Technology and Mental Health, Part 2
Technology as the Epistemological Juncture of the Modern Subject
If technology has become the epistemological juncture of the modern subject, then why do we repeatedly discover a crisis there?
The crisis of the modern phenomenological orientation does not so much originate in technology. Despite what we might want to blame, our problems are not due to technology. Technology has always been part of humanity. It is only in the modern orientation where technology became such a source of complaint and blame for our troubles. Every significant philosophical attempt to account for this limit encounters the same situation while interpreting it differently. With contemporary knowledge, however, we find technology is but the site where knowledge reaches its limit —and this is a threat to the modern mode, not dissimilar to any other antagonist we find in our histories and myths.
We would hope our intellectuals are or were pretty smart. Husserl finds a crisis in the sciences. Heidegger finds enframing. Simondon finds an incomplete understanding of technical objects. Crawford finds a crisis of craftsmanship and practical skill. A thousand other people who are not in our popular literature found a thousand other terms for the same problem, and each description is accurate within its own disciplinary horizon, which is to say, when oriented in the modern subject. Yet when oriented on objects, things themselves, the remarkable convergence of these otherwise disparate thinkers suggests that they are witnessing not separate crises but a single epistemological event.
The event is the culmination of what I call the modern phenomenological orientation, that which the modern method works to avoid, what I call the object of the subject.
Descartes and the Subject-Object Divide
The modern phenomenological orientation begins, at least methodologically, with Rene Descartes (1596-1650). His distinction between the thinking subject and the extended object has often been criticized as though it were merely an unfortunate metaphysical mistake. I do not believe this is quite right. Descartes did not invent the split so much as give expression to an epistemological necessity that had already begun organizing Western knowledge. The subject-object distinction became the new means by which people could semantically navigate without having to continually renegotiate the conditions of certainty. In no uncertain terms (ironically), this certainty, the epistemological basis of modern meaning, is what we call reality.
Kant institutionalized or gave license to this new sense of things this by establishing the correlation between subject and object the condition of possible knowledge, and changed logic into a ontological sacrament in contrast the an epistemological tool. Henceforth, knowledge stopped being focused on objects themselves, conditions with which logic could work, and instead became focused on objects as they appeared to consciousness. The condition of knowing, i.e., the Cartesian thinker, because the stake of logic, for which logic was now used to protect through assumed connection to how the universe should be aligned with thinking; hence reality became that area in which justifications appeared and battled with each other.
The orientation itself became foundational, which is to say, invisible to knowledge, as knowledge was the justification of proposals and reality is the assumption of all justified proposals, also known as idealism. Once this had taken hold, there was no escaping it, and by the 20th century it was being recognized in the cognitive feeling as having no exit, the Existentialist maxim, to Be justified in proposals or Nothing, the conflation of such end-point semantics achieving the Existentialist conclusion that a person bares the ultimate responsibility for reality itself, the ideal which was continued through the Structuralist phantasies as well as the Postmoderns’ (but there is much more to be said about this).
How Modern Science Reduces Reality
Modern knowledge advances by reduction. No other knowledge is knowable except by the phenomenalist qualification of propositional justification, so to say modern as opposed to say ancient, is simple to bracket off the modern method as though its method achieves or has access to all knowledge that is available to be called knowledge. We learned this at least by the 20th century philosophical apologies. Disciplines establish themselves through increasingly imprecise semantic exclusions such that in our current phase of the modern world we have the general interact and acknowledgement of interactional identities. Science gains extraordinary explanatory power precisely because it generalizes its field of inquiry ontologically to avoid having to recognize of its epistemological violations. It is intentionally myopic.
But this in-itself is not a defect. Rather, it indicates a recognition toward its (phenomenalist) ideal, which is expressed subjective precision, and this motion we are being privy to in this moment what Thomas Kuhn would describe as paradigm shift. It is the condition of disciplinary success, which as Husserl tried to point out, ironically modern science now activity works to deny. Modern science functions because it brackets what lies beyond its methodological concern; in our case, mental health is the recognition of the limits of psychology and the opening to what the modern method cannot access. The Postmodern philosopher Jean-Francios Lyotard (who coined the term ‘postmodern’) recognized this as the differend which catalyzes the postmodern condition.
The difficulty arises because its methodological reduction has quietly become ontological reduction; what begins as a way of investigating reality gradually becomes an account of reality itself. People subject to this kind of incomplete but imposed knowledge with no way out end up behaving accordingly; that is, finding oneself through an epistemology that proposed is total account while denying methodologically that such a denial is occurring, a person might naturally act out in all sorts of odd, and even destructive ways in trying to come to terms with the problem inherent the method of meaning that has been given them, having issues in the area of experience and meaning being expressed by the over behaviors.
