Technics as the Tactics of Living

The problem of technics, and of its relation to Culture and to History, first emerges only in the nineteenth century. The eighteenth, with that thoroughgoing scepticism — a doubt that came near to despair — had raised the question of the meaning and worth of Culture: a question that drove on to further and ever more corrosive questions, and so laid the ground for the possibility, in the twentieth century, in our own day, of regarding world-history as such as a problem at all.

In those days — the age of Robinson Crusoe and of Rousseau, of the English garden and of pastoral verse — men had seen in “natural” man himself a kind of little lamb: peaceable and virtuous, and corrupted only afterward, by Culture. The technical side of him was overlooked entirely, and in any case — weighed against moral considerations — held unworthy of notice.

But the machine-technics of Western Europe, swelling since Napoleon into something monstrous, with its factory-towns, its railways and its steamships, compelled men at last to put the question in earnest. What does technics mean? What significance has it within history, what worth in the life of men, what moral or metaphysical rank? Many answers were given, but at bottom they come down to two.

On the one side stood the idealists and the ideologues, the stragglers of the humanistic classicism of Goethe’s age, who despised technical matters and economic questions as standing altogether outside Culture, and beneath it. Goethe, in his great feeling for everything actual, had tried in the second Faust to penetrate into the deepest depths of this new world of facts. But already with Wilhelm von Humboldt there begins the unworldly, philological view of history, by which one came in the end to reckon the rank of a historical epoch by the quantity of pictures and books that happened to be produced in it. A ruler counted for something only insofar as he proved himself a patron of the arts. Whatever else he may have been did not come into account. The State was a perpetual disturbance of the true Culture that went on in lecture-halls, studies and studios; war an improbable barbarism out of ages past; and economic life something prosaic and stupid, to be looked away from, although one drew upon it daily. To name a great merchant or engineer in the same breath as poets and thinkers was very nearly an affront to the majesty of “true” Culture. Look, in this connection, at Jakob Burckhardt’s Reflections on World History. But that was the standpoint of most lectern-philosophers, and even of many historians, down to the literary men and aesthetes of the great cities of today, who hold the making of a novel more important than the building of an aero-engine.

On the other side stood the materialism of essentially English descent: the great fashion of the half-educated in the latter half of the last century, of the liberal feuilletons and the radical mass-meetings, of the Marxists and the social-ethical writers who took themselves for thinkers and poets. If the one party lacked feeling for actuality, the other lacked, to a confounding degree, depth. Their ideal was utility, and utility alone. Whatever was useful to “humanity” belonged to Culture, was Culture. The rest was luxury, superstition, or barbarism.

But the useful was whatever served the “happiness of the greatest number.” And happiness lay in doing nothing. That, at bottom, is the doctrine of Bentham, Mill and Spencer. The goal of humanity was to relieve the individual of as much labour as possible and to load it upon the machine. Freedom from the “misery of wage-slavery” and equality in amusement, comfort and “art-enjoyment”: the panem et circenses of the late world-cities announces itself. The progress-philistines went into raptures over every push-button that set some contrivance going and — allegedly — spared human labour. In place of the genuine religion of earlier ages there steps the flat enthusiasm for the “achievements of humanity,” by which were meant merely advances in labour-saving and amusement-providing technics. Of the soul there was no word.

This is not the taste of the great inventors themselves, with few exceptions, nor of those who understand technical problems, but of their onlookers, who can invent nothing and who in any case understood nothing of it, but who scented something in it for themselves. And with that whole poverty of imagination which marks the materialism of every Civilization, a picture of the future is now drawn up — eternal bliss upon earth, a final goal and a lasting condition, on the assumption of the technical tendencies of about the eighteen-eighties — in dubious contradiction to the very concept of progress, which excludes any such “condition”: books like The Old Faith and the New by Strauss, Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Bebel’s Woman and Socialism. No more war, no more distinction of races, peoples, States, religions; no criminals and no adventurers; no conflicts arising out of superiority and difference; no more hatred, no more revenge, only an endless comfort through all the millennia. Such inanities, even now, when we are living through the closing phases of this trivial optimism, make us think with horror of the appalling boredom — the taedium vitae of the Roman imperial age — that spreads over the soul at the mere reading of such idylls, and that in reality, on even a partial realization, would lead to wholesale murder and suicide.

Both views are today out of date. The twentieth century has at last grown ripe to press through to the ultimate meaning of the facts out of whose totality real world-history consists. It is no longer a question of interpreting things and events, according to the private taste of individuals and of whole masses, with an eye to some rationalistic tendency, to one’s own wishes or hopes. In place of the “So it shall be” or “So it ought to be” there steps the inexorable: So it is and so it will be. A proud scepticism lays aside the sentimentalities of the last century. We have learned that history is something that takes not the slightest account of our expectations.

The physiognomic tact, as I have named it¹ — that which alone enables one to penetrate into the meaning of all that happens, the eye of Goethe, the eye of the born knower of men, of life, of history — unlocks, across the ages, the deeper significance of the particular.

Two errors must here be avoided. To grasp the essence of the technical one must not start from machine-technics, and least of all from the seductive notion that the making of machines and tools is the purpose of technics.

In reality, technics is immemorially old. Nor is it anything historically peculiar; it is something prodigiously general. It reaches far back beyond man into the life of the animals, and indeed of all animals. To the life-type of the animal, as against that of the plant, there belongs free mobility in space, a relative arbitrariness and independence over against the whole of the rest of Nature, and with it the necessity of asserting itself against Nature, of giving to its own existence a kind of meaning, content and superiority. It is from the soul alone that the significance of the technical can be unlocked.

