The Air We Breathe: Reflections on the Humanizing of Technologies (Part I)

People always ask the fishes, 'What does the water feel like to you?' and the fishes are always happy to oblige. Like feathers are to other feathers, they say. Like powder touching ash. We smile and nod. When the fishes tell us these things, we begin to understand. We begin to think we know what the water feels like to the fishes. They are curious things, fish are, and thus they ask, 'Why? Why do you want to know what the water feels like to the fishes?' And we are never quite sure. The fishes press further. 'Do you breathe air?' they ask. The answer is yes. Well then, they say, 'What does the air feel like to you?' And we do not know. Dave Eggers

Hidden in Plain Sight: Problems in Questioning Technologies There are many feelings we have about the technologies that surround us, those with which--and through which--we now interact daily and multifariously with the world and others: frustration, consolation, anxiety, excitement, exhaustion, relief, release, puzzlement, fear and hope. The feelings cut across the whole range of human experience and they are part of a long and still cascading history moving at great speed in many directions toward unknown futures. All of these feelings may help us intuit and partially describe the presence of this technology in our lives, but they do not give us a perspective on it, an ability to see it clearly and to raise questions about it. It is true that at several points in the recent past, quantum leaps in technologies have seemed to bring something about them into a momentary focus, if mostly for the attentive historian; a story could be told and momentous changes in the world traced in outline up to our own time. For example, we could say that the invention of the book (11th century) and later the printing press (15th century) revolutionized the store of language and knowledge in a way unimagined since the invention of the alphabet (See Illich, Abrams). It also allowed the formulation of the modern concept of the (individual) self (Gillespie). In addition, we could recognize, shortly thereafter (in the 16th century) that the humble mechanism of the watch heralded an age of mechanics and that it, along with the new optics of the microscope and telescope (17th century) created a radically new view of the universe and the human place in it (Gillespie on Descartes). Then again, we could say with some certainty that industrialism and mass production in the new nation states reshaped earthly and human landscapes definitively. These
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technologies, re-fueled by newer petroleum-based ones, then spawned a global colonialism that fed off the subjection of the colonized (at home and abroad) and created patterns of violent, rapacious behaviour toward others and the earth itself. This continues and continues to escalate through our own era of globalization. Finally, we ourselves are just past the cusp of another such quantum leap mediated by digital technologies. Within the last twenty years, these technologies have accomplished a most thorough integration of human consciousness itself into a new virtual space which is traced and charted by algorithms of interest and desire. Already it is clear that the most intimately human forms of self-expression ( art, work, sexuality, health, education and memory etc.,) have themselves bcome thoroughly digitized and therefore placed within a technologized consciousness. Time and space have been redefined and refashioned, or at least apparently so. Yet all of these statements can only vaguely hint at the reality we have experienced. In large part this is because what is brought into brief focus in each of these historical instances, through the very novelty of the new technology, is just as quickly absorbed into normative human action and social practice. When it is integrated into that practice, it is humanized, as it were. In this way, it becomes harder and harder to imagine or recall a human before to any of these technological leaps; after the leaps, we seem to ourselves to be simply human again. The result of this ever-accelerating adaptability of human beings is that the time or space for a question to be raised about each new leap closes almost before it opens. The novelty itself quickly becomes water and air, integrated seamlessly into everyday life, one more action hidden among many others and consciousness, accepting it as part of the human self, ceases to marvel or even reflect on it. To be sure there have always been negative reactions at these new historical points of integration--millennialism, religious wars, the antimachine fervor of the Luddites and others promoting a recovery of craft and of the natural, yet these moments and movements rarely yielded profound or consequential questioning about what had been accomplished by the integration of the new technology. Their desire to hold on to the old ways, the human before, was quickly overwhelmed by the eagerness with which the new became the common environment of the human. Human beings seem to be deeply charmed and then seduced by the ingenuity of their own technologies. In this sense, resistance to technological transformation seems futile. We are so unquestioningly open to these transformations, so enticed by the possibilities of yet another transformation of our reality that we assimilate it readily and allow it to become almost immediately native to
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our (new) reality and self-consciousness. Once the novelty of the technology passes through the veil of this human intimacy, it ceases to be other in any significant way. In this sense, the norm of human self-development seems to be established: what can be done, will be done--and has already been done; any idea of self-limitation becomes moot. Within this history of the co-evolution between the human and the technological, there have been a very few notable exceptions to the process of uncritical integration. (We will leave aside the earlier notables--Socrates, Jesus, the Buddha--and focus on those in modern times). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, one group of thinkers created a space for such critical reflection at the height of industrialism and colonialism: Blake, Thoreau, Ruskin, Tolstoy and, above all, Gandhi. Each one of these engaged thinkers began to raise fundamental questions about the relation between the technological and the human. Indeed, they began to try to evaluate that relationship. This was possible only because each of them had first undertaken to stand willfully outside the social consensus and practice created by the technological and to abstain from participating in many of the forms of its current integration within human society. These experiments with self-limitation were brief but very fruitful. Primarily because by their abstention, they made visible a seam where the connection between the two realities--the human and the technologicalcould be seen and questioned. As a result, fundamental and troubling questions were raised and sometimes heard. These questions had an oddness about them and were very difficult to answer: what does water feel like to the fishes?; what does air feel like to the humans? This position of the self-limiting outsider, the abstainer, (and thus the radical) is important in many senses, of course, but for present purposes it is important because it suggests a point of leverage. That is to say, it opens a possibility of thinking critically about technology by identifying its seam with the human. We will try to explore the questions raised in this first modern seam, questions about the possibility of human self-limitation and about the effect of technologies on the human, as we proceed. These questions still constitute an important starting point for any contemporary attempt to reflect on technology, they give us a focus on something that is often hidden for us. Before that, however, it is necessary to push a little further with the problem of reflecting on technology and clarify the nature of the technological as a human phenomenon itself. This will lead to identifying a second seam and strand of reflections.

