Technological Metamorphosis

Botany is genetically one of the oldest natural investigations undertaken by humankind, for what could be more useful than being able to identify which plants are nice to eat, which are poisonous, and which can treat illnesses? It is useful not only to have this power of identification but also to be able to pass it on. Hence, traditions and folklore, and later, treatises and compendiums have passed down our classifications of plants to us from time immemorial.

The beginning of botany as a science in the west is usually attributed to Theophrastus (c. 371 BC – c. 287 BC), who was a close friend to Aristotle, became head of the Academy, and leveraged his mutual friendship to Alexander the Great in order to expand his botanical inquiries beyond the borders of Greece. In his Enquiry into Plants, Book I, Theophrastus focuses on the parts of plants and how they ought to be classified. The classificatory and anatomizing method he deploys here set the stage for botany for many centuries after. He also makes some very interesting remarks on his method that are worth dwelling on for a while:

In considering the distinctive characters of plants and their nature generally one must take into account their parts, their qualities, the ways in which their life originates, and the course which it follows in each case: (conduct and activities we do not find in them, as we do in animals). […]

Now it appears that by a ‘part,’ seeing that it is something which belongs to the plant’s characteristic nature, we mean something which is permanent either absolutely or when once it has appeared (like those parts of animals which remain for a time undeveloped) — permanent, that is, unless it be lost by disease, age or mutilation. […]

But perhaps we should not expect to find in plants a complete correspondence with animals.

(Enquiry into Plants, I. 1-3)

Note how he keeps referring back to animals as a touchstone for anatomizing the plant. No doubt, Theophrastus is drawing off of Aristotle’s Parts of Animals as a guiding method for developing his botany. Animals, to Theophrastus, are analogous to plants. The analogical method really is the basis for nearly all natural enquiries. We must proceed to that which we do not understand from that which we do understand. However, if the object in question turns out to have no distinction at all from that which we know already, the analogical method does not yield much to us.

How exactly does the analogical method work? In order for an analogy to be useful, I posit that there must be a true identity somewhere between the object of study and the analogous object: mere resemblance is not enough. Namely, between the object of study and analogous object there must be a true identity of relations such that the terms between which these relations unfold are perfectly exchangeable. For example, consider a pendulum, a weight on a spring, and an oscillating electrical circuit. These objects have a truly analogous relationship because the relation of periodic motion between the parts is identical between them all, regardless of whether that motion takes place in a ball across an arc, a weight along a line, or electricity through a closed loop. However, it is precisely these differences which give each of the oscillators their own significance. The analogy shows us what is the same while simultaneously giving us a portal into the significance of the object of study by graciously breaking down for us right where we require it to. If two things are entirely different, one cannot be understood by means of the other; on the other hand, if two things are entirely the same, strictly speaking, we do not have two things to consider at all, but only one.

Now, like an animal, a plant develops functional parts, and Theophrastus posits that the parts of a plant must bear some analogical relationship to the parts of an animal. However, it is precisely where the plant is unlike the animal where the significance of the plant itself appears:

We must not assume that in all respects there is a complete correspondence between plants and animals […] for it is a waste of time to take great pains to make comparisons where that is impossible, and in so doing we may lose sight also of our proper subject of enquiry. [...]

If in some cases analogy ought to be considered (for instance, an analogy presented by animals), we must keep this also in view; and in that case we must of course make the closest resemblances and the most perfectly developed examples our standard; and, finally, the ways in which the parts of plants are affected must be compared to the corresponding effects in the case of animals, so far as one can in any given case find an analogy for comparison.

(Enquiry into Plants, I. 2-5)

This opening chapter of Theophrastus’ great work on botany gives us an excellent description and example of the philosophical method of analogy. Also, how wonderful is it to be reminded that we came to our systematic understanding of plants by way of analogy to animals, the more simple by way of the more complex? This is the genius of Theophrastus as a natural philosopher on display.

Even so, Theophrastus ran into difficulties that resonated throughout the foundations of his ultimately anatomical method: The plant is always growing and changing. How can one properly anatomize that which is always in flux? Theophrastus uses the words polychoun and poikilon to describe the plant, which mean something akin to pouring forth much or much-flowing, and complex or intricate respectively. Even so, he marched on carving the plant up into discrete bits and nailing those bits down as static parts for the sake of classification. Important work, no doubt about it, yet this thread of the plant being a pouring forth was mostly left untouched for well over a thousand years.

In the year 1790 AD Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published The Metamorphosis of Plants, the opening line of which reads: “Anyone who has paid even a little attention to plant growth will readily see that certain external parts of the plant undergo frequent change and take on the shape of the adjacent parts—sometimes fully, sometimes more, and sometimes less.” From this acknowledgement of the transformative nature of plants, and after centuries of letting the classificatory method sit on the shelf to mature a bit, Goethe was able to take up that thread which Theophrastus had purposefully put to the side. Tracking the plant from its genesis as seed to the last formation of its own fruit, Goethe noticed a conspicuous feature of all plant transformations. From the cotyledons, or seed leaves, up to the final fruit, the growth and stages of the plant are all carried out by a multiplication and transformation of one and the same organ, the leaf:

[The] same organs fulfill nature’s laws throughout, although with different functions and often under different guises. The organ which expanded on the stem as a leaf, assuming a variety of forms, is the same organ which now contracts in the calyx, expands again in the petal, contracts in the reproductive apparatus, only to expand finally as the fruit. […]

Here we would obviously need a general term to describe this organ which metamorphosed into such a variety of forms, a term descriptive of the standard against which to compare the various manifestations of its form.

