On Dreams, Human Imagination, and Technology

Abstract

In this paper, I reflect on human imagination, the intention of technology, and the future of humanity in the era of the Anthropocene. I begin by presenting the environmental crisis and declare a need to protect and safeguard nature. In the first part, I offer an explanation of a dream of an airliner and link it to the Bachelardian theory of aerial imagination and oneiric flight. I show how, today, technology has entered our lives profoundly and how it has become closely intertwined with us human beings. Based on this, the second part is dedicated to Martin Heidegger and his question concerning technology. By analyzing Heidegger’s seminal essay on technology, I argue for an alternative possibility of thinking about human artefacts (such as various tools or even an airliner) beyond them being merely a standing-reserve and thus rather as a mode of unconcealement. The third and last part of this essay is dedicated to Ilia Delio’s Teilhardian cosmic vision of the future of technological progress. Technology, for Delio, is a part of this cosmic narrative and human beings represent the thinking portion of the universe. I conclude with a thought on a new elemental consciousness and imagination, in which nature, its life force, and the most advanced technology, including AI, would become a part of a new panentheistic whole.

1. Introduction

The impending environmental crisis, with its signs of coming climate-related catastrophes on our planet, requires us to reopen our cosmological, ontological, and theological archives and inquire into nature’s past in order to be able to secure its and actually our future. It seems that gods have withdrawn from their presence into the shades of this world and its spacetime, such that humanity is left alone for the task of its survival. To address the current environmental crisis on the planet Earth, and to offer a proper cosmological and theological response, it is thus necessary to rekindle the elemental presence of life and to call upon gods to help us to recover the primeval cosmological matrix of the Earth and of the living. So much is needed in these times. The Earth and all its life subsist on an elemental–material nexus. We are materially elementary intermingled with the physical environment and to forget this means also to forget the ontological grounds on which any living being subsists (likewise to undertake a path of elevating a human being above Earth and all creation). This is one of the key reasons for the fall of humanity into the catastrophe of the Anthropocene, in which, as it seems, the only god left is a human being with its insatiable will to power over nature, its elements, and other living beings. As God needed the assistance of humanity during and after the evils of Auschwitz—this is exemplified by Etty Hillesum in her diary entry from 12 July 1942: “You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last” (Pleshoyano 2005, p. 14)—today, nature needs to be defended and safeguarded by us and with the help of gods given the danger of the impending environmental and anthropogenic catastrophe. As a part of this urgent question of the future of humanity on the Earth, the question of technology and AI arises as one of the key components of this turn. Since the invention of the first tools, our predecessors have attempted to adjust the environment to the more and more advanced needs of the human race—from the first use of stones and sharpened wooden weapons to the most advanced technological inventions and ChatGPT—the evolutionary potential of homo sapiens is indeed seemingly unlimited. It now seems that the use of technology has replaced ancient cosmological and religious views about nature and its dance of elements. But we are now at the precipice of a danger: a turn will be needed and Ilia Delio recognizes that “to build the earth is another way to talk about the flourishing of life” (Delio 2020, p. xviii). Moreover, the task of rebuilding of the elemental relationship with the Earth and its materially spiritual core (in a Teilhardian sense) will be a religious adventure, but now in a new, future-oriented way, with Delio: “If religion means connecting to ultimate wholeness, and AI is seeking to hyper-connect toward seamless unity, then religion is at the heart of AI” (ibid.). This double question of technology and religion, it seems, might indeed be one of the key questions of our world, and, perhaps, a key impetus for its survival.

This paper is an attempt to think through technology as related to its elemental and evolutionary core. In the first part, we are following an imaginative dream of an airliner and link it to the Bachelardian philosophy of imagination. The second part is entirely dedicated to Heidegger’s question concerning technology. The third part of this paper is about Ilia Delio and her powerful Teilhardian cosmic vision of the future of technological progress. Finally, the aim of this paper is to reconnect with the elemental consciousness and imagination, in which nature and technology would become a part of a new panentheistic whole.