We have been trying to identify the unique difficulty of reflecting on the technological in modern times: it is never simply something that stands over against the human being, objectified and separate. Rather, it has always already been conceived by and integrated into the human being who would reflect upon it. Thus it has always already shaped and become part of the consciousness that wishes to reflect upon it. In this sense, it is as invisible as water to the fish or air to people, that is to say it is hidden in plain sight. We shape our tools, said Marshall McLuhan, and then our tools shape us. In this process, human beings show themselves to be continuously and profoundly adaptive to the new forms of being, doing and thinking that emerge through their connection with these tools/technologies. Indeed we might say, more properly, that we are self-adaptive: for we transform ourselves as we integrate these new forms and make them forms of our being-in-the-world.Yet it is the second part of this process that is quickly hidden by the new normal of a transformed human practice. Another way of picturing this is to say that the technological as such creates an essential blind-spot in consciousness, and erases itself from view for that consciousness. This is one of the primary reasons for the longstanding illusion that technologies are merely instrumental, merely tools outside of us. This illusion--which is really the lie that consciousness repeats about itself to itself--is persistent and continues to shape and distort thinking about technologies. It is a denial of the fact that the technological in its visible outward forms is also anchored firmly within consciousness, shaping its view of it and therefore obscuring its effects upon us. This denial is as fundamental perhaps as the denial of mortality is to everyday human consciousness (see Varki and Brower). When we try to loosen the effects of this denial (and let go of the view of technologies as mere instruments), then the technological may begin to come into view not only or simply as a human creation or product-- a tool-but rather as act of self-creation, or at least, a self-creating extension/expression of the human being. As such, and working in a true synergy with the human (so that both human and technological exceed their original forms and scope) the technological becomes essential to the human and essentially humanized (thus, an axiom of human consciousness). In this sense, too, it is always rooted within us long before we try to objectify and question it. Here again, then, the problem of questioning technology reappears, now not only as a cognitive problem but as a problem of the will. How can one question that on which one depends, that through which one engages with the world? How can one question the air with which one breathes?
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This second (volitional) element of the problem will always be intertwined with the first (cognitive) problem as we have just suggested, in the sense that only an act of will (an act of self-limitation) can hope to make the technological visible again as a question for consciousness. A stark analogy for this might be the illuminating experience of sobriety for the addict. Yet if technology is understood as a self-creation, as humanized and in essential synergy with the human, what kind of questioning about it might be valid and from what point of view or horizon in the human might it arise in the first place? It cannot be naive questioning about this tool or that and about whether it is good or bad, surely. If we view technologies as humanized expressions, as extensions of the human being in synergy with them, then the questions about technology could only be fundamental questions, questions about human destiny and its direction(s) of unfolding through and together with and through its technologies. We can no longer pretend to raise questions as if the human choice(s) vis--vis technology are still to be made. The choices have already been made. We can only ask truthfully about the destiny of that choice and of the human beings who have made it and are borne along by it.1 It was Martin Heidegger who (at another seam created between the two world wars) first clearly articulated this synergistic relationship between technology and human consciousness/will. Technology was a mode of revealing, Heidegger argued, and in effect, the comprehensive horizon of modern consciousness itself (Technology, 13). In this sense, too, he argued, technological consciousness became the destiny of the human being who was shaped by it, shaping the human relationship to the world and others, (Technology, 26). This total claim on consciousness as its horizon hid the coming-to-be of this mode of consciousness (erasing its historical tracks) and thus created a blind spot toward other possible modes of revealing by assuming that technological consciousness was definitive, consciousness as such, Heidegger argued. Still, and in the same breath, Heidegger portrayed this mode of consciousness as as a kind danger to the human and a forgetfulness, a forgetfulness about the essential (ontological) features of the self and the world.2
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Here we need to acknowledge the insight inspiring Heideggers view of technology: Perhaps the much discussed question of whether technology makes man its slave or whether man will be able to master technology is already a superficial question, because no one remembers to ask what kind of man is alone capable of carrying out the mastery of technology.The philosophies of technology pretend as if technology and man were simply two masses and two things on hand. The Question Concerning Technology, 7 2 Forgetfulness is a metaphor from Heideggers earlier work, Being and Time. The essence of technology as a destining of revealing, is the danger.The rule of Enframing threatens man with the

In speaking about this forgetfulness and of being itself, then, Heidegger continued to imagine the possibility of the unveiling of a primary world (of being) not visible to technological consciousness as such. By doing so, of course, Heidegger raised the hope of a before and even of a possible return to some non-technological consciousness. Yet he indicates this hope very vaguely and tentatively through metaphors about thinking as dwelling or building and through the imaginative vision of poetry. In this way, Heidegger creates a kind of second seam against which to think about the relationship between the human and the technological. This must be called an imaginative and speculative seam, in that it posits an original encounter between the human being and being as such, an encounter which is not mediated by technology or technological consciousness and, in retrospect, allows us to identify that features of that technological consciousness. Whether it is really possible to still speak of such essentially human features after the human has been integrated into technologized consciousness is, of course, a question that hovers over Heideggers late work. Yet by hinting at other modes of revealing, he is suggesting that the possibility of some such original consciousness can be imagined, un-veiled and even partially recovered by a concrete being. The underlying metaphor of this project might be that of the palimpsest--namely, the act of identifying the vague imprint of an original writing/drawing on a papyrus that has been erased and written over by another later text. This allows Heidegger both to stress the profound impact of technology on human consciousness and yet still to recognize it as such against a more hidden background light. It is from this imaginative project, or seam, then, that Heideggers account of technology derives its own force and coherence. Heidegger can question technology because he has first made it visible philosophically; his questioning attempts to identify and describe it from a deeper within in consciousness. We will outline Heideggers position and insights more carefully below (in Part II) but this notion of the seam as palimpsest echoes within the work of another important thinker. I want to suggest that there is a parallel and still more profound project at work in the thought of Simone Weil, the young French philosopher and mystic. Weil experienced directly and viscerally the impact of industrial technology as a result of her factory work and later her engagement as a social activist resisting fascism in Spain and England. She
possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth. (Technology, 28)

