Alchemy of the Servile Will: On Life and Politics

“It makes a huge difference whether freedom or life is posited as the highest of all goods—as the standard by which all political action is guided and judged. If we think of politics by its very nature, and despite all its permutations, as having arisen out of the polis and being still under its charge, then the linkage of politics and life results in an inner contradiction that cancels and destroys what is specifically political about politics.” –Hannah Arendt[1]

This passage from Arendt captures what is perhaps the clearest distinction between the classical understanding of politics and the narrow sense politics assumes in the modern era, which begins most forcefully in the seventeenth century with Hobbes and Locke and extends into contemporary liberal democratic theory and practice. The distinction—which is also a judgment as to what politics ought to be—is this: the aim of politics is not to order the relations between human beings based on what they have (e.g., their “life, person, and possessions”), but rather to provide a common and public space of action wherein they become free to reveal who they are. In the former case, “freedom” is something one has at one’s disposal and is in the service of life; in the latter, freedom is neither a possession nor a means to life, but rather, something one becomes the moment life and the satisfaction of its demands ceases to be an “end in itself.” To be free, in the full political sense of the word, is to ready oneself for concerns and obligations greater than life, and thus to stand in relation to life in the mode of “for the sake of…” This, we might say, is the first political truth of politics: life is not for the sake of life, but rather for the sake of a way of life that justifies it as worth living.

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According to the restricted modern notion of politics, my freedom, which is a function of ownership (of my life, my self, my person, and my power to acquire goods conducive to my self-preservation), owes absolutely nothing to others; and politics consists in the protection, preservation, and regulation of this private right of each to freedom from outside interference. The modern individual owes nothing to anyone for their freedom, which belongs to them absolutely, “free and clear,” as it were. With respect to the community, political or otherwise, the free individual exists free of all dependence and debt. The “individual” thus conceived is not only independent of but contrary to community. For as the word itself indicates, community or communitas (cum, “with” or “together,” + munus, “debt,” but also “gift”) is nothing less than the common debt or obligation human beings owe one another for the gift shared out between them—i.e., their freedom, by virtue of which they become human and not merely isolated, laboring beings concerned solely with their self-preservation.[2]

This is precisely what we learn from Arendt and the classical understanding of politics that informs her thinking: my freedom is not my own, but rather owes everything to those others for the sake of whom it comes into being and without whom it would cease to exist. Without others, I would not only cease to be free in the fullest sense of the term, I would also cease to be fully human. For politics, the space of the “political,” is precisely the space in which human beings come to recognize one another as human beings, that is, the space where they reveal themselves to one another through “words, works, and deeds”—through actions that are meaningful in themselves and done for their own sake and thus rise above everything merely necessary for self-preservation or useful as a means to some other end.[3] The freedom that human beings guarantee one another in bearing testimony to the actions they risk for the sake of one another constitutes the very essence and meaning of politics.[4]

With respect to the domain of the necessary and the useful—of things conducive and expedient to the preservation of life and its re-production—politics differs not only in degree or scope but in kind. To reduce politics to a mere means in the service of life, to something useful for something necessary, is to confuse a means (the preservation of life and its re-production) for an end, and thus to rob politics of its essential meaning: i.e., freedom—freedom from the tyranny of means without end, from the essentially unfree compulsion of necessity and utility. To instrumentalize politics in this way is not only to rob it of its essential meaning—freedom, which is not merely freedom “from” compulsion but freedom for action, for the capacity to begin something new alongside and for the sake of others—but to deliver it over to its opposite: unfreedom in the form of compulsory and servile subjection to life and its ceaseless demands.

