Abstract (added by the Editor)
In this chapter the author argues that modern technology rests on the axiom formulated by Giambattista Vico, the famous verum ipsum factum, verum factum convertuntur – we only understand that which we do or realize, or only fully understand all that we do or realize, to the precise extent that we actually do it or realize it. This is a reason-based concept, in the tradition of which we find thinkers such as Vico, Marx, Dewey and Bachelard, asserting the epistemic value of the maker’s knowledge. In this text, Hermínio Martins searches for the epistemological foundations of technical reason, arguing that in the age of cybernetic technologies and bio-engineering, the human being has become the “god of artefacts”.
I can only understand what I can build. (Richard Feynman)
Editor’s note: An extended version of this essay was published in Portuguese in the author’s book entitled Experimentum Humanum: Civilização Tecnológica e Condição Humana [Experimentum Humanum: Technological Civilization and the Human Condition] (Relógio D’Água, Lisboa, 2011, chap. 3, 70–143). There is a longer version of this book published in Brazil in 2012, by Fino Traço. The choice of this essay by Martins, who wrote very extensively on technology, is due to the fact that I regard it as one of his most significant reflections on the foundations of modern technological rationality. Martins’ writings are often long, with convoluted sentences, endless footnotes and extensive annexes. In its printed version, this text is 74 pages long (including footnotes, annex and references).The version offered here includes the most substantial part of the text relating to the topic announced in the title. The omission of the introduction and some sentences, highlighted with square brackets, does not affect the main argument. For further research into Martins’ thought, the English-speaking reader is directed to the festschrift Time, Science and the Critique of Technological Reason: Essays in Honour of Hermínio Martins, ed. J. E. Castro, B. Fowler, and L. Gomes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), in particular the chapter “Hermínio Martins’ philosophical sociology of technology: A short introduction” by J. L. Garcia. I am grateful to Hermínio’s wife, Margaret Martins, for the grant of copyright for publication of the essay in English.
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Notes
- 1.
There are very few occurrences of the expression verum factum in Vico (1968 [1744]), just as the expression “the invisible hand” occurs very few times in Adam Smith, even though it is by far the best known expression in that writer’s corpus. In both cases, however, these expressions acquired considerable resonance, indeed immense resonance in the case of “the invisible hand”, but it has been cited far more often in recent times than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As with the Cartesian cogito, so with verum factum a great deal has been written on its antecedents and (mostly theological) pre-figurations, as is to be expected. For the history of the verum factum philosopheme, see Mondolfo (1969). […].
- 2.
Bryce Gallie reflected on conflict and struggle not only in the intellectual or cognitive field, in his discussion of “essentially contested concepts” as the major concepts in political philosophy (he had previously written about the opposition between liberal and socialist conceptions of justice, a hot topic in the period of the Labour government of 1945–1951 in the UK), but also of war in itself (he fought in World War II as an officer in the British army). […]
- 3.
In Bauman’s book on hermeneutics and the social sciences there is no chapter, and not even a single paragraph on Vico: his name simply does not appear – a truly surprising omission.
- 4.
The most illuminating quotation on this issue is that which appears in paragraph 331 of the first version of the Scienza Nuova, published in 1744: “But in this dense night of darkness, which enshrouds earliest antiquity so distant from us, appears the eternal light, which never sets, of this truth which is beyond any possible doubt: that the civil world itself has certainly been made by men, hence its principles can, because they must, be rediscovered within the modifications of our own human mind. And this must give anyone who reflects upon it cause to marvel how the philosophers have all earnestly endeavoured to attain knowledge of the natural world which, since He made it, God alone knows, and have neglected to meditate upon this world of nations, or civil world, knowledge of which, since men had made it, they could attain” (Tagliacozzo 1983: 65–66).
- 5.
On the topic of felix culpa, which was important at least in the seventeenth century, and crucial in Milton, and which is still used today as an eschatological justification of technology by a Catholic thinker such as Walter Ong, see the classic article by A. O. Lovejoy, included in an edition of his collected essays on the history of ideas (Lovejoy, 1962a, b). […].
- 6.
Perhaps the best and most succinct discussion of generic theories of historicism as metaphysics, ontology and theology (or ontotheology) is Emil Fackenheim’s, in his little book Metaphysics and Historicity, a brief but richly dense study which should be required reading for the study of historicism (Fackenheim, 1961).
- 7.
Marx’s note (note 89), in chapter “Machinery and large-scale industry” in the first volume of Das Kapital: “Spinning machines had already been used before his [John Wyatt’s] time, although very imperfect ones, and Italy was probably the country where they first appeared. A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the eighteenth century are the work of a single individual. As yet such a book does not exist. Darwin directed attention to the history of natural technology, i.e., the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining their life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society, of organs that are the material basis of every particular organization of society, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations. Even a history of religion that is written in abstraction from this material basis is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly kernel of the misty creations of religion than to do the opposite, i.e., to develop from the actual, given relations of life the form in which these have been celestialized. The latter method is the only materialist, and therefore the only scientific one. The weaknesses of the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism which excludes the historical process, are immediately evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions expressed by its spokesman whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality” (Tagliacozzo, 1983: 316).
