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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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Let's start with a quote.
The consumption of all material, including the raw material man,
is determined in a concealed way by the complete emptiness in which beings are suspended.
This emptiness has to be filled up by the unconditional possibility of production,
the production of everything.
But the emptiness of being can never be filled up by the fullness of beings,
especially when we don't experience it for what it is.
The only way to escape this emptiness is to endlessly order and arrange being so as to guarantee incessant,
aimless activity.
Wow. Let's repeat that.
The consumption of all material, including the raw material man,
is determined in a concealed way by the complete emptiness in which beings are suspended.
This emptiness has to be filled up by the unconditional possibility of production,
the production of everything.
But the emptiness of being can never be filled up by the fullness of beings,
especially when we don't experience it for what it is.
The only way to escape this emptiness is to endlessly order and arrange beings so as to guarantee incessant, aimless activity.
You tell them, "Hydiger, your stock may be going way down in this age of thoughtlessness you warned us about,
but you knew what was coming from a long way off."
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Long time friend of entitled opinions, Thomas Shion, joins me in the studio today to talk about Martin Hydiger,
who has a lot of airtime over the years on this program.
That's because, in the opinion of your host, as well as of my guest today, Hydiger remains the most important philosopher of the 20th century,
despite his many character flaws and the exasperating portentiousness of his later writings.
Now personally, I would have said that Hannah Arendt is the most important philosopher of the 20th century,
but she insisted that she was never a philosopher and therefore I leave her out, and besides, she also came from the Hydiger Matrix.
Our show today is devoted to Martin Hydiger's thinking about technology or more precisely to what he called the essence of technology, or "technicity."
Hydiger like to say, "the essence of technology is nothing technological."
But if the essence of technology is not technological, what is it?
Well, not so fast. First, some more quotes from Hydiger.
In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel in 1961, Hydiger called all political movements of the 20th century, including national socialism, communism, and democracy,
halfway measures. Why? I quote, "because I do not see in them any actual confrontation with the world of technology, in as much as behind them all, according to my view, stands the conception that technology, in its essence, is something that man holds within his own hands.
In my opinion, this is not possible. Technology in its essence is something that man does not master by his own power."
Spiegel. It is obvious that man is never a complete master of his tools, witness the case of the sorcerer's apprentice.
But is it not a little too pessimistic to say we are not gaining mastery over this surely much greater tool that is modern technology?
Hydiger. Pessimism, no. In the area of the reflection that I am attempting, pessimism and optimism are a positions that don't go far enough, but above all modern technology is no tool and has nothing at all to do with tools.
Spiegel. Why should we be so powerfully overwhelmed by technology that Hydiger?
I don't say we are overwhelmed by it, I say, that up to the present we have not found a way to respond to the essence of technology.
Spiegel. But someone might object very naively, what must be mastered in this case? Everything is functioning, more and more electric power companies are being built, production is up, in highly technologized parts of the earth, people are well cared for, we are living in a state of prosperity,
What really is lacking to us? Hydiger. Everything is functioning, that is precisely what is terrifying, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that
the ethnicity increasingly dislodges man and up roots him from the earth. We do not need atomic bombs at all to uproot us, the uprooting of man is already here, all our relationships have become merely technical ones, it is no longer upon an earth that man lives today.
I for one, am not going to argue with Hydiger on that score. My guest Tom Shie and might want to later in our show, but our first order of business today is to gain clarity about what Hydiger means by the essence of technology and the place is thinking about technology occupies in his philosophy as a whole, Tomazo welcome back to entitled opinions.
Thank you Rob. We are going to devote most of our show or much of our show today to Hydiger's seminal essay, the question concerning technology because we both believe I gather that that essay occupies a very important place in Hydiger's thinking as a whole.
So could I ask you to begin by sharing with us some of your thoughts about where and how this essay fits into Hydiger's entire project?
I agree with you, Hydiger's reflections on technology are the heart of his work. They're also the shadow of his work. And finally I think they show us the limit of what Hydiger can do, the limit of his work.
His essay on technology is not a late afterthought, even though it comes in the 50s and following, it's not an application of his thought, it's not some cultural aside, it's the culmination of his thought.
And that's why I did philosophy at all. And that's because the modern age of technology in his view obscures the one and only topic that interested him from the beginning to the end of his philosophy.
It obscured it virtually obliterated the radical finitude, that's the source of what he calls "anveasen" or "zine," the meaningful presence of things to human beings.
So in the question of technology, the essay that you referenced it a while ago, we have the summation, I think, of the import of all of his writings from "Zine" on site right up to his death in 1976.
And by the same token, we have the utter limitation of his philosophy. What he was able to say and given his starting point, what he couldn't say.
And I suggest that we cover both topics in this discussion because the question of technology essay both summarizes Heidegger and Barry Sim. It gives us Heidegger at the limits of his greatness and gives us the task that he refused to shoulder that in fact he could not shoulder.
