The Illusion of Technique By William Barrett Anchor Press/Doubleday, 345 pp., $12.95 Citing freedom as “the paramount issue of our time,” William Barrett begins this book—which amounts to an articulation of the essential moral, philosophical, and political dilemmas of modern man—with a quick, cogent sketch of the antithesis between B. F. Skinner and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. With Skinner as perhaps its most authoritative and notorious fan, ours has become an age obsessed and perverted by the notion of “technique,” by the assumption that there is no irreducible reality to the human condition, that all experience is subject to “modification” can we but find the right recipe to achieve this or that desired end. But then there is Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag, a chilling actualization of the means by which man’s very real will to freedom and individuality (pace Skinner) must be broken before he can be molded in a new image.
When Barrett—teacher, philosopher, and author of the classic treatise on existentialism, Irrational Man—speaks of “technique,” or “technology,” he is not, of course, referring to moon shots, microwave ovens, or the SST. He speaks, rather, of a way of looking at the world in which modern man, stripped of his historical role as the hero in a dialogue with both God and nature, begins to think of that world as alien to himself, a neutral realm over which he must seek mastery. Ultimate knowledge of this realm, which in the humanistic tradition was the province of philosophy, is now regarded as the exclusive property of the scientist/technician, leaving the ordinary intelligence with little to mull over but the extent of its own limitations. (To be sure, many of our most prominent and influential academic philosophers, as voluntary handmaidens to the technocrats, have simply dismissed life as it is actually lived from the field of their speculation, writing in a non-humanistic language of matters that bear not at all on questions of meaning and value.)
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