Thomistic Note: Smartphones, Pure Potency, and Virtue

[Prefatory Note: This essay was written independently of the interesting analysis of smartphones by Cody Moran published online in 2021. Although there is some overlap between my analysis and his, our essays enjoy a relationship of complementation rather than of competition (or even of mere repetition). I appreciate Mr. Moran's reflection on smartphones (although I discovered it only after publishing the following essay).]

I was recently reflecting on the nature of smartphones. These remarkable devices are ubiquitous. Indeed, most people regard them as essential items in their day-to-day lives—much like the wallet or the purse was for human persons of yesteryear.

Smartphones are not mere wallets or purses, however. They are far more than these.

Why are smartphones categorized as an essential part of our daily experience? They are certainly convenient. These amazing devices—that can accompany us everywhere—facilitate a variety of tasks. But are they truly essential? Necessary? Not strictly speaking, of course. Smartphones are not necessary for human persons in the way that food, drink, sleep, friendship, and the truth about God are necessary. But these portable gadgets do enjoy a kind of practical necessity. They seem to serve at least four main uses.

First, they enable us to communicate with others. This use, of course, is the reason why we legitimately continue to call them “phones.” Admittedly, communication via the smartphone takes many expressions beyond that of mere verbal-audio communication of traditional phones (e.g., texting, email, video chat, et al.). Nonetheless, the smartphone’s identity as a legitimate phoning device continues. Many residences today no longer have a landline telephone. The smartphone has largely displaced phones that have a permanent place on the kitchen wall.

The second use that smartphones serve is non-communication utility. A few weekends ago, I was traveling through Saint Louis, Missouri. During check-in at the airport, I observed a number of my fellow travelers receive printed boarding passes from the attendant at the airline check-in desk. These same persons immediately placed the paper ticket into the trash bin as they departed from the desk and proceeded to their gates. Why? They all possessed their boarding passes on their phones—with even more (and up-to-date) information about their flights in the palm of their hand. This is only one of the innumerable ways in which the smartphone has facilitated non-communication (i.e., “other”) conveniences in our lives. We have all grown accustomed to the utility applications that smartphones make readily available—mobile wallets and payment apps, transportation services, maps of a city, weather updates, audio/video/photo recording, et al.

The third main use that smartphones serve is one of consumption. This is by far one of the most popular uses of this device. Smartphones have given us ready and constant access to information and entertainment. The device provides continual access to social media and to online video streaming services. All-day entertainment. Most of us would not celebrate this type of time-(mis)management. But such time and attention consumption are not infrequent. Podcasts and audiobooks (as well as music) are also common uses of the smartphone. Additionally, it is possible to make purchases on the smartphone through various shopping applications. Smartphones are things that make it eminently easy to procure other things. Many of us shop almost exclusively on these devices. It is a gateway to any type of product that we require or desire.

The fourth use of smartphones is work or productivity. A growing number of people can fulfill many of their employment obligations through their smartphones. Daily visits to the office are no longer a defining characteristic of some professionals. Immediate access to emails, spreadsheets, PDFs, video conferences, et al., have rendered the smartphone something that can almost replace the personal computer. Even those who do not work in the corporate sphere find these devices to be of great use. The academic, for instance, can read and annotate documents on a smartphone.

These four benefits may not enable us, however, to conclude that the smartphone is an absolute necessity (even in the twenty-first century). Nonetheless, they do help to explain why these devices enjoy such ubiquity. Moreover, I do think that the above benefits legitimately justify, for the most part, the use of smartphones. People are not foolish if they use these devices—even with some regularity.

The Paradox of a “Universal Instrument”: A “Pure Potency Artifact”

But it is precisely here that a paradox emerges. The smartphone enjoys many uses. It can do an ever-expanding variety of things. And yet, the fact remains: the majority of smartphone users experience the device as an impediment to happiness and productivity.

There are a large (and growing) number of books, articles, and videos that argue against the continual use of the smartphone—and precisely for the sake of happiness and productivity. We can ask, then: How is it possible that something so useful can impede our fulfillment? How is it possible that a device that can do so many things prevents us from, well, actually doing many things?