Well, let's say the fireworks of Part 2, a bit later in the show, and can you first think what point in his career does he write this essay or deliver it as a talk?
Well, Heidegger had been thinking about technologies certainly from the early 20s, and then intensely during the 30s and 40s, and he finally gave expression to that thought in the 1950s, in the present case in the fall of 1953 in Munich, where he delivered the question of technology.
The Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, which was led by his friend, A. Mill Praetorius, called him out of retirement, it was a retirement forced on him by the denotsification process.
Called him out of retirement to address a conference on art in the technological age.
And Heidegger chose the title, the question of technology, that is, as you said correctly, the question not of technology so much as of the essence of technology. This is a philosophy of technology.
Well, certainly if what Heidegger says in that Derspiegel interview that I referenced quoted from earlier, he claimed that when he was giving the lecture course that subsequently was published as introduction to metaphysics in English,
and he spoke about the inner greatness of the National Socialist Movement, he had that famous parentheses which he said was its confrontation with planetary technicality.
So he was, I think, you're suggesting that he had been thinking about technology and technicality at least since the early 30s, do you agree with that?
I think since the early 20s, early 20s, you know, it was his experience in World War I that was the real shock, I think, to him of what he would eventually be,
called Total Mobilization, with Ants Yungher. And the 1930s was a time when, unfortunately, he saw Nazism as a political effort to confront global technology. And of course he was terribly wrong.
Do you believe, as I do at times when I read the later Heidegger in the 50s and even the question concerning technology, but even more so later stuff, that there is an implicit maya kulva about having misplaced hopes that a political movement such as national socialism could have actually confronted planetary
technology in an effective and meaningful way, and that he realized that perhaps no political movement would be up to such a task because not enough thinking had been done about, as you say, the essence of technology, all the thinking is about technology but not the essence of technology.
You'll never get a maya kulva out of Heidegger about his Nazi experiment. And if anything, the later writings on technology are his way of saying I was right. I may have picked the wrong party, but I certainly got the problem right, which was global technology.
That's true, and he's been rightly faulted for his refusal, at least in an explicit way of doing a maya kulva. But when I read things like in the end of philosophy, the overcoming metaphysics, as I say, and he speaks about even leaders, the need for leaders is part of the world of
the technology. It sounds like he is confessing without doing so overtly that any hope that he had placed in a leader who could lead us out of what he believed this darkness of the age of technology was truly misplaced.
That's that's act, act Heidegger. They let me down. The Nazis didn't choose me as their philosophical vision for the future.
No, Heidegger continues to say he was right, the Nazis just didn't see what he saw. And so he lays that out for us in the essay that we're going to talk about today.
Just like Plato, by the way, in a certain way, is analogous to Plato who thought that if the king would have chosen him as a philosopher, he could have brought about the kind of ideal republic that then they had to retreat into the platonic academy.
And this is where philosophy becomes, in a certain sense, irrelevant to politics and history and so forth.
Anyway, we can talk about that.
That's something I would love to talk about later. We will talk about that later. So now this essay is brief, but it's very dense and we don't want to go through all the parts of it.
But what part of the essay would you like to focus on first?
Well, first of all, maybe we can just say what the three parts of the essay are. It's definitely a philosophy of technology.
One that goes quickly to what Heidegger calls the essence of technology. It's divided into three sections.
Definition, analysis, and response to technology.
And the first section, definition, traces modern technology back to the Greek word for production, "technay."
The human ability to bring things to presence by making them.
Technology for Heidegger is at bottom a way of revealing things. In Greek, it's a form of a latheia bringing things into intelligible availability.
That's the first section.
The second section, if you will, analysis specifies the kind of revealing that modern technology does.
Unlike previous, unlike previous pre-modern technologies, and he sees that as two things.
First of all, these are his words. It's a provocation of to man to unlock and store nature's energies for human use.
And there you have his definition of modern technology, a provocative relation to nature, challenging it to yield,
storeable, usable energy, which he calls "bechtant," and which we might translate as resources or inventory for commodification.
And the second part of his analysis is his assertion that the drive to do this comes not from us, but from a supervenient concealed power of revelation that forces us to order nature as nothing but commodity resources.
So that secret, prevenient power called ereignus is going to be the core of his analysis. And the third section is called...
The third section, which I call response, holds out the hope of an internalized overcoming of technology by our becoming aware of and resonating with that ereignus, with the concealed, supervenient power of technology, that has forced on us this way of relating to nature.
And he says that might give us other possibilities of revealing things, especially in and through art. That's the essay in its three parts in a nutshell.
So the middle section, I think you call analysis, would you feel comfortable calling it a kind of phenomenological analysis or some kind of phenomenological description that gets to the essence of the essence of technology?
I would rob... I would call that the first part of the essay, a phenomenological description and definition of technology. Like a lot of Heidegger's work, those who know this essay only in English in translation, and therefore only in Heidegger's coded language, can be forgiven for not following his tutonic obscurities about destiny and the like.
