Abstract
For the past fifty years Jacques Ellul has carried out a sustained investigation and critique of the nature, development, and social implications of modern technique.1 Much of the difficulty that has been associated with interpreting Ellul’s thought2 can be traced to a general lack of understanding of his method. It is my view that a deeper understanding of Ellul’s method would show that his thought warrants serious reexamination. The purpose of this paper, then, is to attempt to describe Ellul’s dialectical method.
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Notes
See David Lovekin, “Jacques Ellul’s Philosophy of Technical Consciousness,” dissertation, University of Texas at Dallas, 1986. Lovekin provides a review of some of these misinterpretations.
In Season, Out of Season: An Introduction to the Thought of Jacques Ellul; Based on Interviews by Madeleine Garrigou-Lagrange (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982; French original, 1981), p. 73.
Clifford G. Christians and Jay M. van Hook, eds., Jacques Ellul: Interpretive Essays ( Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1981 ), p. 291.
Christians and van Hook, Interpretive Essays, pp. 291–292.
John Boli-Bennett, “The Absolute Dialectics of Jacques Ellul,” in P. Durbin, ed., Research in Philosophy and Technology ( Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1980 ), p. 174.
Quoted in Christians and van Hook, Interpretive Essays, p. 293.
Jacques Ellul, “Mirror of These Ten Years,” Christian Century, February 18,1970, p. 200.
James Y. Holloway, ed., Introducing Jacques Ellul ( Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1970 ), p. 6.
Christians and van Hook, Interpretive Essays, p. 305.
Ellul, “Mirror of These Ten Years” (note 11, above), p. 201. See Vernard Eller, “Ellul and Kierkegaard: Closer Than Brothers,” in Christians and van Hook, Interpretive Essays: On the contrary, because it deals in concrete realities rather than ideas, existential dialectic cannot arrive at synthesis, it firmly resists any effort to synthesize, and takes as its goal the finding of one’s life within the tension between the dialectic’s unsynthesized poles (p. 55 ).
Ibid. See also In Season, Out of Season: “Having said this, I want to clarify that the dialectic presupposes history. It is not enough to pose a positive factor and a negative factor. There has to be a passage of time for the two contradictory factors to come into relationship and be able to give rise to a new situation” (p. 202).
Christians and van Hook, Interpretive Essays, p. 296.
Ellul adds, a few pages later: My own claim, however, is that well before these intellectual formulations [of the Greeks] from the eighteenth century, B.C., dialectic appeared in Hebrew thought, and that the whole of the Old Testament expresses a dialectic. In other words, the Hebrews formulated God’s revelation dialectically without examining what they were doing intellectually, without working out the noetic aspect (Interpretive Essays, p. 298).
Ibid., p. 296. See also Ellul, The Betrayal of the West (New York: Seabury Press, 1978): “The astounding truth that is peculiar to man: he is a maker of history. History understood as the expression of freedom and of man’s mastery of events, nature, and his own life” (p. 32). Again: Human life has no meaning if there is no chance of changing anything, no part of one’s own to play, that is, if there is no history begun but not yet finished. And this is the precise moment that negativity comes to the fore. In one of my books, I adopted the famous statement of Guehenno: “The first duty of man is to say No” (Christians and van Hook, Interpretive Essays, p. 296).
Boli-Bennett, “The Absolute Dialectics of Ellul” (note 8, above), p. 174.
Ellul, “The Latest Developments in Technology and the Philosophy of the Absurd,” in P. Durbin, ed., Research in Philosophy and Technology, vol. 7 ( Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1984 ), pp. 92–97.
Ellul, Hope in Time of Abandonment (New York: Seabury Press, 1973; French original, 1972).
Ellul, Humiliation of the Word (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1985), p. 39. See also Hope in Time of Abandonment (note 29, above), pp. 53–54.
Christians and van Hook, Interpretive Essays, p. 52.
In Season, Out of Season, p. 189. Ellul says: In my case, I was able to be intellectually strict with Marx’s thinking in the area of world interpretation. Moreover, I was convinced from the beginning that there could be neither Christian politics, nor Christian economics, nor a Christian society, but that the revelation contributes a fundamental existential truth. It was necessary to work it out so that these two truths could be lived together - I do mean lived, not reconciled intellectually in a system (p. 18).
See Maurice Friedman, To Deny Our Nothingness: Contemporary Images of Man (Delacorte Press, 1967), chapter 16: “The Existentialists of Dialogue: Marcel, Camus, Buber,” pp. 281–308.
Christians and van Hook, Interpretive Essays, p. 24. Also: “Ellul’s attachment to dialectic, inherited in kernel from Marx, lies at the heart of his work’s purpose” (p. 29).
Ellul, “Mirror of These Ten Years” (note 11, above), p. 201.
Ellul, Ethics of Freedom (note 1, above), p. 248.
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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Wennemann, D.J. (1990). An Interpretation of Jacques Ellul’s Dialectical Method. In: Durbin, P.T. (eds) Broad and Narrow Interpretations of Philosophy of Technology. Philosophy and Technology, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0557-3_13
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