antonio Nicolas, Avatdra (New York: Nicolas Hays Ltd., 1976), p. 181-182, and Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India (New York: Meridian, 1951), pp. 234-240, 319 and 342-343. Marx's contention in The German Ideology 1.1, Vol. 5, p. 31) that humans are what they produce, and Sartre's that they are "nothing else than the ensemble of [their] acts" (Existentialism and Human Emotions [New York: Philosophical Library, 1957], p. 32), are the complete opposite of the Gitd's "I am not the doer." Where Christianity affirms with Job, "Even without my flesh I shall see God" (Job 19: 26), the Vedanta counters, You are not this "I," phenomenal and transient; "you are It [tat]" (Chandogya Upanishad vii.6) — that is, the divine, transpersonal, indefinable, undifferentiated, absolute Brahman. 59. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, p. 115.

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60. Aristotle, Met. 7, 3 [1028b 36]. Strictures of space make my analysis here rather narrow in scope. 61. De Duabus Natur. 3 (ML 64, 1344). 62. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol 1, 29, \c. On the Christian slant added by Aquinas and his followers, see Jean Mouroux, The Meaning of Man (New York: Doubleday, 1961), Ch.VI. Note that this definition of person is essential to the trinitarian theology of Christianity. 63. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Robert P. Wolff, ed. (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1969), Section II: "rational beings are designated 'persons' because their nature indicates that they are ends in themselves." 64. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in Great Books of the Western World, Robert M. Hutchins, ed. (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), Book II, Chap. 27. 9. 65. Charles M. Schwab, in Ten Commandments of Success (Chicago: La Salle Extension University, 1920), claims that "Personality is to a man what perfume is to a flower." 66. Ontological universality might be found today in the structuralism of Piaget, Kohlberg, and Gilligan, which is rejected by some. 67. Magda B. Arnold, "Human Emotion and Action," in Human Action, ed. Theodore Mischel (New York: Academic Press, 1969), p. 190. Emphasis in the original. Along the same lines, but in a different vein, Max Scheler, in Man's Place in Nature (New York: The Noonday Press, 1961), maintained that "person" is "the center of spirit... a continuously self-executing, ordered structure of acts. The person is only in and through his acts" (p. 47). 68. See, among others, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Se/f (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Seyla Benhabib, Situating the &?//(New York: Routledge, 1992); Gordon Allport, Becoming (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955); Michael E. Zimmerman, Eclipse of the Self (revised ed.; Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986). 69. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (New York: Harper & Row, 1989); Floyd W. Matson, The Broken Image (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1966); and Christos Evangeliou, "The Lost Spirit of Hellenic Philosophy," Alexandria 4 (1997): 289-304. For a brief history of the mechanistic view of humans, see Arama Vartanian, "Man-Machine from the Greeks to the Computer," in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Scribner's, 1973), Vol. 3, pp. 131-146. 70. See John 12. On the influence of this text on the Western contemplative tradition, see Dom Cuthbert Butler, Western Mysticism (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966). 71. The Gnostics of old saw the physical world as alien to human aspirations. It was "the world," with an unmistakable evil coloration; "these miserable elements" (paupertina haec elementd), "this puny cell of the creator" (haec cellula creatoris), as Marcion called it. See Tertullian, Adv. Marc. 1.14, in Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 328. 72. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Comment, in I Cor., lect. 2, sub fine. 73. Even the monastic tradition proclaimed Ora et labora ("pray and work") as the ideal, and in a significant inversion of the primacy of contemplation, it dubbed the singing of the Office "God's work" (opus Dei). 14. Protagoras, 319A. William F. Lawhead, The Voyage of Discovery: A History of Western Philosophy (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1996), p. 43. 75. J. V. Luce, An Introduction to Greek Philosophy (New York: Thames & Hudson, Ltd., 1992), p. 79. 76. H.-I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity (New York: Mentor Books, 1964), p. 82. 77. Ibid., p. 91.

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78. According to the old Scholastics, individuation depended precisely on quantified matter (materia signata quantitate). See Bonaventure, In II Sent., d.3, p.l, a.2, q.3 and Aquinas, Contra Gent. II, 93. 79. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), p. 83. 80. Aristotle, Politics I, 4 [1254a 7]. 81. Paul Ricoeur, Oneselfas A nother (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 33. See also Peter Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1957). 82. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 36-37. In fact, the importance of the existence of pre-historic tools lies in the evidence of prior thinking they present. 83. These correctives arise directly from obvious inadequacies in the classical view of the person as well as of the idea of rationality, especially when split into the practical and the theoretical. A more thorough critique can be found in Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). However, I find Rorty's arguments to be somewhat reductionistic and guilty of "damnation through caricature." It is easy to falsify theories one has restated as falsifiable. 84. In classical Greek, "zoon" ((ooov) means "animated, living being," and it includes gods, daimons, and so forth. Therefore it is not a pejorative appellation. See Plato, Timaeus, 30C. 85. See Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 333 note 11. Also Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," in Basic Writings, pp. 202-205. 86. Webster F. Hood, "The Aristotelian versus the Heideggerian Approach to the Problem of Technology," in Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey, eds., Philosophy and Technology (New York: The Free Press, 1983), p. 347. 87. Ibid., p. 347. 88. Ibid., p. 352. 89. Jonas, "The Practical Uses of Theory," in Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey, eds., Philosophy and Technology (New York: The Free Press, 1983), p. 344. 90. Hood, "The Aristotelian," p. 353. 91. Ibid., p. 356. 92. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 115-117. 93. Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 55.

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Reflections on Technology The most mysterious and wonderful thing about technology is that reality, Being, should allow itself to be manipulated by one of its evolutes, human beings. The truth is that the clay shaped into us after billions of years, allows itself to be manipulated by us to form all manner of artifacts and things. In one of his sonnets, the Spanish poet Lope de Vega (1562-1635), who himself was a priest, marveled at the fact that God in Jesus, transubstantiated into the eucharistic bread, allowed Himself to be held by his hands. It is a mystery, similarly, that the Earth should allow its ore to be smelted by us into iron and its gold fashioned into the most beautiful broach. This awe that may seem strange to us was known to the ancients. Herakleitus, it would appear, was once found by some visitors, who came to his home unexpectedly, to be warming himself by the kitchen fire. Others say he was cooking. The point is that such activities were deemed unseemly in a gentleman. Unashamed, Herakleitus explained, "Here too there be gods!"1 More radical is the story told of Siva. Once several rishis came to visit him and entering his house they found him asleep, sprawled naked upon his couch. Embarrassed, they retreated, blushing and despising Siva in his nakedness. Siva's response was swift: "They will worship me by what they laughed at," he said. And this is how the sivalihga became an object of worship. The word lihga means symbol; what stands for a signified. In this case, Siva, the deity, is conceived as invisible, "signless, without color, taste, or smell, beyond word and touch, without quality, changeless, motionless."2 Siva is the deity unmanifest who can be perceived only in his creation, which is his symbol, his linga. "The lihga, the phallus, giver of life is one of the shapes under which the nature of the shapeless can be represented."3 Therefore "it is not the lihga itself which is worshiped but the owner-of-the-/z7zga, the Progenitor."4 The lihga is one of the most popular and ubiquitous symbols of the deity in

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India. And do we shy away from seeing technology as the symbol of Being? BRIEF IRREVERENT OVERVIEW Here it may be important to remind ourselves that, as R. C. Zaehner once put it, From the moment that "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," matter and spirit were locked in close embrace, but with the Incarnation of the Word of God as man, man's own roots in matter, which Indian and other forms of asceticism had so sedulously and so successfully sought to sever, were triumphantly reaffirmed. Matter, henceforth was not to be regarded as a drag upon the human spirit, but rather as the indispensable vehicle through which the spirit must work.5 In support of this statement, it seems as if the true spirit of the earth has always immortalized itself in stone. We think of Newgrange and the pyramids. Even in India, the magnificent temple structures of Mt. Abu and Madurai bear witness to this. In the West, the Gothic cathedrals prove it, and God himself, inflamed with ire at the upstart builders of the Tower of Babel, did not destroy the tower, but merely contented himself with confusing the masons. Apparently he did not object to technology, but only to the ends to which technology was being put. This pattern is repeated again and again through the centuries. God gives Noah the sketch and specifications for a boat, and later He gives Moses three divine blueprints for constructing the Arc of the Covenant, the Tabernacle, and the first Temple. One of Jesus's favorite metaphors for the Kingdom of Heaven is a technological one: a mansion with many rooms;6 and throughout the Christian centuries, both Jesus and the Virgin Mary have appeared to devout followers with instructions to build churches at the site of the apparitions. As Edward Mclrvine aptly put it, "one is forced to conclude from religious sources that God admires technique."7 God spoke to Moses out of a burning bush — that is, in the midst of transformed matter. If God did not disdain this deed, why should we fear what God did not refuse? Perhaps, answer some today, because technology has become overwhelming. Already in ancient times we find prehistoric peoples instituting taboos; the Cynics ridiculed all progress, and both Jews and Christians had prohibitions against certain foods and certain actions. Surely, some people entertained doubts about the taboos, as we find in a delightful narrative of the Book of Acts. Peter had had a dream in which he saw the heavens open and something like a great sheet descending upon the earth. . . . In it were all kinds of animals, reptiles and birds. Then came a voice which said to him: "Get up, Peter, kill and eat!" But Peter said: "Never, Lord, for not once in all my life have I ever eaten anything common or unclean." The voice spoke to him a second time:

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"What God has made clean don't you dare call tainted!"8 Peter understood, and forthwith he refrained from imposing the kosher laws upon the new sectaries. But stronger opposition was later mounted against the products of human creativity, as in the case of the Minorites and the Luddites.9 Some argue that the onrush of technology began with the invention of writing in Sumeria some 6,000 years ago, and especially with the introduction of alphabetic writing by Semites,10 though the gap between human culture and the rest of nature was not really experienced until centuries later — in fact, only since the invention of printing, and even then, only recently; for initially, only few people, comparatively speaking, learned to read and write, so that for the majority, the relationship to the world of nature was not altered significantly. Moreover, it was not until printing itself was mechanized and other technologies, such as the clock,11 were introduced, that reading and writing became universalized, aided by the rise of the masses and of democracies with their insistence on making everything public. But exaggeration must be avoided. Even today, many words in many languages retain a sacred openness to the mysteries of the universe including those of nature. Such is the case with Om, the cosmic mantra of Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as with the Tantric mantra sounds — the "word-body" (shabda-sharira) of the Goddess, whose enunciation is believed to reverberate throughout the universe as her power is invoked. Such is the case, too, with the eucharistic words of consecration; and in the profane world, with the magic words, "Play ball!" It may be true, as some maintain, that the slow evolution of the alphabetical world, the world of words (written and spoken) has made many in our contemporary cultures unable to hear the non-verbal utterances of the natural world. The same goes for the world of technology in general: it, too, stands for many as a dumb artefact in a museum hall or antiques gallery, while for others it has become a pall over the sounds and silences of nature. But all this may be simply the result of our tendency to pay more attention to the symbols than the symbolized, to words than to their meanings, and to technology rather than to what it unconceals.12 This does not have to be the case. After all, even the alchemists involved themselves in technological explorations in search of spiritual enlightenment. It is nonetheless true that the mechanistic tendency of the last 400 years has immeasurably corrupted our ability to glimpse Being beyond and behind technology.13 Moreover, in an increasingly male dominated world, the feminine spirit (as in ruah, psyche, anima, or shakti) has been banished as a vestige of magic and superstition. Instead, an inert mechanism predominates in which each part or tool stands by itself, unrelated to the whole except by outward conjunction.14 Thus it has become more difficult to sustain an animistic view of technology (such as was quaintly held by natives when first encountering a modern contraption) because all the parts of the machinery are in existence separately from the whole, and are known as such. Moreover, while a living organism lives through forces unknown and unfathomable, a machine moves through forces clearly understandable and controllable. Plato had unwittingly introduced this view in his account of the vision of Er15 in which the universe appeared as a machine, spindle rotating within spindle, all under the impulse of some demiurge. An echo of this utterance is heard in the

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medieval conception of the universe as a machina — a clock, with God as a sort of clock maker,16 so that, in Shakespeare's words, The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order.17 The question, then, becomes whether or not this mechanistic view of technology must endure and continue to block from our sight the richness of nature and the spirit. REFLECTIONS ON TECHNOLOGY What is reality, that it should allow itself to be unconcealed through human means? According to Teilhard, The truth about the way in which things are constituted is this: Everything that exists has a basis of thought, not a basis of ether. Necessarily, then, consciousness has everywhere the power to re-emerge, because everywhere it is consciousness, dormant or ossified, that persists.18 What evidence is there for such a claim? Contemporary physics, by way of "the anthropic principle" and evolutionary theory, points to the appearance of human consciousness as a directional focus in the make for some fourteen billion years. In us, truly, the universe has become conscious of itself. It is as if the conditions conducive to the appearance, first, of life, and then, of consciousness, had been planned from the first instant of the Big Bang. Conditions follow conditions. If we are here, the conditions that rendered us possible must have been sequenced one before the other all the way back to the Big Bang. Moreover, since evolution has not stopped, it is legitimate to claim that there is in the universe a tendency toward the appearance and the enhancement of consciousness — toward the universe's own spiritualization. According to Teilhard, matter, even in all its complexity as machine, exists "to maintain [sustain] the successive growths of consciousness in the cosmos."19 According to Steiner, "the brain is the bodily instrument of thinking."20 For Teilhard, this brain has been extended to include the electronic and communication networks technology has created around the world. Technology has given us the made extension of the natural human brain.21 This planetized brain, then, may be seen as the extended bodily instrument of thinking. But the brain "thinks" when it is informed by the life of the spirit. It can be understood as a "thinking" brain "only when it is considered in relation to the thinking spirit."22 This applies also to the extended, planetized brain. For Teilhard, brain, even as planetized, is dead matter unless quickened by the life force, and spirit is its guiding light. In a more profound sense, the physical is the embodiment of the spirit; the physical is the transmuted human spirit.23 For Teilhard, God as spirit partially

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immerses himself in the physical through the incarnation and thus assumes the control and leadership of the evolving world.24 But the word still continues to become flesh in our speech, in our songs, and generally in our creations. The sea conch is said to carry within itself the sounds of the sea from which it was plucked. The world was created by God's word: God spoke and the world is, and through it the murmur of God's creative word still reaches those who wish to hear.25 Spirit, therefore, can be found in nature's matter as well as in human technology. But special vision is required to perceive the eternal in the midst of change,26 especially in the made world. So, Steiner asks, "is it not possible that what has retained the imprint of the ego in the external world waits also to approach the human soul from without, just as memory, in response to a given inducement, approaches it from within?"27 Surely the made world awaits us. If we approach it with a mind ready to see it as symbolic, it will evoke in us intimations of immortality. Symbols point beyond themselves, but through a mind-concept. The piece of pig skin is a football only for those who have the eyes to see. Whoso have eyes to see, let them see! From this perspective, then, the physical universe, including technology and the made world it has produced, may be seen as a child waiting to be born. We are the midwives. There is risk involved here, but also joy. Our use of technology, if we be artists, will humanize technology and spiritualize it and us. There is a long tradition in Christianity going back to the Pauline epistles that claims that creation eagerly awaits to be redeemed by us so as to share in our glory, just as we long for the redemption of our bodies so that God may be all in all.28 As we hope in the Spirit, creation hopes in us! We fail the world (and technology) if we do not redeem it through right use. For everything was created in Christ and for Christ. Christ is the end and the upholding principle, the point Omega toward which everything converges. The plan of God is to make everything converge in Him.29 How is this to be accomplished? Through the ministry of Christians — that is, through their actions. This is why people have different gifts, to equip them properly, so that through their work "the whole Christ" may be built up — that is, so that the whole body may attain maturity. One must hold firmly to this truth in love and strive to make everything grow into Him. By using the world christianly Christians make it — and themselves — grow into Christ.30 The presuppositions of this Christian model may not appeal to everyone, but they suggest ways in which all of us can approach both nature and the made world, including technology. Other models will be proposed later. We may need guidance in this, and I will suggest that education is the best context for providing this guidance. ACTIO IN DISTANS The ancients, given their knowledge, had difficulty conceiving of unmediated action from a distance. Motion, they thought, had to be transmitted from cause to cause, from one motor to another all the way to the end. In the heavens, each sphere had to transmit motion to the next all the way down to the smallest planet.31 Even when the sense of the enormous distances of astronomical space became

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accepted, "ether" was postulated as a kind of medium necessary for the transmission of motion. It was only when gravity was discovered and understood that the scientific community accepted the notion of action from a distance even in vacuous space.32 In the past, when people became sensitive to the role of distance in human affairs they often sought esoteric means of overcoming it. Magic, in a sense, was a way to get around distance: a curse, an incantation, a hex, a malediction, could be hurled from afar, and people all over the world believed that they produced the intended effects upon the foe. If devils could sleep with maidens, so could curses kill. A case in point: in Loudun, in 1634, Pere Urbain Grandier was burned at the stake for spiritual incest at a distance committed, it was said, with the nuns of a local monastery. Four years later, Father Tranquille, who had set fire to the pyre became himself possessed and died forthwith.33 Distance has played a strange role in human affairs. Awareness of it was responsible for the introduction of the third person in our grammar, for we use he, she, it only of people and objects that are not present to us. Lack of distance was also a deterrent to killing, for one had to be close to one's victim to be able to administer the coup de grace, and facing one's enemy at close quarters was the only guarantee of success. The evolution of war technology can be associated with the development of ways to kill at a distance. The thrown stone must have come first, then the spear, the arrow, the catapult, the musket, the canon, the bomb, and now the rockets and the intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). We no longer need to face our adversaries: pressing a button is enough to wreak havoc from a distance. Paralleling this technological ability to kill from a distance is the growth of technological ways to speak at a distance. Shouts must have come first, then smoke or fire signals, letters, semaphores (used already by Roman commanders in the field), telegraphs and telephones (where the words themselves denote distance), and now e-mail. Note that this technological triumph over distance has not automatically brought us closer together, for love and friendship still linger, but the possibility has been established if only the will be there.34 One reason is that in bridging the distance technology renders us more vulnerable to those who now can reach and touch us from anywhere in the world. One must add to this that, both in the case of war and in that of communication, a major obstacle has been, and continues to be, the influence the money-making, business establishment has exercised over the technologies, though in different ways. Entrepreneurs make money in the manufacture and sale of armaments to the highest bidder regardless of national or other loyalties, and business conglomerates regulate electronic traffic through charges, censorship, and the monopoly of access. It is a matter for wonder that these triumphs over distance should be curtailed by the selfish interest of a few people. Still, in the case of communication, the greed of profiteers should not blind us to the technological boon of being able to sing words of love to loved ones at a distance, anywhere in the world.

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TECHNOLOGY AND ART Pliny the Elder, in his Historia Naturalis, marvels openly at the wondrous power of the art of painting, of which he had made as thorough a study as was possible in his time. It is Pliny who tells us the story of the competition between the fourth century B. C. E. painters Parrhasios and Zeuxis. Zeuxis exhibited a picture of some grapes, so true to nature that the birds flew up to it. Parrhasios then displayed a painting of a linen curtain, so realistic that Zeuxis himself asked him to draw it to see what was behind. On discovering his mistake he conceded the prize to Parrhasios.35 Pliny also has preserved for us the story about Apelles of Cos (fl. fourth century B. C. E.) who made it his rule never to let a day pass, however busy he was, without drawing something by way of practice; hence the proverb, "Not a day without a line."36 Almost two thousand years later, George Bernard Shaw, having attended a concert given by violinist Jascha Heifetz, wrote to him the following note: My dear Mr. Heifetz: My wife and I were overwhelmed by your concert. If you continue to play with such beauty, you will certainly die young. No one can play with such perfection without provoking the jealousy of the gods. I earnestly implore you to play something badly every night before going to bed... ,37 Shaw's humorous comment belies his admiration for the great artist, a feeling most of us have when in the presence of unusual artistic achievement. The same wonder grips us when in the presence of Michelangelo's "Pieta," or when strolling through the gardens in front of the Taj Mahal. There is something magnificent in all these achievements of the human imagination, something that almost makes us believe we are in the presence of genius, or that some wondrous power has shown itself to us upon the earth. But in all of this we often overlook the role of technology. The performance of a Heifetz is wrought on the flimsy strings of an instrument manufactured by human hands. We do not see, as Emerson put it, "that Paganini can extract rapture from a catgut."38 Paintings of extraordinary beauty deck the walls of caves in France, Spain, and Africa, and archaeologists are now trying to discover what tools were used in their execution 45,000 years ago. There are flutes extant made of bone which date to very ancient times, and their sound still reaches us and fills us with emotion. They, too, are tools; they belong to the realm of technology which we employ to create beauty upon this earth. I once knew an old man in a monastery. Having lived there for many years he had acquired a sort of peaceful demeanor that did not betray past struggles and disappointments. Yet I knew that as a young man he had been a rather famous violinist who concertized widely to general applause and commendation. Then, one day, during a concert, in the midst of a rather difficult passage, a string snapped in his violin. The experience so unnerved him that he found himself unable to continue. Thoughts of the insufficiency of life, the inadequacy of human achievements, and the ephemeral nature of fame assailed him and weighed him down. In the end he decided that the only course left for him to follow was to build

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for eternity in heaven "where no thief intrudes and no moth destroys"39 — and, obviously, no violin strings snap. And that is how he became a monk, for want of a string. For want of a technological item lives change, for better or for worse: your car's brakes fail and you plunge into an abyss. The ancient Egyptians used copper chisels, barely adequate to the task, to carve colossal stone statues and inscribe hieroglyphs, and Renaissance sculptors went to great lengths to improve the technology used to produce their art. Benvenuto Cellini has left us an unforgettable account of the hardships he had to undergo in order to cast his famous statue of Perseus severing the head of Medusa,40 and everyone knows the story of Michelangelo, supine on the high scaffold, painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, eyes smarting from the paint that splattered on his face. The point is that these achievements, and thousands of others that could be recounted, involve technology and would never have come to be without it. We read The Epic ofGilgamesh, entirely written in cuneiform, and marvel at the authors that used stylus and clay to transmit their accounts of life on earth. The wonder is, partly, how they were able to transcend the mere instrumentality of the brush, the pigment, or the foundry and the mold, the chisel and the stone, and create such things of beauty to be enjoyed forever. They did not disdain technology, but used it, and for exalted human purposes. THE MONASTERY GARDEN In his essay, "Beauty" (1860), Emerson observes how the sciences, generally, lack a human side. He notes how chemistry, for example, analyzes things and breaks them down, but it does not reconstruct. And he adds, "alchemy which sought to transmute one element into another, to prolong life, to arm with power, — that was in the right direction."41 Without knowing the symbolic nature of the alchemist's pursuit, Emerson had already intuited a profound truth about it. Since the time of Jung we have become aware that the alchemists were not concerned exclusively with the transformation of lead into silver or gold but with their own spiritual transformation, using material elements as symbols of it. The technology of what today we call chemistry was used by them in the search for enlightenment. The elements are not transparent; the message is not clear. On the contrary, the message is enigmatic, and the more so the closer one gets to unraveling the mystery. Thus the alchemical texts are full of allegory, paradox, and a symbolic tension that impels the soul to seek a solution.42 In Joscelyn Godwin's words, "Ultimately, the true alchemist was concerned with a spiritual desire, corresponding very closely to the transubstantiation process . . . ; he was concerned with the searching and finding of the 'Stone of the Wise,' the lapis philosophorum, with the finding of an inner psychic spiritual gold, with the search for the highest wisdom."43 A similar pursuit of the spiritual in the context of the technological is to be found in the cultivation and arrangement of the Zen rock garden. These gardens are not very big — about the size of a tennis court. They consist of a stark rectangle of flat raked gravel, grouped or single stones, and empty space. It is the task of the

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monks to comb the gravel in long, perfectly straight rows, wavy patterns or concentric circles around the rocks, often clustered in groupings that bear a relationship to each other, as in the famous Zen garden of Ryoanji, in Kyoto, first built in 1488, where the fifteen rocks stand out in 5:2:3:2:3 clusters.44 The impression created is one of extreme care coupled with extreme simplicity. Everything unnecessary has been eliminated in order to facilitate an intuitive grasp of basic reality, reality at its most irreducible stage.45 The difference between a Zen rock garden and an English one is clear: In the English garden . . . one seeks nature free of all "artificiality." In the Japanese garden, on the contrary, one attempts to express within a confined space the total of mountains and rivers. This is a highly artistic act representing the highest meaning of Shi-zen [Nature]. The English garden is available to everyone, that is, it has the character of a public garden. The Japanese garden, on the other hand, is of a private nature created solely for the few who are artistically gifted. Nature in the English garden relates itself equally towards everybody. The Shi-zen of a Japanese garden requires one who is able to experience Shi-zen as such. This implies that Shi-zen is never outside, but rather within this or that person.46 The context, however, is material and the meditation is technological. I see the monk in his loose, simple robes walking slowly through the precinct, tracing the patterns on the gravel or the sand with a wooden rake. His attention is riveted on the patterns, but without tension; his effort is directed entirely to the task at hand; his gaze is fixed on the furrows which, under the firm pressure of the rake, appear on the sand in perfect symmetry as if drawn by a machine. The simplicity of the entire exercise possesses a harmony where nothing is out of place, neither rake, nor hand, nor robe, nor gait, nor pace. This is the kind of meditation that sunders rocks and builds gardens, as Muso Soseki (1275-1351) has expressed it in his poetry.47 CONCLUSION The universe fashioned us not only to think of it (we are the universe become conscious of itself;48 nay more, we are Being become conscious of itself and, in this self-awareness, standing out of itself49) but equally to uncover and bring forth aspects of it which it by itself could not reveal. The Pauline Letter to the Romans 8:18-23, presents the world as a woman in labor waiting for us to deliver its offspring: technology makes us the midwives of the world. The Baal-Shem, according to Buber, taught that the people we live with or meet with, the animals that help us with our farm work, the soil we till, the materials we shape, the tools we use, they all contain a mysterious spiritual substance which depends on us for helping it toward its pure form, its perfection.50 "This is the mystery of our existence," says Buber, "the superhuman chance of mankind,"51 and the message we must proclaim about the nature of technology. Buber illustrates his point with a story, with which I will conclude this chapter: "Where is the dwelling of God?" This was the question with which the Rabbi of Kotzk surprised a number of learned men who happened to be visiting him.

