I’ve been working my way through Heidegger on Technology (2019), an excellent (if forgivably dense) collection of essays on Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. Though arguably the twentieth century’s most influential thinker, Heidegger may be its most controversial one as well. Still, I’ve long considered Heidegger’s treatise The Question Concerning Technology (Die Frage nach der Technik, developed between 1949 and 1953) to be a prophetic and surprisingly poignant examination of our late modern era. It’s not that Heidegger’s analysis is entirely original. A similar critique of “the present age” is found in Kierkegaard’s work, and a number of Heidegger’s contemporaries registered concern about modern technology, including theologians Romano Guardini and Paul Tillich and philosophers Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. No, what distinguishes Heidegger’s approach is his attempt to understand technology in phenomenological terms. He tries to answer the question: what do we see when we view the world through the lens of modern technology?
This is the subject of Steven Crowell’s contribution to Heidegger on Technology, entitled “The Challenge of Heidegger’s Approach to Technology: A Phenomenological Reading.” Instead of going through the entire chapter, I want to focus on a section that, however brief, struck me as illuminating. A longtime professor at Rice University, Crowell argues that Heidegger’s phenomenology is first a method by which the conditions of our understanding are made apparent. That is to say, for Heidegger, it is essential that we examine the intuitive “access,” rooted in everyday experience, by which know the world. In this way, we come to understand what things mean. To cite a prominent example from Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927), the meaning of the hammer is not known to the hammer itself but only to the person who uses it in the accomplishment of some task. And yet, Crowell argues, Heidegger also aims to trace an underlying aspect of intelligibility by which “beings as a whole” are grasped “in terms of a meaning that prevails throughout the whole.” In his later work, which, in the wake of World War II, deals frequently with technology, Heidegger comes to concentrate on this depth dimension. Crowell identifies it as thinking.
According to Heidegger, the way we think generates our experience of the world, and, as modern people, our thinking has been “destined” to proceed in terms of calculation. Just why this is the case is ultimately mysterious, but the upshot is all too clear. If, in previous eras, we looked to the shape of things themselves to understand what they are, now all things look the same to us, determined in advance by calculative thinking. As Crowell explains, “What matters, what counts as the being of things, is…their fungibility, their ability to be ‘unlocked’ as sources of energy, which is ‘stored up’ and ‘distributed', ‘switched about ever anew’.” In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger names this mode of manifestation “standing reserve” (Bestand), and he maintains that it explains why modern people often struggle to find meaning in existence. After all, as Bestand, individual things have been reduced to manipulable objects. Crowell goes on:
With [calculative thinking] entrenched, it is the function that counts, not the thing. Things are Gleich-giltig, indifferently valid; individually they count for nothing. Their ordinary names remain, of course, and with them we are still fully capable of correctly marking distinctions in practice and discerning their “value.” But all this has the air of the human, all-too-human, and we behave toward them as though we really is…lacks all meaning.
Famously, Heidegger lectured on Friedrich Nietzsche during the late 1930s, arguing that Nietzschean nihilism marks the culmination of Western thinking. In The Question Concerning Technology, we see a further qualification of this insight—that modern technology, with its own patent to will to power, is essentially nihilistic. Doubtless I have summed all of this up too quickly and with insufficient detail, but I hope it’s at least suggestive of how Heidegger might approach a number of contemporary debates and problems, from rising suicide rates to “post-truth” journalism and politics.
"If, in previous eras, we looked to the shape of things themselves to understand what they are, now all things look the same to us, determined in advance by calculative thinking. " Yes, and some of the themes of other recent posts of yours come to mind here: Ellul on what happens to politics when it has been interwoven with technology and calculative thinking; what happens when institutions are not longer understood as things that possible have "good" in themselves but only serve (assumedly) interests to be unmasked by critical theory, etc.