Because the essay, if cash-died correctly, begins with what you're calling a phenomenological description, but it's still... I think it stands in dire need of an interpretive translation, which we can try to work out here between us today.
I think we can distinguish four moments in his treatment of technology. And those four moments would be first this phenomenological description of technology that you referenced.
Are you talking about modern technology?
Always modern. Because the first section spends most of the time talking about the four Aristotelian causes, a fourfold causality and trying to redefine our whole notion of what causality is.
And that comes prior to his phenomenological description of modern technology. And then the second is the analytic unpacking of that phenomenon.
Third, he looks for an atiology, a search for causation. What brought all of this about? And last, he gives us this protractic, this exhortation about what we're going to do about technology.
So you got, I think, four moves going on there. Phenological description, analysis, causation, and then the agenda that he wants to pursue. I think it'd be worth going through those steps.
But we can go through them as long as we keep our site also on what we consider the importance of his analytic section of getting to the essence of modern technology and why our listeners should be interested in our going through all these moments of the essay because it actually, at least I believe that this is a part of Heidegger's thinking that has the most amount of pertinent for the kind of hyper technological world that Heidegger himself quickly.
Could never have imagined, but we nonetheless live in.
Yes, of course. Yes, of course. The important thing is that we have to know what we're analyzing.
So we need to get this phenomenon of modern technology in front of us. And there I think Heidegger falls down frankly, but we can talk about that later.
He looks past machines, he looks past software computers, he goes beyond all of what he calls the instrumental view of technology where it's a means to an end.
And focus is instead on technology as revelation, a way that we relate to nature. And when I say we are man for your audience, I need to specify that I mean anthropos man not as the male of the species, but this human being.
How man relates to nature in order to unlock its energies and store them for use.
In another formulation, he says we command nature to our will and we produce commodities.
That I think is the core of his phenomenological description thin though it is.
Although he occasionally dresses it up of course with references to non technological views of nature, the peasant versus mechanized agriculture or the wooden bridge over the Rhine versus the hydroelectric plant, etc.
But that's as far as he's going to go in describing this phenomenon that we're embedded in and situated in.
And I think we have to call him out on that eventually. Then we move to what you're calling the analysis of that.
Right. Well, I found it quaint rereading the essay that the hydroelectric plant on the Rhine is his notion of this new, absolutely, almost demonic new technology.
Whereas for us it's still, it's become a quaint sort of antiquated technology. Nevertheless, even though he might be poor in his examples and he might not be bringing onto the table a bunch of other kinds of examples of technology.
I think that what he manages to do in that next section that you're referring to is the breakthrough.
And here's the catch in the analysis, the second step if you will.
In hydrocarism, this mode of revealing things today in modern technology is not of our doing.
Okay, hold on, Tom, if you don't mind my interrupting because some of our listeners, most of our listeners might not have read the essay or not read it in a long time.
This mode of revealing can sound completely elusive to some listeners, but he points out that, so for example, if you're going into the fields in order to find oil or find minerals or something under the earth, all of a sudden, what had revealed itself as a field for cultivation now shows itself to the human viewer as a potential deposit for raw material, minerals, or so forth.
If you look at the Rhine River now as a power supply for water supply for electricity, now all of a sudden, this phenomenon reveals itself in a way that is very different than how it reveals itself before.
So this connection between technology and revelation is something that gives some examples for which I personally find quite compelling because it's true that if a land surveyor goes into the country to find out how he can build,
some massive development of the hotel or something of that sort, it's going to look at that land that's going to reveal itself very differently than that fanartis goes in there and tries to give an impression as a rendition of the landscape.
So, revelation is not the consequence of, but it's part of how something appears to you given either what use you want to make of it or what purpose you have in approaching it in the first place.
That's an excellent filling out of the phenomenological description. And then in the analysis, enter the philosopher.
And here's his point. This mode of revealing things, of having things present is not something that we do.
It has nothing to do with human decisions that have been taken over the last 200 years.
It's instead mysteriously visited upon us as our way of being in the 20th and 21st century, goodbye human agency.
The essence of technology that which explains why we're ultimately caught up in what you just described is given to us from beyond ourselves.
He calls this beyond the essence of technology, calls it in German, it's a gashik dispensation to us of our current fate, not something that we've brought upon ourselves.
So, the essence of technology is not of human doing. That's the important pin that holds together his entire thesis.
Then he goes into why that's the case. That would be the causation, the ideology of that.
And here we get to the real heart of the essay. He's talking about a supervenient dispensing power that has thrust modern technology upon us.
And he says it's intrinsically hidden from us.
We can't explain it. We cannot explain this.
Tom, can I ask this to backtrack a little bit?
Sure. It sounds like you want to skip over the whole concept of gashdel, which I think it would be useful for our listeners to unpack a little bit.
Some of the main concepts that you went through very quickly, they're like the bishtant and gashdel.
Those are two very important words.