And yet the theoretical sleight of hand at the core of the modern conception of politics—beginning with Hobbes and Locke and continuing without significant interruption, either from the “left” or the “right,” to the contemporary pseudo-discourse on “biopolitics”[5]—is such that it presents this compulsory subjection to things necessary and useful for the preservation of life and its re-production as the vital thrust of freedom itself.  Self-preservation and self-interest, and the pursuit of those “goods” conducive to their satisfaction, is presented as the sole aim and function of freedom. And for this “freedom,” born of necessity and procured by utility, I am at once benefactor and beneficiary. My “freedom,” to preserve myself and satisfy my interests, is my property, is that which is most properly mine, and as such, owes absolutely nothing to anyone. The only motivation to politics, to move from the natural freedom proper to the individual to the artificial freedom proper to society, is to supplement and extend those “goods” which can be acquired by the drive to self-preservation and self-interest with those “greater goods” which can only be acquired by mutual self-preservation and mutual self-interest. Politically speaking, the only thing that might hold individuals in common is their common-wealth, which is little more than the coincidence and intersection of their private economic interests. The polity, the res publica or “public thing” that arises from this situation is thus the market product of a “political economy,” wherein essentially private concerns become matters of public administration and regulation.

But, as Arendt insists, to restrict the meaning of politics to the private concerns of individuals is to deprive politics of its non-privative content: a life free from the privation of naked existence, from the poverty of a life utterly lacking in genuine freedom.[6] So long as I am bound to myself alone I remain bound to the tyranny of necessity and utility, to an oppressive economy of means and ends, wherein I find myself delivered over to the compulsory and endless pursuit of things necessary and useful for my self-preservation.

Granted, I may even come to desire these necessary and useful things. Unlike other living things, bound to the instinctive satisfaction of vital needs alone, my desires can attain such a level of sophistication and refinement as to go beyond “need” entirely. I may even desire extravagant things that are utterly “useless” and “unnecessary.” But for all this extravagance the fact remains that I am no less bound to desire than to need. The tyranny of self-preservation, the satisfaction of need, gives way to the more “refined” tyranny of self-interest, the satisfaction of desire. In either case, I am compelled to attain that which I desire or need by any means necessary. Utility, the expedient and efficient pursuit of means to other ends, is the slave of need and desire alike. And no matter how capable or effective I become in satisfying my needs and my desires by my efforts alone (i.e., “independently”), I don’t become one bit freer. If I feel “free” in my independent pursuit of self-interest, then I’ve confused the experience of satisfaction with the experience of freedom (which may very well and often does demand that some of my desires remain unsatisfied, that I be willing to sacrifice my claim to total satisfaction). The experience of satisfaction is not evidence of freedom, but rather of the possibility that one can enjoy being the slave of desire to such an extent that they no longer feel enslaved.

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The highest “good” life can achieve, the “end” proper to life itself, is without question the full satisfaction of its vital demands, its needs and its desires. This is precisely what makes life “viable.” But viability is a biological, not a human, standard of flourishing. A viable life is not yet a free life. The question remains: is the viability of naked existence the highest human good, the highest good of which human beings as human beings are capable? Is the satisfaction of sheer life—of the human organism, its needs and its desires—is this what makes life worth living? Is satisfaction “that for the sake of which” we endure life? And since a life unable to satisfy any of its needs or desires is neither viable nor livable, and hence no life at all, the question simply becomes: “is life its own end? are we alive for the sake of being alive?”

If this is indeed the case, that we live in order to live, then a free and thus fully human life is impossible. For to “choose” or “affirm” life, to “consent” to its demands, is simply to yield to necessity, to submit to the unfreedom inherent in the life-process itself—and suicide, the refusal of life, is the only free act left to those who value freedom more than life. Once life and the compulsion to live becomes its own end, no philosophical sleight of hand can prevent, much less overcome, this inevitable nihilism—neither a stoic amor fati, nor a Nietzschean “will to power,” nor the enlightened, liberal democratic attempt to locate freedom in the “life, person, and possessions” of the autonomous individual. Each of these amount to so many last-ditch efforts to transform unfreedom into its opposite—what we might describe as an alchemy of the servile will.

Freedom without alchemy—this is the irreducibly political aim of politics. And while it is impossible to derive freedom from unfreedom—from life, necessity—this does not entail that freedom exists apart from life. To be free is to stand in a determinate relation to life and necessity, to exceed their demands without ever being able to transcend them absolutely. Absolute freedom, freedom absolved of all relation and obligation, would constitute another fiction, another “alchemy,” that of the isolated and alienated will. The freedom that is the meaning and promise of politics—bound to and yet above life, within and yet beyond the economic domain of necessity and utility—is inseparable from something like “responsibility.” More than life, even my own, I am bound to a certain responsiveness to those others who call me out of my bondage to self-preservation and self-interest, obliged to respond to those for the sake of whom I am called to be free.

