Man and Machine: Part Five

Technology and the Truth

Since ancient times goodness has been considered by the wise to be the highest ideal for which man strives, can strive, or ought to strive. It has never been isolated, at the apex of the mountain of human aspiration, however, and down through the ages of man its closest associate and constant companion has been truth. Not infrequently their names are spoken in connection with that of a third ideal, beauty. The association of these ideals is at least as old as the sixth book of Plato’s Republic, although the formulation of the three as a triad is much more recent, perhaps having its origins in the Renaissance efforts to regain the ideas and achievements of classical civilization. Even in the older, medieval triad of the one, the good, and the true, however, goodness and truth were always associated.

The Athenian philosophers understood goodness in terms of harmony between a thing and its natural end. Everything has a nature, an irreducible essence that makes it what it is. Every nature has an end, in the sense of a telos, a purpose. A lamp, for example, is made for the purpose of lighting up a room. That is the end towards which it is made, to which its nature is bent. If goodness lies in harmony between a thing and its natural end, a lamp is deemed to be good or not based upon how well it achieves the end of lighting up a room. The nature of goodness has been a major subject of philosophical discussion and especially the nature of human goodness which, given the definition of general goodness, can only be understood in terms of the natural end of man.

Goodness is the highest ideal because all other ideals are encapsulated within it. Take, for example, the concept of rightness or justice, which is the subject of ethics. Justice, as the concept was classically understood, means behaving towards others as one ought, in the most literal sense of the word ought, i.e., as we owe it to others to behave. This, it should be clear to see, presupposes that we owe certain kinds of behaviour towards other people. This is not as controversial a presupposition as it may seem. Even liberal individualism acknowledges a debt of behaviour towards other people, at least in the negative sense of owing it to them not to violate their life, person, and property. The most basic of our obligations towards other people are part of our nature as human beings and therefore if justice or rightness consists of fulfilling those obligations it can therefore be said to be goodness as applied to human behaviour, which is, of course, the way everybody thinks about it whether they have gone through the exercise of defining it or not. Likewise, beauty is goodness as applied to that which is appealing to the senses of sight and sound.

Truth too, can be thought of as a type of goodness. It is goodness as it pertains to thoughts and language. Thought, in the abstract, is the total conscious activity of our minds and brains. Specific thoughts are pictures that we form or models that we build in our minds. Language is the medium through which we communicate these pictures or models to other people. These pictures or models are representations of things as we understand them to be, to have been in the past, or as we either expect, fear, or desire them to be in the future. The more accurately our thoughts correspond with the way the things they represent actually are, were or will be the better will our thoughts achieve their natural end, which is our understanding of ourselves, the world in which we live, and that which lies beyond that world. This correspondence between depiction in thought and language and the actuality of what is depicted is what has traditionally been understood by the word truth.

If truth is goodness in thought and language that consists of accurate correspondence between how we depict things in what we think and say and how those things actually are can human beings ever be said to possess truth?

This question is an important one that arises out of the difference between things as they appear to us and things as they are in themselves. We can judge how the way things are depicted in thought and word correspond with how those same things appear to us because how those things appear to us is known to us. We should be careful, however, not to confuse how things appear to us with how things are in themselves. We know that things as they appear to us cannot be declared to be absolutely identical to how things are in themselves because we know that our own senses and minds interpret things so as to produce their appearances.

Do not make the mistake of reading too much into this difference. Our own participation in how things appear to us does not mean that there is absolutely no correspondence between appearances and actual reality. Indeed, for most, if not all, practical purposes it is safe to treat the way things appear as if they were identical to the way things are. The importance of recognizing the difference between the appearance of things, which we know, and the reality of things that lies beneath the appearance, lies in the fact that it is through this recognition that we are aware that there is a greater standard of truth, that lies beyond and beneath that truth to which we have access, of which the latter is merely an approximation. This, of course, is what Plato illustrated for us thousands of years ago in his allegory of the cave.

The insights of Athens are best seen when illuminated by the light of Jerusalem. Expressed in theological terms, the difference between such truth as is accessible to us and that which is beyond is, is the difference between human and divine truth. Man has a knowledge of things as they appear to him, God knows all things as they are in themselves. As the Lord said to Samuel “the LORD seeth not as man seeth ; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart” (I Sam. 16:7).

