Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separated, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. A ratio of interplay among these extensions of our human functions is now as necessary collectively as it has always been for our private and personal rationality in terms of our private senses or “wits,” as they were once called.
Marshall McLuhan 1962: The Gutenberg Galaxy, 6.
To say that we live in unusual times would be an understatement. Certainly, every age has its own unprecedented happenings, many of which are precipitated by technological advances. But in the present iteration of the electronic age—that which we can fairly call “digital”—it appears that technological advance and use no longer occurs as separate from the lives of human beings. In truth, they have never occurred with such separation. But today, technologies’ essential function, namely the extension of our natural faculties, has in a way exceeded the proportions set by nature. This technological disproportion presents an unprecedented challenge.
The rapid unfolding of this unprecedented disproportion, as apprehended (but not understood) in the Western-cultural world, has led to many abandoning their intellectual traditions. This abandonment comes with hope or desperation for new solutions to the problems (such as endemic tendencies towards psychosis, generative intelligence simulators [mistakenly named “artificial intelligence”], the rapid fragmentation of opposed political ideologies, and global economic precarity with instantaneous consequences) which now threaten our civilizations. But this abandonment itself misperceives the persistent root underlying these newly-emergent problems—a root which is not a problem itself, but a difficulty with which we as human beings must struggle: namely, understanding human nature.
For this understanding, we are fools not to turn with repeated humility to the great works of our tradition.
What is Tradition?
This question—“what is tradition?—proves surprisingly difficult to answer beyond providing the most basic definitions and descriptions. But as a fundament for any good response to the question, it must be stated that tradition universally consists in the “handing down” of beliefs and behaviors to others. Tradition proves therefore both something communicated and something essential to communication. Every word read off a page or spoken aloud presupposes a common linguistic tradition, not only of the particular letters, shapes, or sounds by which the meanings are conveyed, but of those meanings as well.
Thus, we build traditions not only by the things we use, but by the thoughts with which we inform those things. Put in other words, tradition always finds itself infused with symbols: conventionally-appointed signs which convey universal ideas.
Traditional Signs and the “Idea” of a Tradition
Behind this identification of symbols and tradition lies a deep inquiry into semiotics (the study of the action of signs). We do not need to make this inquiry, however, to observe the truth that tradition and symbols are intimately related. All we need is a little reflection.
Think, for instance, of long-enduring religious practices. One might think of the Catholic Mass, whether in Roman or Orthodox rites. Here, symbols abound—not only in the appointments of a church building (stained-glass windows, statues, altars, tabernacles, and so on), not only in the vestments of priests and servers (cassock, alb, amice, cincture, stole, chasuble), nor even in their particular adornments and imagery, but also in countless actions and words (every noun, verb, adjective, adverb, conjunction, and preposition including some symbolic signification). Conveyed thereby are not only millennia of gradually-accumulated practices, but a thinking-through of how we ought to behave with regard to the sacred.
Or, as a very common form of traditional symbolism across varied cultures, consider the practice of vestment: a tradition found not only in Catholicism but in, for instance, Zen Buddhism. Japanese practitioners are, upon entry into their monastic life, garbed with the kesa, reception of which symbolizes receipt of the Buddha’s teaching and worn throughout daily rituals to remind of one’s commitment. The meaning of the garment is much more than the garment itself, just as a priest’s opening of the antiphon—Introibo ad altare Dei, “I will go in to the altar of God”—signifies much more than an intent to ascend the stairs of the sanctuary.
We might further think of more common cultural practices that also have a clear symbolic meaning: such putting up decorations for holidays (whether retaining spiritual depth or not), giving gifts on birthdays, eating a large and plentiful meal on Thanksgiving (in the United States, at least), even the act of shaking hands with someone—each means more than the act itself. We decorate for a holiday not only because we like to make our homes more attractive for a time (do we want our homes unattractive the rest of the year?) and we do not decorate however we please to celebrate the holiday, but in a way that is in keeping with the holiday celebrated. Putting up pumpkins at Christmas would be quite bizarre, regardless of one’s religious beliefs. So too, a Christmas tree does not belong at a Fourth of July party. We give gifts on birthdays not because we are rewarding the person celebrated, but because we wish to convey our joy at his or her life, to commemorate another year of being-together and hopes for the year to come. Consuming a large meal at Thanksgiving does not celebrate gluttony (even if often it may turn out that way), but expresses gratitude for life itself, with food that not only nourishes but delights. Shaking hands not only greets the other, but expresses an intention towards that other (and principally, we intend to signify a spirit of cooperation—though an aggressive handshake might signify otherwise).
If we think a little more, we will realize that we participate in traditions through their symbols on an almost daily basis: in prayer, in conversation, in reading, in writing, in almost any interaction with any other human being, we will engage in some symbolic signification of something above and beyond the here and now moment.
