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| Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
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| Steve Jobs |
"…the season
Wherein the spirits hold their wont to walk
the fruitful matrix of Ghosts…"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Steve Jobs died a year ago October 5th, and we can expect his ghost to appear in any number of recollections and assessments as the anniversary approaches.
I'd
like to talk here about a spirit that Jobs carried within himself. It's a
spirit he relied on for inspiration, although he seemed at times to have lost
track of its whisper. In any event what it says can tell us a lot about our
relationship to machines.
I
refer to the spirit of Romanticism. I spent much of this past summer reading about
the Romantics – the original Romantics, that is, of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries – and it's remarkable how closely their most
cherished beliefs correspond to principles that Jobs considered crucial to his
success at Apple.
What Apple does that other companies don't, Jobs often
said, is infuse the technologies it produces with human values. "It's in
Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough," he said during one of
his famous product introductions. "We believe that it's technology married
with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing."
Jobs
can be forgiven for never getting very specific about what he meant by marrying
technology to the humanities. It's by definition a subject that's hard to pin
down, though not especially hard to understand. Basically he was saying that Apple's
products have soul, and that people are attracted to those products because
they can feel that soul, both consciously and unconsciously. These are things
the Romantics thought about a lot.
That
the creative artist can bring life to inanimate objects was a central
conviction of the Romantic poets. (I'm speaking of the thrust of the Romantic
movement in general; individuals within the movement disagreed on specific
issues.) For them the inanimate object in question was words, for Jobs it was
technology, but the basic point – that a work of art, properly executed, carries
within it an invisible, living essence – was the same. Devoid of this essence,
said Samuel Taylor Coleridge, what's produced is as lifeless as the "cold
jelly" of a corpse.
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| Jobs onstage presenting Apple's iPad 2 |
Put
in contemporary terms, soul from the Romantic perspective is an emergent quality,
a product of an organic, harmonious relationship between constituent parts. Even
when those individual elements are familiar in other contexts, as the elements of
Apple's products were often said to be, combining them with due attention to
essence can bring something new into the world. As Coleridge put it, the true
artist "places things in a new light…What oft was thought but ne'er so
well exprest…[He] not only displays what tho often seen in its unfolded mass
had never been opened out, but he likewise adds something, namely, Lights &
Relations."
Relations, in turn, create unity. Each part is completely faithful to the
creation as a whole. To construct a work in accord with some "mean or
average proportion" is to dilute its essence, said William Hazlitt, "for a thing is not more perfect by becoming
something else, but by being more itself."
This supports Jobs' insistence
that Apple maintain control over both its hardware and its software, a policy
that insured they would work seamlessly together. Soul emerges on its own in
nature, but not in art. The unity on which it depends is concealed, as one critic
put it, beneath "a surface world of chaos and confusion." To reveal
essence requires not only vision, but also focused attention and deliberate
action. Coleridge coined a word to describe the unifying power of the creative
imagination: "esemplastic," derived from the Greek for "to shape into one."
Nor will essence emerge on the strength of reason alone. Indeed, Romanticism was explicitly and decidedly a revolt against reason, a rejection of the empirical presumption of the Enlightenment. Coleridge considered the "Mechanico-corpuscular philosophy" his lifelong enemy; its endless reductionism smothered, he believed, any trace of vitality. What remained wasn't art, he said, but "a lifeless Machine whirled about by the dust of its own Grinding" – a fair description of how Steve Jobs viewed the products of Apple's longtime rival, Microsoft.
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| The Romantic contemplates nature |
There's no question that Jobs was intimately
familiar with and sympathetic to the Romantics' convictions, if only because they
were shared by two of his most formative influences, Eastern religion and the
60s counterculture. This is not to say he was directly aware of that
coalescence; I've seen no interview with Jobs in which the Romantics are
mentioned. Nor is there evidence to suggest he recognized how freely the
streams of the three philosophies intertwined. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for
example, wrote poetry based on the Bhagavad Gita and paid tribute in person
to Coleridge and Carlyle. Autobiography
of a Yogi, a book Jobs claimed to have read annually since he was in
college, quotes Emerson several times. Values regularly celebrated in Romantic
texts – passion, spontaneity, authenticity – were counterculture touchstones as
well.
Jobs'
philosophy, then, overlapped with the Romantics', whether he knew it or not. Coleridge
famously said that every person is either a born Platonist or a born Aristotelian
– the Romantics were Platonists, Bill Gates would qualify as an Aristotelian –
and that no one changes from one orientation to the other. It may be that Jobs was,
as he and many others contended, an exception to that rule, able to play
successfully on both sides of the technology/humanities divide.
There
were signs that Jobs wasn't finding it easy to hold on to his Romanticism as
his business career progressed. In Apple's early days he'd been a believer in the
messianic promise of computers, convinced they were the greatest force in
history for human liberation. In more recent interviews he dismissed
suggestions that technology can solve the problems of the world, and he was stung by critics who said that some of Apple's products were more about consumerism than creativity. He also expressed disappointment in the narrowness of
vision he saw in the students who came to hear him speak on college campuses.
The only thing that seemed to impress them, he said, was how much money he'd
made.
Jobs'
weariness speaks to a point I'd mentioned at the beginning of this article:
that the spirit of Romanticism can tell us a lot about our relationships to
machines. To believe that technology can be our savior was a minority opinion
in the counterculture. The predominant sentiments of the time were more in tune
with the Romantics, who believed that salvation was to be found not in mechanical
power, but by living as simply and as close to nature as possible.
Pastoral
retreat on any substantial scale isn't likely at this point. Our technologies are
with us to stay. Living more simply would seem to be an option, though. We
might also consider the possibility of constructing those technologies more
Romantically. That would entail recognizing, as Steve Jobs did, that the things
we create really do have souls, and that they speak a language we can hear.
Books that were especially useful in my research for this reflection were Richard Holmes' two-volume biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, M.H. Abrams' The Mirror and the Lamp, David Newsome's Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English Romantic Thought, and Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs.
Note: This essay was published earlier
this morning by O'Reilly Radar. Thanks to Mac Slocum for opening the door.
Image credits: iPad 2 presentation: Rob Pegoraro, Washington Post; "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog," Casper David Friedrich, 1818.
©Doug Hill,
2012