Can we at least flesh out what he means by those things before we talk about how he in your view leaves us agents without agency?
Right. Heidegger's view of the history of philosophy, the history of Western culture, is divided into what he calls epics.
And these are frameworks of meaning. You just described two of them.
The land developer coming or the man looking for oil versus the peasant farmer cultivating the things.
These are two frameworks of meaning.
And the framework of meaning in which we're operating today when things are given to us as commodities, he calls in German gashdel, which is probably, it's usually translated as framework, but that's too vague.
It's an imposition upon nature that we make. That's what gashdel would mean.
And imposing ourselves upon nature to withdraw resources from it for our own use.
And the word for resources, the way we treat things inside of the epic of the gashdel or imposition, is called bishtant.
And for me, the best translation of that would be commodities, things that we can use, store, inventorize, and use.
So that's the overarching view that touches on the two words that you mentioned, gashdel and bishtant.
And again, he calls these dispensations. That's another name for epics of meaning because we did not produce them.
It was not our economy. It was not our society.
I understand that. That's the last part.
The translation of bishtant, as commodity, it's fine. I like that.
The usual, the translation in the standard English edition is standing reserve because there's something there that high-degener insists on, which is that it's not just for the purposes of consumption, of immediate consumption, that the essence of modern technology, which challenges or provokes the
earth is something that we extract, not in order to consume only, but to put on in stock piling.
For eventual use.
Consumption.
For eventual consumption. And then this consumption becomes the motivation for endless production and activity, and that there's a way in which the emptiness of being that I reference at the beginning of the top, that there's a way in which the ceaseless activity might be one of the motivating principles.
But regardless of that, it's the idea of putting things in a kind of stockpile for eventual consumption.
And that this is how things are revealed.
But notice the world out of which that position, which you correctly describe, comes.
It's an utter view that's so utterly abstracted from and decontaminated by anything like a view of the economic mode in which he lived at the time.
He's in a transition from village culture to city culture, which he doesn't like.
And the name of that transition is the commodification of everything.
That's what Bishtant means to me in a de-abstracted, concretized way.
And I agree. And that's where even though I'm not a big fan of Adorno and Horkheimer and Adorno, but in the dialectics of enlightenment, they do a very good job of actually saying things very similar to what Heidegger says about technology, about the endless,
commodification and consumption and productivity and the reification of the earth and so forth.
The Gishtel, I think we might want to linger a little bit longer on the Gishtel because it's not,
I mean, you say it's just imposing, but it's more than imposing because it's the framing, but it's the ordering and the arranging.
And I would say that to update Hightiger, we would today call it the programming, everything now becoming a data for organization.
And that this is where I think if there's something in this essay that still has pertinence to our understanding, what's taking place in our hyper technological world, it is in the imperative to this absolute totalized ordering of everything that comes within the purview of our world.
And you referenced the dialect of the enlightenment, the difference between, and they are different, we recognize that, between the analysis and the etiology of Hightiger in the one hand and Adorno and the other would be the question of context, historical context.
For Hightiger, the cause of all of this is not what's happened in the last 200 and 400 years, the cause of it all is that we have forgotten Erignus.
That is to say, our finitude has brought upon us the forgetfulness of our finitude, without any references to the economic, social, political, ideological history of the world in the last 400 years has brought us to this programming, if you want to use that word.
But notice what he does, he puts that causation entirely beyond our touch, it's hidden to us, it's intrinsically hidden.
And his whole history of being is a history of various epics including Gishel, in which we've forgotten this dispensing power.
And if only we could wake up to that, that's the last part of his essay, his response, if you will.
If only we could go inside of ourselves, and it is an interior quietism, go inside of ourselves and find revelation itself, a laither itself, and recognize the finitude that underlies that revelation, we would have some chance at a better world, at least the few, as he said, might be able to have a better world.
Now that's miles away from dialectic of enlightenment, because of its contextualization, its historicization, and its view of the future.
But as you said earlier, he is doing a philosophy of technology, and perhaps we must require philosophers to contextualize, historicize, and become economic philosophers, or social, sociologists as well as philosophers.
That was not Heidegger's forte, and he certainly is very cavalier about ignoring all the contextualized forces that created the phenomenon of modern technology.
Which is the sad thing he is in Aristotelian should know, above all others, that where you begin with is the empirical situatedness, that's where your discourse begins.
This is the quote "heldling" in that famous "The Rhine". "Vidu'an thinks d'Hirch du Blyben, where and how you begin is where you're going to end up."
And Heidegger began with a village view of technology, not a contemporary 20th century view of technology, so I would argue that the realm of his phenomenological field is so diminished precisely because of its de-contextualization, as to leave us wondering how far away you are.
How far we want to go with the analysis, the etiology, and the response.
Well then the question for you is, if it is a village view of technology, why do you agree that this essay is crucial to his entire thought?
And if its shortcomings are so severe, does that mean his thought is worthless? And why are we spending any time talking about Heidegger's thinking?