- 8.
It is curious that despite his brilliant note in Das Kapital, Marx only mentioned Vico three times in works published during his lifetime, manuscripts, and correspondence, although the significant interest in the connections between these two authors’ thought accounts for the fact that a collection a few hundred pages long entitled Vico and Marx (Tagliacozzo, 1983) was published a few years ago. Nevertheless, that note, which is in any event significant, attracted many Marxist writers to Vico (from Lukàcs to Bernal), but few of them openly and unequivocally adopted the line followed by Sorel in interpreting science as essentially techno-science, no doubt mainly on account of the Leninist orthodoxy set out in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, which became the great epistemological manual of the Marxist-Leninist vulgate […].
- 9.
On Kapp see Martins (2011a).
- 10.
“Philosophers have merely interpreted the world in different ways; the issue, however, is how to transform it”. […].
- 11.
The clearest and most astute discussion of the reciprocal implications of classical Marxism and today’s environmental thinking seems to me to be that of the philosopher Jonathan Hughes (2000), which deserves to be better known and studied.
- 12.
For Anaxagoras, the hand had created Man, for Aristotle, Man had generated the human hand. For Engels, work had humanized the human hand. On the history of philosophical thought on the human hand, see Brun (1961).
- 13.
This is a paraphrase of the introduction to Daniel P. Todes’ book on Pavlov’s physiology factory-laboratory (Todes, 2002).
- 14.
On this topic, see Martins (2011b).
- 15.
- 16.
These theories were commonplace at the time, and Cournot had already made these points. It continues to be asserted today that biological development has stagnated, and that it falls to humans to induce it rationally, according to the best interventionist techniques. However, biotic evolution is proceeding rapidly at the micro-biological level, with superbugs regularly emerging in the space of a few years, or in one or two decades at the most, in response to antibiotics and anti-virals (with a pseudo-Lamarckian rate of mutations which have already been dubbed “hyper-mutations”) which are being invented, and superweeds in response to the biocides (pesticides, fungicides) which are being applied in agriculture in crazy quantities. A recent study on this topic offers many examples (Palumbi, 2001). […].
- 17.
See Martins (2011a).
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
Not to be confused with his brother, the neo-liberal economist Ludwig von Mises.
- 21.
Related, moreover, to the concept of “pseudomorphosis”, which Marx mentioned in passing, and which Spengler, Lewis Mumford, and E. Panofsky, amongst others, drew on considerably in their studies of the morphology of cultures, the history of technology, and the history of art, respectively (Martins, 2009).
- 22.
Editor’s note: In the original version of this text, Martins writes here “(Martins, 1998)”, but, inadvertently, does not provide the reference. However, taking into consideration the topic and the year at stake, the reference should be Martins, 2011e (this text was originally published in two parts: the first in December 1997/January 1998 and the second in June/July 1998).
- 23.
Popper found the term “ontology” repugnant. It was only “naturalised” very late in analytical philosophy by Quine, taking on the meaning which philosopher of science Émile Meyerson had given it, of a more general conceptual schematization of things as they are, and not in the traditional sense of an a priori discourse on being and beings.
- 24.
This is a technological aspect of great interest to contemporary artists, who always love technological novelties. However, decades before the biolytic revolution many artists had shown a very particular interest in the symbioses of the organic and the inorganic, of human beings and machines, as images of the future or revelations of reality. This was true of the Italian Futurists, Nazi Germany and the USSR in the first decade after the October revolution, when avant-garde artists were fascinated by the aesthetic-revolutionary possibilities of “fusion”, symbiosis, or the union of “flesh and steel”, of the body and the machine (starting out with synaesthesia, the feeling that, for example, in the heroic era of aviation before 1914 the pilot felt “as one” with his plane). This became a rhetorical figure for artists, and later an apocalyptic image of a new type of almost-human being, a mechanical-biological “chimera”. In the Soviet case there was a fashion for defining it as a duty of industrial workers to imitate machines and their rhythms, to achieve greater productivity. This was preached by propagandizing poets in extended campaigns throughout the vast territories of the USSR. Even ballet was inspired to do this, although machine ballet was in fact not very successful (all this preceded Chaplin’s satire in the film Modern Times).
- 25.
See Martins (2011c). Generally speaking, this is by no means an idiosyncratic view among today’s scientists, other than in the details, but it is impossible to say to what extent it has been disseminated by the Nobel Prizes for Science, for example, or among the more influential ranks of the Academies. A topic possibly to be addressed by surveys in “experimental philosophy”, a branch of philosophy much in vogue.
- 26.
A term coined by the writer W. Gibson, much used by enthusiasts of the globalizing implications of information technologies. For many progressive publicists of the nineteenth century, the hive served as an excellent model for the collective in action, as evidenced by the titles of various publications.
- 27.
On this topic, see Martins (2011d).
- 28.
See Martins (2011e).
- 29.
“Second Creation” has served as the title of various works by today’s scientists, for example the biologist whose name became associated with the most famous animal clone, Dolly.
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Martins, H. (2023). The God of Artefacts: Vico’s Principle and Technology. In: Jerónimo, H.M. (eds) Portuguese Philosophy of Technology. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 43. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14630-5_3
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