spent a great deal of time in her short life, thinking and writing about this impact of technology as oppressive especially in the social forms both embodied in the industrial economy and the modern state. In particular, she strove to understand how its oppressive force shaped the consciousness of both the oppressor and the oppressed ones. In this way, she developed a profound account of the consciousness of privilege on the one hand and, on the other, of submission and disempowerment within the post-modern context. Weil identified this consciousness, technologized through the economy and the state, in part, from her own experience living among those who did not count but also by setting it against the background of classical literature/philosophy (primarily the Iliad and Plato but also the Bhagavad Gita) and the notions of power and karma/destiny articulated there. From the context of the latter and through her mystical experiences, Weil was able to see in this experience of submissive/afflicted post-modern consciousness, the vague outline of a deeper and much different consciousness, namely, one which echoed the classical mystical-spiritual acts of attention, selfemptying and detachment. On the basis of that deeper consciousness, she posited the possibility of a contemplation of the (transcendent) good as a guide to meaningful (good) action in a world of necessities, brutal force and technologized violence. This was a very limited and fragile possibility, as she acknowledged--since the true good, was transcendent and its appearance in the world was only possible through the de-creation of the human ego. By this she meant an un-making of the consciousness created in the first palce by technological seductions to exceed our limits, to try to become gods in our own right. Weil, like Heidegger, does not minimize the profound and thoroughgoing impact of technology on modern and post-modern consciousness, yet from the seam that she identified in her experience of affliction and impoverishment, she opens the slightest crack for the entry of a very different light into consciousness. Her account of technology draws in elements of the classical paradigm (with its reflection on the human use of/need for tools) but it sets it firmly in the post-modern context. In that context, Weil argues, the labourer is forced to turn his body and soul into an appendix of the tool (Roots, 295). Despite, and as a result of that, she insists that, the consciousness which consents to physical labour is of far greater spiritual significance than all other acts of technologized consciousness--whether command over men, technical planning, art, science, philosophy and so on ( Roots, 296). It is a consciousness that is intrinsically open to that very different light, the light of a transcendent
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good which is hidden within the experience of human affliction and suffering. From this point, Weils understanding of the role of work/labour unfolds quite uniquely and contextualizes the question of technological consciousness/human action in a much larger context, namely that of gravity and grace. In this way, Weil rejuvenates some earlier and classical arguments about technology as an expression of overweening human pride (Babel) and a devils bargain that ends in self-destruction (Faust, Frankenstein). She also, identifies its social dimensions and their negative effects on the human spirit (i.e., Platos social beast from the Republic). There are, then, many similarities between the projects of Weil and Heidegger and in particular, their understanding of technology. Both appealed to classical insights on the problem of technology yet both sensed the the modern/post-modern synergy between technologies and the human could not be essentially undone. Especially in the work of Weil, there is an articulation of the willfully chosen nature of this synergy and a profound reflection on how it might become transparent, not by acts of willing but my the much deeper askesis of de-creation, abandonment and detachment. In that sense too, she believed that it might be ultimately dissolved but only insofar as the ego itself was dissolved. Both Heidegger and Weil are also good guides, in that sense, to attempting to find and formulate the questions about technology that we may still be able to raise in our time. While both of them had already seen through the naive questioning about technology as object, they each prise open a thin crack through which light might still fall open the synergic relationship between human being and technologies. Both of them lived at the end of the industrial period and in beginning of the post-modern era of mass man.3 They knew well the human being subject to consistent and concerted propaganda, state control and social engineering in the era of mass media and state control; yet the more subtle and pervasive digital age with its quantum leap toward internalized censorship and surveillance and collaborative submission was still far off. In order to approach our own position or really, our-selves and our destiny, with any hope of still questioning through the veil of technologized and technologically
See Ortega y Gasset, Revolt of the Masses, on the concept of mass man: We do not know what is happening to us, and this is precisely what is happening to us, not to know what is happening to us: the man of today is beginning to be disoriented with respect to himself, he is outside of his country, thrown into a new circumstance that is like a terra incognita. (1926)
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humanized consciousness, it behooves us to reflect more deeply first on these two groups of pioneering thinkers. Out of that dialogue, may we begin to breath and think more deeply on our own air.

