Technology

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)

Technology and Spiritual Development

By taking the necessary materials for our technology from nature, the natural context is increasingly destroyed. The elementary beings working in nature are thereby driven out of nature, but these elementary beings feel this as a liberation, as a blessing. However, nature is also becoming poorer in elementary beings as a result. If we now assemble the dead materials taken from nature into machines, these will inevitably be populated by ahrimanic elemental beings. In our increasingly mechanised world, we are therefore also increasingly exposed to the effects of these ahrimanic elementary beings, namely in our sleep, and our spiritual development is thereby increasingly impeded. This development will be unstoppable and resisting it will do us no good, as Rudolf Steiner also emphatically emphasises. In future, everything will depend on our succeeding in strengthening our spiritual forces against this resistance in such a way that they create the necessary counterweight to the increasing ahrimanisation of our world. Only on this path is it also possible to develop a moral technology of the future that does not rely solely on the dead, ahrimanised physical forces, but brings etheric forces into action, as for example Rudolf Steiner indicated in his third mystery drama, The Guardian of the Threshold, through the so-called Strader apparatus (see also → Technology and Morality).

„First of all, let us take an external look at what happens when we develop modern technology. What happens is nothing other than, I would say, a work in two stages. The first stage is that we destroy the coherence of nature. We pound the quarries and take the stones out of them, we maltreat the forests and take the wood out of them - one could go on - in short, we first create raw materials by pounding and wearing down the coherence of nature. And the second stage consists in putting together again into a machine what has been cut out of nature in this way, according to the laws which have been recognised as laws of nature. These are the two stages, if one looks at the matter externally.

But how is the thing viewed inwardly? Seen inwardly, the thing is like this: when we wear down nature, first of all the mineral, this - we know it from earlier observations - is connected with a certain feeling of well-being which the spiritual elementary feels in it. But that should worry us less here. In what is going on, however, it is important that we expel from nature the elementary spirits which hold nature together and which belong to the realm, the sphere of the regular progressing hierarchies. In all existence in nature there are elementary spiritual beings. By wearing down nature, we press the spirits of nature out into the realm of the spiritual. This is indeed what is continually connected with the first stage. We smash and wear down material nature and thereby release from this nature the spirits of nature, which we chase out, as it were, from the sphere assigned to them by the Yahweh gods into the realm where they can flutter freely and are no longer bound to the dwelling-place assigned to them. So we can also call the first stage the expulsion of the spirits of nature. The second stage is this, where we put together, according to the laws of nature that we have recognised, what we have martyred out of nature. Yes, when we form a machine or a combination of machines from raw materials according to a law of nature that we have recognised, then we again place certain spiritual beings into the structure that we form.

The structure that we form is by no means a spiritless one. By forming it, we create the bed for other spiritual beings, and these spiritual beings, which we now conjure up into our mechanical structures, are the beings that belong to the ahrimanic hierarchy. So in the first stage we meet the nature spirits that are in continuous development, we drive them out, and in the other stage we unite these ahrimanic spirits with what we build up as mechanisms or other works of technology. The effect of our living in this technical milieu in modern times is that we create for ourselves an ahrimanic environment for what we have sleeping within us either by night or by day. It is therefore no wonder that he who is on the first stage of initiation, when he awakens and brings in what he has experienced outside in the roaring, clamouring and noise, feels it to be destructive when he enters the physical and etheric body with his I and his astral body. For he brings, as it were, the result of living together with the ahrimanic elemental spirits into his own organism. We can say that as a third stage, as a cultural stage, we have this from the technology surrounding us, that we stuff ourselves with ahrimanic spirits, really stuff ourselves with them. - This is how things look inwardly.

If we now look back from what we have come to know, as it were, as the occult side of modern life, to those times when man lived more in such a way that he only slept separated from nature by the spiritually slightly permeable walls, or also worked by day within nature, in which the right spirits of the Yahweh hierarchy were still within, we must say: At that time the souls of men, the I and the astral body, brought into the physical and etheric body the nature-spiritualities which had a stimulating effect on the inner life of the soul. And the further back we go in the history of the development of mankind, the more we find that which is becoming rarer and rarer today, that men do not stuff themselves with the ahrimanic spirits of technology, but with the spirits of nature which are developing in a straight line and which, if we may use the expression, have united the good spirits of the hierarchies with what is happening or going on in the facts or beings outside in nature.

Now the human being reaches that connection which he must have if he wants to be a human being in the true sense of the word, only by seeking this connection through life in his inner being, by being able to descend so far into the depths of his soul in his inner experience that he finds the forces in these depths, which bring him together with the spiritual of the cosmos, from which he descends and in which he is embedded, and from which he can be separated, from which he has already been separated by sense perception and intellectual thinking, but now also by the fact, as we have seen, that modern life stuffs him with ahrimanic spirits. Only by descending into the depths of his own being does man come into contact with the divine-spiritual beings who are good and wholesome for him, with the spiritual hierarchies which are continually developing in a straight line. This coming together with the spiritual hierarchies, for which we were actually born spiritually, this living together with them is made more and more difficult for man by the world becoming more and more permeated with the milieu of modern technology. Man is, as it were, being torn out of his spiritual-cosmic context, and that which he should develop in order to remain in connection with the spiritual-soul of the cosmos is being dampened and dimmed in his inner being.