2. A Dream of Technology

Let me introduce this essay with a peculiar or “mystical” experience that I had on an airplane a few years ago: an experience that relates to the question concerning technology. While cruising with the huge airliner over the surface of the Earth, I had an impression as if we all—the passengers, crew, and the airliner—were a part of a larger whole, a mysteriously revealed intention of humanity. This whole—technology and flesh being mysteriously yet visibly intertwined during the flight—seemed to me as incarnated in the airliner now, and I intuitively sensed that our strange community is impregnated with the intention of a love of Christ. Even more, I “sensed” the airliner as one, with the flesh-intertwined technological being, as a gentle undulation (or energy) of the cosmic Christ. Let me now try to explain this strange personal experience.1

Firstly, we might ask why did I see the airplane as embedded with love? One answer could be that any passenger airplane is heavily impregnated with many particular thoughts, even rituals. As a technological ‘device,’ it brings people together, but, more importantly, its place is filled with our most elemental hopes (and fears, no doubt). Also, on a different level, if we listen to Gaston Bachelard and his Air and Dreams, one of his four elemental books, the dream of flight is most directly linked to the vectoral nature of our psyche (Bachelard 2011, p. 21). Bachelard calls this type of a dream as “oneiric flight” (i.e., meaning the dream of flying). Bachelard states himself that thanks to the airplane, “human flight ceased to be an absurdity” (ibid., p. 25), but still, he also adds that long before real aerostats were actually invented, humans have already dreamed vividly of flying. So, he wishes to go deeper to explain this phenomenon (I must also contend that in my youth, I also had a series of vivid oneiric dreams. I could indeed fly as I was a bird, or even as an airplane, but without wings, as also Bachelard clearly states). But Bachelard then comes to the main point of his interpretation of this dream. He states

A good sleep is one in which we are rocked or carried, and the imagination is well aware that we are rocked and carried by something and not by someone. While asleep we inhabit a Cosmos; we are rocked by water; we are carried in the air and by the air—which we breathe according to the rhythm of our own breath. This is the sleep of childhood, or at least the peaceful sleep of youth when nocturnal life so often hears an invitation to travel, to undertake an infinite voyage.

(ibid., p. 36)

We all are cosmic passengers, it seems. Whether in our dreams, or in our everyday lives (including being on a transatlantic flight with an airliner), the high hopes and expectations underly our entangled and interconnected lives. An airplane flight seems to be one of the most profound distillations of these dreams—with its specific, as it were, possibility of an ontology of the flight, or its specific form of aerial imagination that constitutes it. But today, technology has entered our lives even more profoundly, and with the recent developments, it became even more closely intertwined with the flesh of the world—us human beings. Finally, to somehow alleviate the possible doubts around this dream and its interpretation, let me add another passage from Bachelard now as he quotes from Louis Cazamanian’s commentary of Shelley’s “Eolian Harp”. He states “Shelley’s whole being vibrates with the thousand sensory impulses that nature sends out in that ‘ideal breath of air’ that could be both the soul of every being and the God of Everything” (ibid., p. 45). Perhaps it was just my imagination that wanted to see more as it really was during this flight. Perhaps I was only another aerial dreamer, now taken literally. But as John Caputo would say about his dream in The Insistence of God,

I dream of learning how to say “perhaps.” I have the same dream, night after night, of a tolle, lege experience, in which I open a book—I cannot make out the title—always to the same sentence, “Peut-être—il faut toujours dire peut-être pour …” In the morning I cannot remember the rest of the sentence. (…) Perhaps unhinges us from the real, making the impossible possible. (…) Whenever and wherever there is a change for the event, that is God, perhaps.

(Caputo 2013, pp. 3, 7, and 9)

Perhaps there was an event on that airplane, and, perhaps, there was even Christ, or at least a ghost of a change—perhaps—I do not know. But what is certain is that it is a question concerning technology that haunts us today.

