The Tragic Philosophy of the Intelligence Age
On Oswald Spengler's "Man and Technics"
Navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse.
[To sail is necessary; to live is not.]
—Pompey Magnus (quoted by Plutarch)
What are we to make of the comically tragic statements made by the world’s leading AI entrepreneurs that, yes, while there’s a chance their work may result in human extinction (according to themselves1), they’re still going to go through with it, because if they don’t, then someone else surely will—that someone else being of a clearly dubious moral character and so unsuited for the task—though, of course, they’re all still going to do it regardless, and never mind the fact that this has nothing to do with the inherent risks of the work…?
The answer, according to one early 20th century German philosopher, is that they simply cannot stop.
In his 1931 book called Man and Technics (a kind of supplement to his more famous work, The Decline of the West) Oswald Spengler observes that Western inventors embody what he calls the Faustian spirit, which is defined by a deep need to solve big technical problems. Inventors and entrepreneurs driven by this spirit cannot stop, or even slow down, because what motivates them is not the consequences of their technical solutions (as they may often claim), but the thrill of discovering them. Even if a technology has foreseeably disastrous effects on society, the Faustian inventor, like an explorer with an insatiable hunger to see what lies just beyond the hill, feels compelled to carry out the work.2
The tactics of living
Spengler’s book revolves around the idea of “technics,” which he defines as the tactics of living. Unlike technology, the concept of technics is much broader. “Technics is not to be understood in terms of tools,” writes Spengler. “What matters is not how one fashions things, but the process of using them; not the weapon, but the battle.”3 In fact, Spengler’s technics aren’t limited to humans—they are ancient and extend into the life of all animals. Even without any tools, an animal uses tactics to catch its prey, or evade its predators. A lion outwitting a gazelle, for example. “Methods themselves are weapons.”
But animal technics are purely instinctive. What separates humans from animals is our ability to consciously create and develop technics. “Technics in man’s life is conscious, arbitrary, alterable, personal, inventive. It is learned and improved,” writes Spengler. “Man has become the creator of his tactics of living.”
Closely related to technics is Spengler’s categorization of human thought, which he splits into two kinds: the “thought of the hand” and the “thought of the eye.” The first of these is linked to the creation of tools, which is tied inseparably to the hand. “The unarmed hand is in itself useless,” writes Spengler. “It requires a weapon to become a weapon itself. As the implements took form from the shape of the hand, so also the hand from the shape of the tool.”4 The second kind, the “thought of the eye,” comes from the beast of prey’s forward set eyes which can focus on a target, thus giving rise to a world of perspective space and objects in space (in contrast to herbivore’s eyes, which are located on the sides of its head to give it broad, peripheral vision).
“The eye seeks out cause and effect; the hand works on the principle of means and end. The question of whether something is suitable or unsuitable—the criterion of the doer—has nothing to do with that of true and false, the values of the observer. And an aim is a fact, while a connection of cause and effect is a truth.” The two kinds of thought broadly divided human societies into spheres of action: statesmen, generals, merchants; and spheres of thought: priests, scholars, philosophers. More on the significance of this division in a moment.
The evolution of human technics is marked by two milestones: speech and organized enterprise. As Spengler views these as technics—i.e. the tactics of living—he sees their origin in action rather than contemplation. “The original object of speech is the carrying out of an act in accordance with intention, time, place, and means”—e.g. “Do this!,” “Ready?,” “Yes!,” and “Go ahead!” “Speech and enterprise,” writes Spengler, “stand in precisely the same relation to each other as the older pair hand and implement.” In other words, they developed simultaneously, serving the same purpose, and, just as the fabricated tool freed man from the limitations of the human body, organized enterprise freed man from the limitations of what an individual can achieve on his own.
But this evolution of technics came at great cost. The tremendous power gained through organized enterprise can only be attained by sacrificing freedom. The making and the using of the weapon are separated. The planning and the carrying out of the plans are turned into distinct roles. There arises a hierarchy: the few who direct and the many who execute—those who command, and those who obey. And in this bargain, not even the leaders get to keep their freedom. “This verbally managed enterprise involves an immense loss of freedom—the old freedom of the best of prey—for the leader and the led alike,” writes Spengler. “They both become intellectual, spiritual members of a higher unit, body and soul. This we call organization, the gathering of active life into definite forms … With collective doing the decisive step is taken from organic to organized existence.”