Is there anything in this essay that you think is worth holding on to or trying to gain clarity about, or should we just read the dialectics of enlightenment and be much better off for?
Think of Heidegger's work as unfolding in two steps, and think of the capital letter T across bar at the top and aligned down.
The early Heidegger went down. He analyzed human existence right down to its foundations, immortality, and finitude, etc.
And he did amazing work. I mean being in time is still the greatest philosophical work of the 20th century, I think.
Then he stepped back and he did the bar at the top of the tree, the T, and tried to cash out what he had found in his existential analysis over what he calls a history of being.
So he starts with the pre-socratic, he works us through the Greeks, then through the medieval period of to modern times and beyond.
And he offers us a story based on a reading of a handful of pre-socratic fragments, very ten-dentious reading, 12 philosophers that I can count of that count.
And then he ends up saying, "That's why we're stuck in technology." I think that he shot himself in the foot. He oversold his real achievement, which was the deconstructive reading that is being in time by trying to cash it out over a history of philosophy.
You end up with a kind of mad Hegelianism where what philosophers think is actually what drove the world.
And that's what we come up with in Heidegger's reading. So I really would call into question,
Roy already says that the whole import of Heidegger's philosophy lies in his history of philosophy.
And I think that's dead wrong, weakest part of his work.
I'm still trying to find out, well, I'd like you to say,
something to our listeners about those who may be all too happy and eager to write Heidegger off,
not bother going to the effort to find out what his philosophy was,
dispersion because of his political engagement with the Nazi party and so forth.
And I know a lot of people who would just love to hear Tom,
and say, "Don't bother with it. He's not worth it.
He just shot himself in the foot and he gives us a whole narrative story,
which is based on tendentious readings of presocratic fragments of philosophy.
Why have you spent so much of your adult life coming to terms with this thinker?
And do you think that beyond being in time and the early stuff that we should just write him out?
Is that just to be thrown out of the corpus?
Or are we going to be like Bert Dreyfus who, in a certain way,
is actually very compelling? He says, "He takes from Heidegger what he needs and what he wants
and he leaves all the rest aside and you could take the essay concerning technology,
leave aside the whole history of being that's part three and just find,
I find in that middle section of, you know, about standing reserve and Gestel,
that's all I need from it. I don't need the dispensation of being
to, but is there anything after 1929-1930 that you find salvageable in his corpus?"
That's a very good question.
What exactly is usable of Heidegger?
What is the future of Heidegger? The Heidegger wave is crashed on the shore.
Let's face it, nobody talks being anymore. Except Heideggerians,
I just came back from Heidegger Conference where having painted themselves into a corner,
Heideggerians talk to nobody but themselves and have no discourse with anybody beyond,
pragmatist, analyst, you name it, because those people have missed the boat.
In fact, the other day a humanist on campus said to me,
and I think it goes to the Heidegger matter, said, "The discourse of meaning is dead."
And I think he may be right. In fact, sometimes I fear he's right, but if that's true,
then here comes Heidegger. Now, the whole university is dead. The humanities are dead,
because the one thing that human beings do is meaning at whatever level,
practical, theoretical, aesthetic, or whatever, and the universities in the business of sorting out the kinds of meaning,
and then from Jane Austen to quantum mechanics for that matter,
and then providing a critique of that.
Now Heidegger's real contribution is to has given us the means for writing up that critique,
for reading that even into the future. However, I don't think that his essay on technology is his best work.
Just as I feel while we can learn a lot about Aristotle and about Kant and about his readings of Hegel and so on,
we learn a lot from Heidegger in the history of philosophy,
I do at least, and have worked, spent my career doing that in effect.
What I think is wrong is the framework in which he puts that from the pre-socratic,
again, a very ten-dentious reading of about seven fragments from the pre-socratic, right, the nobody agrees,
up to technology.
I think we ought to do is bracket that, learn from Heidegger what we can,
and apply it to our modern situation, but for that, here's what we can also learn from him.
We need to critique Heidegger, find out where the limits of his methodology were,
and then start from there, and I have some things to say about that, I'm sure you do as well.
What we can learn from the failure of the Heideggerian efforts in the essay on technology.
Well, we haven't talked about the failures of the essay yet,
because we've gone back and forth between reconstructing the central section and then jumping,
I find a little precipitously into the dispensation discourse of it,
to really fully appreciate the shortcomings of Heidegger, I think one has to do in justice in where he has something worth listening to,
even in this essay, because we chose this essay because we both agreed that it's a crucial thing in his corpus.
It might be crucial because it's where he goes wrong, but I think that for us to point out the shortcomings,
that we're going to have to maybe find out what in this essay actually exists independently of his theory of the history of being,
because I find that I can skip that third section of this essay and still understand something about the essence of modern technology, as he calls it,
and that this essence of modern technology, as he sees it, I think has a future beyond Heidegger, and which throws all sorts of light into the kind of world we live in.