There is a story that was related by nineteenth century Danish Lutheran theologian and existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments. (1) In the second part of the book, where Kierkegaard discusses the eighteenth century German philosopher and playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, he quotes Lessing as having said that if God were to hold out both His hands with the right hand containing the truth, pure and whole, and the left hand containing the relentless, endless, striving for truth, and say “Choose”, that he would fall down before God’s left hand, saying “Give, Father, for the truth is for You alone”. While Kierkegarrd did not seem to be impressed with Lessing’s profession of humility (2), he approved of the idea that truth is something for God to possess and man to eternally strive for. By approving this idea, Kierkegaard was not endorsing the behaviour of the “silly women”, St. Paul refers to, who are “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (II Tim. 3:7). The Apostle was talking about people who constantly jump from one new religious fad to another. Kierkegaard was talking about the gulf that exists between the pure and absolute truth as it is known to God and that small approximation of it which man can arrive at through his philosophical efforts. (3) He contrasts that idea with the arrogance of Hegel’s absolute idealism, and the whole concept that human philosophy could devise a “System” which would satisfactorily explain all of reality.

The arrogance which Kierkegaard objected to in Hegel’s “System” is hardly unique to Hegel. The idea that a complete and fully integrated knowledge of all things lies within man’s reach if he will but stretch forth the hands of reason and science to grasp it lies at the heart of most modern thinking. The contrast between this attitude and that of Socrates, who was puzzled by the Delphic Oracle’s proclamation that he was the wisest man in Greece because in his own estimation he “knew nothing”, could not be any greater.

Now it could be argued that Socrates, who laid the foundation of classical philosophy, lived almost two and a half millennia ago, at the dawn of Western thought and that between then and now we have accumulated so much knowledge that while a disavowal of knowledge was an indication of wisdom in his day, humanistic confidence in man’s ability to attain full knowledge is the mark of wisdom in our own. Indeed, the modern point of view would be difficult if not impossible to hold, without some such argument being taken as an assumption. Is it the case, however, that our accumulation of knowledge has been so great as to justify such an assumption, or is it rather that modern man, by an alchemy of redefinition, has reduced the meaning of knowledge itself so as to make our knowledge appear more complete?

There is much that points to the latter explanation as being the most correct one. As far back as the fourteenth century William of Ockham argued against the multiplication of entities and on this basis denied reality to the universals the knowledge of which Plato argued was the truest of knowledge. Renaissance humanism, shifted the focus of human thought away from God and the metaphysical and towards man himself. Rationalists argued that the only true knowledge is that which can be rationally formulated and empiricism reduced the meaning of science to observable information about the natural world and theories explaining that information which can be tested in the laboratory.

The result of all of this is that while our store of facts has indeed grown since Socrates’ day, a growth which has been both exponential and accelerating in modern times, our concept of knowledge itself has been severely reduced. Thus, an attempt at producing a modern integrated system of knowledge is actually less impressive than classical and medieval attempts at synthesizing a worldview, for while the latter had less in the way of raw data to deal with they sought to incorporate what information they had about the whole of reality into their synthesis.

Our idea of truth cannot be unaffected if our understanding of what constitutes knowledge changes. For if truth is goodness as it pertains to thought and language then it must also be the goal of knowledge. Thought is the medium of knowledge, just as language is the medium of thought. If modern man has deluded himself into thinking that he has a fuller, more complete, system of knowledge by shrinking the definition of knowledge how has this affected his concept of the truth?

Modern man continues to acknowledge truth to be the end of knowledge (and hence science) in theory. In practice, however, he has substituted another end for knowledge in place of truth. Modern man’s confidence in modern science rests upon its practical results – its ability to deliver tools and techniques that decrease his burden, increase his leisure, make the necessities and luxuries of life more available, provide relief from pain and illness. This ability of modern science is nothing to be sneered at but it must be acknowledge that this ability is the result of modern man having substituted power for truth as the practical end of knowledge. George Grant, in his critiques of modern science and technology, argued that technology is, like the term itself, a fusion of making and knowing, created by modern man to serve the end of modern science which is the subjection of nature to the will of man. (4) That this is indeed the end of modern science was acknowledged by one of its earliest and most important proponents, when Sir Francis Bacon equated knowledge with power.

One of the results of this has been that facts have taken the place of truth. Facts the modern man has an abundance of. They are the raw material of the kind of science that produces power and domination. They are not the same thing as truth, however, and as Oscar Wilde once put it “When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.”

In his Technology and Empire, George Grant criticized what he called “the most sacred doctrine of our public religion”, saying that it is “not self-evident, as is often claimed”. This is the distinction between a fact” purportedly a description of what is, and a value, a description of what we think ought to be. The former, the modern academy declares to be that with which science has to do. The latter it relegates to the realm of moral judgement. This, Grant maintained, creates problems in both the fields of science and morality. To think about morality in terms of values, Grant frequently argued, was to think about morality solely in terms of our freedom and choices, for values are what modern man has substituted for goodness, the difference being that values are what he chooses for himself whereas goodness is something that is which he is to seek after, strive for, and find. To think of science in terms of facts is to create and maintain the idea of an objective or value-free science when science is actually in the service of the human will. In other words the fact-value distinction as it is commonly understood separates what is from what we decide but puts each in the wrong place.

