A Preliminary Inquiry into Heidegger’s Media Ontology

1

When Heidegger’s philosophy of technology is mentioned, what often comes first to mind is Heidegger’s late “question concerning technology,” the thought of technology as revealing, as a mode in which truth happens, as the consummated form of metaphysics, as well as propositions such as the fourfold of earth and sky, mortals and divinities, and poetic dwelling. Technology is unquestionably a keyword of Heidegger’s late thought. Yet the crucial significance of the technological question in Heidegger’s thought, and Heidegger’s important status as a philosopher of technology, were already established in his early thought represented by Being and Time, and it was precisely on the basis of his fundamental ontology that Heidegger’s philosophy clearly manifested itself as a “philosophy of technology” as a philosophical character, rather than merely as “philosophical reflection on the question of technology.”

Therefore, an inquiry into Heidegger’s early philosophy of technology will help us grasp Heidegger’s thinking on technology from a more fundamental level. On the other hand, Heidegger’s late philosophy becomes increasingly unrestrained and fanciful, introducing a large number of poeticized concepts and formulations; interpreters are easily bewitched by concepts, and when they speak of Heidegger they often spill out all manner of flashy “terms,” keeping people at a distance. In fact, what is probably happening is that thought is being missed because it has been obscured by words.

This article will focus on Heidegger’s early philosophy, taking Being and Time and its preparatory second draft, Introduction to the History of the Concept of Time (the summer semester 1925 lecture course), as its basis for an elucidatory reading. By “elucidatory reading,” I mean that I will begin from Heidegger, but I will not be bound by the conceptual framework Heidegger uses; nor do I aim to present Heidegger’s text word for word. Rather, I aim to present, “through” Heidegger’s text, a possibility for philosophy of technology. And this mode of reading is precisely the one most in keeping with Heidegger’s own philosophical thinking—“the way, not the works”—so Heidegger said of his own Collected Works shortly before his death[1]. What follows will also make clear that the truth of things is not, in fact, understood in a contemplative gaze that objectifies, topicalizes, and theorizes them; rather, it is understood in dealings, as a referential relation of “for-which” in practical handling. To take Heidegger’s text as a ready-made object for scrutiny and analysis is precisely not to treat it authentically; rather, to regard the text as a path leading somewhere rather than as a finished work is a reading that lets it be what it is.

I will interpret Heidegger’s ontology as a kind of “media ontology” or “media-being ontology.” Of course, such a “translation” cannot be fully faithful to Heidegger himself: in Heidegger’s own terminology, the concept of “technology” has not yet even appeared, let alone the word “media.” But I am introducing the concept of media to restate Heidegger because I think that the “intervention” of this concept of “through” will help us approach Heidegger’s thought more readily. Compared with concepts such as technology or equipment, the word media more strongly highlights meanings such as “in between…,” “reach by way of…,” and “present to…”; such a mediating structure of guidance is something Heidegger consistently emphasizes. In everyday language, media in the narrow sense refers to tools for “dealing with” things, while in a broader sense it can also refer to any tool, background, means, or method. “Using… as the medium for achieving…” is to say “through… to…”; anything that is thus “gone through” can be called a medium. Even in everyday language, something serving as a medium need not be a concrete, tangible object—for example, “speech” is regarded as a basic medium of communication, yet it is not a utensil. And in an ontological reading, what introducing the term media is meant to emphasize is not first of all those concrete media devices, but the mediacy of media itself—that is, the guiding structure of “through… and…”

2

What is called “ontology” is nothing other than the questioning of the problem of being. Heidegger first analyzes the problem-structure of the question of being, namely: “1. What is sought in the questioning: the meaning of being. 2. What is asked about in the questioning: the being of beings. 3. What is at issue in the questioning: beings themselves.”[2] He says: “Starting from what is at issue in the questioning, we must orient ourselves toward what is asked about in the questioning so as to determine the primordial way of experience and access, to determine the way of viewing and the content itself that is viewed.”[3] “The question of being demands that we gain and preliminarily secure the correct way of access to beings.”[4]

To seek an appropriate way of viewing is also to enter a phenomenological attitude. Heidegger points out: “All phenomenological analysis of behavior observes behavior in this way: analysis does not really attest behavior directly, does not investigate the thematic meaning of behavior, but rather makes behavior itself thematic, and thereby lets the object of behavior and the way in which it is meant become thematic along with it. This means: what is perceived is not meant directly in itself, but is meant through its way of being. … To let beings be presented with a view to being.”[5]

Simply put, phenomenology is a reflection on the “way of access” (the medium) by which we gain access to the object (content, beings) we intend. And such reflection does not proceed by excluding the question of beings; phenomenological investigation does not “cease to relate to beings”[6], but instead maintains its relation to content (beings) while shifting its focus to the medium through which beings are accessed (being). This phenomenological attitude stands in opposition to the natural attitude or everyday attitude. In the natural or everyday attitude, we deal directly with beings, while the being of beings remains hidden and unmanifest; in other words, we directly encounter content, while the “medium” is transparent—we are unaware of the medium’s presence and proceed straight to the object. The phenomenological attitude, by contrast, brings out precisely this thing we usually see right through, namely mediacy: we suspend the “content” conveyed by the medium and reflect on the medium’s own nature and structure.

For example, I look at an object through glasses (the eyes, a telescope, or any other medium). In the everyday attitude, my glasses are “transparent”; I do not notice my glasses, but directly deal with the object by way of the glasses. The first situation is an unreflective oscillation between the everyday attitude and the reflective attitude: for instance, I can no longer see clearly, so I begin to reflect on the way I am seeing and discover that something is wrong with the glasses, whereupon I take them off to inspect and wipe them. In the course of inspecting the glasses, my intention has already moved away from the previous object of vision and toward the glasses themselves; at this moment, the glasses do not exist as glasses. They no longer serve as a medium, but as a ready-made thing to be examined as another experiential object. Moreover, under such inspection, the glasses in fact become the content under another medium—for example, we need to take off the glasses and move them to a certain distance; only through a specific distance can the glasses, as an object, properly show themselves.

