George Grant's Three Languages

Frank K . Flinn

FRANK K . FLYNN is a graduate of Harvard University and of the Uni-

versity of Toronto. He is presently the Director of theological pro-
gramme at St. Louis University.

When the United States weekly, Time Magazine, awarded its

Man-of-the-Year cover story in 1982 to that apothesis of North
American ingenuity, the "personal" home computer, I recollected a
phrase from George Grant's essay, " A Platitude: Technique is Our-
selves." ^ In a pungent interview with Gad Horowitz on the occasion
of the publication of his book of essays. Technology and Empire
(1969), Grant said: "Technology is the metaphysics of our age
it is the way being appears to us, and certainly we're rushing into
the future with no categories by which we can judge it."2 Grant's
question about categories with which to think about technology is a
question about language and meaning in the age of technique.
Grant is asking a radical question: How can we speak and think
about technology f r o m "within the within" of a linguistic and con-
ceptual framework that is itself the footservant of technique?
Grant's question, then, is about the very possibility of questioning
technique and his struggle has been to find a language with which
we can comprehend the technique that has become ourselves.

On more than one occasion Grant has described his thinking as

a tortuous journey not unlike the journey of the philosopher in Plato's
allegory of the Cave {Republic, 514a-541b). The Cave from which
Grant felt himself released—if only for brief respites—is the cave of
the technological Hberalism which has come to be in the Great
Lakes civilisation of North America and which portends to become
the ideology of the coming planetary civilisation. In the stages of his
ascent, we can discern three different languages and three different
interpretive frameworks to which Grant has resorted in order to

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understand the relation between technology and meaning. Yet,

where Plato's philosopher emerges f r o m the darkness of phantasmic
existence to be stunned by the brilliance of the Sun, Grant escapes
f r o m the modern only to encounter a black sun and a darkness
within language itself.

1. The Language of Progress: Myth and History

Grant's first interpretive framework for understanding technol-
ogy is summed up in Philosophy in the Mass Age, in which he
speaks of "myth" and "history." Under the term myth, he subsumes
concepts such as cosmos, natural law, order, limit, time as the mov-
ing image of an unmoving eternity (see Timaeus 37d), and contem-
plation.^ Under history, he includes such concepts as freedom, time
as a progress of irreversible events, providence, the limitless and
action."^ I n regard to the truth of myth and the truth of history,
Grant wrote: "The truth of natural law is that man lives within an
order he did not make and to which he must subordinate his
actions; the truth of the history-making spirit is that man is free to
build a society which eliminates the evils of the world."^

The truth of myth and of the natural law is that they open
humanity to contemplation, reverence and awe. But these undoubted
virtues have ethical limits. The idea of an immutable divine order,
Grant warned, can lead to an indifferent acceptance of scarcity,
starvation and misfortune. Against this the adherents of the idea of
progress legitimately revolt. Conversely, the danger lurking beneath
the history-making spirit, as incarnate in Marxism and pragmatism,
is "the temptation of the limitless" by which no action can be
judged categorically wrong. Despite the conflict between myth and
history, Grant hoped for a synthesis between the ancient concept of
reason as contemplation, reverence and awe and the modern con-
cept of reason as action, history and mastery over nature.

In Philosophy in the Mass Age, Grant understood technique

within a framework of contemplation and action. Technique was
something external to human nature as the means to an end.
Though Grant expressed premonitions about the survival of con-
templation in an age of progress, he nonetheless saw technique as
the moral means to dominate nature. He was hopeful that the "egal-
itarian technologism" of the mass age could be encompassed by the
higher teleology of the contemplation of the whole. Thus, Grant

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defined technology in partly Marxist terms as the domination of

nature for the purpose of eliminating the evils of material existence.
Grant's first interpretive foundation was still a hopeful one. He
believed that the journey ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem was a
journey toward freedom, a "journey of the mind beyond all myths—
out of the shadows and imaginings into the t r u t h . T r u t h lay on
the side of history and progress, or, at least, history and progress
did not mean the loss of truth. Though Philosophy in the Mass Age
was in no sense an apologia for modernity but rather the posing of
a contradiction between two partial truths. Grant later came to see
that his interpretive framework was unequal to its task because it
partook of the progressive faith of modern technologism itself. I n
his retraction, which serves as the preface to the second edition of
Philosophy in the Mass Age, he confessed that he had been held by
the North American dogma of "progress through technology."^