3. An Intention of Technology

We can now approach the question of technology. It can be argued that technology is the most important topic for Martin Heidegger. As claimed by Albert Borgman, “The technological culture is for Heidegger the decisive environment of humans in the late modern era, and their most fundamental welfare defends on their ability to pass through technology into another kind of world” (Borgman 2005, p. 420). In 1877, Ernst Kapp published Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik (Outline for a Philosophy of Technology) and with the First World War the question of technology became topical. Many European philosophers started to think about technology (such as Ortega y Gasset, Nikolai Berdjajev, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, and Ernst Casirrer) and Heidegger was of course aware of this trend (Ruin 2016, p. 353). “The Question Concerning Technology” from 1954 is his main essay on this. But Heidegger’s interest in technology started earlier: in 1922, he composed an article on Aristotle and this article contains remarks on the nature of the technical. In his main work from this period, Being and Time (1927), Heidegger does not explicitly mention techne or technology. But he still makes a distinction between “genuine reflection on method” and “empty discussion of technology” (ibid., p. 355). This already indicates his later conviction that we need to find a new way towards thinking of being through technology and, of course, beyond Cartesian substance ontology. In the 1930s, we see another stage in the development of this thought as the essence of a modern human is encapsulated in the concept of “machination” (Machenschaft, also “coercive force, power, mastery”). In his works from this period—Contributions to Philosophy, History of Beyng and Mindfulness—Heidegger deals with machination and its avatars—force, power, violence, and the like—as the basis of the predominant worldview of his time and at the same time as the fundamental effect of Western metaphysics. He states “Rather, the name should immediately point to making (poiesis, techne), which we of course recognize as a human comportment” (Heidegger 1999, p. 88). Against the domination of machination, Heidegger now introduces a new term, new “domination” (Herrschaft), now in the form of the cháris (mildness) of being. However, this new mode of domination is for now still in some relation to power and thus not yet fully revealed:

Whoever rules over power is sovereign. A mere “yes” to power as the essence of actuality is the basest form of slavery. The one who transforms its essence is sovereign master of power. Such transformation springs from beyng alone. And eventually beings come before beyng and must fathom the ground and commencement of their truth in beyng and—reach into the abyss of ground.

He then continues: “Propriation and the gentleness of supreme sovereignty, which does not require power or ‘struggle’, but originary critical setting apart. Power-less holding sway” (Heidegger 2015, pp. 8 and 20). In Mindfulness, machination means “the makability of beings which produces as well as makes up everything, such that only in this makability the being-ness of being that are abandoned by be-ing (and grounding of its truth) determines itself” (Heidegger 2016, p. 11). It is therefore clear that humanity must enter another stage of its historical development—beyond machination and power. The history of being and its metaphysics have thus reached its final destination—not only as related to the climate crisis and the Anthropocene but also—as WW2 showed—with the Holocaust (the production of corpses) and nuclear weapons, being able to destroy life on Earth2. But he recognized already in the 1930s that we need to rethink the question of technology and “The Question Concerning Technology” from 1954 is the most cited philosophical work in the field of technology today.

In this lecture (later published as an essay), Heidegger identifies technology as a form of enframing (das Ge-stell, or “framework”) with standing-reserve (das Bestand) as a mark of the modern technological world. Heidegger recognizes that we can hope for another beginning only after we are able to rethink the very essence of technology. According to him, “[t]echnology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealement take place, where aletheia, truth, happens” (Ibid., p. 319). But the mode of revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenge (Herausforderung) that puts to nature the insatiable demand for energy—and thus makes it as a supply for humans. This is quite opposite from an old preindustrial elemental and peasant way of using technology (as in the case of a windmill, which, according to Heidegger, “does not unlock the energy from the air currents in order to store it” (Ibid., p. 320)) since the industrial revolution technology is only understood as exploiting raw materials (not understood as the ancient elements anymore) and energies of nature3. If we return to our airliner now, this is how it is designated by Heidegger:

Yet an airliner that stands on the runway is surely an object. Certainly. We can represent the machine so. But then it conceals itself as to what and how it is. Revealed it stands on the taxi strip only as standing-reserve, inasmuch as it is ordered to insure the possibility of transportation.

(Ibid., p. 322)

The airliner is, as it were, on call for duty, and ready for takeoff. But to move on toward our main topic, because of his death in 1976, Heidegger did not see the rise of the modern microcomputer. He of course saw the rise of the informatics and cybernetics and in his writings “information retrieval systems” and “language machines” (Sprechmachine) are mentioned (Heim 1993, chp. 5, pp. 55–72). But for Heidegger, now in an elemental sense of the natural philosophy of Presocratics, already physis as bringing-forth (such as in case of the bursting of a blossom) is a mode of poiesis. This pure, as it were, pre-technological intention is not present in the work of an artisan as bringing-forth is not present in itself anymore but in another (en allo)—the very craftsman or an artist. Yet, “[t]echne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poetic” (Heidegger 2008, p. 318) (remember now our airliner and, perhaps, a possibility of its revealing as an unconcealement, as shown earlier in the above citation). Based on this, Gestell (framework, enframing) reveals as a name for the essence of modern technology, for all the usages and misusages of technology by human beings. Enframing means, for Heidegger, “the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve” (Ibid., p. 325). This now is the highest danger: [e]nframing blocks the shining-forth and holding sway of truth (…) Technology is not demonic; but its essence is mysterious”. But, with Hölderlin, for Heidegger, “But where the danger is, grows/The saving power also” (Ibid., p. 333)4.

