If a child, writes Plotinus, shows no talent and seems unfit for a more serious career, the parents say it is best to put them to a trade.⁴³ They do exactly the same today as they did seventeen hundred years ago. The difference is that back then, people were well aware of the mediocrity of those who practiced a trade. Today, however, the untalented — not so much due to their numerical superiority, but rather by the very nature of modern civilization — consider themselves the sustaining element of humanity. For the moment, we are not speaking of Bernard Shaw’s remark, who, with his usual ingenuity and his usual frivolity, considers the chauffeur-type to be the man of the future.⁴⁴ At this moment, by virtue of the power of technology, it is the so-called 'technical man' who dictates. Which is just another name for a craftsman. The technician does not, and never will, figure among the representatives of the human spirit. Yet today, it is the technical colleges and universities that are overcrowded, because a person without skills can most easily secure a well-paying job through what he has learned there. This is the person who dictates the standard of thought, lifestyle, taste, morals, and temperament. He attains the goods of life with the greatest of ease. This is the man who enjoys so-called success.
We are not talking about technology now. What we are talking about is the technician. A. Perron⁴⁵ says that technology is puerile, typically a product of the adolescent imagination. Everyone has a more or less developed technical phase, but by the age of eighteen, in the normal man, it passes away. Once intellectual maturity is reached, the technical imagination occupies only those who possess no higher qualities. It is a pity, says A. Perron, to speak of the realization of particularly great values in connection with technology. Behind our entire technical civilization lies the Jules Verne ideal: wanting to furnish the world the way Captain Nemo furnished the Nautilus. If we valorise the hundred-seater jet airliner in spiritual terms, we must admit that its value is no greater than that of a merry-go-round. Rather less.
The literature on technocracy is vast but useless, says E. B. Wallace.⁴⁶ The opinion of every author is decided by some sympathy or aversion, as if taking a disinterested stance on this matter were impossible. Technology has moved into the focal point of worldview tensions. Spiritualists reject it fundamentally and unconditionally, just as materialists exalt it. European thought does not possess, and has never possessed, that unbiased standard capable of determining the significance of technology without preoccupation. With a few exceptions, our thinkers have merely given better or worse form to the passions of history, but there has been no one capable of viewing them from above. European thought stands under the sign of the 'gifted personality,' but not under that of the absolute spirit. To arrive at the truth, it takes more than merely being an interesting person.
Mircea Eliade claims that the earth's chthonic rhythm is pretty slow, and technology is the speeding up of this rhythm.⁴⁷ Man takes over the role of time. What the earth's physical-geological-chemical life creates over thousands of years, man can do even in a matter of minutes with his technology. Man melts metal, cleans it of elements that do not belong there, or mixes it appropriately with other elements, shapes it and makes tools. He shortens natural processes, and what he achieves is always the more in a shorter time.
Here is one of the interesting theories of European man, which is as witty as it is frivolous. The author does not tell us the most important thing. What is the purpose of this shortening? Why does man take over the role of time, and why does he speed up the processes?
Man's attitude toward nature can be threefold. The first is metaphysical, which wants to raise up every speck of dust in nature and wants to ennoble it. For us, after having completely disappeared even from historical religions, this primordial attitude is preserved by the tradition of alchemy. Alchemy wants to turn the world into gold, that is, it wants to raise it with its every atom into the world of the incorruptible and imperishable spirit.
The second attitude is man's paternal care for nature. Archaic cultures arose from this care. Where agriculture and animal husbandry are still intact, there this spirit lives on.
The third attitude became general with the decline of the archaic era, and this is the plundering of nature. If one takes a look today at the mines, the devastated primeval forests, the plundered seas, the slaughtered animals and primitive peoples, and the billions of civilized robot slaves, one can have no doubt as to what is happening here. For a short time in the last century, it seemed that socialism would create a perfect change in the way of life, and everyone believed that it would end this exploitation. The opposite happened. Socialism is a European theory just like the others; it is not a solution to a crisis, it is only a product of crisis, which is to say, it cannot grasp things from above, it merely formulates the difficulties with great pains. Instead of creating a radical solution, it only intensified the plundering and, moreover, justified its crimes with a stupid ideology.