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Technology and the Spirit They laughed at him: "What a thing to ask! Is not the whole world full of His glory?" Then he answered his own question: "God dwells wherever man lets Him in." This is the ultimate purpose: to let God in.52

Or, in more secular terms, to let Being be there, even in the midst of our highest technological achievements. NOTES 1. Frag. 74[W]. Philip Wheelwright, Heraclitus (New York: Atheneum, 1964), p. 68. 2. Linga Purana 1,3, 2-3. 3. Alain Danielou, Hindu Polytheism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), p. 222. Early Christian Patristic theology will make a similar distinction between God's inner word, un-uttered and unutterable (logos endiathetos) and God's spoken Word (logosprophorikos). 4. tivaPurana 1. 16. 106. 5. R. C. Zaehner, Matter and Spirit (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), pp.157-158. However, one should keep in mind the contrarian philosophy and practice of Tantra in which yoga is bhoga (enjoyment), and the material (prakriti, signified by "the five M's") is not renounced but experienced ritually unto salvation. The contemporary development of divyabhava sadhana into an evolutionary mixture of matter and consciousness by Sri Aurobindo Ghose is especially noteworthy in this regard. 6. John 14: 2. 7. Edward Mclrvine, "The Admiration of Technique," in Dialogue on Technology, ed. Robert Theobald (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1967): 41. 8. ,4cte 10: 9-16. 9. The Luddites were not against machinery per se — though they destroyed it — but against the unemployment and the low wages that factory owners had instituted. 10. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 100. 11. According to McLuhan, the technologization of life began in earnest with the rise of the scholastic method in the Middle Ages and the spread of the clock. See The Mechanical Bride (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 33. Also Cox, The Secular City. 12. Abram (p. 115) bemoans the substitution of speech for the encounter with nature, which he discerns already in Socrates's word in Phaedrus 230D, "I'm a lover of learning, and trees and open country won't teach me anything, whereas men in the town do." Abram is only superficially correct, for the learning Socrates is after — what is human love — is, indeed, more to be learned from humans than from bees. It is thus that Enkidu, in The Epic ofGilgamesh, had to learn from the prostitute what the animals couldn't teach him: how to dwell among humans in the city of Gilgamesh. It must also be remembered that already at the time of Plato there was a "back to nature" movement, spearheaded by the Cynics, from which Plato, no doubt, would have wanted to disassociate both Socrates and himself. 13. Merchant, The Death of Nature, p. 193. 14. Ibid., p. 195. 15. Plato, Republic, X. 614. 16. See Nicole Oresme, Le Livre du del et du Monde (1370), excerpted in Merchant, p. 223. 17. Ulysses, in Troilus and Cressida, Act I, Scene 3, line 85 and following. 18. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "Cosmic Life," in Writings in Time of War (London: Collins, 1968), pp. 4 0 ^ 1 .

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19. Teilhard, "Mystical Milieu," in Writings in Time of War, p. 121. 20. Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1971), p. 11. 21. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Man's Place in Nature (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 92, 110; The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), p. 249, note 2. 22. Steiner, Theosophy, p. 16. 23. Ibid., p. 39. 24. Teilhard, The Phenomenon of Man, pp. 293-294. 25. Cf. St. Gregory the Great, Moralia V, 29; ML 75, 707. 26. Theosophy, p. 39. 27. Ibid., p. 43. 28. Romans. 8:18-23. 29. Colossians 1:16-20 and Ephesians 1:10-12. 30. Ephesians 4:10-16. Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations VII, 9, gave expression to the same sentiments: "All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other thing. For things have been coordinated, and they combine to form the same ordered universe. For there is one universe made up of all things, and one God who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, one common reason in all intelligent beings, and one truth." For a recent statement of the same idea, see G. M. Hopkins's poem, "As Kingfishers catch Fish," in Poems and Prose (New York: Knopf, 1995), p. 18. 31. See Aristotle, Metaphysics 12, 8 [1074a 15-21]. 32. Johannes Kepler, Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, IV, in Great Books of the Western World, Robert M. Hutchins, ed. (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), Vol. 16, p. 897. 33. Aldous Huxley, The Devils ofLoudun (New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, 1992), pp. 220-226. 34. Charles J. Sabatino, "Human Meaning in a Technological Age," Humanitas 14:1 (February, 1978): 22. 35. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 35, Ch. 65. 36. Ibid., Ch. 84: "Nullus dies sine linea" 37. Quoted in Rollo May, The Courage to Create (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1975), p. 27. 38. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Spiritual Laws," in Essays (New York: Books, Inc., s. a.), p. 108. 2>9.Luke\2:Z2>. 40. Benvenuto Cellini, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, George Bull, transl. (London: The Folio Society, 1966), pp. 302-310. 41. Emerson, Essays, p. 297. 42. Adam McLean, A Commentary on the Mutus Liber (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1991), p. 47. Jeffrey Raff, "Jung and the Alchemical Imagination," Alexandria 5 (2000): 209-234. 43. Joscelyn Godwin, "Introduction" to Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1989), p. 79. 44. Abd al-Hayy Moore, Zen Rock Gardening (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1992), pp. 22-23. J. Edward Kidder, Jr., Japanese Temples (Amsterdam: Harry N. Abrams, 1964). 45. Daisetz T. Suzuki, The Essentials of Zen Buddhism (London: Rider & Co., 1963), p. 461. 46. Humbertus Tellenbach and Ben Kimura, "The Japanese Concept of 'Nature,' " in Nature in Asian Traditions and Thought, J. Callicott and Roger T. Ames, eds. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 158.

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47. Moore, Zen Rock Gardening, p. 55. 48. Teilhard, The Phenomenon of Man, p. 220. 49. This is what Heidegger terms "ek-sistence." See "Letter on Humanism," in Basic Writings, p. 204. 50. Martin Buber, "The Way of Man according to the Teachings of Hasidism," in Religion from Tolstoy to Camus, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), p. 440. 51. Ibid., p. 441. 52.Ibid.

4

On Spirituality So far I have made the claim that technology can and should be spiritualized. I have also shown some examples of ways in which this can be accomplished. It is time now to explain in greater detail what is meant by spiritualization, and how this can become one of the most important tasks to be performed by teachers and other concerned individuals. More than a hundred years ago William James called the attention of teachers to what he termed a "pathological anaesthesia" to the magic of the world.1 More recently, David Purpel has written of a moral and spiritual crisis in education;2 Steven G. Smith has written that today spirit "suffers philosophical neglect,"3 and Robert Coles has called for the development of "a day-to-day attentiveness . . . that touches all spheres of activity."4 Yet nowhere in either pedagogical literature or practice (much less in society at large) do we find a concern to develop such qualities of life in teachers, even though it is obvious that, if spirituality is desired, those who live the spiritual life, however narrowly, are likely to be better teachers than those who merely know about it, however much.5 Spirit, spiritus, means breath, almost onomatopoeically. It is the ruah that YHWH breathed into the clay model of a man he had fashioned, and therefore it is an onrush of wind, expansive, vivifying. According to Smith, terms such as ruah, pneuma, spiritus, convey the notion of air moving, of breath, or wind.6 Spirit is a long, drawn-out breath. Spirituality, on the other hand, may be said to denote the mind grafted onto the wind that is spirit. More concretely, it is the practical way in which we ready ourselves to let Being blow us on or, to use another metaphor, to shine among us.7 Here I will argue that spirituality is one of the most important qualities we all can develop, not only for ourselves, but also to instill such qualities and attitudes in the users of technology. I shall point to some of the obstacles to such spiritual development and shall suggest some ways in which it can be integrated in teacher preparation and practice. How this can be achieved will be detailed in another chapter.

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PLATO AND THE SPIRIT Michael Gelven develops his fundamental idea of spirit from an analysis of Plato's Republic, especially Book IV. Singling out the middle "part" of the tripartite view of the human person and its corresponding virtue — courage (87ri6C|Liia), which he translates as spirit (OVJJIOC; denotes a somewhat forceful gust of wind, hence the association with courage) — he sees in it the capacity to stand up or fight for something greater than the individual self, namely, the collectivity, the group. Therefore he concludes that spirit means "that who I am is understood in terms of my belonging to a greater reality than my own private existence."8 Gelven's analysis is brilliant, though some might object to the interpretation of the Platonic "courage" (0C(i6g) as spirit. Many translators use a phrase, "the spirited part" (to OujioeiSec;), by which they strive to convey both the quality of courage as bravery and the quest for fame and preferment, and one could argue that spirit does have this connotation of effort; but the significant point, I think, is the realization that courage involves a transcendence beyond the individual self, a point Gelven develops very well. In one of his books, Joseph Campbell narrates an incident that took place in Hawaii. A despondent young man was about to jump to his death from a high cliff in the mountains when the police patrol came upon him and rushed to save him. As the young man jumped, one of the policemen grabbed him, and he was himself being pulled to his death by the momentum of the jumper when the other guard drew the two of them back. Campbell wonders how the first policeman could have taken an action that so clearly endangered his own life, and he finds an answer in an essay by Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer claims that at moments like the one that faced the first policeman we are suddenly made aware of our unity with others. The boundaries that make us individual dissolve and before us lies the collectivity to which we all belong; even, perhaps, the That (tat) of the Upanishads: The recognition of one's own essential being in another, objectively present individual is most clearly and beautifully evident in those cases in which a human being already on the brink of death is anxiously and actively concerned with the welfare and rescue of others.9 Gelven develops his insight further in terms of the political necessities of the state. Also, he sees spirit as prerequisite to rationality because having committed to the whole, the "spirited ones" or warriors understand the value and importance of the dictates of the guardians or rulers who, after all, are chosen from among them. This allows Gelven to claim that "respect for the authority of mind is what is called spirit."10 From Gelven's analysis, as I explain below, I choose the quality of openness to the beyond as the characteristic of spirit. This beyond may be reason, or the Good, or some divinity; it may also mean simply, in Heidegger's terms, the region that regions, an undiscovered country forever to be discovered, with whose bourne we are constantly in touch but which we never fully reach. Because of this paradoxical condition attendant on the concept of spirit, spirit

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is often interpreted in different ways and the pursuit of spirit, the spiritual, is concretized in different paths. I shall outline some of these later, but here it should suffice to say that none of these, just by itself, encompass spirit in toto, but that all of them, in their diversity, bear witness to the riches of the region beyond. Lao-tzu wrote in Tao-Te Ching, 1, that "the way that can be walked is not the way," which must mean, at least, that any claim of finality or exclusivity for any path is sheer delusion. As St. Augustine would later put it, "if we understand it, it is not God."11 THE NATURE OF SPIRITUALITY The nature of spirit is by no means a matter agreed upon. In the West, the Platonic distinction between the intelligible and the sensible was colored by the Christian distinction between soul and body, itself tinged with the Gnostic distinction between spirit and matter and the Hebrew distinction between spirit and soul. The result was a tripartite division between spirit, soul, and body. Spirit was defined in contradistinction to matter, and spirituality as a certain non-material and even religious quality of life.12 Here I maintain that spirituality connotes, first of all, a quality of lived experience rather than a mode of knowing, though obviously such living involves reflection and may include profound cognitive interests. Further, I maintain that such living involves some sense of self-transcendence, "the transcending of one's being,"13 not necessarily toward a god or higher power, but certainly beyond the narrow, selfish confines of ego; and it is rooted in the knowledge that human nature involves a radical openness, or a radical non-coincidence with itself that is the ground of hope, humility, and growth, but also of moral evil. According to Suzuki, in a spiritual situation, the experience indeed is my own but I feel it to be rooted elsewhere. The individual shell in which my personality is so solidly encased explodes at the moment of satori. Not necessarily that I get unified with a being greater than myself or absorbed in it, but that my individuality, which I found rigidly held together and definitely kept separate from other individual existences, becomes loosened somehow from its tightening grip and melts away into something indescribable, something which is of quite a different order from what I am accustomed to.14 To be human is to be capax infiniti.15 Again, as Suzuki says, there is no necessary connection here with a deity or any other kind of transcendental reality (though this is not excluded, either). The point is that spirituality does not automatically or vi verbi connect with religion. Writing about spirituality is not an underhanded way of bringing in religious considerations but a way of conceiving the human condition as open to the beyond. Further, spirituality entails the pursuit of the highest values commensurate with one's particular calling, personality, culture, and religious orientation. Thus it would be found in the actualization of the highest ideals of a Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Shinto, Buddhist, Anthroposophist, or Humanist life,16 and it would be equally discernible in the failures.

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More specifically, spirituality defines the quality of a life of spirit. Spirit itself consists in the radical openness or self-transcendence characteristic of human nature. It is the basic possibility of a true human existence in time. It is opposed to thing, the Sartrean in-itself, and to all facticity; in Derrida's words, "it is what in no way allows itself to be thingified"17 or immobilized. Moreover, spirit is what ultimately makes us undefinable because the terminus ad quern, the parameter toward which there is an openness, is not forthcoming and is not definable outside a strictly religious context. It is like a horizon blurred in the pale blue haze of distance. We are undefinable due to the elusiveness of that toward which we are an openness and in relation to which we would, perhaps, define ourselves. For this very reason, spirit is what allows us to ask questions of ourselves, because, unlike things, we are not "finished" or "complete."18 We are like travelers constantly on the verge of journeys, of whom it is always legitimate to ask, quo vadis? Or, if the mode be feminine, quo duceris?19 Spirit, then, is not mere inferiority, as is often supposed based on the PlatonicJudaeo-Christian model. Neither is spirit primarily what is opposed to matter as eternity is opposed to time. Actually, temporality is essentially connected with spirit because time pertains to the essence of actualization, to the essence of journeying. On the other hand, once its being is given to it, a thing is what it is instantaneously; but spirit becomes. Therefore temporality is not negative; in fact, from a certain perspective, spirit and temporality are inextricably twined, for the very existing of spirit is the temporalization of human becoming.20 This meaning is captured exquisitely in the children's story, "The Velveteen Rabbit." The Velveteen Rabbit, a Christmas gift to The Boy, had lived for a long time in the cupboard with all the other toys. He had seen a long succession of such toys come and go, broken and then abandoned, for once their mainsprings were snapped they could not hold the attention of The Boy. This happened mostly to the mechanical toys, the arrivistes, who were popular with those who knew nothing about reality. The Rabbit's only true friend was the Skin Horse. Now, the Skin Horse had been in the cupboard longer than any other toy. He was shabby and ordinary, but there was something about him that made him special: he was real. "What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?" "Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real. . . . It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."21 Reality, according to the Skin Horse, is conferred by love, but yet it is a quality not

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easily apprehended by all. The question, therefore, is worth asking, whether the ugliness and unreality many people perceive in technology is simply the result of their own lack of spiritual insight. Finally, spirituality describes the ecstasy of spirit,22 spirit's passing beyond itself in the free actualization of all human potentialities. To be spiritual is to be aware of being awakened to the beyond.23 In this sense it is germane to the notion of vocation, understood as the call to tap the most fundamental aptitudes we possess while in pursuit of our lives.24 SINS AGAINST THE SPIRIT Now, it is obvious that not every life is lived in the context or awareness of an openness to the beyond. We do not like uncertainty. We find it difficult to live in hope because hope implies a certain unpredictability, a lack of control of all the outcomes of our actions; we prefer planning, which has a certain futuristic orientation and includes, even, a manageable degree of uncertainty which we minimize as much as possible. Openness to transcendence is not everybody's cup of tea. It is not difficult to see, therefore, how much of life is passed in denials of transcendence. Here I shall maintain with Niebuhr that sin is any denial of transcendence. Sin is what Sartre called "bad faith,"25 pretending there is nothing left for us to become, whether as individuals or as groups. Such denials, however, carry with them a certain sense of shame because we "know" all along we are not finished till we die. We are simply lying to ourselves as well as to others. In Niebuhr's words: If fmiteness cannot be without guilt because it is mixed with freedom and stands under ideal possibilities, it cannot be without sin (in the more exact sense of the term) because man makes pretensions of being absolute in his fmiteness. He tries to translate his finite existence into a more permanent and absolute form of existence. Ideally men seek to subject their arbitrary and contingent existence under the dominion of absolute reality. But practically they always mix the finite with the eternal and claim for themselves, their nation, their culture, or their class, the center of existence. This is the root of all imperialism in man and explains why the restricted predatory impulses of the animal world are transmuted into the boundless imperial ambitions of human life.26 These general claims must be explained and concretized, but here I shall restrict myself to some that characteristically might affect our dealings with technology. Without being exhaustive, what examples can one give of denials of transcendence? An obvious one is the abbreviation of infinity to mean this or that orthodox ideology, religion, or political system, the esoteric or occult, the conceptual, one's culture (especially if taken at its lowest common denominator), one's pet teaching method, one's discipline. Partiality and fanaticism are reprehensible on many grounds, but perhaps principally as denials of transcendence. Thus it would be "sinful" to abbreviate reality to the sanctioned modes, making no room for innovation, especially because of some obscure scriptural saying, the pronouncements

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of some pseudo-prophet, or the tenets of one's political party. Two, the ready capitulation to mediocrity, to the average, to the mass point of view is surely another example. As Ortega claimed, we live in the era of the rights of the mediocre, where to be different is to be indecent. "The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will."11 This commonplace average person, Ortega says, is "the new barbarian," typified above all by the specialist and the professional, "more learned than ever before, but at the same time more uncultured — the engineer, the physician, the lawyer, the scientist,"28 to which we could add today the business person and, too often, the teacher, and the computer expert. Three, there is a pride of reason, a distinctly male sin which Michele Crozier has called "the arrogance of rationality"; namely, self-assurance in one's knowledge to the point of dogmatism. In Niebuhr's words, All human knowledge is tainted with an "ideological" taint. It pretends to be more true than it is. It is finite knowledge, gained from a particular perspective; but it pretends to be final and ultimate knowledge.... [This] pride of intellect is derived on the one hand from ignorance of the fmiteness of the human mind and on the other hand from an attempt to obscure the known conditioned character of human knowledge and the taint of self-interest in human truth.29 One ponders with dismay Camus's words, "How many crimes committed merely because their authors could not endure being wrong!"30 or, in the case of women, because their authors could not endure being right.31 This sinful pride of reason is conspicuous among sectaries of cyberspace, hackers and other fanatics who glory in their recondite knowledge to the point of despising those who know less than they. Of course, such pride is not the exclusive domain of the computer expert: it appears, too, among physicians and nutritionists, for it is always alluring to communicate in an esoteric language not intelligible to all. Four, the schismatic sin. This sin is somewhat connected with rationality because the function of reason is generally to divide, to apportion, to distinguish between this and that, to create orders and hierarchies, sequences, compartments, which we then consider final, unresolvable, irreducible one to the other. Pascal himself distinguished between "1'esprit de geometrie" and "1'esprit de finesse," and he went on to describe them, the one based on obscure principles, the other on principles so clear that it would only be necessary to open one's eyes to see them. To be intuitive, he says, is only a question of good eyesight.32 On the other hand, as Luke Keller writes, science, a contemporary method of approaching mystery in nature, does not preclude spiritual experience of the mystical. On the contrary, science informs an intuitive approach to mystery and allows us to explore in great detail our connectedness with our physical surroundings. Such explorations, like a glance

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into the night sky, inspire awe and spark imagination.33 Life does not come to us with labels. "Our meddling intellect," as Tennyson calls it, "misshapes the beauteous forms of things," and we make no effort to straighten or put together what it dissects. No wonder that through the centuries, as rationalism grew (and as the romantic revolt against it was being quietly hatched), people like Luther could speak of "the Whore reason," and Swift would echo the epithet by labeling the floating island Gulliver encounters in one of his travels, "La Puta" ("the Slut"). Five, there is the instrumentalist fallacy (to which teachers are especially prone today), that flashy technology can supplant mystery, and that where insight is lacking hardware can win the day. But, as currently used, technology eschews mystery and, with it, transcendence. Also, democracy abhors mystery because it is unpublishable. Mysteries are unpublishable because they cannot be put into words and because only some, not all, can peer into them. How would we handle a situation in which only visionaries could be teachers? The suggestion is inconceivable today, but the truth is there: since we cannot have visionaries we train instrumentalists, people with the tools to handle every eventuality, and we forget that, in Norman O. Brown's felicitous phrase, "fools with tools are still fools."34 This sin is especially lethal in the case of technology, for the machine is, almost by definition, immanent. It is made to certain specifications, and these are known to the inventors as well as the manufacturers. In fact, most users receive, upon purchase of a machine, a set of instructions on how to operate it, and while some of these are more detailed than others, they are generally intended to remove mystery from the machine so that any idiot can operate it. This is the message of the proliferation of books for "dummies." This is also one problem with the scientific method, for it aims at prediction, for which it is necessary to have a grasp of the phenomenon with nothing left to chance. This is, of course, not possible, as Heisenberg's so-called "uncertainty principle" holds and as Godel's undecidability theorem further demonstrates, but the science that grounds technology is, for the most part, ignorant of such refinements as it plunges along assured that everything will eventually be made plain. Indeed, as an overflow of the scientific method into ordinary life, we no longer hope but plan (as was mentioned above), for hope connotes a certain openness to mystery and unpredictability, and science and business cannot deal with this. This sin, however, carries within itself an implicit penalty. Mystery holds things together because outcomes are not predictable; the elimination of mystery makes things fly apart, disintegrate, discombobulate. This is the punishment of Oedipus for solving the riddle of the Sphinx: his life must now unravel, every little detail of it made public, the ultimate consequence being his exile, which for a Greek was almost worse than death. The history of riddles and enigmas support this conclusion, for generally they do not provide answers, since the objective of the riddle is not an answer but the dwelling in the mystery. "To be riddled," writes David Appelbaum, "is to put one's identity in question.... To put the riddle to rest with an answer amounts to the death of our most human possibility, which is to

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enter and re-enter the enigma of life. Why else have we been placed on the planet?"35 To deal with the riddle of transcendence we need to learn the spiritual wisdom that Uddalaka wished for his son, Svetaketu, the wisdom which enables us to hear the unheard, think the unthought, and know the unknown.36 Six, the demise of questioning brought about by the subordination of mind to power, of teacher to administrator, of truth to political correctness, of invention to repetition is, again, "sinful." Today most teachers are subalterns and, as such, they speak someone else's words or speak because they are expected to, even commanded, though they may have nothing important to say. Nietzsche raises the question: Can a philosopher commit himself with a good conscience to having to teach something daily? And to teach anyone who cares to listen? Must he not pretend to know more than he actually knows? Must he not talk before strangers about things which he could discuss safely only with his closest friends? And is he not robbing himself of his most wonderful freedom to follow his genius when and where it calls him — by being obliged to think publicly on predetermined subjects at appointed hours? What if he feels some day: "Today I cannot think, I have no good ideas" — and nevertheless he would have to appear and give the appearance of thinking!37

FALSE PREMISES, FALSE PROMISES I am setting this seventh "sin" separate because its roots involve a denial of transcendence based on false premises. Ray Kurzweil correctly points out that spiritual experience has been a part of human life for far too long to be ignored. He defines spiritual experience as "a feeling of transcending one's everyday physical and mortal bounds to a sense of a deeper reality."38 He also mentions the fact, known for almost half a century, that during periods of meditation or intense creativity, the brain's electrical activity is clearly marked by the appearance of so-called alpha waves, which are different from the waves the brain produces while engaged in other types of activity. From these facts Kurzweil goes on to describe current experiments aimed at enhancing the production of alpha waves on the assumption that encouraging the generation of these waves is synonymous with the generation of spiritual experiences. If spiritual experience is synchronous with alpha waves, he argues, then the production of alpha waves should give rise to spiritual experiences. But this is not the way it works. Synchronicity is not causality. Running, for example, is synchronous with an increased heart rate, but increasing the heart rate does not produce or enhance running. All human activity is synchronous with a brain event; this is part of our physicality. Further, specific activities may correspond to or be accompanied by specific brain events which are not associated with other kinds of activities; but concomitance does not entail causation. The fact that two events are observed to occur together is not enough to warrant claims of causality either way. Constant conjunction is just that, no more, as any student of Hume would know. It is, moreover, important to emphasize that the very open-endedness of spirit

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renders problematical its being tied to any kind of brain wave or, for that matter, religious implementation. These two factors, the logical mistake and the encapsulation of spirit, should help us understand the fallacy of claims, such as Kurzweiler's, about the future of "spiritual" machines. It is not so much that such claims are repugnant to the spirit as that they are based on a category mistake when from concomitance they argue consequence. A spiritual machine is an oxymoron because it is not enough to produce machines to conjure up spirit. Kurzweil's claim is appealing but fallacious. I should add that a similar mistake was made by Newton when he concluded, at the end of his prism experiment, that light was "made up" of the colors of the spectrum, not realizing that the experiment had interfered with light and that therefore his conclusions applied only to refracted light, not to light itself, a point that was brought up against him forcefully but unsuccessfully by both Kant and Goethe. SPIRITUALITY AND INTELLIGENCE Recently, Howard Gardner has made the claim that a spiritual intelligence and an existential intelligence should be added to his original list of seven.39 The grounds for this assertion were that the new modes met the criteria he had originally set up for distinguishing among different types of intelligence. Stepping very carefully around claims of religion and morality, Gardner delineates types of spiritual and existential "thinking" that come very close to what I have termed "spirituality." For example, writing about "existential intelligence," he identifies it as "the capacity to locate oneself with respect to the furthest reaches of the cosmos — the infinite and the infinitesimal. . . . There is a species potential to engage in transcendental concerns."40 Gardner's claim may be sustainable, but the grounds for his classification differ from the ones I have adopted here. Gardner introduces each intelligence in terms of what he calls "an end state — a socially recognized and valued role that appears to rely heavily on a particular intellectual capacity."41 That is, the beginning, at least of the inquiry is set off by specific and recognizable behaviors, and there is nothing reprehensible about this stance. However, I seek what Sartre has called "an irreducible,"42 something that cannot be reduced to simpler categories and, in turn, that grounds a whole wealth of meanings. In other words, my definitions of spirit and of the spiritual arise or flow out of what human beings are, not how they behave. The difference may not be large, but it is, I think, significant enough to be mentioned here. CONCLUSION Technology presents one of the greatest challenges to the life of the spirit. This is due to the fact that, at least in appearance, technology seems to have a life of its own. Prospects of cloning, robotics, and artificial intelligence immediately raise questions about technology's independence, as if it were a new golem or a new creature from Dr. Frankenstein's lab, only too ready to turn against its makers. Not that this is a new threat: it has existed in the past, but every new startling invention

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reawakens the primal fears and the warnings about enslavement. In ancient times Asklepios, the first known great medical doctor, was turned into a god after his death, his shrine being at Epidauros. Daedalus was mistaken for a god as he flew away from Crete on wings of his own invention, and while he was able to maintain a balanced outlook on his powers, his son Icarus was not, and therefore tumbled into the sea and drowned. Simon Magus commanded the admiration of emperors and public alike and so have countless magicians and prestidigitators since his day. In 1741 Tortelli wrote about the clock that "it seems to be alive, since it moves of its own accord"43; and need we remind ourselves that this was the very reason for naming our cars "automobiles" ("self-movers")? Whenever such inventions have occurred there has been a tendency to see them as independent units challenging the human hegemony on this earth, and consequently there has always been a need to counter such anthropomorphic explanations by keeping the machine in its place or by worshiping it, thus denying human transcendence. But the threat is not extinguished by awareness of it. Clocks, and cars, and flying machines are very much with us, so the need still arises to discover a way to interpret their being and to bring them into our own modes of existence. The suggestion being made here is that spirituality offers the best way to achieve this redemption. NOTES 1. William James, Talks to Teachers (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1958), p. 170. 2. David E. Purpel, The Moral and Spiritual Crisis in Education (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1989). Also Arthur T. Jersild, When Teachers Face Themselves (New York: Teachers College Press, 1967). 3. Steven G. Smith, The Concept of the Spiritual (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 4. 4. Robert Coles, The Spiritual Life of Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1990), p. 9. 5. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Mentor, 1959), Lecture XX, Conclusions, p. 370. In some respects the neglect of spirituality, especially when contrasted with the emphasis on scientific investigation, arises from a masculine preference for the inquisitive and the analytic; for spirituality, in so far as it implies openness and receptivity, hearkens to a predominantly feminine stance. Not that spirituality is restricted to women; but accepting one's call requires a receptive stance characteristic of feminine consciousness. See Erich Neumann, The Fear of the Feminine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 84; Gotz, "Education and Masculine/Feminine Consciousness," pp. 23-32. 6. Smith, The Concept of the Spiritual, pp. 9-10. 7. Adrian Van Kam, In Search of Spiritual Identity (Denville, NJ: Dimension Books, Inc., 1975), pp. 8-9. 8. Michael Gelven, Spirit and Existence (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1990), p. 14. See also Smith, The Concept of the Spiritual, p. 15. 9. Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Ethics," 6, in Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, transl. (London: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 140; Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 110. 10. Gelven, Spirit, p. 16.

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11. "Si enim comprehendis, non est Deus": Sermo 117, 3, 5; ML 38, 663. 12. For a more detailed and penetrating analysis see Smith, The Concept of the Spiritual, passim. 13. Smith, The Concept of the Spiritual, p. 45. 14. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism. Second Series (London: Luzac & Co., 1933), p. 18. 15. See Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man (Chicago: Regnery, 1967), p. 6: "Man is not intermediate because he is between angel and animal; he is intermediate within himself, within his selves. He is intermediate because he is a mixture." Also Sartre, Being and Nothingness, and Reinhold Niebuhr, Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York: Meridian, 1960), p. 66: "Man is infinite in the sense that his mind constantly seeks to relate all particular events to the totality of the real. He is finite in that this same mind is itself 'imbedded in the passing flux, a tool of a finite organism, the instrument of its physical necessities, and the prisoner of the partial perspectives of a limited time and place.' " See also Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Scribner's, 1964), and Daniel A. Helminiak, Spiritual Development: An Interdisciplinary Study (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1987), pp. 35, 41. For important feminine dimensions of this view, see Nor Hall, The Moon and the Virgin (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). 16. van Kaam, In Search of Spiritual Identity; Karlfried, Graf von Durckheim, Daily Life as a Spiritual Exercise (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Gelven, Spirit and Existence, Part II. See Carolyn M. Craft, "Spirituality for Passionate and Rapidly Changing Times," Cross Currents 46: 4 (Winter, 1996/97): 541: "Spirituality involves 'hints and guesses' (in the words of T. S. Eliot) reverently received with passion and detachment, with commitment but without grasping." 17. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 16. 18. In this respect Descartes' Cogito is sterile, since the facticity of the sum admits no doubt. The greatest importance, however, attaches to the next sentence, "I reflected upon the fact that I doubted . . . and that, in consequence, my spirit was not wholly perfect" (Discourse IV [33]. Emphasis added). Descartes' conclusion is that he is "a being who doubts" (Meditations II [22]). Doubt is possible where there is no absolute certainty. A being that doubts is one open to the many possibilities of truth. 19. See Ignacio L. Gotz, The Culture of Sexism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), Ch. 7. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Bollingen Series XX, 1956), p. 383, Jung speaks appropriately of "the eternally sucking gorge of the void." 20. Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 29. 21. Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit, in The Family Treasury of Children's Stories, Pauline Rush Evans, ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1956), pp. 197-198. 22. Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 98. 23. Smith, The Concept of the Spiritual, p. 67. 24. See Wayne Booth, The Vocation of a Teacher (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988); Ignacio L. Gotz, Zen and the Art of Teaching (Westbury, NY: J. L. Wilkerson, 1988) and "On Teaching as a Profession," Journal of Thought 30: 3 (Fall, 1995): 7-17; D.Huebner, "The Vocation of Teaching," in F. S. Bolin and J. M. Falk, eds., Teacher Renewal: Professional Issues, Personal Choices (New York: Teachers College Press, 1987); David T. Hansen, The Call to Teach (New York: Teachers College Press, 1995). 25. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 59 ff. 26. Niebuhr, Interpretation, pp. 84-85. 27. Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1960), p. 18.

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28. Jose Ortega y Gasset, Mission of the University (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1966), pp. 38-39. 29. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, I, pp. 194-95. 30. Albert Camus, The Fall (New York: Vintage, 1956), pp. 18-19. 31. See Mitzi Minor, "The Women of the Gospel of Mark and Contemporary Women's Spirituality," Spirituality Today 43: 2 (Summer, 1991): 134-141. 32. Pascal's Pensees (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1958), No. 1. 33. Luke Keller, "Science, Observation, and Mystery," Parabola 25: 2 (May 2000): 50. 34. Norman O. Brown, "Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind," in The Movement toward a New America, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1971), p. 629. 35. David Appelbaum, "Focus," Parabola 25: 2 (May 2000): 5. 36. Chandogya Upanishad VI. 1. 3. 37. Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator (Chicago: Regnery, 1965), p. 97. 38. Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 151. 39. Howard Gardner, Intelligence Reframed (New York: Basic Books, 1999). The original seven were described in Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 40. Gardner, Intelligence Reframed, p. 60. 41. Ibid., p. 48. 42. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 686. 43. Giovanni Tortelli, De Orthographia (1741). See Alex Keller, "A Renaissance Humanist Looks at 'New' Inventions: The Article 'Horologium' in Giovanni Tortelli's De Orthographia" Technology and Culture 11 (July, 1970): 351-363. Also Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

5 Models of Redemption This chapter presents several models of how technology can be spiritualized rather than rejected; that is, how one can maintain the openness of spirit rather than subscribe to a closed system that views technology in a purely mechanical way. The models are an aesthetic one based on the work of Dewey; a revealing one based on the work of Heidegger; one of encounter with nature drawn from several sources and another one based on the work of Buber; one based on play, and several spiritual ones derived from many sources. Further, it maintains that using these models satisfactorily does not happen automatically or the first time around: as with all spiritual paths, there are stages of development one must go through before any salutary effects may be experienced. Generalizing, in each of these models one can distinguish four stages of development, preparation, incubation, insight, and creation or verification. In other words, the development follows an established and well known pattern; they are not ready-made. These four stages correspond to the traditional spiritual ones of purification, illumination, ecstasy, and praxis. Finally, it is claimed that at least the first stage, preparation, falls squarely within what schools, for example, can do to train their wards to deal with technology in a positive spiritual way. These four stages will be illustrated in Chapter 7. No truly human life can be lived without some effort or preparation. The panoramas accessible from a high peak are not available without climbing the peak. Videos are no substitute. Nor is the exhilaration of winning a race possible without training. The self-control known to every athlete is needed equally in the search for meaning. Asceticism and purification are other names for the same thing in different contexts. Nor is this asceticism to be understood in purely negative terms, as renunciation. There is another, and perhaps more demanding, asceticism of right use. This ascetic approach, I contend, is absolutely necessary if any of the models are to be successful in redeeming technology from the crass use to which it is too

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often put. Moreover, it is incumbent upon institutions of formal education to help young people develop the skills that will enable them to lead lives that reach beyond the quotidian struggle for survival. Besides the knowledge and expertise needed to hold a job and build a career, schools must empower students to lead human lives; that is, lives that can soar above technology without despising it or being swallowed up by it. The following models may be helpful in this pursuit of meaning. TECHNOLOGY AND THE AESTHETIC Dewey's major work on art is titled, Art as Experience. Art, Dewey says, "denotes a process of... making."1 It "includes all practice," for Dewey sees "no difference between the artist and the artisan."2 On the other hand, experience is a term Dewey uses to signify the dynamic and organic interactions of nature. In a sense, experience is nature in process. From this point of view, experience is not primarily cognitive, since it is simply nature in action. However, our human consciousness, says Dewey, can convert "the relations of cause and effect that are found in nature into relations of means and consequences."3 This quality of experience available only to humans Dewey calls thinking. Thinking is "the discernment of the relation between what we try to do and what happens in consequence."4 If thinking qualifies experience insofar as it is an intelligent doing, aesthetics qualifies experience insofar as art or making is involved. Basically, art is "action that deals with materials and energies outside the body, assembling, refining, combining, manipulating them, until their new state yields a satisfaction not afforded by their crude condition."5 This definition of art hearkens back to the ancient Greek meaning of techne which involved all intelligent making. In this way art connects to technology. Just as thinking is not a different quantity in experience but merely a qualitative mode of experiencing, so aesthetics is a further qualitative refining of experience. The aesthetic is a feeling of wholeness, "of belonging to the larger, all-inclusive, whole which is the universe in which we live"; it is a feeling "of exquisite intelligibility and clarity,"6 "the delight that attends vision and learning, an enhancement of the receptive appreciation and assimilation of objects irrespective of participation in the operations of production."7 The aesthetic quality may also be predicated of objects. The difference between the two dimensions, intelligence and aesthetic feeling, is primarily one of emphasis. It is not at all a matter of different objects, some intelligible and some aesthetic, but of the emphases placed in experiencing. The aesthetic, however, is not an isolated feeling on its own account, for nothing is isolated in the organic whole of nature and experience. The aesthetic refers to vision and appreciation, and it is the primary quality of the spectator's experience. It is an appropriative enjoyment on the part of the spectators as they undergo an experience. It is possible, however, to react to the aesthetic in a more practical way. Such is the case when aesthetic perception and feeling are "utilized to bring into existence further analogous perceptions."8 This is where art comes in. It is an activity that

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simultaneously experiences the harmonies and interrelationships of nature in stirring aesthetic moments, and "uses" them as instruments or motivation for the creation of new, deeper, and more stirring experiences. Art moves from aesthetic moment to aesthetic moment by means of its own creative activity. It should be clear that if art is a quality of nature in its entirety, art does not deal with a separate reality. It is merely the intelligent and enjoyable enhancement of the harmonies of experience. Defined this way, it is clear that art does not have to do solely with poems and statues, or paintings and symphonies. Whenever and wherever harmony and coincidence of opposites is experienced in aesthetic consummation, and the experience is instrumental in recreating such harmony so that a renewal of experience may recur, we have art. Nothing is excluded, nothing is discounted. Every element of experience is capable of being raised to the instrumentality of aestheticism by the operative power of art. The only limitations are the artist's intent and desire. This is important, because to help children learn how to see technology aesthetically, one does not have to be a teacher of art, nor must the task of conjuring aesthetic feelings be restricted to the times during the school day when teacher and students are in "art classes." The aesthetic may be built from the raw materials of any ordinary experience. Through teaching, Dewey says, "a body of matters and meanings, not in themselves esthetic, become esthetic as they enter into an ordered rhythmic movement toward consummation."9 It needs to be made clear that this aestheticism must be cultivated, and that it is not necessarily associated with artistic talent. Anyone can be trained to experience the aesthetic in the presence of technology as well as everything else. Nor is this aesthetic feeling to be attached only to finished products. On the contrary, it is a refashioning that is interactive through and through and that therefore requires the constant interplay between ideal and experience. Processes can be aesthetic as much as products. Finally, it should be noted that aesthetic enjoyment is not purely a matter of feeling in disregard of intellectual understanding. The intelligent quality of experience is not relinquished in the aesthetic process: it is a factor that contributes not insignificantly to the overall experience of harmony and wholeness that is aesthetic. This aesthetic model is one of the most readily available to ordinary people and to teachers in the classroom eager to prepare their students to find beauty in technology. TECHNOLOGY AS REVEALING As we have seen above, Heidegger bases his understanding of technology on the meaning techne had among the Greeks. As he writes, technology "derives historically and essentially from techne as a mode of aletheuein, a mode, that is, of rendering beings manifest."10 The main point here is that techne, even as manufacture, is fundamentally an activity of revealing what has been envisaged.11 What has been intuited or discovered in a situation or raw material during that space Ortega speaks about is then manipulated into existence or actualized, to use Aristotle's term. The processes of manufacture, because of their complexity or the

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talent demanded in the agent, or both, often attract our attention to the point where we bypass the fact that an aspect of reality is being brought out into the world, either for the first time or in repetition. This revelatory dimension is what Heidegger emphasizes in his analysis of technology, and it is a point worth bearing in mind. I shall explain later on how this revelatory nature of technology becomes a fundamental datum for understanding teaching. Here, what is important is that we learn to bear in mind the simple fact that technology, as everything in existence, reveals to us the mysterious nature of Being allowing itself to be revealed as made. ENCOUNTERS WITH NATURE America has a long tradition of approaching nature as something more than acreage to be exploited for lumber, drilled for oil, or mined for coal. In fact, in his essay, "Nature," Emerson claimed that the term referred "to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf,"12 a sentiment preserved in the idea of our national parks by the wilderness protection efforts of John Muir (1838-1914) and others. But the mere existence of such tracts of land is not enough, for, as it is quite evident today, millions troop to them simply as a place to picnic away from the harried routines of the work year. Such places are visited on vacation, that is, on short respites from the serious occupations of our lives. They are not usually sought for themselves as places to meditate in, to encounter the spirits that pullulate the forests and swim in the pristine brooks cavorting, perhaps, with water sprites. Few of us go to the wilderness as we go to libraries, to read the Great Book of Nature, which, as the mediaeval Muslim mystic 'Aziz al-Din Nasafi says, is basically the book of God: Each day destiny and the passage of time set this book before you, chapter for chapter, verse for verse, letter for letter, and read it to you . . . like one who sets a real book before you and reads it to you line for line, letter for letter, that you may learn the content of these lines and letters. This is the meaning of the words: "We will show them our signs in different countries and among themselves until it become plain to them that it is the truth."13 But what does it avail if you have no seeing eye and no hearing ear, i.e., no eye that sees things as they are, and no ear that hears things as they are? This is the meaning of the words: "They are like the brutes; yea, they go more astray; these are the heedless."14 O dervish, you must read this book. You do not read it because you have no eye for it. "It is not that . . . their eyes are blind, but the hearts in their breasts are blind."15 But if you yourself cannot read, then you must at least listen when someone reads to you, and accept what he reads. But you do not accept it because you have no ear for it. "Who hears the signs of God recited to him, and then, as though he heard them not, persists in proud disdain"16 "as though his ears were heavy with deafness: Announce to him therefore tidings of affliction and punishment"17.... But he who finds for himself the eye of the eye and the ear of the ear, who transcends the world of creatures and attains to the spiritual world, he obtains knowledge of the whole book in one moment, and he who has complete knowledge of the whole book, who frees his heart from this book, closes the book and sets it aside, he is like one who receives a book and reads it over and over until he fully knows its contents; such a man will close the book and set it aside. This is the sense of the

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words of the Qu 'ran: "On that day we will roll up the heavens as one rolls up a written scroll,"18 and of that other passage: "And in his right hand shall the heavens be folded together."19 To use another metaphor, we need to go to the wilderness to hear the voice of Nature, of the Goddess Gaia, "broad-bosomed Earth, the solid and eternal home of all,"20 whose voice has been silenced, or at least drowned, by "the thunderous masculine tones of 'thou shaft' and 'thou shalt not'. . . the voice of power and law,"21 which has justified our dominion and control of the earth and thereby prevented us from encountering in beauty and care what we thought we had to enslave. John Evelyn, the seventeenth century British diarist, has remarked that human happiness seems to be always associated with a garden, which is the reason why we conceive heaven as paradise, a garden of endless delights, while often neglecting the earthly garden in which we live.22 But the Spirit dwells in both, if we should only have the wisdom to open our hearts to it. As Emerson put it, "Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit."23 ENCOUNTERS WITH TECHNOLOGY But can we encounter the immaterial in the midst of matter? Can we find meaning in metal? And can there be a real relationship, involving real reciprocity, between speaking humans and wordless technology? This is not a problem merely of the opaqueness of things: each one of us also is encased in an armor that prevents our being addressed and whose insulating effect we do not even notice, since it is so much a part of our daily living and has been so for a long time.24 Then there is the problem of alienation. The technological world is real and its reality demands a quest for objectivity. But this objectivity itself often renders it opaque to our eyes and impervious to our promptings. The natural world comes from the hand of God and the world of technology from our human hands, but in so far as both are physically real they present essentially the same problem. Moreover, says Buber, the objectivity of the world is not static: it grows as it is transmitted from generation to generation in schools and universities as "the objective knowledge of the world," as we are taught to approach the world — indeed, everything — with a so-called scientific, objective mind. It grows, too, as the compulsion to use, and even abuse the world increases with every age. Such pressures create a split between us as subjects and things as objects, a split that grounds the rise and development of what Buber calls the It-world. Today many become reconciled to the It-world as a world to be bought and used, and nothing more. Many who seek to safeguard the human spirit contend that the only way to do so is to reject technology as unredeemable. However, the major premise of this book is that there is no solution in rejection: we cannot reject our own bodies, though many have attempted to do so, unaware that their bodies were involved in the rejection. But if not through renunciation, then how can the plight of the person seeking meaning in this technological world be righted? In several early essays, Buber argues that spirit is wholly present everywhere, even in technology, as Herakleitus averred. On a gloomy morning, walking on the highway,

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Buber sees a piece of mica lying on the ground, lifts it up and looks at it for a long time; and the day is no longer gloomy, so much light is caught in the stone.25 One must not, however, wait passively for such ecstasy to occur. God is forever active in the world creating meaning, and purpose. Our task is to discover such meaning and purpose and, through our action, to return the world to God. However, the action called forth must not interfere with the purposes God has for everything and for every occurrence. Truly creative action has the appearance of rest; in fact, it looks very much like non-action, but we know it is action because it accomplishes what it sets out to do, to re-create God's meaning, not ours, in the world. Still, these various ways of reconciling the spiritual quest with its endemic earthliness and worldliness did not appear ultimately satisfactory to Buber because he felt they were exclusionary in some unacceptable ways. It is only in encounter, he concluded, that such a feat of acceptance is possible, and he expressed this insight in 1923 with the publication of I and Thou. We humans always speak to the world (other humans as well as technology and things) or about the world. We speak about the world when it is distant from us (or we feel distant from it), and we use almost always, grammatically, the third person: he, she, it. In fact, the third person is used only when there is distance, be it in space, in time, or in emotion. More fundamentally, the third person is used when we feel existentially distant from the world. We speak about the world, says Buber, when we want to deal with it as a separate, independent, objective, knowable, experientiable, usable reality. Speaking about the world connotes an attitude we have toward it and a mode of relating to it as distant and separate. Speaking about the world is still a way of relating to the world, but a way of relating that emphasizes distance. Distance is a relation: One is always distant from something, but it is a relation in which separateness is emphasized. This mode of relating to the world Buber calls the I-It. However, one can also speak to the world. In such instances, grammatically, one always uses the second person: thou, you. Speaking to the world implies that the world is present; one does not utter you in an emptiness or at a great distance. Saying "you" to the world means that one considers it present and that one opens up to it the richness of one's being. Speaking to the world is also a relation, but one that implies nearness: one is always near to something. Here the emphasis is on towardness. This mode of relating to the world Buber calls I-Thou. There is no human being not related to an other. The question concerns how the I is spoken. Buber is clear on this: "There is no I as such but only the I of the basic word I-Thou and the I of the basic word I-It."26 The I of I-It grows with the passage of the years. It is the I that experiences, that objectifies, that uses the world of technology. It is the I, alienated and forlorn, of which we spoke above. It is the I that establishes the It-world. The It-world is necessary, but it is only "half" of reality. "In all seriousness of truth, listen," says Buber: "without It a human being cannot live. But whoever lives only with that is not human."27 The I of I-Thou, on the other hand, is the I of encounter and reciprocity. It is the I that is spoken with one's whole being. It is the I that is uttered when one enters into a relationship purely for its own sake. There is no ulterior purpose here,

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no cause, no means-to-an-end, no object. There is only an I open to another in immediacy and in reciprocity, in the present. The I of I-Thou is all towardness. There is no self-reference here (it is never an I of Peter, o/John, and so forth). It is an I that pours itself out totally into the context of the present encounter. It exists as I only because it is not You and that is enough. Thus it never loses itself, and therefore pantheism (or at least some version of it) is excluded. But it exists as I only in so far as the relation of encounter exists in the present and is lived purely for its own sake. But saying the I of I-Thou and opening oneself to the mystery of otherness is no guarantee that encounter will take place. Encounter necessarily involves reciprocity. It necessitates that another I address one with the same openness. That is why encounter, in Buber's sense, does not take place automatically when one approaches others, persons, technology, or the world, with openness and wonder. Encounter is born from reciprocal I's uttered in radical freedom. Nothing can oblige the participants. Encounter must arise in a context of total and mutual generosity. As Buber puts it, "encounter is a form of grace for which one must always be prepared but on which one can never count."28 Encounter is a gift. For it is always a miracle that at one special time, in the same place, two I's should address each other with the freedom and fullness required. Further, encounter is not a matter of feelings but of fact. The feelings that often accompany the meeting of a friend, participation in a religious celebration, the thrill of a motorcycle ride, or the contemplation of a sunset or luscious landscape have nothing, really, to do with encounter. "Feelings merely accompany the fact of the relationship which after all is established not in the soul but between an I and a You."29 Encounter, then, is a rare occurrence. And it is inexpressible. For even though each being opens itself to the other fully, the meeting takes place for its own sake, not for the sake of knowing, of experiment, or of investigation. Encounter is genuine only when the mystery remains mysterious and the sacred is never rendered profane nor the sublime trite and ridiculous. This is especially so of encounter with the divine Thou. The only thing that can tangibly come out of such an encounter is a living that bears witness to it. Encounter can take place among humans and with God, for in all such instances an I speaks to an I. But how can encounter take place between a living person and a senseless machine? How can technology reciprocate the Thou uttered by a genuine I? It cannot, says Buber, to the full extent that humans can. Things never hug you back, as Morrie Schwartz told Mitch Albom.30 Yet inanimate technology, the same as plant and rock that exist below the threshold of self-consciousness, reciprocate to us in encounter the most elemental reality of being, what being is most basically. Our Thou grants inanimate technology the opportunity to manifest to us the wonderful and mysterious riches of being actual, of being "there." This actuality is, quintessentially, the reality of the divine. "Through every single You the basic word addresses the eternal You," says Buber.31 Whenever we address with our whole devoted being the Thou vibrating in the dynamo, pulsating in the throat of the toad, flickering in the leaves of the cypress, or scintillating upon the waves of the sea, we address the ultimately Real and the ultimately Present: we