Interlude on Counting the Costs: Celebrating the Tool and Human Ingenuity Before turning to examine these critical reflections on human technology by Gandhi, Heidegger and Weil, it will be worthwhile to listen to another and contrary voice, the voice of human celebration in the technological conquest. As we have said, the technological is also a human self-expression and in that sense also always a self-transcendence of previous limits and boundaries; therein, it is the cause of celebration and indeed often a moment of intense self-expression. One of the legendary and romantic figures of the last century, Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944) was a contemporary of Gandhi and very much a European of his time and culture. St.-Exupery, an impoverished French aristocrat, found his fortune as one of the early aviators and aviation explorers through his work in North Africa and later South America. St.Exupery discovered himself through this flying career and also became a celebrated author often writing about on his experiences as pilot and explorer while flying. He crashed his plane in the Sahara in 1935 but subsequently survived while walking with a friend until he was rescued by a Bedouin. This experience was featured prominently in a memoir, Terre des Hommes (Wind, Sand and Stars) and also in his later childrens story, Le Petit Prince, (The little Prince). In Terre des Hommes, St.-Exupery celebrated his encounter with the primal landscape of the Sahara, as an untouched and pure place, (un sable infiniment vierge, 60). He pondered this experience (as a cultured and technologized European) as an important moment of self-knowledge: Dont we all realize that there are unknown conditions which feed into and fertilize the life of the human being? Where does the truth of the human being reside? (Que savons-nous, sinon quil est des conditions inconnues qui nous fertilisent? Ou loge la verite de lhome?, 159) This moment of looking to the simpler and more direct encounter with nature was a resonant one with many of the westerners of his generation and it provided a vision of the seam which stitched together the new technologized consciousness of the European with what they imagined was a
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simpler and simply human past. It is this seam that St.-Exupery identifies and celebrates in the opening sentences of Terre des Hommes, with its praise of the spirit of adventure and conquest: The earth teaches us about ourselves more than do books-precisely because it resists us. Human beings discover themselves when they measure themselves against an obstacle. But to attain that it is necessary to fashion a tool whether it is a plane for working wood or a plough for working the earth. The farmer gradually digs up certain secrets of nature, and the truth that they encounter thereby is universal. In the same way, the airplane, the tool of modern airlines, leads us to the ancient problems (5).4 There are several assumptions worth noting here. First, this is the earth that teaches the human being about themselves precisely by resisting the human drive for conquest and thereby pushing it to transcend itself in that direction. Secondly, it transcends itself precisely through the invention and use of tools/technologies which allow the human being to dig up its hidden secrets, secrets which are the universal--human--truths. Thirdly, this is the sense in which the earth is The Earth of Humans Terre des Hommes, the earth belonging to the conquering spirit of the human. Earth, the fundamental human obstacle, becomes earth the mirror of the human. Finally, the modern technologies are essentially tools like the wood plane or the plough, for they allow the human being to dig up and encounter the same ancient problems, the secrets of nature itself and of the human being who is fertilized by the earth. So St. Exupery rightly celebrates the technological as tool, for it allows him to encounter nature (again) in its secret and miraculous forms by virtue of a night flight among the stars. Yet we may well wonder about the claim made here that the modern technologies actually do lead to the same ancient problems, the experiences of the secrets of earth uncovered by the plough. We may also ask whether the self-knowledge that comes from the technological conquest of earth as obstacle is actually a light to the human being or simply a mirror in which they may see their apparent act of
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La terre nous en apprend plus long sur nous que les livres. Parce qu'elle nous rsiste. L'homme se dcouvre quand il se mesure avec l'obstacle. Mais, pour l'atteindre, il lui faut un outil. Il lui faut un rabot, ou une charrue. Le paysan, dans son labour, arrache peu peu quelques secrets la nature, et la vrit qu'il 4 dgage est universelle. De mme l'avion, l'outil des lignes ariennes, mle lhomme tous les vieux problmes.
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transcendence over it? Does it cast the light of self-knowledge or merely reflect their successful ingenuity? At the same time we must recognize that many things are left out of this celebratory portrait of human technological transcendence, for example: the vast industrial apparatus needed to produce an airplane and its impact on countless thousands of lives; the use of the airplane for destruction not long after St Exuperys flight in the carpet bombing of Dresden or the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the normalization of the experience of flight and the commercialization which takes form in the modern airline industry with all of its environment impacts from mining through fuel to ozone; and finally, the technologically-charged exploitation of the colonies that such exploration made possible with its slow eradication of diverse cultures and languages and traditions around the globe. These were humanized technologies which turned around on their maker to create vast swathes of dehumanizing conditions. The consequences of each of these invisible elements of St.-Exuperys flight continue to ripple among us and indeed increase with an exponential force that no one controls. These, primarily ethical considerations did not emerge in the work of St.-Exupery in fact because what was being celebrated was not selfknowledge in any previously known sense, (i.e., self-knowledge which framed a set of ethical obligations for the human being) but rather ingenuity, craft and power rising out of a very human desire to transcend limits. It is not surprising then and somehow sadly appropriate that St. Exupery, like Icarus before him, disappeared in the Mediterranean after a plane crash. Remnants of a bracelet he wore were recovered some years later but his death remains as mysterious as the miracle of flight itself. St.-Exupery remains a cogent symbol of the celebration of the modern technological development and of the first successes of the synergy between technological and the human. His voice cannot be simply dismissed for it continues to echo among us as we reflect on our nature and its present state. Both the highs arising from the transcendence of limits and the real benefits of technological developments (from electricity through antibiotics to digital communication) cannot be denied, nor should they be, but they must be set in a context which includes all of the effects and consequences of those developments. Humanized technologies are not simply sources of good for the human being, they also express and amplify the potential of an inner darkness that is all too human. We can no longer pretend that we are simply using a tool when we are actually refashioning our life by producing, using and becoming reliant upon these and their accompanying systems. Moreover, self-transcendence through technology includes new possibilities of a
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transcendence of physical, but also of ethical, limits; the night flight among the stars and the bombing run. In neither case is it simply a tool: we are the effect and consequence of our technologies and not we alone, but the earth as well. There were a few others, however, contemporaries of St. Exupery, who from the beginning saw that the classical metaphor of the tool was flawed and inadequate to capture the reality of technology as human selfexpression which they were experiencing. Gandhi was the pre-eminent of these. First Movement: Gandhis Questioning of the Craze of Technology. Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi was a well-known questioner of the technological at the end of the industrial era. Gandhis experience of industrialized life in England and South Africa had a profound impact on his subsequent thinking. His critical approach evolved by way of this personal experience as an outsider and a colonial in both countries, as well as through a series encounters with several critical dissenters in the west. For example, it was his vowed Hindu/Jain vegetarianism which eventually led him, through a meeting with Henry Polak in a vegetarian restaurant in South Africa in 1904, to John Ruskins famous critique of capitalist economics and plea for a social economy, Unto this Last. Reading this encomium of manual labour and advocacy for the well-being of all set Gandhi on a very counter-cultural path: it led him to establish his own first rural farming community (Phoenix Farm) and also to articulate his first and lasting vision of social justice--sarvodaya--the well-being of all, which was the title of his Gujarati translation of Ruskins work. Although Gandhi came to dissagree with him on some of the ultimate questios, Ruskins influence still resonated at the end of Gandhis life, half a century later when in his famous testament for Nehru, the talisman, he advocated a government working for the well-being of the least and the last one-antyodaya. Shortly thereafter, in 1909, Gandhi read Tolstoys Letter to a Hindoo (published in 1908), advocating non-violent resistance to British colonialism with its central insight into power and submission (it is not the English that have enslaved the Indians, but the Indians who have enslaved themselves). This led Gandhi to read Tolstoys great Christian anarchist manifesto--The Kingdom of God is Within You--with its critique of the nation state and call for conscientious withdrawal from its ideology and influence. Sailing back
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to South Africa from India in 1910, no doubt with Tolstoys words still ringing in his ears, Gandhi composed--in ten days--his own great manifesto, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule. This work contains in kernel his own unique approach to ethical-politics and social change, along with a series of trenchant criticisms of industrial England and its civilization of machinery (as Gandhi called it). A small pamphlet, written quickly at the end of Gandhis 21 year struggle in South Africa, it is can easily stand as one of the great written texts of the twentieth century. In many ways this text expressed the summary of his twenty-one years of learning, struggle and failures in South Africa and yet it also expresses his vision of the way forward. It is written with great conviction and a clear vision. It was to set the course for the rest of life and work when he returned to India shortly thereafter. It is worth noting first, that Gandhis thought on technology emerges out of his core insights about swaraj (self-rule in both the individual/communal sense) which Gandhis articulated so forecfully in Hind Swaraj. It is no exaggeration to say that Gandhis notion of swaraj attempted to redefine traditional political thought; primarily, it shifted the onus of political action from the reform movement or party or even the nation on to the individual acting in an ethical and conscientious way. Thus it expressed what Gandhi believed was the path that India, as an ancient civilization, should follow away from colonialism (Parel). In that context, Gandhis critical account of modern civilization and its machinery expresses, something essential about his vision and approach to nonviolence; it is not at all an addendum. While it might be easy, then, to dismiss Gandhis critique of the technology/machinery of modern civilization as simply eccentric and cantankerous, this would be a serious misreading of it. In what follows we will first outline and trace Gandhis arguments concerning technology (or machinery as he called it) and then turn to examine his own practice as the expression of a still deeper critique. The argument of Hind Swaraj is really about the civilizational potential of the ancient culture of India (Parel)--as well as the threats to it, from the modern civilization of Europe and England. The deepest threat, Gandhi insists from the outset, is not the English as such, but rather the enticement within Indians for their modern civilization: Many problems can be solved by remembering that money is their God. Then it follows that we keep the English in India for our self-interest. We like their commerce, they please us by their subtle methods, and get what they want from us. To blame them for this is to perpetuate their power, (HS, 40 and the following.)