But there is still a third attitude or mode, namely to preserve the existence of the glasses as glasses while at the same time reflecting on the glasses themselves. That is to say, I am still wearing the glasses, still looking at objects through them, but at this point what I am concerned with is no longer what content I see through the glasses; rather, I am concerned with the activity itself of seeing through the glasses. I still need to look at the object behind the glasses, yet this looking is no longer for the sake of pursuing the content of those objects, but for helping me adjust or understand the function of the glasses. I view all kinds of objects through the glasses, but what I am thinking about is not the properties of those objects themselves, but the possibilities contained in the way those objects present themselves through the glasses. In other words, what kind of possibilities can wearing glasses open up for my world? Only in such a special activity of looking do the glasses, on the one hand, play the role of glasses themselves, and on the other hand, become the object of reflection and examination. Only through such activity is the existence of the glasses revealed. And the meaning of its existence is ultimately understood in the possibilities it opens up through itself for Dasein.

3

What is called a “phenomenon” is “that which shows itself in itself—meaning the peculiar way in which something presents itself”[7]. It is not “some thing,” but “some mode of presenting itself,” or more precisely, some mediating form of dealing with things (I use the word form only to avoid understanding the medium here as a ready-made utensil). In a vulgar understanding, by contrast, “phenomenon” merely means some kind of “appearance,” and this appearance (the appearing) may be something illusory or deceptive, while the crucial thing is the “true state of affairs” behind the appearance. Heidegger distinguishes phenomenon from appearance; in the simplest terms, appearance is the content of what appears, whereas phenomenon is the appearing of content. Whether true appearance or false appearance, appearance always shows itself through the guidance of phenomenon: appearance “means a referential relation on the level of beings among beings; and only when that which refers (that which announces something) itself shows itself in its own right, only when the referent is ‘phenomenon,’ can it exert its possible function. Appearance and semblance are founded in manifold ways on phenomenon.”[8]

Everyday or traditional philosophical thinking always opposes phenomenon to reality, as if behind the world of appearances there were still a real world, and the appearances that correspond to this real world would be truth, while those that do not correspond would be illusion. But this line of thought is precisely what misrecognizes beings as being itself, taking reality to mean the ready-made presence-at-hand of certain things as objects. Heidegger tells us that it is not the case that there is first some real world, and only then do people seek various media with which to deal with this ready-made real world. On the contrary, reality as such and the worldliness of the world are themselves founded in mediacy.

What mediacy means is a non-objective referential relation itself. Heidegger points out that, in a certain sense, “reality means non-objectivity”[9]—the things we take hold of as objects are often things like illusions or phantasms, so where does so-called truthfulness come from? The phenomenological doctrine of intentionality says that consciousness is always directed toward external objects, but even this does not yet explicitly reveal the origin of the real and the illusory. If we ask how consciousness can be directed toward real objects and when it is directed toward false objects, we may still sink deeper into the mire. Heidegger tells us that reality is not grasped in objectifying apprehension at all, but in non-objectifying dealings. In short, the issue is not at all whether one is directed toward a real or an illusory object; reality does not belong to the object here at all, but to this “directing” itself. The real and the illusory are different ways in which things present themselves to us.

But is such an explanation satisfying? A classical philosopher would probably not be satisfied; they always want to find, “behind” the sensible and tangible appearance, some intangible transcendent essence, and then use this essence to explain the appearance. Yet is this transcendent abstraction really “behind” the appearance? In fact, when abstract entities are used to explain concrete phenomena, language as a special medium is always being employed. Language as a medium certainly can gain access to the world: “What our language first speaks of and utters is beings as world, and precisely not the beings that speaking itself is.”[10] In the natural attitude, we directly pass through language and point toward the objects we speak of. But there are two further problems:

On the one hand, there is the neglect of the worldly phenomenon itself. Heidegger says: “Even if we were able to state one by one all the things in the world, we would never thereby reach a grasp of the meaning of world. In all such cataloguing, we have always already taken them at the outset as ‘things in the world.’ … What is crucial is not descriptive reporting of world events, but an interpretation of worldliness, and this worldliness determines the specific mode of appearance of everything that shows up as a thing in the world.”[11] That is to say, before we seek how to describe the essence behind things, things have already presented themselves to us as things in the world, and how this presentation happens still remains to be explained. Heidegger interprets worldliness as the network of referential relations among ready-to-hand entities; I will return to this point later.

On the other hand, the intrinsic character of language as a medium makes it tend toward referring to objective things, while making it difficult to express non-objective being. The reason traditional philosophy becomes obsessed with seeking some objectifiable and reportable essence is precisely that it is obscured by language and thus unable to deeply reflect on its own inherent tendency. Heidegger says: “It is one thing to report on beings narratively, and another thing altogether to seize upon the being of beings. For the latter task, what we often lack is not only words, but in a fundamental sense even grammar. … The tendency of language is initially suited only to expressing beings rather than being.”[12]

4

Traditional philosophy not only tends to understand truth as a sentence, but also tends to understand a sentence as a “proposition”; Heidegger points out, however: “The primordial process of interpretation does not occur in theoretical propositional sentences, but in the circumspective, wordless casting aside of inappropriate tools or replacing them with appropriate ones; yet no inference can be drawn from the absence of words to the absence of interpretation. On the other hand, the interpretation expressed in circumspection still need not be a definitively formulated proposition.”[13] A proposition is then “a derivative mode of interpretation”[14]. To offer a proposition is indeed a kind of “providing an interpretation,” but not the primordial interpretation itself. I point to a hammer and ask, “What is this?” and you pick up the hammer (or guide me) and drive a nail; from this operation I understand the hammer’s for-which—this is a primordial interpretation. To give a name—“This is a hammer”—means nothing more than affixing a label; and to follow it with a proposition, saying “A hammer is used to drive nails,” is in a certain sense also to provide an interpretation. But this interpretation is interpretation precisely because it is grounded in the guiding function of language as a medium; this sentence guides us to a situation of picking up a hammer and driving a nail, and the questioner ultimately understands the hammer’s for-which in just such a situation. If I cannot understand the hammer’s use simply by watching the process of hammering a nail, or if I cannot convey the corresponding situation of use through the sentence “A hammer is used to drive nails,” then this sentence has given no effective interpretation at all. In Heidegger’s words: “Circumspective inquiry: What is this particular ready-to-hand thing? For this question, the circumspective interpretive answer is: it is for doing such and such. Enumerating ‘what for’ is not merely naming something: the thing in question is recognized as something; what is named is thereby understood as that thing. That which unfolds in understanding, that which is understood, is always already accessible in the following way, namely that its ‘as-what’ can be explicitly brought out in it. This ‘as’ constitutes the definite structure of what is understood.”[15]