This is why justice is the highest of the virtues: as we learn from Aristotle, it alone is free action (praxis) done for the sake of another.[7] Short of this justice, the political virtue par excellence, we are neither free nor human. If we take this seriously, then we’re forced to admit that modern democratic liberalism, and the possessive individualism[8] that serves as its theoretical justification, is unable to make good on its promise: i.e., “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” For we’ve already seen that the individual, who owes nothing to anyone for their “liberty” (to dispose of their “life, person, and possessions” as they alone see fit), remains in a state of perfect unfreedom, however “liberal” it might be. And if genuine freedom depends on justice—on other human beings for the sake of whom one acts—then it follows that the liberal yet unfree individual is destined to unhappiness. In other words, if happiness—the flourishing and coming to completion of a human being as a human being—is the product of a complete, free, and active life “in accord with complete virtue” (i.e., justice), then the individual as individual is by definition incomplete and therefore unhappy.

In the end, these questions aren’t exclusively political or philosophical. They are human questions, questions fundamental to the human condition as such. And if that word “human” still means anything to us, if we are still concerned with those conditions in which a distinctively human way of life becomes possible, then it’s imperative to question those concerns (freedom, justice, happiness, and the rest) that presumably qualify us as human.

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Gregory Grobmeier is a PhD candidate in the Joint Doctoral Program in Religious and Theological Studies at the University of Denver and Iliff School of Theology, and a Term Instructor in Philosophy at Regis College. His doctoral research deals with the question of “community” in the works of Georges Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Levinas.

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[1] “Introduction Into Politics,” The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn, (New York: Shocken Books, 2007), 144-5.

[2] See Roberto Esposito’s brilliant etymological and philosophical study of this term, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

[3] Cf. Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 23-37, 175-247.

[4] Cf. Arendt, “Introduction Into Politics,” 108: “The meaning of politics is freedom.”; and 110: “If it is true that politics is nothing more than a necessary evil for sustaining the life of humanity, then politics has indeed begun to banish itself from the world and to transform its meaning into meaninglessness.”

[5] If one understands “politics” in the classical sense as pertaining to a distinctively human way of life (bíos) transcending the demands of sheer life (zoé), then “biopolitics” is little more than a pleonasm. And if by “biopolitics” one is referring to either (i) the modern restriction of politics to the preservation and maintenance of life and the administration and regulation of human populations (e.g., Foucault’s notion of “governmentality”), or (ii) the essentially self-defeating attempt to derive an emancipatory politics from this same restrictive concern for things necessary and useful to life (e.g., failed Marxist attempts to elevate labor to a principle of human emancipation, or à la Hardt and Negri, the confused and confusing attempt to reclaim an emancipatory “biopolitics” from totalizing and global techniques of “biopower”), then one fails to recognize that modern politics, concerned exclusively with non-political ends, is not bio-political so much as it is anti-political. In this latter sense, biopolitics is and can only ever be an antipolitics.

[6] Cf. Arendt, The Human Condition, 38: “In ancient feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself, was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man’s capacities…. We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word ‘privacy,’ and this is partly due to the enormous enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism.”

[7] Nichomachean Ethics, 1129b25-1130a5.

[8] Regarding the possessive and acquisitive quality of the modern individualism subtending later liberal democratic developments, see C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).

The Failure of the Post-Secular

I recently attended the final conference of the ongoing ReligioWest research project, which is directed by Olivier Roy at the European University Institute. The EUI is located in the quaint Italian village of Fiesole, just a quick 20-minute bus ride outside of Florence. ReligioWest exists to study “how different western states in Europe and North America are redefining their relationships with religions under the challenge of increasing religious activism in the public sphere.” The underlying question for the EUI has been “What does religion mean in a secular Europe?”

In analyzing contemporary religion in Western societies, the EUI assumes as factual basis that “European societies are highly secularized” and that secularization inhabits all its levels: legal, constitutional, cultural, and perhaps most crucially, sociological (a.k.a. “the decline of religious practice”). There has been discussion about whether or not there is a secular (i.e. ‘the myth of the secular’ by Rodney Stark and Roger Finke), and there is also ample discourse on the meaning or definition of the ‘secular’ for the sake conceptual clarity (as captured in the analytical distinctions of ‘secular, secularity, secularization’ by Jose Casanova). Where ReligioWest concludes their analysis on these discussions is that “Secularism has won.”