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address God. For God is always there, as He has promised. His Thou to us never ceases, even if we are not always there to respond, distracted by the whir of the machine. TECHNOLOGY AND THE SPIRIT What does it mean to see technology (or anything, for that matter) as spiritual? What does it mean to be spiritual or to live spiritually? Spirituality connotes, as I said above, a quality of lived experience. This quality involves some sense of selftranscendence. If humans are one being anchored to two poles, an immanent one and a transcendent and undefinable one; and if spirit is, precisely, this openness to the beyond, then living spiritually requires that we "so transform our ordinary daily life that every action is an opportunity for inner work. Our very efforts toward worldly efficiency may, under these conditions, become the means of inner practice (exercitium)."32 To achieve this, the what of what we do need not be altered; it is the how that needs transforming in ways we can begin to learn in school. Two points may be helpful in this regard. First, technology, like the rest of the physical world, is not something we have or possess, but something we are. We manufacture, have, and use things because this is the mode of being of beings who live physically in a physical world. As Gelven put it, the simple verb "to have" exposes a dimension of the way we think about ourselves: that our own reality extends beyond our corporeality and lays a real claim to the use and right to certain things. We are, in other words, users and havers: in such ways do we understand our own existence.33 Secondly, this mode of being is established through repetition. Repetition, as the practice of beings who have bodies, enables us to relate to a world of bodies. This is what we do when we strum a guitar, switch on a computer, or handle a ball: we are establishing connections in the only way we can, not theoretically or conceptually, but factually or concretely. Moreover, repetition and routine eventually free us for our meaning-making activities in the same way as repetitive practice in a sport enables us to play the game with style. Through practice and exercise we build for ourselves the form of our existence in the world, both natural and technological, and, at the same time, the form in which the transcendent reaches into the immanence of the world. As the tornado's funnel is the shape of the mysterious force that touches and destroys, so our bodies are the form of the transcendent at work in the world. To live this is to live spiritually; and while it may not be possible to maintain this awareness every waking minute, we must become ready to welcome it. "The first and most vital practice in everyday life is to learn effectively to value those moments in which we are touched by something hitherto undreamt of."34 This something is undreamt of because the possibilities we are an openness to are unfathomable in their totality, though they can burst upon us at any time if we are ready. TECHNOLOGY AND PLAY I mentioned earlier that one way of dealing with computers is to take the stance

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of play. What this might entail from the viewpoint of spiritualizing technology needs to be elucidated in greater detail now, for seeing the technological world, and not just computers, from the point of view of play can be one of the most spiritualizing activities of our lives. J. C. Friedrich von Schiller, in his Letters upon the Aesthetic Education ofMan, XV, maintained that "man only plays when, in the full meaning of the word, he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays."35 From this perspective we humans would act in our most human way when engaging in our activities, including technological ones, with a playful attitude. In his monumental novel, The Glass Bead Game (1943), Hermann Hesse wrote: The Glass Bead Game is . . . a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors in his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all the subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property — on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like an organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manual and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number.36 The Glass Bead Game, which Hesse had concocted in his imagination (but which resembled Lull's Ars magna combinatoria) was a spiritual way of "playing" with the whole of known knowledge and culture. With R. F. Dearden I defined play above as "a non serious and self-contained activity which we engage in just for the satisfaction involved in it."37 This is essentially the definition given by Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens (1938)38 and by every serious theoretician. To play means to approach an activity as self-contained or autotelic; that is, as something that has no goal or end beyond itself. In other words, we play for the sake of playing. The moment there is a goal or end or product willed beyond the activity or game in questions, it is not play. This does not mean, of course, that nothing is produced, but that production is not the goal or intent of play. If there is a product, one could almost say of it that it just "happened," for it would have formed no part of the purpose of the game, which is just to play. Play, as Sartre puts it, is entirely gratuitous, for it takes place totally in freedom without the slightest compulsion from "outside," and we are only compelled to play by the intrinsic logic of the game.39 Play concretizes itself in games. Roger Caillois40 has proposed four general categories of games. According to him, there are games of competition (such as most sports), games of luck (such as roulette), games of mimicry or make-believe (such as the theater), and games of exhilaration (such as bungee jumping). None of these types exist in absolutely pure form; they appear in combinations — for example, football is primarily a game of competition, but it incorporates elements of luck and exhilaration; acting is primarily a game of make-believe, but it incorporates elements of luck and exhilaration. Caillois also speculates that the progress of civilization through the centuries has witnessed a steady shift in emphasis from games of exhilaration and make-believe, games in which the

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Dionysian spirit is more prominent, to games of competition and luck in which the rationalistic spirit, the Apollonian, holds a clear sway. It is also apparent that the disinterested and gratuitous character of play have been constantly receding to the background while the heterotelism of business culture has slowly risen to take the upper hand. Thus, today, it is a rare student who studies for the satisfaction found in it, or a sports person who plays simply for the fun of it. Another way of saying this is that the amateur, the "lover" of games, has slowly been pushed aside by the money-minded professional. It would seem, however, that the play attitude is more thoroughly human. This is Ortega's point, as we saw before, and it extends to technology as well as to everything in life and in society. The problem is that computers and other technological innovations are being used today primarily as heterotelic tools, as means to something outside the use activity itself. In school, computers are used for learning', young people go into the technology fields of computers and media in order to obtain a job, and the lowly and often despised "hacker" is the only one who engages in these technology-based activities purely for the satisfaction found in them. It ought to be possible for us to teach the young how to use technology "just for fun" — at least some of the time. It ought to be possible for us to play any game, use any technological apparatus, paint, sculpt, shoot videos or perform in plays not because our careers are going to be enhanced by participation in these activities but simply for the satisfaction found in them. If Schiller's characterization quoted above is in any way accurate, we will only use technology in a true human way when we play with it. Eugen Fink once defined play as "finite creativity in the magic dimension of illusion"41 because the play attitude fundamentally involves the imagination, and to employ the imagination is essentially to play — the very word "illusion" means to enter (in-) the game (-lusus). Hence Plato could conclude that the most basic attitude we could adopt is the one the gods have toward the world42; but the gods play with the world and people as with puppets on a stage; therefore the attitude we should prefer above all others is the play attitude. A NOTE ON KARMAYOGA Much has been written about the need for renunciation in the mystical path. All religious traditions in the East as well as in the West consider asceticism of some kind as a conditio sine qua non for spiritual enlightenment. The first stage, the so-called via purgativa, comes first, no matter how interpreted. The Yogasutra II. 28, had already stated that "practice of the various exercises of yoga . . . leads to enlightenment," while Gregory of Nazianzus says explicitly that "purification [Koc0dpoi<;] leads to contemplation,"43 for "only the pure can possess the wisdom pure."44 In general, renunciation meant always the giving up of any action pleasing to the senses, from sex to seeing and from touching to tinkering; in fact, it meant also, and perhaps paramountly, the control of the imagination, so that the mind could be tethered, as the ox in Zen's the "Ten Oxherding Pictures," and be rendered completely free from distraction.

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It was always understood that practice of this self-control had to be undertaken explicitly and deliberately. It was not likely to happen by itself, though some found it easier than others. It was also quite clear that ascetical practice was in fact aided by actual disengagement from distraction, so that the preferred purgative life was that of the sannydsi, the anchorite, or the monk. Hence, over the centuries, and in all contemplative traditions regardless of creed, some form of isolation or sequestering of the self from worldly cares was, and continues to be, the ideal. Still, it was understood that action was necessary for some, that the world's affairs had to be run, and that this should not be an insurmountable obstacle to the attainment of mystical union. To this effect, all traditions have elaborated alternate paths to enlightenment. These are generally considered equal to the more pronounced ascesis of the solitary, for the purpose is the same, and it has become generally understood that people's orientations vary naturally, and that therefore their paths to vision will vary accordingly. Thus, Taoism developed the practice of wu-wei, that is, action that is not action; the Gita introduced karmoyoga, or action that leaves out attachment to the fruits of action; and Christianity found its solution in what Gregory termed "a middle path," midway, that is, between isolated contemplation and engaged action. Writing about himself, Gregory said: I saw that those who relish th' active life To people in the world can offer help But useless to themselves are troubled most, Their virtuous life's foundation insecure. Still, those who bid the world farewell are firm, And with a tranquil mind converse with God, Yet help they but themselves in selfish love And lead a strange and fruitless, arduous life. So then, 'twixt these, I chose the middle path, To pray like these, to help all souls like those.45 This middle path in no way compromises the traditional Western view that the contemplative life is better than the active one. From Aristotle's times the primacy of contemplation, as reflective of the primacy of mind in human nature — the specific difference of humanness being rationality — has been preached and encouraged, and Christianity merely sanctified the hierarchy. In fact, Christianity preached that the heavenly reward of the elect in heaven would be of a contemplative nature, a "beatific [intellectual] vision"; for there, as Augustine put it, with the transformed eyes of the soul, "we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. This is what shall be in the end without end."46 Gregory's "middle path," therefore, did not entail a downgrading of the contemplative life, merely its admixture with the active: "As contemplation is more sublime so is it also more difficult; the active life, on the contrary, is more humble and despised, but also more fruitful. Therefore each of these two must blossom in us, each helped by the other. . . . For it cannot be that people be wise yet not live wisely."47 A thousand years later St. Thomas Aquinas embraced this ideal of the middle path,48 and St. Ignatius Loyola propounded it as "contemplation in action," the phrase by which it is

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generally known today. But underlying these compromises between contemplation and action there has always been an understanding that the world of action, insofar as it enmeshes the mystic — or, for that matter, the ordinary person — in the physical realities of "the world," must be renounced somehow. The rationale for viewing the world of action with suspicion is different in the religious traditions of East and West, but the effect tends to be the same. Thus, even as far back as Jainism in India, the material is seen as entrapment of the spiritual, very much as Plato's pun, soma sema (oooLxa orjixa),49 will later state it. The Vedanta will modify this view by considering matter as ultimately unreal, spirit (dtman) being the only transcendental reality. Material action will tend to be viewed sub specie aeternitatis, and therefore as really inconsequential in the spiritual scheme of things. Christianity, influenced by the same Persian ideologies that colored Greek realism, will concur, despising those engaged in "fleshly" action (the oapKiKOi of the Pauline letters) in favor of the "spiritual" ones (the 7IV€V)|ICCI;IK6I). It will retain into contemporary times an uneasy ambivalence about matter, whether the physical stuff of the earth, the flesh of the human body, or the scintillating goods of the commercial and business worlds. Into this ambivalence the GIta introduced the idea of karmoyoga, the yoga of detachment in action: all actions, even seemingly holy ones (such as the offering of sacrifices and the performance of rituals) are to be performed without attachment to the fruits of the action.50 We cannot avoid action; we are "condemned to act"; action is a primary component of our circumstance in the world, of our human condition. This determinism, however, this enslavement, is escaped or transcended through unattachment to the results of action, whether by recourse to duty (dharmd) as the GIta suggests (and as the Stoics and Kant will later assert), or through an asceticism of right action, as Teilhard de Chardin has proposed in our own times. As was explained earlier, Teilhard took his clue from a close reading of the Pauline epistles and an explication of the theology of the incarnation. For him, the incarnation, God's taking of human flesh (which is material) is automatically a taking on of the materiality of the world. Humans represent the culmination of billions of years of evolution from matter to thought. In the dawn of the first human consciousness the universe becomes conscious of itself. The assumption of human flesh by the divine Person marks a further development of the very same universe, this time entirely gratuitous. In Jesus the universe is initially divinized. This initial contact, as we saw above, must be extended to the entire world through the action of believers; through their action, they must route the divine current through the entire circuitry of the cosmos. This is the way Teilhard reads Ephesians 4:10-16. The purpose of Christ's ascension into heaven is to fill the universe. How? Through the diverse ministry of the believers who are the members of his mystical body. That is why people have different gifts, as proper equipment to make everything "grow with us into him" (au^rjacbjiev eiq auidv). It should be clear from this that Teilhard disassociates himself from the more traditional ascetical practices of renunciation (a doctrine that, to him, ends in impoverishment and diminishment) in favor of an asceticism that demands right action; that is, action that will unselfishly divinize the world. This is the point of

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his book Le Milieu Divin (1957). Before that, in Le Milieu Mystique (1917), he had written: Then it is really true, Lord? By helping on the spread of science and freedom I can increase the density of the divine atmosphere, in itself as well as for me, that atmosphere in which it is always my one desire to be immersed. By laying hold of the earth I enable myself to cling closely to you.51 This idea of an asceticism of right action comes very close, it seems to me, to the detachment from the fruits of action propounded by the GIta. True to its Jain and Sankhya sources (according to which action occurs solely in the realm of prdkrti, not purusha), the GIta insists on the spirit's detachment. Similarly, true to its dualistic Christian conception (according to which both spirit and matter exist forever, even though matter, the body, is divinized in the resurrection), Teilhard advocates a spiritual involvement that is, truly, detached from goals and consequences that are not spiritual. Both approaches are ascetical; both counsel action; both involve detachment; both have as their goal an increase in spirituality. The difference is that the GIta is not concerned with the spiritualization of matter (prakrti) through action, while Teilhard is, and that the GIta presupposes an awareness of the distinction between purusha and prakrti, while Teilhard presupposes a preadherence to the divine and a faith in its mysterious deployment through the world. My point is that we have here a way of using technology without "tainting" our souls with it (if that is the concern). The point is to use technology intelligently, without subverting our human aims and the care of our spirits. TECHNOLOGY AND TANTRA Tantrism represents in India an effort to bring together the reality of the Absolute (Brahman) and the Relative (samsara) in a coincidentia oppositorum that might have been recognized and acknowledged by Nicolas of Cusa himself. The mythology is helpful here. Brahman, the Absolute, contains all opposites, therefore also male and female, matter and spirit, represented by the figures of Shiva and Shakti, their unity symbolized in their eternal embrace. In their beginningless dream they objectify themselves, and Shakti, the Divine Power, creates this impermanent world in a transcendental dance. But Brahman and Shakti are really identical, therefore there is no need to transcend or leave behind this world of may a produced by Shakti; there is no need to extricate oneself from this world to gain salvation. All one needs to do is to unite oneself with this flowing stream, to participate in the illusion created by Shakti, and thus to gain the union which alone assures self-realization and nirvana. As Sri Ramakrishna puts it, "The Divine Mother is always sportive and playful. This universe is Her play.... Her pleasure is in continuing the game. It is as if the Divine Mother said to the human mind in confidence, with a sign from Her eye, 'Go and enjoy the world.' "52 Tantrism insists on the intrinsic holiness and purity of everything, and to make this point clear, it singles out as "sacraments" the five forbidden things of Hinduism: wine, meat, fish, grain, and sexual intercourse. Participation in these

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sacraments does not open the door to licentiousness, since it is part of dharma, the way of life chosen to obtain eternal liberation. A strict practice (sadhana) is prescribed and rituals are scrupulously observed. But my point is that this spiritual approach deliberately includes what other traditions tend to exclude, because it understands that everything is holy as it flows from the power of the Deity. The ultimate nature of the phenomenal world is not different from that of the Absolute. The world of technology is ultimately not different from the world of the spirit. The point, then, is to be able to achieve enlightenment and, eventually, salvation, by means of nature, not by rejection of it. CONCLUSION Some people object. They claim that there is something morally reprehensible in finding aesthetic or spiritual satisfaction in works or products built on the blood and suffering of thousands of human beings sacrificed on the altars of technology. To them, there is something wrong in visiting the pyramids or the Great Wall of China, and in riding on automobiles. I believe there is something to be said for this view and that, consequently, there is undeniable moral value in boycotts of grapes and of goods fabricated by people working under subhuman conditions. On the other hand, these are human productions, things in the world, revelations of Being. This is their factual nature regardless of the conditions attending their production. This book is not meant to condone but to transcend. The faults of production must be dealt with politically and socially, but nothing should prevent our overcoming their alienating threat to us while we fight the political battles. This answer is not proffered lightly. It must be pointed out that the adverse socioeconomic conditions of production we deplore are, at least partly, caused by uninspired views of technology which sanction its misuse. If the very technology that enslaves was seen as another instance of the presence of God among us, perhaps its use would become more humanitarian. It might even help "to restore within us the divine likeness."53 To train us to see technology this way is the task of our institutions of formal education. NOTES 1. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958), p. 47. My concern here is not with Dewey's approach to technology but with an application of his aesthetics to technology. 2. John Dewey, "Experience, Nature, and Art" in John Dewey on Education, ed. Reginald D. Archambault (New York: The Modern Library, 1964), pp. 158-59. 3. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 25. 4. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 144-145. 5. John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover, 1958), p. 356. 6. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 195. 7. Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. 356. 8. Dewey, "Experience," p. 162 and Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 46. 9. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 326.

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10. Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," in Basic Writings, p. 220. 11. Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," in Basic Writings, p. 295. 12. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1903-1904), Vol. I, p. 2. 13. Qu'ran 41:53. 14. Qu'ran 7:178. 15. Qu'ran 22:45. 16. Qu'ran 45:7. 17. Qu'ran 31:6. 18. Qu'ran 21:104. 19. Qu'ran 39:67. Nasafi, Kashf 309b penult. See Fritz Meier, "The Problem of Nature in the Esoteric Monism of Islam" [1946], in Spirit and Nature: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, Joseph Campbell, ed. (Bollingen Series XXX. 1; New York: Pantheon Books, 1954), Vol. 1. 20. Hesiod, Theogony II. 116. 21. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 254. 22. See Charles Cummings, "Exploring Eco-Spirituality," Spirituality Today 41:1 (Spring, 1989): 3 0 ^ 1 . Also Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964, 2000). 23. Emerson, "Nature," in The Complete Works, Vol. 1, p. 3. 24. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 10, 14. 25. Martin Buber, Daniel (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), p. 140. 26. Martin Buber, I and Thou, Walter Kaufmann, transl. (New York: Scribner's, 1970), p. 54. 27. Buber, I and Thou, p. 85. 28. Ibid., p. 178. 29. Ibid., p. 129. 30. Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie (New York: Doubleday, 1997), p. 125. 31. Buber, land Thou, p. 123. 32. Karlfried, Daily Life as Spiritual Exercise, p. 8. 33. Michael Gelven, Winter, Friendship, and Guilt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), p. 134. 34. Karlfried, Daily Life, p. 24. 35. J. C. Friedrich von Schiller, Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1938), XV, p. 252. Italics in the original. 36. Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (New York: Bantam Books, 1966), p. 6. 37. Dearden, "The Concept of Play," in The Concept of Education, p. 84. 38. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 13. 39. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp. 710-711. 40. Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961). 41. Eugen Fink, "The Oasis of Happiness: Toward an Ontology of Play," in Game, Play, Literature, Jacques Ehermann, ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 28. 42. Plato, Laws VII. 803. In the Indian tradition, the world is the game (IMS) of the gods. 43. Orat. 20:12; MG 35, 1100. 44. Carmen de seipso 45:196; MG 36, 1367. 45. Carmen de vitasua\\\ 302-311; MG 37, 1049^ My translation. 46. De Civ.Dei XXII. 30. 47. Oraf. 4:113; MG 35, 850. 48. Summa Theologiae 2.2, 188, 6.

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49. Plato, Phaedrus, 250. 50. BhagavadgM 18: 6. 51. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 115. 52. Quoted in Zimmer, Philosophies of India, pp. 566-567. 53. Hugh of St. Victor, quoted in David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology (New York: Knopf, 1997), p. 20.

6

Spirituality and the Material Every year, on Ash Wednesday, Christians the world over troop to church to hear the somber words, Pulvis es . . . : "Thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return."1 But back in August, 1881, "6000 feet beyond man and time,"2 Nietzsche experienced the joy of knowing that, precisely because he was dust, he was eternal; for the demon told him, "The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"3 When young Augustine began his search for God, he turned to the earth, and it answered, "I am not He." He asked the sea, the deeps, and all the living creeping things, and they all answered, "We are not thy God, seek above us"4 — expressions reminiscent of the neti, neti ("not this, not that") of the Upanishads.5 And yet, the Bible tells us that, shortly after the proclamation of the Ten Commandments, the Hebrews fell before a Calf made of molten gold and worshiped it.6 The preceding paragraphs expose self-canceling attitudes toward the material dimension of life. The issue is not whether or not the spirit/matter duality evident in them is justifiable, nor how this dualism contributed to modern materialism, nor how it is essentially a patriarchal point of view.7 The purpose of this chapter is to expose some features of modern spirituality that may become grounds for a postmodern spirituality — that is, a spirituality that steps beyond duality, as much of contemporary feminist spirituality seeks to do.8 I wish to show that, despite protestations to the contrary, despite diffidence about matter, and despite a long history of dualistic thinking, a tradition exists in which matter is spiritualized and sacramentalized. Therefore we should not hesitate to seek in matter the needed nourishment for our spiritual quests. Without acknowledging it, many of us, even many who oppose the spiritualization of technology proposed in the previous chapters, are already practicing such a doctrine and use matter spiritually even though unawares of it.

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BRIEF HISTORICAL CONTEXT We live in a world that appears to be thoroughly dualistic. Dualism is almost ingrained in us. Light and darkness, high and low, narrow and wide, good and evil, matter and spirit — to mention but a few examples — are modes of talking, thinking, and apprehending the world that seem natural to us. This view has a long and distinguished ancestry. Equally old and distinguished is the tradition that conceives matter to be, at best, less good than spirit, if not altogether bad.9 Perhaps the oldest religion of the world still being practiced, Jainism, conceived reality as composed of Life (jlva) and No-life (ajiva), irreducible principles forever seeking to secure their respective spheres in perfect isolation (kaivalya) from each other. Sankhya — again, an ancient Indian system — also saw the world in dualistic terms, Self (atman or purusha) and inert Matter (prakrti), eternal, irreducible and indestructible elements entwined with each other and yet forever seeking to extricate themselves from their cosmic entanglement, for matter obscures the luminescent vision of spirit, so that the Self cannot see itself in its own transcendental brilliance. Sankhya developed a complex psychology to explain the effects of this duality in humans, a psychology later modified and used extensively by Buddhism and the Vedanta. The Yogasutra of Patanjali also employed this psychology in its development of ascetical and meditative practices. Although there is some doubt about Zarathustra's own views on this issue, he seems to have espoused a dualism of two realms, Life and Non-life,10 associated with Light and Darkness, translated into Spirit and Matter, moralized into Good and Evil, and identified with two divine beings, Ahura-Mazda (later Ormudz) and Ahriman. Thus was born so-called Persian dualism, a viewpoint that colored later Gnosticism and that has become endemic in the Western tradition through Manichaeism, the Cathari and the Albigensians, and which has lately reappeared in Theosophy and Anthroposophy. According to Mani, the great third century prophet, "Two beings were at the beginning of the World, the one Light, the other Darkness."11 One can discern here the light-darkness dualism that pervades many of the documents found at Qum'ran, as well as in the gospels and letters of John the Evangelist. Plato, as is well known, and perhaps influenced by Persian dualism, adopted the Orphic view that body (matter) is the tombstone of the soul (spirit).12 St. Paul, too, makes extensive use of the distinction between the "spiritual ones" (TUvevjjaaTiKOi), possessors of a special "gnosis" (and therefore hostile to "the world"), and the "materialists" (oapKiKOi), who live according to the dictates of the flesh,13 a distinction that pervades later Christianity. When Descartes, therefore, concludes that he is "a substance whose whole essence or nature was only to think," and that "this ego, this soul" is "entirely distinct from the body,"14 he was merely secularizing what had been a long religious dualistic tradition. On the face of it, nothing could be more opposed to spirit than matter. Porphyry himself, following Aristotle, had divided Being into corporeal and noncorporeal, a philosophical distinction which echoed that between matter and spirit. And it is easy to see why this distinction was more or less accepted as fact: thought, soul (psyche), the spheres surrounding the earth (in which the sun, moon, and