(The Metamorphosis of Plants, XVIII. 115-120)

Theophrastus separated and conceptually froze the plant for classification while Goethe united and conceptually melted the plant to see it as a process. Both methods of thought have truth to them, and both have utility. We might call the method of Theophrastus classificatory, or anatomical, or analytical, whereas we might call the method of Goethe metamorphic, ontogenetic, or synthetic. In any case, both methods really ought to be used to grasp the plant in full: these methods are complementary. Also, as Theophrastus used zoology as an analogy to clarify the mode of existence of plants, the discovery of Goethe found its way back into zoology as his concept of morphology later evolved and merged with other ideas into what biology now knows as homology, or the anatomical or genetic similarity of different organs which appear to be functionally distinct.

What does this nice story of the history of botany have to do with technology? I say that as Theophrastus used animals as an analogy for understanding plants, we too may find fruit in using plants as an analogy for understanding technology. With the complementary methods of classification and metamorphosis, we may come to some insights regarding the existence of technology. In carving technical objects up into parts, it is fortunate that we do not seem to run into the same kinds of difficulties which we run into in biological anatomization. The technical object readily yields itself up to analysis at a glance. There is seldom a question of where one part begins or ends, or what constitutes a functional unit versus a system. This is in large part thanks to the methods of construction of technical objects. We build the parts one at a time, independently of the others, and then we assemble them into a whole. The biological organism grows in a much more continuous and holistic manner. Additionally, we do not encounter the problem Theophrastus did in deciding what counts as a part of a technical object. Once a technical object is built, it does not continue to develop individually, and it does not, on its own, grow and cast off its parts seasonally, like fruits or flowers. We already have an implicit science for the classification of technical object; take any trip to the hardware store, or to (a now rare) Radioshack, or your grandfather’s garage, and you can walk through a physical layout of our technological classification systems. Likewise, any read through patent material will involve a catalogue of functional parts of the object in question.

The technical object does have functional parts, but it does not develop these by its own vital principle. The vital principle for the technical object is in the workshop where it is constructed, not within itself as is the case with organic things. We may say that the organic being has an inner workshop that it carries with itself until death. The technical object, on the other hand, does not grow, does not develop, does not heal from injury or wear-and-tear outside of the workshop. Nonetheless, we still might ask, are these functional parts analogous to the leaf? Though there is no individual metamorphosis of the technical object from seed to fully grown (perhaps plant a screw in a scrap heap and water with WD-40?) there may be an archetypal form of the technical object in the way the leaf is the archetypal form of the plant. Like Goethe, we are in need of a word which adequately describes the standard against which each of the various forms can be compared to one another.

If the leaf is the archetypal form of the plant, then it is the transducer which is the archetypal form of the technical object. A transducer is that which converts one kind of energy into another, or transfers energy from one place to another. Any given technical object or ensemble may be grasped by the concept of the transducer. E.g., a battery transforms chemical potential into electrical-kinetic energy; a pendulum transforms gravitational potential into mechanical-kinetic energy; a screwdriver transfers its rotational-kinetic energy into the screw which transforms that rotational-kinetic energy into lateral-kinetic energy, etc. It is worth noting that the leaf also plays the functional role of converting or directing energies for the purposes of the plant as a whole, but it is not a transducer in the sense that the transducer is created by art, deliberately designed to mediate between specific energetic domains for defined purposes. It is not obvious that the leaf, or any organ arrived at through natural selection, is produced in the same teleological way. The transducer is not an organ, but an artificial analogue.

If the transducer is the archetypal form of the technical object, then in what respect does it undergo metamorphosis? We have acknowledged that the individual technical object does not grow and develop on its own once it has been built. However, technical objects do grow and develop on a different scale. The technical object does pass through stages of prototype, mockup, object proper, and then it develops further by way of innovation into new versions of itself. Each of these stages are manifest in physically distinct objects (or at least simulations of them), but are conceptually one technical object. The mode of metamorphosis of a technical object is then quite different from that of an organic being. This is where the analogical method breaks down productively for us: The development of an organic being is continuous whereas the development of the technical object is discrete. When a leaf changes from a cotyledon to a stem, and from a stem to a node, and node into leaf, it happens gradually, by degrees. When a transducer changes, say from a wall plug into a battery, it happens all of a sudden and in one jump. While the leaf is on its way to form a flower, many leaves of the plant coordinate continuously to support the change into a flower: the stem lengthens, several leaves collect near the end, they form around an axis and change shape, melding together to become a calyx, and so on. When the plug becomes the battery, all the internal parts shift and change shape to accommodate the new transducer, but again, this happens all at once from our perspective. Of course, the technical object does not really suddenly split into a new clone with conspicuous mutations all by itself. It is constructed in a workshop, and before then, the transformations are thought out in advance by a designer or inventor, or team of people. Nonetheless, the perspective of the maker is a privileged perspective. The craftsmen alone see the full process of technological development as it unfolds. However, everybody else only sees the final product, or the technical object as it enters the world properly, once its becoming has ceased and its being commences. The ordinary person encounters a technological ecosystem characterized by discrete jumps in form and relations.