Husserl and the Crisis of the Lifeworld
More generally, Husserl recognized this movement when he argued that the sciences had forgotten the lifeworld. Mathematics, measurement, and abstraction had become so successful that they came to define what counted as genuinely real. The world of ordinary involvement, of things themselves, the universe of objects which constitutes the world in which we fashion tools, build homes, repair engines, prepare meals, and raise children, appeared somehow secondary to the formal idealistic structures and their more and more religious appearing assertions of science explaination.
Existentialist psychologists, such a Viktor Frankl’s, response was to a sort of desperate plea and therapeutic approach for the purpose of helping people to get over their insecurities and recover the dignity of the lifeworld, in a way of viewing, to realize the power they were giving up by orienting their dignity within the modern mode.
Now we are able to notice that even this recovery remains situated within the same phenomenological configuration, and this are bids to escape a knowledge that by its nature is made to be inescapable.
So it is, the question remains how consciousness should recover its proper relation to reality. Orientation speaks to the real limit, while not arguing that it should be any different —it cannot be different, or, can only be different through phenomenalist operations of denial, shapes, so to speak, of meaning, because of the nature of modern knowledge.
Heidegger’s View of Technology and Modern Being
Heidegger tried exit by moving further into it. His critique of modern technology is often misunderstood as an environmental or cultural argument. It is considerably deeper than that. Technology reveals a mode of Being in which the world appears as standing reserve, as that which is continually available for ordering, storing, transforming, and distributing. Nature itself becomes something awaiting deployment.
This description is extraordinarily perceptive and could be seen as a proto-entry into mental health, since mental health operates as body-first knowledge, as opposed to the modern psychological default of cognition-first theories. In this regard the body is closer to nature than is mind, but he was still contrasting modern semantic ideas as though arguments has the power to break through the reality they draw from to make proposals of justice. Again, I believe Heidegger mistakes the phenomenological situation for its object by speaking of the semantic horizon that, a few years later, Michel Foucault would make even more explicit on the social-ideological level, ideas and political economics. The river does indeed become a hydroelectric resource. The forest becomes lumber. The mountain becomes mineral reserves. The human being becomes human capital. Yet these are not primarily transformations of rivers, forests, mountains, or persons. They are transformations within the modern organization of knowing. Nonetheless, through all these ontological arguments, we can notice that technology has not changed the ontology of rivers as much as it has disclosed the ontology of the modern subject. The standing reserve is therefore not principally a condition of nature but a condition through which modern phenomenology recognizes its own completion.
This explains modernity’s foundation in anxiety. Heidegger recognizes something that should not be visible from within the modern orientation. He encounters the organization of the orientation through the very objects upon which that orientation depends, but unable to step outside the phenomenological method, its modern reality, the discovery necessarily appears as an historical catastrophe rather than as an epistemological disclosure.
The Mechanic Analogy: When Theory Meets Reality
The similar pattern appears in Crawford. For sure his concern over disappearing trades, maintenance, repair, and practical competence expresses something genuine. We cannot dismiss or even make demands upon things without becoming idealist.
Let’s use an example for this. A mechanic cannot simply impose theory upon an engine. It is very similar to what psychology and psychiatry end up perpetuating when not held to certain standards or procedure (which, again, paradigms explain). Imagine what could happen if a mechanic were to dismiss or demand his ideas of what was happening upon an engine that was brought to him for repair. Being skillful herself having learned from a high quality school and good mentors, she knows what she is doing. So she observes the engine, listening, prodding, watching, and so on. Based on her expertise, she decides what the problem is an begins to solution. When completed, though, the engine still is not functioning the way it should according to her knowledge of how things should go. So she reevaluates, decides, and tries again. Still the engine does not work properly. She continues this procedure and over time and, leaning on here expertise all the more, she begin to question that the engine itself is not defective. She knows everything there is to know about this particular brand of engine, and yet her applications are not yielding results. It must be the engine itself, something about its first casting perhaps.
Of course, this is a sensible situation that happens frequently in the real world. But let us continue along this line. Another of the same type is brought in with similar or different issues, and she finds over and over that her applications do not work. Soon she will make a proclamation about all of that type of engine, begin to advise people about the innate and inherent problems of that engine, and maybe even start a campaign against the company for shoddy workmanship and bad faith. Until one day she hears of a mechanic across town who is fixing them. The question becomes, will she admit that her 30 years-backed expertise is faulty go to the other mechanic and try to learn where her knowledge is limited, or will she insist that the other mechanic is a fraud and continue her campaign to uphold her professional integrity?