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planets were thought to be embedded), demiurges, muses, and, later, angels were said to be real but invisible (because incorporeal), while the rest of the world was real and visible, tangible, audible, and the like. Plato himself had claimed that the intelligible world was real (though not material) and quite distinct from the sensory world, which, as the name indicates, was the object of sensory perception. For us the matter is more complicated, for today we know that matter is not altogether visible and that what we think of as spirit is not altogether invisible, so that the boundaries between them have become blurred, and hard and fast divisions appear to be no longer so easy to justify. Thus, on the one hand, thought processes become visible on an oscilloscope; known chemicals conduct thinking between the synapses of the brain, and Prozac can make one feel one is not oneself without it.15 On the other hand, black holes are black because light cannot escape their enormous gravitational pull: it is invisible; atoms, electrons, quarks are not visible at all, though they leave traces on photographic plates (thus proving their material existence); the range of the human ear is limited, so there are sounds way beyond what we can hear. And so it is that the science, which in the not-too-distant past dismissed spirit because of its invisibility, now validates the unseen which is so large a part of its own realm, and in so doing it also validates the spirit, invisible all along.16 Given these preliminary comments, the rest of this chapter seeks to explore briefly some traditional areas or dimensions in which the spiritual and the material are conjoined. The examples are not exhaustive; they merely illustrate ways in which spirit and the body have been brought together, matter providing the basis for a spiritual life. After this, the spiritualization of technology should not seem so far fetched. A SACRAMENTAL WORLD The primitive mind is animistic: it knows nothing of lifeless matter, whether in places, trees, animals, or clouds. We moderns have construed progress as growth beyond this panpsychic monism. We treat talk of water sprites and lihgams as quaint, and scientific descriptions as true accounts of the nature of the world; yet ancient alchemists, way before the Middle Ages, knew of a stone in the Nile that had a spirit (TtveuLxa). The alchemists, says Jung, "were looking for the marvelous stone that harbored a pneumatic essence in order to win from it the substance that penetrates all substances — since it is itself the stone-penetrating 'spirit.' "17 Teilhard de Chardin, too, claimed that God unifies the diverse currents of the world "by partially immersing himself in things, by becoming 'element,' and then, from this point of vantage in the heart of matter, assuming the control and leadership of what we now call evolution";18 and contemporary cosmologists speak of an "anthropic principle" in order to explain the appearance of human life on this "third rock from the sun."19 In Christianity, the eucharist is an example of the presence of spirit in matter. The bread of the eucharist is "transubstantiated" into the spiritual body of Christ. A material substance is changed into a spiritual substance. The accidental properties remain: the bread looks and tastes like bread, but the substance has been

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transformed into another, spiritual, substance. This is not altogether surprising in a religion that believes in an enfleshed God.20 In a sense, God's manifestable aspect, His Word (as our word is the manifestation of our thoughts) enfleshes Itself in physical reality (as our thoughts drape themselves in sound), so that forever "the world is charged with the grandeur of God," and thence forward "there lives the dearest freshness deep down things." God's grandeur shines in lightning, but also "from shook foil": it may be discovered in nature, but also in things wrought by human hands.21 But if through the enfleshment the Word overflows the world, it must also be true that the world can become Word.22 The entire world, then, including technology, is a sacrament: an outward sign of the inward grace that approaches and would sanctify us if only given the chance. Sacramental objects and actions appear in most religions. For the Kabbalists, as Scholem remarks, the performance of the sacred law (Halakhah) is transformed into a sacred rite, "a sacrament, a mystery rite."23 In Vedic Hinduism, karma refers to the ritual actions of the priests performing a sacrifice. Hence the belief in a special kind of action that has effects at a distance in space and in time. This is the meaning that the notion of karma carries once connected with reincarnation: it is action whose effects reach beyond time to new existences. The term samskara (often translated as "sacrament") refers to latent impressions and residues from previous lives affecting a current phenomenal existence. These residues are active, or can become so. This active meaning obtains vi verbi. As Zimmer remarks, prakrti means matter that has not been acted on, while samskrta (from which samskara derives), means matter that has been transformed by action. The transformation originally referred to the religious rites and what they brought about,24 but this notion is extended in reincarnation to the effects of actions in succeeding existences. In the Latin of ancient Rome, sacramentum is the expiatory object placed in the hands of the priest to redeem an offense, or the oath taken by a soldier which renders the words "holy." This is not too far removed from the Greek, where the term is "mystery" (^uaxfjpiov), consecration, initiation, with the flair of hiddenness and sacrality accompanying our current meaning of the word. The early JudeoChristian usage refers to the hidden plan of God being made known in the new dispensation. Sacraments are material objects which in a particular (religious) context are signs of God's grace active through them in the world.25 The efficacy of grace is not due to the thing itself but to the spirit in it. This applies typically to the eucharist. From the beginning, and before any theologizing began, Christians understood the eucharistic bread to be the body of Christ. Ignatius of Antioch (|107) clearly said so in his letters;26 Justin explained this belief in detail;27 so did Cyril of Jerusalem,28 Tertullian,29 and Augustine,30 among many others. Later, theologians speculate about this faith and seek to explain how Christ's body is in the bread. During the Middle Ages they come up with the word "transubstantiation" — that is, as was mentioned above, the substitution of one substance for another. Given the Aristotelian distinction between substance and accident, the theory maintains that the divine substance replaces the substance of the bread, though the accidents of the bread (color, texture, taste, etc.) remain

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unchanged. In fact, the faith affirms that the material, physical accidents of bread become salvific. Matter is spiritualized. By eating the transubstantiated bread Christians believe they are made "cocorporeal [ouaacoJIOI]" with Christ.31 The eucharist is one of the clearest examples of the traditional union of spirit and matter in current use among us. SEX AND THE SPIRIT One of the areas in which the distinction between matter and spirit has been most blatant is that of sexuality, especially in the West. Stoic, Gnostic, Manichaean and other doctrines influenced nascent Christianity to the point where sex, being physical, was damned with the whole of matter, and love, being thought spiritual, was exalted above all things.32 But, as Simone Weil has put it, "Human nature is so arranged that any desire of the soul which has not passed through the flesh by way of actions, movements and attitudes which correspond to it naturally, has no reality in the soul. It is only there as a phantom."33 Love, too, we now know, is a bodily phenomenon, an emotion', an "out-flow" (Lat. e-, out of + motio, movement). Despite its opposition to sexuality, Christianity acknowledged this factual connection between love and the sexual body in its doctrine of marriage. It determined that marriage is a sacrament and therefore a legitimate and holy state; and it further determined that the "matter" of the sacrament, the outward thing that is the sign of the inner grace, was the actual act of sexual intercourse, while the "form" distinguishing it from other sacraments is the consenting words of the spouses. Borrowing from Roman law and practice, the sacrament of marriage was considered valid when "ratified and consummated"; that is, when the words were said and the deed done. The words alone were not enough, and marriages in which the sexual act had not occurred, even if there was cohabitation, could be dissolved. The priest, therefore, does not perform or administer the sacrament of marriage; he is only an official witness. The real ministers are husband and wife, and the marital bed is the altar.34 The administration is the sexual act itself, which, physical and material though it certainly is, is considered, none the less, as the vehicle of spiritual grace. A similar attitude toward sexuality, except in a much broader and unrestricted way, was developed in the East by Tantra. Tantric practices appear in China, in India, and in Tibet,35 and there are significant differences among the developments (as was pointed out above); but in general they all agree that the path to selfrealization does not consist in renunciation, but, rather, in participation. As Blofeld puts it, the Tantra adept is likely to be unorthodox; intent upon employing everything in life as a means to achievement, he does not except such animal processes as sleeping, eating, excreting and (if he is not a monk) sexual intercourse. The energy of passions and desires must be yoked, not wasted. Every act of the body, speech and mind, every circumstance, every sensation, every dream can be turned to good account.36 In Hindu Tantra, reality is conceived as originally one, a coincidence of opposites symbolized explicitly by the sexual embrace of Masculine and Feminine,

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Shiva and Shakti, Purusha and Prakriti, and in more popular ways, Krishna and Radha. Shakti, Shiva's consort (and literally a feminine term meaning strength and power in motion), dreams herself separate; she dances and dances before her consort, and her dance creates the multiplex of the universe. She dances still and forever, constantly staging and restaging the plays of existence in which we all are involved; she "is continually producing through us and for us; wherever we turn we meet her at work generating us as time-bound beings."37 For us humans, the saving moment is the realization that we are part of a neverending game. The dance of Shakti is may a ("illusion"). To return to the primal unity we must turn toward the source, the Divine Pair, and sexually recreate the originating act. At our human level the act is dual, involving a man and a woman, but as sacrament it leads to the oneness of the cosmic Dyad.38 Through a complex series of ritual activities (sadhana) the participants are brought "to the point where the identity of each is blended with the other's, and both experience the condition before the separation happened."39 Zimmer comments: The pleasure of love . . . is the bliss . . . of Shiva and his Shakti in their eternal realization of identity; only as known in the inferior mode of ego-consciousness. The creature of passion has only to wash away his sense of ego, and then the same act that formerly was an obstruction becomes the tide that bears him to the realization of the absolute as bliss (ananda).40 In other words, the same material act of sexual intercourse becomes the conduit of grace, as every man becomes Shiva and every woman becomes Shakti.41 Kabbalists, too, discovered the mystery of sexual union in God himself, in the union of En-Sof and Shekhinah. But, unlike the Christian mystics, they did not rum this mystery into a mere object of contemplation. Rather, and mindful of the Genesis 1: 28 injunction, "Be fruitful and multiply," they rejected any renunciation of sex and, as Scholem remarks, "continued to regard marriage not as a concession to the frailty of the flesh but as one of the most sacred mysteries. Every true marriage is a symbolical realization of the union of God and the Shekhinah."42 Here again spirit was joined to matter to produce enlightenment. SPIRITUALITY AND SPORTS At the beginning of his book, Zen in the Art ofArchery, Herrigel explains how archery, as conceived by the Zen masters he encountered, was not a mere metaphor of the spiritual search but an actual exercise, utilizing a very physical activity, which engendered a spiritual transformation, "so that fundamentally the marksman aims at himself and may even succeed in hitting himself."43 Michael Murphy conceived golf along the same lines,44 and Tim Gallwey did the same with tennis.45 John Brodie, quondam quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, commented how "Sometimes in the heat of the game a player's perception and coordination improve dramatically. At times," he added, "I experience a kind of clarity that I've never seen described in any football story."46 Michael Hynson, a former surfer, explained how, "When you become united with a wave . . . you feel like you're in total harmony with the divine at every level."47 And so on; examples could be

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multiplied.48 The point is that we have here, once more, sets of very physical conditions, with very specific material objects, which, for the properly trained, become vehicles of mystical grace. Take the case of the goalkeeper in soccer. His training demands that he learn to focus on the ball with utmost attention. By itself, the soccer ball is a piece of leather sown to certain specifications, but to the goalkeeper, the ball is as complicated a conundrum as a Zen ko'an. He has to concentrate on it at all times. If his awareness wavered for a moment, he might miss the most important happening of his life, just as he might miss the most spectacular save of his career. There is no time to switch off, as it were; his eyes must not blink, for everything is centered on the ball — life is focused on the ball, concentrated in it, and he must follow it intently, for this is what it takes to live. If he fastens his attention on the ball to the point of merging with it, then he gains salvation, enlightenment, satori, as perfectly on the soccer field as in a Buddhist monastery; for, in fact, there is no difference. What matters is to concentrate to the utmost, not to let the mind wander, to see nothing but the ball, to let his whole being, body and mind, merge with the ball in the flux of reality, to move with the movement of the ball — that is, with the flow of life. The important thing is the exhilaration of belonging, the joy of merging, the utter happiness of losing all form and of blending in the formless streaming that some label existence. This is what it means to be a goalkeeper. For is not the goal, everybody's goal, to merge, sooner or later, with the spirit of the universe? So the thing for him to do is to stick to this goal, to keep this merging as his goal, to be a keeper of the goal — a goalkeeper. Of course, it should be obvious that none of this happens by accident or without training; not just the physical training required for every sport, but, in addition, the spiritual training peculiar to it and suited to one's idiosyncratic personality. In some cases, as in trekking or backpacking, the steps are clear and recognizable;49 in others, there may be need of specific direction; but sports provide a suitable example of how physical activities can be the basis for a spiritual life. MEDITATION IN ACTION In the sixteenth century, when St. Ignatius (1491-1556) founded the Jesuits, he had in mind an institution that would depart radically from the practices common among the monastic orders of his day. Benedictines, Augustinians, Franciscans and Dominicans were tied to the singing of the Office in church at specified hours of the day. This was considered their most important task, the opus Dei, as it had come to be called, and it consumed large chunks of time. St. Ignatius realized that this routine perpetuated the distinction between physical work and spiritual prayer, and that adherence to it would interfere with teaching in schools and universities and, generally, with missionary work, whether in Europe or in other countries. Hence, and with approval from Rome, he made the recitation of the Office a private matter that could be done anywhere and at any time (though preferably at the traditional hours); and he instituted a form of prayer that overlapped physical activity throughout the day. His followers, as he wrote in 1551, should be able to "exercise themselves in seeking the presence of our Lord in all things, in their conversation,

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walks, in all they see, taste, hear, learn, and in all they do. For it is true that the divine majesty is in all things by His presence, His power and His essence."50 This approach to prayer came to be called "contemplation in action." It marked a radical departure from tradition, but it was not an isolated example of how St. Ignatius conceived the relationship between spirit and matter. For in his Spiritual Exercises, No. 258, St. Ignatius described a method of prayer as follows: "With each breath or respiration, one should pray mentally while saying a single word . . . in such a way that from one breath to another a single word is said." A similar method had been employed by the Hesychast monks.51 The connection of prayer with breath has an ancient lineage. In India, pranayama is the respiratory discipline that aims at producing a balance between exhalation (prana) and inhalation (apana) so that an "equalized" breath (samana), like that of dreamless sleep, is achieved, a state unperturbed and peaceful, reminiscent of the tranquil state of Being before becoming.52 The object is for the yogi to "penetrate the 'states of consciousness' peculiar to sleep without in any way sacrificing his lucidity."53 China, too, developed meditative practices associated with breath control,54 the best known of which is T'ai Ch'i Ch'uan, "The Supreme Ultimate Form." T'ai Ch'i is pure meditation in action. T'ai Ch'i is, of course, partly bodily exercise, and it has given rise to self-defense practices preserved in traditions in China and Japan. But it is also a discipline of concentration, will power and visualization; and, as Galante puts it, "for the soul, it is a system of spiritual meditation."55 The bodily movements constitute the "form," "a choreographed series of refined and coordinated techniques"56 based on the ancient teachings of the / Ching and the Tao Te Ching. In Galante's words, "the / Ching teaches that the world is always and continuously in movement. The Tai Chi Chuan form reflects this truth also, in its uninterrupted movements, without pause and without hesitation."57 The goal is to learn to see without looking, act without doing, so that one may catch the Ch 7, or vital breath of everything that is,58 "the tool which produces things."59 In becoming the Supreme Ultimate instrument while doing the form, one becomes "onened" with the creative process that is the Tao itself. If T'ai Ch'i is meditation in action, dance has provided an admirable example of the fusion of spirit with physical movement. In the Indian tradition, the god Shiva Nataraja — "Lord of the Dance" — was thought to be dancer, stage and audience to himself while he performed his eternal five-fold dance. The ancient Israelites praised God with dancing,60 and none more than King David. When the ark of God was being brought to Jerusalem, he "danced before the Lord with all his might... leaping and dancing," oblivious of what was going on around him.61 In Islam, the Whirling Dervishes have kept alive the tradition of the sama\ a cosmic dance in which each dancer is a planet circling the sheikh, who represents the sun. Wearing black capes and high felt hats representing tomb and tombstone, they enter the precinct and wait for the sheikh to recite the opening prayers. Then, on his signal, they drop the black cloaks and emerge in long, loose white robes, as if liberated by a second birth, and begin to whirl slowly, arms spread like wings, the right palm turned upwards to receive the divine grace, and the left palm turned downwards to channel this grace to the world; for in this dance the dervishes are

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conduits of God's favors.62 Thus they dance until the sheikh signals the end of the whirling. The dance is performed by a physical body infused by spirit. Rumi asks: Oh Moslem, who has ever seen a cloak dance without a body in it? The cloak dances because of the body, the body because of the spirit, and love for the Beloved, like a string, holds tight the spirit's neck.63 Finally, in Christianity, legend has it that, after the Last Supper, Jesus invited his followers and friends to join him in dance, for, he said, "He who does not dance/does not know what happens." And he added: Now, if you follow my dance, You will see yourselves in me who am speaking.64 CONCLUSION Peoples of the ancient Middle East believed that the universe was a watery infinity within which the Creator had scooped up a dry world, setting boundaries to the waters below to form what we call Earth, and arching a transparent dome over the dry expanse to prevent the waters above from overwhelming it. This cupola-like divide was call Sky. Sluice gates in it opened occasionally to let some water fall down as rain, and to it were affixed the sun, the moon and all the stars.65 It is understandable that some, at the time, might have speculated that a climb to the high mountains on whose peaks the dome was thought to be anchored might have allowed the intrepid explorer to peer into the primeval waters above, an experience captured in Medieval Christian fables and, in combination with Plato's "Vision of Er,"66 even in prints. It is easy to see how this picture of the world might have led some to believe that the heavens themselves, even Paradise, were watery, a misconception difficult to dispel, but against which the faithful were warned. The following story illustrates this point: Four men ascended into Paradise, Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Acher [Elisha ben Abuyah], and Rabbi Aqiba. Rabbi Aqiba said to them: "When you arrive at the stones of pure marble [the gates of Paradise] do not exclaim, * Water! Water!' for it is written, Those who lie shall not tarry in my sight.' "67 Ben Azzai gazed and died; Ben Zoma gazed and became demented; Acher cut the plants [lost his faith]; Rabbi Aqiba departed in peace.68 This story can serve as a cautionary tale to those who refuse to allow for the spiritualization of matter, including technology. In our own times, some have so strained their conception of the purity of spirit and the impurity of matter, that intimations of admixture may lead them to lose their faith or become demented. But even in traditional patriarchal spirituality it is possible to approach the world with an integrity of vision that excludes nothing. This is the task. The horizon that we contemplate is one in which spirit is spilled upon the entire material universe, which thus can become for us a sacrament, a saving "thing."

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NOTES 1. Genesis 1:19. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 295. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), IV. 341, p. 273. 4. Confessions X. VI. 9. 5. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad IV. 4. 22. 6. Exodus 32:7-8. See also 2 Kings 2:11-12 for a picture of heaven accessible to a "fiery chariot." Teilhard de Chardin used this text as the context for his own mystical, "The Spiritual Power of Matter," in Hymn of the Universe. The Roman authorities distrusted his vision of matter, and so they first forbade the reading of his works (Monitum of 1956) and later warned the faithful in a lengthy footnote, pp. 70-71. 7. This has been explored by, among many others, Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature and David Ray Griffin, "Postmodern Spirituality and Society," in David Ray Griffin, ed., Spirituality and Society (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 1-31. See also David F. Noble's insightful essay, "A Masculine Millenium: A Note on Technology and Gender," in his The Religion of Technology. 8. Feminist spirituality correctly presents itself as pas/modern — that is, pas/patriarchal. It is unitary and avoids making a distinction between spirit and matter (nature). See, among many others, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983) and Gaia and God; Eleanor Rae, Women, the Earth, the Divine (New York: Orbis Books, 1994); Carol J. Adams, ed., Ecofeminism and the Sacred (New York: Continuum, 1993); Charlene Spretnak, ed., The Politics of Women's Spirituality (New York: Anchor Books, 1982). My purpose here, however, is not so much to suggest the substitution of this "new" spirituality for the "old" one, but to show that even within traditional spirituality there is an incorporation of the material into the spiritual. On cyberfeminism, I have commented enough in the Introduction. 9. This tradition is, indeed, ancient, but it has become more rooted in us through the rise of mechanistic science. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature for a detailed historical account of the growth of this view in modern times. 10. Gdthas, Yasna 30: 4. 11. Quoted in Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 57. On Zarathustra, see Zaehner, Matter and Spirit, pp. 130-156. 12. Phaedrus 250C. 13. For example, 1 Corinthians 3: 1, Romans 7: 14 and 8: 5-9. See Louis Bouyer, The Spirituality of the New Testament and the Fathers (New York: Desclee Co., Inc., 1963), pp. 79-81. 14. Discourse on Method IV [33]. 15. Kramer, Listening to Prozac, p. 19. Also Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines. 16. Huston Smith, "The Ambiguity of Matter," Cross Currents 48: 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 49-60. Donna Haraway, in "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," Socialist Review 15:2 (March-April, 1985), p. 70, agrees with Smith that "the boundary between the physical and the non-physical is very imprecise for us," but she hazards the guess that there may be some sort of pleasure in the confusion of boundaries, as happens with robots and cyborgs (p. 66). 17. Carl G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1968), pp. 296-297. 18. Teilhard, The Phenomenon of Man, pp. 293-294.

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19. See George Gale, "The Anthropic Principle," Scientific American 245: 6 (December, 1981), pp. 154-171; Henry Margenau and Abraham Varghese, eds., Cosmos, Bios, Theos (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1992); and Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1990). 20. See John 1:14: 6 Adyog odp£. 21. Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur," in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). 22. R. C. Zaehner, Dialectical Christianity and Christian Materialism (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 6. 23. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), p. 29. 24. Zimmer, Philosophies of India, pp. 324-325. 25. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theolgiae 3, 62, 6. 26. For example, adRomanos 7: 3, ad Smyrnaeos 7: 1. 27. IApolog. 65-66. 28. Cat. Mystagog. IV; MG 33, 1097-1104. 29. Adv. Marcion. I, 14, 3 and V, 308. 30. For example, in Sermo 272; ML 38, 1246. See Jesus Solano, S.J., ed., Textos eucaristicos primitivos (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1952). 31. Cyril of Jerusalem, Cat. Mystagog IV, 1; MG 33, 1097. 32. See, among others, Peter Brown, The Body and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Wayne A. Meeks, The Origins of Christian Morality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven (New York, Doubleday, 1990). 33. Simone Weil, "Theorie des sacraments," in Pensees sans orde concernant I'amour de Dieu (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 135, quoted by George Grant, "Justice and Technology," in Theology and Technology, ed. Carl Mitcham and Jim Grote (Lanham: University Press of America, 1984), p. 243. 34. Milan Kundera, Immortality (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), p. 40. See Mary Anne McPherson Oliver, "Conjugal Spirituality (or Radical Proximity): A New Form of Contemplation," Spirituality Today 43: 1 (Spring, 1991): 53-67. 35. Besides the sources cited below, the following should be noted: Omar Garrison, Tantra (New York: Causeway Books, 1964); Lama Yeshe, Introduction to Tantra (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1987); Lama Yeshe, The Tantric Path of Purification (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995); Swami Sivananda Radha, Kundalini: Yoga for the West (Spokane, WA: Timeless Books, 1978); Miranda Shaw, Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); David Snellgrove, trans. & ed., TheHevajra Tantra: A Critical Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1959); John Blofeld, The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1970). 36. Blofeld, The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet, pp. 32-33. 37. Philip Rawson, Tantra (London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 1973), p. 16. 38. Agehananda Bharati, The Tantric Tradition (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1970), p. 18. 39. Rawson, Tantra, p. 21. Also Lilian Silburn, Kundalini, Energy of the Depths (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 137. 40. Zimmer, Philosophies ofIndia, pp. 576-577. Despite the gender exclusive language (characteristic of the time), Zimmer's comments apply to both men and women participants. 41. Mircea Eliade, Patanjali and Yoga (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1969), p. 178. 42. Scholem, Major Trends, p. 235. 43. Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery (New York: Vintage, 1971), p. 18.

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44. Michael Murphy, Golf in the Kingdom (New York: Viking, 1972), and In the Zone: Transcendent Experience in Sports (New York: Penguin/Arkana, 1995). 45. W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis (New York: Random House, 1974). 46. Quoted in Adam Smith, Powers of Mind (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 187. 47. Quoted in Ignacio L. Gotz, The Psychedelic Teacher (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1972), pp. 114-117. The original account appeared in The New York Times, Sunday, May 10, 1970, p. 58. 48. There is evidence that the first organized games at Olympia were for women only, those who kept the sacred flame going, the men being involved in them only later. The Amazons, too, having been among the first to tame the horse in sport, developed a spirituality centered on the Goddess. See Wolfgang Lederer, The Fear of Women (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1968), p. 103. Also Phyllis Chessler, "The Amazon Legacy," in Charlene Spretnak, ed., The Politics of Women's Spirituality (New York: Anchor, 1982), p. 97. 49. John Tallmadge, "Nothing Special: Spiritual Dimensions of Backpacking," Orion Nature Quarterly 2: 2 (Spring, 1983): 14-23. 50. Letter to Father Antonius Brandao, June 1, 1551. Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu, Ep. Ignat., Ill, 510, quoted in Joseph F. Conwell, S. J., Contemplation in Action (Spokane, WA: Gonzaga University Press, 1957), p. 3. 51. Eliade, Patanjali and Yoga, p. 76-79. Also Jean Leclercq et al, The Spirituality of the Middle Ages (New York: The Seabury Press, 1968), pp. 576-588. 52. Yogasutra II, 49. See Silburn, Kundalini, pp. 39—40 and Zimmer, Philosophies of India, pp. 318-319, 361-362. 53. Eliade, Patanjali and Yoga, p. 71. 54. See Jane Huang and Michael Wurmbrand, transl. & ed., The Primordial Breath (Torrance, CA: Original Books, Inc., 1987). 55. Lawrence Galante, Tai Chi: The Supreme Ultimate (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1981). See also Tern Horwitz and Susan Kimmelman, Tai Chi Chuan (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1976) and Herman Kauz, Tai Chi Handbook (New York: Doubleday Dolphin Books, 1974); and Emily Culpepper, "Martial Art Meditation," in The Politics of Women's Spirituality, Charlene Spretnak, ed. (New York: Anchor, 1982), p. 258

ff 56. Galante, Tai Chi, p. 23. 57. Ibid., p. 34. 58. See Holmes Welsh, Taoism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 160. 59. Quoted in Fung Yu-lan, The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), p. 189. 60. Psalm 149. 61. 2 Samuel 6: 12-21. 62. Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch, Rumi and Sufism (Sausalito, CA: The Post-Apollo Press, 1987), pp. 43-53. 63. Jalaluddin Rumi, Diwrn-i Shams-i Tabriz, B. Furuzanfar, ed. (Tehran: University of Tehran Press, 1336-46/1957-67), 20379-80, in William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Love (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), p. 328. 64. Acts ofJohn 95-97, in Edgar Hennecke and Wilhelm Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1964), pp. 227-232. 65. Genesis 1: 6-10 and Enuma elish \WA2>5ff See also Job 38 and Psalm 104: 2-5. 66. Republic X. 613. 61. Psalm 101:7. 68. Babylonian Talmud (Bavli), Hahigah 14b. See also Lesser Hekhaloth, 19.

