This article is a reprint from the Histories # 64 edition of  Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture.  Spring Publications is a Journal of Archetypal Psychology. It is located at 299 East Quassett Road in Woodstock, Connecticut, 06281. Their phone number is (860) 974-3428. Their Website is www.springpub.com.  At the end of this article you will find a very short list of questions to be answered, and a form to submit billing and address information for you Continuing Education Credits (MFT & LCSW).At the end you will find a very short list of questions to be answered, and a form to submit billing and address information for you Continuing Education Credits (MFT & LCSW).
 

 
"Within and beyond the looming presence of modern technology there dawns the possibility
of a fuller relationship between man and Being—and hence between man and all that is—than
there has ever been."    -- Martin Heidegger

The technological way of seeing the world often brings about significant human distress. It can strip the soul from us, pushing up incidence rates of depression. Often referred to as the pathology of the 20^th Century, at least one of the most common forms of depression in our culture known as Dysthymia means literally, a loss of soul, referring to the open and disclosive essence that defines who each of us really "is". In this sense, freeing our relation to the technology means finding a way to affirm our technological devices, while at the same time denying the technological way of seeing the world that strips away the essence of who we are as human beings.

To get at what I mean by a free relation to technology and distinguish this from the kind of relation in which we are driven by the needs of efficiency and optimization, I would like to contrast two senses of technology – the first as a way of seeing the world; and the second, the local manifestations derived from this way of seeing the world. We tend to miss this distinction when we think of technology only in terms of its scholastic definition; as a means to an end. Oddly, this definition is not incorrect. On the contrary, it is so uncannily correct that it tends to focus our attention only on technologies of a local nature, obscuring the technological way of seeing the world that has us in its grip. But it is this essence of technology that at root calls for more and more flexibility, more and more efficiency, shaping our way of seeing the world by endlessly focusing our vision on the maximum yield for the minimum expense. Everything, everywhere -- people, trees, oceans -- are hereby called to stand-by for further ordering. A forest of old-growth trees is seen as a potential profit center. A desert is seen as a potential for irrigation improvements. People are seen as human "resources" ...or they are quite often not seen at all (The component of Freud’s psychoanalytic goal...to return the individual’s capacity to work, or the ‘Bible’ of modern psychopathology’s birth – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s – as a tool for filtering military human resources, are consistent with the optimizing goals of technology). What is missed by defining technology as a means-to-an-end, is that this way of seeing the world, as a thing to be ordered, is entirely new and different in the development of man’s understanding.

One can distinguish, as the philosopher Martin Heidegger did in the early part of this century, alternatives to our modern way of understanding our world. Early on, man understood the world in terms of physis (the Greek root of Physics). The things of the world here emerged spontaneously, on their own, as objects set over against man’s subjectivity. At another time, man understood the world through the paradigm of beings-as-creatures of a creator God. The technological attitude we are living today came about slowly, ushered in by Gallileo and Descartes, then by the physics of Newton and philosophers like John Locke and Leibnitz. But it hasn’t really been until this century that we’ve been able to see what has been going on here. Albert Gormann writes that before the triumph of technological devices, "...people primarily engaged in practices that nurtured or crafted various things. So gardeners developed the skills and put in the effort necessary for nurturing plants, musicians acquired the skill necessary for bringing for music...[but technology]...replaces the worlds of poiesis, craftsmen, and Christians with a world in which subjects control objects. In such a world the things that call for nurturing, craftsmanly, or praising practices are replaced by devices that offer a more and more transparent or commodious way of satisfying a desire." Thus, Heidegger wrote that anyone living in the shared understanding of modern technology, "...is regularly expected, and expects himself, to be able to impose order on all data, to process every sort of entity, nonhuman and human alike, and to devise solutions for every kind of problem. He is forever getting things under control."

