CONTINENTAL REALISM by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

b. ‘ Wohin haben wir uns verirrt?’94

The question of technics has been dominated for decades by Heidegger’s well known analysis of the essence of technology in “The Question of Technology”. This lecture is at odds with thinking the great outdoors, but it is important to know why. It is my contention that Heidegger’s analysis of the essence of technics is concerned, for the most part, not with technics per se, but with the essence of human freedom. In Heidegger’s analysis, technics remain ambiguous and obscure. The entire thrust of the argument is that technics cannot be equated with anything technological – in particular not with technological instruments, objects, or apparatuses.95 Heidegger claims that we think through the question concerning technology via its “instrumental and anthropological definition” [“die instrumentale und anthropologische Bestummung” (QCT, 312/8).96 In his attempt to uncover the conditions for the emergence of the instrumentalist definition Heidegger settles on causation, but this is not causation in the Harmanian sense of the interaction between technical objects, but rather causation as a metaphysical decision of the ancient Greeks. Heidegger does extend causation beyond the human remit in relation to nature. His preferred mode of ‘causation’ is poiēsis ( Her-vor-bringen, bringing-forth) which he tells us is also characteristic of nature ( physis). In fact physis is “poiēsis in the highest sense” [“Die φύσις ist sogar ποίησις im höchsten Sinne” (QCT, 317/12).The difference between the natural and the ‘unnatural’ is that what is brought-forth in nature arises of its own accord, but what is brought forward in technics is brought out by another (from us). But it is precisely when Heidegger shifts the discussion toward the broader epochal significance of technics that we begin to lose sight of technical objects.97 In Heidegger’s etymological discussion of technē what is important is that the connection with skilled human activity is both retained and widened to include “the arts of the mind and the fine arts” [“die hohe Kunst und die schönen Künste” (QCT, 318/14).98 The contemporary difference between poiēsis and technē is, as is well known, severe. Since contemporary technology does not allow things to be brought-forth into appearance it is diagnosed as a “challenging” [“Herausfordern”] (QCT, 320/15).

In its epochal sense challenging is Enframing [ das Ge-stell].99 What is decisive for Heidegger about Enframing is ‘its’ capacity to occlude the other path i.e. to set up the conditions for the diffi-culty of remembering, and thereby retrieving, poiēsis as a thought.

This leads to Heidegger’s famous proclamation that technology is “the danger” [“die Gefahr”] (QCT, 331/27 his italics). Here we learn that even the freedom to dominate that belongs to humans is an illusion in and within Enframing. What is lost in our age and never encountered is our essence: “In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself i.e. his essence” [“Indessen begegnet der Mensch heute in Wahrheit gerade nirgends mehr sich selber, d.h. seinem Wesen” (QCT, 332/28). We should remember that this is the precise problematic in Heidegger’s reading: the essence of technics is an obstacle to the remembrance of our essence.

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