The Illusion of Technique Quotes

“Not only do I not know what I believe, but also I cannot know for sure that I believe. How can I define precisely what my attitude is toward something it cannot conceivably grasp? Can I be said to be in the relation of "belief," in any usual sense of that term, toward something that I cheerfully and readily acknowledge to be absolutely incomprehensible to me?

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No man can be sure that he is in faith; and we can say of no man with certainty that he has or does not have faith.
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Not only does faith always carry its opposite uncertainty within itself, but also this faith is never a static condition that is -had-, but a movement toward... And toward what? In the nature of the case we cannot state this "what." We cannot make a flat assertion about our faith like a simple assertion that we have blue eyes or are six feet tall. More than this, the affirmation of our faith can never be made in the simple indicative mood at all. The statement "I believe" can only be uttered as a prayer.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

“The bond that attaches us to the life outside ourselves is the same bond that holds us to our own life.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

“What you find in the mirror you will find in the reality it mirrors.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

“There is no truth that does not ultimately rest upon what is evident to us in our own experience.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

“We have come to understand the phenomena of life only as an assemblage of the lifeless. We take the mechanistic abstractions of our technical calculation to be ultimately concrete and "fundamentally real," while our most intimate experiences are labelled "mere appearance" and something having reality only within the closet of the isolated mind.

Suppose however we were to invert this whole scheme, reverse the order in which it assigns abstract and concrete. What is central to our experience, then, need not be peripheral to nature. This sunset now, for example, caught within the network of bare winter branches, seems like a moment of benediction in which the whole of nature collaborates. Why should not these colours and these charging banners of light be as much a part of the universe as the atoms and molecules that make them up? If they were only "in my mind," then I and my mind would no longer be a part of nature. Why should the pulse of life toward beauty and value not be a part of things?

Following this path, we do not vainly seek to assemble the living out of configurations of dead stuff, but we descend downwards from more complex to simpler grades of the organic. From humans to trees to rocks; from "higher grade" to "lower grade" organisms. In the universe of energy, any individual thing is a pattern of activity within the flux, and thereby an organism at some level.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

“Truth and untruth weave the seamless web of human nature.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

“In teaching the young you have to satisfy the schoolchild in yourself and enter the region where all meanings start. That is where, in any case, the philosopher has perpetually to start.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

“From what deep springs of character our personal philosophies issue, we cannot be sure. In philosophers themselves we seem always able to notice some deep internal correspondence between the man and his philosophy. Are our philosophies, then, merely the inevitable outcome of the body of fate and personal circumstance that is thrust upon each of us? Or are these beliefs the means by which we freely create ourselves as the persons we become? Here, at the very outset, the question of freedom already hovers in the background.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

“The nature of consciousness is to point beyond itself. It is a tending toward or pointing to... Since consciousness points beyond itself, it is in its very being a self-transcendence.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

“Our freedom is the way in which we are able to let the world open before us, and ourselves stand open within it.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

“We must be free for the truth; and conversely, to be able to be open toward the truth may be our deepest freedom as human creatures.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

“The computer only gives back ourselves. It is a faithful mirror that reflects the human traits that are brought to it.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

“What has to be accepted, the given, is forms of life.' (Wittgenstein) This is the fact, the given, from which all thinking must start; and thinking, which starts from this fact, is in turn itself but another form of life.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

“Even if there were no ear for them but the void, our prayers would still be the only things that sanctify our existence.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

“The philosopher seeks a generality beyond the boundaries of science; he attempts to frame a comprehensive and coherent framework of ideas within which the partial results of science may become more intelligible.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

“The happiness of mankind, if it ever should come to pass, would still leave men asking: Why? What point to it? To what end?”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

“Mechanism as a philosophic doctrine might be defined as the belief that the last machine which human ingenuity has created gives us the final form of reality.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization