The Practical Is More Real than The Technical
How what's "technically true" might not be realer than what is "practically the case."
What is “technically true” is what we have been trained to believe is “most true,” while what is “practically true” is what we are trained to believe is “less true.” This, I believe, is partially a result of the “technological thinking” which Heidegger warned we were being “captured” by (Deleuze), and that escaping this “mode of being” requires an inversion of this cultural paradigm which we have absorbed. The practical is more real than the technical, which is a flip I associate with Hegel, who stresses the concrete, and David Hume, who stresses “common life” as foundational.
Throughout O.G. Rose, the word “practical” is used often in italics with terms like “practically inevitable” or “practically the case,” which is to say that “when x is acted out” or “when x is brought into the realm of action,” then x becomes highly probable. We italicize “practical” because I mean it in a very special way to both suggest approximation and “in practice.” This is discussed in “The Tragedy of Us” extensively, but I think it is important to note here.
I am not saying that the technical is false; rather, I am saying that, for human subjects, what “is” is what is practiced. This could be thinking about a cat, throwing a ball, taking a walk—the world is a collection of actions, change, and processes (as argued by Maurice Blondel). The technical only matters to the degree it can “be brought into the practical,” versus how we seem trained to think that what is practiced should reflect what is technically the case. If “the practical” falls out of line with “the technical,” then we are trained to think it is “the practical” which is at fault.
We have perhaps absorbed this notion from law and how everything in a machine must be perfectly aligned so that it works, as makes sense given the vast prevalence of bureaucracy and technology in our lives today. The State is very powerful, as is technology, and so we can subconsciously associate “the technical” which both of these enterprises require as “most real” or “most true” (in them being “most powerful”). The technical can seem more powerful than the practical, but that doesn’t mean it is truer (the practical is humbler and “becoming-other”), and yet this is what we seem to think. None of this follows, but the error seems natural. And in absorbing this, we find ourselves “captured,” just as Heidegger and Deleuze warned.
Nothing can be technically true other than what humans create, which suggests an irony in us treating “the technical” as more real than “the practical” which humans live in and by. Nothing in nature is “technical,” for nothing in nature is “a technology” (even if “technological-like”). Nature can be complex, sure, but “complex” and “technical” are not similes. Though we seem primed to conflate these because of our perpetual encounter with bureaucracy and technology (a Kafka move, perhaps). “The technical” is the profoundly detailed where all parts must align with all other parts for things to function, but this is not how nature works. Nature is far more “approximate” and “improvisational”: there is not a hard rubric for what makes a cat “a cat,” as I can lose fingers and still live. Yes, there are “essential things” in nature, but things need only “approximately align” with those essences to work. The technical is rarely needed for life to be practiced, even if there are times when “the technical” matters. Life is not a courtroom, but if we think of “the technical” as most real, then in our efforts to give it substance all the world can end up on trial. We will be the judge, in power—a temptation Heidegger noted.
Without the practical, the technical would have never been created, and so to treat the practical as “less real” than the technical is strange. In O.G. Rose, to emphasize “the practical” leads us into phenomenology, motivation, concretion, and the like, and for us philosophy which cannot move into these realms is “less real” than philosophy which can. We seek what can be practiced, for we are not tools of our “technical” creations.
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