The Technical and the Ethical (what they share, and what they don’t)
It is commonplace to hear that our morality has not ‘kept up’ with our technology, or that the latter proceeds at a more ‘rapid’ pace than the former. But seen from the perspective of action in the world, morality and technology occupy the same relative place to what is technical, or involves technique, and what is ethical; morality in action or conscience enacted. Both morality and technology proceed from our Promethean humanity. We require external prosthetics, from the simplest of wooden and stone tools of our distant ancestors to the quantum accelerators of our own day, in order to make a culture at all or indeed to survive the night. The domestication of fire was key to these regards. Morality is an idealized prosthetic, an extension of our mental life into the world, just as technology extends the capacities of our bodily form. It is plausible that our very idea of ‘embodiment’, a theological term but also one phenomenological, originates in this early distinction between our physical and mental capabilities and endurances. For to feel ensconced in a material vehicle as something other than is the world might well play on an ancestral sensibility brought about by that very duet of prosthetic extensions; I am more than I seem to be.
Is this ‘more’ defined only by our evolving extensions, or might it also be the case that embodiment is of the essence of things in this matter; that I have not only made myself into a ‘more’ in the life I know and share with other human beings, but that I am also to be more, perhaps in a further life, or, to extend the logic of extension itself, a further part of this life? Conceptions of the afterlife, in their earliest form, saw it as a mere transition between earthly lives, a kind of eternal recurrence, not necessarily of the exact same thing, as in Nietzsche’s radically life-affirming formulation, but simply as another round of something similar; similar, especially in social contract cultures wherein this earliest idea of existential extension arises. Even with rudimentary social stratification, political power, and the presence of consistent material surplus, this first afterlife is not altered. What we observe is an inclining difference in burial rituals rather than the abandonment of the rites of passage in general. But with the advent of sedentary mass cultures we do see the idea that some have different destinies in the afterlife than others. Yet even here, the essence of the purpose of the afterlife, though altered from its primordial recurrence theme, remains consistent for all who thus enter it; some kind of evaluation is at stake, and that of one’s conscience and not one’s essence.
By this point, an idea that must have been percolating within our ancestral breast for eons has appeared bodily in the world: the sense that embodiment as a locus for technological and moral extensions has a purpose beyond itself. Not only is life to be extended, but so also is its meaning. In this, we humans are gifted with the fuller sense of the Promethean ethic. Indeed, it was not so much the ability to live in ignorance of our own deaths as did the Gods themselves, though for us as a limited period, that riled the Greek pantheon, but rather that mortal life should have a meaning beyond itself. And this idea, implicated in the gift of the demigod, essentially annulled the difference between Gods and humans; both had now indefinite existences from which purpose and meaningfulness might be gleaned. Worse still, from the divine perspective at least, was that meaning itself for an omniscient and omnipotent being was not truly relevant, or at the very least, occurred in whole cloth as with everything else such a being would bring into being with its own presence. For us, rather, making meaning as we go along, though long the order of the quotidian day, abruptly upshifted itself into the essence of life, the very reason that we lived at all.
What fills the conceptual as well as experiential gaps between technology and morality and actual human life in the world is, respectively, technique and ethics, the technical and the ethical. What they share is their fundamentally ad hoc basis: both technique and ethics responds to a specific circumstance, as often as not unpredicted or at least, unexpected. And just as there is not a one-to-one correspondence between morality and ethics – the idea that the former contains timeless principles as ideals and the latter is the space of real-time action wherein what is good in one case might not be in the next, and so on – so there is no levels-identity relation between technology, an umbrella term for anything prosthetic in culture, and technique, the actual use of tools and as well the skills involved in the construction thereof. Ethics is not morality simply brought down to earth, but rather moral ideas enacted and thus modified in the world on an ongoing basis. If such an image rapidly becomes blurred, we understand that ‘life is vague’, as Gadamer sagely notes, though it sounds like a mere truism and might even contain a nascent sense that ‘this life’ is vague when compared to some other life. Just so, the very ad hoc character of human life – we are constantly faced with differing circumstance and indeed, the very sense that life is mostly circumstantial both in action and in essence; we often meet our mates by chance, we do not ask to be born, etc. – forces upon us a reckoning: if our extensory apparatus seeks to ameliorate the chance quality of existence, if our extended sensibilities based upon prior experience purposes itself as the assuagement of our limited conscience – conscience can no more predict the future with due certainty than can technique itself – then might it be the case that because we our aware of ideals in the first place, that there is another kind or form of life within which such ideals actually exist?
This speculation should be familiar from Peter Berger’s 1967 argument concerning the possible reality of the afterlife, whatever its culturally defined character. It has its germ in James’ legendary Gifford lectures of 1901, wherein ‘the reality of the unseen’ is of great moment in the career of belief. Not just this, but as well, and rather more darkly, ‘the sacrifice of the intellect’, must also be had if one is to authentically adopt a religious suasion. At some point, reflection must cease, reason give itself away, in order for faith alone to carry the day. The idea that due to our ability to at least imagine an ideal way of life, which at once does away with the need for both the technical and the ethical, is suggestive of ‘another’ world or yet an otherworld where the very idea of the ideal is also moribund. We do not of course reiterate any of this argument here. For us, ideals arise through the human ability to make history; though ad hoc in its action, life remains to be lived by a being who is possessed of both memory and anticipation; two sibling, if contrasting, phenomenological dispositions of Dasein. Because of this, we are able to say to ourselves, ‘well, that was different, but it reminds me of the time when I…’ and such-like. Or, by way of comparison, ‘I have never experienced anything the like…’. All culture, all history, is only possible by way of the constant remarking upon the difference between what is similar and what is contrasting, and indeed how and by how much such experiences do in fact contrast. Technique is not only technology in use but also the reflexive process through which the former is modified by having become part of a human life; for now, technology has no life of its own. Ethics, rather, is not only morality lensed by action in the world but is as well its own domain, and this is the point at which the technical and the ethical part ways.
For what they do not share with one another is autonomous form and thence formulation. The technical, the realm of technique alone, is always enthralled to the task at hand. It cannot compare itself to its ideal. One does hear, ‘well, if all other things had been equal, this would have worked’. Applied scientists, who should be wiser than all of this, are often the source of this plaintiff. But one also hears another refrain, one that only partially quotes the original source, and that is ‘for all action there is an equal and opposite reaction’. Yes, ‘in a closed system’, as the actual text concludes. Human life, history, culture, and the world at large are manifestly not such closed systems as Newton ideally described for his local physics. Those who misuse this famous epigram, speaking in part of his second law of thermodynamics, do so to make simplistic human relations, especially those political, in order to manipulate others. In so doing, however, they have, perhaps inadvertently but nonetheless bodily, moved from the technical to the ethical. They have expressed what is of the utmost for our shared humanity; not at all our ability to extend our physical capabilities through equally material prosthetics but rather our inability to know our ends, both singular and indeed collective. Its is only ethics which speaks, Janus-like but without duplicity, to this human dilemma and not and never technique. In doing so, we are brought face to face with the existential import of being able to at once have an awareness of how we would ideally act ‘if all else was equal’ and the ‘system was closed’, and thus the equal understanding that we must in any case take action without direct recourse to either ideals or to an ideal world.
G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, religion, aesthetics, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.