Technology

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Animation of a steam engine with centrifugal governor in action.
A Roberts loom in a weaving shed in 1835. Textiles were the leading industry of the Industrial Revolution, and mechanized factories, powered by a central water wheel or steam engine, were the new workplace.

Technology ("the teaching or science of craft", from Greek: τέχνη téchne "skill, artistry, craft" and -λογία -logia "teaching, learning, reason") in its broadest sense encompasses all the techniques, processes, methods, skills and theoretical knowledge to transform nature for a purpose by producing artistic, craft or industrial products, or to perform services in order to satisfy material as well as cultural needs. Moreover modern technology can be embedded in machines to allow for more or less autonomous operation without detailed knowledge of their workings.

Technology that is state of the art and uses the most modern processes is called high technology, cutting-edge technology or high tech for short. The philosophy of technology deals with the philosophical and the ethics of technology specifically with the ethical implications of technology and its relationship to man and the world or nature.

The history of technology is closely interwoven with human history. From the very beginning, technology was an essential and necessary part of being human, but for a long time it was limited to the narrowest needs. Technology experienced a first significant upswing with the first advanced civilisations of the Egyptian-Chaldean period, when humanity began to develop the sentient soul. A further advance was achieved in the Greco-Latin period. However, the great, almost explosive breakthrough of technology came only with our present consciousness-soul age, especially with the Industrial Revolution that began in the late 18th century and intensified from the middle of the 19th century. Technology itself became an essential and necessary driving force for the further development of the consciousness soul. Associated with this were far-reaching effects on the natural and social environment. In order to assess the risks to humans and the earth associated with rapid technological progress, the research field of technology assessment (TA) emerged in the USA in the 1960s and increasingly spread to Europe from the 1970s onwards.

Technology on the path from nature to sub-nature

Rudolf Steiner has made it clear that with the highly industrialised technology of modern times, especially since the ever-expanding use of modern electrical engineering, humanity has taken the path from nature to sub-nature and has thus increasingly come under the influence of Ahriman. This is in itself a necessary step in the development of humanity, but it needs to be balanced by a corresponding conscious spiritual development if humanity is not to be harmed by it.

„One speaks of the fact that with the overcoming of the philosophical age, the scientific age arose in the middle of the nineteenth century. And one also speaks of this scientific age continuing today, while at the same time many emphasise that one has found one's way back to certain philosophical intentions.

All this corresponds to the paths of knowledge that the newer age has taken, but not to the paths of life. With his ideas, man still lives in nature, even if he brings mechanical thinking into the conception of nature. With his life of will, however, he lives to such an extent in the mechanics of technical events that this has long since given the scientific age a completely new nuance.

If we want to understand human life, we must first look at it from two sides. From previous lives on earth man brings with him the ability to imagine the cosmic from the earth's surroundings and that which is active in the earthly sphere. Through the senses he perceives the cosmic that is active on earth, and through his thinking organisation he thinks the cosmic that is active on earth from the earth environment.

Thus he lives through his physical body in perceiving, through his etheric body in thinking.

That which goes on in his astral body and in his I, operates in more hidden regions of the soul. It operates, for example, in fate. But one must first seek it out not in the complicated contexts of fate, but in the elementary, simple processes of life.

Man connects himself with certain earthly forces by orienting his organism into these forces. He learns to stand upright and to walk, he learns to place himself with his arms and hands in the balance of the earthly forces.

Now these forces are not those which work in from the cosmos, but are merely earthly.

In reality, nothing that man experiences is an abstraction. He only does not see through where the experience comes from, and so he forms abstractions from ideas about realities. Man talks about mechanical regularity. He believes that he has abstracted it out of the interrelationships of nature. This is not the case, however, but everything that man experiences in the soul in terms of purely mechanical laws is experienced inwardly in his relationship of orientation to the earthly world (in his standing, walking, etc.).

In this way, however, the mechanical characterises itself as the purely earthly. For the natural law, in colour, tone and so on, has flowed into the earthly from the cosmos. Only in the earthly realm is the mechanical implanted in the natural law, just as man with his own experience only confronts it in the earthly realm.

By far the greater part of what is at work in culture today through technology, and into which he is spun to the highest degree with his life, is not nature, but sub-nature. It is a world that emancipates itself downwards from nature.

See how the Oriental, when he strives for the spirit, seeks to get out of the states of equilibrium which come merely from the earthly. He assumes a position of meditation which brings him into the mere cosmic equilibrium. The earth then no longer affects the orientation of his organism. (This is not said for imitation, but only to clarify what has been said here. Those who know my writings know how Eastern and Western spiritual life differ in this direction).

