Man and Technics is a short book by German polymath Oswald Spengler. If you are familiar with my Substack, you will know that I have recently concluded a series of essays on Spengler’s The Hour of Decision. Man and Technics was published in 1931, a couple of years before the publication of The Hour of Decision. This book discusses the relationship between life and technique, and the consequences of this relationship on a civilizational scale. The book has 5 chapters, each composed of a varying number of subsections. I plan to cover the book chapter by chapter. Chapter 1 is titled ‘Technics as the Tactics of Living’.
In the first section, Spengler discusses the study of technics. The relationship between technics and Culture was not interrogated until the 19th century. Rousseau and other proponents of the noble savage thought that culture ruined man, but they did not pay attention to technics. Napoleon's conquest showed that technics were of colossal importance to Culture.
Spengler asks, "What is the significance of technics? What meaning within history, what value within life, does it possess, where — socially and metaphysically — does it stand?" (page 6). There are two camps that Spengler describes that aim to answer this question. Some considered technics to be below Culture. Goethe was in this category. Those more concerned with art, literature, and poetry thought that pursuing technical ends was a waste of energy and resources. Spengler says that this perspective lacks a sense of reality.
The other side was the materialists. Liberals, Marxists, and the half-educated took the materialist view. This perspective is overly concerned with utility. Only that which is useful qualifies as culture, and everything else was "luxury, superstition, or barbarism".
The progress-philistine waxed lyrical over every knob that set an apparatus in motion for the — supposed — sparing of human labour. In place of the honest religion of earlier times there was a shallow enthusiasm for the “achievements of humanity,” by which nothing more was meant than progress in the technics of labour-saving and amusement-making. Of the soul, not one word (page 7).
Inventors and technicians did not buy into the idealism of progress, Spengler said. Rather it is the spectators who get caught up in the eschatological promise of ultimate freedom and liberation via technics. It is a trivial optimism. All distinctions between one man and another will be shed. Unending comfort will reign for millennia. This naive optimism was waning in Spengler's time.
Both of these views are out of date, according to Spengler. They are displaced by the facts of history and a radical skepticism that recognizes what is, not what ought to be.
In section 2, Spengler defines technics. Technics does not just refer to machines in the modern age. Technics is not something historically specific either. Instead, it is a general aspect of all animal life that has its basis in the soul alone. Animal life is struggle, both against the forces of nature and against other animal life. Technics are the tactics developed by animal life to respond to conflict. Spengler states:
For the free-moving life of the animal is struggle, and nothing but struggle, and it is the tactics of its living, its superiority or inferiority in face of “the other” (whether that “other” be animate or inanimate Nature), which decides the history of this life, which settles whether its fate is to suffer the history of others or to be itself their history. Technics is the tactics of living; it is the inner form of which the procedure of conflict — the conflict that is identical with Life itself — is the outward expression. (Page 9).
Technics is not concerned with a specific object, or "terms of implement" as Spengler says, but rather is concerned with the process or use. Technics is about "what one does" with these terms of implement. It is not the weapon, he says, but the battle fought with the weapon that defines technics. Some technique does not have an implement at all, such as the lion's outwitting of the gazelle, or diplomacy. Spengler also points to administration and the way a painter uses his brush as examples of technique. The process is often overlooked, with the focus instead going on the tools themselves. But this is a mistaken way of viewing the history of technics. Spengler says:
>And it is just this that is so often overlooked in the study of prehistory, in which far too much attention is paid to things in museums and far too little to the innumerable processes that must have been in existence, even though they may have vanished without leaving a trace. (Page 9).
All machines are downstream from thought about the machine. The thought is not only about the machine, though, but primarily about the process the machine is meant to serve. For example, with the washing machine, it was washing the clothes themselves that was thought of primarily. Only after the process is considered is there space for the technology to come in and contribute to the process.
Spengler also notes that technics is not subservient to economics. He clarifies that no domain is subservient to any other, nor are any of them self-contained. Technics, economics, war, and politics are all just "sides of one active, fighting, and charged life." Consideration of these domains in a vacuum brings us further from reality, not closer to it, because reality is in process and the unpausing flow of action.
There is a continuous line from the first weapon technique, the trick, and the weapons of war we use today. Spengler also points out that we use our new technics to wage war against nature and outmaneuver here.
Mankind assumes in the 19th century that progress would be infinite, and that we would march on indefinitely with continuously improving technology. Spengler responds to this sentiment: "But whither? For how long? And what then?" (page 10). All doing and all work contains an envisioned conclusion. There is some way things are going to end. We as humans look both at how we would like something to end and how we expect it to end realistically. Those obsessed with progress do not have any end in sight. They have a "goal," but they do not see some end. He notes that the creative type has in mind the emptiness that comes along with concluding a great creative work. The end must be recognized. If there is no recognized end, things get "a little ridiculous" (page 10).
Man is not like animals in that he is cognizant of the fact that he will someday die. An animal only thinks of death when death is possibly imminent, but every man may recognize his morality at any moment. Man's thought is emancipated from the present and is capable of reflecting on the past and the future. Recognition of mortality brings fear. Progressivism comes from the inability to face the fear of mortality. Everything goes away, everything is perishable. The progressive philistine rails against this, wishing and hoping for deliverance through technology. The mind attuned to recognizing the facts of history notices around him the "ruins of the 'have-been' works of dead Cultures" that "lie all about us" (page 11).
The history of man and his Cultures is a history of brief flourishing and rapid decay. Spengler notes that the capability to do history is the capability to see decline, a sign of the arrival of decline. We are only able to see the world so clearly and recognize the facts of history because we are tipping over the edge. He says "Our eye for history, our faculty of writing history, is a revealing sign that our path lies downward. At the peaks of the high Cultures, just as they are passing over into Civilizations, this gift of penetrating recognition comes to them for a moment, and only for a moment" (page 11).
Spengler describes reality in a way that could easily be mistaken for Reddit atheism. We are people with short lives on a small planet amid a seemingly eternal void of space. Nonetheless, we are "a lifetime cast into that whirling universe" (page 11). The large scale of time and universe, and how tiny we are in comparison, does not mean that we do not matter. We are humans, and we assign value and meaning to the things around us. Value and meaning in the universe stem from our observation of the world around us. World history, which we are thrown into as Heidegger says, is of supreme importance to us. Our destiny is shaped entirely by the context we are born into. We are in a specific time and place, surrounded by specific people. We have no control over our context, but our context dictates our meaning and shapes our lives. Spengler concludes Chapter 1 with:
There are no “men-in-themselves” such as the philosophers talk about, but only men of a time, of a locality, of a race, of a personal cast, who contend in battle with a given world and win through or fail, while the universe around them moves slowly on with a godlike unconcern. This battle is life — life, indeed, in the Nietzschean sense, a grim, pitiless, no-quarter battle of the Will-to-Power (page 11).
We are the active forces of the world. We are the clashing apex will that Schopenhauer describes, the will that subjugates all other will to itself. We matter because we choose to matter. We matter because we make something out of our lives.
Finally, I've been hoping you'd get to this book!