The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization by William Barrett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Those book started off very strongly with a focus on mathematics and logic. It drifted into a discussion of ontology (Being) and then ended with a cold war vision of two possibilities for technology, USSR and USA. Unfortunately for Barrett, this amazing book is marred by an economic invisibility. He is on the right track, but the weakest part of the book is its second part, which affects the last part. Barrett seemed to want the second and first parts to coalesce into a third view so that we can critique the first view again. Being (through Heidigger and William James) was meant to define for us freedom — and with this freedom we were meant to critique the rationality of technique.
What Barrett wanted was to find another point of view on human existence with which to critique the techno-rationality that the first section was meant to be exemplify. Unfortunately he was able to do this because transcendental philosophy is the basis from which this techno-rationality historically arose. He couldn’t use it to critique itself. Marxism might have been able to provide a basis to inflect a different point of view with a different set of values than techno-rationality except for the fact that Marxism arose as a response to the same state apparatus that helped centralize techno-rationality in the first place.
What Barrett realized was that mathematics and logic have the same aesthetics used to form social control (as with Behavioralism) but he was able to connect their formulation with transcendental philosophy, ontology and the economic rise of the state.
I do like his direction, although his research is incomplete. What this book eventually suffers from is a lack of energy in which the last section is woefully truncated due to his lack of connection. In a major way, Barrett needs to show us how we are chained before he is able to point the way we are free. Without an analysis that would involve corporations, economics, consumerism and present day politics, his last section lacks the punch needed to explicate freedom.
Only when Barrett is able to define freedom will he be able to show us how technique is an illusion.
I believe his attempt solidify human existence on the basis on ontology in order to debunk techno-rationality was the primary failure of his book… you really can’t use ontology that way because ontology is the grandfather for this rationality.
If anything this book of its time (1978) shows a philosopher who tried to do philosophy with respect to his tradition, but failed. The tools at his disposal are weak; dated. If anything this work shows us that at 1978 if philosophy were to have an impact it would need to reinvent its toolbox, which it is still in the process of doing so.