The model of "myth and history" was laden with Hegelian pre-
suppositions which obscured the truth of the ancients. Hegel's cen-
tral belief was that the truth of the ancients could be "subsumed" or
"sublated" {aufgehoben) into a modern synthesis.^ Grant's encounter
with Leo Strauss's critique of modernity taught him that the "syn-
thesis" effected by Hegel tended not toward the nuances of preser-
vation and conservation in the ambiguous Aufhebung but toward
the nuances of negation and cancellation of past meaning.^

2. The Language of the Good: Chance and Necessity

In his middle period. Grant comes to see technique in a new
light. The new understanding is shaped by his deeper reading of
Simone Weil and the critique of technology by Jacques Ellul and
Leo Strauss. Contemporaneous with this new understanding is a
new language which begins to emerge in Lament for a Nation and
comes into f u l l view in the essays written in the middle 1960s and
later collected in Technology and Empire. Grant came to a second
definition of technique as "the mastery of human and non-human
nature" through the pursuit of the natural and social sciences.

Corresponding to this second definition of technique was

Grant's detection that the hidden agenda of modernity posited
human essence solely in freedom such that value is not something
that inheres in creation but is something bestowed by human beings

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in their sovereign mastery. In response to this hidden agenda, Grant

begins to employ an old—but for him, new—language in order to
lay bare the essence of the modern. He begins to speak of our situa-
tion as an "enthralling fate" instead of an exercise of freedom. I n
place of progressive projections into the future, he calls forth recol-
lection and remembrance of what it means to be human. A t the
zenith of our mastery through technique, he posits chance as the
grace whereby we can see, at least for a moment, beyond the tech-
nological fate that binds us. In place of values, he speaks the Pla-
tonic language of the good. Then he pits the language of the good
against the language of value.

The question about Grant's use of the language of the good is a

question about the darkness concealed in the language of value. The
language of value embraces such words as freedom, progress
through technology, personality and history. Without pointing
beyond the modern. Grant endeavours to speak the unspoken in
these most modern of words. Beneath the term value is the assertion
that there is no goodness in the created order apart f r o m our valu-
ing it. 11 Beneath the word freedom is the claim that we create free-
dom out of the absolute sovereignty of the self and that no concep-
tions of the good can limit that freedom. 12 Beneath the term
progress is the assumption of an open-ended progression of human-
ity toward a universal and homogeneous world order which is
assumed to be moral but which, in Grant's mind, portends a
tyranny of sameness. The language of value, the pre-eminent
language of the modern, was for Grant an obscuring language. "Our
modern way of looking at the world," Grant wrote in relation to the
Vietnam War, "hides f r o m us the reality of many political things;
but nothing is more obscuring than the inevitable relation between
dynamic technology and i m p e r i a l i s m . " G r a n t f o u n d in the
language of the good—fate, necessity, chance, recollection, remem-
brance—?i clearer way of speaking about the modern: " I t is in my
opinion a sensible way to talk about events, though obviously it is
far f r o m the liberal dogmas within which most people are taught to
think." 14

Grant's retreat to the language of the good is both strategic and

therapeutic. Strategically, the language of the good functions like
"negative theology" which "paradoxically attaches itself to the world
in speech, in order through its critique to prepare an opening for

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the t r a n s c e n d e n t . I n employing the language of the good, Grant

gives the impression that he detaches himself from the world in
classic idealist fashion. But this would be a serious misinterpreta-
tion. Ideals lay in front of us to be realised in history. Ideas are
above us and serve as critical fulchra by which we may judge the
presence or absence of reality. The Platonic idea of justice as behold-
enness to each person or thing such that it receives its due is the
mental and moral lever by which we can detect the presence or
absence of good in any regime. Furthermore, Grant's Platonism is
not other-worldly. For Grant, justice is God's intended order for
this-worldly life.'^ Grant's use of the language of the good, then, is,
first, a detachment not f r o m the world but from the modern and
what is unthought in it, and, second, a reattachment to the world as
the arena in which eternity and justice become matter in our love of
the good. As Grant frequently has said, in questions of eternity and
justice, "matter is our infallible judge."i^ Therapeutically, the lan-
guage of the good parallels the critical theory of the Frankfurt
School by uncovering the false consciouness and "irrational ration-
ality" hidden in the technological reduction of meaning to instru-
mental reason.