The current usage of the buzzword ‘post-secular’ is, as many know, the latest entry in the attempts at conceptualizing the relations between religion and the public sphere. The post-secular model, made popular by contemporary thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, proposes the idea of “overlapping consensus”, “translation”, “complementary learning”, or “reasonable accommodations” between religious and secular cohorts. Undergirding this concept is multiculturalism (whereby various religious and non-religious cultures sit equally at a round table to dialogue and learn from each other’s way) and the notion of a common anthropology (which assumes the ‘humanity’ and ‘dignity’ of cosmopolitan human rights, natural law or rationality), through which religious and non-religious cohorts reasonably dialogue to convince one another of the value and correctness of their worldview.

One observation I had regarding the discourse between the various EUI scholars is that post-secularity is problematic and, I would add, perhaps untenable. I offer two reasons: the first is that multiculturalism is a failed project, and the second is that religious believers and secular adherents no longer share a common anthropology in which to frame a mutual discussion.

On the failure of multiculturalism, Olivier Roy proposes in his text, Holy Ignorance, that religion and culture have parted ways. Dialogue between the believer and non-believer is based on the multicultural paradigm, which presumes the inherent, internal, and stable link between a religion and its culture. This link has been severed due to globalization, secularization, and individualization. Because there is no longer a natural link between a religion and its culture, a dialogue predicated on the multi-cultural model is bound to cause more confusion than clarification because the language of the religionist stands above, against, and outside the cultural reference. Religions are becoming less a matter of thick ethnic cultural history and are transforming along the lines of personalized choices and individualized religiosities: think of the Charismatic church growth in central China made possible by Grand Rapids, Michigan missionaries, or young British and German Christian converts to ISIS. How does one begin with a multicultural dialogue of and between religions in such scenarios?

This deculturation fragments any sacred collective canopy into myriad petit sacred canopies, and thereby any common anthropological basis within a shared society becomes increasingly uncommon to each other. There is no longer a bond or collective identity that ties the believer and the non-believer together towards an ultimate referent in Western societies. Dr. Kristina Stoeckl, a political scientist from University of Vienna, proposed in her EUI presentation that in a post-secular order, the religious and the non-religious share no common dialogical ground because both have radically different starting points on anthropology. Once upon a time we referred to God or the sacred cosmological order as an ultimate referent; this shifted to nationalism in the eighteenth century, and now we are left with the human rights of the mere individual as the sole referent of sacral basis. This chasm between rival anthropologies has been exacerbated since the 1960’s sexual revolution and is made quite clear with the abortion debate: one version of anthropology argues for the sacred human personhood of a human embryo in utero while another anthropology argues for a moral human personhood status bequeathed on the human embryo after birth. Though both religious and non-religious individuals find “faith” in these competing anthropologies, it is evident that the twain shall never meet.

The post-secular should be understood in terms of competing pluralization. Increasing religious diversity in secularized Western societies will result in increasing conflict between opposing values, because many of these religious communities will not shape up to ‘moderate’ forms of religion—religions that look good in the mirror of the post-secular mind. Within a post-secular model, up to what point can the liberal state make accommodation for the religious who don’t kowtow to the ‘moderate’ talking points? The future of political liberalism is on trial.

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Joshua Ramos (@ramosreyjoshua) is a PhD candidate in the Joint Doctoral Program of Religious Studies at the University of Denver and the Iliff School of Theology.

Badiou, the Event, and the (Silenced) Voice

Caveat: I am by no means a Badiou scholar and apologize up front for my ignorance about his larger corpus. That being said, I am engaging a handful of his texts for a current course called “Theory of the Subject” (which takes its moniker from the title of Badiou’s book by the same name). In engaging Badiou’s theory of the Truth-Event and the “militant” formation of the subject that follows in the one who professes fidelity to the event, I am seeing a gap in what religious theory broadly calls the vocative, or the voice which calls or invokes, names or designates, or brings the subject into a certain state or condition. From the texts I have engaged (Badiou’s Theory of the Subject, St. Paul, and Philosophy and the Event), it appears the mathematical-materialist “Philosopher of the Event” has little to say about that the role of the vocative in both the Event of Truth and the shape of the subjectivity it engenders.