There is a possibility, perhaps, to save us, and our Earth, from destruction. Technology in its essence is therefore nothing demonical. But when its poietical (orelemental) core is blocked, or veiled by the powers of machination, it can reveal as the most destructive and demonic power imaginable.5 This ambiguous essence of technology is what is now designated as the “stellar course of the mystery” by Heidegger and the question of technology is “the question concerning the constellation in which revealing and concealing, in which the essential unfolding of truth propriates” (Ibid., p. 358). There is another possibility, perhaps: it is already visible in the realm of art.

Are we capable of another imagination and of a dream, in which technology would be brought back to its elemental poietic milieu?

4. A Future of Technology

In her paper “Why Technology is Our Future” (Delio 2023), Ilia Delio (a theologian who is both a Franciscan sister and a Teilhardian) presents us with a fascinating idea of the future in which technology (especially computers and AI) will reveal as an inherent part of our evolution. I will first briefly outline some of her ideas from her books Re-Enchanting the Earth (Delio 2020) and The Unbearable Wholeness of Being (Delio 2013).

For Delio, love is unmistakably the fundamental energy of evolution. For her, beginning with the Big Bang cosmology through quantum reality and biological formation, “love shows itself as explicit God-consciousness in the person of Jesus and the continuation of Jesus in evolution” (Delio 2013, p. xxiv). As a panenetheist, Delio believes that religion belongs to the cosmos, and not to a human person alone—also that the God is the living wholeness of reality; God is in matter and matter is in God, for Delio, and God thus is the “supranatural center of everything that exists” (Ibid., p. 69). This is how she explains this cosmic mystery using Teilhardian language:

If God is in the heart of this psychical, evolving cosmos, then love is the energy that makes everything precious and alive. God is the ultimate wholeness and depth of love, the inner Omega of everything from the smallest quark to the largest galaxy. Because divine love is totally other-centered, the whole cosmos is a theophany, a revelation of God’s glory. (…) There too we discover that we are not strangers in this evolving universe. We are its future.

(Ibid., pp. 69 and 91)

Now, based on her Teilhardian evolutionary (and generally optimistic) outlook, technology, for Delio, is a part of this cosmic narrative.6 Human beings represent the thinking portion of the universe. Delio would suggest that it is precisely the technology that is bringing us to the next level of evolution wherein the human person will become a global terrestrian. Of course, she is fully aware of both dangers as well as ambiguities of this relationship between human beings and technology, especially computers. The world of intersubjectivity (with proximity, empathy, compassion, and care) and our natural dwellings with all the related sensible capacities (such as sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing/listening, reading, and so forth) might diminish or even be critically endangered in this process. But Delio would still like to dream or imagine of another future.7 Relating also to Heidegger and his explanation of techne as bringing-forth, Delio sees shells of clams and snails already as “a kind of technology dressed in biological clothing” (Delio 2023, p. 216). The same holds for human beings, and Delio relates to Peter Cariani here: from eyeglasses to microscopes and telescopes and sensors to explore other planets, all these are extensions of our senses. Technological devices, such as an airplane, are extensions of our bodies’ effectors, carrying us from one place to another. Finally, systems of writing (Heidegger’s “language machine”), memory systems, and generally, computer technology with the most advanced AI are all extensions of our mind. We are thus, already from the very beginning of the stone age technology, always something more than human. Only humans can dream of the future; for this purpose, we create technology and bring alternative worlds that we have imagined into being. We are unlimited and godlike (“the human person is God-in-the-making” (Ibid., p. 226)) as it were, and are able to act both in creative as well as in destructive ways. Now, for Delio (as well as for Teilhard, who has witnessed only the earliest attempts of new computer technology),

Computer technology is integral to the evolution of conscious wholeness because it advances the evolution on the level of extended mind. Technology is a part of the flow of evolutionary becoming; it reflects an awakening and growing cosmos. It is not outside the human person; rather technology conveys the human longing to define itself by rearranging the world, challenging the biological limits of suffering and death, and revealing the insatiable desire to know the unknown.

