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Id like to frame my approach to the topic of our panel with the following quote, taken from George Bernanoss

Diary of a Country Priest. Look, Bernanos writes, Ill define you a Christian people by the opposite. The opposite of a Christian people is a people grown sad and old. My aim in this essay is to approach the question of wonder primarily through an investigation of its opposite. If true wonder is founded on seeing, if wonder is a contemplative letting-be before being as given, then the antithesis of wonder is a precipitous grasping, the attempt to control and, ultimately, to dominate. Following 20th century Canadian philosopher George Grant, I will argue that modern science, insofar as it consists in a conjoining of knowing and making, bears within itself this tendency to dominate, and that it is for this reason technological in its essence. I will conclude with some very brief indications of how a technological approach to being is contrasted to a more wonder-filled approach to being in the literature of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

What does it mean to say that modern science is in its essence technological? Mechanistic, empiricist, materialist: almost everyone readily recognizes these as marks of modern science but why technological? We tend to think of technology as an array of instruments lying at our free disposal, created through human ingenuity for our own purposes and goals. Insofar as the development of these instruments depends on a greater understanding of how the world works, technology is dependent upon science. But surely we should recognize the distinction between applied science and science as such?

To think in this way, Grant argues in his essay, Thinking about Technology, is to think already within the modern paradigm, which by its very nature inhibits us from thinking through the novelness of our situation. The novelty of modern technology is not simply that we can do what has never been done before, it is not simply the miracle of electricity or the Internet or the iPhone. We tell ourselves that weve achieved these feats because weve learned more closely to align our making to our knowing, and devised a surer method for knowing the world. We look at pre-modern sciences and the way they understood nature as so many stumbling provisions for our own understanding. But to represent the modern situation to ourselves in this way, according to Grant, is to close down on the fact that modern technology is not simply an extension of

human making through the power of a perfected science, but is a new account of what it is to know and to make in which both activities are changed by their co-penetration.

Grant goes on to note that the attempt to think why this is so, and to think through the implications, is not an easy task. That it is so, however, has been articulated for us readily enough already in the very beginnings of modern science, by such thinkers as Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes in the way they distinguish modern science from its medieval and ancient predecessors. Bacon is famousor infamous, depending on how you take itfor the aphorism Knowledge is power, but this saying was not necessarily meant in as ominous a way as it might sound. The goal of knowledge, according to Bacon, is the mastery of nature for the relief of mans estate, the overcoming of hunger, war and disease. And as Grant points out, this is, as far as it goes, a noble goal. One must never think about technological destiny, Grant says without looking squarely at the justice in those hopes. Let none of us who live in the wellcushioned west speak with an aesthetic tiredness about our worldliness. The point, however, is not necessarily the intention of these forefathers of modern science, whether good or ill, but the objective logic of the method they devised. Insofar as the goal of modern science is not, as it was for the ancients, knowledge as such but, in Descartes words, to be masters and possessors of nature, the very method employed is geared towards mastery and control.

As you know, the thinkers responsible for the rise of modern science defined this new discipline in reaction to the older Aristotelian natural philosophy. No longer, they declared, would science concern itself with the fruitless search for occult qualities and invisible essences. The study of formal and final causality was accordingly dropped, replaced by mathematical explanation of matter in motion enlisted in the service of a practical philosophy based on experiment. The distinction between primary and secondary qualities, already present in Galileo, and the distinction between res extensa and res cogitans that Descartes himself enacted, must, it seems to me, be understood in this context. The objective world is purposively reduced to pure externality, bits of matter whose primary qualitiesmass, length, motionare at least theoretically capable of being completely circumscribed in mathematical formulas. Any qualities not reducible to quantityin other words, virtually the whole world of our lived experience as it comes to us through our senses, including any values or purposes inherent in things themselvesare 2

banished to the realm of subjective consciousness. Note that the realm of the thinking subject did not much concern Descartes, to say nothing of the questionable interrelationship between thought and matter. The relevant point is that this distinction was posited in order to understand nature more clearly and distinctly, that is, empirically-mathematically, and this, again, for the sake of an enhanced control.