Some consider the life-destroying nature of technology to be a forced consequence of overpopulation. This frenzied robbery economy would make no sense anyway. The author⁴⁸ revels in the usual horror statistics that we all know: how many people were on earth in 1800, how many in 1900, how many we will be in 2000. He secretly hopes that nuclear war or an epidemic will thin our ranks. If this did not happen, the situation would be hopeless. In a few hundred years, there will be four people per square meter on earth, which means we will have only as much space to stand as on a crowded tram. These people, says G. B. Balling, will have a socialist ideology of a high order, compared to which today's is simple barbarism. They just won't have anything to eat. The predatory character of technology is beyond doubt. However, this plundering is a compulsion that must be continued because there are many of us. If we maintained a normal economy, more than half of humanity would starve. Invention, says the author, is a function of population density. The anxiety caused by the ever-increasing population forces man to create more and more opportunities for plundering, and to exploit those opportunities with ever faster and more efficient methods. If the population of the earth were to decrease to the 1800 level, technology would cease to exist by eighty percent, if only because there would not be enough of us to maintain the industrial complexes employing a large number of people and the densely stratified branches of occupation. Cybernetics would disappear just like nylon and canned pineapples.
Of course, things can also be reversed. It is not at all certain that the regularization of robbery was caused by overpopulation. It could easily be that the exploitation that has become general, that is, the conscious breeding of slaves — just to have as many workers as possible and the labor as cheap as possible — caused such a horrible increase in the population. It seems that wanting to explain organized robbery economy by the compulsion of population density is nothing more than a lame excuse. One cannot be cautious enough with a theory that ascribes a critical phenomenon of life to external causes and wants to absolve man from mandatory responsibility. The first cause is always man. The responsibility must be assumed not only out of fairness, but also because it makes sense, so there is an opportunity for man to change the situation he has brought about with his own will.
There is also an author⁴⁹ who attempts to bring technology and bureaucracy to a common denominator. In their life-destroying mechanization, the two really have something in common. One could also say that bureaucracy and technocracy are both by-products of modern utopianism. The author considers bureaucracy to be older, but technology to be more harmful. Today, in their demoralizing effect, they work together in wonderful harmony, as if both had the goal of exterminating life. G. W. Allington is, for that matter, a wittier sort of journalist, who noticed the life-destroying effect of these two modern phenomena, but who failed to see the functional difference between officialdom and technology. Bureaucracy is always a question of the human element, the tension between organism and organization. Technology is a question of the living and the inanimate, the tension between organism and mechanism. The aim of bureaucracy is to corrupt joy. Technology is a suicide attempt.
The natural consequence of man's activity to acquire more in a shorter time is twofold: one is that life speeds up, and the other is that it becomes increasingly empty. E. B. Wallace calls this phenomenon loss of life-essence.⁵⁰ Always more in less time. In an ever shorter time, as far as possible. Run or swim a hundred meters in as little time as possible. Throw the javelin as far as possible. Jump as far and as high as possible. Lift as much weight as possible. This is the modern hero. How many bricks does the Stakhanovist lay in one hour? The speed of automobiles is two hundred kilometers per hour, that of trains is the same, and airplanes travel at the speed of sound. One man operates thirty machines, another forty. It is necessary to accelerate the development of plants with radiation. You have to produce more in a smaller area. More people need to be accommodated in fewer places. Bunk beds, double-decker beds. To make use of space, time, material, strength, and energy. This grandiose idiocy is called rationalism. Rationalism is the metaphysics of robbing life. The faster someone runs a hundred meters, the less sense it all makes. There are performances that are absolutely absurd. Rationalism is an excellent example of how something can be rational, and at the same time, completely meaningless.