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Gandhi, characterizes this modern civilization as the tiger and points out that the desire for Indian home rule based on the principles of this modern civilization will bring only a deeper form of colonization: In effect it means this: that we want English rule without the Englishman. You want the tiger's nature, but not the tiger; that is to say, you would make India English. And when it becomes English, it will be called not Hindustan but Englistan. This is not the Swaraj that I want. In making this subtle and crucial distinction about the two sided relationship between colonizer and colonized, Gandhi has taken great inspiration from Tolstoys insight about the inner submission of the colonized and laid the foundation for his future campaigns for self-rule. He also anticipates and inspires the much later critical thinking about decolonization (Nandy, The Intimate Other). Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that Gandhi is already thinking in post-modern terms at the very height of modernity (Rudolph). When Gandhi turns his attention to a critique of the colonizers then, it takes the form of an analysis of that modern civilization which has already also encompassed the English themselves: It is not due to any peculiar fault of the English, but the condition is due to modern civilization. It is a civilization only in name. Under it the nations of Europe are becoming degraded and ruined day by day ( HS, 32). This model of civilization, Gandhi argues, reduces the citizenry to passivity, removing the duties of self-realization in moral action and service in civic action by making bodily comfort (kama) the sole object of life (purushartha), (HS, 34). Moreover, because it removes the ethical and religious objects of life, the mode of governance (artha) within this civilization becomes highly exploitative and oppressive by tapping into the greed of the many: Formerly men were made slaves under physical compulsion now they are enslaved under the temptation of money and of the luxuries that money can buy (HS, 35). Finally, Gandhi insists, it undermines the very foundations of human integrity:
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This civilization is irreligion (adharma) and it has taken such a hold on the people in Europe that those who are in it appear to be half madthey keep up their energy by intoxication. They can hardly be happy in solitudeI can hardly give you an adequate conception of it. It is eating into the vitals of the English nation. (HS, 36-7) The attempt to colonize, as Gandhi recognizes, is in fact an attempt to convert the whole world into a market for their goods. In this attempt, modern civilization reveals its fundamental principle : the incessant search for comforts and their multiplication, and thus a material development unrestrained by any form of self-limitation (19). Gandhi contrasts this clearly with the principle of ancient civilization which is self-limitation and restraint. He argues that our ancestors set a limit to our indulgences (HS, 66) and this has led to the tendency of Indian civilization to elevate the moral being (HS, 69). Here Gandhi identifies his contrasting principle of swaraj as (duty/self-knowledge) as he understood it: Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man [sic] the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing,we know ourselves, (HS, 65) In fact what he envisages here is the profound renovation of traditional civilization by complementing its principles with a very post-modern and Tolstoyan call to conscientious duty in the individual. (See Nandy, on the critical traditionalism' of Gandhi in The Intimate Enemy). It is necessary to recognize the features of this positive vision which Gandhi proposes, if we are to appreciate his critique of the machinery civilization he opposed. There is one other crucial feature of modern civilization which Gandhi often states throughout the text and which for him becomes a crucial point of distinction between the modern and the ancient, that is, its speed. For example, on the question of doing good and political action, Gandhi notes: Those who want to do good are not selfish, they are not in a hurry, they know that to impregnate people with good requires a long time. But evil has wings. To build a house takes time. Its destruction takes none (HS, 47) Speed embodies much that Gandhi feels is wrong about modern civilization-the centralization of power in the hands of few; the pace of an unreflective,
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unethical life; action that is aimed only at achieving a result and thus becomes merely a means to an end. This speed, moreover, has its symbol in the machine (The machine produces much too fast, and brings with it an economic system which I cannot grasp). Indeed, such speedy production by the machine is just the opposite of Gandhis slow and daily practice of spinning khadi and what he called swadeshi. We will return to this contrast below. Having identified unlimited material development (without moral restraint) and incessant speed as principles of modern civilization, Gandhi turns to the discussion of technology or machinery because, as he argues, machinery is the chief symbol of this civilization (HS, 106). In Chapter XIX, he characterizes it with a series of vibrant images: as a whirlwind (wayaro), a net (sanchani jal ) and a great sin. He then completes the series with the metaphor of a snake-hole: Machinery is like a snake-hole which may contain from one to a hundred snakes. Where there is machinery there are large cities; and where there are large cities, there are tram-cars and railways; and there only does one see electric light. (HS, 108) What all of these images capture is both the sense of unlimited material development and the manner in which that systemically and exponentially transforms human life. While the whirlwind suggests the speed of this transformation, the net suggests the systematic way that for Gandhi, it ensnares the human and reshapes it. What looks like a scintillating progress and development to this civilization is, to Gandhi, a Pandoras box or snakepit full of unknown and unanticipatable dangers. Not only is there no possibility of limitation, there is no mechanism of control; the whirlwind or whirlpool images suggest a human being carried along by forces much greater than it can possibly control. For Gandhi, this situation has arisen out of the imbalance within the human being itself, namely, the displacement of duty and autonomy by the desire for comfort and the drive to achieve it. All of this focus on speed and efficiency works contrary to very construction of the human body which was designed to limit to mans locomotive ambition but modern man has proceeded to discover means of overriding the limit. This rends the fabric of natural communities and neighbours and reshapes them in the form of anonymous and centralized cities. Moreover, the speed required to make these cities function will consume greater and greater resources and time. Thus having once arisen, modern civilization moves on with a life of its own and carries the human being along with it.
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Whether Gandhi knew the story of Goethe's Faust or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is uncertain to me, but his account is very resonant with them. In Hind Swaraj then, Gandhi is identifying material comfort, prosperity and conveniences as the benefits of modern civilization and reading in them a series of dangers to the human being: an ever-increasing fast pace of life, work and thought, a loss of control and autonomy, and a reduction of all values to the lowest common denominator of money. To these benefits and risks, he is opposing the slower and deeper values of autonomy (swaraj), self-restraint (duty) and mutual co-operation with neighbours (swadeshi). Needless to say, at least until the first world war, this wave of modern technology had an aura of excitement and novelty; most of his contemporaries did not positively receive Gandhis dark portrayal of the technologies of modernity. Within his own country and his own movement there were constant challenges. Although he maintained his early position in its essentials and complemented it with a life increasingly based on the rigorous practices of simplicity and alternative forms of practice, he was often challenged about his critique of the technology. These challenges brought out some important nuances in his position. In 1921, at the beginning of his return to India, he responded to a question about the need for growth and its benefits, by developing further the important distinction between the material and the moral. He spoke of moral progress as the progress which is the permanent element within us and went on: I do want growth, I do want self-determination. I do want freedom, but I want all of these things for the soul. I doubt if the steel age is an advance upon the age of flint. I am indifferent. It is the evolution of the soul to which the intellect and all of our faculties have to be devoted (Young India, Oct. 1921).5 Gandhis soul is not simply the religious notion in the traditional sense but rather his unique insight into the coalescence of the ethical, social and political in the spiritual core of the act of swaraj (as self-control and duty to others). More and more he realized that true autonomy for the human being
5