C.S. Lewis makes exactly this point in The Abolition of Man. Under the gaze of the scientist, he says, Nature seems to be the spatial and temporal, as distinct from what is less fully so or not so at all . . . the world of quantity, as against the world of quality; . . . of that which knows no values as against that which both has and perceives value. Lewis then goes on to point out, significantly, that we in fact reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may conquer them. [Thus] we are always conquering Nature, because Nature is the name for what we have, to some extent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature. . . . The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyze her.

This sharp distinction between matter and spirit gives rise to the typically modern distinction between subject and object. Grant is keen to point out that this seemingly innocuous, even necessary, distinction contains already within it the problematic tendencies of modern science. The literal meaning of an ob-ject is that which we have thrown before or over against ourselves, that which we hold before us at a distance, as it were. Modern reason, says Grant, is the summonsing of anything before a subject and putting it to the question, so that it gives us its reasons for being the way it is as an object. . . . That summonsing and questioning requires well defined procedures. These procedures are what we call . . . experimental research. To be an object, then, is essentially to be at the mercy of a questioning subject. It seems to me that Emmanuel Kant captures this same notion in the second preface to his Critique of Pure Reason: Reason, he says, must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he himself has formulated.

The way in which we compel nature to speak is primarily through experiment. It is in modern scientific experimentation, then, that we find most precisely the conjoining of knowing and making. The experimental method is premised upon actively introducing a disturbance into a given situation in order to determine the result of this interference. This involves controlling the situation as far as possible in order to keep random variables in check, while manipulating a given variable to see if there results a measurable change in what is thought to be a related one. Essential to the procedure is the ability for any researcher to replicate the results.

What might we take issue with here? In the first place, it is clear that such an approach presupposes mechanism, insofar as it aims at the isolation of discrete factors and their quantification. But at the core of any such mechanistic account of reality is what we might call theoretical manipulability, to borrow a term from 20th century philosopher of science Hans Jonas. The experiment is concerned not first and foremost with understanding what a thing is, since that question has been put out of bounds with the rejection of Aristotelian science. The experiment is concerned rather with how a thing works. If things are viewed simply as complex aggregates of interacting partsif nature is understood as essentially artifice, in other words then what it means to know a thing is to know how to take it apart and put it back together again. To know nature is to be able to manipulate it consistently and correctly predicate the results. But this, it would seem, is not knowledge per se, but power: or rather, it is knowledge as power, knowledge in the service of power. As Jonas makes clear, The analysis of any complex phenomenon into its simplest geometrical, material and dynamical factors is tantamount to finding out how even the most sophisticated natural entity comes about . . . from the collocation of primitive components. But knowing how a thing is made of its primitive elements leads of itself to knowing how one can make it up oneself out of those elements. For this reason, Jonas says, Practice in the service of theory, which is what experiments are, is readily converted into theory, in the service of practice, which by now most of science almost automatically becomes.

The problem with modern science is in treating things solely or primarily or firstly as objects. To do so is to forget that natural things are in the first place subjects, subjects of their own being and action, wholes that are more than the sum of their parts. This integral wholeness, which we 4

encounter spontaneously in everyday experience, is precisely what distinguishes nature from artifice. To have a nature, to be a subject means to have ones own projects, so to speak, to have a purpose in oneself beyond any purpose an external agent might impose. Modern science forgets this fact, or, we might say, purposefully overlooks it. This overlooking is not innocent, it is in fact necessary. For if you want to change the world into a receptacle for your own will, you have to begin by first denying it its own being and purpose. Once nature sanctions nothing, it permits anything. This, it seems to me, is the primary reason behind the distinction made between res extensa and res cogitans, a distinction that we are still largely living within. Once meaning and purpose are evacuated from the realm of extended things, we as subjects, who are now the sole repositories of meaning, are free to impose our own purposes on the world.