What might we draw from this development? We have begun with botany and ended at the discrete existence of the transducer — so what? In fact, there may be a crucial point of technological ethics to be deduced from here. We have been working to put the technical object back into Nature by way of analogy. Far from being empty utility, the technical object is, first and foremost, a natural object. When we implicitly think of the technical object as utility, or merely the means to an end, it becomes invisible to us in a critical way. It disappears from us conceptually and bears no significance of its own outside of our immediate interests which are usually biological or economic, but seldom technological in a pure sense. We manage then to simultaneously rob the technical object of its own significance and of its own dignity as a natural object. We make of it something akin to a slave: invisible labor at command with no recognition. This lack of recognition or significance though does not deprive it of its reality and its ability to be the cause of certain environmental effects. We also deprive Nature of a product that is really hers. We conceive ourselves and our products as being “unnatural.” This distinction is sometimes used to refer to human activities in a derogatory manner, but it is just as often deployed implicitly as an expression of human exceptionalism, placing us outside, or more particularly, above Nature. However, it is only by the workings of Nature that anything becomes intelligible to us, ultimately. Hence, when we wish to understand anything that exists, the analogical method is one of the very few tools we have access to. For what does it mean to say that something is natural other than to say that it operates by the same laws and operations as all other things do? What does it mean to say that something is unnatural other than that it does not operate by these laws and operations and is therefore truly aberrant? If we wish to understand our technology at all, not according to empty utility, but according to its own being, we must begin by putting it back into Nature. The plant analogy does this for us, but it is where the analogy breaks down that the significance of the technical object itself appears to us.

Is there then a more fundamental difference between beings than how they relate to time? How different is a human life to a fruit fly’s? How different a human life to a thousand year old cypress tree? These are differences characterized by temporal scale or degree, but what about differences in kind? The relationship of the continuous and the discrete may be a difference in kind more than a difference in degree. This difference means a lot. As we live our lives, our experience of the present moment is always continuous. We grow and develop continuously, our bodies age gradually, our personalities drift, our fears and interest wax and wane. Yet our technical objects stagger and jump, and these play no small role in our experience. As our environments become more technological, we become more dependent on technical objects in order to interface with more technical objects, and someday we may even begin to incorporate technical objects into our bodies as new organs, outside of medicine. What exactly does it mean to put our continuous existence in relation to technical object which exist discretely?

It is worth noting that organic existence is not entirely continuous. Cellular mitosis, for example, may be argued to be a discrete phenomenon; there are critical thresholds in the development of an embryo; even our experience of the past in our memories has a discrete quality about it. Neither is technological existence wholly discrete. The wear-and-tear of a technical object accumulates gradually; the settling of a technical object into the environment is continuous, such as the gentle warping and sinking of a newly built building. Nonetheless, I say that the continuous and the discrete are the dominant temporal modes of organic and artificial things respectively. For us, our experience of the present is always continuous and we are always in the present. Our experience of technology, however, is like a discrete break upon the field of our continuous present; there is the world before a new technical object exists, and then suddenly there is a new world which includes the new technical object after it exists. Each aspect of the technological ecosystem shifts to accommodate a new technical object, often with a delay. There seems to be a speed of propagation, and when the other pieces of the artificial ecosystem change to accommodate a new object, they do so discretely. Each metamorphosis of a technical object creates a cascade of discrete shifts.

Meanwhile, we, and the other organic beings in our environment, are drawn into a sort of paradox. When a transducer changes form it does so all at once. We then are left to catch up to it continuously. Once we have caught up, however, the technical object does not change continuously with us. It stays the same as we continue to develop, yet it is a part of us in some significant way. Now, multiply that dynamic until it is sufficient to describe the massive number of technical objects we are connected to at any given time. They are all changing, sometimes more quickly, sometimes more slowly, but always discretely from our point of view. We are a sort of organic node in an artificial network which is changing in leaps and jumps all around us. We are simultaneously outpaced and stunted by our technical objects, and this dynamic becomes only more apparent as our experience of reality becomes more saturated by technology and as technological development accelerates. The notion that technological development is temporally different as well as out of step with organic development characterizes the existential condition of modern societies. Eventually this poses a problem for which we must seek a solution, but in what way? Do we desaturate our environments and put ourselves back into relation with a primarily organic environment which changes continuously like us? Do we slow technological development down so that technical objects change more or less on the same pace as generations of human life come and go? Do we push technological development to speed up to such a degree that it appears continuous, so that the artificial basically becomes organic? Do we ourselves become discrete beings?