What follows will shortly show that Heidegger regards the world as a guiding network of what things are “for”; thus, so-called “interpretation” is “the revealing of what a thing is for, whereby it foregrounds the directive relation pertaining to ‘for-the-sake-of’.”[16] In other words, it reveals the mediality of things. And the activity of handling things itself is always already showing what things are for; thus, “just insofar as handling reveals the directives implied in its already unfolded environing world (the production world), all handling itself is uncovering and interpreting.”[17] What is meant by “the medium is the message” is not only that ready-made messages are conveyed through the use of media (as in “interpretation”), but also that the operation of the medium itself is a message.

The more content comes to the fore, the more the medium is concealed. A proposition can effectively convey an interpretation, but this conveyance is often too effective, so much so that people fail to notice this “conveyance” and directly take what is conveyed through the proposition to be the most originary interpretation, while failing to notice the mutation produced by this mode of conveyance. Heidegger says: “The uncovering of the present-at-hand is a covering up of the ready-to-hand. … The proposition determines the present-at-hand thing as something something … the ‘as’ structure of interpretation has undergone a mutation. When this ‘as’ exercises its function of taking hold of what is understood, it no longer extends into the totality of involvements. Originally the ‘as’ articulated the linkage of directives in a disarticulated way; now this ‘as’ that carries out the disarticulation is severed, as regards meaning, from the context.”[18] In other words, in this interpretive conveyance provided by the proposition, “hammer,” “striking,” and “nail” all become present-at-hand things, while the ready-to-hand state in which the hammer originally stood is covered over in this interpretation. The network of directives implicit in the actual practical activity of using a hammer to strike nails is abstracted into a grammatical relation among a few signs, becoming an isolated present-at-hand statement. So let us no longer misunderstand Heidegger’s later concept of “unconcealment” — it does not mean that the medium is a kind of concealment, covering over the object; on the contrary, it is precisely the object, always too conspicuous, that covers over the medium. The eye-catching object keeps the medium continually receding from the researcher’s field of vision. Heidegger notes: “It is easy for a researcher to encourage himself to take a thematic theoretical comportment toward the world as the object of inquiry. In this way, a special theoretical mode of grasping things is set up as a paradigmatic way of being-in-the-world, instead of one’s directly placing oneself phenomenologically within the process of everyday dealings with things and the situations in which I communicate with them (and these processes and situations are quite inconspicuous).”[19]

V

The obsession with descriptions of language, with propositional interpretation, and with such activities as contemplative cognition is precisely a reflection of “a traditional definition of man,” namely that “man is a rational animal”; in Heidegger’s view, even phenomenologists before him still took this definition “as their guide.”[20] Heidegger’s insistence on using Dasein rather than man as the designation is in part also a resistance to this traditional definition: “At bottom, we do not accept the experiential horizon and the horizon of questioning outlined by the most usual name for this being, by the definition of man as rational animal. What we need to elucidate is not any appearance of this being; rather, from beginning to end, the only thing we need to explain is the way in which this being exists.”[21] Description, proposition, contemplation, and so on are merely some of the most particular modes in which this being exists, “but first of all we must not understand Dasein on the basis of some conspicuous and exceptional mode of being. … What we must bring to light is the mode of being that Dasein has in its nearest everydayness.”[22]

Then Dasein’s nearest everyday state is “handling” (concern, busyness), or, to put it (medially), “dealing with.” Heidegger says: “The task of phenomenologically exhibiting the being of beings nearest to hand is pursued along the thread of everyday being-in-the-world. The being of everyday being-in-the-world we also call dealing with the beings of the world within the world. This dealing is already dispersed among manifold ways of concern. We have already shown that the nearest mode of access is not a purely cognitive knowing, but a practical, using concern … Phenomenology first asks about the being of the beings encountered in such concern.”[23]

So what are the beings encountered in such concern like? Heidegger “calls these beings encountered in concernful activity equipment. In dealing with things one finds writing equipment, sewing equipment, crafting equipment, transport equipment, measuring equipment … Strictly speaking, no such thing as a piece of equipment ever ‘exists.’ The being of equipment is always that of an equipment-totality. Only within this equipment-totality can a piece of equipment be what it is. Equipment is essentially ‘something in-order-to-…’ … And in the structure of this ‘in-order-to’ there is a directive relation from something toward something. … As equipment, equipment derives from a relation of dependence on other equipment. Writing equipment, fountain pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, window, door, room. These ‘things’ by no means first appear in isolation and then fill a room as a sum of real things…”[24] The claim that there has never been such a thing as a piece of equipment means, in other words, that equipment does not encounter us as an isolated object; rather, it appears as a medium — that is, as an intermediate directive mediation that emerges within a relational structure of “in-order-to…” and “through … to achieve …” So “phenomenology first asks about” nothing other than the mediality of the medium.

