Perhaps nothing is more characteristic of modernity than the growth of science and technology. In premodern times (say, before 1480), human calculative reason was rated as only one among the several capacities of man, and it was always kept "in its place." With the rise of perspective (for with perspective came the spatializing and mathematizing of human reason), the powers of mind to control nature technologically were multiplied many fold. Perspective also separated the viewer of the world from what surrounded him, and by defining objects in terms of extension, of mass, perspective laid the foundations for the familiar Cartesian (and modern) dualism between a nonmaterial consciousness and a world of material objects. Galileo's maxim, "To measure everything measurable and to make what is unmeasurable measurable." may be called the slogan of the modern era. Time, too, came to be conceived in spatial terms, as the visual faculty began subtly to dictate the forms of modern thought. Being became "being-in-space" and time became a measured, linear continuum. An abstract, mental world of measurements, formulae, and conceptual thinking increasingly enabled modern man to take charge of his world.

Perspective, then, is more important than one might at first think. It furnishes the foundation for the spatialized thinking of modernity and the rise of mathematical geometry, which is the prerequisite for building modern machinery, as well as the natural basis for the metaphysics of objectivity. To it can be traced the problems that have dominated modern philosophy—the mind-body problem, the subject-object dichotomy, and the epistemological foundations for both rationalist and empiricist thought.²² The quest for verifiable knowledge rests on the assumption of a central, verifying subject, with a method or set of definitions that gives sense to the world. The egocentric, humanistic, and reason-centered cast of modern thought is rooted in the perspectivist model epitomized in Dürer's famous woodcut of a man looking through a grid as he draws a human body. The abstractness, the reduction of the model to spatial squares, the separation of the observer from the object, so that it appears to him only in terms of extension—these are all reflected in the famous woodcut. The saying of Protagoras that "man is the measure of all things" depends for its meaning on the dimensions of man. A definition of man emphasizing his spiritual nature will provide a different measure, however, than a merely humanistic definition. One might say in general that with the rise of perspective, measurement—that is, extension—becomes the measure of all things.

William Blake and the great romantic poets, especially Wordsworth, were among the first really effective voices of protest against modernity, and they were among the first to perceive the inner relationship of modernity to objectivizing and technological thought. Blake attacks the "single vision" of Newton's sleep which manacles the mind. The visionary gleam whose loss Wordsworth laments with the passing of childhood is the light of a way of seeing before reason and morality separated man from nature.²³ Yet pleas on behalf of nature, imagination, and the life of the senses could not halt the movement of invention, exploration, annexation, and exploitation spreading itself across the modern scene. In fact, the romantic protest seemed to point away from the central thrust of social development and invention to aesthetic escapes that belong after business hours. Romantic and postromantic literature and art became the compensation for an increasingly machine-dominated economic system.

Among the most trenchant critics of contemporary technology is Theodore Roszak, who consciously goes back to romanticist thought and visionary reality. His first major work, The Making of a Counter Culture, attempted to articulate a critique of technological rationality and scientific objectivity. Although probably more an attempt to supply after the fact a theoretical background for the counterculture than a description of the beliefs and motives of the quotidian cultural dropout, Roszak's work offers a sharp critique of prevailing cultural assumptions and reveals some of the seamy side of the modern idolatry of objectivity. Where the Wasteland Ends and, most recently, his Unfinished Animal continue and expand the critique, with explicit philosophical dependence on romantic and visionary realities.²⁴

The case against technological rationality is stated with trenchancy on quite different philosophical foundations by Philip Slater and by Herbert Marcuse. Slater attacks the ideals on which American capitalist individualism is based, especially the pursuit of lonely success through competition. Technology is the perfect instrument for these ideals, yet it is self-defeating. "Technology," says Slater, "is an extension of the scarcity-oriented, securityminded, control-oriented side of man's nature, expressed vis-a-vis a world perceived as unloving, ungiving, and unsatisfying."²⁵ For Slater the solution is to turn away from the masculine virtues toward the feminine. Yet "Western culture is founded on the oppression of women and of the values associated with them: wholeness, continuity, communion, humanism, feelings, the body, connectedness, harmony."²⁶ No less penetrating in his criticisms of a technologized rationality that leads to modern "one-dimensional man," Herbert Marcuse bases his case on assumptions derived from Hegel, Marx, and Freud.²⁷ Marcuse argues for a transcendence that is able to overshoot and comprehend the prevailing structures of thought and the culturally created needs generated by them. We should be seeking not just more and better ways of meeting our "needs" as presently conceived, but a "redefinition of needs." In arguing for such a transcendence, Marcuse offers a postmodern global critique of the prevailing culture.

But unlike Slater and Roszak, Marcuse takes a basically Freudian attitude toward "irrationality" and civilization; he argues that only Reason (Vernunft)—some kind of post-technological rationality—will meet man's present crisis. Man frees himself from Nature and creates civilization through Reason, and it is only through Reason that man can realize himself as an historical being. "Civilization produces the means of freeing Nature from its own brutality .. . by virtue of the cognitive and transforming power of Reason. And Reason can fulfill this function only as post-technological rationality, in which technic is itself the instrumentality of pacification."²⁸ Marcuse obviously defines reason as much more than the mere calculative faculty in man. It is something like "mind" or "spirit." By following the Freudian analysis of desire and of cultural repression, Marcuse can define liberation in terms of a social order free of repression of desire and free of the artificial needs created by the present onedimensional rationality—without having recourse to romantic terms like a "rhapsodized intellect" (Roszak), post-humanistic "visionary reality" (Roszak and others), or Slater's "feminine values." For Marcuse, irrationality and mysticism are not the way beyond technological rationality; what is needed is a new rationality that can control technique in behalf of liberation instead of repression, the satisfaction of eros without the abandonment of civilization.

Critiques of technology and technological objectivity are also found in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the thinking of all three overshoots the basic horizons of modern technologized thought.²⁹ Nietzsche saw through modern objectivity as a disguised form of the will to power over nature: the heart of technology, therefore, is the will to power. Heidegger took the definitively postmodern step, however, in negating the will to power, subjectcenteredness, and humanism itself. Heidegger argued that man must take a "step back" from das vorstellende Denken—representational thought. He must, in other words, take the step back from everything that has been constituted by the structure of modern thought. He must call subject-centeredness and humanism into question. He must call into question the presupposition that we must continue indefinitely in a time from which the gods and all divinity have fled. We must redefine what it means to "be" in the world and in the matrix of time; we must reask the most fundamental question of all—the meaning of being. Gadamer, as a follower of Heidegger, criticizes the modern conception of consciousness as inherited from Descartes and Kant, and even the "transcendental subjectivity" of Husserl. Aesthetics has been "subjeetivized" since Kant, he argues, and needs to be put on a whole new footing.³⁰ The subjectcenteredness of modern thinking gives us a distorted view of language and of dialogue. Ultimately, it gives us a false view of understanding as unhistorical and undialectical. Although he does not philosophize with a hammer, like Nietzsche, nor urge us to leap back from all representational thought, like the later Heidegger, Gadamer does so alter the fundamental notions on which modern interpretation operates that one has the feeling of transcending the general horizons of modern thought.