Vitalist technocratism in the times of materialist idealism

(on the philosophy of technology by Piotr Engelmeier in pre- and early Soviet Russia)

Olga Goriunova

og@dxlab.org

* This paper was written for re:place 2007 conference in Berlin. It is intended as notes for the speech and not as a stand-alone article.

Piotr Engelmeier (1855-1942), a Russian of a German origin, was among the first thinkers in Russia to research the role of technology as a cultural factor. An engineer by profession, he got inspired by a concept of philosophy of technology, originating from writings of a number of German and French philosophers of the late XIXth century, and set out to develop it further to suggest a means of understanding the human being, society and culture through their relation to technical action, object and environment. Engelmeier lectured in technical schools and published numerous articles and books on the matter. In 1911 he presented a paper at the IVth International Philosophical Congress in Bologna, along with such a philosopher as Henri Bergson, whose influence on Engelmeier could never since evaporate.

In the years 1912-1913-s he published a series of books under the general title Philosophy of Technology in which he accounted for the contemporary philosophy and set out to establish the foundations for a philosophy of technology [Engelmeier 1912-1, 1912-2, 1913]. In the late 1920-s Engelmeier led a corresponding study group within the Polytechnic society of All-union Association of Engineers (AAE). In 1929 he survived a campaign against philosophy of technology and ceased his philosophical career; AAE was liquidated.

If one is to embark on an adventure to find a ’logic’ behind banning theories in the Soviet Russia, she has to accept that such a ‘logic’ is rooted in playful transformations within a dichotomic opposition of materialism versus idealism, where neither element of the pair has any fixed meaning attached to it. Moreover, such-like general dynamics of opposing and fusing together of materialist and idealist systems of interpretation, construction and propagation, largely detached from any specific philosophical history or content, seems to be one of the key factors behind not only acceptance and fate of theories and human beings, but of the societal and historic dynamics of a number of countries in the XXth century, Soviet Union could serve only one example of.

The body of theory produced by Piotr Engelmeier is of interest for it represents not any specific hidden and forgotten ‘treasure’ but rather retrospectively sheds light on sets of trends, motifs, and patterns constituting some of the backbones of cultural processes of his and subsequent times. The ‘materialist – idealist’ dynamics is one of the magnifying centres, around which his body of work evolved.

Engelmeier’s theoretical pathway can roughly be described as structured by the three stages. His first works demonstrate engagement with understanding the system and origin of the technical invention [Engelmeier 1898]. Then this trend develops towards setting out to understand technical creativity at large, the creativity of everyday, and creativity that creates the material culture that acts as an ecology within which a human being is to exist [Engelmeier 1910, 1911]. Developing a culturalist approach to technology, Engelmeier then proceeds to establishing philosophy of technology as a new discipline describing a human being as a technical being, and suggesting ‘technicism’ as a title for such an endeavour [Engelmeier 1912-1, 1912-2, 1913].

During the first phase Engelmeier develops the criteria that would allow for the evaluation of the success of technology, defines what technology is and classifies it, describes its relationship to the forces of nature, conceptualises the power and accumulation of power and so on. It is in the early 1900-s that he develops a theory of technical creativity that further lays grounds for his technicism.

Engelmeier starts off by approaching creativity and inventiveness ‘formally’, describing its constitutive elements, conditions under which it develops to the fullest and systems of education through which student engineers can be taught to create.

Creativity / surmise / inventiveness for Engelmeier is a basic, finest and intimate ability of human beings. Engelmeier describes creativity as consisting of three acts, creation of an idea (hypothesis, concept) rooted in the sphere of the intuitive and the desire, developing the idea into a plan (system, construction, form, model) and carrying out of the plan (constructive implementation, accomplishment of a plan, proof of a hypothesis). Such three-act theory of creativity, arising from the area of the instinctive, from the sphere of the ‘vital’, of the intuition, and ‘ascending‘ (for Engelmeier) into the sphere of conscious work is applicable, according to his model, to any creative act [Engelmeier 1910, 18].