Intellectual Traditions
Of particular importance for the Lyceum Institute are intellectual traditions. An intellectual tradition comprises symbolically-conveyed relations of beliefs which have been handed down from earlier thinkers. To give an example, we can take a word we just used: namely, “belief”. What do we mean by this word? To some, it may signify faith or religious / personal conviction. Here, however, it is being used in the tradition of Charles Sanders Peirce, who defines it (to paraphrase) as “conviction in the truth of a proposition so as to act in accordance with it when the occasion arises”. I believe that spilling water on myself is a nuisance, and so I act in a manner that attempts to prevent spilling water on myself. I believe that truth is a good to be shared, and so, when the opportunities present themselves, I attempt to share the truth. I believe that C.S. Peirce has insightful things to say, so I try to read his works. Each of these beliefs shapes my action, because my conviction is not only that they are true, but that the truths they convey are good.
The purpose of an intellectual tradition is to hand on the truths which produce convictions that turn into beliefs. We uphold an intellectual tradition because we find that it reveals the intelligible truths of being and, in the beliefs it fosters, we are motivated to actions that are good. These intellectual traditions can be scientific, theological, literary, historical, artistic, religious, and anything in-between. The Shakespearean sonnet, for instance—a specific metrical poetic form—belongs to an intellectual tradition inasmuch as this form itself, not independently of but irreducible to the content, signifies something beyond itself. Likewise, the practice of modern scientific methodology forms part of an intellectual tradition, inasmuch as it is believed to discover and indicate explanations for observed phenomena. So too, the religious practices of churches and temples alike all are informed not only by a tradition of practice but also of intellectual understanding and likely of some theological belief—however well or poorly formed that understanding may be.
But that literary, scientific, or theological traditions are formed well—this requires a kind of synoptic, holistic, and fundamental perspective: a perspective which can be formed only through philosophy.
Philosophical Traditions at the Lyceum
Just as with the above disciplines, philosophy, too, both produces and develops within intellectual traditions. Unlike those mentioned above, however—although a certain exception must be made for theology—philosophy encompasses the whole of human experience, including that which is pursued in all other intellectual pursuits. Nothing falls outside of its domain.[2]
In light of this truth, perhaps no intellectual traditions have as fundamental an importance for our earthly lives as those of philosophy, for it is within and through philosophy that our beliefs about diverse matters can be resolved into a unity. As these philosophical resolutions gradually grow—one truth illuminating another, another dissolving a false opinion, and yet another coming from the connections drawn between the truth and falsity, and so on—they form a tradition. Put otherwise, a philosopher establishes some premise as a principle. From this premise, further conclusions are drawn. These relations of premises and conclusions are taught to others, students. These others discover yet further meanings in light of the earlier thinking. Often, the teachers and students alike write down their thinking. Thus, the tradition grows not only from mouth to ear, but from pages through eyes.
As more is written—and as traditions come into conflict with one another—their reception becomes increasingly complex. If we do not read Plato himself, but only what is said about him by others, we do not truly know Plato’s thought, even if those others are accurate. Conversely, if we read only Plato himself, we inevitably will miss certain truths about his thinking that others have perceived and explained. Doubtless we will discover with little enough reading, commentaries upon Plato often conflict with one another. It belongs to a student of Platonic thinking, then, not merely to receive the tradition’s conclusions but, much more poignantly, to re-think its questions.
Such is the approach to philosophical traditions taken at the Lyceum Institute. We give certain traditions—Platonism, Aristotelianism, Thomism and Scholasticism generally, Peircean semiotics, certain thinkers within phenomenology and hermeneutics—greater emphasis than others because the questions they ask, and the answers provided to them, have proven better explanations than those given by those others. Because philosophy asks perennial questions, and because its answers are not like the solutions to simple mathematical equations, one cannot simply appropriate a tradition; one must live within it. Doing so develops a philosophical habit, and it is through this habit that we are able to face new challenges and difficulties.
What is Technology?
Among the emphasized philosophical traditions mentioned above, one will find commonly a tendency towards what can call realism: that is, simply put, the belief that our knowledge, at least in part, really is of things as they are in themselves. Many other philosophical traditions are not realist, in at least some one or another important way. Whether one is a realist or an anti-realist will change how one understands technology: for the latter, since human nature itself remains essentially unintelligible, technology can only be a construct of our own making. For the former, the realist, technology can instead be understood as an extension of human faculties.