To plant as many sugar beets as possible in as small an area as possible. This is what is rational. To exploit it. As fast as possible. No one has ever asked the question: what happens to the time you save when you do something faster? The word production is used misleadingly for this phenomenon. It is as clear as day that it is a robbery. To sow twice a year. Growing five-kilo potatoes. To introduce the cultivation of oranges and bananas to the Arctic Circle. Shortening manufacturing processes. The shortest path in the fastest time. This is what Mircea Eliade calls the acceleration of the rhythm of nature, when man takes over the role of time and dictates a faster pace. He wants to swim the hundred meters faster, but he doesn't know what to do with the time he has saved. M. Eliade is certainly not a musical person and does not know the difference between rhythm and tact. Nature, life, thought, and art have a rhythm, a pulse given together with life. Mechanics, however, are metrical. The machine is an automaton. Rhythm and tact can never be confused. If you apply tact instead of rhythm, the result is the loss of life-essence. Dance is rhythmic; the military step is metrical. The heartbeat is rhythmic; the metronome keeps tact, even if the numerical value of the two is the same. Rationalist thought is an abbreviated and accelerated thought from which the essences of life have disappeared. Rationalism is the mindless, frenzied tact in one place, which has no meaning that can be called by any name. It is the modern chase, and the record, and performance, and speed, and the lust for life, and hurrying, and devouring, and rushing, and vertigo, and the disappearance of essences, when man is nothing more but existence in Nothingness.
In every civilization, says Perron,⁵¹ there is a stage which may be called the minimum of spirituality, and there is every indication that this minimum is the same in all civilizations. Fruitful life is only possible above this. When a person reaches the freezing point, his life is not directed by spiritual forces, but by pseudo-spiritual compulsions, which we know from the psychology of the weak-minded, the immature, the primitive, and the psychopathic, and which common parlance calls obsessions. Obsession is a mere psychological phenomenon without spiritual content. A. Perron claims that if a person descends to the spiritual minimum because he loses control over himself, he can become prey to every abnormality. Abnormality is precisely that a person is governed by an obsession instead of an intelligent spirit. In general, an untalented person can be recognized by the fact that their life contents are pseudo-spiritual. Untalentedness is actually a kind of spiritual minimum. The life of society depends on the wealth of talents within it. The dissolution of society begins with the disappearance of talents.
Rationalism is actually an obsession that arose from the spiritual minimum of European civilization at the beginning of the modern age. Technology, un rêve défaillant,⁵² a swooning dream, was born of this pseudo-spiritual compulsion. What does this dream dream? Jules Verne novels. Airships and airplanes and wireless telegraph and radio and television, rocketry and flight to the Moon, a journey on the stream of fire toward the center of the earth, electromagnetism extracted from the air, and solar energy stored in boxes. Captain Nemo sits in his Nautilus, twelve thousand meters under the sea, alone. The submarine has its own power plant, brilliant light everywhere. It has its own heating. Its own oxygen generator. He presses one of the buttons, and the invisible organ plays Bach's Mass in B minor. He presses another button, and the television plays Hamlet. In the meantime, he gets hungry, presses the third button, and the table rolls in with an eight-course lunch and port wine. He presses the fourth button and sees the Moon and Venus and Jupiter up close through the telescope. Pressing another button, the submarine starts and rises to the surface of the sea; another button there, the Nautilus grows wings, rises into the air, and ascends to the top of Mount Everest. Captain Nemo sits on deck and smokes a pipe, watching the hurricane raging in the mountains, while he presses a button and a glass of fresh grapefruit juice appears on the table. He only needs to know which button to press. Captain Nemo is very careful that if he wants to listen to the Sunday sermon in Westminster Abbey, he does not press the button that fires forty shells per minute from the automatic rapid-fire cannon. Captain Nemo is a colossal man because he takes all of this with supreme seriousness and swears by the push-button theory. He invented and built all this himself. If this fascinates a sixteen-year-old, it is understandable because this is his world. If a mature person, then un rêve défaillant. However, if it becomes an entire civilization, then it is a collective lunacy. And if this collective insanity prepares for war and makes tactical weapons, then that is what can be called suicide. Captain Nemo is a dangerous opponent. Not because he is smart, but precisely because he is incredibly narrow-minded, and crazed, and untalented. Because he is mediocre. Because he is immature and has no inkling of the values of humanity. He only cares about which button he presses. If he were a schoolboy, there would still be a chance that he might mature. But he is a grown man, so the situation is hopeless. Captain Nemo lives below the spiritual minimum and isn't even aware of what he is doing, like the student who gets drunk from the fact that he succeeded in generating chlorine — and poisons the whole house.