Significant human distress occurs as a result of relating to the world in this way. The distress of those disposed of by society when they are no longer valued is but one the example. There are others, carved into our lives as technology demands that everything everywhere, including each of us, stand ready to be used as a resource, ready to be optimized. But when this happens, neither people nor things are understood to have an essence, to have an identity, or even to have the goal of satisfying their own arbitrary desires. Hubert Dreyfus speaks directly to this issue:

"If the computer paradigm becomes so strong that people begin to think of themselves as digital devices on the model of work in artificial intelligence, then, since for the reasons we have been rehearsing, machines cannot be like human beings, human beings may become progressively like machines. During the past two thousand years the importance of objectivity; the belief that actions are governed by fixed values the notion that skills can be formalized; and in general that one can have a theory of practical activity, have gradually exerted their influence in psychology and in social science. People have begun to think of themselves as objects able to fit into the inflexible calculations of disembodied machines...Our risk is not the advent of superintelligent computers, but of subintelligent human beings."

More is Up

To get a sense of what the shared background know-how is like, one might consider how people in various cultures stand different distances from one another. Most of us have experienced this spatial awareness at one time or another. But this is the kind of thing no one explicitly teaches us. It is simply part of our shared background of understanding. Another example is the way we understand the quantity "More" in terms of the verticality schema "Up". Examples such as Prices keep going up; The number of books published each year keeps rising; His gross earnings fell, suggest that we understand "More" as being oriented "Up".

These particular examples illustrate the point that no experience exists as unique or isolated. The experience we have of someone standing a little too close, or a little too far away, is embedded within a background know-how we share with others. The orientation of "More" as "Up" is embedded within a background know-how associated with common everyday experiences (e.g., if you add more liquid to a container, the level goes up). In fact, perceiving anything at all involves perceiving it as embedded within a background whole we share with others – experiences which in general relies on a context of meaning which is quite often ambiguously neither entirely conscious nor entirely unconscious.

Edgar Rubin, the author of the first book on the phenomenon of figure and ground, gave several examples in which visual figure-ground situations were ambiguous and therefore reversible. I will use this sort of visual experience as a metaphor for experience in general. We are all familiar, for insistence, with the goblet picture whose outlines into two profile faces confronting each other. "When one sees the goblet, the outlines look so completely different from those of the faces that the identity can only be understood intellectually, not acknowledged visually." But even more significant is the fact that the two versions cannot be seen at the same time! This is significant because it implies an unconscious (for lack of a better term) background dynamically related to our immediate awareness of foreground.

There is an unbroken tradition that presents a strict dichotomy between subject and object, foreground and background, soul and matter, conscious and unconscious, reaching far back into antiquity. On one count, self-contained objects are seen in terms of "figure" against an empty or otherwise qualitatively different space which serves as "ground." Rutherford and Bohr’s traditional model of atomic structure is an example. "Notice," writes Rudolph Arnheim, "how the peculiar blend of discomfort and elation which one experiences when such a system is redefined as a continuous electro-magnetic field, in which the objects or particles may be thought of according to Erwin Schrodinger, as ‘more or less temporary entities within the wave field whose form and general behavior are nevertheless so clearly and sharply determined by the laws of waves that many processes take place as if these temporary entities were substantial permanent beings." On another count we can push the model of visual perception further, past the immediate process of informing us about how far to stand away from people we are talking to a general analogy of how background contexts shape our understanding of what it is to be a person at all, or what it is to be a thing, or an object.

It is instructive to note here that this sort of indeterminate background understanding is one of those things computers can’t seem to get. They cannot know how far to stand from someone partly because they don’t have bodies, and this sort of common sense spatial know-how is tied to our having a body. But they also cannot know how far to stand from someone because this sort of know-how is indeterminate, and the computer can only work with determinant data supplied by a programmer who is in touch with the indeterminate shared background of understanding.

Hubert Dreyfus at Berkeley tells an interesting story that ties in neatly to this idea of shared backgrounds of understanding. The story is of early attempt to use Neuronets to teach a computer to distinguish between two pictures: one of a forest of trees with tanks...military tanks, that is... and the second of a forest of trees without tanks.

The researchers were in fact able to teach the computer to distinguish between the two pictures, and the Army was delighted. But just to make sure, the researchers took another set of pictures of the same two scenes, and this time the computer couldn’t tell the difference. Why? Well, eventually the research team figured out that the difference between the pictures was that some were taken on a sunny day while others were taken on a cloudy day, and what the computer was learning to distinguish was not the difference between tanks and no tanks, but shadows and no shadows.