He who has already gone through the first steps of initiation notices that all the machinery which pervades modern life penetrates into the spiritual-soul humanity in such a way that it kills and destroys much of it. And such a one notices that through this destruction it is made especially difficult for him to really develop the inner forces which bring man into connection with the rightful - do not misunderstand the word - spiritual beings of the hierarchies. When a man who has thus taken the first steps of initiation meditates in a modern railway carriage or on a modern steamship and wants to settle down in the spiritual world, he naturally makes an effort to develop in himself the power of vision and seeing which will carry him up into the spiritual world, but he notices how the Ahrimanic world stuffs him with everything that is contrary to this devotion to the spiritual world, and the struggle is then a tremendous one. One can say that it is an inner struggle that is experienced in the etheric body, a gruelling and crushing struggle. Of course, others who have not gone through the first steps of initiation also go through this struggle, and the only difference is that those who have gone through the first steps of initiation consciously recognise it. Everyone has to go through it, everyone experiences it in its effects.

It would be the very wrong thing to say that we must resist what technology has brought us in modern life, that we must beware of Ahriman, that we must withdraw from this modern life. In a certain sense, that would mean spiritual cowardice. The true remedy is not to allow the powers of the modern soul to weaken and to withdraw from modern life, but to make the powers of the soul strong so that modern life can be endured. A brave attitude towards modern life is what is necessary according to the world karma, and that is why true spiritual science has this peculiar character, that it demands efforts, more or less even intensive efforts, from the human soul from the outset.“ (Lit.:GA 275, p. 22ff)

Technology and Freedom

„In the machine, man has surrounded himself with something transparent but alien to him. He has linked his life to this stranger. The machine stands there cold and far from man, a triumph of reliable knowledge; next to it stands man himself, darkness in front of him, when he looks into himself with this knowledge.

And yet: humanity had to educate itself to look into the transparent dead if it was to become fully awake. It needs the image-knowledge of that which is alien to its own being in order to be awake. For all preceding knowledge is co-determined out of the darkness of man's own nature; it only becomes clear before the soul when the human soul becomes a mere mirror which only creates images of that which is alien to man. Before, when man spoke of knowledge, he had in his soul content the urges, the contents of his own nature, which as such could not be clear. His ideas were interspersed with being; but they were not clear. - The images of lifeless being are clear. But now man has in these images not only the revelation of the inanimate, but also inner experiences. Images, by their own nature, cannot cause anything. They are powerless. If man experiences his moral impulses in the realm of the imageable in the same way as he has acquired them in lifeless nature, then he rises to freedom. For images cannot determine the will like instincts, passions or instincts. Only the age that developed mathematics-like pictorial thinking on the dead can guide man to freedom.

Cold technology gives human thinking a character that leads to freedom. Between levers, wheels and motors lives only a dead spirit; but in this realm of the dead the free human soul awakens. It must awaken the spirit in itself which before was only more or less dreaming when it still animated nature. The dreaming becomes awake thinking in the coldness of the machine.“ (Lit.:GA 36, p. 84f)

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

• Ivan Illich: Tools for Conviviality, Marion Boyars 2001, ISBN 978-1842300114; eBook ASIN ‎B007558B04
• Andrea Vetter: Convivial and Emancipatory Technologies – suitable conceptions for Technology in a Degrowth Society?, Degrowth conference, Leipzig, September 2014 researchgate.net
• Andrea Vetter: The Matrix of Convivial Technology – Assessing technologies for degrowth. in: Journal of Cleaner Production 197. March 2017 doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.02.195 researchgate.net
• Paul Emberson: Maschinen und Menschengeist, The DewCross Centre for Moral Technology, Edinburgh 2013
• Paul Emberson: From Gondishapur to Silicon Valley, Volume I, Etheric Dimensions Press, Switzerland and Scottland 2012
• Paul Emberson: From Gondishapur to Silicon Valley, Volume II, Etheric Dimensions Press, Switzerland and Scottland 2014
• Paul Emberson: From Gondishapur to Silicon Valley, Volume III, Etheric Dimensions Press, Switzerland and Scottland
• Rudolf Steiner: Vier Mysteriendramen, GA 14 (1998), ISBN 3-7274-0140-0 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophische Leitsätze, GA 26 (1998) English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Der Goetheanumgedanke inmitten der Kulturkrisis der Gegenwart, GA 36 (1961), ISBN 3-7274-0360-8 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Die Tempellegende und die Goldene Legende , GA 93 (1991), ISBN 3-7274-0930-4 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Das esoterische Christentum und die geistige Führung der Menschheit, GA 130 (1987) English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Menschenschicksale und Völkerschicksale, GA 157 (1981), ISBN 3-7274-1571-1 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Das Karma des Berufes des Menschen in Anknüpfung an Goethes Leben, GA 172 (2002), ISBN 3-7274-1720-X English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen. Das Karma der Unwahrhaftigkeit – Erster Teil, GA 173 (1978), ISBN 3-7274-1730-7 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Individuelle Geistwesen und ihr Wirken in der Seele des Menschen, GA 178 (1992), ISBN 3-7274-1780-3 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Mysterienwahrheiten und Weihnachtsimpulse, GA 180 (1980) English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Die Polarität von Dauer und Entwickelung im Menschenleben. Die kosmische Vorgeschichte der Menschheit., GA 184 (2002), ISBN 3-7274-1840-0 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Die soziale Grundforderung unserer Zeit – In geänderter Zeitlage, GA 186 (1990), ISBN 3-7274-1860-5 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Perspektiven der Menschheitsentwickelung, GA 204 (1979) English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Initiations-Erkenntnis, GA 227 (1982) English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Kunst im Lichte der Mysterienweisheit, GA 275 (1990), ISBN 3-7274-2750-7 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Die gesunde Entwicklung des Menschenwesens, GA 303 (1978) English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Die vierte Dimension, GA 324a (1995) English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

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.