The same way I would use biology, Darwin comes up with a theory of evolution and of random variation without knowing anything about modern DNA and genetic rans,
but when discovered, confirmed his theory about genetic variation, and I think the kind of world of informational technology that dominates the gush-dell that we're in, practically.
This is something that Heidegger stills, that this central part of this essay can still provide some true insight into.
So therefore, is it necessary to buy into the whole story of the history of being in order to retrieve some really valuable insights from the essay?
There's two things going on there, that's well said.
The real core of the essay, if we want to get to the essence of technology, is what I call his original sin story.
Heidegger asks us to appropriate a evolutionary vision of Western civilization and culture in which our overlooking, our radical finitude, codeword, erigness, since the Greeks explains why we're trapped in techno-think today.
And I submit to you that that has, I think this is number one, what he means by the essence of the essay in the essence of technology.
And I submit that this narrative has about as much explanatory power as the Christian fable of original sin, causing all of the woes of the world today.
What can we get out of this essay, or how could we help Heidegger rewrite the essay in a way that would speak to the 21st century?
I think that might be the challenge that our audience would rise to.
And I think the first step is to begin with not a lighting every other thick and interesting phenomenological description of technology in the name of that short definition that he gives us, provocation to store Bishtant.
He says nothing at all about the difference between the steam engine and the transistor, or between the cotton gin and the printed circuit.
Certainly, can we let philosophy get off with that little?
Don't we have to ask that he flesh out the phenomenon in a way that would include all of the, he don't have to be an economist, a sociologist or a politician, but you do have to point out the economic, social, and political,
ramifications of this so that we'll know what kind of an essence where after, the essence of what are we after.
So I think Heidegger wants to decontaminate philosophy.
I think this is one of his problems.
Keep history out of it, real history, because we've got this other meta history called Gishtant, this dispensation of being.
But you can't do philosophy without contamination, if nothing else we've learned that from Derrida.
And I think Heidegger avoids that, the ontagon to logical distinction, so we can actually help him.
The essay does need help, and we can actually give at the first stage a richer phenomenology of modern technology than he does.
Well, can we, why don't we do that?
I'm, I'm game for it, because I, I otherwise I think that we're better off, you know, with the dialectics of enlightenment.
What does the essay, or what does his thinking about technology give us that we don't get from a Dornorn hook or a chimer?
Or others, I mean, I mean, I just use that as an example because there's a lot of sympathy in their views.
And if the answer is nothing, then, you know.
First of all, we get to find out where we're situated.
The Stoics used to say Seneca said about philosophy, something that I think all humanists and philosophers should remember.
Primom Vivaré, de Ende Filosophari.
First, live, live in a given situation, then go about doing your philosophy.
And Heidegger holds to that.
That's an Aristotelian principle.
So where does this essay live would be our first things?
And where do we live would be another question, right?
We're talking to our mentioned the university and its peril today, the humanities, and their peril today.
Part of the reason I suggest that why the humanities are in such difficulty today is that they have shot themselves in the foot by doing everything except talking to the real situation in which their students live, for example.
And that's a certain mode of economics, a certain mode of sociology and politics.
And unless we are at least aware of that, we haven't begun.
So I don't think this is the program in which we lay out that kind of phenomenon, but we can formally at least draw a picture of where we would want to start this discourse.
Earlier you alluded, you mentioned techno thinking, something that had an ominous ring to it, and I presume that you're as worried as I am about techno thinking.
Do you find that the essay concerning technology can teach us something about how we end up in techno thinking?
It can. It can indeed. And it's basically an Aristotelian point that when we narrow down the human relationship to the world to simply a productive one without considering contemplation, without considering the arts, etc.
We're really losing it big time. I was just looking a moment ago for just some data on what's going on with people who live by their computers.
And it turns out that we have thousands of tweet experiences a day, if we're not traveling thousands, hundreds of tweet experiences a day, that are really changing the way we think about things, focusing our attention and so on.
That's something that we really should worry about as academics. But broader yet, it's a challenge to me, and I don't have the answer.
You know, as humanity has simply become a job program for humanists. It's a way of employing ourselves, it's a way of having something to say, publishing articles, or what is it that we want to leave with our students? What kind of questions? What kind of critical stance do we want to leave with them?
I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. I wouldn't expect that you would agree with me that one of the purposes of vocations is to awaken thinking.
But regardless of what direction it may take later, and then the humanists may also want to be the shepherding of the direction of the thinking, but to awaken thinking is a far more difficult task I find these days, and it was when I began this profession a few decades ago.
And I think that technology has a lot to do with that.
But I think we'd be running down the sciences and the students that we have at Stanford, if we didn't think that there was serious critical thinking going on in economics and sociology, in the sciences and physics and all the STEM disciplines, I think the high-digarians in particular think that they owned thinking.
When what they're really talking about is a very high level, rarefied vision of the contemplation of the origin of being.