Perhaps, in order to resolve this paradox, we need to ask the quid est? question: What, exactly, is a smartphone? This question seems easy to answer. A smartphone is a device that enables us to have access to other persons in our circles (FaceTime, texting, telephone, email, et al.) and other things in our lives (shopping, information, travel, food, et al.). It is an “access device.” It is something akin to a “universal instrument.”

But is a “universal instrument” not, itself, something of a paradox?

Smartphones are artifacts. This is clear. They are a product of human ingenuity and fabrication. But unlike virtually all other facta, they do not have a proper (or even a primary) purpose. And herein lies the tension: the very “purpose” of the smartphone is to have no proper purpose. Smartphones seem to lack a proper nature and, thus, inherent intelligibility—even in the practical order.

I propose that the smartphone’s aspiration to universal utility renders the smartphone difficult to define—and, consequently, difficult to understand and (at times) frustrating to use. A smartphone does not have a real, specific purpose. Indeed, our conception of what makes a smartphone “good” is precisely its lack of a specific purpose. We consider smartphones of limited capability to be inferior to smartphones with fewer such limitations. Thus, the “best” smartphone is the one that most evades per se definition. They are instrumental paradoxes because they are universal instruments. The “nature” of a smartphone is to be an instrument without an intrinsic purpose or order. In the order of being and of intelligibility, this phenomenon is highly unusual.

If we were to look for analogues in the order of nature, the smartphone appears to be something specified (ironically) by its resemblance to prime matter. Pure potency. The smartphone’s very nature is to elude a proper nature—to be without a proper specifying form. The device is defined by its capacity to receive any form. The better a smartphone is, the more it can do—the more formalities it can receive and the more objectives it can attain.

Smartphones are thus unique artifacts. As universal instruments, their proper purpose is to be without a proper nature—to be without a proper (intrinsic) inclination. This is most peculiar.

The Irony of Smartphones: A Most Demanding Device

All of this, perhaps, helps us to understand why smartphones can be such formidable impediments to productivity and to human flourishing. Because they are universal instruments—specified by a profound lack of integrated teleological order—they provide little direction when picked up. They receive their specification almost exclusively from the activity of the user. Smartphone users must provide the (almost complete) formality of their smartphone activity. (Smartphones can be whatever we want them to be.) These devices approach an almost purely passive nature and state.

Natures always tend to some specifying end. This ordering is necessary for both their being and for their intelligibility. And a smartphone’s nature today is framed precisely as not possessing a specific end. Their “end-less nature” renders smartphones unlike almost any other artifact. And the human mind does not immediately know what to “do” with such a thing. The smartphone can do anything—and this is the dilemma it poses to its users.

In order to illustrate this point, consider another artifact: the pencil. A pencil is also an instrument that enjoys a kind of universal utility. Pencils can do many things—they can facilitate diverse activities like letter writing, note taking, picture drawing, book marking, etc. But even with a wide range of utility, a pencil retains a unified orientation and nature. A pencil can do all of these various activities because of the proper and specific thing to which a is ordered: making graphite marks on a surface. Thus, when human persons pick up a pencil, they still have to decide what type of graphite marks they will make on which surfaces. No pencil draws, writes, or marks by itself. Nonetheless, the potency of a pencil is still specified by a particular objectivity. We draw or write with pencils. We do not brew coffee or shop for groceries by means of a pencil. We can do many things with a pencil, yes. But we can only do specific kinds of “many things” with a pencil. We can only use pencils to do pencil things.

As we have noted above, smartphones lack a specific order of this kind. Smartphones can do many and disparate—and even contradictory—things. And this is the challenge: because smartphones can do anything, we don’t immediately know what to do with them. Thus, each time we take it in hand we are faced with a real dilemma that must be solved each time we take it in hand: What do I do with this? This is a much broader question than the question of the penciler (i.e., “what do I draw/write with this?”).

Smartphones demand more of their users than do pencils. Because smartphones possess a greater passive potency, they require greater formal specification from their users. And this is the reason why smartphones can frustrate human flourishing and productivity.

