Our Battle for the Human Spirit: Scientific Knowing, Technical Doing, and Daily Living by Willem H. Vanderburg (review)

Vanderburg says this book is "the fifth" and "perhaps the last" installment of his investigation of technology in society. Vandenberg, originally an engineer, had an enlightening experience reading Ellul's The Technological Society. This led to his undertaking deep and extensive investigations of the transformation of our society and psychology by the growth of formal technological intermediation of all aspects of life, and the replacement of the understanding of symbolic meaning with formalized, idealized representations, often tied to specialized, isolated fields. Vanderberg describes the broad sweep of human social evolution as involving three "mutations":1) symbolism, language, myths; 2) social connection; 3) techniques intermediating all human relations and communication. In accounting for more recent centuries, Vanderburg utilizes sociologist David Riesman's sequence of traditional, outer directed, and inner-directed personalities, corresponding to the pre-industrial, the industrializing, and the industrialized society.

The author presents these features of desymbolization, fragmentation of knowledge, and life as tied together. The holistic nature of children's learning processes and of socialization in general are undermined and replaced by the formalistic and fragmented systems of technology. Throughout, Vanderburg advocates genuine organic unity of knowledge and of facets of life.

Vanderburg rightly identifies Ellul's "technique" with Max Weber's "rationalization." The phenomenon spans not only technology but also education, social relations, economics, and the rest of society. Vanderburg's views obviously emphasize as central to the counteracting of present dangerous trends strong interdisciplinarity in all levels of education and in research. The technologization and scientization of life goes hand in hand with formalistic economics abstracted from institutions and the variety of human desires. Vanderburg sees the present struggle against this so-called rationalization of everything as a struggle of life against death. In this respect, his perspective resembles that of earlier French Bergsonism and German lebensphilosophie.

I should have thought that Vanderburg, as an engineer, would have made much more of how Claude Shannon and Alan Turing—founders of the Information Age—worked to eliminate "meaning" from their analyses of communication and computation: Shannon put "meaning" in scare quotes or quarantined it, and then ignored it.

Vanderburg counters the tendency to formalistic and digital desymbolization with a defense of the centrality of symbolization to being human. He refers briefly to Terrence Deacon's treatment of humans as the "symbolic species" and later briefly refers to Ernst Cassirer's description of humans as animal symbolicum. Vanderburg sees myths as producing the frameworks for our orientations to the world. He characterizes myths as 1) infinite contexts taken for granted, 2) horizons, and 3) roots. Given this emphasis on symbolism and holism, he would have done well to make use of Cassirer's detailed works on language and myth. Vanderburg also would have profited from use of George Herbert Mead's account of the emergence of mind, self, and society, and his theory of the "significant symbol." Vanderburg's only mention of Mead is in a peripheral anecdote.

The author does discuss anthropological and psychoanalytical accounts of symbolism, frequently citing the very interesting ideas of Georges Devereux, the founder of ethnopsychology, as well as the psychoanalyst Karen Horney. He emphasizes that his account of our situation makes use of cultural anthropology, sociology of religion, and depth psychology. Given this—I believe correct—approach, I wish he had gone into more detail about and explicitly incorporated more material from these fields.

Vanderburg notes that neglect of human embodiment is part of the formalistic, fragmented turn that he deplores. Along with Joseph Weizenbaum's critique of artificial intelligence, Vanderburg makes use of Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus's different critique, which emphasizes embodiment. It would have furthered Vanderburg's cause if he had utilized work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and later phenomenologists on the lived body, as well as the early work of Mark Johnson and George Lakoff on the role of embodiment in metaphor.

The...