Vikings of the mind
Spengler’s analysis divides humankind into several “high cultures,” of which Western European culture—which he calls Faustian—is of especial interest with respect to its relationship to technics. As mentioned above, Spengler separates human thought into two kinds, that of the hand and that of the eye—i.e. action and contemplation. In the case of early Faustian culture, Spengler calls the social groupings that reflect these two kinds of thought the Vikings of the blood and the Vikings of the mind. The former were the warrior conquerors that migrated down from the Far North in the 8th–11th centuries, while the latter were the monks of 13th and 14th centuries that “forced their way deep into the world of technical-physical problems.”
What is particularly interesting about Faustian culture is that its Vikings of the mind, that is, its men of thought, have themselves strayed into the sphere of action. “[I]n the Faustian, and in the Faustian alone, every theory is also from the outset a working hypothesis,” writes Spengler. “A working hypothesis need not be ‘correct,’ it is only required to be practical. It aims, not at the embracing and unveiling the secrets of the world, but at making them serviceable to definite ends.” In the Faustian mind, the distinction between fact and truth disappears. As the Pragmatists would later put it: what’s true is what works.
Unlike, say, the Greeks, whose philosophers were content with the contemplation of abstract ideas—and indeed, who identified divinity with the contemplative eye of the eternal spectator—the Faustian thinker wanted more than to unravel the secrets of the world, he wanted to take part in the spectacle, wanted to “build a world oneself, to be oneself God.” The Faustian spirit desired “not merely to plunder [nature] of her materials, but to enslave and harness her very forces as to multiply his own strength.” And so, as the Vikings of the blood plundered the material world, conquering and looting their enemies, the Vikings of the mind discovered ways to seize and harness the invisible forces of nature. “The conception of booty of the beast of prey is thought out to its logical end. Not this or that bit of the world, as when Prometheus stole fire, but the world itself, complete with its secret of force, is dragged away as spoil to be built into our culture.”
The result of this union of thought and action in Faustian culture gives rise to an explosion of technical innovation—indeed, gives rise to an industrial revolution that changes the course of the world. We see a torrent of inventions, one after the other: the steam engine, mechanical mass production, trains, cars, planes, electricity, computers, robotics, AI…
Spengler, however, was a pessimist. He saw the Faustian journey not as an endless path of progress, but as a process with a beginning and an end. For Spengler, Faustian culture ends with its own self-destruction. This is, in part, due to the unsustainable use of the earth that results in “climatic changes … which imperil the land-economy of whole populations,” in part due to the West’s exporting technologies to developing countries, which, “owing to their low wages, will face us with a deadly competition.” If the West declines, Spengler believes that other cultures won’t stay on the same path of technological development because they do not share the same deep spiritual need to solve technical problems. The Faustian technologies will “one day lie shattered and forgotten—railways and steamships as good as the old Roman roads and the Chinese wall … The history of this technology is fast approaching its inevitable end. It will be eaten up from within, like all great forms of any culture.”
To be sure, one can certainly challenge Spengler’s prediction of the West’s downfall (said take place within the next two centuries, so there’s still plenty of time), or his view that only the Faustian spirit would pursue technics with the same zeal (and indeed his tacit assumption that, even in a globalized world, it won’t spread to other cultures), but, be as it may, Spengler does highlight something very important, which is that the Faustian mindset pursues the development of technics with little regard for their costs and consequences—a tendency that will only become more apparent and dangerous in the years ahead as the pace of technological innovation picks up.
Prisoners of progress
With the advent of the Intelligence Age, the Faustian inventor has achieved his greatest triumph: he has created a machine to solve technical problems for him. Man, who has freed himself from the limitations of his genus through a conscious invention of technics, and the limitations of the individual through organized enterprise, is now detaching technics itself from the limitations of his own mind. The machine, which has hitherto been used to harness nature’s forces for locomotion and mass production, and later to amplify the power of the brain (Steve Jobs’s notion of the computer as a “bicycle for the mind”), is now entering the domain of human thought.