For this and the following quotation as well as a good account of the main texts from Gandhi on technologies, I am indebted to Mulford Q. Sibley,In Praise of Gandhi: Technology And The Ordering Of Human Relations published online at http://universalistfriends.org/library/in -praise-of-gandhi-technologyand-the-ordering-of-human-relations
5 5

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had to be based on a self-limiting duty to others and also to the Truth (in the sense of the a conscientious acceptance of the ultimate realities of human life in the universe). Autonomy could only be preserved through such conscientious self-reliance, or swaraj. In that sense, human development, when it included these moral, social and spiritual dimensions, could not rely on or put its hope only in a technological future, for then it would necessarily sacrifice true autonomy. The dominance of technology over the self-governing individual was not simply an abstract issue. Gandhi saw that it meant a new form of dominance of the powerful over the weak and of the nation-state with its inevitable violence over the community of self-reliance: What I object to is the craze for machinery...Men go on saving labour till thousands are out of work...I want to save labour, not for a fraction of mankind but for all...Today, machinery helps a few ride on the backs of millions. We should recognize here that Gandhi is proceeding on the assumption that the technological is no mere tool but a rather a system (though he does not use that word and pictures it rather as a net, a snakepit, a whirlwind), a system which ensnares the human being and in which control is lost to them. Within this net of the technological, Gandhi argues, the human being becomes more and more dependent and less and less autonomous. In this way, people become easy prey for a nation state with more power and less ethical restraint as well as vast technological resources( the state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form he says in Hind Swaraj anticipating the much later notion of structural violence). For Gandhi, the only possible form of real resistance to this was to recover self-reliance in a spiritual and ethical sense; such an act of swaraj, as he realized, had enormous political implications and became the effective act of individual emancipation and empowerment. As he explained to a young man who wanted to volunteer to help in the politics of home rule: Emancipate your own self. Even that burden is very great. Apply everything to yourself. Nobility of soul consists in realizing that you are yourself India. In your emancipation is the emancipation of India. All else is make-believe, (Parel, Hind Swaraj , lxxiv). In Hind Swaraj itself, he states this with even more clarity:

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It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. It is, therefore, in the palm of our hands. But such Swaraj has to be experienced, by each one for himself. One drowning man will never save another. Thispersonal and empowering act of swaraj contrasts starkly with image of the drowning man caught up in the web of modern civilization. We will return to this personal, practical and interiorized notion of swaraj below. It is important to stress that lthough he recognizes the systemic dimensions of technology, Gandhi does not yet see what we called above a synergy in which the human being is technologized and technologies are humanized. For Gandhi, the changes to which the human being is subject are powerful and difficult to escape but they are in principle reversible. Indeed, swaraj as ethical practice is, for Gandhi, primarily the act of selfemancipation from this system and the regaining of autonomy. Therefore as we noted above his repudiation of the machine culture and the way of life that it brings, reflects a core value of his thought and life. As he himself followed more and more seriously the path of abstention from the use of technologies and social norms of a technological culture (by spinning and wearing his own khadi cloth, diet, working with a hand-press, advocating manual labour for each person and a fundamental equality in community based on simple living and self-reliant crafts), Gandhi was led to reflect more deeply (as often happens to abstainers) about the meaning of the technology he was not using. In a preface to the 1938 edition of Hind Swaraj, Mahadev Desai reproduced a dialogue between Gandhi and a questioner from 1924. This dialogue shows a still more nuanced and detailed attempt to account from his abstention from the technological and its purpose: How can I be against technology when I know that even the body is a most delicate piece of machinery? The spinning wheel is a machine, a little toothpick is a machine. What I object to is the craze form machinery as such. . .The supreme consideration is man. The machine should not tend to atrophy the limbs of man. For instance, I would make intelligent exceptions. Take the case of the Singer's Sewing Machine. It is one of the few useful things ever invented, and there is a romance about the device itself." "But," asked the questioner, "there would have to be a factory for making these sewing machines, and it would have to contain power-driven machinery of ordinary type."
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"Yes," said Gandhiji, in reply. "But I am socialist enough to say that such factories should be nationalized, State-controlled.... The saving of the labour of the individual should be the object, and not human greed the motive. Thus, for instance, I would welcome any day a machine to straighten crooked spindles. Not that blacksmiths will cease to make spindles; they will continue to provide spindles but when the spindle goes wrong every spinner will have a machine to get it straight. Therefore replace greed by love and everything will be all right." "But," said the questioner, "if you make an exception of the Singer's Sewing Machine and your spindle, where would these exceptions end?" "Just where they cease to help the individual and encroach upon his individuality. The machine should not be allowed to cripple the limbs of man." "But, ideally, would you not rule out all machinery? When you except the sewing machine, you will have to make exceptions of the bicycle, the motor car, etc." "No, I don't," he said, "because they do not satisfy any of the primary wants of man; for it is not the primary need of man to traverse distances with the rapidity of a motor car. The needle on the contrary happens to be an essential thing in life, a primary need." But he added: "Ideally, I would rule out all machinery, even as I would reject this very body, which is not helpful to salvation, and seek the absolute liberation of the soul. From that point of view I would reject all machinery, but machines will remain because, like the body, they are inevitable. The body itself, as I told you, is the purest piece of mechanism; but if it is a hindrance to the highest flights of the soul, it has to be rejected." (Hind Swaraj, 1938 ed., 7-8) This passage contains several new and critical points and so is worth outlining in a summary fashion. First of all, in it Gandhi is no longer simply positing a radical dichotomy between the traditional and modern around the issue of machinery but rather attempting to see the spectrum along which all tools or machinery are related, from the humble toothpick and the spinningwheel all the way up to the modern technologies like the automobile. What allows him to do this is the broader concept of machine as human tool which creates a common denominator of sorts.

