Against techne

I’ve said that I hate techne (τέχνη). Now let me explain why.

I’ll quote from Socrates in the Apology by Reeve, which is illuminating and convinces me that I’m not mistaken.

Techne is ‘craft-knowledge,’ the sort of thing that horse-trainers and doctors have. Doctors? “Fifth-century Greek physicians tried to prove that medicine is a craft, just as present-day psychiatrists try to prove that their discipline is a science.”

Reeve draws from Plato, Aristotle, and Hippocrates to show that techne was conceived of as a kind of knowledge having these characteristics:

I observe that the first and third points are related: techne does not rely on inaccessible causes because it contains its own cause. Techne, then, is man’s endeavor to wrest causality from the gods and bring it into his own sphere. Therefore, it must be systematically acquirable by humans, hence point two.

Just as science is reproducible discovery, techne is reproducible effect. The horse-trainer and the doctor do not need to thank divinity for their successes because they can tell you what they did, where they learned it, and why it works. In Laplace’s words, they have no need of the hypothesis of God.

Ironically, the goal of technology is to eliminate the need for techne. If we can teach a skilled laborer how to build a ship, then modernity instructs us to try to teach a machine. What about art? We have, of course, taught machines how to write poetry at a surprisingly high level. Since language models can be run without randomness, their existence proves that this kind of poetry is teachable and luck-independent.

The process is also explanatory because the poem is generated by a prompt. While explaining individual weights in a neural network remains a difficult problem, the causal chain from prompt to output is deterministic and would satisfy a physician, who deals every day with the greater complexity of our own metabolic and nervous systems. The prompt is the pathogen and the poem is the symptom. Reading becomes diagnosis.

Contrast this with what Socrates says of the ancient poets:

There was hardly a man present who would not speak better than [the poets] about the poems they themselves had composed. … I presently recognized this, that what they composed they composed not by wisdom, but by nature and through [divine] inspiration[/possession], like the prophets and oracles; for these also say many fine things but know none of the things they say.

(Fowler’s translation of the Apology, brackets are mine. The meaning of ἐνθουσιάζοντες is ‘being inspired by divinity.’)

Socrates, therefore, places poetry beyond techne. In fact, the main argument forces him to do so: his teaching, as Reeve explains, says that ‘wisdom’ is the techne of virtue itself (equivalently, of politics) and is thus unattainable by humans. Since the greatest poems no doubt contain wisdom, they, too, must exceed human understanding, or at least exceed the human ability to explain, teach, and produce independent of τύχη. If there is a ‘prompt,’ it must be written in the inscrutable language of nature, etched in the poet’s soul.

So here is why I hate techne. We live in a culture which views art and techne as synonymous (what writer has not been praised for their vocabulary? what mathematician has not been told that they must be good with numbers?) yet tries as hard as possible to eliminate techne. So be it. Techne is the bitchwork, and all the techne in the world cannot buy an ounce of art or divinity, which are the same thing. The great artists are as blind as Homer, as penurious as Socrates, because they can never lay claim to what they channel.

If we are at any point content with mastery, then do we even meet our own standard for humanity?

can you?

P.S. In Modern Greek, τέχνη means ‘art,’ with other senses influenced by ‘technology.’

Victor Mair has proposed that τύχη and 德 are cognate via PIE.