For the freely-moving life of the animal² is struggle, and nothing else; and the tactic of that life — its superiority or inferiority over against the “other,” be it living Nature or lifeless — decides the history of that life, decides whether it is its destiny to suffer the history of others or itself to be that history for others. Technics is the tactic of the whole of life. It is the inner form of the procedure of the struggle that is one and the same thing as life itself.

That is the other error to be avoided here: technics is not to be understood from the tool. What matters is not the making of things but the procedure with them; not the weapon, but the battle. And as in modern war the tactic, that is, the technics of the conduct of the war, is the decisive thing, and the techniques of devising, of manufacturing, of employing weapons count only as elements of the whole procedure, so it is everywhere. There are countless techniques that use no tools whatever: the technics of a lion that outwits a gazelle, and the technics of diplomacy; administrative technics, as the keeping of the State in form for the struggles of political history. There are chemical and gas-technical procedures. In every struggle over a problem there is a logical technics. There is a technics of the brush-stroke, of horsemanship, of steering an airship. It is never a matter of things, but always of an activity that has an aim. This is just what prehistoric research so often overlooks, thinking far too much of the objects in the museums and far too little of the countless procedures that must have existed but have left no trace.

Every machine serves a single procedure and has arisen out of the thinking of that procedure. All the means of transport have developed out of the thinking of driving, rowing, sailing, flying, and not, say, out of the idea of the wagon or the boat. The method itself is a weapon. And for that reason technics is no “part” of economic life, just as little as economic life is, beside war and politics, a self-subsisting “part” of life. All these are sides of the one active, fighting, soul-filled life. But there leads, nonetheless, a road from the primal warfare of early animals to the procedures of the modern inventors and engineers, and likewise from the primal weapon, cunning, to the construction of the machine with which the war against Nature is waged today, and Nature is outwitted.

Men call this progress. It was the great word of the last century. They saw history before them as a road on which “humanity” marched bravely ever onward — meaning at bottom only the white peoples, meaning only the metropolitans among them, meaning among these only the “educated.”

But whither? How long? And what then?

It was somewhat ridiculous, this march into the infinite, toward a goal that one did not seriously think about, that one did not try to picture clearly, did not dare to picture; for a goal is an end. No one does anything without the thought of the moment in which he will have reached what he wanted. One wages no war, one puts not out to sea, one does not so much as take a walk, without thinking of its duration and its close. Every truly creative man knows and dreads the emptiness that follows upon the completion of a work.

To development there belongs completion — every development has a beginning, every completion is an end —; to youth there belongs age, to coming-to-be there belongs passing-away, to life there belongs death. The animal, with its thinking bound to the present, neither knows nor forebodes death as something future, something threatening it; it knows only the fear of death in the moment of being killed. But man, whose thinking has freed itself from this fetter of the here-and-now and ranges broodingly over the yesterday and tomorrow, the “once” of past and future, knows it in advance; and it depends upon the depth of his being and of his world-outlook whether he masters the fear of the end or not. According to an old-Hellenic legend, presupposed in the Iliad, Achilles had been set by his mother before the choice of whether he would wish a long life or a short one full of deeds and fame, and he chose the latter.

Men were — and are — too shallow and too cowardly to bear the fact of the transience of all that lives. They wrap it in a rose-tinted optimism of progress that at bottom no one believes; they cover it over with literature; they creep behind ideals in order to see nothing. But transience, coming-to-be and passing-away, is the form of all that is actual, from the stars, whose destiny is for us beyond reckoning, down to the fleeting swarm upon this planet. The life of the individual — be it animal, plant or man — is just as transient as that of peoples and Cultures. Every creation falls to decay; every thought, every discovery, every deed to oblivion. Everywhere we sense vanished courses of history charged with great destiny. Ruins of bygone works of dead Cultures lie everywhere before our eyes. To the hubris of Prometheus, who reaches into the heavens to subject the divine powers to man, there belongs the fall. What is all the chatter about the “eternal achievements of humanity” to us?

World-history looks very different from what even our own age lets itself dream. The history of man is, measured against the history of the plant- and animal-world upon this planet — to say nothing of the lifespan of the star-worlds — a brief, abrupt rise and fall of a few millennia, something wholly without consequence in the destiny of the earth, but for us, who are born into it, of tragic greatness and force. And we men of the twentieth century are going down with our eyes open. Our eye for history, our capacity to write history, is a tell-tale sign that the road slopes downward. Only on the summit of high Cultures, at their passage into Civilization, does this gift of penetrating insight appear for a moment.

In and for itself it is of no consequence what destiny, among the hosts of “eternal” stars, this little planet has, which somewhere in infinite space draws its orbits for a short while; still less, what for a few moments moves upon its surface. And yet each one of us, in and for himself a Nothing, is for one unnamably brief moment, a lifetime, flung into this swarming. And for that reason it is for us important beyond all measure, this little world, this “world-history.” And beyond that it is the destiny of every individual that, by his birth, he is set not merely into this world-history at large, but into a definite century, a definite land, a definite people, a definite religion, a definite estate. We cannot choose whether we would be the son of an Egyptian peasant about 3000 B.C., of a Persian king, or of a present-day tramp. To this destiny — or chance — one has to submit oneself. It condemns us to situations, outlooks and achievements. There is no “man in himself,” as the philosophers prate, but only men of a time, of a place, of a race, of a personal kind, who assert themselves in the struggle with a given world or go under, while the universe abides round about, divinely unconcerned. This struggle is life — life, indeed, in Nietzsche’s sense, as a struggle out of the will-to-power, cruel, inexorable, a struggle without mercy.