7

Technology and Education According to Steiner, "we must acquire an organ for what is necessary for our age," for "it is one of our social tasks to derive from the present our educational subjects."1 This, then, we must understand: if spirit is in the world, then the world must not be rejected. As Teilhard put it, "No longer do we live in a physical sphere and a moral sphere — there is nothing but the physico-moral."2 Literally, we live in a divine milieu that includes technology, and education is the context in which this unity of spirit and matter is to be discovered and realized: "To ensure the psychic continuity, at every? phase, of this vast development embracing myriads of elements strewn throughout the immensity of time, there is one single mechanism — education."* The problem of education and technology is, then, not to undergo passively the onrush of technology, but actively to make sure that "the letter does not kill."4 The objective is, really, to create a new yoga to yoke us to Being even in the midst of a bewildering plethora of tools. TECHNOLOGY AND EDUCATION The primary educational instrumentality is teaching. As techne teaching is knowledge beyond the given. It involves allegorical knowing, knowing of the possibility of situations, of the potentiality of children and of the manner in which these potentialities may be actualized — the ways in which their logos may be brought to our presence. Teaching is not primarily a performance or a task but a mode of knowing sui generis that apprehends specific possibilities within its reality and helps reality actualize them. Like art, teaching is making the way open for Being to unconceal itself as truth — which, after all, is what teaching is all about. When authentic, teaching is a mode of being through which unconcealedness — that is, truth — takes place. The actions of both teachers and pupils are, according to Vandenberg, "the opening out

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of being into the pedagogic relation. This opening out of being is the work of being clearing a place for its own appearance."5 Quill pens are tools, but their use for writing could not foretell the beauty and profundity of what would be written with them. The fact that Dante used a quill pen left open the possibility of what he would write. In fact, in chronicling Dante's writing of La Commedia we do not mention what he wrote with, for it is not deemed necessary. Seeing technology as a tool concentrates on the instrumentality, on the thing separated from its base and foundation; but obviously, technology implies more than this, and it is this beyond of possibility that is characteristically made present by technology and defines its essence more than its character as a tool. The trick is not to succumb to the lure of the tool and its use, as when one drives a good car for the firs time and becomes infatuated with the color, the shape, the power and the speed; but without losing the sensual pleasure of the use, to open up to the possibilities engendered by the car, such as a good ride through the mountains or cruising through enchanted forests and glens. To succumb to the lure of instrumentality is to become necrophilic, a real danger in the twentieth century;6 it is to become narcissistic, fixed on the sensory extension rather than on the depths beyond. At the other end of the spectrum Archimedes was transfixed to death by a dull Roman soldier because he was absorbed in the contemplation of a mathematical diagram! Is there any significance in the fact that one of the first to construct a computer was a mystic — Ramon Llull {ca. 1236-1315); that Hildegard von Bingen was an herbalist; that astronomer Johannes Kepler composed the Harmoniae Mundi (1619); and that Newton wrote more spiritual books than he did scientific tomes? What mystical meditations have not been written on the abacus? Doesn't Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel portray the sublime joys (and dangers) to which a mystical use of computer games can lead? Only Magister Ludi Josef Knecht understood because he was an artist, and because he was both master {magister) and servant {Knecht): he mastered himself and his actions in the service of the spirit that forever reappears in the world and unconceals itself as truth. Inevitably, Josef Knecht ended up as a teacher! Perhaps a way to understand what is expected of us is to make a distinction, common in the study of religion, between iconic and aniconic forms. Iconic forms connect us to the symbolized by the resemblance they bear to it. Thus, the statue of an angel in battle array slaying a dragon reminds us of St. George; statues of the Virgin Mary remind us of the Mother of Jesus; and statues of elephant-headed Ganesh connect us with Shiva's decapitated son. Similarly, hammers are for hammering and computers for computing: the forms connect us with the obvious purposes, nothing more. It is the same with technology: we are too conscious of the instrumental nature and connect each too easily to the task it represents, and no more. Aniconic forms, on the other hand, are symbolic forms which refer to the symbolized without any representational likeness. The connection between symbol and symbolized depends totally on associations that do not rely on representational similitude. A typical example in the Hindu religion is the lirigam (phallus) which (as was pointed out above) is not at all the likeness of Shiva, yetfor those who know

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it symbolizes Shiva himself. In Western Christianity the consecrated host is an aniconic symbol of the body of Christ. Now, why can we not learn to see technology as an aniconic symbol of Being? When confronted with a wrench, why must we think only of its function and purpose as a fastening tool? Why can't a wrench, which is not (nor can it be!) the likeness of Being, symbolize Being itself? And should not this be, precisely, the task of education, to help us learn how To see a World in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour?7 THE PERSON, TECHNOLOGY, AND EDUCATION The implications of the preceding for educational theory and practice should not require much elaboration.8 Basically, we do not need freedom from technology but liberation from the constraint to see technology in exclusively industrial, instrumental, non-aesthetic, and non-philosophical ways. We also need to understand ourselves better through a deeper study of poetry and literature, and by making schooling more spiritual. To achieve this we must, first, free teaching from an exclusive identification with technique. Whoever wants to know what teaching is must look neither at the theories and definitions nor at the methods, but at the actual teaching of teachers. Teaching is techne. Teaching is not mere theoretical knowledge; neither is it "practical" knowledge, the knowledge of lesson plans, of teaching methods, of skills, of classroom management. These things, which so many people, including specialists, identify with teaching, are only remotely connected with it. As techne teaching is not mere practice, either. As I said above, teaching is knowledge beyond the given. Moreover, from the point of view of learning, teaching is letting leam. "What teaching calls for is this: to let learn."9 To be a teacher, then, is not merely to leam to know when and where and how unconcealment is to take place, to leam to listen to the call of Being, to leam to answer, correspond, and converse; to be a teacher means above all to leam to let others leam. All authentic teaching is the letting happen of the advent of truth (as unconcealedness) as the truth of what is. When this letting be happens in teaching, teaching becomes the site wherein Being unconceals itself. Then not only is teaching grounded in Being, but the unconcealment of Being, the truth of Being, is established by teaching.10 This is one of the most exciting ways of viewing teaching, for it places the teaching situation, teacher, children, and subject matter, in a volcanic context in which Being is always about to erupt. Second, and in a more general sense, one of the primary tasks of teachers is to help dispel the many misconceptions of technology rampant in the market place and to introduce a newer and more human understanding of it. This involves correction of widespread though myopic views of technology. For example, it is false and misleading to claim, as some do, that "there can be no technical ends to life, only technical means," or that "the ends of life belong to another sphere, that of the

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spirit."11 This is false because, as I argued above, from the moment there were humans there was techne, a fact captured, perhaps, in the /narrative of the creation of Adam and Eve. For, as we read, God, Divine Craftman {technites), fashioned them from the clay of the earth (which He had made), and He breathed into their nostrils the breath of life; and the golem became a living soul, its "sphere," thus constituted as a mixture of matter and spirit by the very action of its Maker. It is important that we leam to see our selves not as disembodied beings whose spirits and souls are destined to a non-material heaven. If the person is an entity to which both spiritual and physical predicates are attributed, then our schooling must emphasize both and not relegate the physical to the realm of the extra-curricular as peripheral to the education of spirit. After all, even the Bible tells us that the prophet Elijah was whisked away to heaven in a chariot of fire}1 The equation of person with rationality and of technology with mechanics must be challenged by a new understanding that sees persons as concrete agents and technology as their effort to unwrap nature and the world. This conversion is to be achieved by an art of teaching whose main lesson must be to let the young leam to glimpse the translucence of the eternal splendor of the One in the many materials we use for our technology.13 TOWARD A SPIRITUALITY OF TEACHING When St. Ignatius proposed his new spirituality, no activity was to be excluded. Taking his plan as a model, there are many ways in which the perspectives outlined above could be employed in a school set-up. For example, they could affect the way we approach sports, how we conduct our sex education courses, how science understands the physical world, and so on. I have chosen to detail here how they would affect the mundane life of the teacher. What, for example, would it mean to be a contemplative, spiritual teacher? What follows is an attempt to outline the rudiments of such a spirituality. The first thing to be said is that to think that an overall plan or a general methodology for developing a spirituality for teachers is possible is to delude oneself. To take a parallel example, religious spirituality itself has dozens of legitimate paths on which thousands of people have trod since time immemorial. Even a superficial survey of monastic Christianity, to take a narrow example, will reveal ways such as Benedictine spirituality, Jesuit spirituality, Dominican, Carmelite, Franciscan, and Trappist spirituality, each distinct, each special, each legitimate or valid in its own right yet mostly incompatible with the others. Still, the field can be narrowed somewhat in that the objective is the development of a spirituality for teachers, though here again difference threatens the enterprise because of the diversity of teaching styles, methods, and situations, let alone the idiosyncracies of individual teachers and their particular callings. What follows, then, must be taken as tentative and provisional. I take teaching to mean a set of ostensive behaviors (pointing, showing, and the like) intended to let learning take place. A spirituality developed in the context of a teaching life would have to strive to maintain an ongoing openness toward new and diverse ways of letting people leam, but especially toward letting oneself learn how to let others learn, in such a way that one would progressively become

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transparent to what one intends to let others leam, so that in "seeing" the teacher pupils would leam the taught. Buber has written that "what we term education, conscious and willed, means a selection by man of the effective world: it means to give decisive effective power to a selection of the world which is concentrated and manifested in the educator." This means that "the master remains the model of the teacher," for in imitating the master, the techniques and the life lived by him/her are learned. Similarly, through the teacher (says Buber), "the selection of the effective world reaches the pupil. He [the teacher] fails the recipient when he presents this selection with a gesture of interference,"14 so teachers accomplish their task best when they are transparent to the world. This notion of openness and transparency has a long tradition in the major spiritualities of the world. The Gospels claim that Jesus said, "Who sees me sees the Father,"15 by which Jesus probably meant that his personality was totally transparent so that the divine horizon of Godhead could be glimpsed through it. Mohammed, too, made the same claim, contained in a hadith: "He who has seen me has seen the Truth," whence it follows that to know the Prophet is to know Allah.16 In India, the tradition of darshan accentuates the belief that to "see" the teacher is to see the taught, especially when the taught is the divine reality of Brahman. Now, darshan is the seeing of the divinity incarnate in the icon, but it is procured also of holy people and seers, of the real teachers. To see them is to see the pointing that is teaching, the pointing they have become. But to see teaching is to see the Self, because we all are It. Therefore the darshan of the teacher is the darshan of Brahman, the eternal, imponderable Self. Therefore, to see (= know) the teacher is to see (= know) Brahman, and to know Brahman is to become Brahman.17 How to achieve this transparency? A story by Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273) may offer a suggestion: The Chinese said: "We are the best artists." The Byzantines said: "To us belong the power and the perfection." "I will put you to trial," said the Sultan, and I will see which of you is right in your pretensions. . . . There were two rooms whose doors faced each other; the Chinese took one and the Byzantines the other. The Chinese asked the Sultan to give them a hundred colors. The Sultan opened his treasure in order that they might have what they wanted. Each morning, through his generosity, more colors were taken from his treasures by the Chinese. On the other hand, the Byzantines declared, "No tint or color is necessary for our work; we need only to take the rust off the walls." They closed the door and started to polish the walls which became as clear and pure as the sky. . .. When the Chinese finished their task, they started to beat their drums with joy. The Sultan came and saw the paintings, and the vision ravished his mind. Then he went to the Byzantines. When they drew away the curtain which separated the two rooms the reflection of the paintings of the Chinese struck the walls which had been cleansed. Everything the Sultan had seen in the room of the Chinese was splendidly reflected here, and the sight ravished his entire soul.18 It is easy to see that an adequate teaching spirituality would entail a constant

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polishing of the self to render it as perfectly reflective or transparent as possible. In all spiritual traditions self-analysis has led to the mapping of the way to selftranscendence. Not that the steps described necessarily or automatically lead to the desired transparency, but that when a break-through occurs, it appears to have followed a loosely recognizable sequence. Philosophical, artistic, and scientific literatures in the West speak of preparation, incubation, insight, and creation or verification; mystical traditions East and West have produced exhaustive analyses of four similar stages generally termed purification, progressive illumination (with intervals of "darkness"), ecstasy, and praxis.19 Purification is the cleansing of the walls, dirty through use and misuse. In the Indian tradition, the image is that of a pond whose bottom has been stirred so that the water has become turbid. There is need to still the water so that transparency may be regained. Similarly the apprentice teacher must leam to still the mind's surface so that it may truly reveal to the pupils the reality the teacher expects to be learned. All spiritualities speak of an initial period of preparation. This may be long or short, easy or fraught with difficulties, but in all cases it is a sine qua non of illumination. In the mystical tradition of the West, asceticism is said to lead to contemplation.20 Similarly, with regards to teaching, the years of preparation, the learning of techniques and the making of lesson plans, the development of a classroom manner, the mastery of subject matter, and so forth, are, indeed, necessary to render the experience of teaching possible, but at the same time, they are purificatory exercises designed to enable the teacher to embark on a personal spiritual quest. Concern with the curriculum ("small running course") can give way to interest in the actual walking or running experience (Latin currere), and to what it feels like to traverse the course.21 Emphasis on learning the prescribed curriculum must be balanced with attention to the actual running of the course for both teacher and pupil. As one enters teaching, there may follow a period which in the mystical way is traditionally called "incubation." It is a period when nothing seems to happen. Course follows course, year follows year with monotonous regularity and a sense of boredom may begin to overtake the teacher. In fact, a certain feeling of discouragement may appear because the results of one's efforts are not visible or measurable, no matter what the textbooks say or politicians decree. Mystics have often encountered at this stage what they termed "a dark night of the soul," periods of arid darkness and even despair. One reason for this dreary stretch is that teaching really consists in letting others leam; perhaps in enhancing the conditions of their learning, but always respecting their freedom to reject the learning and, at the same time, to reject the teacher.22 Given this view of teaching it is, of course, almost impossible to know what is happening in the minds and souls of the learners. Few things can be as discouraging as plodding without knowing whether one is progressing or not. Perseverance in one's efforts, no matter how sterile they may appear, leads eventually to a third stage, illumination. It may happen, though often only after a long life and mostly to a few chosen ones, that a mystical union of sorts takes place. This does not mean that all obstacles automatically disappear and everything is

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plain sailing from then on; neither does this mean that teachers proficient in their own spiritual development are holy: spirituality does not confer sainthood. What it does mean is a centering of all energies at one's command, like spokes in a wheel, around the execution of the tasks one is called to, so that failure to heed such a call would undermine not only the performance of the specific tasks at hand, but the development of one's personality as a whole. Hermann Hesse described an instance of this teaching summit in a letter Knecht wrote about the aging Music Master: It was as if by becoming a musician and Music Master he had chosen music as one of the ways toward man's highest goal, inner freedom, purity, perfection, and as though ever since making that choice he had done nothing but let himself be more permeated, transformed, purified by music — his entire self from his nimble, clever pianist's hands and his vast, well-stocked musician's memory to all the parts and organs of body and soul, to his pulses and breathing, to his sleep and dreaming — so that he was now only a symbol, or rather a manifestation, a personification of music. At any rate, I experienced what radiated from him, or what surged back and forth between him and me like rhythmic breathing, entirely as music, as an altogether immaterial esoteric music which absorbs everyone who enters its magic circle as a song for many voices absorbs an entering voice.23 In an earlier age Plato had envisioned the same three-fold development in a way that extended beyond mere intellectual wisdom and contemplation, the ultimate reaches of which, steeped as they are in mystical experience, are surely beyond the pale of most individuals and outside the range of most institutions. There is here "a new type of cognition," he wrote, "which cannot be learned from anyone else, but if the thought in the soul of the inquirer is led on in the right way, arises of itself."24 This takes place under the impulse of Eros in oneself yearning to attain one's true nature, and therefore it is a "moulding of oneself."25 The processes are described by Plato in Republic VI.490A-B and 500B-C. Nettleship summarizes them: Beginning with the instinctive attraction to what is familiar, passing on into the ready receptivity for all that is admirable in nature and art, with the unconscious grace and refinement which accompany it, it has now become the consuming passion for what is true and real, at once the most human and the most divine attribute of the soul, the crowning gift and complete embodiment of perfect manhood.26 The affective and even religious elements are found, not in the Republic, but in the Phaedrus and the Symposium. Several of the speeches in the latter — for instance, Alcibiades's — indicate some of the ascetical practices27 required to begin the march toward the mystical heights sketched later by Diotima. Detachment from individual and physical beauty is followed by learning to value moral beauty and to contemplate the unity and kinship of all that is noble and honorable. There follows the relish of abstract relationships, culminating in a divinizing union with Beauty itself, as in the Mysteries. Thus the individual, "initiated into perfect mystery, becomes truly perfect."28 Only after having attained this pinnacle of spiritual self-development did Plato think people could become teachers!

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CONCLUSION To descend to the concrete and the practical is to become necessarily provincial. Nothing wrong in this, provided fanaticism is avoided and openness preserved. What I mean is that the "how" of pedagogical spirituality must be developed in the context of specific spiritualities. Some of these have been delineated already. For example, the Jesuits (the most successful educators from their beginnings until the nineteenth century) developed their own teaching spirituality and method in the Ratio Studiorum (1599), based on St. Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises.29 Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) developed the spiritual method and approach of the Waldorf Schools (the fastest growing independent school movement in the world) between 1919 and 1924, based on the tenets of Anthroposophy.30 Similarly, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) institutionalized his ideas of a spiritual and universalistic education in learning centers {ashrams), principally Sriniketan, Shantiniketan, and Visvabharati University,31 while Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) and the Mother (1878- 1973) developed their spiritual approach to education based on his ideas of evolutionary consciousness and "integral yoga," showcased first at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry and now in Auroville.32 There is also the long standing spiritual tradition in education of the American Plains Indians,33 and even a proposal for a Zen teaching spirituality adapted to the West.34 Does this mean that there should be courses on spirituality in teacher preparation programs? Why not? But with the caveat that such programs be conducted in ways that avoid the pitfalls or sins referred to above. In a more positive vein, the emphasis in teacher preparation should be, not on the tools alone, but on the spirit, and this emphasis should be reflected in the choice of required programs and courses. NOTES 1. Rudolf Steiner, Education as a Social Problem (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1969), pp. 108, 107. 2. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, L'energie humaine (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962), p. 90. 3. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 34. 4. 2 Corinthians. 3:6. 5. Donald Vandenberg, Being and Education (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971), p. 142. Also Gotz, Zen and the Art of Teaching, p. 98. 6. Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1964); The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973). 7. William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence." 8. See Gotz, Zen and the Art of Teaching, Ch.VII. 9. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968), p. 15. 10. Vandenberg, Being and Education, p. 76; Gotz, Zen, Ch. VII. 11. Nicholas Berdyaev, "Man and Machine," in Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey, eds., Philosophy and Technology (New York: The Free Press, 1983), p. 203. 12. 2Kings 2:l\.

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13. Werner Heisenberg, "Science and the Beautiful," Alexandria 4 (1997): 26. The reference is to Plotinus, Enneads I, 3, 2. 14. Buber, Between Man and Man, pp. 89-90. \5.John\A:9. 16. This sentiment is common in the early mystical literature of Islam. A prayer of Bayazid al-Bistami ( | 874) is preserved: "Adorn me with thy unity and clothe me with thy I-ness and raise me up unto thy oneness, so that when the creatures see me, they may say, 'We have seen Thee [i.e., God] and Thou art that.' Yet I [Bayazid] will not be there at all" (quoted by Abu Nasr al-Sarraj, Kitdb al-Luma'fil-Tasawwuf, R. A. Nicholson, ed. [Leyden: E. J. Brill, 1914], p. 382, in R. C. Zaehner, Hindu and Muslim Mysticism [New York: Schocken Books, 1969], p. 94). 17. Mandukya Up. III. 2. 9. 18. Mathnawi I, 3467 ff. A different image, but with the same import, may be seen in Rene Magritte's painting, "The Human Condition" (1934). 19. Gotz, Zen and the Art of Teaching, p. 173; Helminiak, A Spiritual Development, Chapters 3 and 4. 20. See Gregory of Nazianzus, "Purification leads to contemplation [ica0apoi<; 87upaoi<; eiQ Oecopiav]" {Orat. 20, 12). 21. See William F. Pinar et al., Toward a Poor Curriculum (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co., 1976). 22. See Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? p. 15. 23. Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (New York: Bantam, 1969), p. 239. 24. Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1943), II, p. 171. Meno 85D.; Epist.VII. 341C-D. 25. Republic 500D. In our times Richard Rorty has revived the idea of education as selfcreation or "edification" {Bildung) in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. See also Rene V. Arcilla, For the Love of Perfection (New York: Routledge, 1995), and Kenneth Wain, "Richard Rorty, Education, and Politics," Educational Theory 45:3 (Summer, 1995): 395409. 26. Richard Lewis Nettleship, The Theory of Education in the Republic of Plato (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968), p. 23. 27. Eduard Zeller, Plato and the Older Academy (New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1962), p. 193 ff. Republic 515E speaks of a "steep and rugged ascent." 28. Phaedrus 249C: xeAeoug dei xeXexac, T€Aou|ievo<;, xeAeoc; 6VTO<; udvog yiyvexax. On the implication of teloumenos (teAoujievog) see Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), especially Ch. Ill and notes, and Marvin W. Meyer, ed., The Ancient Mysteries (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987). Also, briefly, Ignacio L. Gotz, "A Note on Myth, the Mysteries, and Teaching in Plato's Republic^ Alexandria 3 (1995): 271-275. 29. See John W. Donohue, S. J., Jesuit Education (New York: Fordham University Press, 1963); Jose Francisco Corta, Hacia una mayor eficiencia en los colegios (Caracas: Hechos y Dichos, 1963). 30. Alan Howard, You Wanted to Know... (Spring Valley, NY: St. George Publications, 1983); Ekkehard Piening and Nick Lyons, Education as an Art: Essays on the Rudolf Steiner Method— Waldorf Education (New York: Rudolf Steiner School Press, 1979); Douglas Sloane, ed., WaldorfEducation: A Symposium published in Teachers College Record 81:3 (Spring, 1980): 322-370; John F. Gardner, The Experience of Knowledge (New York: Waldorf Press, 1975); Mary Caroline Richards, Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1980).

100 Technology and the Spirit 31. See K. G. Saiyidain, The Humanist Tradition in Modern Indian Educational Thought (Madison, WI: Dembar Educational Research Services, 1967), Chapter II; Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). 32. See Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on Education (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1973); Norman C. Dowsett and Sita Ram Jayaswal, eds., The True Teacher (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Society, 1975); Kireet Joshi and Yvonne Artaud, Exploration in Education (Auroville: Auropublications, 1974); Robert McDermott, ed., The Essential Aurobindo (New York: Lindisfame Press, 1987). 33. Sylvester M. Morey, ed., Can the Red Man Help the White Man? (New York: The Myrin Institute, 1970); Joseph Epes Brown, ed., The Sacred Pipe (Baltimore: Penguin, 1971). 34. Gotz, Zen and the Art of Teaching, pp. 140-184.