According to Badiou and as described in the book of Acts, Paul’s (then Saul) procedure in becoming militant was first to recognize the Event of the God-man in the person of Jesus Christ, who violently encountered Paul on the road to Damascus; secondly, Paul named it as an Event that took place in a wholly contingent (yet unpredictable) way – as an incalculable disruption that broke-in to the order of things, as a situation that arrived ex nihilo); and finally, Paul declared fidelity to this Event by living out the consequences of this singular, subject-forming truth in a processional way of discernment. For Badiou, subject formation in the light of the Truth-Event is a process of becoming: it is a reactive and explicit incorporation of the Event into the world of the subject. Bartlett and Clemens note, “(t)he subject, suspended between an event and a truth, is the point at which, on the one hand, the empty, universal truth, carried by the event, is verified and, on the other, is the point through which the event of the appears of this truth is retrospectively made true, by the unfolding of its consequences[1].”

Becoming, then, is a matter of faithfulness to the Truth-Event, and this gives shape to postevental subjectivity. Zizek notes: “What defines the subject is his fidelity to the Event: the subject comes after the Event and persists in discerning its traces with the situation[2].” Badiou characterizes this form of faithfulness as militancy: those who are able to perpetuate its sense are those who possess an unflinching loyalty to the open-ended nature of the Truth-Event. Interestingly, it is in this context that Badiou envisions the ekklēsia of early church: as a small group of militants juxtaposed against the current conceptualization of fragmented denominationalism and sectarianism. Militant subjectivity that is faithful to the Truth-Event it is thus a dedication not to signs of power, ideological identification, and mere exemplary lives but to “what a conviction is capable of, here, now, and forever.”

However, it is notable how little voice Badiou gives to the voice that calls in Saul’s Truth-Event. As Raschke notes, “In a semiotics of the vocative it is not Being that gives ‘voice,’ but the voice that makes ‘Being’ present[3]” (italics original). In fact, the “discourse of ontology” which exists at the (absent) center of Badiou’s project of “gestural ontology,” has everything to do with Being. Badiou wants to posit an absent center to the “compossibility” of theory and praxis as it relates to the subject, but if we are to take the biblical accounts of Paul as our guide – the same accounts used by Badiou – it seems there really is something at the center of his militant subjectivity (or at least somewhere near it). Perhaps, to use Badiou’s nomenclature, there is a “punctual anchoring^⁠” that names, calls, and invokes the so-called empty space. Again, Raschke:

“If the theos in all religion…is capable of speaking, which popular traditions as well as the magisterial ones take in large measure for granted, then why have we not broached the problem of how the provenance and character of that voice are a compelling task for theory, and not simply a side issue? It is, after all, the ‘voice’ that bears the revelatory power of that religion. We are accustomed to asking what, if anything, is actually revealed, but dare we wonder how such a ‘revelation’ is communicated and takes hold[4]^⁠?”

That Badiou fails to discuss the vocative – in general and in Christianity’s particularity – is perplexing given his emphasis on the paradigmicity of the religious in militant subjectivity. Zizek, too, notes this peculiarity and adds that the “paradigmatic example of the Truth-Event is not only religion in general but, specifically, Christian religion centered on the Event of Christ’s arrival and death[5]” (italics original). And yet, curiously, Badiou – from what I’ve read – doesn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Does this mean that perhaps the voice that is couched in the Damascus road Event is simply too whimsical a tale to take seriously? And if so, why take any thing else about Paul’s Truth-Event seriously if the Scriptures are his source? Are not the narratives surrounding Paul’s Truth Event (Acts 9:1ff, Acts 22:1ff, and Acts 26:1ff) and Paul’s recollections (see Galatians 1-2 and, more obscurely, 2 Cor. 4:6) permeated by the voice? Can a mathematical-materialist ontology make room for the very voice that makes being present?