The encounter with and understanding of these near-at-hand beings does not involve treating them as objects set there awaiting dissection and analysis; rather, it takes place when the medium operates as a medium, namely, when one is “dealing with” them — “Only in dealing with them does equipment show itself in its genuinely native character. Such dealing, for example hammering with a hammer, does not grasp the being that is present-at-hand as a thematic object lying there; this use is also not at all aware of the structure of equipment itself. The hammer has not only knowledge of the hammer’s equipment-character, but it also possesses this equipment in the most appropriate way. In such using dealing, concern makes itself subordinate to the ‘in-order-to’ that constitutes the current equipment. The less one merely stares at the hammer as a thing, and the more intensely one uses it, the more originary becomes one’s relation to it, and the more unequivocally it encounters one as what it is — as equipment.”[25] There are mainly two situations in which one takes a hammer as an object of contemplation for thematic investigation, and both are of course developments from everydayness. One is inspection or adjustment of the hammer, for example checking and fiddling with it when something is wrong with the hammer; but the possibility of such inspection is grounded in an understanding of the hammer’s hammering in advance. Only if I first know how the hammer is used to hammer can I examine it to see whether it can be used better. In another case the hammer is no longer being contemplated as a hammer at all, but as what is pointed to when using another medium — for instance, I may be fiddling with a magnifying glass, and then casually pick up a hammer and examine it closely through the magnifying glass; in fact I am using this act of looking to understand the magnifying glass, not the hammer. Or again, I use mathematics and physics to analyze the structure of a hammer; through this analysis, what I am actually grasping, or practicing, is the use of mathematics or physics. Even if these matters of objectifying the hammer through another medium ultimately help me use the hammer better, that help itself is precisely one of the uses of those media, belonging to the directive network jointly constituted by those media and hammers and the like.

VI

Thus Heidegger characterizes the basic structure of Dasein’s existence as “being-in-the-world,” which is nothing other than an expression of this state of dwelling within a network of medial directives. Let us first speak about this “in” (the “within-ness”), and then later discuss the “world” as a directive network.

Heidegger points out that the concept of “in” originates in “dwelling”; “here, dwelling is also understood as sheltering something in a familiar way, existing as dwelling in something.”[26]

What does this phenomenon mean? Heidegger asks: “Then what else does this phenomenon offer, apart from a present-at-hand commercium (commerce) between a present-at-hand subject and a present-at-hand object? If this interpretation says that Dasein is the being of this ‘between,’ then it would at least come somewhat closer to the factual content of the phenomenon.”[27] Heidegger then points out that it is also inappropriate to understand Dasein by means of “between,” because the concept “between” gives the impression that there is first a present-at-hand subject and a present-at-hand object, and then a present-at-hand relation between the two. But if we can break through this present-at-hand, objectifying mode of thought, and instead recognize that the existence of so-called objects such as subject and object is precisely disclosed through Dasein, then we may indeed understand Dasein as this “between-being,” or, more precisely, as “the medium.” Thus this being, Dasein, like any being, is understood as a kind of “medium,” and Dasein as medium is the most special of all: “Only through a disclosure toward … can what is at hand in the surrounding world become accessible as intraworldly being.”[28] The being that reveals things by “opening toward …” is Dasein; other media are disclosed by opening toward Dasein, whereas Dasein itself is “essentially undisclosable.”[29]

Dasein as “between” does not mean that communication is achieved between two present-at-hand inner and outer domains; rather, the boundary between the inner and the outer is itself constructed through this “between.”

For this reason Heidegger offers an analogy: “Let us compare the subject and its inner domain with the snail in its shell. … One might say: the snail sometimes crawls out of its shell while at the same time retaining its shell; it reaches something, gets to food, gets to certain objects it encounters on the ground. But does the snail thereby attain a relation of being to the world? No! The snail’s crawling out is only a spatial change in its already-being-in-the-world. Even when it is in its shell, its properly understood being is an out-there-being. Its being in its shell is not like water being in a glass, because the snail has, as its world, the shell’s interior, with which it is contiguous, which it wants to contact, in which it wants to warm itself. … The snail is not, in the first instance, merely in its shell and not yet in the world, not yet in some so-called opposed world, to which it must attain through crawling outwards. According to its being, only when the snail is already in a world can it crawl out. It does not acquire a world by crawling, but because its being means nothing other than existing in a world, it crawls.”[30] In short, human beings do not have a ready-made “inner domain,” nor a ready-made boundary between subject and world; such a boundary is determined through activities like “crawling.” And before crawling out of the shell, the snail must still deal with its “outside” through acts of contact, warming, and so on. The reason the shell becomes an interior is that the snail unfolds possibilities through crawling; if the snail had never had such a possibility, by means of this “skill” to burrow out of the shell and crawl outward, then what lies within the shell would be its “outer world.” Related questions will also arise later in the discussion of Dasein’s spatiality.

VII

What is meant by “world” is the “network of directives” (the totality of significance). Heidegger says: “The being of the ready-to-hand has a directive structure; that is to say, it has in itself the character of being directed. As the being that it is, a being is directed toward something; and it is precisely in this direction that it is disclosed. This being has become allied by itself with something. The ontological character of the ready-to-hand is involvement. In involvement there is contained: one thing is by its own nature involved with another … The toward-which of involvement is the in-order-to of utility and usability. With the in-order-to of utility, there can again be involvement. For example, … the hammer is involved with hammering, hammering with fastening, fastening with protection from wind and rain … This shelter from wind and rain ‘exists’ because Dasein can dwell beneath it, that is to say, it ‘exists’ for the sake of some possibility of Dasein’s existence.”[31] What is meant by “involvement” is nothing other than mediality, namely “through this thing to that thing in order to achieve.” Things in the world are intermedially articulated in this way, and what they ultimately point toward is the possibility of Dasein’s existence.

Thus “we have in this way determined the being of the ready-to-hand (involvement), indeed worldhood as such, as a directive nexus.”[32] “The being that is the world is shown through such characteristics as ‘useful for…,’ ‘helpful for…,’ or ‘harmful for…,’ ‘significant for…,’ and the like. Things in the world themselves always encounter us through a directive relation to something else and as a directive relation to something else.”[33]

People may still insist that things exist first, and only secondarily the relations between things. But Heidegger reverses the status of “things” — “In the structural nexus of the world, what has the primary role is not things, but directives; and if one wishes to express this fact in the terminology of the Marburg School, then one must say: not substance, but function.”[34] In the vocabulary of media ontology, this means: not content, but medium. “The medium is the message” — not that messages first lie there and are then carried and transmitted by media, but that the medium occupies an ontologically prior position.

