Now, jumping ahead to our own day, I'd like you to think for a moment of the various words we use to designate technological products. You will notice that a number of these words have a curious double aspect: they, or their cognate forms, can refer either to external objects we make, or to certain inner activities of the maker. A "device," for example, can be an objective, invented thing, but it can also be some sort of scheming or contriving of the mind, as when a defendant uses every device he can think of to escape the charges against him. The word "contrivance" shows the same two-sidedness, embracing both mechanical appliances and the carefully devised plans and schemes we concoct in thought. As for "mechanisms" and "machines," we produce them as visible objects out there in the world even as we conceal our own machinations within ourselves. Likewise, an "artifice" is a manufactured device, or else it is trickery, ingenuity, or inventiveness. "Craft" can refer to manual dexterity in making things and to a ship or aircraft, but a "crafty" person is adept at deceiving others. This odd association between technology and deceit occurs not only in our own language, but even more so in Homer's Greek, where it is much harder to separate the inner and outer meanings, and the deceit often reads like an admired virtue. The Greek techne, from which our own word "technology" derives, meant "craft, skill, cunning, art, or device" all referring without discrimination to what we would call either an objective construction or a subjective capacity or maneuver. Techne was what enabled the lame craftsman god, Hephaestus, to trap his wife, Aphrodite, in a promiscuous alliance with warlike Ares. He accomplished the feat by draping over his bed a wondrously forged snare whose invisible bonds were finer than a spider's silken threads. The unsuspecting couple blundered straightway into the trap. As the other gods gathered around the now artless couple so artfully imprisoned, a gale of unquenchable laughter celebrated the guile of Hephaestus. "Lame though he is," they declared, "he has caught Ares by craft [techne]." Here techne refers indistinguishably to the blacksmith's sly trickery and his skillful materialization of the trick at his forge. Likewise, the Greek mechane, the source of our "machine," "mechanism," and "machination," designates with equal ease a machine or engine of war, on the one hand, or a contrivance, trick, or cunning wile, on the other. The celebrated ruse of the Trojan Horse was said to be a mechane, and it was admired at least as much for the devious and unexpected turn of mind behind its invention as for the considerable achievement of its physical construction. |