To hold that there is meaning or purpose in sub-human nature is of course to open myself up to the charge of anthropomorphism. But such a charge, it seems to me, is precisely begging the question. Experientially, we encounter a world not of parts but of wholes, a world of things, not bits of matter. Organisms show themselves to us as possessing varying levels of perception and striving, and thus as having some sort of interiority analogous to our own. The fact that living things normally grow and develop not randomly but in an ordered way from seed to adult seems to indicate a telos. Modern science, of course, is premised upon denying these realities as what is really real, and positing a counterfactual reality that can explain these epiphenomena. For the scientist, the interaction of partswhether the parts are atoms or genesexplains the whole, rather than the parts existing only within and for the sake of the whole. But the relevant point is that this way of understanding reality is the result of the way scientists approach reality. The questions modern science asks and the way it asks them are clearly different from the questions pre-modern science asks. Pre-modern science wanted to know first and foremost what a thing is. Modern science wants to know how it works. As Grant points out, at the simple surface of the question, it is clear that what was known in the physics of the Greeks was not knowledge of the kind that put the energies of nature at their disposal, as does modern western physics. But insofar as you cant really do away with the question of being, of what a thing is, then how a thing works comes to be identified with what it is. The result is a mechanistic ontology, which is consequent upon a technologistic science.

Insofar as things have no meaning or purpose in themselves, the whole of nature is now put at our disposal as if it were nothing but so much raw material existing for our own purposes and ends. Nature becomes, in the words of Heidegger, a standing-reserve, available for whatever uses we might see fit to put it to. This, it seems to me, is the essence of modern technology: it is the power to make indifferent things what we will. But to say this is to say that our freedom, and the way we understand our freedom, is intimately tied up with our reason and the way we understand the world. As Grant puts it, The belief in the mastering knowledge of human and non-human beings arose together with the very way we conceive our humanity as an Archimedean freedom outside nature, so that we can creatively will to shape the world to our values. Things in the world no longer have any claim upon our freedom as being good in themselveshow could they, if they are simply the accidental products of chance and necessity?

What is missing in this picture of the world? What is missing, I would say, is wonder, that is, contemplation of things in their otherness, a letting-be that listens before it speaks and that looks before it acts. This sort of wonder, it seems to me, can easily be confused today with admiration at the simultaneously complex and beautifully simple structures inherent in things. But such admiration, while admirable, still remains to some extent at the material level of the organization of parts, instead of going deeper through this to the immaterial level of the order of being. For wonder to be full, that is, it needs to start from and return to the astonishing fact, not that something is in this or that manner, but that anything is at all. It needs to reflect on what it means for this concrete finite thing before me to exist, to be a subject in possession of its own act of existence. To be so already implies a kind of interiority inherent in every existent thing, however analogous it may be to our own, and a wholeness that governs, rather than is subject to, its parts.

Clearly there must be a distinction between natural science and metaphysics, and I dont mean to suggest that all scientists must become metaphysicians. What I do want to suggest is that, in the first place, scientists become self-aware of the philosophical presuppositions built into the very logic of their science from the beginning. Secondly, I want to suggest that scientists learn to approach their subject matter differently, and learn to do so as scientists. It is not enough, in other words, simply to recognize science as a necessary abstraction from reality, and then to add something to the scientific enterprise from the outside: a moral injunction against domination, 6

say, or an aesthetic appreciation for the wholeness of things. The problem is that such an addition is already extra-scientific, and therefore presupposes and perpetuates the problematic distinction between fact and value, between a technologistic reason that is correlated to a mechanistic order, on the one hand, and a free-floating freedom that is in its essence irrational, on the other. What is needed, rather, is a transformation of the scientific act of abstraction itself, from the inside. This would involve, among other things, an attempt to see the relative priority of meaningful wholes over their parts, and an attempt to understand natural entities within and as necessarily dependent upon their environment. It would therefore involve, not necessarily the rejection of experiment, but certainly granting primacy to experience over experiment, to theoria over praxis, and this because things are not in the first place indifferent objects for our use but subjects of being in their own right.1 C.S. Lewis captures well my own sentiments about such a science: I hardly know what I am asking for. . . . The regenerate science which I have in mind would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself. When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While studying the It it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the Thou-situation. . . . Its followers would not be free with the words only and merely. In a word, it would conquer Nature without being at the same time conquered by her and buy knowledge at a lower cost than that of life.