Then, for Engelmeier, all human activity is saturated and based on creativity. He suggests that all human activity can be structured through four major types of work: scientific, moral/ethical, artistic and technical [Engelmeier 1913, 50]. There is a specific type of creativity that corresponds to every of these areas:

‘...in science as well as in art and technology, we find a creative element: science creates new thoughts, art creates new figures, technology creates new things. The creatures of science are called discoveries, the creatures of art are called art pieces and the creatures of technology are called inventions [Engelmeier 1898, 88]’. The moral/ethical creativity, or ‘creativity in religion’ as it is called elsewhere, according to Engelmeier, is based on revelation, whose nature is claimed to be identical with that of intuition, surmise, ‘jump over the logical void’ that is core to any kind of creativity (see below) [Engelmeier 1910, 60].

Specifically, if the second two phases of creativity (development and implementation) are distinctively different in different areas of human activity, the first (the level of the idea) represents a common ground that allows uniting all types of activity.

‘…without the moment of pure creation, without intuition there is no invention, that we understand as new purposeful combination of materials known earlier [Engelmeier 1925, 32]’. ‘.. in this process (creativity) we shall recognize a revelation, a jump over a logical void. This is intuition’ [ibid., 60].

Thus, intuition / surmise / vital energy becomes the basis of his theory of a human action and a society, his technicism.

Moreover, since Engelmeier describes creativity as a process that is ascending, from an idea to its implementation, aimed at fulfilling certain ‘goals’, in a determinist and mechanistic manner that allows only success or failure, his theory of creativity lays ground for a ‘technocratic’ understanding of the nature of all human activities. Curiously contradictory as it is, his ‘technocratic’ theory of a human being (who is aimed at setting out and achieving certain goals) is rooted in a specific version of vitalism and based on the concept of intuition / revelation / surmise / inventiveness, as understood in specific ways. This core statement characterizing Engelmeier’s theory I am going to better explain now.

Engelmeier generally describes technicism as a trend of philosophy that is focused on creating a theory of ‘life’, of human activity as a theory of a technical activity that is at the same time essentially a creative activity.

To start with, a human being is able to influence her natural habitat, the environment, adjusting it to her needs. The ability to come up with a need, a goal and work towards achieving it, thus, making a change on a ‘landscape’, is the basis for describing a human being as a technical being. The aim of technology is to adjust the environment to the human needs [Engelmeier 1910, 88]. As ‘technology’, in its pure meaning, for Engelmeier, signifies a component in every human activity - a component that is a means of achieving anything [Engelmeier 1898, 42-44], every human activity is ‘technical’, and every human being is a ‘technical human being’.

For Engelmeier, any human action is susceptible of rational formalisation as he believes any ‘action’ stands for carrying out of a certain intention that is not only a subjective intention, but is an ‘objective’ performance of a ‘fight with nature’, which constitutes ‘practical life’. Engelmeier maintains that a human being always acts, that basically means ‘to live’, but practical life never interested philosophers [Engelmeier 1913, 31]. So Engelmeier enquires, what philosophy encounters if it approaches practical life. And he finds that it is a technical human being emerged in practical life that becomes the new subject of philosophy.

This is a point where a curious junction of technicality and creativity takes place in Engelmeier’s theory. For him, a human being is essentially a technical being capable of fulfilling her goals in various areas of life. But since, for him, everyday life and different spheres of human action is primarily rooted in creative acts, and specifically the technical action is essentially creative in the way it is perceived and carried out as he specifies in his theory of technical creativity (see above), he to an extent equates the technical and the creative, with the technical ‘growing out’ of the creative (a larger domain, linking into some ‘dark’ unconsciousness).

Engelmeier explains: a technisist is someone who understands that one cannot live by ‘pure mind’ or ‘pure ethics’, but actively engages with life. A technological being is capable to, first, set out aims and, second, achieve them. To research the means of achieving aims, to research a human being in action are the goals of technicism [Engelmeier 1913, 11]. At the same time, a human being that acts, does in fact create, as technical act is based on the exercise of creativity. And creativity is, in turn, rooted in intuition. Thus, technical means creative [Engelmeier 1912-2, 89-94], and turns out to be rooted in the ‘vitalism’ of the intuitive.

