Worthy of Amplification (Newman Reading)

The Newman volume's culminating claim is that Segal's 'Are you worth amplifying?' is not a motivational slogan but a rigorous philosophical question with specifiable content. The amplifier carries whatever signal it receives without evaluation. The signal is the human contribution. And the quality of that signal is determined not by the intellect's capacity for sophisticated justification but by the quality of formation the person brings to the work — the depth of real assent, the integrity of conscience, the reliability of the illative sense. Worthiness of amplification is not a state the person achieves once. It is a quality of life maintained through the ongoing cultivation of the person who directs the machine. The question is Newman's question, posed in the vocabulary of a technology he could not have imagined, and answered in terms his entire body of work anticipates.