Asking the Right Questions
This notion—that technology extends our faculties—requires, of course, that we understand what those faculties are and how they function. The author quoted at the outset of this article, Marshall McLuhan, dedicated much of his career to discovering the relations between diverse kinds and instruments of technology and the human sense faculties. His seminal 1964 book, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, considers (among many others) as such technologies: spoken and written words, clothing, money, printing, photographs, automobiles, games, movies, radio, television, and automation. As each use of one technology increases, McLuhan argues, the ratio of our senses is changed. Some pull us into more of a visual modality; others, auditory; others still, the tactile.
Through the alteration of these ratios, we alter also the environments of our human and especially social living. We human beings have been shifting the ratio of our senses since before recorded history. Indeed, such shifts were required to invent the means of recording: the development of languages and the means of their preservation as an extension of memory. But while we can conceive easily enough certain superficial extensions of our faculties—writing an extension of memory, photographs an extension of sight (allowing us to see things from the past)—the complex interplay of these technological extensions often eludes our awareness.
Allow me to suggest that this elusiveness belongs not to the technological devices or products, but rather to the fact that technologies never exist independently of human beings. That is, technologies come into being through human invention, yes; but more importantly, they operate as technologies only in relation to some human purpose. Automate a technology to continue past all human existence, and it may continue to function. But will it continue to function as a technology?
In other words: what makes a technology to be a technology? What do we really mean when we say the word, “technology”? Of course this question is not new. But do we have (have we ever had?) the right intellectual traditions to answer it? Can we incorporate such answers into a philosophical tradition?
Technology and Human Environments
As we have already mentioned, technological innovation and use alters—we may even say, to some degree, constitutes—the environments of human experience. Connections between the advent of automobiles and the development of suburbs, for instance, are well known. To many, this exodus from the urban life of city and town has a double concern: first, the evacuation of the cities themselves. As McLuhan writes in Understanding Media, “There is a growing uneasiness about the degree to which cars have become the real population of our cities, with a resulting loss of human scale, both in power and in distance.”[3] As anyone who has lived in or near a city or sizable town can likely attest, the car presents a struggle: it requires much real estate for driving and for parking—increasing both horizontally and vertically the expanse of concrete, pushing out shops, stores, restaurants; destroying neighborhoods and communities alike.
But secondly, the remove of persons to suburban environments likewise has an effect on our psychology, as well. It makes us much more private. Our suburban neighbors are always there—but merely there. We may work in entirely different directions; we may commute long distances; we may shop at different stores; our kids may go to different schools; we may have naught in common as to the conduct of daily life but for the fact that we live on the same street. The destruction of human scale inhibits our formation of communities; and the lack of communities affects the mind of each human being who needs such community in order to thrive.
The impact of technological developments upon our lives, in other words, consists not only in a physical reshaping of the environment, but also the psychological restructuring, which always plays a role in environmental constitution. How we look at things—how we think about them—has a way of changing how they fit into our lives. But if technology changes how we look at and think about things, how we hear what they have to say, then clearly it is also important that we perceive and think correctly about technology, as well.
Digital Paradigm of Technology
In the past several decades, a new paradigm of technology has become increasingly prevalent in this, the electric age: namely, the digital. Few have sufficiently considered the weight of this shift. While the first several decades of electricity saw communication transferred primarily through analog means—where one medium is used to represent one or another, but with a physical limitation that constrained the suitability of instruments (e.g., you could not produce a photograph on a vinyl record, or record sound in a Polaroid)—the increasing translation of records into digital formats has radically altered the human environment of today.
Where previous technological innovations have altered the ratios of our faculties, that is, the digital has altered it beyond all proportionality. It homogenizes all data: images, sounds, representations of tactility, relations and patterns of relationships. It captures with deceitfully-perfect seeming-fidelity not only the real, but so too the fake; fact and fiction become, in a digital paradigm of preservation and re-presentation, increasingly indistinguishable. We may witness this through the big-budget cinematic film, in which the digital creation of imagery and sound has become increasingly difficult to distinguish, as to what belongs really to things themselves and what was created through some other means.[4] As we blur lines between reality and fantasy, we damage the faculties of perceptual distinction upon which we intellectually rely. Reciprocally, the less we strive to develop our intellectual habits, the more damaging these sensory distortions become.
As the digital permeates our environments ever deeper—integrating into our homes, our devices, our communications, ever-present through one or another screen, always ready-to-hand through the phones in our pockets—we urgently need to ask: how do we understand these technologies? How do they fit coherently into human life?
Philosophical Tradition and Technology
Many propose responding to this question with the Luddite answer: eliminate the technology, either in itself or from your life; disconnect your homes and your devices, sign off of your accounts, live in a technologically-minimalist way. Doubtless, this answer appeals to many. Modern life causes no shortage of exhaustion and a retreat from its technological instruments promises a desirable rest. But though this may prove a solution to the problem of one’s own individual living, it does nothing to resolve the essential and essentially-human difficulty of technology. Fleeing from technology will not give us understanding of it, and thus—sooner or later, in our lives or those of generations yet to come—technology will grow again.