‘..intuition underlies our mind, as vital cosmic force’ [ibid., 21], ‘world thinks in us by an instinct, under our consciousness in the dark fundamentals of our souls’’ [ibid., 21], ‘the potential for creativity lies outside conscious’ [Engelmeier 1910, 154-155].

Engelmeier creates a curious fusion of Bergson-inspired and very loosely Bergson–related ‘intuitivism’ with technocratic thinking; he attempts to get beyond the crisis of positivism and idealism and lay foundation for some material-rooted account of the processes that however should not be subsumed, in his opinion, to mere ‘material side of culture’ (what he criticises Marxist thinking for) [Engelmeier 1910, 197-200]. (Building a philosophical genealogy for his ‘intuition’, he brings in the concepts of a ‘categorical imperative’ of Kant, ‘lumières naturelles’ of Descartes and Pascal, and ‘intuitivism’ by Henri Bergson without managing to explain his own concept of intuition or build insightful conceptual connections to any of the concepts mentioned above [Engelmeier 1912-1]. )

Engelmeier is an idealistic technocrat, who believes technology is an engine of any progress, whose main pre-condition, however, rests in human intuition, ‘dark vitalism’ and creativity. He believes it is the engineers who should govern the state (a point that once mentioned is never further developed) [Engelmeier 1915], but who first should develop their creative capacities, surrender to their intuition.

Engelmeier’s version of the philosophy of technology could not stay in line with the Communist Party politics regarding the role of engineers in the society.

In the magazine Engineer Labour in January 1929 an open debate between Engelmeier and his critic, some Markov was published [Engelmeier 1929]. Engelmeier suggested a long article ‘Do we need philosophy of technology?’ where he summarised his life-long work attempting to persuade his fellow engineers in a necessity to think technology as a creative and everyday endeavour, to interpret culture as a technological environment throughout. He mentions that an engineer should rather be someone with a broad horizon of experience, than a manager-Party member, suspicious of a specialist [Engelmeier 1929, 39]. It is surprising such wording did not cost him a life.

The opponent’s article entirely ‘destroys’ Engelmeier. Markov claims that philosophy of technology is not only beyond what is needed, it is merely ‘impossible’ [Markov 1929, 40-42]. From the position of the ‘dialectical materialism’, philosophy of technology should have looked for the roles technology played in the class struggle. Development of technology is interesting for the Soviet Academia as far as it contributes to the change of the social order. ‘We are not for any technology’ [Markov 1929, 40-42]. (((Since engineers do not belong to the progressive class of the proletariat, they cannot be able to lay ground for any progressive culture, and should only serve the proletariat and make sure they understand its ideas right.)))

For the dialectical materialism, Engelmeier is truly ‘idealistic’ in his culturalist approach. Engelmeier’s ethos of an engineer, as of a creative individual building an environment that influences back and defines society and culture is not at all in line with the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The reason and the engine of ‘life’ for him rest primarily in human beings (not in the mode of production); he is interested in everyday life organised by the material layer of technology as the basic condition of human existence. Philosophy of technology is not possible because it departs not from the context of the class struggle but from the ideas of creativity, intuition, technology and culture not rooted in any straightforwardly Marxist category.

Engelmeier regards technology as a potentiality of any productive activity. His technology is a tool and a potential for a creative action, for an improvement on usefulness, based on intuition, and emanating from an individual. He understands technology as an environment, as an engine of movement and as a potential at the same time concluding it directly from some ‘vitalist’ energies.

The logics behind the critique of Engelmeier’s thinking is repeated in many Soviet ‘trials’ and can be found behind many accounts of theory banning.