3. The Language of Deprival: Darkness and Diremption

In his third phase, Grant came to see in technology a new
paradigm of knowing and making; that is, a new way of being in
the world. In shorthand, he defined technology as "the mastery of
chance."18 He also employed Jacques Ellul's definition of technique
as "the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute
efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human
activity." 19 Finally, he came to see that the conjunction of techne,
art, doing, making, and logos, reason, account, rationale, in the
modern neologism, technology, hid the key to the altered relation
between "the arts and sciences" in the technological paradigm.

In "Knowing and Making," Grant stated that it no longer made

sense to talk of the arts and the sciences as if they were two kinds
of branches of knowledge with separate methodologies and different
tasks. Instead, he speaks of the "interdependence between the mod-
ern sciences and the arts . . . the copenetration of the sciences and
arts."20 This copenetration has brought about not simply "the scien-
tific study of the practical arts" (as in the Oxford English Diction-

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ary's definition of technology), but an entirely novel relation

between knowing and making such that the arts are not simply stu-
died and systemised but changed " i n their very essence." This
transmutation of essence is nowhere better seen than in bio-
medicine wherein both art and science conspire to master and con-
trol the being of the human itself. Here Grant tracks the spoor of
technology as the copenetration of knowing and making to a cave
in which the very meaning of justice has become obscure:
The chief cause of this is that our justice is being played out
within a destiny more comprehensive than itself. A quick
name for this is technology. I mean by that word the en-
deavour which summons forth everything (both human and
non-human) to give its reasons, and through the summoning
forth of those reasons turns the world into potential raw
material, at the disposal of our "creative wills." The defini-
tion is circular in the sense that what is "creatively" willed is
further expansion of that union of knowing and making
given in the linguistic union of teche and logos.
The very phrasing of the above quotation is beholden to those twin
masters of the modern, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.
It was Nietzsche who summoned forth creativity beyond good and
evil for those who would be worthy to be "masters of the earth."
And no modern thinker penetrated more deeply than Heidegger the
subjection of all that is to the "summons" (Herausforderung) of
technical reason as the calculation of the calculable. Despite their
greatness as thinkers. Grant parts company with them. Grant saw
Heidegger's "wonderful account of technology as having been writ-
ten within the loss which has come with 'technology.'"22 That loss is
most perceptible in the sundering of thought and truth f r o m the
love of justice. I n the definition of technology as the copenetration
of knowing and making cut off f r o m love and justice. Grant touches
on the heart of darkness within modernity. Hence his interpreta-
tive method shifts f r o m the ironic recollection of the good to the
enucleation or cracking of the shell that conceals the darkness in the
modern.

No longer is the journey ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem

obstacle-free: "To move ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem
involves continually bringing to consciousness all the distortions
which are bound to be present f r o m one's individual and social his-
tory."23 I n his third phase. Grant renounces all "virtuous proposals,"

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all edifying discourses, all practical hopes for his thoughts. He

alters, if he does not invert, his first interpretative framework. In
the end. Grant simply and starkly wants "to bring the darkness into
light as darkness."24

With this third mode of interpretation of the modern there

arises a new vocabulary in Grant's thinking. This new lexikon for
cracking the nut of the modern includes words and phrases like
enucleation, the primal, the enfoldment in and the unfolding of
North American destiny or fate, diremption. dispossession, absence
of the good, and intimations of deprival. This new way of speaking
comes to the fore in such essays as "The University Curriculum"
(1969), " I n Defence of North America" (1969), " A Platitude" (1969)
and, most especially, in Time as History (1969). In English-
Speaking Justice, he wrote: "The first task of thought in our era is
to think what that technology is: to think it in its determining
power over our politics and sexuality, our music and education."25
The new language, then, arises f r o m the struggle to give a searching
account of what remains hidden in the North American fate of
dynamic technologism. The very pervasiveness of technique in
North America "stands as a barrier to any thinking which might be
able to comprehend technique from beyond its own dynamism."2^