8 Some Dangers of Spirituality There is no boon that cannot become a bane. The consecrated host can become moldy and baptismal water can rum brackish. As emperor, Nero was the High Priest of the Romans' religion, but in the circus he perpetrated the most lewd and obscene acts.1 King Midas's gift turned into a curse, and so did Pandora's, while Lucifer left his heavenly brilliance for the darkness of hell. Looking at the world through spiritual eyes is a gift that can be misused. The purpose of this chapter is to expose some serious dangers that arise precisely out of this perspective. DEUS EX MA CHINA The producers of ancient theatrical spectacles had devised ways of making the gods appear unexpectedly to rescue a hero or simply make an awe-inspiring entrance. Cords and pulleys took care of this, hence the divinity descending upon the stage was a deus ex machina. The ruse worked well for the most part, but it occasionally failed, as in the case of Simon Magus, who was killed when the rope broke and he plunged to the ground from a great height. There is no doubt that we have often expected technology to descend and dwell among us like some great divinity and to work marvels among us or at least dazzle us with a spectacle. This expectation is a danger lurking behind any effort to spiritualize technology, and it must be addressed here in some detail. In a brilliant and insightful book, Richard Stivers has argued that "our expectations for technology have become magical and our use of it increasingly irrational."2 He defines magic as "a set of words and practices that are believed to influence or effect a desired outcome."3 I pointed out above that there is, indeed, a danger of being lured by the power of technology and by the complexity and sophistication of its current examples and uses to the point where we would credit it with supernatural — that is, magical — powers and would expect it to produce

102 Technology and the Spirit for us all manner of wonderful boons and effects. Virtual reality, for example (as in the "holodeck" of "Deep Space Nine"), conjures up inexhaustible possibilities; games such as "Myst" and "Riven" do the same; computer programs do the most astonishing things and at speeds almost beyond comprehension, "and because we worship quantity, speed, and growth, the computer appears to be omnipotent. How can we refrain," asks Stivers, "from attributing to it magical powers and expecting a Utopian future from its widespread use?"4 As if in answer to this question, TIME has run many sections in several recent issues projecting what the world will be like because of current technological advances. Stivers's work is based on that of Jacques Ellul, and while it contains a great deal of useful data and critical comments, it suffers from the same flaws as the master's, among which are a narrow interpretation of magic, irrationality, and the sacred. He asserts that "magic begins historically in the attempt to influence nature, which was experienced as sacred,"5 but we can go even further back in time; for chimpanzees in the wild are known to perform a ritual "dance," brandishing sticks at the raging, thunderous storm, as if in an effort to frighten it away as it, in fact, is frightening them. But the point is that this definition of magic applies to a whole set of practices which we would be loath to call "magic," such as prayer of petition, offering masses for the dead, indulgences, and even the sacraments. In fact, science itself has developed as an effort to control or, at least, influence nature. We clothe ourselves, we build protective dwellings, we hunt, we observe the stars, all with the intention of establishing a certain control over our natural environments. True, some science — for example, alchemy — appears to have had a more magical bend, but we understand today that the alchemists' experiments, which for long were considered to be mere magic, were, in fact, symbolic of an inner search which was of great importance. Furthermore, the use of magic, or of any other method of influencing nature and the world, need not be irrational simply because it seems to go against the objectifiable predictions of science. Or, perhaps better, not everything that is not rational is a fortiori irrational. This applies especially to the sacred. The relationship of humans to the sacred is not irrational, as Stivers maintains, but, rather, non-rational; that is, it cannot be wholly subsumed under the categories of the rational, but this does not mean that it is anti-rational. As Godel demonstrated (and as Aristotle had already insinuated), not every proposition that cannot be proved is ipso facto false: it could be true but unprovable or undecidable.6 Stivers also maintains7 that, in so far as they subscribe to the idea of a transcendent God, Judaism and Christianity reject (at least in theory) the idea of the sacred. But this view of both religions is truncated, for while Judaism and Christianity subscribe to the idea of a transcendent God, they do not subscribe to the idea of a God who is only transcendent; both espouse, in theory as well as in practice, the concept of a divinity immanent in the world, which is the idea of the sacred: YHWH says this explicitly to Moses in Exodus 3:5, and Jesus does the same with the eucharistic words in Luke 22:19. Finally, there is nothing wrong or damnable, as Stivers maintains,8 in treating technology as a hierophany, as I have argued in this book. In fact, this is one important way of ensuring that technology does not overwhelm us, because what

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shines through it is Being secularized or sacralized according to one's orientation. It is precisely when technology ceases to be a hierophany that it runs the risk of becoming lethal: the spirit vivifies, but the letter kills! A NOTE ON THEURGY Quasi-magical practices are probably very old, as Stivers has said. One interpretation of the paintings in the caves of Chauvet and Lascaux with their myriad heads of cattle, is that they represent a prayerful wish of the painters, in the midst of a glaciation, that animal herds become available to them for hunting above ground as they had depicted them underground. Much later on, the Yi Ching, a book of meditation, became a book of divination, for people sought in it answers to the riddles of their lives. In India, the vedic peoples enjoined ritual sacrifices whose action {karma) was designed to cause the gods to favor the performers as well as those on whose behalf the rites were performed. The same conditions obtained among the ancient Greeks. This idea of influencing the gods was never lost completely in ancient Greece, and it reappeared in classical times as well as during the glory days of Neoplatonism. The term used was theurgy, and it connoted an action upon the gods not just to gain influence, but also to approach the gods in some kind of mediumistic fashion.9 While theurgy flourished in the wake of Neoplatonism, examples of it are found much earlier. In the Peloponnese, for instance, Diotima was said to have prevented the plague; Sisyphus captured Hades ("forcing" an end to death, at least for a while); and Asklepios "forced" the return of a dead man to life. In Israel, the witch at Endor brought Samuel back from the dead to converse with King Saul,10 and Elijah coaxed God to cause rain to fall and end the drought. ll A characteristic of this type of theurgy is its self-centeredness; it provokes the gods to act for personal gain and it achieves this through the power of rituals which exert "pressure" on the gods ex opere operato}1 According to Iamblichus, It is not thought that links the theurgists with the gods: else what should hinder theoretical philosophers from enjoying theurgic union with them? The case is not so. Theurgic union is attained only by the efficacy of the unspeakable acts performed in the appropriate manner, acts which are beyond all comprehension, and by the potency of the unutterable symbols which are comprehended only by the gods... . Without intellectual effort on our part the tokens [ouvOrijiocia] by their own virtue accomplish their proper work.13 It goes without saying that in spiritualizing technology there is a risk of assuming that its use will automatically bring down among us the kingdom of heaven, or that its mere possession will make us happy. Such expectations may have grounded our intoxication with technology, of which the horrors of the last century may have helped to sober us. The risk is there, but it need not materialize. IDEOLOGIES OF EXCARNATION One of the first heresies the nascent Christian movement had to face was that of Docetism, the doctrine, preached by Marcion and Valentinus, according to which

104 Technology and the Spirit Jesus did not have a real, physical body, but only an apparent one. Jesus's body, they said, was heavenly, and the proof of this was that Mary had retained her virginity at the time of birth, for Jesus had passed through her "as water through a pipe."14 And the reason for denying a carnal body to Jesus was the Gnostic belief that matter was evil and therefore unsuitable for union with God. In fact, the Gnostics maintained, the union of body and spirit in humans was a punishment for a primordial "sin" committed by Sophia. Against this belief Tertullian {ca. 155-235) argued strenuously that what the Gnostics considered unworthy of God, "this flesh suffused with blood, built up with bones, interwoven with nerves, entwined with veins . . . human without a doubt, as bom of a human being,"15 he considered a gain to himself, for he found in this the proof of God's love for humankind. Apostrophizing Marcion, he wrote: This reverend course of nature you, Marcion, spit upon; and yet, how else were you born? If you detest a human being at his birth, how can you love anybody? . . . . At any rate, Christ has loved even that man who was condensed in his mother's womb amidst all its uncleanness, even that man who was brought to life out of that very womb, even that man who was nursed amidst the nurse's simpers. . . . Being the Creator's Son, shouldn't he love his own creature?16 One of the dangers of spiritualizing technology is to think of it, in so far as it is material, as unworthy of us as spiritual selves. It would be sad if we despised matter because we are ashamed of our own material bodies; after all, we cannot act in this material world without them! REINCARNATION Belief in reincarnation,17 whether as metensomatosis (inappropriately labeled metempsychosis, since the same soul is said to inhabit successively different bodies, not the other way around) or transmigration (the belief that the soul migrates to different levels of reality), is an ancient one. In Hinduism, the belief in reincarnation is most often tied to the idea of karma. At a very simple level of meaning, karma means that all actions have both physical and moral consequences. As long as the morally evil consequences of actions outweigh the good ones, final release from the world, and therefore salvation, is not possible. Many lives may have to be lived through before the evil fruits of actions are dissipated or counterbalanced by good ones. Hence reincarnation. In Hinduism, reincarnation is understood according to a psychological theory of the human personality developed by the Sankhya system before the advent of the Indoeuropeans. This view maintains that there is only one self, the SELF {Atman), which is transcendental and spiritual. This one Self becomes somewhat connected with individual material bodies. These material bodies have senses through which they experience the outside material world. They also have a set of corresponding interior senses which represent a level of purification of sensory experience. All such experiences are organized under the aegis of a central inner sense, the I-Maker {aham-kara), which is the "I" we employ in ordinary conversation and the "I" we think we are. But, say the seers, this is the first and fundamental error, to believe

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that there is a separate, distinct "I." It is an error because there is only one Self {Atman). To think that each one of us has or is a self, an "I," is an illusion to be transcended, the last obstacle to be overcome on the way to release and salvation. Now, it is true that the body acts, that there are actions in the world; but the Self does not act. Since it does not act, it is not connected with consequences. Therefore the law of karma does not affect it. The law of karma — that actions have consequences — applies only at the level of the material, in the realm of appearances, at the level that philosophers call "phenomenal." The self that is affected by the consequences is, therefore, not the "real" self — the (universal) SELF {Atman) — but the phenomenal self I mistakenly think I am. Consequently, there is reincarnation, but "I" am not reincarnated, because "I" am really and truly the one SELF {Atman) which does not act and therefore is not at all polluted by the consequences of action. In Buddhism, matters are a bit more complicated, because according to Buddhist psychology, there is no self, really. What exists is a series of contiguous moments or bits of consciousness which, together, co-produce effects in the world, much as the disparate frames of a film, when viewed at a certain speed, project a moving image on the screen. The belief in an extended "self co-extensive with all these moments is understandable but illusory, for all the instances are distinct. At the moment of death, the last discrete moment of "my" existence impinges on the first moment of another's existence, but no "I" or "self" continues, because there was, really, no "I" or "Self." As Rahula puts it, as there is no permanent, unchanging substance, nothing passes from one moment to the next. So quite obviously, nothing permanent or unchanging can pass or transmigrate from one life to the next. It is a series that continues unbroken, but changes every moment. The series is, really speaking, nothing but movement. . . . A person who dies here and is reborn elsewhere is neither the same person, nor another. . . . It is the continuity of the same series. The difference between death and birth is only a thought-moment: the last thought-moment in this life conditions the first thought-moment in the so-called next life, which, in fact, is the continuity of the same series.18 The law of karma makes sure that the effects which have accumulated during the time "my" series was in operation affect, for better or for worse, the series which begins after my death; the effects continue, but "I" do not, because there is, really, no "I." Here, there is not even a reincarnation, properly so called, for nothing is enfleshed again; effects, however, continue to operate and affect those whose consciousnesses are still being strung out in the world.19 Things were somewhat different in the Greek tradition. Greek religion had, indeed, an idea of reincarnation. It also had an idea of the effect of one's actions on the afterlife as well as in future reincarnations. This was very much a part of popular belief and is found in many of the Greek myths. Plato incorporates it in the "Myth of Er," in Republic X.613-620. However, the effects of previous lives on the present one are not as automatic as the current Western view of karma makes them to be. While the deeds of this life do color the thousand year experience of the afterlife, at the time of rebirth, the souls about to be reborn "choose" the new

106 Technology and the Spirit kind of life they want to lead; they then drink of the waters of forgetfulness and therefore, upon rebirth, do not remember their previous lives. And even though their choice, according to Plato, is usually influenced by the kind of life they led before, there is still an element of indeterminacy that makes the consequences of one's actions not as ineluctable as in the traditional Hindu view of karma. Now, the belief in reincarnation, while popular among the Greeks, was not accepted by all philosophers. Empedocles affirms it when he writes, "The notion that men exist, enjoy and suffer only during their so-called lifetime, and that before they received human shape and after their dissolution they are nothing at all, is a notion that no wise man would entertain in his heart;" and he adds: "In the past I have been a boy and a girl, a bush, a bird, and a dumb water-dwelling fish."20 Herakleitus seems to have accepted it, but Aristotle, on the other hand, rejected reincarnation on purely philosophical grounds. According to him, the human soul, insofar as it is the form of the body,21 cannot lose its transcendental (essential) relation to its body, for otherwise its entire essence would be changed: it would not be itself. In his own words: the soul cannot be without a body, while it cannot be a body; it is not a body, but something relative to a body. That is why it is in a body, and a body of a definite kind. It was a mistake, therefore .. . merely to fit it into a body without adding a definite specification of the kind or character of that body. . . . The actuality of any given thing can only be realized in what is already potentially that thing, i.e., in a matter of its own appropriate to it.22 The soul, in other words, does not exist simply as soul, but as soul-to-to-body (for the two of them together make up this person), and it retains this definite and specific relation even if separated from its body, a view on which Christianity will eventually base its own arguments against reincarnation. In Judaism, among kabbalists, the notion of metempsychosis {Gilgul) began to appear in the thirteenth century, probably borrowed from the Cathari, gnostic Christian heretics who were eventually exterminated. For the early kabbalists, metem-psychosis was not believed to be universal, but the fate of only those guilty of sins against procreation,23 and it is clearly a punishment. The notion was elaborated in great detail by Hayim Vital Calabrese (1543-1620) in his Sefer HaGilgulim. Scholem suggests that the factors which contributed to such esoteric developments are probably similar to those which accounted for the origin of the idea of transmigration in prehistoric times, "i.e., the impression made upon sensitive minds by the sufferings of innocent children, the contentedness of the wicked, and other [similar] phenomena."24 Eventually the doctrine became part of Jewish popular belief and folklore, though it was never accepted as orthodox. In orthodox Islam reincarnation after this life is denied emphatically. Several reasons are given. To begin with, Muslims believe that human life is given us to get to know God and, after this life, to proceed to paradise (or to hell, if we reject God). We are given one chance to either accept or reject God, and for this, even an instant suffices to believe or disbelieve. Another life would be simply a repetition of the first. The responsibility to attain this knowledge of God is not repeatable. If it were, it would take away the importance and significance of this life for the

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knowing of, and submission to, God. Further, metaphysically, transmigration demands that the soul have a reality independent of God, an unthinkable tenet. In esoteric Islam (as in esoteric Judaism and Christianity) matters are somewhat different. The word tandsukh may mean transmigration (the passage of one soul from a lower state to a higher one {naskh) or from a higher to a lower one {maskh); it may also mean reincarnation (rebirth in a human state); and metempsychosis (transmission after death of psychic elements, such as memories or aspects of personality, to another). While Islam generally rejects the renewal of life after death, esoteric doctrines leave open the possibility of lives or stages before birth.25 From its inception, Christianity — like Hinduism and Buddhism — accepted the belief that human actions have transcendental effects.26 What one does to one's fellows, Jesus said, will determine whether one goes to heaven or to hell. In other words, one's actions are meritorious, even though a controversy has raged since the time of St. Augustine regarding the degree to which God's grace empowers and renders one's actions meritorious for good. This dispute was also one of the major bones of contention during the Protestant Reformation, and it continued for a while to agitate the ranks of Roman Catholics in the guise of the Controversy DeAuxiliis. On the other hand, Christianity has consistently rejected reincarnation. Writing toward the end of the second century, Tertullian's arguments are typical: If, just as death follows life, life should follow death, the number of people in the human race would always remain the same.... Besides, since souls depart from this life at different ages, why do they all come back at the same age? At their birth, all people are imbued with the souls of infants; but how comes it that a person who dies in old age returns to life as an infant?. . . . If they return as precisely the same souls, even though they might acquire different bodies and totally different fates in life, they ought to bring back to life with them the same characters, desires and emotions they had before.... [If it is answered that they "change," then] they won't get the punishment they deserve; for the whole idea of punishment will be frustrated if they have no consciousness of what they truly deserve.27 But Christianity's strongest arguments against reincarnation arise because of its belief in the resurrection of the body, a belief that obliges Christianity to postulate that each risen body will be rejoined to its own specific soul, for it is as whole persons that the risen will enjoy eternally the joys of Paradise or the torments of Hell. That all people will rise with the same bodies they had while in this life is a dogma defined by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and reaffirmed by other councils and popes. Tertullian had insisted that "the flesh . . . will rise, all of it, itself, and whole," and Augustine had written that, at the sound of the trumpet, "God, wonderful and unspeakable artist, will, with wonderful and unspeakable speed, return our flesh to everything it once was."28 Aquinas, following Aristotle, argued that "the soul is naturally united to the body, for in its essence it is the form of the body. It is, then, contrary to the nature of the soul to be without the body."29 Now, since the soul is eternal, the body must eventually be joined to it.30 But why the same body? Because body and soul are

108 Technology and the Spirit united essentially at birth, as form to matter,31 and thus constitute the individual human person. If the same body was not rejoined to the same soul, it would not be the same person who rises.32 Therefore the soul, even after death (that is, after its separation from the body), "retains the being which accrues to it when in the body."32 Similarly, Karl Rahner argues that the act of informing the body is not accidental to the soul but is its substantial act, its very reality. Consequently, the soul's own substantial existence is, so to speak, grafted upon the material reality of the body, so that the act of informing the body is not really distinct from the very existence of the soul, and therefore cannot cease to exist except if the soul itself cease to be.34 From the preceding it is clear that the problem of our relationship to the world of matter, especially our own bodies, has been a perennial concern in all traditions. For us, the question is, How united or intertwined with our bodies do we experience ourselves to be? Belief in reincarnation may be seen, in some way, as an effort to excamate our spirits so as not to be blamed for what "we" — our bodies — do. Whether due to shame or repugnance, many of us seem bent on denying our connections to the world of matter, and every emphasis on the spirit is bound to raise this problem in one way or another. This is the background against which many people frame their attitudes toward technology. THIS VALE OF TEARS But there is more. In the Salve Regina, Roman Catholics pray to the Virgin Mary, we cry to Thee, exiled children of Eve, we sigh to Thee, sobbing and weeping in this vale of tears. A persistent belief in Christianity has been that our existence on this planet is painful and that only the transition to heaven after death will remedy it. St. Paul had given expression to this feeling in his letters — for example, when he wrote, "I desire to be freed from this body and be with Christ,"35 and, again, "we would rather be away from the body."36 The meaning is unmistakable: being loosened from the physical body and existing spiritually in heaven with God is the preferred thing. It is understandable that people should want to be freed from an earthly condition in which there is suffering and, eventually, death. Goethe, in his Wandrers Nachtlied, could sigh, I am weary of this contending! Why this rapture and unrest? Come, sweet Peace, Oh, come into my breast!37 a wish that echoes the ancient Upanishadic prayer,

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Lead me from untruth to truth, from darkness to light, from death to immortality.38 But such yearnings may be taken as the wishes of those who have never rooted themselves in the physical reality of their bodies. The young, for example, in whose lips such prayers are not usually found, take risks with their lives because they are not yet fully incarnated, so to speak; they have not yet tasted the fullness of life, which is material, so they show no fear of losing it. Not knowing its value they risk losing its riches. Some adults, similarly, seem never to have fully entered into their bodies, to have sunk roots into this world, so they readily deny it at the slightest provocation, especially because it is often fashionable to appear spiritual: in our culture, to call someone a "materialist" is usually not a compliment. And yet, the so-called "mid-life crisis" that seizes some men in their forties and fifties is not a matter of spirit but of the body, of the "gut" that knows that at their age they may have already traversed half of their life span. The point is that the body is inescapable. Despite all the yearning to be freed from this physical body, Christians have always believed that the resurrection entails the reunification with their own material bodies. As Jeffrey Burton Russell writes, The resurrected body was viewed as in some way identical with this earthly one, one that eats, excretes, breathes, circulates the blood, and fires neurons. The resurrected Christ ate fish (Lk 23: 42-43). A body that does not eat or drink could not function. The resurrected body is a different sort of body, a glorified body, but unless it functions as a body it resembles less an earthly body than a Platonic disembodies soul. Will our resurrection body be at our physical or intellectual peak? Will a mother encounter her child as a baby or as a grown person? Beneath these questions lay a consensus that the body in heaven would be at once a physical body and a body freed from its limitations; it would possess the qualities of completion and fulfillment.39 The irony here is that those who seek to avoid their bodies will find them again in heaven! Even people who believe in reincarnation espouse unintentionally an unending involvement in matter. And if this is the case with regard to the body, so it is with the earth as a whole. Revelation 21 promises "a new heaven and a new earth" so no matter how reviled and shunned now, the earth will remain forever. And this "new earth," as St. Augustine explains, must not be thought to be a different one, newly created, but rather the same one transformed and rendered incorruptible, and therefore eternal.40 A TALE OF TWO CITIES But there is a twist here. In the year 410, Alaric sacked the city of Rome. Even though Rome had ceased to be the center of the Empire, the event resonated throughout the civilized world and shocked all cultured people. Many looked around for a cause to blame this catastrophe on and found one ready at hand: the

110 Technology and the Spirit Christians. The Romans, they argued, had deserted the worship of the old gods and had permitted the establishment of a new religion: no wonder the gods had left the city to its own resources. The proof was the destruction of the city. St. Augustine, fifty-six years old at the time, undertook a vigorous defense of Christianity which included turning the tables on the Romans themselves, whose dissipation he blamed for the fall of the city: "So given are you to luxury that not even when crushed by the enemy is your wantonness repressed. You have missed the profit of your calamity; you have been made most wretched and have remained most profligate."41 For twenty years after the fall of Rome St. Augustine worked on his refutation of the accusations against Christianity. Seriatim he published what many consider his most outstanding work, De Civitate Dei ("On the City of God"). In the process he formulated a philosophy of history that has remained influential until the present day. The kernel of his view is the rejection of earth for the sake of heaven, for all civilizations will meet the fate of Rome simply because they are earthly, corruption and decay ceasing only when the whole human world will be taken up into the heavenly Jerusalem, the eternal City of God. In a famous passage he wrote: Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self even to the contempt of God, and the heavenly by the love of God even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself; the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men, but the greatest glory of the other is God, the witness of conscience. The one lifts up its head in its own glory; the other says to its God, "You are my glory, and the lifter of my head."42 In the one, the princes and the nations it subdues are ruled by the love of ruling; in the other, the princes and the subjects serve one another in love, the latter obeying, while the former take thought of all. The one delights in its own strength, represented in the person of its rulers; the other says to its God, "I will love you, Lord of my strength."43 Therefore the wise men of the one city, living according to human wisdom, have sought for profit to their own bodies or souls, or both . . . for they were either leaders or followers of the people in adoring images. . . . But in the other city there is no human wisdom, but only godliness, which offers due worship to the true God, and looks for its reward in the company of the saints, of holy angels as well as holy people, "that God may be all in all."44 This powerful view of history has been used as the justification for the abandonment of earthly improvements and concerns, for — the argument goes — human efforts should be directed wholly to the acquisition of the grace necessary to dwell in the heavenly Jerusalem. The tendency has been, not to spiritualize the earth but to flee from it, "for what other end do we propose to ourselves," asks St. Augustine, "than to attain to the kingdom of which there is not end?"45 ESCHATOLOGY A major consequence of this view of history is that it is eschatological, fixed on a future end (eaxaxov). This view originated in the decades after the death of Jesus in the thought that a "second coming" was imminent, just around the comer. The theologians simply elaborated on this thought, pointing to the fact that the end was, indeed, at hand because God had already become present to the world in the

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incarnation of Jesus. Having God in history already left nothing of importance to happen: the road to heaven was laid down; it was only a matter of time until its inauguration. Earthly civilization, as Danielou says, "survives under a sort of stay of execution until the end of the world."46 This means that, basically, there is no indefinite progress for the world. The system is closed. We move ineluctably toward a final end (eoxocxov), except that we do not know the date of its arrival. Moreover, we are living the last days before the end, and Christianity is the context in which we live it.47 In fact, other religions are seen as obstructions to its progress toward the millenium.48 It is difficult to say which of these viewpoints is more objectionable. Perhaps they are all equally objectionable but from different perspectives. In the context of this book, the main objection is the denial of the importance of the earth, the very earth into which — according to Christian belief— the Divine immersed itself in the incarnation; or, according to Jewish belief, over which the Divine Presence {shekinah) has been spread. Moreover, the conception of spirituality I have presented here is open-ended, while the eschaton imposes a closure that closes the system upon itself. Finally, it seems eminently unfair to judge the whole of human history on the basis of one system held by fewer than one sixth of humankind. Eschatology, a belief that became so apparent at the turn of the rmllenruum, is a real danger to spirituality. DISCERNMENT Aristophanes, in Clouds 1019, has "Good Logic" warn her charge: "Listen to him and you'll think what's bad is good, what's good is bad." In other words, beware of what Orwell called "Newspeak," for it, jargon, and not argument, is what convinces us in the long run, as the old devil Screwtape told his nephew and apprentice, Wormwood: "Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is truel Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous — that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about."49 These warnings apply both to advocates of the spirit and purveyors of matter. Hence the need for discernment, to be able to separate attitudes that bind from those that liberate. Today we are told that "greed is good." Why go to college except to get a good paying job? Why become a physician except to become rich and take Wednesdays off to play golf? Jargon, repeated often, dulls the mind. Cupidity, a classical vice (and therefore moral evil) dominates much of the educational enterprise as it does the whole of American society. "Unconstrained laissez faire capitalism," as Bellah calls it,50 is the order of the day, and one does not know whether one should wonder at the current triumphalism of business culture or at the fact that its base is the moral evil we condemned as vice a couple of generations ago. Ayn Rand calls selfishness a virtue51 and we do not even wince. It is as if Nietzsche's understanding of the origin of morals had come to pass again in our own day and age. For, as Nietzsche explained it, in the beginning the masters, those in power, define virtue as what they themselves are and value; but as they weaken, their slaves, who defined virtue as what they were and valued, gain ascendance until

112 Technology and the Spirit their definition becomes the accepted one in a perverse reversal of values.52 And is this not what has happened? The culture of the businessman, of the money maker, which for long was derided and, through derision and restraint was kept under control, has now become the order of the day. It rules — rather, its values rule; and yet, one cannot but wonder if these new values, the shun vices of previous generations, are not, in many ways, hollow, empty, and ultimately unsatisfying, as the claim used to be. First impressions, advertisement in all its enormous variety, especially now that it can create such alluring visual displays of what it seeks to sell, establishes, as Lusseyran says, a relationship with the surface of things. With the eyes we pass over furniture, trees, people. This moving along, this gliding, is sufficient for us. We call it cognition. And here, I believe, lies a great danger. The true nature of things is not revealed by theirfirstappearance.53 Not everything that shines is gold. But the same problem of deception obtains in the realm of the spirit. St. Ignatius Loyola narrates how, when he was at prayer in Manresa after his conversion, he beheld next to him a creature of great beauty, with a myriad points of light, which enticed him with its brilliance and filled him with spiritual delight. Only later did he discover that this was a temptation, and the experience led him to write in his "Rules for Discernment of Spirits," "It is a mark of the evil spirit to assume the appearance of an angel of light."54 When the reality of our own commercialized environment is such that deception of the consumer is practiced with impunity, and even rewarded and praised; and when supposed spiritual masters turn out to be just charlatans,55 one needs to leam discernment, one needs to leam how to distinguish gold from trash; one needs to leam to prod below the surface in order to determine the true reality of what is pandered and proffered. Already in ancient times Herakleitus remarked that "donkeys prefer straw to gold" and that "pigs wash in mud,"56 hence the need for discernment. Jesus, in a logion, counseled, "Be ye careful money changers!"57 — as good an advice then as it is now. CONCLUSION It must remain a matter for wonder that many of the traditions that could be sources of spirituality should contain within themselves exaggerations of which one must be wary. Corruptio optimi pessima, the Latins used to say: the worst failure is that of the best, and thus it is that we must be warned about the dangers to any solid spirituality coming from the very traditions that nurture it. The warnings included above are only partial, but they should suffice to alert us to this problem as we seek to spiritualize the technology with which we live in order to render our world, in Teilhard's phrase, into a divine milieu.

