By chance, I happen to be reading Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley.
The world in the title is a sterile one in which humanity has completely
surrendered itself to technology, where Henry Ford, who popularized the
assembly line, is the closest to a god.
If Martin Heidegger were asked, he wouldn’t say that it was just technology
that the ordered citizens of Huxley’s world were subjected to. It was a certain context of viewing technology. A context that he viewed as dangerous to
humanity’s free essence (32).
Context meant a great deal to Heidegger. How we see the world. How we see ourselves in the world. How we speak of the world. Etymology, and language in general, is so
central to his work that his idiosyncratic uses of German phrases are often
italicized alongside their English translations. In his exploration—or should I say revealing—of the context in which we
moderns view technology, he spends a great deal of time explaining how the
Greeks referred to the manufacture, use, and context of tools, sculpture, and
poetry. He does so to eventually land on
the revelation that they used the same terms to refer to all of those contexts
(34). It is we who have insisted on
taking techne to be nothing but
technique, and purging it of any context aside from use by humanity. We call this technology.
Heidegger’s term for this way of thinking of technology is “enframing,”
which “blocks the shining-forth and holding-sway of truth” (28). Enframing nature makes us consider it a “standing
reserve,” a utility. He thought that
truth was a more primal desire than mere utility. I find his discussion of the aims of modern
physicists interesting for its context.
This essay was developed between 1949 and 1953, after the novelties of
quantum physics had lost their charms and segued into the fears of the atomic
age. He says that enframing “demands
that nature be orderable” and that our investigations into causality (which I
would call science) are shrinking into mere reporting of calculations
(23). This is a bleak view of
science. When I studied physics as an
undergraduate, I thought I was searching for truth in the same way as Heidegger’s
ancient Greeks. His point seems to be
that instead of just challenging nature, we should be questioning how we do so,
and not accept it as the only way to reveal truth.
After finishing this essay a second time, I thought of Keats’s
“Ode on a Grecian Urn.” It’s not just
because of Heidegger’s use of a silver chalice as an example of causality. It’s also his discussion of poetry at the
very end of the essay:
The poetical brings the true into the splendor of what Plato in the Phaedrus calls to ekphanestaton, that which shines forth most purely. The poetical thoroughly pervades every art, every revealing of coming to presence into the beautiful. (34)
It took ancient Greek techne
to bring forth the poem’s titular Urn, an object of both practical and artistic
worth. But it also required a kind of
technique by Keats as the poet, a revealing of truth. I wonder if Heidegger agreed that
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays.Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Garland, 1977.
I think he would agree with you. And you are absolutely right that "context is all." That's a line from The Handmaid"s Tale that applies, I think, to everything. I like that you emphasize that Heidegger wants us to question technology as well as question how we are questioning it. That's part of what the Standing Reserve Collage assignment is suppose to help us do. I'm excited to see what you all come up with.
ReplyDeleteI often feel strange, discussing and analyzing things as a student, and it certainly becomes a way of seeing the world. You learn something in one class and you take that enframing with you to the next, or to a life situation. Our practices shape our views, and our technologies shape our practice—would we analyze as much without written language, without science? I like how you point out that we should question how we challenge nature in order to reveal a deeper truth. The danger, then, is being unable to find the "saving power," of going the opposite way; analysis for analysis' sake. But in my experience, this seems to be big part of liberal arts and social sciences: someone does a work, someone analyzes that work, someone analyzes the analysis, and so on. Does that process qualify as a revealing, or is it part of a system to maintain a standing reserve? I think both are probably true.
ReplyDeleteObserving an issue from multiple angles has always been an important part of analyzing technology and whether or not a new device or service has use for us. It is interesting that Heiddeger states that technology is not neutral, using the four causes as a factor, and that the maker's intention is involved in the judging a technologies moral placement. While it is a good rule to follow, often society can skew a technology with good intentions to em-frame it as an immoral technology through its alternative use. An example of this in our modern world can be seen with Torrent software. Bit-Torrent was developed as an alternative way to share files, using the collective network power of users rather than a central server to retrieve the data. While this original intention was developed to save webmaster's money on bandwidth, the technology quickly became the web-standard for piracy. Becuase of the peer-to-peer nature of the program, it simply became the easiest option for unlawful data distribution, despite the creators intentions. I would like to ask Heidegger if the moral judgement of technology lies solely on the creator's intention, societies implementation of it, or a combination of the factors.
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