Grant does not abandon the language of the good in using the
language of deprival. Rather, he seeks to speak indirectly about the
good by speaking directly about deprival and diremption. Amid the
rhetoric of flattery in the age of technique. Grant announces the
word of the Cross: "The theologian of glory says that evil is good
and good evil; the theologian of the Cross says the thing as it is"
(Luther, Heidelberg Theses, #21).27 The language of deprival is
Grant's way of appropriating the negations we experience with the
fate of being enframed in the monism of technique. This language
points to a diremption within language itself:

All coherent languages beyond those which serve the drive to

unlimited freedom through technique have been broken up in
the coming to be of what we are. Therefore it is impossible to
articulate publicly any suggestion of loss, and perhaps even
more frightening, almost impossible to articulate it to our-
selves. We have been left with no words which cleave
together and summon out of uncertainty the good of which

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we may sense the dispossession. . . . The language of what

belongs to man as man has long since been disintegrated.^8
Grant speaks f r o m within the diremption of language itself. While
showing profound admiration for the scientists who turn to "what is
mathematicisable" and who can "abstract f r o m themselves and their
own ambiguities, into the safe light of the quantifiable object,"
Grant steadfastly pays attention to the darknesses of "the distor-
tions of our social prejudices" and "our tortured instincts" f o r which
we have no language that cleaves together.^^ Indeed, the scientistic
separation of subject and object itself obscures those distortions and
tortures, most especially in the sense that "objects" are items f o r the
mastery of chance and no longer beckon f r o m us both justice and
love.
It is for these reasons that when Grant speaks of enucleating
the modern he does not mean setting the modern over against him-
self as an "object" which can be quantified and mathematicised.
Rather, to enucleate means "to extract the kernel of a nut, the seed
of a tree" in such a way as "to partake in the seed f r o m which the
tree of manifestations has come forth."^^ Enucleation is an innova-
tion in the Platonic method of participation (methexis): " I n another
age, it would have been proper to say that I am attempting to
partake in the soul of modernity." The method of enucleation is
contrasted with the quantifying, calculative method of modern
behavourial science which seeks to observe human action and to
predict therefrom. Grant, however, does not want to be able to pre-
dict but rather to reveal the hidden "animating source" of the mod-
ern. Enucleation—knowing through participation, knowing that one
is a part of that which one seeks to understand—is Grant's way of
appropriating the modern. Technology cannot be defined f r o m the
outside: " A l l descriptions of definitions of technique which place it
outside ourselves hide f r o m us what it is."^! The externalisation of
technique into the quantifiable and the calculable hides the fact that
we partake of technique, that "techique is ourselves."

Technology as the copenetration of knowing and making —

science and art—hides behind those most modern of words—values
and ideals, freedom and progress, and self and personality, contract
and justice as the calculation of self-interest, and most especially
time as history and only history. With the method of enucleation
Grant attempts to unmask the implicit ontology and hidden ideol-

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ogy that conceals itself behind these words of self-flattery. The lan-
guage of enucleation includes words like primals ^nd fate, distortion
and dispossession, diremption and deprival, and enfoldment and
darkness. Grant's manner of enucleating the modern with these key
terms is what most has brought on the charge of pessimism. But
Grant does not speak attitudinously about the modern; rather, he
speaks ontologically. Ontologically, the confrontation with moder-
nity as glittered darkness has its moments of illumination. In "Revo-
lution and Tradition," Grant wrote:
How can we, who are western men, think about western
thought outside the thinking which makes us western men?
The very circle is the root cause of why we must say that in
this era there is no alternative to being in darkness. But it is
that being in darkness from which comes forth the determi-
nation to be outside that circle.^2
What lies outside the circle of darkness? Grant is reticent but
he does add: "the question of the good appears as inescapable
because of the darkness which has fallen on both tradition and
revolution." It is the question of the good which moves Grant "to
bring the darkness into light as darkness."