What Grant said values are to goodness, it can be argued facts are to truth. In the third chapter of his Historical Consciousness, (5) John Lukacs writes that the historian “does deal with things that happened” but that “these things are not necessarily facts” and gives a fascinating history of the word fact, pointing out that when it was first used as a noun it originally referred, as its cognates in other languages continue to refer, to something that was done or accomplished rather than to a category of reality. Just as Grant argued that the fact-value distinction was created to serve the interests of modern technological society by creating a false image of scientific objectivity and subjective morality, Lukacs wrote that “the nineteenth-century cult of Facts was…one of the intellectual concomitants of the Industrial Revolution”. He went on to explode the “Fact-Fiction dichotomy”, by showing that facts are as much the intellectual constructions of men as fictions and to illustrate the difference between fact and truth by writing:

One evening in 1960, after having worked all day, I drove over the hill to see some friends after supper. My account in my 1960 diary reads: “June went by, closely together with H., in our little country house.” “Late on the evening of June 1”, someone could write, “Lukacs left his ailing wife alone in a darkened house, and drove off to spend several hours drinking with friends on a well-lit terrace, in an electric atmosphere with pretty women.” Absolutely correct. Deeply untrue. (6)

The difference between fact and truth illustrated in the above quotation is the difference between accurate details and a right understanding.

This brings us back to that vital distinction between things as they appear to us and things as they are. Facts, at least in the sense the word came to be used by the nineteenth-century in the English-speaking world, belong to the realm of appearances even though the fact-value and fact-fiction dichotomies both attempt to place them in the realm of things as they are. A fact is a thing or an event as interpreted for us by our senses and our own minds. For practical purposes we can safely act as though the facts we possess are things and events as they are or were.

To forget or deny, however, that there is a reality beyond and beneath fact and appearance is as much a mistake as to think that morality consists only of what we choose to value for ourselves. Goodness and truth, in the sense that these are known to and belong to God, are beyond the reach of our human capabilities. We should not, however, settle for values and facts as substitutes, but should strive to achieve goodness and truth while acknowledging the gap between our achievements and the ideals. Only thus can any sort of human excellence be accomplished.

(1) First published in 1846. Kierkegaard wrote the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and the Philosophical Fragments which appeared two years earlier, under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. The title of Concluding Unscientific Postscript appears to have ironic intentions. It refers to a book of over five hundred pages, written as a “post-script” to a pamphlet of less than one hundred.

(2) Immediately after the quote he says that if Lessing had lived to see Hegel’s “System” he would have embraced it with both hands.

(3) Note that it is in this same work, indeed in the same section discussing G. E. Lessing, that Kierkegaard points out that the only way across this gulf is a leap made in faith. In speaking of this leap, his point was not, as it is often misrepresented as being, that faith is something that one must exercise in the absence of evidence or even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

(4) This is a persistent theme throughout all of Grant’s writings but especially his Technology and Empire (Toronto: Anansi, 1969) and Technology and Justice (Toronto: Anansi, 1986).

(5) John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers Ltd., 1994, originally published by Harper & Row of New York in 1968).

(6) Ibid., p. 108.

The Revival of Civilization

The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt, translated by S. G. C. Middlemore, London, Phaidon Press, 1960, 462 pp.

The Renaissance is a period of European history which is of interest to people for many different reasons. For art aficionados the Renaissance was the era of the great masters - Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, and so many others. For people who love political plots and schemes and intrigues the Renaissance was the age of the Medici, Sforzas, and of course the Borgias, and for those who take a more theoretical approach to politics modern political science was born in the Renaissance in the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli. The rediscovery and emulation of the Greco-Roman culture of classical antiquity makes the Renaissance an essential period of time for classicists, and for those of a scientific bent, the Renaissance was a time of ground-breaking discoveries about the natural world. It is the historical backdrop to the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.

The Renaissance is also an important historical period because it is the transition period between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. An early stage of the spirit of the Modern Age is discernible in the intellectual and cultural movement called humanism which developed in the Renaissance. Today, the term humanism refers to secular humanism, a movement which believes that religion should be completely a matter of private belief and should not be part of the organization of society. This rabid hostility towards religion was not present in Renaissance humanism, which was born centuries before the Enlightenment Project began, but the earlier humanism involved a transfer of focus from God to man which was arguably one of the first steps in the development of what would eventually become the later, secular humanism. The blessings and curses of the Modern Age both have their roots in the Renaissance.