(Ibid., p. 221)

Clearly, technology can both be divine and demonic, futuristic, and dystopian. In an optimistic sense, it can, as it were, belong to God and guide us towards the Teilhardian Omega point. Being fascinated with computer technology, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was convinced it can contribute towards achieving the next level of evolution: for him, technology indeed has its role in the birthing of God in evolution—we may add—of the earliest formation of matter to the most complex quantum computer, made and consisting of the matter (minerals). It is in this view fascinating to read the following excerpt on the elemental philosophy and its relation technology from Marko Pogačnik’s The Universe of the Human Body:

In suppressing the things and beings of the materialized world, human consciousness stands in stark contrast to the decisive role that the lithosphere plays in the development of all the various forms and periods of human culture—including modern high-tech civilization. Minerals play a decisive role in human culture from the use of stone tools in the Paleolithic, through classical construction in stone and wood to modern skyscrapers and highways built of steel, concrete and glass. Even our computers would not work without the valuable participation of tiny particles of rock, among which is silicon. The interaction of human hands (which includes our ability of imagination) with the noosphere of rocks, contained in the most diverse types of “materials,” became the source of many cultures and civilizations in ancient times.

(Pogačnik 2016, p. 112)

This elemental setting and the understanding of the materially elemental basis of all technology by Pogačnik are in consonance with Teilhard (both are using “noosphere”) and Delio has brought us to Heidegger’s understanding of technology as danger and as the saving power. Another Catholic thinker (like Teilhard and Delio), Marshall McLuhan, also prophetically saw the potential of computer technology already in the 1960s. In his optimistic vision of the future of our civilization, McLuhan declared

The computer thus holds out the promise of a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the logos that could knit mankind into one family and create a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace. This is the real use of the computer, not to expedite marketing or solve technical problems but to speed the process of discovery and orchestrate terrestrial—and eventually galactic—environments and energies. Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness. In a Christian sense, this is merely a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.

(McLuhan 1969, p. 18)

In a Teilhardian sense, this would be a mark of entering of a human being into the realm of the noosphere: a forward moving of our consciousness and evolution of our spiritual energies towards a new stage of humanity—a new religion. The religion of the future will be elemental and it will acknowledge the spiritually material intertwining of the cosmic and quantum coordination of beings. Max Planck once stated

All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force that brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter8.

The technological future must be able to adjust to this level of evolution of the human being. Nature indeed “does not distinguish between the clamshell and the clam, or the first flint knife and the human that made it” (Delio 2020, p. 96). From the very first beginning of the human technological progress, seemingly natural elements were always already interwoven with human activities and our various artefacts. Moreover, as contemporary quantum theology shows, evolution itself entails the processes, resembling the most advanced quantum computer. The process of photosynthesis, for example, might be one such example—for according to recent scientific discoveries, photosynthesis in plants operates on levels of quantum superpositions and, thus, evades any naïve or simplistic labelling from the point of the view of gradualist evolutionary thinkers. In the process of capturing the energy of light from a chlorophyll molecule and its transformation into chemical energy (glucose), the plant itself is strikingly efficient: “[f]unctioning almost like a quantum computer, the exciton taking what is called a ‘quantum walk,’ in contrast to a classical random (drunken) walk, explores all the possible routes at once, determining which is the most efficient and follows that”9 (Engel et al. 2007, pp. 782–86).

5. Conclusions

The elemental plane of dwelling can be related to the awareness of a connection between beings (plants, animals, and humans, including the tools and technology we produce) and their ontological foundation that is revealed through the nature of the world that surrounds them—the meaning of the elemental world of dwelling—which is linked to the old cosmological matrices of interdependence of dwelling in relation to the ancient “elements” of air, water, fire, and earth. This is a Heideggerian world of revealing and unconcealement. The elemental character of the world of dwelling also embraces the mineral strata of nature (stones, metals…), which were usually rather understood as inanimate or inorganic forms of nature—standing-reserve (Bestand)—ready to be used and exploited. Through this new elemental consciousness and imagination, nature unfolds as a space permeated with the omnipresent life force of all living things and the most advanced technology, including AI, is a part of this new whole. It is a task of humanity to advance through and with these elemental settings and to acknowledge a vital thread permeating the whole of creation. Perhaps only then it will be possible to think of another intention of humanity—beyond mere ones dedicated to exploitation—towards what I described in the beginning of this essay in my technological metaphor of an airliner—as an example of an entanglement of flesh and technology in a larger, not-yet-fully revealed panentheistic whole.

“The airliner”10.