And what are called “things,” in Heidegger’s formulation, are “grounded” — the shape and matter of bodies are “grounded in present-at-hand usability, and present-at-hand usability is grounded in the non-encountering of directive connections, while the non-encountering of directive connections is grounded in the nearest manifestation of what is handled.”[35] “The mode of access appropriate to worldliness is concernful dealing, not some free-floating and isolated perception of things. … Directives are what allow things to be present; and directives themselves are made present or disclosed only through the totality of directives. The graspable and then objectified state of a thing has its origin in the world’s nexus of events, whereas the objectified state of a thing is by no means the precondition of the nexus of events.”[36]

“Thing” emerges through the interruption of everyday dealings. In ordinary circumstances, “things are constantly sinking back into the referential totality, or more precisely: in the most immediate everyday dealing, things never even break away from the referential totality. … And the referential totality itself first and foremost shows itself in a taken-for-granted way, … things sink back into connections and do not stand out as such”[37] “In a certain sense, in the act of handling, one glances past the tool as an object; the tool, in fact, did not originally appear as just such an object at all, but rather as a tool, that is, as a ‘for-the-sake-of-…’ in use.”[38]
“Interruption” is a special mode of dealing: “When a worldly entity becomes unusable, only then does it stand forth unmistakably before us. The handling, the natural course of handling, comes to a halt because of this unusability. The referential connection, and thereby the referential totality, suffers a peculiar disturbance, and this disturbance forces handling to stop. It is precisely when the tool is broken and becomes unusable that, through its own defectiveness, the tool is made originally manifest, so that it stands out glaringly, and now comes forth into the foreground of the world in an emphatic sense. But this stopping before a conspicuous worldly thing is not a mere staring or an observational lingering; rather, the stopping still has and retains the mode of being of handling. As a specific mode of handling, the state of stopping has the sense of repair and the like. The disturbance does not appear as the mere alteration of a thing, but as an interruption of the familiar referential totality. All changes in the world, down to the alternation from one thing to another and simple transformations, are first experienced through this mode of encounter (interruption).”[39]

Some philosophies try to clarify reality through the phenomenon of “resistance,”[40] and Heidegger thinks this insight is rather profound, but “nevertheless, we must still say: the phenomenon of resistance is not the primordial phenomenon,”[41] for in fact the phenomenon of resistance is also a phenomenon of interruption, and “interruption” is grounded in “penetration”: “Only when I have a will to pass through, that is to say, when I want to get beyond something … can oppositionality come to be encountered as resistance.”[42] Only with a prior understanding of the medium as ready-to-hand, or rather, only once there is already a medium to be penetrated, can resistance as the interruption of penetration be understood.

Eight

Interruption is still a mode of dealing (a mode of encounter), in other words, this interruption is still mediatic. We may call this interruption “demediation” or “interposed mediation.” By “demediation” I mean that something which originally existed as a transparent medium no longer functions as a medium and instead becomes content (a thing); by “interposed mediation” I mean that, in order to make what originally served as medium into content, we need to put some distance between ourselves and it—that is, let another medium intervene. This medium plays the role of “breaking in from the middle,” and the medium that is thus inserted is often still transparent.

For example, when a machine in operation breaks down, we go and fetch a hammer, screwdriver, and other tools to repair it. First we locate the appropriate tools according to the relevant referential connections, and once we have taken those tools in hand, we immediately “glance past” them and instead take the machine as the object to be repaired. When the machine is functioning normally, the machine is ready-to-hand as the medium “for producing products”; but in the activity of repair, the newly inserted tools make the machine into a present-at-hand object, while those tools are ready-to-hand as the medium “for repairing the machine.” This change is at once a removal of one medium (the machine) and an insertion of another medium (the repair tools).

Language is also such a medium that can be inserted at the point of interruption. Precisely because it is one of the most universal of media, it can be inserted almost anywhere in order to set us at a distance from things; language can most easily turn anything into “content.” And the nature of language also includes its ability to easily become content itself, thereby establishing within language a certain referential structure. When dealing with “language” as such, it often appears mixed together with both ready-to-hand and present-at-hand states. But language as analyzed as propositions with truth value often does not appear as language in its original sense, as ready-to-hand language.

When language functions as language itself, it is like glasses being in a ready-to-hand state as glasses, or a hammer as a hammer; what it plays is the role of a medium—it must point to something, or make something appear, or, one might say, “bring out” something. Like any ready-to-hand medium, it always functions within a concrete context; waving a hammer in the air is not the hammer’s original state, and the ready-to-hand state is always contextual.

And when we use language most naturally, it too is always in some context and functioning as a medium, that is, pointing to other things. For instance, if I say “It’s raining,” then depending on the specific context, I may very likely be pointing to: you should take an umbrella before you go out; or: we ought to bring in the clothes hanging outside; or, most simply: why don’t you look out the window too? The person hearing this sentence will not direct attention to the sentence “It’s raining,” will not take it as a proposition to be judged true or false, but will go straight through it and attend to the umbrella, the clothes, or the window. Only when something goes wrong with this sentence, just as only when something goes wrong with your glasses, do you begin to notice it itself and take it as a present-at-hand object; only then does speech become a “proposition.” That is to say, the “proposition” is the inauthentic state of language, the present-at-hand state of this medium of language, the result of demediation or interposed mediation performed on speech. Demediation means that at this point the proposition no longer points to what it originally meant; you set aside the umbrella, the clothes, and the window, and examine the sentence itself. Interposed mediation means that, in order to treat this sentence as content for examination, you need to insert another medium. This medium may also be language—for example, “What did you just say?” “Really?” “It is said that ‘It’s raining.’” Or it may be symbols or gestures. Only when “It’s raining” is itself pointed to as content by another medium does it become a “proposition.”