Well, the high-digarian thinking when it's talking between themselves and reproducing the language of the master, that's not thinking in the way I tried to practice it on this show of correspondence of what topic is under discussion, but what I would call the, I think, even Heidegger might call it reflective thinking.
He doesn't use reflective, might meditate of thinking, but that's not necessarily, there isn't a certain kind of philosophical reflection that can be brought to bear on everything.
And it doesn't have to be on the origin of being, and so it can be on the sciences on human behavior, on the arts and computers and so forth.
See, that's maybe a limit to, I talk about we want to give Heidegger as do and also recognize his limitations.
Heidegger's philosophy as a whole, 102 volumes of the gazamptau scaba, eventually.
Heidegger's philosophy is like Aristotle's philosophy, Aristotle's metaphysics, without an ethics, without a politics, without a rhetoric, without a Heidegger just never wanted to tell.
That's what I call his decontamination feelings, right?
If Heidegger had given us something like the beginnings of a social theory, we can get that of Heidegger's life, Jean-Luc Nolcee, who began to try to develop what Mitzind would mean in democracy, et cetera.
We might have something to go on, we might have the beginnings of an ethics, but when Heidegger was asked specifically whether his philosophy could tolerate or lead to an ethics, he quoted Heraclitus, Aethos on Thropodimone, which means,
The Aethos of Man, the place where Man dwells is the mystery, meaning that mystery of thinking.
That's why for Mihana Arent is the real thinker of the 20th century, because she learned her philosophy from Heidegger and then went and did a different kind of philosophy, a different kind, it's not even political philosophy, but she takes the Mitzind, she takes being in the world and gives it that concrete contextualization that I agree with you is utterly absent in Heidegger's corpus,
but sometimes I'd like to breathe that completely-verified air every now and then of the Heidegger and decontaminated.
I think that what we get when we get the decontamination is the end of human agency in Heidegger, Heidegger doesn't want to touch the question of human agency.
So we've left out history, real history, we've left out human agency, we've left out a rich, thick, interesting, sensorium of what technology is, and what we end up with, this is the saddest part, I think of his whole philosophy, is we end up with this interiorized, quietism, which basically gives up, walks away and says we must cultivate some inner connection with revelation,
and it tells you and me not one thing, not the least thread of how to relate to this technological world that we live in, in the Zolicon seminars Heidegger, interestingly says, he says,
He says, "Sells of resistance will be formed everywhere against technologies unchecked
power, they will keep reflection alive and will prepare the reversal for which that people
will clamor when the general desolation becomes unbearable.
This is Salgin-Etzen.
This is not good philosophy."
Don't you think that what you've pointed out as this decontaminated high-digger, this
insistence on a decontamination, has to have something to do with the misadventures
that you experience with Nazgius?
Because in being in time, it seems like a very aggressive call to engagement, to agency,
being responsible for your own death, being responsible for your choices, doing it authentically
not authentically, and then also, historicity is becoming historical and choosing your
thing.
And then he does act for better or worse, and it's a disaster when he becomes a
vector of the Harvard University and then the Nazi debacle and so forth.
Then I think he was traumatized, and he was not going to go near history.
He's not going to go near the notion of agency.
I think that he had been profoundly defeated in that regard.
There is a story, no doubt, a powerful student coming out of his class saying, "Using
high-diggers language, I'm resolved.
I'm resolved."
But I don't know if it means I should read the pre-socratic or join the Nazi party,
but I'm not going to be in it, but I'm resolved.
And this is wonderful work that he did.
I mean, I think high-digger is like the foyer-bok of ontotheology.
To go to a certain reading of foyer-bok, here comes Hegel.
He's put together the Christian Greek synthesis of metaphysics, right, and it's all about
this unfolding of a spirit.
It's almost a divine spirit.
And a long-comes foyer-bok, and in his principles of the philosophy, the future says, "The
whole purpose of modern philosophy is to turn theology into anthropology."
An interesting perspective, right?
Heidegger comes along and says, "In a devolution of ontotheology, this search for God
is the basis of all being and reality, etc., and Heidegger comes along and says, "Let me rub
your nose in finitude."
But when he does that, and he does it brilliantly, I mean, he also puts an end to a certain
project.
And his project, in effect, is over by the time he leaves Marbok, I will maintain.
I mean, that's a pretty radical statement.
That's 1928, etc.
He'd done his work.
And after that, he really has, because he has no ethics, he really has very little to
say about what we're going to do from here on in.
And yet, desperately, that's what we need.
We need some sort of radical, but did you put it reflective thinking upon things, which
we're going to get by analyzing the economic, the social, the political, the ideological order,
and that's where I want the humanities to exercise their power?
Well, we did a show just last week on Kafka, and I quoted Hannah Arendt on Kafka saying that
when governments turn into administration and when laws become arbitrary dictates, then
you have this Kafka-Snightmarish world that it's under-representation there in the work.