Just as with modern science, so with modern technology: I would not want us simply to do away with it, but I do want us to become much more aware of the technological destiny from which it springs, together with the way in which it necessarily enframes our experience, to use Heideggers language. As Pope Benedict XVI said in Caritas in Veritate, technology is never just technology. The computer, for instance, bears a certain logos, an order, that structures our experience, and that is therefore not simply neutral. Does the computer promote the sort of stillness and patience necessary to really know created entities distinct from ourselves, or does it promote distraction? The Internet is premised upon the ever more rapid acquisition of information, upon having the world at our fingertips, so to speakdoes this inspire to contemplation and wonder or to its opposite? What is the significance of having surrounded
Some scientists who, it seems to me, thought or are thinking along similar lines include biologist Adolf Portmann, physicist David Bohm, and cognitional theorist Michael Polanyi.
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ourselves with an almost completely artificial environment, so that the only natural entities we tend to encounter in our day-to-day world, the only things we meet that we have not ourselves had a hand in making, are each other? Of course, with the rapid proliferation of Wi-Fi, laptops and hand-held devices, even this artificial world is encountered not directly but through an electronic medium, so that we stand, as it were, at a double remove.

The writings of J.R.R. Tolkien can be helpful, I think, in trying to envision a different sort of technology then that which we are accustomed to. In his essay On Fairy Stories, Tolkien makes a strong distinction between Magic as Enchantment, which is essentially the art of the elves, and the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific magician, which can be found in the works of Sauron and Saruman. The latter type of magic, as Tolkien expounds elsewhere, is essentially concerned with the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective . . . By [this] I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talentsor even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills. The machine is our more obvious form . . . .

This second type of magic is clearly the kind which I have been taking issue with in this essay. But what would it mean to try to develop technology along the lines of the first kind of magic, along the lines of Art or Enchantment? I suppose it would mean in part a shift from a machineoriented technology to a craft-oriented technology. The latter presupposes a deep knowledge of the material at hand and an attempt to work with it even as you change it for your own purposes, instead of the more typical bulldozing approach in which the material youre working with becomes just raw matter to be imposed upon. Craft begins with and in some ways returns us to a world of things that are good in themselves and not simply good insofar as I make them so. I find this sort of craft-like development of the inherent inner powers or talents in things represented in the Lord of the Rings, for example, in Galadrials gift of Lothlorien soil to Sam. Regarding this precious gift, Frodo advises Sam to Use all the wits and knowledge you have of your own . . . and then use the gift to help your work and better it. I think this captures the basic thrust of a regenerative technology.

Id like to end with a rather longish quote from C.S. Lewis novel That Hideous Strength, which I think in many ways illustrates in literary form the findings of this paper. In this work, C.S. Lewis is concerned to depict the potentially nihilating effects of modern science working themselves out to their full conclusions. The following quote concerns the magician Merlin in the way that he differs from the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments at Belbury. Merlin, Lewis writes, is the reverse of Belbury. Hes at the opposite extreme. He is the last vestige of an old order in which matter and spirit were, from our modern point of view, confused. For him every operation on Nature is a kind of personal contact, like coaxing a child or stroking ones horse. After him came the modern man to whom Nature is something deada machine to be worked, and taken to bits if it wont work the way he pleases. Finally, come the Belbury people, who take over that view from the modern man unaltered and simply want to increase their power by tacking on to it the aid of spiritsextra-natural, anti-natural spirits. Of course they hoped to have it both ways. They thought the old magia of Merlin, which worked in with the spiritual qualities of Nature, loving and reverencing them and knowing them from within, could be combined with the new goetiathe brutal surgery from without. No. In a sense Merlin represents what weve got to get back to in some different way.

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