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Jeff Appel (@jeffappel) is a PhD student in the Joint Doctoral Program of Religious Studies at the University of Denver and the Iliff School of Theology. His research interests include Continental Philosophy, the Philosophy of Technology, and Theological Anthropology. When he’s not writing or reading or working, his two daughters ensure he’s not sleeping, either.

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[1] A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens, Alain Badiou: Key Concepts, 41-42.

[2] Slavoj Žižek, “The Politics of Truth”, The Ticklish Subject, 149.

[3] Carl Raschke, Postmodernism and the Revolution in Religious Theory, 131.

[4] Ibid., 132.

[5] Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 163.

Desiring Machines and Civilizational Destinies: A Response to Alan Jacobs

By Jeff Appel

The Infernal Machine blog at UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture is hosting a magnificent discourse on technology right now between Baylor’s Alan Jacobs, UVA’s Chad Wellmon, and Ned O’Gorman, professor of rhetoric at the University of Illinois. I have followed Jacobs on Twitter for a few years now and have found his posts on technology refreshing and insightful. He really leaves no technological stone unturned and has posted on topics such as the state of web, graphic design, content ownership and sharing functionality in social media sites, and why Twitter is sometimes totally the worst.

Jacobs set off the conversation by nailing his “79 Theses on Technology: for Disputation” to the (Charlottesville?) door (digitally, of course). I assume the 79 Theses is a culmination of sorts (though not in the sense of a climax); on second thought, perhaps it is more a collection, a gathering-together of thoughts that are the fruit of years of reflection and teaching. If you read carefully you will note that much of his missive focuses more on the behaviors and practices of attentiveness than on technologies themselves. In fact, one of the chief lines of disagreement between Jacobs and O’Gorman (which, in my opinion, actually gets to the heart of the issue) is the question of whether wanting can or should be ascribed to technologies. Jacobs suggests that this line of thinking leads us down the bleak path toward the Borg Complex: “Once you start to think of technologies as having desires of their own you are well on the way to the Borg Complex: We all instinctively understand that it is precisely because tools don’t want anything that they cannot be reasoned with or argued with.” In contrast, O’Gorman believes it is only by “coming to grips with the profound and active power of things that we best recognize that resistance to technology is…a cultural project, not a merely personal one, let alone primarily a definitional one”.

I have found the Canadian political philosopher George Grant helpful in these conversations and I would like to discuss him here (if not especially because I often find nobody has ever heard to him). Caveat: apologies to my Deleuzean friends who began salivating at the title of this post: alas, I will not be discussing him here…

Because we live in a technological society, Grant argues that we are blind to particular foibles about technology. We tend to pare down the novelty of our milieu because we see it as the modern embodiment of the dialectic of socio-cultural and scientific progress – it is merely a step forward in our collective abilities to apply systematic reason to the invention of instruments for our use. Technology is thought of as “the whole apparatus of instruments made by man and placed at the disposal of man for his choice and purposes.”[1] This technological epistemology seems so obviously true as to be beyond argument. Grant calls this a “civilizational destiny”, by which he means the constellation of fundamental presuppositions that the vast majority of a people inherit in a given civilization. These presuppositions are given the absolute status of ‘the ways things are’; they are seemingly beyond reproach.

Thus we assume modern machines like the personal computer are technological instruments in that their capacities have been programmed in to them by human beings, and it is human beings “who operate those machines for purposes they have determined”[2] (as an aside, Jacobs takes this line of argument in discussing algorithms, saying that technological production can overwhelm us to the point where we “talk about what algorithms do as though algorithms aren’t written by humans”). Grant offers a version of this argument, put forth by a computer scientist in his day, who argues, “The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used.” Grant argues it is a mistake to abstract the computer from the paradigm of knowledge in which it was created. In our case, the computer arose from the paradigm of knowledge consisting of the methodologies and assumptions carved out through the new science and its abstract mathematics. Computers are thus an invention conceived of within a civilizational destiny. The computer scientist, then, is incorrect in assuming that “the computer does not impose”: on the contrary, the computer imposes itself upon us because it is an invention engendered within an imposing destiny.