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Secondly, Gandhi takes the rather fateful step of reaching backward to think of the human body itself as a delicate piece of machinery. This seems to provide an ultimate justification for the human being as toolmachine-maker, and yet it is difficult not to see in this extension of the metaphor of the machine back to the body an already quite embedded technologization of consciousness/self-consciousness of which Gandhi himself appears not to be aware. In any case, Gandhi is no longer speaking so clearly of the body as a natural norm for human being on which to resist the temptations of technology. Thirdly, this view leads Gandhi to praise the relatively complex modern mechanism of the Singer Sewing Machine and the interviewer subsequently to raise the problem of the infrastructure necessary to create the sewing machine. This infrastructure was what Gandhi himself identified as the system or net in which the human being becomes ensnared. Yet here Gandhi replies to the problem of a technological infrastructure by evoking the ideals of human control (i.e., state-owned industry, motives of laboursaving and love rather than greed etc.) and arguing that they will avail to define and apply feasible limits on the production and use of machinery. This is Gandhi speaking as the political activist and indeed projecting a rather utopian social order based on his own hopes. Restraint in the individual and restraint in the state are of course quite different matters, although Gandhi hoped in his heart of hearts to align them. Such limits, fourthly, are to be determined by a two-sided criterion: what helps the individual and will not encroach upon his individuality. This echoes Gandhis earlier statement that with regard to tools or machinery, the supreme consideration is man...it should not tend to atrophy the limbs of man (and therewith the ability to be self-reliant). Yet clearly what will help but not encroach upon individuality will be a difficult criterion to apply in the concrete. Fifthly, however, when the interviewer raises the problem of the subjectivity apparent in applying this criterion (i.e., making exceptions based on the claim of personal need or even desire), Gandhi develops a new argument: he will accept machines which are an essential thing and meet the primary needs ; needles do meet such an essential need, a car does not. Even Gandhi seems uncomfortable with this very flexible criterion and so finally, he returns to his own absolute spiritual ideal: in principle, he says, machines should all be rejected--even the body--because they are not helpful to salvation, the absolute liberation of the soul. Still, he acknowledges, machines will remain because, like the body, they are inevitable . The ultimate conclusion seems to be that somehow we must
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learn to move among them as both helps and hindrances while maintaining an inner integrity. At this point, we may say that the gap between the spiritual ideal of simplicity and a practical criterion for the use of technologies has become very broad. Gandhi seems to have become more aware of the continuities which flow from the human creation and use of tools to the technologies of modern times and also his awareness of himself and his own body have convinced him of the claim of this model of a delicate piece of machinery. He would like to set a limit to the human use of technology based on his inner and spiritual ideals of simplicity (i.e., essential need) and the liberation of the soul (i.e., love not greed), but he seems to realize that this will be difficult or at least must remain a matter of conscience for each individual. From here to the socialist state which would limit the technological infrastructure is a long distance indeed. The temptations of the technology will be strong, he recognizes, but so will its negative consequences (to atrophy the limbs of man and be a hindrance to the highest flights of the soul). He hopes for and clings to the ideal of a realizable inner self-control as well as a political way to achieve a social control of human greed and its tendency to magnify itself in the infrastructures of technology. Concluding Reflections on Gandhis Critique and the Practice of Printing Gandhis reflections on machinery/technology in this theoretical form do indeed contain anomalies and even contradictions (e.g., between seeing the body a the purest piece of mechanism or a natural construction designed to limit human locomotion or again as necessary but also a hindrance to the flights of the soul). Having accepted the appropriateness of the technological/machine as human tool (extending from the intrinsic criterion of the body itself), he turns to seek an inner criterion by which to limit its use--though he also recognizes the difficulty in this. Indeed, he seems to acknowledge there is no way to develop an abstract theoretical criterion, for this is finally a question of individual--conscientious--practice, moving among the helps and the hindrances of the modern world and attempting to avoid being caught in the snare of the technological infrastructure. Since it is a matter of the conscientization of swaraj (to borrow Paolo Freires latter notion), this is a process which cannot be hurried or simply manufactured by the politics of reform, but must arise from within and slowly transform practice of each of us. In the deepest sense, Gandhi put his faith in this practice and its slow way of reform/resistance. As he wrote in 1910:
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The more I observe, the greater is the dissatisfaction with the modern life. I see nothing good in it. Men are good but they are poor victims making themselves miserable under the false belief that they are doing good. I am aware that there is a fallacy underneath this. I who claim to examine what is around me may be a deluded fool. This risk all of us have to take. The fact is that we are all bound to do what we feel is right. And within me I feel that the modern life is not right. The greater the conviction, the bolder my experiments. (quoted in Ahimsa, IX, 2, May-August 2013, trans. Yatish Mehta). We may appropriately conclude our reflections on Gandhi by sketching the reality of one of these bolder experiments We have already indicated the practice of Gandhis bolder experiments in resistance to modern civilization and its machines. Khadi spinning is the most well known of them but another one which began much earlier at Phoenix Farm was printing. This long term commitment to interaction with the printing-press (Gandhi used a hand-operated version that was donated to him) has recently been studied in great detail by the South African scholar, Isabel Hofmeyr in the historical work Gandhis Printing Press. By focussing on the South African years and the genesis of the first edition of Hind Swaraj, Hofmeyr argues that Gandhis approach to printing, writing and reading (his textual culture) is worth investigating not only for its own sake but for the light it throws on the philosophy of satyagraha. (Loc 73).6This practical focus echoes Gandhis belief in the practical basis of self-rule, or ruling the self, creating sovereignty, one person at a time (Loc 73). In this vein, Hofmyer presents accounts of 1) Gandhis use of the printing press in the Phoenix Community to create an interactive community, 2) the counter-imperialist and counter-nationalist forms of the work that he produced through it (i.e., the copyright free pamphlets and the newspapers) and finally 3) the ideal reader and kind of reading that he wished to create by his writing and printing work. For our purposes, this account is important (and especially the finally point) because it illustrates Gandhis practical approach to addressing, resisting and transforming the effects of the machine/technological culture through a necessary interaction with the
6

Loc numbers are given to the Kindle electronic edition of the work, which unfortunately does not provide access to original book page numbers. This is a great irony of course, when contrasted with Gandhis hand press.