As the industrialist “dragged away as spoil” the forces of nature, the AI entrepreneur, in order to build and grow his new machine, drags away the world of language, the world of thought, as spoil—precisely as spoil, for he seizes a world of intellectual and creative work without permission (the beast of prey needs no one’s permission). Like a colossal trawler, the AI machine casts its vast neural nets across the ocean of information, harvesting and dragging away the treasures of man’s mind. A trawler, moreover, that is forever hungry for “compute”—forever hungry for more power. As it consumes the world of knowledge and culture, it is simultaneously consuming the world’s resources to fuel its perpetual feast.
We are assured that this will result in unimaginable prosperity. But for whom? Mechanical mass production enabled a massive leap in output, but it came at the cost of individual freedom. The craftsmen of the pre-industrial era were moved to the factory floor, on which they became as cogs of a larger machine, “members of a higher unit, body and soul.” Their craft was carved up into a series of dreadfully monotonous tasks, while the profits went to the owners of the machines. The optimistic case for AI is that it will handle tedious and repetitive tasks, letting humans focus on the more creative jobs. But the reason people are doing the tedious tasks in the first place is because they are either limited by their skills or by the jobs market. Letting AI take these jobs might make a company more productive, but it is not at all apparent that it will also create an equivalent number of fulfilling jobs for those who would now find themselves redundant. And this is as much a problem for physical jobs as it is for knowledge work, for, as the new generation of AI robots enters mass production, those jobs will likewise be automated. Human workers will be liberated from the drudgery of menial labor, freed to pursue more fulfilling work. What that work will look like, however, is yet to be revealed.
But no matter, the Faustian inventor won’t be deterred by consequences. “In reality the passion of the inventor has nothing whatever to do with its consequences,” writes Spengler. “It is his personal motivation in life, his personal joy and sorrow. He wants to enjoy his triumph over difficult problems, and the wealth and fame that it brings him, for their own sake.” And in many cases, the “wealth and fame” pales in comparison with the triumph. To see a rocket land itself; to see a robot walk, jump and dance; to hear a computer speak with a human voice—that is the triumph the inventor works for, it is in those moments they feel the incredible sense of achievement, the satisfaction of conquering a problem, of seeing their hard work come to life. This is their life’s purpose, this is what gives their life meaning and joy.
In this lies both the grandeur and the tragedy of Faustian culture. Its spiritual pursuit of technics enabled its conquest of the world, but it also set in motion a race for technological supremacy which is no longer under its control. The power gained by technics drives its development at every scale of humanity: individuals compete with each other for prestige, companies compete with each other for profits, and states compete with each other for survival. Technological innovation is thus a kind of prisoner’s dilemma: if you don’t participate, you get left behind, and as long as one party keeps innovating, the rest must keep up.
We call this race “progress,” which frames it as something both positive and voluntary: humanity’s path of constant improvement and advancement. Moreover, by giving humanity an apparent purpose, the idea takes on a religious quality, which forbids all criticism of itself by making it a moral issue. It isn’t necessary to refute those who dare criticize “progress” when you can simply denounce them as Luddites who want to hold humanity back. The alternative—that the process may not be quite so positive or quite so voluntary—is unthinkable. Having lost control over the process, we fall back to what is wholly in our power: imagining the future. And it is certainly more agreeable to imagine a time of unprecedented prosperity than upheaval and unrest.
A survey of 2,700 AI researchers arrived at a 5% chance of AI causing human extinction. I won’t comment on whether or not I think their assessment is reasonable (not least because I have no idea)—what matters is that they, and the people leading their enterprise, believe it.
As the consequences of any invention cannot be known in advance, the inventor will naturally paint the best possible picture of the future that their invention will make possible. And, in the event the future turns out to be less a utopia than a dystopia, one can always lay the blame on those who “misuse” the technology they’ve been gifted.
All quotes, unless otherwise stated, are from the 2023 edition of Man and Technics published by Legend Books, which is based on the 1932 translation by Charles Francis Atkinson. Italicized words are part of the original text.
As an aside, Spengler here casually anticipates Eldredge and Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium by suggesting that evolution happens in quick bursts to adapt to environmental shifts, rather than gradually. “[A] slow, phlegmatic alteration,” writes Spengler, “does not represent Nature. To support the theory, since measurable periods of time give evidence of no such process, one makes conjectures about periods of millions of years. But in truth we cannot distinguish geological strata unless catastrophes of unknown kinds and causes have separated them from us, nor yet species of fossil creatures unless they appear suddenly and hold on unaltered until their extinction.”