The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

xx, 359 pp. "Technology extends our freedom greatly in certain areas, yet it drastically threatens that freedom elsewhere. The nagging doubt grows more persistent that technical thinking cannot deal with our deeper human problems. Where can we turn for some understanding of these issues and of our future? William Barrett, one of America's leading philosophers, would have us turn to the thinkers shaping the climate of this century. ...Barrett selects three representative thinkers--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and William James--and brings before us a vivid picture of the main currents in modern thought. We explore, first, the limits of logic and logical thinking as a formal technique; then consider the ways in which we, as members of a technical society, could lose our primary relation to the core of Being. Finally, we come back to the stumbling block that no civilization, however dazzling its powers, can evade: the question of the individual in his stubborn and lonely struggle to find a meaning for his existence."