Technology and the Spirit (review)

In his introduction to Technology and the Spirit, Ignacio Götz makes it quite clear that he does not want to create a carefully articulated philosophical system, or to uphold a particular religious outlook. Rather, he seeks to enable a philosophical project, that of "finding a way to integrate technology into our spiritual lives" (p. xv). Götz asserts that "Spirit comes first" (p. xiii) and that spirituality—defined as openness to the transcendent—is as indispensable to human life as breathing. The properly attentive human will experience the physical world as real, but also will experience the world, including the world made by human techne, as a sacrament of the grandeur of Being, of God. In eight loosely linked essays, Götz elaborates this claim as to the sacramentality of technology utilizing myriad insights from Greek philosophers, Western and Indian religious traditions, Nietzsche, anthroposophy, and, by no means least, Heidegger.

These meditations could provide intellectual stimulus to anyone sympathetic to the claim that tools and technological systems and conceptualizations embody spirit. Götz's approach is to take a general theme, such as fear of technology or education and technology, and run through a series of topics tied to the theme, demonstrating his wide reading and often delivering Emersonian aphorisms—"technology makes us midwives of the world" (p. 47). This approach has its weaknesses: the exposition can become manic, quickly jumping from source to source, from Marshall McLuhan to "The Dynamo and the Virgin" to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to The Time Machine.

Several essays do provide sustained explorations of the place of technology in a given spiritual worldview. "The Nature of Technology" presents a Heideggerian reading of human making as a revelation of reality, of Being, and marries this discussion with a critique of an overly intellectual definition of human personhood deriving from the time of Plato. In "Models of Redemption," Götz expounds John Dewey's views on technology and the aesthetic, and he reformulates the view of technology as hierophany in the vocabulary of Martin Buber, the "I" of each of us able to encounter the "Thou" behind our inanimate technological surround. In "Technology and Education," Götz argues for a holistic approach to teaching, opening students to a view of self and world beyond the merely instrumental.

Throughout these essays, Götz constantly seeks a middle path in our approach to technology, avoiding the Scylla of reductionist materialism and the Charybdis of hatred of the material, eschewing a dualist view of humans in favor of the human as both ratio et manus. He rates any limit on self-actualization, any denial of the possibility of transcendence, as "sin," and so he refuses to situate himself in any particular philosophical or religious tradition, although he turns again and again to Christian references.

This general refusal to be contained by boundaries explains his occasionally breathless compiling of authorities from many traditions to make a point. The wide range of Götz's citations does have the advantage, however, of exposing readers to strands of thought that are probably unfamiliar to them. Certainly the confident references to the Hindu and Tantric traditions will be novel for many Westerners. Perhaps the attention to sources from the thousand years of Western thought between Augustine and Luther will prove intriguing for some readers.

Götz criticizes in passing the misuse humans have made of their technologies when, due to patriarchal prejudice or entrapment in a mechanistic view of reality, those controlling society deny the dignity of persons. Yet his argument is not so much against particular ideologies that warp human responses to ultimate values as against general tendencies to deny the possibility of touching the transcendent through human poesis. He is so committed to the proposition that the divine shines through the physical world, and the technological instrumentalities within it, that he argues for an educational process explicitly echoing the mystical journey...