The Given and the Made

In virtual reality, because all words, images and sounds can be easily altered, everything that is "given" — whether traditional canon or current expertise — can be taken as tentative or "made." Thus, what we know, how we know, the conditions of our histories, and even nature itself can be made over into what suits our purposes. In virtual reality, everything is malleable.

What would learning mean in such a world? What sort of world is constructed through a technology which promises that every reality given by history and nature can be made virtual? Would it be endurable discover that anything given to our knowledge can be made into something other than what it is? We might want to take it back, but could we?

A world entirely virtual presents us with a reality in which every single thing can be constructed and reconstructed. But when nothing needs to be as it is, when nothing is hidden from our ability to understand and remake it, what can we rely on in the way we depend on the stability, the unmalleability of natural things? Is anything simply given and indefinitely reserved from being made over into something else? In a virtual world, what is authentic?

A human life resting upon total construction, in which there is nothing authentic, is offered no place to dwell, no place to rest from the perpetual work of making over. Such a life would be unendurably frantic. Such a life, ever given over to constructing, results from subduing the natural or given world to a certain kind of knowing, the knowing of technology. This kind of knowing construes the world according to unambiguous rules or algorithms. They represent that world as a product. This way of knowing the world also produces it; and thus, the distance between the activity of learning and the object of knowledge is progressively obliterated.

However, as Heidegger reveals in his essay, "The Question Concerning Technology," it is terrifyingly empty to live in this place (1977, 283-317). When we assume that "truth" is something to be extracted and grasped from nature, rather than "uncovered," we find that we have helplessly bound ourselves to the unmoored, ceaseless activity of making and remaking. Everything would be utterly clear and yet boundlessly brittle. We could not endure it. And so, the more completely "virtual," the more completely "made" our lives become, the more obsessively we search to rediscover something simply given, something authentic. In short, the more successfully our knowledge enables us to make the world entirely according to our plans, the more we desire to encounter a world resistant to those plans. Enacting this desire demands a certain kind of unlearning, a letting go of the kind of knowing through which we have made much of the modern world. We experience this desire as anxiety. Our anxious search for authenticity can range from seeking solace in anything, from the spiritual to the savage. Indeed, we should understand that a reality entirely virtual may be dehumanizing, but in our effort to undo it, we also risk the violence and helplessness of reverting to a savage state of nature. More benignly, we try to re-find the authentic in what is distant from our control and understanding. We try to rest by being apart from or ignorant of things so that they might go on of themselves. Ironically, the outcome of a kind of learning which promises to obliterate distances is that we want to learn how to recover them. We want to recover the happiness of distance.

The Given and the Made: Authenticity and Nature in Virtual Education