Artifice, Thought, and Coping

In fact history does not belong to us; we belong to it. [...] The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.

– Hans-Georg Gadamer¹

Overview

The following is a high-level overview of my current project. The ultimate goal is to comprehend technologies that are so advanced that they feel not so much like tools than like a force of nature.

Artifice

A great irony of humankind is that the tools and techniques that we devise, produce, and use—which I collectively call artifice—expand the possibilities of what we can do, and at the same time expand the possibilities as to the kind of challenges we must cope with. Insofar as the technological reality of the species at large serves as a constant backdrop of an individual’s daily life, the most mundane task a person can perform is conditioned by artifice in some way or another, and so are those struggles that are closest to their heart. Furthermore, this sort of duality has existed on a historical continuum for a long time. As the historian Rosalind Williams suggests, if the agricultural revolution was accompanied by a profound cultural transformation of the world, millennia later, it is now “probable that humanity’s decision to unbind itself from the soil—not to return to a nomadic existence, but to bind itself instead to a predominantly technological environment—has provoked a similarly profound spiritual crisis.”²

But what I wish to point out is more than just a mere concomitance between new technologies and new challenges. In the early pages of Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing (1994), an unidentified wolf from south of the border roams around the county. To protect the calves, Billy is out there with his father tracking the wolf by her footprints and setting up traps. McCarthy writes:

Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sky he looked to be truing some older, some subtler instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself someway in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there was such space. If it be knowable.³

What space is the narrator talking about? It appears that the “world that [is]” and Billy himself are separated by an epistemological gulf, dubiously traversed at this moment through the usage of artificial tools. Like the sailor who uses a sextant to quite literally navigate the sea, Billy must use iron trappings, grease, rulers, and so on in order to navigate his world, which at this moment entails studying the wolf’s habits and outsmarting her. But the issue isn’t only epistemological; the sextant not only endows knowledge of the sea, but enables the sail altogether, which for the sailors aboard brings upon a whole new sea of experience. Similarly, Billy’s trap not only gives him an idea as to how he shall catch the wolf, but is an indispensable element of his comportment towards the wolf, or even towards the natural world at large.

The passage above mentions physical tools, but for us the whole of human artifice is at stake, material or otherwise; we are concerned with a totality of equipment (Heidegger) which includes language, learned skills, institutions, and so on. In the same way that a room—say, a dining hall or an office—acquires its function, character, and boundaries through the objects that furnish it, artifice furnishes the world and thereby puts the world into definite forms. Put succinctly, the space between our being and the world, if it be at all, is begotten by artifice. The human condition is itself anthropogenic.⁴

History and Subjectivity

Nietzsche pointed out a certain tendency, or even a necessity, on the part of reason to identify a subject who acts, who owns feelings and thoughts, who stands against an object, who ultimately provides the locus of our notions of causality and classification. He wrote:

We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things—only thereby does it first create the concept of "thing."⁵

He's not making a radical claim here; in my view, what he points out is something familiar to common sense. We must identify subjects of clauses just to be able to communicate what or whom we're talking about. He seems to suggest that our notion of a subject comes from the fact that we experience ourselves as such a subject—that is, as an ego, an ego that has a will that effects the world, and an ego that persists throughout time. We then understand "all things" by analogy of this sense of will and ego, and thereby "thinghood" is comprehended.

This sort of notion has been taken up by many writers. But for our context, the most relevant and explicit might be Tolstoy. In the second epilogue to War and Peace, he critiques what's now dubbed the "great man theory" of history: the idea that a few, certain people's will and decisions determine the outcome of history. His critique is often described as a "little man theory" of history in contrast, but I think that is extremely misleading. What he critiques is not merely the fact that a few people's wills are considered as the cause, but that will itself is.

What he presents is a dispositional view of history. I am disposed to think, feel, act, and so on; or that I am part of such a disposition. By "disposition," philosophers roughly mean a set of non-determinate causes. Water flows (or runs) if and when it is set on a sloped surface. Now, we might say that gravity causes water to flow, or that water flows because it is a liquid. But we can also say that water is disposed to flow. In saying so, we'd be implying an infinitely large set of details such as the molecular structure of water; different kinds of surfaces, creases, or containers in which we might find water; the physical laws governing gravity; our own notion of continuous movement; and so on. Nelson Goodman writes:

Perhaps we ought to notice [...] that more predicates than we sometimes suppose are dispositional. A tell-tale suffix like "ible" or "able" is not always present. To say that a thing is hard, quite as much as to say that it is flexible, is to make a statement about potentiality. If a flexible object is one capable of bending under appropriate pressure, a hard object is one capable of resisting abrasion by most other objects. And for that matter, a red object is likewise one capable of certain color-appearances under certain lights; and a cubical object is one capable of fitting try squares and measuring instruments in certain ways. Indeed almost every predicate commonly thought of as describing a lasting objective character of a thing is as much a dispositional predicate as any other.⁶

In this view, what do we imply when we say, for example, "the house was flammable"? After a house catches on fire, we might identify the determinate cause by saying: "Ryan started the fire," or "the broken toaster started the fire." But we can also think about how the house was disposed to catch on fire: the oxygen that was present in the atmosphere, old hardwood floors, Ryan's failure to properly plug in the electrical cord of the toaster, and so on. Some of these things are not essential qualities of the house, necessarily; yet, it is the house that is disposed to catch on fire.

Similarly, we could think of something like "the intelligent agent" or the "mind" as a being that is disposed to understand, disposed to make rational choices, disposed to act appropriately, and so on. The subject—whether it be an agent, the mind, the flammable house, or water—appears in this light to be simply the terms in which this larger disposition becomes salient to us, becomes sensible to us, by distilling a worldly causal structure into one entity.

We could thus consider history itself as a dispositional process, de-privileging the role of the subject—the subjective experience of being a subject, to be more precise.

Neurosis

Do you feel in control of the technologies that you use? Or do you encounter technology more or less how primal humans would've encountered nature? If our inner lives are deeply shaped through technology—or, speaking more to the point, if our world is begotten by artifice—and we encounter artifice not as something fully in our control, not as something fully comprehensible, what would be the reason not to consider ourselves alien to us? But then, did we ever understand ourselves?

Was the Cold War inevitable? With hindsight, one can feel at the end of WW2 that the next five decades of world history had already been set in motion. How much were Truman, Stalin, Churchill, and the likes—and their successors—truly in control of this motion? Surely, their decisions had enormous consequences; but considering their ideological, economic, and strategic dispositions, can we expect them to have acted differently? This isn't a normative question; we are asking whether it is sensible to locate the causes that drove the Cold War in the subjectivity of these individuals. Had the most powerful men during these times in fact been cogs of a giant, historical machinery?

Their are many "determinisms" that have been floated around: technological determinism, media determinism, linguistic determinism, and so on. But we could speak also of an artifice determinism—and this is, if you consider the outlook I presented above, not any traditional sense of determinism. Our subjective experience of being a subject, regardless of whether such an experience is truly "free," actively shapes the unfolding of worldly artifice from and out of itself. Without a clear boundary between subject and object, or between that which determines and that which is determined, we might just be able to make sense of history in the twenty-first century.