Man needed the relationship to the merely earthly for the development of his consciousness soul. In recent times there has been a tendency to realise everywhere in action that which man must live into. By settling into the merely earthly, he meets the ahrimanic. With his own being he must bring himself into the right relationship with this ahrimanic.

But in the present course of the technical age, the possibility of finding the right relation to the ahrimanic culture is still eluding him. Man must find the strength, the inner power of knowledge, in order not to be overwhelmed by Ahriman in the technical culture. The sub-nature must be understood as such. This can only be done if man in spiritual knowledge ascends at least as far to the extraterrestrial super-nature as he has descended in technology to the sub-nature. The age needs a knowledge that goes beyond nature, because it must inwardly come to terms with a dangerously effective content of life that has sunk below nature. Of course, we are not speaking here of returning to earlier cultural conditions, but of man finding the way to bring the new cultural conditions into a right relationship with himself and with the cosmos.

Today only a few people feel what important spiritual tasks are developing for man. Electricity, which after its discovery was praised as the soul of natural existence, must be recognised in its power to lead down from nature into sub-nature. But man must not glide along with it.

In the time when there was no technology independent of nature itself, man found the spirit in the view of nature. The technology that was becoming independent made man stare at the mechanistic-material as that which was now becoming scientific for him. In this, everything divine-spiritual, which is connected with the origin of human development, is absent. The purely ahrimanic dominates the sphere.

In a spiritual science the other sphere is created, in which the ahrimanic is not present at all. And it is precisely through the discerning reception of that spirituality to which the ahrimanic powers have no access that man is strengthened to face Ahriman in the world.“ (Lit.:GA 26, p. 255ff)

The Forging Together of the Human Being with the Machine Being

Rudolf Steiner has pointed out that in the future there will be an ever closer union of man with the machines he creates. Through his power of thought, man will direct the machines, which will increasingly become a part of his own being. Clear beginnings of this, as propagated in particular by the ideology of transhumanism emanating from the West, are already present today.

„Once more I want to point out that in this fifth post-Atlantean period humanity is about to enter into a special treatment of great questions of life which have been obscured in a certain way by the wisdom of the past. I have already referred to them. The one great question of life can be described by saying that an attempt should be made to place the spiritual-etheric in the service of outer practical life. - I have drawn your attention to the fact that the fifth post-Atlantean period will have to solve the problem of how human moods, the movement of human moods, can be transferred in wave motion to machines, how man must be brought into connection with that which must become ever more mechanical and mechanical. That is why eight days ago today I drew your attention to the outward way in which this mechanisation is being taken from a certain part of our earth's surface. I gave you an example of how American thinking is trying to extend mechanisation over human life itself. I have given this example of the breaks that are to be exploited so that, instead of far fewer tons, up to fifty tons can be loaded by a number of workers: one need only really introduce the Darwinian principle of selection into life.

In such places the will is there to harness human power together with machine power. These things must not be treated as if they had to be fought. That is quite a wrong view. These things will not be absent, they will come. It is only a question of whether, in the course of world history, they will be staged by men who are selflessly familiar with the great aims of earthly development and who shape these things for the salvation of men, or whether they will be staged by those groups of men who exploit these things only in an egoistic or group-egoistic sense. That is what it is all about. It is not the what that matters in this case, the what certainly comes; it is the how that matters, how things are done. For the what is simply in the sense of the development of the earth. The forging together of the human being with the machine being will be a great and important problem for the rest of the evolution of the earth.

I have often pointed out, also in public lectures, that the consciousness of man is connected with degrading forces. Twice I have said in public lectures in Basel that we are dying into our nervous system. - These forces, these dying forces, will become more and more powerful. And the connection will be established between the forces dying in man, which are related to electrical and magnetic forces and the external machine forces. Man will, so to speak, be able to conduct his intentions, his thoughts, into the machine forces. Yet undiscovered forces in human nature will be discovered, such forces that act on the external electric and magnetic forces.

That is one problem: the merging of the human being with the mechanism, which must become more and more widespread in the future. The other problem lies in that which will call the spiritual conditions to our aid. But this can only be done when the time is ripe, and when a sufficient number of people are prepared for it in the right way.“ (Lit.:GA 178, p. 218f)

Literature
References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com.
Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books
A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works
Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English.
Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold
steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA)
Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.
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