4. Technology and Reflection

Grant's traversing through three languages issues f r o m his
growing conviction that we cannot think about technology because
the very language we use partakes of technique and falters when it
comes to the immense task of forming categories with which to
comprehend technique within a vision of the whole. He is not alone
when he makes this claim. In Discourse On Thinking, Heidegger
wrote, "The meaning prevading technology hides itself."^^ Elsewhere,
Heidegger has written of technique as the "Set-up" (Ge-Stell) which
enframes our modes of apprehending what is.^^^ And Jürgen
Habermas, a leading exponent of the Frankfurt School of critical
theory, has referred to the "glassy background ideology" which
envelopes technology in a film of transparent n e u t r a l i t y . s u c -
cess of technology in modernity has meant a reduction of reason to
instrumental and strategic action and a suppression of communica-
tive interaction (symbolic discourse) which sustains ethical and
political action. In the name of freedom, modern humanity has been
willing to overcome freedom itself. Habermas says that technologi-
cal consciousness is headed toward "planned alienation" in which

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"men would make their history with will, but without conscious-
ness."^^ Grant says that we are trapped in a "monism of
meaninglessness."
What is the root of that meaninglessness? Grant's enucleation
of terminal modernity makes it possible for us to see in technology
not simply a "Set-up" or "glassy ideology," but an affliction of the
soul which might be called inner-worldly gnosticism. In the other-
worldly gnosticism known to church historians. Creation, especially
material creation, was seen as the bungled handiwork of a malevo-
lent Demiurge. The aim of salvation through gnosis was to escape
the homelessness of time and the rootlessness of space by a leap
into the everlasting abode of the "true Self." In inner-worldly gnos-
ticism there are no cosmic exits and nature is not the handiwork of
a Demiurge but the accidental conglomeration of matter which is
indifferent to human purposes. Matter is not so much "evil" as
"neutral." The "facts" are indifferent to the "values" we arbitrarily
impose on them. We "owe" nothing to the "facts." They call forth
f r o m us neither justice nor love. Facts are beyond good and evil.
They are "value-free."

Granting important differences, we can say that both ancient

other-worldly and modern inner-worldly gnosticism share one con-
viction in common: the earth is not truly our home. Whether
human or non-human nature is viewed as positively evil or indiffer-
ently neutral to our earthly dwelling, creation cannot be called
"good" and human beings can find no meaning in the search f o r
"the Good" in time and space. There is nothing, says Grant, to
sustain our wills other than the will to master chance. The will to
mastery has led to the interpenetration of the physical and moral
sciences and the copenetration of knowing and making. I f Grant
has pointed to the frightful images of the "colossus," "Leviathan,"
the "Great Beast," the "gorgon's face" and "Moloch" as indices of
the technological present, it is because he sees in the coming to be
of the will to mastery a sundering of intelligence from love in
"researched objectivity," of technique f r o m justice in the calculation
of convenient self-interest, of nature from goodness. This sundering
leads to the alienation of human beings from the highest hope on
earth, namely, that only in submission to justice and love and in the
consent to otherness beyond mastery can we expect the coming of
the Kingdom of God on earth.

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George Grant's Three Languages

Grant's passage f r o m the language of progress to the language

of the good, and, finally, to the language of deprival might bespeak
depression and hopelessness. Yet his facing of fate has not led him
to the embracing of fatalism. The technological present has been for
Grant a f o r m of therapy. He has found emancipation in bringing
"the darkness into the light as darkness" by discovering the distor-
tions in personal and social consciousness. Grant has found a way
to speak about the darkness and thereby has discovered a route
back to language. The experience of diremption is an appeal to
thinking about the good: "Those of you who are Christians have
been told that there is something 'beyond' both thought and prac-
tice. Both are means or ways. In their current public division f r o m
each other, their joint insufficiency will be helpful to both."^^

