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

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"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||iioupY6ueiv), 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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Technology and the Spirit

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;ri9.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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Technology and the Spirit

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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Technology and the Spirit

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

On Spirituality

53

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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Technology and the Spirit

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

On Spirituality

55

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