Instead, to handle the difficulty, we need philosophy. But what we need more than merely a set of philosophical doctrines. We need a philosophical tradition that instills in us a habit of careful thinking about the phenomena that not only surround us, but that shape and constitute the environment in which we live.
Thoughtful Engagement of the Digital Paradigm
Most especially do we need this habit of thoughtful reflection within the digital paradigm. As mentioned above, the weaker our habits of thinking, the more damaging we may find this most-pervasive of technological developments. Most readers of this essay, it is expected, are wary of social media: its effects on the psychological well-being of youth have become a hot topic no less than the proliferation of “fake news”. But it influences us in more subtle ways, as well, providing us not only with unhealthy self-images or untrue claims, but also changing our very patterns of thinking.
It may seem silly, perhaps, to look for answers about how we ought to live in the digital age from thinkers who died centuries ago, thinkers who never experienced technologies or modes of life quite like our own—thinkers like Aristotle and Aquinas. But although the particulars of our own day differ from these thinkers of antiquity, their insights into the universal truths of the human being remain ever-pertinent, and, if we can engage these traditions thoughtfully, we will find ways to bring their insights into an illuminating dialogue with the unique particulars of our own day.
The first task for a philosophical tradition appointed to initiating such a dialogue is the articulation of technology’s essence. The Lyceum Institute is taking up this task in a year-long project, Humanitas Technica, which will run throughout 2024, including an extended and expansive seminar to take place in the Fall. We have already begun preliminary conversations—covering how our relationship with technology has gone wrong, the conception of technology held by those responsible for creating it, and begun a preliminary consideration of technology’s definition. These preliminary conversations serve to illuminate the questions still to be asked. But primarily, they have shown that most of our technologies—even those that seemingly concern naught but the change of physical entities—modify our relations of communication.
Questioning Presuppositions
This centrality of communication to all technologies brings to light two common presuppositions: first, that technologies are principally instruments; and second, that they are inherently neutral in themselves and only incidentally used for good or evil. Recasting the conversation about technology—such that we consider technological instruments not principally through what they do according to their own forms but what we do through them in our most human capacities, and how this activity reverberates into us—challenges both these presuppositions.
To unfold this claim for recasting the conversation requires both the strength of a philosophical anthropology, such as that found in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, and the robust understanding of signification found both in late developments of Latin Thomistic thinkers and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. These latter considerations—concerning signs, symbols, and their interpretation—will allow us not only to apply our traditions to the technological developments of recent decades or those to come in the future, but to fold technology itself into these traditions. What is a smartphone? A piece of protective equipment? A new medicine? To understand such innovations, we cannot ask only what they do, but how we understand them. For this, semiotics will prove essential.
Many other contributions across diverse philosophical traditions of realism, no doubt, will find their place in these conversations as well. But regardless of the insights’ sources, it is a conversation which needs to be had and one which indeed requires recasting. The growing cultural problems—worry over which fills our publications, our daily discussions, the anxieties which gnaw at the souls of parents and teachers alike—all appear exacerbated by the technological environment we now inhabit.
Traditions of Philosophical Realism and Technology
Much more remains to be said on this topic, and I have little doubt that the many fine people involved in Humanitas Technica will have much worthwhile to say, but allow one final point here.
If we cannot know things as they are independently of our minds—know them not only according to their sense-perceptual, empirically-observable, mathematically-calculable attributes but according to their intelligible and universal essences—then technology may have all the effects mentioned above, but we cannot know or discern their causality. From any anti-realist perspective, our concern with technology cannot but become one that is merely instrumental, and, ultimately, which aims at using technology for dominance.
By contrast, the traditions of realist philosophy, which not only possess the capacity to unveil technology’s essence but also to discover its possible coherences and incoherencies with human nature, enables us to use technology well. This good use can come only through inculcating the philosophical habit. Such a habit, which enables us not only to handle the digital paradigm but to navigate future difficulties as well, comes not through a set curriculum of courses, nor through receiving the right information, nor even through studying the right figures, but from continuing to question.
[2] So too, theology: but the subject matter of theology, properly speaking—at least according to the Catholic intellectual tradition—is provided by divine revelation; and thus, to enter into its study properly, one must possess a certain faith, for all things as they fall under the umbrella of theological study resolve not to human experience, but to the divine eschaton.
[3] 1964: Understanding Media, 293.
[4] In truth, the sound of films has almost always been created by something other than what is represented through the screen—the industry having relied for long upon what is termed Foley art to make sounds more convincing than those that can be captured by on-set microphones.