Mathematics, physics, structural analysis, and so on are also media that can often be inserted at the point of interruption. What we need to notice, then, is that their significance is first and foremost mediatic and instrumental; their meaning appears in the handling of “analyzing something through them.” But if one objectifies the very “analysis of a thing,” and then re-mediates the mathematical operations that serve as the medium for analyzing the thing, taking the mathematical relations therein as a present-at-hand object, then this object is not the thing that was originally analyzed through it. Modern science often takes these media of “analyzing things through them” to be the “thing itself”; this blocks other possibilities for disclosing things and excludes outright every other medium through which things might be accessed. In fact, we can say that “the object toward which mathematical analysis is directed is indeed the thing itself,” and that “physics is indeed one way of accessing things,” but we cannot say that “the analysis produced by mathematics is the thing itself,” or that “the theoretical system of physics is the mode of being of things.”

Heidegger says: “One can formally grasp the referential nexus as a system of relations. Yet one must note: formalization of this sort flattens the phenomenon, until the genuine content of the phenomenon disappears.”[43] In other words, we can, “through” a system of relations, a mathematical function, grasp the world as a “referential nexus”; however, this does not mean that this world is that mathematical function—just as a nail is by no means a hammer, a canvas is by no means glasses, and bacteria are by no means a microscope. Even though a mathematical system can indeed disclose the world in some way, the world is by no means a mathematical system.

Nine

As a medium of “interposition to create distance,” the simplest and most basic medium, without doubt, is “distance” itself. For example, when my glasses develop a problem, I take them off, hold them out in front of me, and inspect them carefully. Then this process can be seen as inserting a stretch of distance; without introducing this appropriate distance, the glasses cannot be contemplated as a present-at-hand object.

Here we come to Heidegger’s analysis of the spatiality of Dasein and of the phenomenon of de-severance. Space, first of all, is not a present-at-hand thing (for example, a distance or a coordinate system), but a medium, the mediatic character possessed by Dasein. “Distance” and “coordinate system,” and so on, already involve the insertion of another medium, whereby space is grasped as an object—for example, space as distance disclosed through measuring instruments, or space as a coordinate system disclosed through geometry. Distance and coordinates indeed disclose space, yet just as a nail is not a hammer and a canvas is not glasses, space is not simply distance or a coordinate system.

Spatial distance and direction are grounded in Dasein’s de-severing and orientation. “De-severance is a way of being of Dasein as being-in-the-world. … To remove something in order to make it farther away is only a particular, practical way of de-severance. De-severance means making the distance vanish, that is, making something near by de-severing it. Dasein is essentially de-severing; as the being that it is, it lets what is constantly present come near.”[44]

Heidegger uses the German word meaning “going-far-away” (Ent-fernen) to describe the sense of “bringing near.” This is not merely a new definition of the word; rather, it is because going-far-away and nearness are indeed fundamentally interconnected, and moving an object away is indeed one way of making it near. This has already been made explicit in the example of taking off one’s glasses: removing one medium and inserting another medium are one and the same thing. On the one hand, from the standpoint of objectifying reflection, the glasses are farther away from me, or rather, I have inserted a medium between myself and the glasses (a certain distance); on the other hand, from the standpoint of the phenomenon itself, the glasses are closer to me, or rather, the glasses’ originally transparent mediatic character has been removed.

Far and near are not determined by distance; on the contrary, “distance is discovered and measured by the activity of de-severance.”[45] “If the worldlessness imposed upon things causes them to shrink into two geometric points, then they will eventually lose the character of being far or near, and will possess only a distance. And distance itself is a quantity.”[46] We can grasp space through quantity, but space is by no means quantity.

The near and far of things are disclosed by media. We may reveal space through distance as quantity, for example “a thousand meters”; or through the anticipation of the proper time, for example “it’ll take a puff of a pipe”; or through the capacity of a tool, for example “bring a chair and it’ll be within reach”; or through referential relations to other things, for example “just over this wall” … In short, the accessibility of media determines the nearness, farness, and orientation of space. “The ‘ready-to-hand’ entity has always its varying nearness, which cannot be ascertained by measuring distance. This nearness is regulated by circumspective ‘calculative’ dealing and using. … The referential totality of equipment at hand in the surrounding world gives direction to each location, and each location determines itself from the totality of these locations as the position of this implement for such-and-such a thing.”[47]

“For example, glasses are, in terms of distance, so near that they are ‘on the bridge of the nose’; yet for the person wearing glasses, this implement in the surrounding world is far more distant than the picture on the wall opposite.”[48] “‘Near’ means: within the surrounding sphere of what circumspective concern initially deals with. Nearness is not determined by the thing called ‘I’ attached to the body, but by being concerned in-the-world; that is to say, by what first comes to hand in being-in-the-world. Therefore the spatiality of Dasein cannot be determined by listing the present-at-hand places where bodies happen to be located. Although when we speak of Dasein we also say that it occupies a place, this ‘occupying’ is in principle different from the being-at-a-place of a ready-to-hand entity at a location. Occupying a location must be understood as: going-far-away from what is ready-to-hand in the surrounding world and bringing it into the place disclosed in advance by circumspection. Dasein understands its ‘here’ from the ‘there’ of the surrounding world. … Dasein returns from this there to its here.”[49]

What is meant by “what first comes to hand” and “what first comes to sight” is roughly the “transparent” medium. This medium that is first ready-to-hand is, in the first place, the human body, and in the second place it also includes media that function as “extensions of the human body,” as if they were operating as part of the body. Human beings are not things of an entirely extensionless soul; they possess a certain spatiality. But this spatiality is also not a matter of clinging to the body as a boundary separating oneself from the world. Media, as ready-to-hand tools, are extensions of the body, or rather, are part of the body; human beings define their own situation through media, not through the body.

To say that Dasein is spatial means that Dasein is not a point of soul floating outside space. Spatiality also means that Dasein is always mediatic and cannot leap out of any medium to make direct contact with objects. — “Dasein is essentially spatial. Dasein cannot wander about in its own or in far and near surroundings; what it can always do is only alter the distances between things. Dasein has spatiality in the way of circumspective discovering of space, in such a manner that Dasein constantly de-severs, and thereby has something to do with the beings that come to presence in space in this way.”[50] “Can only alter the distances between things” means, in other words, that what humans can always do is only remove and insert media, acting upon beings through mediatic handling.