Not only can our modern technologies not be abstracted from the paradigm of knowledge in which they were created, Grant argues, “the ways that computers have been and will be used cannot be detached from modern conceptions of justice, and that these conceptions of justice come forth from the very account of reasoning which led to the building of computers.”[3] Modern technological instruments and modern standards of justice are therefore indissociable – they are “bound together” and belong to “the same identity of modern reason.”[4] Thus “[W]hen we seek to elucidate the standards of human good (or in contemporary language ‘the values’) by which particular techniques can be judged, we do so within modern ways of thought and belief. But from the very beginnings of modern thought the new natural science and the new moral science developed together in mutual interdependence so that the fundamental assumptions of each were formulated in light of the other. Modern thought is in that sense a unified fate for us.”[5]

All of us in technoscientific modern North America are working within the same sets of assumptions about the nature of the world and our place in it. Yet Grant notes, “the very substance of our existing which has made us the leaders in technique, stands as a barrier to any thinking which might be able to comprehend technique from beyond its own dynamic.”[6] The North American ethos is technological, and it’s become a fate we can’t think outside of. In this way Grant is very much a Heideggerian: both men argue that modern technology, far from being a neutral endeavor, has enabled a pervasive and dynamic way of thinking and seeing the world that conceals alternative modes of knowing and being. We want modern technology to be a neutral edifice whose use is dictated by us for good or ill. However, once illuminated, it is helpful to see it as “a destiny which enfolds us in its own conceptions of instrumentality, neutrality, and purposiveness. It is in this sense that it has been truthfully said: technology is the ontology of the age.”[7]

It’s a whole package view, then, and not merely one from which we can pick and choose and determine our own ends as responsible individuals. Our technologies are determined by a particular philosophical mindset and do not simply rise from the ashes of technological neutrality. In this way, I am unsure how much I can get on board with Jacobs’ theses, which seems to put the onus on shaping behavior and yet misses the larger cultural (and I would dare say political) vision of what modern technologies desire.

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Jeff Appel (@jeffappel) is a PhD student in the Joint Doctoral Program of Religious Studies at the University of Denver and the Iliff School of Theology. His research interests include Continental Philosophy, the Philosophy of Technology, and Theological Anthropology. When he’s not writing or reading or working, his two daughters ensure he’s not sleeping, either.

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[1] George Grant, “Thinking About Technology” from Technology and Justice (Concord, Ont.: Anansi, 1986), 19.

[2] Ibid., 20.

[3] Ibid., 27.

[4] Ibid., 28.

[5] George Grant, “In Defense of North America” in Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Concord, Ont.: Anansi, 1969), 38.

[6] Ibid., 40.

[7] Grant, “Thinking Through Technology”, 32.

A-Dieu

This brief missive serves to launch the Grayscale Collective, a multi-contributor young scholars blog that will attempt to connect critical postmodern theory (religious, theological, philosophical, psychoanalytical, etc.) to global affairs and contemporary culture (whatever culture one finds one’s self in).

Why “Grayscale”? One gift of postmodern thought is the deconstruction of binary thinking. That which seemed so clear and obvious in the past is no longer the case, and a great deal of this has to do with the philosophical shifts that have happened over the past 125-150 years. In fact, it seems many are vaguely aware of these shifts in cultural ways of knowing and understanding but lack reference points that aid in understanding why they have happened. This blog should help in shining light on why things seem so different. Postmodern thought offers complexity but provides fresh avenues through which one might theorize on the shape of contemporary life and society. To put it another way, what was once so (seemingly) black and white is now some gradient of gray, which in the end opens up for a much more interesting type of discourse.

Why “Collective”? Quite simply, the aim of this blog is to curate a space for writers and to foster a welcoming type of discourse among others. This will (hopefully) function as a quasi-techno-community for a host of people spending 50 hours each week reading everything from Lacan to Luther, Khōra to Kierkegaard. Everyone who forges a space here is creating scholarship that is interesting and fresh and helps brings context for life in our postmodern milieu. Not everyone will agree with the posts expressed here; the hope here is to foster a context that pulls together in the midst of disagreement – to forge congenial and humble discourse – and to put forward words and ideas that sharpen and not merely sharp words that lacerate.

Posts here will likely span the reverent to the cheeky and will (hopefully) cover a wide range of topics and literary forms. While academic argot may reign sovereign, there is always place for writing that connects at all levels of discourse and understanding.

On that note, let’s begin!