What is Technosophism?

“Technosophism” is a hybrid term that I have employed to explicate a phenomenon that gives rise to distortions in humanity’s approach to negotiating the referents to reality in its external environment. The term conjoins aspects of technology and sophism and builds on elements borrowed from the classical Greek notions put forth in Plato’s Sophist.

I hold culture and technology to be manifestations of the same thing—an inventive response of the mind, actualized in concrete symbolic expressions or material form, to exteriorized engagement with the natural order.

A more formal definition might be:
The extension, augmentation, magnification and/or amplification of an internal state in order to enhance the apprehension of, or the effect upon, external environments and their inhabitants.

The Greek techne, which encompassed art, craft, skill, technique, and profession—belies a proclivity for material representation or imaging, fabrication and hierarchy.

The Greek dilemma over representation of internal subjective reality using exteriorized, logically constructed symbolic representations and the dichotomy of mind and matter that it introduced to western thought is a legacy of the adoption of writing—the new, disembodied mode of communication.

All communication has an exterior aspect to it but it is significantly different when the message is mediated via a non-living artefact that, after surviving the ravages of time, can be reconstituted in a new time and a new context. This is contrasted with the oral/aural traditions that rely on intergenerational embodiment of messages. Both modes invite significantly different ways of relating to knowledge—one is detached and, literally, “objectified,” whereas the other is embodied and subjective and highly intimate and interpersonal in nature.

To reiterate: the transition from the immediate and intimate modes of acoustic communication into external, disembodied, abstract, imagistic and rigidly “fixed” pictographic/alphabetic modes reveals a trend toward what I call “disembodiment.” Disembodiment constitutes a radical disconnect from the intimate level of communion that embodied living and acoustic and signed communication necessarily requires. It represents the transference of communicative power to an external, material agent and the conferring of innate, powers to these external artefacts.

Lewis Mumford’s notions of how power and pecuniary interests combined with class-based systems of social organization arose in this environment and engrained the material, economic, functional and mechanistic view of human purpose that is predominant in current discourse. The import of this departure from human interest to one of object value cannot be understated.

Social and institutional trends in history, like the adoption of writing, etc., that tend to fix and inflate this notion of material significance in our collective conscious has generated an ever widening chasm between technologically-facilitated humanity and the natural environment.

Notions of the self in relation to community have changed in accordance with this trend and our rational, progress-driven, hierarchal and mechanistic modes of social organization have lead to a general social malaise that reflects deep feelings of alienation and isolation on the part of its members—where the techno-cultural milieu that we have created and empowered, slips from our grasp and takes on a life of its own—subjugating the human condition in servitude to its rapacious and exponential growth (McLuhan, War and Peace in the Global Village).

Jay Early, "Transforming Human Culture" employs an ecosystem approach to demonstrate the need for reintegrating the human enterprise with its natural state. This divorce of modern humanity from what Early refers to as our natural “ground conditions” can be attributed to particular historical social developments articulated by Lewis Mumford in The Myth of the Machine:

“…our age is passing from the primeval state of man, marked by his invention of tools and weapons for the purpose of achieving mastery over the forces of nature, to a radically different condition, in which he will have not only conquered nature, but detached himself as far as possible from the organic habitat.
With this new ‘megatechnics’ the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, [echoed in McLuhan’s War and Peace in the Global Village] designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized, collective organizations.”