Technique, Discourse, and Consciousness - Paperback

by David Lovekin (Author)

This study examines the French thinker Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) and his historical, biblical, and social analyses of how technology manipulates and impoverishes modern thought, culture, and language. In the spirit of Georg Hegel and Ernst Cassirer, Ellul explores how technology begins in myths, stories, and religion, advances to tools, and then develops into data, algorithms, and abstract systems which are detached from human bodies and communities. Efficiency then becomes an absolute in all areas of human life, and the mentality of technique becomes lost in its creations. These modern symbols, posing as ultimate human goods and values, are denigrated by technique, leaving humanity awash in cliches, in groundless social media, and in blathering slogans that sustain the illusion that politics and culture have now become.

Author Biography

David Lovekin is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Hastings College, Nebraska. He is co-translator of Jacques Ellul's The Empire of Non-Sense: Art in the Technological Society, and co-editor of Political Illusion and Reality: Engaging the Prophetic Insights of Jacques Ellul. He has published numerous essays that deal with technology as a problem for a philosophy of culture and its symbolic forms. He is a contributing editor of the Ellul Forum and a member of the International Jacques Ellul Society.