More recently, the name homo faber has been coined for the mediocre man. Homo faber means contriving man. This is the one about whom Plotinus says that he is unfit for a more serious career. If one wants to understand this man, one must turn to the Hebrew tradition. This tradition teaches that creation is only perfect if it passes through four stages. Creation is born in the realm of potentials (Atzilut) as possibility and thought. From there it moves into the virtual world (Beriah); this is the first step of realization. Then it must be shaped (Yetzirah), and finally physically made (Asiyah). Homo faber lives solely and exclusively in this last, fourth circle. It deals only with what needs to be done manually and physically. What is usually called an invention today is such a hybrid creation that does not touch upon the spiritual phases, which is why it is such an awkward fabrication. That is why most machines are strange and grotesque. The machine was not made to be an object of joy forever, like a work of art. All machines are gnome-like because they are mere fabrications. Homo faber is such a dabbling man. The operation of the machine is terrifying, and comical at the same time. The machine is stupid. There is hardly anything more ridiculous than watching its ever-repeating motions, as it pours forth the tin elephants. Since each thing is not only itself, but at the same time a symbol and a sign of something else, the question must be asked: what is the machine a symbol of? The machine is a symbol of the rational function, of that certain human ability below the spiritual minimum, which was just mentioned — that is, mediocrity, which is to say, the lack of talent. Since the machine only moves in the circle of making, it only does something that can be made, and nothing beyond that. Therefore, all technical creations, like sound records, photographs, and reproductions, are mere fabrications. The machine does not create, but repeats. That is what is so outrageously comical about it, because life knows how to do everything, except to repeat. The machine stands outside of time. It has no metaphysics. And if someone were to ask what the metaphysics of this lack of metaphysics is, the answer would be that here, the fear of time manifests. Man has managed to create something that has no awareness of passing away. However, this creation is, unfortunately, idiotic and knows nothing else but to say the same thing for time immemorial. What does not know death does not live. The machine has no guilt, no conscience, no religion. Technology, let us say, is the ineptia mysterii.⁵³ Therefore, it is ultimately an occult phenomenon.
Man likes the machine because it is obedient.
The advantage of the machine over man is that it has no demand for freedom. The dictator's ideal is the machine.
The machine is mere practice, without any theory. But we know that practice is depraved theory.
The machine is reason manifested; technology is rationalism manifested. An accelerating and shortening intervention into the processes of nature. A kind of artificial and counter-nature, where things are predictable because there is no lived time.
Technology is an attempt to make man live without sacrifice. The machine is liked by the man who believes that he is at home on the earth.
Machine sentimentality (the electric chair).
Technology is the triumph of the external world — that is, technology is proof that even the wildest phantasm has a greater reality than the external world.
Whoever builds on the external world degrades the human element.
Technology is the desacralization of human work.
The comforting nature of technical civilization eliminates the tragic. Now, there is only the accident.
Sacred and profane work. There is no fruitful work without valeur liturgique⁵⁴ (M. Eliade).
There is no distinct sacred and profane work. Work is the realization of dreams. Mediocre dreams (Verne novels, technology). Technology, being inspired by the fear of time, is an insurance against passing away. Illusion. This is the mechanical ideal of immortality.
A never-before-imagined materiality.
Technology is the swoon of the spirit.
Inventing technology is not productivity.
Technology is a defense against the threat of genius. The craftsman hides in his trade so that he does not have to deal with serious matters. Hence the spiritual deafness of the technical man.
The technical man has a degenerate sense of reality.
Technology and baseness. A hermaphrodite machine, it neither begets nor gives birth. It excretes.
The infernal character of machines.
Technical civilization and narcotics.
The unproductiveness of machines.
The machine is a projection of that subspiritual layer which is instinct and reflex; the base of the machine is the Pavlovian world.
A mechanized nightmare, like utopia.
