Abstract

Three powerful themes run through this series of essays. Technical civilization is the destruction of all myths, and, perhaps, through the agency of psychoanalytical techniques, of the very source of all myths: the pre-conscious. Technology's method in achieving this destruction is to pre-determine a chain of choices of which the initial one must be taken as dictated by the dynamics of a situation. Hence there is an eschatological meaning of these choices whose final consequences can be catastrophic. Moreover the implications of these choices cannot be considered moral or immoral by a casuistic based, as traditionally, on fixed natural rules. The development of these themes encompasses insights derived from recent research about the will, technology's drift toward fixation, the disenchantment with the world that accompanies rationalization, and the epistemology of sanity and insanity.—A. M.