The point important here involves the issue of recognizing significance, which is one thing computers can’t handle on their own. It is interesting to note that much of the efficiency-enhancing software coming onto the market today is often viewed by physicists as a threat to their job security (another example of the anxiety associated with technology). It shouldn’t be, because the one thing we can’t infuse the computer with is the ability to distinguish significance -- That...is a product of the shared background of understanding! It is the product of the indeterminate background defining the determinant foreground. There is no computer substitute for it. No one really understands precisely how it works. As a result, the computer can only help to supply facts but cannot substitute for the physicist’s ability to see relevance.

Ambiguous Contours of Consciousness

We have drawn a distinction between specific technological devices and the technological attitude in which they are embedded. We will see again that this background understanding is neither entirely conscious, nor entirely unconsciousness, but is an ambiguous contour. We have indicated that the background understanding influences each of us in significant ways we don’t usually pay much attention to, shaping what we take for granted -- like our understanding of what counts as a thing, or what counts as a human being, or what counts as real.

And yet, it would be pointless to conclude that technology is bad or evil and must be romantically eradicated from our culture. On the contrary, technology is something we depend on in a positive sense. The question then, returning us to the issue of gaining something we might call a free relation to technology, asks how we can keep our technological devices without offering ourselves over as just another resource to be optimized.

An initial attempt to answer would perhaps not oppose technology but, rather, see it as being our latest shared understanding of the world, thus bringing the background understanding forward into view. This initial move, bringing into the foreground of awareness, I would suggest, is the first move toward gaining a freedom toward technology. From a depth psychologist’s point of view, bringing unconscious "material" forward into consciousness is an important step in opening one’s self to a free relation to background phenomena (unconscious material or practices). In this case perhaps that is the most we can do, for theoretically we can never extract ourselves from our shared background understanding. By opening ourselves to the awareness of our relation to it, however, we alter our degree of freedom with respect to it.

Don Ihde describes the altering of a similar degree of freedom with respect to reflecting upon "Multi-Stable" phenomena like the goblet referred to earlier that changes into two faces, or the contour described in Figures #1. The series of illustrations in Figure #1 suggest that recognition (significance) is based on a dynamic relationship of foreground (conscious) and background (unconscious) demarcated by a contour that separates the two. Figure #1a represents a shape with an abstract identity. Figure #1b places this shape against a pattern adapted from Picasso’s painting La Vie. The same shape, now a part of a larger whole, looses its former identity. The unity of the outline is absorbed. Its left side now belongs to the woman in the painting. Its right side not belongs to the man in the painting. The dynamics of the shape reverses. The concave interval between the two most active protrusions in Figure #1a now becomes the actively protrusive elbow of the woman in Figure #1b.

           Figure #1                         Figure #2                          Figure #3

[From Rudolf Arnheim. Art and Visual Perception. A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1974. Pp. 225-226.]

Another example I will call "The Hallway" distinguishes between different levels of phenomenal perception. When ask to describe what they see in a drawing like Figure #2, groups of students generally see the pattern as a hallway. Accordingly, the square area appears to be in the rear of the configuration as perceive three-dimensionally. Another group, however, sees the figure as a cut-off pyramid. Ordinarily, the hallway-group will see the pyramid appearance very soon, and vice-versa. In both cases, this description is a variation of what Ihde calls a "literal-minded" perception. Literal-mindedness in this case refers to the initial appearance of the figure. And we might note that such literal-mindedness is not incorrect (any more than defining technology as a means-to-an-end is incorrect). Indeed, each group can verify their assertion experientially, thereby offering a certain evidence for their assertion. But soon, both groups of observers – Hallway and Pyramid – see what the other group sees (precisely because the figure is multi-stable). Then, they will have moved from the literal-mindedness of the first level to the polymorphic-mindedness of being able to see the alternation. What was originally dormant background now shifts to the foreground.

Don Ihde’s use of the drawing below illustrates the fact that "...there is a basic figure-ground phenomenon that is necessary for there to be any perception at all: whatever is prominent in our experience and engages our attention appears on a background which remains more or less indeterminate...[but which] affects the appearance of what is determinate... by letting it appear as a bounded figure." (Hubert L. Dreyfus. What Computers Still Can't Do. A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press; 1997.