We can make two further observations about pure potency in reference to smartphones. First, pure potency is not a perfected state. (Pure potency is not defective, of course. There is a real distinction between potency as a principle and privation as a principle. But only act and form are perfective principles.) Not only does pure potency not exist (as such), those things that do exist do not—and cannot—actually be ordered to pure potency. The act of existence is actually per se ordered away from pure potency. First act is ordered to second act. The existence of a supposit is ordered to the operations of that supposit. And neither the act of existence nor operational actions are (or can be) ordered to pure potency—by definition and by necessity.

Consequently, a “pure potency device” like a smartphone places a heavy burden on the user. Why? Because the only type of being that can engage with potencies in their purest, most unspecified, instances is a being who is most fully actualized. An agent can only actualize a potency to the degree that the agent is in act. And the greater the passive potency is, the greater the act that the passive potency demands from its activating agent. Indeed, if we remove all formal specification in a being, then we are left with nothing. And, as we know, He who is Pure Act is the only being who can create ex nihilo.

Of course, smartphones do not exist in an absolutely pure-potency state or condition. Thus, one does not have to be God in order to use a smartphone. (This claim enjoys per se nota certainty.) Nonetheless, the dynamics of smartphones do have something like an ever-more-pure potency orientation. The newer smartphone models and the proliferation of their apps all try to extend the potential activity of the devices. And with the ever-increasing possibilities surrounding their utility, smartphones require more from their users—more formal specification—not less.

And this is the irony. The more smartphones can do, the more they demand from those who use them.

The more devices possess a higher degree of potency for communication and action—as a kind of fabricated participation in the extensive infinity of the intellects and wills of their fabricators—the more do such devices require something beyond “right artifact-use.” The devices require a true and complete human rectitude—moral, certainly, but also cultural and intellectual rectitude. (As in the case of the morally disordered person who has wonderful penmanship and employs the art of penmanship to craft beautiful letters for the sake of an illicit love.)

The potency of the smartphone participates in the open potency of our intellect and will. (St. Thomas, himself, likened the open potency of our rational powers to prime matter.) Hence, the right use of the smartphone requires the rectitude of the whole person—of the one who uses this device to externalize (instrumentally) his life according to intentional existence.

This paradox of potencies, perhaps, helps to explain why it is so easy to waste time on a smartphone. If we approach such a device without a specific conception of what we will do through our use of the device (i.e., a specific purpose, an intentional form), then we approach the smartphone from a posture of passivity rather than with the specifying actuality that it requires of us. This is a frustrated encounter. The smartphone requires formal activation from its users. And we look to our devices for activation, or stimulation, or information. In other words, unspecified smartphone use is analogous to two passive principles trying to realize composite actualization—a prospect that is as humorous as it is futile. This futility, however and of course, does not result in “non-action” (we still use our smartphones even if we are not rightly ordered in a comprehensive way). Without the direction of prudence, our use of the smartphone will receive specification “from below”—from an imprudent command (a disordered imperium) informed not by right reason (contra rectam rationem) but rather by unmeasured passions and disordered volitions.

Moreover, if we do not come to the smartphone with a specific purpose that will inform our use of the device, then we will allow the device to supply the specifying formality of our encounter with it. Unsurprisingly, this can frequently result in the default use of social media or entertainment apps. These types of apps supply a formality that is sensibly pleasing—they can readily specify our use of the smartphone as one of consumption. This type of use is easy, pleasant, and truly specifying. I believe that this is why it is so easy to waste time on smartphones. We approach these devices with a fundamentally passive posture, and we easily gravitate towards the pleasant formalities that such apps can provide.

Smartphones demand much from their users. Most users are not proximately prepared to provide what their smartphones require. This is where the problems arise.

The Requirement of Smartphones: Moral and Intellectual Virtue

I conclude this “Thomistic Note” with a summary statement that captures the practical implications of this essay: Only the virtuous can use a smartphone well.

Why? The smartphone makes holistic demands of its users—on both moral and intellectual levels. Only the virtuous come to a smartphone—as they do to all things—in stable possession of perfective qualitative forms (e.g., the virtuous habitus themselves). In other words, the virtuous person is already well-ordered—in being and in operation. Thus, only the virtuous person can consistently provide what the smartphone can only instrumentally serve: a formal ordering that is perfective of the human person.