In a quite integral but deeply schizophrenic way, Soviet academics had to regard technology and, later, media systems in Marxist-Leninist fashion, as conditioned by the overall mode of material production and at the same time exclusively through idealism, as serving ‘spiritual’ growth, ‘educating’ by appealing to the ‘classic’ retrograde aesthetics and ethics. Dialectical materialism forced academics to claim primacy of socio-technical relations of production to ideological systems. But when it had to come down from the general claims to practical analysis, they could not but focus on ideological ‘content’, ignoring its materiality, the materiality of the technology and media systems, as its analysis would have demonstrated the mechanisms of the Soviet propaganda.

Cornelius Castoriadis suggests that dialectical materialism turns out to be the most naïve idealism in its attempts to reduce the entirety of human history to the result of one factor that then is necessarily divorced from its context and becomes a pure abstraction of the order of ideas [Castoriadis 2003, 28]. In such a system, the possibility of the ‘materialist’, energetic accounts and actions depends entirely on the existence or the appearance of existence of a valid theory, an idea [ibid., 84].

Engelmeier’s desire to marry the materiality of the technical environment and human creativity emerging from the unconscious (((poorly exercised))) somewhat tragically interplays with the failures of the Soviet version of Marxism in its attempts to arrange the materiality of the idea. Philosophy of technology is banned for its ‘idealism’ by the essentially idealist system, preparing a gap in thinking technology culturally of over 50 years.

Bibliography:

Bergson, H. (1998). Tvorcheskaja evolutsija. [L’évolusion créatrice] Moskva, Kanon-press

Engelmeier, P.K. (1898). Tekhnicheskij itog XIX veka. [Technical sum of the XIX century]. Moskva, Tipografija K.A.Kaznachejeva

Engelmeier, P.K. (1910). Teorija tvorchestva. S predislovijami D.N.Ovsianiko-Kulikovskogo i Ernsta Makha. [Theory of creativity]. S.-Petersburg, Obrazovanije

Engelmeier, P.K. (1911). Tvorcheskaya lichnost’ i sreda v oblasti tekhnicheskikh izobretenij. [Creative individual and context in the sphere of technical innovation]. S.-Petersburg, Obrazovanije

Engelmeier, P.K. (1912-1). Filosofija tekhniki. Vypusk 2. Sovremennaja filosofija. [Philosophy of technology. Ed. 2. Contemporary philosophy] Moskva

Engelmeier, P.K. (1912-2). Filosofija tekhniki. Vypusk 3. [Philosophy of technology. Ed. 3] Moskva, Nasha zhizn’

Engelmeier, P.K. (1913). Filosofija tekhniki. Vypusk 4. Technizism. [Philosophy of technology. Ed. 4. Technicism] Moskva

Engelmeier, P.K. (1915). V zasshitu obssikh idej v tekhnike. [Defending the general ideas of technology] in Vestnik inzhenerov, T.1 # 3, 1 Fevralia, Moskva

Engelmeier, P.K. (1925). Kak nado i kak ne nado izeobretat’. Konspect lekzij s diapositivami. [How we should and should not invent. Lecture notes]. Moskva, Izdatel’stvo VZSPS

Engelmeier, P.K. (1929). ‘Nuzhna li nam filosofija tekhniki?’ [Do we need philosophy of technology?] In Inzhenernyj trud, # 2, 15 Janvarja, Moskva

Castoriadis, C. (2003). Voobrazhaemoje ustanovlenije obsshestva. [L’institution imaginaire de la société] Moskva, Gnosis – Logos

Markov B. (1929). ‘V filosofii li delo?’ [Is it a matter of philosophy?] In Inzhenernyj trud, # 2, 15 Janvarja, Moskva

Medvedev, P. (Bakhtin, M.) (1928). Formal’nyi metod v literaturovedenii. Kriticheskoje vvedenije v sociologicheskuju poetiku. [Formal method in literary studies. A critical introduction to sociological poetics] in Bakhtin, M. Tetralogija. M, Labirint, 1998

Such as: Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik, 1877; Alfred Espinas, Les origins de la Technologie, 1897; Fred Bon, Ueber das Sollen und das Gute, 1898.