What accounts for the Hallway group seeing a hallway initially or the Pyramid group seeing a pyramid initially (i.e., what accounts for their particular literal-mindedness) is what some phenomenologist's call "sedimented" beliefs. And while I would argue strongly against characterizing the shared technological background of understanding as any kind of "belief" system, the notion of multi-stable phenomena and background "sedimentation" does offer a phenomenological account of unconscious background being brought forward into foreground awareness to alter the degree of perceptual freedom of the observer.

This altered degree of perceptual freedom involving multi-stable phenomena is analogous to one’s relation to technology. Presumably, the result bringing the background understanding forward would move us in the direction of neither pushing technology forth as our only goal, nor resisting it. It would mean keeping clear about where we ourselves fit into the picture, cultivating the awareness that what is most important in our lives is not necessarily subject to efficient enhancement, but may lie instead within the very practices typically pushed out by efficiency. Non-efficient practices like friendship, skiing, or love hold up to us the alternatives to the technological thinking that must optimize for optimization’s sake, that must turn the world into a resource to be endlessly ordered. Opening to Technology’s Figure & Ground, valuing non-efficient practices, frees our relation to the technological attitude in which we are embedded, opening us to ways of affirming our technological devices, while at the same time denying the technological way of seeing the world associated with them that would deny the essence of who we are as human beings.

"...the merely correct is not yet the true. Only the true brings us into a free relationship with that which concerns us..."

  --Martin Heidegger, 1977

 

I would like to acknowledge the work of Dr. Hubert Dreyfus, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from whom I have drawn heavily in this essay, and Dr. Patricia Carpenter, Professor Emeritus at Columbia University for her help and suggestions.
 

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1.  Martin Heidegger; William Lovitt, trans. The Question Concerning Technology and     Other Essays. New York: Harper & Row; 1977.

2.  The Thymus gland was one of several ancient “seats”of the soul. Depression was thought to be caused by the loss of soul from its seat within the Thymus region.

3.  Hubert L. Dreyfus. Gaining a Free Relation to Technology. University of California at Berkeley: Conference Recording Service. 9/8; c. 1994. Applied Heidegger Conference. Living with Technology Symposium.

4.  Hubert L. Dreyfus, Charles Spinosa. Highway Bridges and Feasts: Heidegger an Borgmann on How to Affirm Technology. University of California at Berkeley; Undated Paper.

5.  Dreyfus & Spinosa. Undated Paper. op.cit.

6.  Martin Heidegger. 1977. op.cit.

7.  Dreyfus & Spinosa. Undated Paper. op.cit.

8.  Hubert L. Dreyfus. What Computers Still Can't Do. A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press; 1997.  p.280

9. The reader interested in Artificial Intelligence may recognize the notion, as it is one of the more important arguments against the prospect that computers can think.

10.  Mark Johnson. The Body in the Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; 1987.

11.  Rudolf Arnheim. Art and Visual Perception. A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Los Angeles: University of California Press; 1974, p. 225.

12.  “Freud’s conception of the Id and the Ego retains essential features of the ancient model. The Id is the central source of blindly radiating energy. Under the impact of the physical environment, the outer sheath of the psyche develops the organs of sensory perception and becomes a protective bark against injuries from the outside&ldots;None of these conceptions transcends the basic perceptual pattern of figure and ground.” (Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking, 1969)

13.  Rudolf Arnheim. Visual Thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1969, p.286.

14.  Hubert L. Dreyfus. 1994. op.cit.

15.  Hubert L. Dreyfus. 1997. op.cit.

16.  Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, Hubert L. Dreyfus. Disclosing New Worlds. Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press; 1997.

17.  Hubert L. Dreyfus. Being-in-the-World. A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press; 1991.

18.  Arnheim. 1974. op.cit.

19.  Principally Husserlian.

20.  Don Ihde. Experimental Phenomenology. An Introduction. New York: State University of New York Press; 1986.

21.  Theoretically we can never extract ourselves from the shared background of understanding. We can never stand outside it and look back upon it&ldots;i.e., we can never objectify it. We are always “in” it, involved with it. The most we can do is cultivate an awareness of our position within it, dealing with this position hermeneutically as an interpretive process.

22.   Heidegger. 1977. op.cit. p.6.