Ten

If Dasein is such a mediatic being, then what, precisely, is the meaning of this being’s existence? If, for any worldly thing whatsoever, its significance lies in the referential relation of what it is “for,” then what, exactly, is the “for” of Dasein? We ultimately understand things through the possibilities opened up for Dasein by things in their referential relations, but how is Dasein itself to be understood?

Although Dasein is something “essentially undisclosable,” this does not mean that there is absolutely no way to understand it. In simple terms, it is through phenomena such as Dasein’s “self-manifestation” and “self-reference.”

No medium is ever completely transparent. For example, when hammering a nail with a hammer, although the hammer does not become an object of scrutiny, it manifests itself to us through states such as its “heaviness” and “hardness.” We know that this “heaviness” does not come from the nail, nor from my arm; it is neither from outside nor from inside, but comes from the hammer itself as a medium. Thus, while we are dealing with the nail, the hammer continually manifests itself through the state of “heaviness.”

Then Dasein as this medium also “always, in one way or another, discloses itself in all dealings with the world.”[51] “One mode of being of Dasein (namely, disclosedness) should be able, ontologically, to furnish ‘news’ about Dasein itself as an entity”[52]. This mode of self-disclosure, or possibility of being, is what is called “disclosedness,” that is, “mood” — “Mood assails us. It comes neither from ‘outside’ nor from ‘inside,’ but rises from being-in-the-world itself as a way of being-in-the-world.”[53] “In disposedness Dasein has always already been brought before itself; it has always already found itself, not in the sense of perceiving itself in a cognitive way as standing before it, but as mooded self-disclosure.”[54] This is rather like a hammer disclosing itself through its “heaviness” (perhaps a more apt example would be a pair of photochromic sunglasses revealing themselves through the change in hue of the scene presented by them): the point is not a disclosure like that of placing a hammer before us and confronting it face to face, nor is it a hammer noticed in some rational reflection; rather, it shows itself precisely in ready-to-hand, non-objectifying operation. Heidegger says: “Disposedness also belongs to being-in-the-world itself. We have chosen this term in order to avoid from the outset understanding self-disclosure as any sort of reflection upon the self itself.”[55]

This self-disclosure is by no means insignificant, just as the hammer is precisely through its heaviness that it enters into connection with the nail and the arm. “It is disposedness that opens up the world to threatening, and so on. Only what is encountered in fear or in fearlessness can reveal the ready-to-hand in the surrounding world as threatening.”[56]

Some mood is a “possibility of being of Dasein,” a “state of disclosedness” of Dasein.[57] And this possibility has a double significance in the referential totality through which Dasein exists in the world: on the one hand, the presentation of “things” still requires the “affection” of disposedness, “so that one may ‘have a feeling for something’ and that which affects may show itself in the feeling”[58]—even the cognitive activity of “the purest theory” must go through mood (for example, a calm mood),[59] which is to say, mood is the first medium through which things are brought out. But on the other hand, mood, as a possibility of Dasein’s being, is also at the same time the destination toward which things ultimately point. As Malhall summarizes it: “The being of any given ready-to-hand entity is always already bound up with some work (actual or potential), which itself may be embedded in other, more complex work. But such a totality of references must ultimately be grounded in some referential relation that no longer has any further referential connections to other things—grounded in the ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ inherent in Dasein’s being. The readiness-to-hand of a hammer is ultimately for providing Dasein with shelter; the readiness-to-hand of a pen is ultimately for communicating with others. In other words, the mode of practical activity in which an entity is first encountered is, by its nature, a contributor to the mode of Dasein’s existence in the world—a contributor to concrete possibilities of existence.”^[60] That is to say, as the final orientation of the referential network, as the place of the ultimate “discharging of implications,” it is still Dasein’s possibility of existence. Here a certain phenomenon of “self-reference” appears: within the referential nexus implied by Dasein’s being-in-the-world, Dasein itself appears twice.

Eleven

This self-reference is what Heidegger calls Dasein’s “ahead-of-itself,” that temporal structure—“In its being, Dasein has always already gone ahead of itself. Dasein is always already ‘beyond itself,’ not in the sense of exerting itself toward some other entity that it is not, but as the being of a potentiality-for-being that relates to its own self; this essential structure of being ‘for…’ we grasp as the being of Dasein ahead of itself.”[61] Thus we discover that this unique entity, “whose essence lies rather in this, that in its being there lies the very being that it has to be.”[62] If Dasein is a medium, then what it reaches is still itself.

The being of Dasein not only refers toward things in the world, but also toward its own possible being, because in the solicitude (care) structure of referring toward things in the world, there is already precontained the possibility of Dasein itself as the ultimate point of reference. (“‘I can’ necessarily corresponds, in relation, to the comprehensibility of something.”[63]) Dasein reveals what it is by unfolding its own possibilities. Heidegger says: “Dasein has not only the possibility of dealing toward something; rather, insofar as Dasein exists, Dasein itself is nothing other than becoming possible. In terms of its being, this Dasein that I myself always am is defined thereby—for this being we may say: I am, that is to say, I can.”[64]

Anything whatsoever is understood within Dasein’s possibilities, yet not every possibility of Dasein is understood through certain things, through manipulation. The exception is “death,” that ultimate possibility, which is not connected with the handling of some things but corresponds to sheer “nothing.” And this absolute “nothing” is precisely the realm toward which Dasein will ultimately gain access; so long as Dasein exists, “Dasein is essentially in the middle of the way toward something; in care it moves toward the self it has not yet become.”[65] And only in death does Dasein become a completed whole and become accessible,

What Heidegger is talking about is not “mortality,” but death as an extreme possibility. Even if there were the possibility of “immortality,” so long as death hovers before me as a possibility, then “death is understood as a determination constitutive of Dasein’s being.”[66] It is not that I will certainly die in the future, but that at every moment I stand within the possibility of death; death, as the ultimate possibility, constitutes Dasein itself.