What lies "beyond" thought and practice that can give meaning
to both? In substituting an indifferent "state of nature" for the
createdness of nature as the primal truth. Grant believes that modern
humanity has lost something of absolute importance and that this
loss has propelled us into the cave of technological mastery.^s Tech-
nology sunders intelligence f r o m love and justice in the way we live,
move, and have our being in the world. Grant is convinced that the
passing of justice and love through the flesh is what human beings
are eternally fitted for and that only in that passing through will the
earth become our true home and the fitting habitation of the pres-
ence of love. We owe justice and love to the earth and to all that
dwells thereon because, in the beginning, a primal Word enfleshed
our language and shaped our being in the world: "God saw every-
thing that he had made, and behold, it was very good" (Genesis,
1:31).

1 George Grant, Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America

(Toronto, 1969), p. 137.
2 Gad Horowitz, "A Conversation on Technology and Man," Journal of
Canadian Studies, Vol. 4 (August, 1969), p. 3.
3 George Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age (Toronto, 1966), pp. 14-41.
4 George Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age, pp. 42-53.
5 George Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age, p. 77.
6 George Grant, "Adult Education in an Expanding Economy," Food for
Thought, 14 (September-October, 1953), 6, 10.
7 George Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age,p. vi.
8 G . W . F . Hegel, Logic, tr. William Wallace (Oxford, 1975), p. 142.

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9 Leo Strauss, On Tyranny {WhdiCSi. 1968), p. 205.

10 George Grant, "Value and Technology" in Canadian Conference on Social
Welfare (Ottawa, 1964), p. 21.
11 George Grant, "Value and Technology, p. 24.
12 George Grant, Lament for a Nation: the Defeat of Canadian Nationalism
(Toronto, 1970), p. 50.
13 George Grant, Technology and Empire, pp. 72-73.
14 George Grant, Technology and Empire, p. 63.
15 Philip J . Hanson, "George Grant: A Negative Theologian on Technology"
in Research in Technology and Philosophy, ed. Paul T . Durbin (Greenwich,
Conn., 1978), Vol. 1, p. 308.
16 See Herbert Richardson, Commentary on George P. Grant, "Faith and the
Multiversity" in Modernization: The Humanist Response to its Promises and
Problems, ed. Richard Rubenstein (Washington, 1982), p. 124.
17 Herbert Richardson, "Faith and Muhiversity," p. 108.
18 George Grant, Technology and Empire, p. 113.
19 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (Nev/ York, 1964), p. xxv.
20 George Grant, "Knowing and Making" in Transactions of the Royal
Society of Canada (4th Series, No. 12, 1974), p. 60.
21 George Grant, English-Speaking Justice (Sackville, N.B., 1974), p. 88.
22 George Grant, "Justice and Technology," paper given at Erindale College,
1977, p. 11.
23 George Grant, Preface to "Religion and the State" in Technology and
Empire, p. 45.
24 George Grant, " T h e computer does not impose on us the ways it should be
used,'" in Beyond Industrial Growth, ed. Abraham Rotstein (Toronto, 1976), p.
131.
25 George Grant, English-Speaking Justice, p. 1.
26 George Grant, Technology and Empire, p. 40.
27 See Douglas Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Towards an Indigenous Theol-
ogy of the Cross (Philadelphia, 1976), pp. 203-229.
28 George Grant, Technology and Empire, pp. 139-140.
29 George Grant, Technology and Empire, p. 45.
30 George Grant, Time as History, (Toronto, 1969) p. 8.
31 George Grant, Technology and Empire, p. 137.
32 George Grant, "Revolution and Tradition" in Tradition and Revolution,
ed. Lionel Rubinoff (Toronto, 1971), p. 94.
33 Martin Heidegger, Discourse On Thinking, tr. John M . Anderson and
E . Hans Freund (New York, 1966), p. 55.
34 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other
Essays, tr. William Levitt (New York, 1977), pp. 19ff.
35 Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, tr. Jeremy J . Shapiro (Bos-
ton, 1970), p. 111.
36 Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, p. 118.
37 George Grant, " T h e computer does not impose on us the ways it should be
used,'" in Beyond Industrial Growth, p. 131.
38 George Grant, English-Speaking Justice, pp. 17-18.

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