Despite all of this it is only quite recently that we began to think and speak of this period as “the Renaissance”. The term “Renaissance” signifies a re-birth and the concept behind the term was that of a renewing of the high cultural achievements of the civilization of the ancient world. While some art critics such as Vasari, who dismissed medieval art as barbaric (1) had considered the new classical style to be a re-birth it was in the 19th Century that historians began to regard the 14th-16th centuries as the distinct period of cultural achievement that we think of as “the Renaissance” today.

Although he was not the first to write about the Renaissance, credit for making it a firmly established part of our understanding history must be given to Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt. Jacob Burckhardt, who was born into a prominent family in Basel, where he lived and taught for most of his life, was the son of a Protestant clergyman who ministered at the Basel cathedral. Like the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, another parson’s son who would become his student and for a brief time his colleague (2), Burckhardt initially began his academic career as a student of theology. History, however, would come to take the place of the queen of the sciences in his heart, and especially the history of art. Indeed, he was one of the pioneers of art history as a serious academic discipline

It is remarkable therefore, that his most widely known book, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, is not about art and does not include a section on art. The author himself, on the very first page draws our attention to this fact by stating that he had intended “to fill up the gaps in this book by a special work on the ‘Art of the Renaissance’” but had only done so in part. That he did not complete this intended work is unfortunate for the history of art.

In the same context Burckhardt had lamented what he called “the most serious difficulty of the history of civilization”, namely, “that a great intellectual process must be broken up into single, and often into what seem arbitrary categories, in order to be in any way intelligible”. This is a description of the structure of his own book. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is divided into six sections the largest of which are the first “The State as a Work of Art” and the last “Morality and Religion”. The other sections are “The Development of the Individual”, “The Revival of Antiquity”, “The Discovery of the World and of Man”, and “Society and Festivals”.

His misgivings about breaking down the Renaissance into categories appear to have been groundless because a unifying concept of the Renaissance does emerge towards which each of the sections contributes. The Italian Renaissance, as Burckhardt conceived it, was the first modern civilization, in which the individualism, humanism, scientific pursuits, and other characteristics of the modern age are first born in a country where the political foundations of modernity had not yet been laid.

Therefore, in “The State as a Work of Art”, we find a multi-layered account of the political situation in Renaissance Italy. There is a faithful narrative of the misdeeds and achievements of the Borgias, Visconti, and all the other colourful characters of this time and place, the sort of thing most historians would be interested in both in Burckhardt’s own day and our own. There is a comparison of the two basic kinds of city-states which existed in Italy at that time. Then there is an account of a nation-state, struggling to emerge in a country where feudalism had not developed in the direction of national unity as it had elsewhere in Europe.

It is this last concept, of how the dream of national unity underlay the aspirations and ambitions of Signoria and republican theorists alike, that contributes the most to the overall picture of the Renaissance Burckhardt was painting and he introduced the theme early by writing:

The struggle between the Popes and the Hohenstaufen left Italy in a political condition which differed essentially from that of other countries of the West. While in France, Spain and England the feudal system was so organized that, at the close of its existence, it was naturally transformed into a unified monarchy, and while in Germany it helped to maintain, at least outwardly, the unity of the empire, Italy had shaken it off almost entirely.

In the absence of that unity, Italy consisted of a number of city-states, some of which were republics governed by a senate, others of which were dominated by families which had attained wealth and then power through the hired soldiers called Condottieri, the leaders of which Burckhardt calls “despots” to distinguish them from the governing houses which had emerged from feudalism elsewhere in Europe. These sought legitimacy and security for their dynasties and dreamed of uniting Italy. Poets like Dante and Petrarch sought to capture the spirit of a national Italy in verse. These dreams of a politically unified Italy went unfulfilled, however. Italy would not be united until a year after Burckhardt’s book was first published in the 19th Century.

If a modern nation-state did not quite materialize in Renaissance Italy, modern individualism did. This, according to Burckhardt, made the Italian “the firstborn among the sons of modern Europe”. The consciousness of the individual personality, developed in both types of city-states alike, as man who had previously “been conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category” began to separate his outward view of the world from his inward view of himself.