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NOTES 1. Gaius Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars (New York: Penguin, 1957), "Nero," No. 29. 2. Stivers, Technology as Magic, pp. 1, 17. 3. Stivers, Technology as Magic, pp. 41-42. 4. Ibid., pp. 6-7. See also Douglas Rushkoff, Cyberia (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995), and Jennifer Cobb, Cybergrace: The Search for God in the Digital World (New York: Crown Publishers, 1998). 5. Stivers, Technology as Magic, p. 2. 6. See Kurt Godel, "Uber formal unentscheidbare Satze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme, I," Monatsheftefur Mathematik und Physik 3 8 (1931): 173-198. Also Barkeley Rosser, "An informal exposition of proofs of Godel's theorems and Church's theorem," The Journal of Symbolic Logic 4: 2 (June, 1939): 53-60, and Harry J. Gensler, Godel's Theorem Simplified (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), p. 64, and George Boolos, "Godel's Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable," Mind 103: 409 (January, 1994): 1-3. See also Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 3. 332. 7. Stivers, Technology as Magic, p. 38. 8. Ibid., p. 39. 9. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 284-285. 10. 1 Samuel. 27:8. 11. 1 Kings 18:41-46. 12. Christian, especially Roman Catholic belief that the sacraments are efficacious ex opere operato ("by virtue of the act performed") is basically theurgic. See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 3, 62, 1, and Josephus A. de Aldama, S. J., et al, De Sacramentis (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1956), p. 5 7 ^ Hence the emphasis on the ipsissima verba of the sacramental formulas and on minute performance of the prescribed rite. At the secular level, computer protocols certainly fall within this class. 13. Iamblichus, de myst. 96. 13, quoted in Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 287. 14. Irenaeus, Adversus Haeres. 1, 7, 2, in A. Roberts and W. H. Rambaut, eds., The AnteNicene Library: The Writings of Irenaeus (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1869). 15. Tertullian, De Came Christi V, in Corpus Christianorum, J. G. Ph. Borleffs, ed. (Turnhout, 1955). 16. Ibid., IV. 17. Reincarnation must be distinguished from death-and-resurrection themes. These are ancient, too, such as the descent and ascent of Inanna, Persephone, Orpheus, and Jesus (according to the hymn that opens the so-called "Gospel of John"), the death and resurrection of Osiris, Shiva, and many others. See Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949). These themes found their expression in the ceremonies of initiation into the Mysteries, which endure in the baptismal ritual of Christianity. 18. Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught (Bedford: Gordon Fraser 1959), p. 33, in Richard A. Gard, ed., Buddhism (New York: George Braziller, 1962), pp. 115-116. 19. As Servapalli Radhakrishnan put it in Indian Philosophy (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1931), Vol. 1, p. 408, "Though the present self may not be the past, it is yet the outcome of the past." There is a peculiar idea of reincarnation among Tibetan Buddhists. Briefly, it involves the super-spiritualization or super-abstraction of consciousness before death and a continuation of this flare of pure consciousness for a certain period of time as a sort of bridge between one life-series and the appropriate next one. Only very few lamas are capable of such high degree of enlightenment, and therefore they are thought to reincarnate as the

114 Technology and the Spirit leaders of famous monasteries. See Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy, p. 440-446, and Tenzin Gyatso, Fourteenth Dalai Lama, The World of Tibetan Buddhism, Geshe Thupten Jinpa, transl. (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995), p. \3Sff 20. Frag. 64 and 91. Philip Wheelwright, ed., The Presocratics (New York: The Odyssey Press, Inc., 1966), pp. 137, 141. 2\.OntheSoul\\.\ [412 a 21]. 22. On the Soul II.2 [414a 19-28]. 23. Zohar I, 186b and III, 7a. See Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, p. 243. 24. Scholem, Major Trends, p. 281. 25. See, for instance, 'Aziz al-din Nasafi's explanations in his Kitab al-Insdn al-Kdmil ("Book of the Perfect Man"), (Paris and Tehran: Department dTranologie de 1' Institute Franco-Iranien, 1962), Appendix 9, "On the doctrine of the believers in Reincarnation." 26. Matthew 25: 31-46. 27. Tertuttian, De Anima 30, 1; 31, 2; 31, 3; 33, 2. 28. Enchiridion 89 (ML 40, 273). 29. Summa Contra Gentiles IV, 79. 30. Summa Theologiae, Supplement 75, 2c. 31. Supplement 79, \c. 32. Supplement 79, 2c. 33. Supplement 79, 2, ad 1. It should be noted that the Christian belief in the impossibility of radical change after death (on which the eternity of heaven and hell is predicated) necessarily excludes reincarnation. 34. Karl Rahner, "On the Theology of Death," p. 2Sff. See Silvano Zucal, La teologia delta morte in Karl Rahner (Bologna: EDB, 1982). 35. Philipians 1: 23. 36. 2 Corinthians 5:8. 37. My own translation. Johann W. von Goethe, Goethes Werke (Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag, 1948), Vol. 1, p. 142. 38. My own translation. Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad 1, 3, 28. 39. Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Heaven (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 15-16, 47. Also Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity from 200 to 1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). In Judaism, Moses Maimonides maintained that belief in the resurrection was orthodox and that the resurrection for the messianic times would entail corporeality, but he denied the physical body for "the world to come." See his "Essay on Resurrection," in Epistles of Maimonides: Crisis and Leadership, Abraham Halkin, transl. and ed. (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1993). 40. St. Augustine, Sermo 256. 2; ML 38, 1192. The text of the sermon is 1 Corinthians 15: 53-56. 41. St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei I, 33. 42. Psalm 3: 3. 43. Psalm 18: 1. 44.1 Corinthians 15: 28. Saint Augustine, De Civitate Dei XIV. 28. See John Herman Randall, Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1954), pp. 19-20. 45. Saint Augustine, De Civitate Dei XXII, 30. 46. Jean Danielou, S. J., The Lord of History (New York: Meridian Books, 1968), p. 16. 47. Ibid., pp. 6-7. With utmost chauvinism, Danielou calls Judaism "an anachronistic survival," and Islam "a regression" (p. 17). Other religions are barely mentioned or discussed. 48. Ibid, p. 18.

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49. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 8. 50. Robert N. Bellah, "The True Scholar," Academe 86:1 (January-February, 2000): 22. 51. Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: New American Library, 1964). 52. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy ofMorals, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967). 53. Jacques Lusseyran, Blindness, A New Seeing of the World (New York: The Myrin Institute, 1973), p. 22. 54. Saint Ignatius Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, Louis J. Puhl, S. J , transl. (Allahabad: St Paul's Press, 1962), #332. 55. Mariana Caplan, "Questioning Authority," Parabola 25: 3 (August, 2000): 100-104. 56. Herakleitus, Frags. 9D and 37D. 57. Kerygmata Petrou, in New Testament Apocrypha, Hennecke and Schneemelker, eds. Vol. 2.

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Conclusion More than two hundred years ago Thomas Jefferson expressed, both in words and in deeds, his love of technology and his fear of factories, for he saw the machine as an item in the liberation of the human spirit but considered the factory a way of enslaving people; and while he was all for liberty, he opposed control in any form.1 Moreover, Jefferson saw no opposition between the machine and nature. In many ways, I believe he would have understood the modem predicament and would have been able to identify our problems as not having to do with technology/?er se but with the uses to which we put it. Of course, the machine had not developed then to the extent to which it has now, nor had the industrial revolution extended its sway so far and wide in the world. Still, it is somewhat refreshing to see Jefferson make a distinction between technology itself and the uses to which technology can be put. The history of the past three hundred years, in America as well as elsewhere in the world, bears witness to an increasing concern with the ways in which technology is being employed and the values which are supposedly being lost or altered because of its spread. Still, the last forty years — since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1961) — have seen an unprecedented rise in the concern with technology and its effects, to the point that the very essence of technology has come into question, with nary a thought for the fact that we could not continue to be human without being technological. Lately, this opposition to technology has increased. It is in a way comforting to know that Freud had already wondered at the strength of people's opposition to technology and, more generally, to the advances of culture and civilization. "How has it come about," he asked, "that so many people have adopted this strange attitude of hostility toward civilization?"2 While acknowledging the fact that civilization had proved to be disappointing in the fulfillment of its promises, Freud went on to suggest that such discontent is inherent in the very nature of the human condition, which is ineluctably imperfect. The comforts humans seek, the intimate

118 Technology and the Spirit relationships they expect, the refinements they cultivate, all are impossible without some degree of curtailment of our libidinal and other desires, and such curtailment is bound to engender feelings of dissatisfaction. It is impossible to have civilization without discontent. The imperfection that St. Augustine experienced in a grand manner as the result of the fall of Rome, and which prompted him to postulate a perfect state of affairs in the heavenly Jerusalem, Freud discovered in the very structure of the human psyche, and he speculated that this unfulfilled yearning prompted all of us to fantasize bucolic realms of nature where we would be free of the restraints of culture. St. Augustine believed in heaven in the same way as, according to Freud, we believe in paradise, and he wrote about an impetus which leads us to create reservations, state parks, and resorts where we may flee from the encroachments of reality all about us.3 We have seen above some of the ways in which we deny this earth for the sake of some conception of heaven, here or hereafter. Such fantasies are not without consequence, for they incite us to neglect this material world for the sake of imagined and wished-for heavens. In this neglect a lot of the opposition to technology takes its root. BEYOND DUALITIES To all intents and purposes, the BhagavadgMpresents, develops, and justifies, a kind of morality. It advocates certain standards of what constitutes "good" and "bad" behavior; that is, behavior that is either salvific or damning. It portrays the life of the "good" person, and it sets up an ideal of absolute goodness. All this is undeniable and quite appropriate given the circumstances, the quandary of a young warrior confused by the demands of conflicting ethical systems. Even the solution proposed by Krshna, that Arjuna should follow his own duty {svadharma), is not that dissimilar from what would have been counseled by the ethics of classical Stoicism, and would be very much in accord with the categorical imperative of Kant. Still, there is an undercurrent in the BhagavadgM that in a way advises the transcending of ethics, the giving up altogether of the usual modes of moralizing; after all, the genius of the BhagavadgM consists in part of its synthesis of Vedic religion and Upanishadic philosophy in which good and evil are only phenomenal categories to be transcended in one's search for Self-realization. In a true sense, then, the BhagavadgM preaches a morality "beyond good and evil." Proof of this is not hard to find. Very explicitly, Krshna advises Arjuna to move beyond the pairs of opposites, among which a primary one is the moral pair par excellence. To act in obedience to moral dictates based on good and evil is to be subject to the gunas and to the discriminating directions of the mind, itself a factor of phenomenal existence. Truly enlightened {sattvic) behavior must be extricated from the pairs of opposites. In fact, true to Vedanta doctrine, such acting is no behavior at all, for the self "moves" only in its gross incamational nature; It Itself is immobile, and therefore clearly "beyond good and evil." In fact, according to Krshna, it is only those who have renounced or "stepped beyond good and evil" {shubhashubhaparityagif who are dear to him. This thought calls to mind Nietzsche's idea of a morality "beyond good and evil," the title of one of his books as well as the preoccupation of his later years.

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This idea is a complex one, for by the giving up of good and evil Nietzsche meant the transcending of the ordinary meanings of the terms as well as acting without paying attention to such norms and/or to their applications in particular settings in particular times. Nietzsche also meant, of course, to utter a call to get to the other side of traditional morality, and even to rise above it, to a plane where the standards are entirely different. Thus, for instance, his statement, "What is done out of love always happens beyond good and evil."5 The fact that the BhagavadgM should counsel such transcendence should not surprise us. All the major ethical and religious traditions have proposed similar ideals to their adherents and have thus set up the standards peculiar to each one of them. According to Hillel, the entire Jewish law, including its hundreds of minute precepts, could be summed up ("transcended") in the duty to love God and one's fellow humans, a thought that found expression in Jesus's preaching. St. Augustine would later state that when guided only by love one could do no wrong ("love and do what you will"), an idea that John Lennon would popularize with the musical refrain, "All you need is love!" Zen, too, which in many respects is an heir to the wisdom that produced the BhagavadgM, suggests that it is a mark of the sage to see the world without the colorations of our value judgments. A brief and lapidary statement conveys this perfectly: "A child sees a mountain and sees a mountain; an adult sees a mountain and sees many things; a wise one sees a mountain and sees a mountain." Wisdom, the masters would seem to be saying, consists in approaching the world and all that is in it with the same non-judgmental openness with which a child confronts its world, for whom neither feeding nipples nor diapers nor parents are first known by name but, simply, as "being there" {Dasein, in Heidegger's sense). It is this kind of "innocence," as he called it, that Camus probably experienced in his encounters with the warm and salty sea while swimming in the coves of his native Algeria, and that he chronicled so tellingly in his early literary essays and in the sensual sallies of Marie and Merseault. Interestingly, the BhagavadgM and Christianity speak of transcending good and evil in the context of the religious life. In other words, when the experience of the sacred is genuine, it transports one beyond the pairs of opposites, and thereafter the mystic's actions are legitimated by a higher authority. This does not mean that the mystical experience is intrinsically moral, but that in it the mystic steps beyond the moral, as Kierkegaard said the hero and the martyr also do.6 In our own, less sacred times, transcending good and evil is often spoken of in a context without God. "If God is dead, everything is permitted," is Ivan Karamazov's claim, and a correct one; for if God does not exist, then the standards of good and evil preached in his name have no justification, and we are forced, as it were, to step beyond them. This does not mean, as Camus reminds us, that nothing is forbidden, but that new standards must be found either in the blinding clarity of the sacred encounter or in the darkness of the soul's night. Both are experiences of the beyond. Is it too much to expect that, in our meditations and curricular discussions, time and space should be saved for the contemplation of this extraordinary perspective? That the world opens itself to us in all its power and beauty is something we all can

120 Technology and the Spirit entertain without subscribing to Vedanta philosophy. That our curricula can thus be enabling rather than constricting is a real possibility, and one that one may do well to consider. That the dichotomy between matter and spirit can be transcended is something we can all leam, and this lesson may be, perhaps, the best way to avoid the pitfalls of the spirit. WHY SPIRIT ? But why spirit? Because to insist on more concreteness than the relational openness of spirit to the beyond can provide is to betray our own insecurity with regard to the beyond.7 It is a denial of transcendence, and as such a "sin." But how do we know that the road delineated here leads to a better world or to a higher truth? We cannot know with absolute certainty, but this we do know, that spirit, as defined here, is the door to regions to be explored relentlessly with the understanding that the end is not to be no matter how near we come to it. Can this truth save us? Who can tell? Nietzsche introduced Zarathustra as the prophet of a new age that was not to come just by itself but which had to be coaxed into being and moulded with great care. However, the passage there was not to be an easy ride: like a rope over an abyss he said it would be, and a dangerous crossing all along.8 But perhaps the question to ask is not one of truth but of existence. With Gelven, therefore, I can at least conclude that "it is less the truth of spirit than the falsity of nonspirit that evoked . . . this inquiry."9 Something, I think, will be lost if we continue to isolate technology from the spirit, not something theoretical, a point of view, or a theory of the world, but something existential, something affecting our lives from day to day and through our long sojourn here. TO LOVE THIS EARTH More than a thousand years before the Hebrew Bible was written, we find an Egyptian papyrus containing the description of a soul in turmoil. This man hates his life, for everything around him seems detestable, and the only solution, the one that would bring peace to him, is suicide, by which he would enter the eternal realm of the gods. Just then, out of his own depths, his soul speaks to him: "Love life here," it says; "forget about the beyond."10 A similar affirmation of earthly life is found in Homer's Odyssey. When Kalypso has decided to let Ulysses go, she still tempts him with a promise of immortality if he should choose to stay with her; but while acknowledging his own mortality and that of his wife, Penelope, Ulysses replies, "I want to get home, and can think of nothing else."11 Nietzsche, too, in The Gay Science, asked himself whether the promise of an eternally recurring life would elicit from him despair or delight, to the point where the question, "Would you desire this again and again?" would become the highest moral standard for choosing any course of action.12 The point here is not so much the viability or lack thereof of the idea of eternal recurrence; the point, for Nietzsche, is whether or not one has grown to love life on this earth so much that one would be willing to live it again countless times. Nietzsche is concerned with an experience of the majesty and power of life so overwhelming that out of the

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sheer delight in the moment one would want to live one's life, this earthly life, again forever,13 because one considers this earth a table fit for the gods.14 What can we do to provide our growing children with experiences that would engender desires such as this? My point is that our human lives are inextricably entwined with this earth, and this is the reason why we are technological. We need to leam to appreciate this earthly life of ours, this technological life, to the point where we would think it a loss not to be technological. This is the task I envision for our schools, where an effort must be made to teach children how to value their lives precisely because they are technological, and at the same time, through the spirit, how to gain a new appreciation of technology in all its manifestations.

NOTES 1. Marx, The Machine in the Garden, p. 150. 2. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, III, in Robert M. Hutchins, ed. Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), Vol. 54, p. 776. 3. Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis, 23rd Lecture, in Robert M. Hutchins, ed. Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), Vol. 54, p. 599. Marx, The Machine in the Garden, pp. 8-9. 4. BhagavadgM 12: 17. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955), No. 153. 6. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1954), p. 69. 7. Smith, The Concept of the Spiritual, p. 66. 8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New York: Viking, 1966), Prologue, 4, p. 14. 9. Gelven, Spirit and Existence, p. 259. 10. "A Dispute about Suicide," in Documents from Old Testament Times, D. Winton Thomas, ed, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), p. 166. U. Odyssey V. 223. 12. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, IV, 341, pp. 273-274. 13. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche (New York: Vintage, 1968), pp. 322-325; Bernd Magnus, Heidegger's Metahistory of Philosophy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970). 14. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, 15, 3, p. 229.

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Index Adams, Henry, xiv, 9 Aeschylus, xiv Aesir, xii aesthetics, 63-65 Alberich, xii alchemy, 46, 81 Alexander, xiii, 11,28 Altamira, 25 Aphrodite, xii Aquinas, Thomas, 30, 31, 74; and reincarnation, 107 Arendt, Hannah, 32 Aristophanes, 111 Aristotle, 5, 26, 29, 31-32, 65, 73, 82; and reincarnation, 106 Asklepios, 60, 103 Aurobindo, Sri, 98 Augustine, St., 53, 79, 82, 110, 118; and reincarnation, 107, 109

Caillois, Roger, 71 Calabrese, Hayim Vital, 106 Campbell, Joseph, 52 Camus, Albert, 13, 56, 119 Carson, Rachel, 117 Cathari, 106 Chauvet, 25, 103 communication, 9, 44 Cornford, F. M , 28 Cox, Harvey, 10 cyberfeminism, 14-15 cyberspace, 2

Bacon, Francis, 30 Being, xi, xiii, 15, 21-23, 27, 48, 86; revealed, 32; manipulated, 39, 93 Blake, William, 24, 93 Boethius, Annicius, 30 Buber, Martin, 47, 67-70, 95 Buddha, xiii Buddhism, 41, 80, 107; and reincarnation, 105

education, xv, 93 Eliot, T. S, xi Ellul, Jacques, 16-17, 102 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 46, 66, 67

Caesar, xiii

Gardner, Howard, 59

Dearden, R. F , 71 Derrida, Jacques, 54 Dewey, John, 63, 64-65 Dodds, E. R, 28 Dubos, Rene, 9 Dukas, Paul, 2

Feuerbach, Ludwig, 24 Fink, Eugen, 72 Freud, Sigmund, 30, 117 Fromm, Erich, 11

136 Index Gelven, Michael, 52, 70, 120 gilgul, 106 Gnostic, 13-14, 31, 53; "Hymn of the Pearl," 14 Gnosticism, 13 Godel, Kurt, 57, 102 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, 108 Gregory of Nazianzus, 72; the "Middle Path," 73 Gur-Ze'ev, Ilan, 15 Harrison, Jane, 28 Heidegger, Martin, 8, 14, 21-23, 26-27, 33; and revelation, 63, 65-66; and the spirit, 52. Henry, John, Ballad of, xiii, xiv Hephaistos, xii Herakleitus, 39 Hesse, Hermann, 12, 71, 92, 97 Hildegard von Bingen, 7, 92 Hinduism, 41 Huizinga, Johan, 71 Icarus, xii Ignatius Loyola, 18, 85, 94, 98, 112 internet, as feminine, 2-3 Ivins, William, 29 James, William, xiv, 51 Jefferson, Thomas, 117 Jesuits, 85, 94 Jesus, xiii, 4,40, 95, 104, 110, 112 John of the Cross, xi Jonas, Hans, 13, 32 Jung, Carl G, 46, 81 Kant, Immanuel, 30, 74, 118 karmayoga, xiv, 72, 73 Kepler, Johannes, 92 Kurzweil, Ray, 58 labor, xii Lascaux, 25, 26, 103 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 28 Hnga, 39, 92 Llull, Ramon, 71,92 Lope de Vega, Felix, 39 Lusseyran, Jacques, 112 Marrou,H.-I,31 Marx, Karl, 3, 14, 17

material, xi, xii, xiv, 81 maya, 84 McLuhan, Marshall, 8, 23-24 Mill, John S , 5 Mohammed, 95 Mysteries, 97 Nasafi, 'Aziz al-Din, 66 necrophilia, 11-12 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 55, 56 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 21, 28,58, 79, 111, 118,120 Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 25, 26, 56, 65 Pascal, Blaise, 56 Paul, Saint, xiii, 56 Pirsig, Robert, 9 Plato, xii, xiii, 27, 31,41, 72, 74, 81, 87, 91; on reincarnation, 105; and spirit, 52 play and computers, 5-6; and technology, 63, 71 Pliny the Elder, 29,45 Prometheus, xii, 33 Rahner, Karl, 108 Rand, Ayn, 111 reading, xiii, 4 reincarnation, 104-106 Ricoeur, Paul, definition of person, 32 Rousseau, Jean-Jaques, and reading, 5 Rumi, Jalal al-Din, 95 Russell, Jeffrey Burton, 109 sacrament, 81,82 Sankhya, 75, 80, 104 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 15, 55, 59; and play, 71 Schiller, F. C. S, 72 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 52 sex, and the spirit, 83 shakti, 75, 84 Shaw, George B , 45 Shelley, Mary, 2 sin, 55, 56 Siva Nataraja, 86 Siva, 39; Socrates, 14, 31 sphinx, 57 spirituality, xiii, xiv, 51; and intelli-

gence, 59; nature of, 53; and sports, 84; and teaching, 94 spiritualization, xv; of teaching, 104 Steiner, Rudolf, 42, 43, 91, 98 Stivers, Richard, 10, 101-102 Suzuki, Daisetz, 53 Tagore, Rabindranath, 98 Tantra, 41, 75, 83 Tao Te Ching, 86 teaching, xii, 94 techne, 21-22,26-27,64-65; as teaching, 91,93 technology, xi-xv, 1-2, 8, 25; ambiguity of, 8; and art, 45; as disclosure, 22; and feminism, 2-3; and happiness, 16; as know-how, 18; and purity, 12 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, xiv, 42, 74, 81; and education, 91 television, 3 Thetis, xii theurgy, 103 Weil, Simone, 83 Wells, H. G, 9 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xiv Ymir, xii Zaehner, R. C , 40 Zarathustra, 80 Zen, 46, 73,119; gardens, 47; and teaching, 98 Zeus, xii, 28 Zeuxis, 45

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About the Author IGNACIO L. GOTZ is Lawrence Stessin Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Teaching Fellow at New College, Hofstra University. Before coming to Hofstra he taught for many years in India. His books include The Psychedelic Teacher, Creativity: Theoretical and Socio-Cosmic Reflections, Zen and the Art of Teaching, Conceptions of Happiness, The Culture of Sexism (Praeger, 1999), and Manners and Violence (Praeger, 2000).