Etymologically, ‘technology’ has its roots in the Indo-European root tek, ‘a term that probably referred to the building of wooden houses by wattling, that is, weaving sticks together’ (p. 19). That is why ‘textile’ and ‘technology’ sound similar. From tek comes the Greek techne, initially skills of working with wood but soon broadened to specialized expertise, ‘know how’, knowledge of how to make things that would otherwise not exist. Techne, therefore, concerned the artificial. Nevertheless, there were already disputes. Medicine was a form of techne, at least to some of the Hippocratic authors. But was, say, rhetoric techne? Plato said no, Aristotle said yes. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle went further: while techne was a form of knowledge (of how to make, an art), it was to be distinguished from phronesis (moral knowledge, knowledge of how to act well) and episteme (knowledge of the eternal). Crucially, these three were set in a hierarchy. Knowledge of how to act was better than knowledge of how to make. This hierarchy led to the separation of means and ends. Ends might be valued, but the mere means of getting there would not be, and in insisting on this point techne became ‘morally neutral’ (p. 22).
Schatzberg is careful to contextualize these arguments. Aristotle was defending an aristocratic hierarchy: those at the top might have had time and independence for the contemplation of the eternal as well as the philosophical reassurance of knowing how to act well, while those lower down who had to labour to make the necessities of life possessed techne. But, as Serafina Cuomo and Pamela Long, amongst others, have argued, there were always tensions within the hierarchy: aristocratic society still needed things to be built, and artisans could, on occasion, contest their lowly status. Nevertheless, contempt for the ‘banausic’ – base, manual – arts was passed from Greek to Roman elite culture.
While Aristotle’s fine distinctions were lost, the hierarchy remained even as techne, or the Latin translation ars, widened to cover all types of learning. Galen in the second century CE included everything from woodworking and handicrafts (at the contemptible end) to medicine, philosophy and arithmetic (at the honourable end, the ‘liberal arts’). In early Medieval Europe, flattened hierarchies necessitated more contact between clerical elites and craft workers, encouraging deeper reflection by the former on the latter. The result was a new category: the ‘mechanical arts’. Like Lynn White and Elspeth Whitney, Schatzberg credits the twelfth-century theologian Hugh of St Victor with influentially wielding this category, although unlike White he emphasizes that the mechanical arts were still subordinate to the liberal arts.
From the fifteenth century the dependence of expanding political, military and commercial power on artisanal skills, which Schatzberg, again following Long, calls the ‘new alliance of techne and praxis’, fostered a ‘surge in authorship about the mechanical arts’, some by a humanist elite and some by artisans themselves (pp. 43–4). Yet this was not an alliance of equals, and the ‘trouble with techne’ – that it had the potential to upset the social order – remained. The mechanical arts remained subordinated, even as their status was somewhat revised. Francis Bacon’s works, such as The New Organon and New Atlantis.
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