First of all, only “being-toward-death” guarantees Dasein’s wholeness. In a certain sense, Dasein is not the only medium that refers to itself. For instance, I build a tower by stacking stones; then the stones I have already stacked at some moment will serve as the stepping-stone for the next stone I place, that is, as a medium pointing toward a future possibility. So then, we ask: what is the possibility of the tower’s final completed state? If the aim of the tower’s construction is ultimately a one-hundred-meter-high pyramid, then before that state is completed, at every moment it is not yet a “complete tower,” but can only be called a “half-built tower,” a “one-third tower,” “a tower base,” and so on. But if we say that this tower can be piled up indefinitely until it collapses with a crash and ceases to exist. Then we can say that before its collapse, at every moment it is a “complete” tower: although it is always unfinished, it is always “complete” as well; it is a tower, or what we might call “a tower that keeps growing.”

Thus only in “being-toward-death” does Dasein become a complete “self,” rather than merely the sum of fragmented states of living.

At the same time, only this possibility of death belongs inalienably to oneself. “In everyday self-interpretation, Dasein is precisely seen as arising out of what it is always doing; Dasein interprets itself, talks about itself, and names itself out of these things; one is nothing other than what one is engaged in. In this everyday state of being intertwined with one another in the world, people can replace one another in a certain definite way, and within certain limits one person seems able to take over another’s Dasein.”[67] In fact, in the daily lives of most people, they have “handed over the projection of their own potentiality-for-being to the they (the ‘they’).”[68] And “Dasein’s ‘going-ahead’ toward death at every instant is nothing but Dasein’s reclaiming itself from the they through ‘choosing itself.’”[69]

Speaking of “the they,” this would in turn bring in Heidegger’s related discussions of “being-with,” “falling,” and so on. Dasein’s being-in-the-world not only always has to deal with things, but always with others as well; and this is precisely where the concepts of “dealing with” and “medium” ought to apply. But as a first tentative glimpse into Heidegger’s ontology of media, this article can be brought to a close here.

References

Heidegger:

Being and Time, trans. Chen Jiaying and Wang Qingjie, proofread by Xiong Wei, revised by Chen Jiaying, SDX Joint Publishing Company, third edition, 2006

An Introduction to the History of the Concept of Time, trans. Ou Dongming, Commercial Press, 2009

Phenomenology of Formal Indication: Selected Early Freiburg Writings of Heidegger, ed. and trans. Sun Zhouxing, Tongji University Press, 2004

Selected Works of Heidegger, ed. Sun Zhouxing, Shanghai SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2006

[U.S.] S•Malhall: Heidegger and Being and Time, trans. Qi Xiaosheng, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2007

[Canada] Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000

Wu Guosheng: Lectures on the Philosophy of Technology, China Renmin University Press, 2009

Zhang Xianglong: A Biography of Heidegger, Commercial Press, 2007

Abstract:

Heidegger’s philosophy of technology is not limited to his late thought; it was already established in his early ontology. This article aims, “through” Heidegger’s text, to present a possibility of philosophy of technology: treating Heidegger’s thought as a road or medium leading to somewhere. Rather than treating it as an already-given work to be analyzed, this approach better fits Heidegger’s own thought. I interpret Heidegger’s ontology as “media ontology.” Here “medium” does not refer to concrete media devices, but to the mediate character of “through.” The proper attitude for asking the question of being is phenomenological, and this attitude is precisely a way of reflecting on media as media. Phenomena are media’s self-disclosure; truth or falsehood in the vulgar sense must be grounded in phenomena, and reality is precisely non-objectivity. The approach that clings to objectifying contemplative methods in pursuit of “essence” is seduced by the inherent tendency of language and neglects worldly phenomena. Propositions are a derivative and special mode of interpretation; cognition is grounded in manipulation, and all manipulation itself is a kind of interpretation. Clinging to humans’ propositional activity reflects the definition that “man is a rational animal”; this dogma must be broken so that we return to human everydayness, and begin from the nearest entities, namely tools, in order to ask about being—that is, to understand the mediacy of media. The basic structure of Dasein’s existence is “being-in-the-world,” and the “in” is precisely mediate character,

[24] Being and Time, p. 80, pp. 68–69.

[25] Being and Time, p. 81, p. 69.

[26] Technics and Time, p. 214.

[27] Being and Time, p. 153, p. 132.

[28] Being and Time, p. 100, p. 85.

[29] Being and Time, p. 100, p. 85.

[30] Technics and Time, p. 226.

[31] Being and Time, p. 98, p. 84.

[32] Being and Time, p. 103, p. 88.

[33] Technics and Time, p. 256.

[34] Technics and Time, p. 276.

[35] Technics and Time, p. 270.

[36] Technics and Time, p. 261.

[37] Technics and Time, p. 257.

[38] Technics and Time, p. 263.

[39] Technics and Time, pp. 258–259.

[40] Technics and Time, p. 304.

[41] Technics and Time, p. 306.

[42] Technics and Time, p. 307.

[43] Being and Time, p. 103, p. 88.

[44] Being and Time, p. 122, p. 105.

[45] Being and Time, p. 123, p. 105.

[46] Technics and Time, p. 316.

[47] Being and Time, p. 119, p. 102.

[48] Being and Time, p. 124, p. 107.

[49] Being and Time, p. 125, p. 107.

[50] Being and Time, p. 126, p. 108.

[51] Technics and Time, p. 353.

[52] Being and Time, p. 213, p. 184

[53] Being and Time, pp. 159–160, p. 136

[54] Being and Time, p. 158, p. 135.

[55] Technics and Time, p. 354.

[56] Being and Time, p. 160, p. 137.

[57] Being and Time, see around pp. 212, p. 183.

[58] Being and Time, p. 169, p. 137

[59] Being and Time, see p. 161, p. 138

[60]
[U.S.] S•Malhall: Heidegger and Being and Time, trans. Qi Xiaosheng, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2007, pp. 50–51.

[61] Being and Time, p. 221, p. 192.

[62] Being and Time, p. 15, p. 12.

[63] Technics and Time, p. 416.

[64] Technics and Time, pp. 414–415.

[65] Technics and Time, p. 430.

[66] Technics and Time, p. 439.

[67] Technics and Time, p. 433.

[68] Being and Time, p. 223, p. 193.

[69] Technics and Time, p. 445.