This sense of the individual, according to Burckhardt, took its highest form in the universalism of the Renaissance humanism, both in the cosmopolitan belief that the learned man is at home everywhere expressed by Dante and Ghiberti and in the ideal of “’l’ uomo universale’”, the man who possesses knowledge in many different areas. Dante, Leon Battista Alberti, and Leonardo da Vinci are given as examples of this ideal and today we still speak of someone whose expertise covers many areas in which most people concentrate and specialize on one as a “Renaissance Man”.

This new individualism manifested itself in a number of different ways. Glory and honour, previously attached to groups and classes, now took the individual form that we know today as “fame”. The pursuit of fame led to great achievements, but also created many problems. “The corrective”, Burckhardt wrote “not only of this modern desire for fame, but of all highly developed individuality, is found in ridicule, especially when expressed in the victorious form of wit”. The latter “could not be an independent element in life till its appropriate victim, the developed individual with personal pretensions, had appeared”.

Following the short but pivotal section on the individual, Burckhardt turned to the aspect of the Renaissance which gave it its name, the rediscovery and revival of ancient civilization. He began by criticizing the term as being “one-sided”, which today seems more than a little ironic in light of the extent to which this very book popularized the term. Burckhardt insisted that it is “one of the chief propositions of this book, that it was not the revival of antiquity alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people, which achieved the conquest of the western world.”

This is how Burckhardt regarded history. A particular people in a specific time period would have a certain spirit which manifested itself in everything they did so as to lend its character to the era itself. In this case it was the spirit of the individualistic, non-politically unified, Italian people which manifested itself in the Renaissance. The renewal of the classical was a manifestation of that spirit, not that spirit itself. It was a spiritual movement, Burckhardt argues, in which the Italian people, no longer effectively ruled by either the Holy Roman Empire or the papacy, “awakened to self-consciousness, sought for some new and stable ideal on which to rest” finding it in the world empire of ancient Rome.

This vision of the ideal of ancient Rome inspired the study of ancient Rome, of the architecture of classical Rome still visible in a dilapidated form in the ruins of ancient buildings and roads, and more importantly in classical literature. Study of the classical languages, first Latin, a dialect of which had evolved into Italian, and then Greek became an important pursuit. People who had the wealth to do so (and some, like the monk who would become Pope Nicholas V, who did not) began to collect large libraries of classical manuscripts, and the science of textual criticism was born.

An awakened people, however, captured by the vision of an ancient civilization from which they could claim descent, was not satisfied and could not be satisfied, by treating that civilization as something dead to be viewed in a museum. The next step was to translate the Roman ideal into contemporary – for the 14th to 16th centuries – Italian. Enter the humanists. Dante (3), Petrarch, Boccaccio and their successors, imitated and built upon classical literary models, to give new life to Italian literature.

Humanism was not contained within the realm of literature, however, but spread throughout the universities, transforming existing disciplines and creating new ones, and laying the foundation for the modern approach to the humanities. The desire to discover the world gave birth to the exploration of men like Christopher Columbus and to a deep interest in the natural sciences. (4) This in turn led to new discoveries which provided inspiration for poetry and literature.

The renewal of civilization did not take place in an academic world cut off from the society around it. “Every period of civilization, which forms a complete and consistent whole manifests itself not only in political life, in religion, art, and science, but also sets its characteristic stamp on social life”. Social life in the Renaissance, as Burckhardt depicted it, was deeply affected by the fact that the nobles now lived in the cities, and so shared the interests of the burghers (enfranchised townsmen whose wealth was derived from commerce). One result of this was that birth had come to be of less importance in terms of social influence than wealth and education. This too is a distinctively modern phenomenon.

Overall, Burckhardt’s book is informative about many different aspects about the Renaissance, although it will undoubtedly be disappointing to those whose primary interest in that period is in its art. His depiction of the Renaissance, as the first modern civilization is a convincing one, even if some of the modern phenomena he describes, such as individualism and equality, meant something very different in their Renaissance context, then they do to us in the 21st Century – or for that matter than they meant for Burckhardt in the 19th Century. This has been one of the most influential books on the history of the Renaissance ever written and it is likely that its influence will continue.

(1) In the literal sense. Such art was dubbed “gothic”, i.e., of the Goths, the Germanic invaders who had sacked Rome.

(2) It was Burckhardt, as a matter of fact, who, upon receiving a postcard from Nietzsche after his mental breakdown, first realized that the philosopher had gone stark raving mad and notified the people who would arrange for him to receive the care he needed.

(3) Burckhardt regarded Dante, who “treats the ancient and the Christian worlds, not indeed as of equal authority, but as parallel to one another” as the first humanist. Subsequent historians have not followed Burckhardt in this.

(4) Here too Burckhardt pointed to Dante as displaying an early scientific interest in the natural world.