Now, when we talk about governments becoming administration, or when we talk about a university
becoming this kind of ascendancy, that administration is having in every sector of our cultural,
social, and economic lives, is something that I find that, you know, opened up a path to
thinking about how technology is the transmutation of things into a kind of hyper-administrative
what he calls, you know, the endless ordering, arranging, and programming of everything.
And you're talking about the fate of the humanities, and I know that you even have people
dear to you who are worried and about online education, and the way that there's, it's not
out of the realm of possibility that very shortly the university can become a place where
you have students and administrators, and the whole story can gradually disappear, be narrow
down because of this technology that makes it possible, you know, for one professor to service
hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of consumers, mainly students.
You brought up two very interesting points.
One administration, the other MOOCs, as they're called, massive open online courses and that kind
of thing.
Let me introduce something here that I think applies to both of those.
Whenever we think of MOOCs, and I have great reservations about MOOCs, we have to look at
the other side of the ledger and look at those students coming out of our universities with
$200,000 debts, right?
Mom and dad and they have paid and they've got $200,000 debts.
Here comes a solution that we may have great reservations about.
It says we can cut that to a third, at least, you know, by having you work at home and
so on, with all of the deleterious consequences that you referred to.
So I'm introducing economics into that discourse.
Let me introduce that into the question of administration.
I think that the emphasis on administration may be, let me at least introduce a different
perspective, the nation state is dead.
Capital has won.
The globe is, doesn't care, what nation state you're from or who's taxing you, its capital
is elsewhere.
And I think we have to seriously consider that administration governance is not what's at
state.
It's a Republican party doing its very best to roll back the 20th century.
All the gains have made in social democracy in the 20th century, they would rather put
on the chopping block.
Unless we look at the, as Heidegger did not, this is the point I'm coming to, as Heidegger
did not, unless we look at the economic situation, I think we're blowing smoke.
There's a new, you'll be interested in purchasing this for $595.
There's a new Heidegger concordance coming out that lists every word in Heidegger's vocabulary
from A to Z and the volume and page on which it is printed.
I am to have a copy of this.
And I was looking up the letter K in Heidegger's concordance.
And there is an entry for comf, oom, dasine, the struggle over dasine.
Next entry, katagoriara, categoryo.
The way between would have come the word kapitalezmos, which he has such an aroalgic reaction
to never mentioned once in Heidegger's discourse.
Well, it's certainly something that has to be taken into consideration, but I think capitalism
and a hyper-capitalism is imminently conjugated with his whole philosophy of technology.
And in fact, it's almost there without him ever mentioning it because it's endless consumption
in the frenzy and it goes very well with what Mark said about capitalism is that which
uproots every settled society in the world and it thrives on uprootedness and rootlessness
because by destabilizing the world, it serves its own purposes.
So you would think that Heidegger would have embraced that kind of thing.
Now, it's true.
He didn't do it and we'd be mowing that.
Yeah.
We even have a name now, a nickname for the inevitability of this thing that he never
talked about.
It's called TINA.
T-I-N-A, there is no alternative.
That's the mantra of capital, neoliberal capital of the world of, give me an alternative.
But he's right in this regard that this juggernaut is moving without any real human agency
we can trace it to.
It's a generic human agency of profit.
But where the ones that are losers for it, I wish he had, as you suggest, conjugated
his discourse on this with that analysis, something about that.
Instead what we get is Solzhenitsyn saying, if we can only go back to the Russian Orthodox
church, we'd all be better off.
Heidegger's saying, if we could only remember our finitude, we'd be better off.
Well, the only thing that I would add to that is that even if he did conjugate it brilliantly,
like no one could have imagined, there would still remain this question of whether the
profit motive is enough of an etiology for the essence of modern technology.
Because I think that in the sciences, which I'm pro science, I've done a lot of shows
on science, I think it adds to the miracle mystery and the miracle of things.
But there is a drive to an utter no ability of everything that falls within the scope of
scientific investigation.
And that drive is not so much to profit from it.
And it's people can take advantage, corporations can take advantage of it.
But there is this other drive of the radical no ability of everything.
And that seems to be a compulsion that even scientists themselves in science as a whole
does not master.
It does seem to be not--it kind of faded if you want to use that term.
You know, this is the first sentence of Aristotle's metaphysics.
The human being by nature is this desire or regonti and Greek to know.
However, I maintain that's the proof of human finitude because we'll never get our hands
around everything.
In any case, the failure to conjugate Heidegger's analysis and questions of economics gives
us a task for the future.
For sure.
And that's what the university might and should maybe turn its attention to.
Here, here.
There you go.
Tomazo, thanks for coming back on to entitled "Pinience Speak to Joseph" about Heidegger.
We've been speaking with Professor Thomas G. N., from the Department of Religious Studies
here, authored endless articles and books on Heidegger, so we will continue this again sometime
in the future because I get all sorts of emails, you know, for more Heidegger, more Heidegger,
and I'm always happy to oblige that.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled "Pinience.
Thanks for listening."
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