Man and Technics

In the following pages I lay before the reader a few thoughts that are taken
from a larger work on which I have been engaged for years. It had been my
intention to use the same method which in The Decline of the West I had
limited to the group of the higher Cultures, for the investigation of their
historical pre-requisite — namely, the history of Man from his origins. But
experience with the earlier work showed that the majority of readers are
not in a position to maintain a general view over the mass of ideas as a
whole, and so lose themselves in the detail of this or that domain which is familiar to
them, seeing the rest either obliquely or not at all. In consequence they obtain an
incorrect picture, both of what I have written and of the subject-matter about which I
wrote. Now, as then, it is my conviction that the destiny of Man can only be
understood by dealing with all the provinces of his activity simultaneously and
comparatively, and avoiding the mistake of trying to elucidate some problem, say, of his
politics or his religion or his art, solely in terms of particular sides of his being, in the
belief that, this done, there is no more to be said. Nevertheless, in this book I venture
to put forward some of the questions. They are a few among many. But they are
interconnected, and for that reason may serve, for the time being, to help the reader
to a provisional glimpse into the great secret of Man’s destiny.

Chapter One
Technics as the
Tactics of Living

The problem of technics and its relation to Culture and to History
presents itself for the first time only in the nineteenth century. The
eighteenth, with its fundamental scepticism — that doubt that was
wellnigh despair — had posed the question of the meaning and
value of Culture. It was a question that led it to ever wider and more
disruptive questions and so created the possibility for the twentieth,
for our own day, of looking upon the entirety of world-history as a
problem.
The eighteenth century, the age of Robinson Crusoe and of Jean Jacques
Rousseau, of the English park and of pastoral poetry, had regarded “original” man
himself as a sort of lamb of the pastures, a peaceful and virtuous creature until Culture
came to ruin him. The technical side of him was completely overlooked, or, if seen at
all, considered unworthy of the moralist’s notice.
But after Napoleon the machine-technics of Western Europe grew gigantic
and, with its manufacturing towns, its railways, its steamships, it has forced us in the
end to face the problem squarely and seriously. What is the significance of technics?
What meaning within history, what value within life, does it possess, where —
socially and metaphysically — does it stand? There were many answers offered to
these questions, but at bottom these were reducible to two.
On the one side there were the idealists and ideologues, the belated stragglers
of the humanistic Classicism of Goethe’s age, who regarded things technical and
matters economic as standing outside, or rather beneath, “Culture.” Goethe himself,
with his grand sense of actuality, had in Faust II sought to probe this new fact-world
to its deepest depths. But even in Wilhelm von Humboldt we have the beginnings of
that anti-realist, philological outlook upon history which in the limit reckons the
values of a historical epoch in terms of the number of the pictures and books that it
produced. A ruler was regarded as a significant figure only in so far as he passed
muster as a patron of learning and the arts — what he was in other respects did not
count. The State was a continual handicap upon the true Culture that was pursued in
lecture-rooms, scholars’ dens and studios. War was scarcely believed in, being but a
relic of bygone barbarism, while economics was something prosaic and stupid and
beneath notice, although in fact it was in daily demand. To mention a great merchant
or a great engineer in the same breath with poets and thinkers was almost an act of
lèse-majesté to “true” Culture. Consider, for instance, Jakob Burckhardt’s
Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen — the outlook is typical of that of most professors of
philosophy (and not a few historians, for that matter), just as it is the outlook of those
literates and æsthetes of today who view the making of a novel as something more
important than the designing of an aircraft-engine.
On the other side there was Materialism — in its essence an English product
— which was the fashion among the half-educated during the latter half of the
nineteenth century, and the philosophy of liberal journalism and radical massmeetings,
of Marxist and social-ethical writers who looked upon themselves as
thinkers and seers.
If the characteristic of the first class was a lack of the sense of reality, that of
the second was a devastating shallowness. Its ideal was utility, and utility only.
Whatever was useful to “humanity” was a legitimate element of Culture, was in fact
Culture. The rest was luxury, superstition, or barbarism. Now, this utility was utility
conducive to the “happiness of the greatest number,” and this happiness consisted in
not-doing — for such, in the last analysis, is the doctrine of Bentham, Spencer, and
Mill. The aim of mankind was held to consist in relieving the individual of as much of
the work as possible and putting the burden on the machine. Freedom from the
“misery of wage-slavery,” equality in amusements and comforts and “enjoyment of
art” — it is the panem et circenses of the giant city of the Late periods that is presenting
itself. The progress-philistine waxed lyrical over every knob that set an apparatus in
motion for the — supposed — sparing of human labour. In place of the honest
religion of earlier times there was a shallow enthusiasm for the “achievements of
humanity,” by which nothing more was meant than progress in the technics of laboursaving
and amusement-making. Of the soul, not one word.