Translated by op
(Second, revised edition, 2026)
Source: Béla Hamvas, Patmosz I. (written 1958–1964), Medio, Budapest, 2004. ISBN: 9638569379
Footnotes:
⁴³ Plotinus: direct reference to Ennead III.8.4-6 (Nature, Contemplation, and the One). Hamvas’s opening sentence is a masterful paraphrase of Stephen MacKenna’s iconic translation of this specific passage: "The relation of action to contemplation is indicated in the way duller children, inapt to study and speculation, take to crafts and manual labour." Plotinus posits that physical craftsmanship (techne) and mechanical labor are merely products of a weaker, diminished capacity for pure spiritual contemplation — a desperate attempt by the unspeculative soul to find expression in the material world. For the definitive English edition, see: Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. by Stephen MacKenna (London: Medici Society, 1917–1930).
⁴⁴ George Bernard Shaw: Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (1903). The character of Henry Straker, the pragmatic, tech-obsessed chauffeur, serves as Shaw's satirical archetype for the "man of the future," which Hamvas reframes as the embodiment of technical mediocrity.
⁴⁵ Arnold Perron, Un Rêve défaillant (Paris: Metteur, 1957).
⁴⁶ E. B. Wallace, The World of the Mediocrity (London: Pencil and Stone, 1959).
⁴⁷ Mircea Eliade: The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structures of Alchemy, trans. by Stephen Corrin (London: Rider and Company, 1962) – Source for the theory of accelerating the chthonic rhythm of the earth.
⁴⁸ G. B. Balling, Malthus and Edison, Books of the Recent Times, no. 12 (London, 1955).
⁴⁹ George William Allington, Technocracy and Bureaucracy: Diseases of Modern Human Life (New York, Ontario, 1956).
⁵⁰ E. B. Wallace, op. cit., pp. 188–216.
⁵¹ A. Perron, op. cit., pp. 127–141.
⁵² un rêve défaillant: literal French translation: "a fainting, swooning, or failing dream." Placed by Hamvas into the mouth of his fictional French author, Arnold Perron, this concept denotes a weakened, decadent state of consciousness where the creative human imagination loses its spiritual vitality and degenerates into passive, mechanical, and infantile fantasies (such as the uncritical worship of technological gadgets or the naive escapism of Jules Verne novels). Arnold Perron, Un Rêve défaillant (Paris: Metteur, 1957).
⁵³ ineptia mysterii: a Latin phrase meaning "inaptitude for the mystery" or "the folly of the mystery." The term was famously employed by Carl Gustav Jung in his seminal work Psychology and Alchemy (The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, trans. by R.F.C. Hull, Princeton University Press, 2nd edition, completely revised, 1968). Jung uses it as a precise psychological diagnosis to denote a one-sided, hyper-intellectual mindset that is utterly incapable of enduring psychic paradoxes, the tension of opposites, or the transcendent, choosing instead to completely reject the existence of the mystery. It was coined by psychologists themselves to describe this specific internal trauma or blindness. Hamvas masterfully projects this psychological diagnosis onto modern technology and the homo faber, defining it as an ontological condition that is entirely deaf to the sacred and intimate mysteries of existence.
⁵⁴ valeur liturgique: French for "liturgical value." A core concept used by the renowned historian of religions Mircea Eliade. It posits that in archaic and traditional societies, human work (such as agriculture, building, or craftsmanship) was never a mere economic or secular activity. Instead, it was performed as a sacred ritual — a liturgy — that repeated a primordial cosmic act of creation, thereby infusing daily labor with transcendent meaning and divine worth. Mircea Eliade: The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. by Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959)
Translator's note on literary mystification: a fascinating aspect of Hamvas's essayistic style is his playful integration of literary mystification. It is important to note that while classical giants like the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus, the playwright George Bernard Shaw, and the world-renowned religious historian Mircea Eliade are, of course, very real and crucial reference points in this text, the other authors cited in the footnotes (Perron, Wallace, Balling, Allington) do not exist in reality. They were invented by Hamvas as philosophical chess pieces to expand his narrative.
kianamaiart
gamechangershow
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