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machine. This is, in effect, an interaction with the technology in order to create a heightened awareness of it and its effects. Early in the work, Hofmeyr offers a good summary of Gandhis intention: He favored hand printing and encouraged a style of reading that was patient, that paused rather than rushed ahead. He interspersed news reports with philosophical extracts, and he encouraged readers to contemplate what they read rather than hurtle forward. In effect, he experimented with an anti-commodity, copyright-free, slow-motion newspaper. (Loc 87) On the question of reading, she notes, Gandhi was very concerned with how the pace of modern civilization had affected consciousness and the style of learning. For example, he was very taken with and reprinted Thoreaus account of how that modern technology had increased the speed of communication such that it had effected reading by macadamizing (paving with asphalt) the mind (Loc 86). The result was that thought, reflection and internalizationthe pondering of the ideas--was left behind. Reading became more superficial and less critical because it did not engage the whole reflective mind-spirit of the reader. As Hofmeyer notes, the slow reading which Gandhi tried to create by his writing was meant to pause industrial speed and, in doing so, it created small moments of intellectual independence (Loc 92). In an eloquent and insightful analysis of the production of Hind Swaraj, for example, Hofmyer points out that the ways that Gandhis chosen medium and form of writing, also embodied his message. Thus Gandhi speaks of placing the text before the reader and Hofmyer notes that this is a paradigm of ideal social relations: The act of placing something before a reader carries overtones of a gift. Such gift-giving creates relationships of obligation between the Reader and the Editor and shifts reading away from the realm of anonymous mass consumerism and toward the domain of semipersonalized reception. Placing an object before a group equally creates a certain ceremonial association[a] commonwealth [in which] all can find a place provide if of course, they are prepared to undertake the necessary apprenticeship of reading. In a Gandhian theory of reading, those who do so with virtue and application will turn themselves into true readers and writers, exemplars and
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analogues of self-ruling subjects, and miniature and summarized zones of sovereignty. (Loc 2228) All of this of course, creates a heightened awareness of relationships and also of the mediating technologies in the reader and that seems to have been Gandhis primary intention as a writer. Here he is trying to accomplish a slowing down and a counter friction to the machine as Thoreau put it (Loc 1342). Hofmeyr concludes by noting that Gandhis appeal to the interiority of the reading would be a much more difficult in our own post-modern culture: Post-modernity now operates as modernity without interiority, a series of instantaneously assimilable, visual signs and experiences. From a Gandhian perspective, such turbo-reading would represent macadamaization taken to absurd lengths: to those living in the swirl and confetti of social media he would no doubt quote Thoreau, namely, that they had not heard from themselves in a long time (Loc 2368). Returning to the Stories and the Questions: Thinking on the Run We began by reflecting on the difficulties of seeing, let alone reflecting upon, our interaction with technology. Its invisibility to consciousness and its sinking below the horizon of what-we-cannot-livewithout, create enormous challenges for us. We tried to highlight these challenges by speaking of the synergy between the human and the technological; the way in which human consciousness (and will) have been technologized and conversely the way in which technologies have been humanized, (integrated into daily practice and given a human face). This synergy truly shifts the boundaries by which human being might be conceived and measured. We are already different and our self-reflection, our understanding of ourselves, has not yet caught up to these shifts. It is a dangerous and still powerful denial that continues to see our technologies as mere tools (to be used or not from some sovereign platform of will ) on the one hand, and to see ourselves as essentially independent of them. We have shaped our destiny through them and continue to do so--but in a way which is not critically reflective, which does not see the complete picture and which avoids seeing on the deeper ethical issues. Tolstoy reminded us of one of these deeper issues when he asked How much land does a man [sic] need?. In that story-fable, Pahom the
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main character takes up the challenge to purchase as much land as he can traverse by running from dawn to dusk. He returns to his starting point exhausted in the evening and drops dead. He is buried in some six feet of earth. Tolstoy is contrasting the measure of how much we need when measured by desire/greed and how much when measured by our intrinsic limits (the body and mortality). He, like Gandhi, seemed acutely aware of the danger involved in our desire to exceed limits, to transcend ourselves in what could be considered the wrong ways. Like Pahom, we are already running and have been for some several generations, as Gandhi suggests. On the run, we are still searching for an appropriate measuring stick to gauge and limit our desires for the real and the possible. He already seemed to see that finding our way among the helps and hindrances of the technological was a complex and uncertain task. It required a deep listening to the voice of conscience and a practical commitment to work and be in the present moment. This is an important first step, to be sure. But will it truly show us ourselves or will it simply reflect the ways in which we have already been transformed? The questions that Gandhi raises are of this nature: does this (new technological possibility) make me more free? What is the nature of true freedom/autonomy? What is the meaning of mutual cooperation? Must we go higher and farther and faster, or rather deeper and toward a more patient dialogue/listening to the inner voice? Where will the answers really come fromwithin or without? Where will we find true happiness, true fulfillment, true love? How can we possibly fulfill our responsibilities as human beings and meet our destiny together with a clear mind and and a pure heart? We will have to decide to what extent these are still our questions. In the meantime, we may at least be grateful that someone worked to see this seam between the human and the technological with such sincerity and dedication. Even if our questions are different than these, they open a path for us. In view of Gandhis theory of slow reading, I would ask you, gentle reader, to ponder and reflect on your own running, your own searching of conscience and your own light. Let us each try to ask and 'hear from ourselves' about the questions that can and should be raised. I will also try to listen and continue to listen with patience. In the next issue, inshallah, I will continue these reflections. In the meantime, we may continue to learn from the questioning of the fishes:
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Well then, they ask again, 'What does the air feel like?' And we have to think about this. Air feels like air, we say, and the fishes laugh mirthlessly. 'Think!' they say. 'Think,' they say, now gentler. And we think and we guess that air feels like hair, thousands of hairs, swaying ever so slightly in breezes microscopic. The fishes laugh again. 'Do better, think harder,' they say, encouraging us. It feels like language, we say, and they are impressed. 'Keep going,' they say. It feels like blood, we say, and they say, 'No, no, now you're getting colder.' The air is like being wanted, we say, and they nod approvingly. The air is like being pushed and pulled and yanked, punched and slapped and misunderstood and loved, we say, and the fishes sigh and touch our forearm sympathetically. (Dave Eggers).

Paul Schwartzentruber, Al Gharbia, UAE, 2014

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Works Cited Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-thanHuman World (2006). Eggers, Dave, How the Water Feels to the Fishes. McSweeneys, New York, 2007 Gillespie, Michael. The Theological Origins of Modernity. University of Chicago, 2008. Heidegger, Martin, The Question Concerning Technology "The Question Concerning Technology", from Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings from "Being and Time" (1927) to "The Task of Thinking" (1964), rev. ed., edited by David Farrell Krell. Harper: San Francisco. Hofmeyr, Isabel. Gandhis Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading. Harvard, 2013. Kindle edition Illich, Ivan. The Rivers North of the Future. The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley.Toronto, Anansi , 2005. Ortega Y Gasset, Jose. Man in Revolt, 1930. Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy, Oxford. 2009. Patel, Anthony. Gandhi. Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, Centenary Edition. Editors Introduction,(Cambridge, UP, 2009) Rudolph, Lloyd and Susanne. The Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays, Chicago; UP, 2010. Sibley, Mulford. In Praise of Gandhi: Technology And The Ordering Of Human Relations published online at http://universalistfriends.org/library/in-praise-of-gandhitechnology-and-the-ordering-of-human-relations De St.Exupery, Antoine. Terre des Hommes, Folio, 2006. Varki, Aji, and Danny Brower. Denial. Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind. New York, Hachette, 2013. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Routledge, London, 1999. ___________. The Need for Roots. Preface to a declaration of duties toward mankind, Routledge, London, 2004 ___________. Oppression and Liberty. Routledge, London, 2004.

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