The first thing we recall, then, from early Greek philosophy is that there is an intimacy between words and thoughts by which a differentiated reality is identified. In later Latin philosophy, during the medieval period, language was said to have a transcendental character, by which it was meant that language cannot itself be regarded as something within reality or one reality among others; language is not merely one thing or human capacity among others. [31] Language transcends things and capacities by constituting the conditions under which things or capacities can be identified in the first place. A philosophy of word processing, then, encompasses more than the work habits we can identify and restrict to certain times, circumstances, and people. Language, as Anaximander’s principle suggests, is fundamentally a response to the infinite and as such manifests the human encounter with the openness in which realities first obtain presence and identity.
The inquiry into word processing touches an ontological dimension, which is to say that the effects of word processing are not so much traceable to the computer as to the transcendental intimacy of language and reality. In this sense the question about word processing is more fundamental than the question of whether machines can think or whether circuits can be said to be intelligent. So too, this question is more basic than the question of whether we distort the human self by learning to apply to ourselves models taken from computerized inventions.
The second misunderstanding is to confuse the philosophical question about the phenomenon of word processing with the question about how we think here and now when we use word processors. In misunderstanding the question in this way, the phenomenon is approached empirically, with personal awareness serving as the final arbiter.
Empirically, and seen from the viewpoint of the individual I, we can observe and evaluate writing with a word processor directly and with no further ado. Writing this way is unequivocally far superior to writing with a typewriter or with pen and pencil The reasons for this are obvious and manifold: as I write, text can be kept tentative and captured in a fluid state while the right word can be found and easily inserted later; I can edit and rewrite at the same time; the printed word no longer seems sacred or complete as soon as it is typed—improvements are always possible; I can write more, revise more easily and effectively, eliminate unnecessary words, sentences, paragraphs, perhaps save fragments which might be [32] used later somewhere else, maybe even transmit manuscripts or letters over telephone lines to publishing houses or to other computers. To the individual self, word processing is little more than an increase in efficiency, hardly anything to which one ought to give much thought.
On the private level of personal experience, the impact of the word processor on the mind seems eminently positive because word processing facilitates the recording of thoughts on paper. The word processor is just another, more advanced tool. Like any tool, we can put it down’when we are finished without having undergone any basic changes in the way we go on to experience the world. From this point of view, to ask whether our thought process is affected by word processing is like asking whether using lead pencils will make my letters heavy and morose or whether blue ink will make my thoughts blue. Just as blue can be used equivocally to stretch fallaciously over two distinct spheres of meaning, so would it be equally fallacious reasoning to expect anything so neutral as a tool to affect a wholly different domain such as the spirit or mind with its nonmaterial thoughts.
The first inclination is to apply to word-processing technology the same structure of analysis applicable to a tool. Tools fit nicely into the structure of means and ends set by the human will. Tool analysis permits a simple and direct approach to evaluating a phenomenon according to a utilitarian scale of personally felt satisfaction or socially evident efficiency. Evaluation based on individual observations is, to be sure, a commonsense criterion for evaluating technological devices in our day. We judge a tool by how well it gets the job done. It is we, the humans, who determine what constitutes the purposes or jobs that need to be done.
When we call something a tool, the assumption about it usually is that we can put it down or pick it up at will. The tool serves one dimension of ourselves, the dimension in which we alter the environment for our purposes. The tool serves an ulterior will; it achieves an effect in altering something in the world. Though the [33] tool may alter the conditions under which we live, it does not itself become a condition under which we live, as does, for instance, the network of highways we traverse with automobiles. The highway system is more than a mere tool for transportation, or even a coordinated network of tools—especially when we include in the highway system the economic structure required to produce more automobiles to keep the system operative as a means of transportation. The highway system possesses a certain autonomy as a mode of transportation; we must comply with it as a system to move rapidly between destinations which are themselves in part defined by the highway system with its systematic necessities. The highway system has its own structure, and transportation from point A to point B becomes defined by the highway system; transportation makes certain demands on our will vis-a-vis the automobile. The automobile is not a simple implement of the human will, but it imposes various levels of necessity which create compliance with the transportation system. To define, in the contemporary United States, the automobile as a human tool may pass for a truth; it is, however, a gross understatement and fails to touch what is essential in the existing interface between human and machine.
Language too has a structure and a destiny independent of individual will and intention. We could try to apply to word-processing technology the analysis applicable to a set of means and ends. We could understand word-processing technology as a tool, or means for accomplishing the same end as several other means. Papyrus scrolls, chisels, the printing press, pencils, all can be regarded as nearly equivalent tools or as means conducive to one and the same end, namely, putting words down. It is true that, in their use, such tools can be experienced as extensions of ourselves in the sense that our force and our intentions can directly affect the environment with immediacy and without a feeling of sequential causation. The tool discloses a new set of possibilities in our will to create immediate effects on the environment, but those possibilities [34] are in the service of conscious intentions. Tools, in the usual sense, can be put down or picked up at will.
Do we grasp the phenomenon securely on its own terms when we describe it by way of a tool analysis, when we describe it as a tool which is essentially applicable to human ends? Might not such an analysis lead us away from asking about what is happening with us and to us? As with the automobile, a mechanism can become culturally decisive, and no reassuring scheme of means and end, of subservient tools and conscious human goals will adequately explain it. If language is a system which we do not privately and individually create and manipulate for our own immediate ends, then might not the instruments by which thought is put into language, and is then composed, entered, stored, and exchanged, be in some sense essential to an understanding of ourselves?