I submit that this is the question put to psychology through the instance of mental health.
Reality Pushes Back Against Theory
The object always answers back and failure disciplines understanding. Multiple unsuccessful repairs temper the conceit of mastery. Reality continually exceeds conceptual certainty. However, the question is not simply whether a person has an open mind, but whether such a mind is able to become aware of its limitation in what is knows as reality itself. We are not questioning reality here, as though we can decide that reality can be different, which is a move into idealism. No. The question centers in the orientation upon things and what is happening in that relationship.
While every physician, machinist, carpenter, electrician, and engineer learns this lesson within a epistemological paradigm, very few will be able to become aware sufficiently enough to notice how the paradigm shift concerns their activity of justifying proposals of practicality.
Technology Is More Than Machines
Consider that why this lesson might be understood belong uniquely to manual labor? Which is to say, that technology is cause of problems instead of the site of ontological engagement with meaning. Is an algorithm less a machine? Does a software engineer not maintain systems? Does a network administrator not diagnose failures? Does a mathematician not work through technical procedures every bit as rigorous as a machinist?
If technology is understood only in its primitive material, which is to say, physical sense, then these questions appear paradoxical. Based in a paradigm of knowledge where the essence of thinking is different than the essence of psychical things, the effort of aligning things with thoughts takes place through the idea and therefore idealist, while at the same time this alignment confirms the idea that this the way things should be arranged, and therefore ideological.
However, if technology instead refers to the means through which human beings engage the world, then reasoning itself becomes technological. Language is technological. Geometry is technological. Writing is technological. Computation is technological. Manual craftsmanship is one technological configuration among many. Simondon’s account shows and edge of significance because technical objects are then not isolated things but exist through relations. Their individuation occurs through ongoing interaction with environments rather than through closed mechanical independence.
Why Technology Is Not the Source of the Crisis
Yet even here a subtle ambiguity remains. Simondon occasionally seems to privilege the technical object itself, as though greater understanding of machines would resolve the modern crisis. Crawford similarly privileges repair and maintenance. Heidegger privileges unconcealment, to open a portal or removing the cover which hides essense technology. Husserl privileges the recovery of the lifeworld. Each recommendation identifies a genuine phenomenon, which is to say that the object remains out of the picture. Removed from the possibility of knowing knowledge of phenomena demands a justification for why the proposal of idea should take precedence and control of the thing itself.
None, however, reaches the epistemological juncture that makes the recommendation necessary. So likewise we can say that the crisis is not that people have become disconnected from objects, that the crisis is unnecessary where it efficiently addresses the idea that is good enough for certain tasks. Therefore we can come upon an awareness that is good enough to notice that the crisis is that the modern phenomenological orientation discovers its own organization through objects while interpreting this discovery as evidence that something has gone wrong with the objects themselves.
Mental Health and the Limits of Modern Knowledge
This distinction changes everything. This is the distinction which articulates mental health and pronounces disciplinary discernment. Any and every thing that is known opens unto the possibility to be known itself, which is to say, to become intelligible. Environmental degradation becomes intelligible. Planned obsolescence becomes intelligible. The disappearance of skilled trades becomes intelligible. Digital abstraction becomes intelligible. Every known thing is opened unto itself, now knowable for what it is. As the contemporary philosopher Francios Laruelle might agree: none of these are illusions, and neither are they the origin of the crisis, but if they were then we have a site through which we might talk about victims. Objects, and their operations, are the situations through which the modern subject encounters the repercussions of its own orientation upon knowledge.
Accordingly, there is no need to further accuse philosophy of merely projecting its anxieties onto technology. The accusation is already present in the phenomenalist method upon things. While language still presupposes an interior subject casting meanings outward, technology is the objective circumstance in which the phenomenological organization of modern reason becomes available for reflection on what is indicated over what is expressed. When this is centered, as opposed to centering the presumptions of a thinkers, technology has arrived at its proper epistemological juncture. Once recognized, a subject no longer needs to bear the entire explanatory burden assigned to it by phenomenalism-based philosophy. In this way, mental health neither alienates nor redeems humanity nor does it distance us from reality or restore us to it. It simply stands where the modern subject finally becomes visible to itself.
The remaining question is what philosophy becomes when this orientation has been recognized for what it is, and this concerns the relationship between mental health and the psyche-logics, i.e., psychology, psychiatry, and neurology.
mental health and explorations of speculative realism