This article is a rewriting based on the earlier Heidegger’s Thinking on Technology. In fact, very little was changed, but after changing the title it suddenly became much more to the point and more complete. What I presented at this year’s Yangma Island conference was this very article, so before posting the conference record, let me post this article first.

 

 

Is Heidegger a Technological Pessimist?

Hu Yilin, Department of Philosophy, Peking University

 

Abstract:    Heidegger’s philosophy of technology is often described as a typical kind of pessimism. Starting from the question of whether Heidegger is in fact a technological pessimist, this article selectively expounds Heidegger’s analysis of modern technology. Heidegger does indeed believe that the human destiny dominated by modern technology is impossible to “overcome,” but this does not mean pessimism. Heidegger believes that seeking to “control” destiny or everything at all is precisely where the ailment of modern technology lies; the key is not to design and master the future, but to know how to prepare for the future and leave room for it. In this sense, Heidegger believes in, and points out, the path of salvation. Technology is a way of bringing things forth, of unconcealment, but the problem with modern technology is that its unconcealment leaves “no room to spare.” And the path of salvation—poetry, earth, art, and so on—means opening up space in the interstices and preparing for the arrival of a new age.

Keywords: Heidegger, technological pessimism, Gestell

 

As everyone knows, “technology” is a core concept in Heidegger’s later thought. Heidegger’s thinking on technology has had a major influence on the critique of modernity and on the development of postmodern currents, and it pointed the way for the “philosophy of technology” that rose in the second half of the twentieth century; Heidegger has even been retrospectively upheld as a model “philosopher of technology.”

Yet this typical image of Heidegger is often portrayed as that of a reactionary resister, a representative of pessimism or romanticism. In a recently published anthology on philosophy of technology, Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology is still described as “a source of many technological pessimisms”[1]. Whether supporters or critics of Heidegger’s view of technology, scholars mostly take Heidegger to be a representative figure of technological pessimism: he is said to have denied “the exaltation of human subjectivity”[2], to have ignored the “promotive function” of modern technology[3], and to be a “romanticist” afflicted with “nostalgia syndrome”[4].

These judgments are all correct on the surface, but to use Heidegger’s own words, they are “correct, but they miss the truth.” To pin these labels on Heidegger in a preemptive way is of no benefit at all to our understanding and explication of Heidegger’s philosophical thought.

If pessimism means holding that human theoretical design and social movements are both incapable of overcoming the destiny of modern technology, then Heidegger certainly is such a pessimist. But what if Heidegger does not think at all that the destiny of modern technology is something that needs to be “overcome”? What if, in his understanding, “destiny” is not “a forced misfortune” at all (《演》24[5])?

Control and Preparation

Heidegger himself clearly draws a line between himself and pessimism and romanticism. He says: “The essence of modern technology lies in enframing. Enframing belongs within the destining of unconcealment. These sentences differ from the often heard statement: technology is the fate of our age, by which ‘fate’ means the inevitable character of a happening that can no longer be altered. ” (《演》25)

We live in a technological age—this fact need not be discovered by philosophers. The key question is, what does this thing that dominates our age—modern technology—actually mean? Heidegger says: “What is truly uncanny is not that the world is becoming entirely technical. Far more uncanny is that man is wholly unprepared for this transformation of the world. We are still not capable of meditating on, of really thinking through, in a matter-of-fact way, what is truly coming to presence in this age.” (《选》1238)

When people seem to be “fully prepared” for every single thing, they are precisely forgetting the “world” and losing the capacity to prepare for the changes of an age.

And what so-called pessimists emphasize is not this capacity for “preparation,” but the capacity for “control.” Modern people hope to control their own destiny, to control the development of technology, and to dominate the changes of the world. Thus those who proclaim that human beings do not have this sort of control are classified as pessimists. But is not this human fixation on control, or this obsession with power, along with its self-righteous arrogance, precisely one of the “symptoms” of modernity?

The reason Heidegger uttered that line, “Only a god can save us,” is that a reporter from 明报 kept hoping to obtain from him “help” for “reform and revolution” (《选》1310). Heidegger said: “Philosophy will be unable to bring about any direct change in the present condition of the world. Not only philosophy, but all human thought and endeavor cannot do it. Only a god can save us. The only possibility left for us is to prepare, in thinking and in poetry, for the appearing of a god or for the absence of a god in decline…” (《选》1306)

Is this a “pessimistic” statement? What is truly heartbreaking is not precisely the situation in which “philosophy has been replaced by cybernetics” (《选》1308), and science has been reduced to a mere tool for transforming the world? And if what is most terrifying is that human beings are wholly unprepared for the transformation of the world, then Heidegger’s saying that the activity of thinking and poetry can allow us to prepare ourselves anew—isn’t that rather optimistic?

Then what, in this age, is truly coming to presence? How can we possibly prepare ourselves? Heidegger ultimately turns to poetry and art; does this mean a romanticism that flees reality? We need to revisit Heidegger’s thinking on “technology,” first clarifying where, exactly, the ailment of modern technology lies.

Technology and Truth

In everyday usage, technology is understood as a means oriented toward ends and as a kind of human action. Heidegger does not deny these understandings. Although these explanations are correct, if one is satisfied with them, one will miss the essence of technology. Starting from the everyday understanding of technology, Heidegger presses the question further:

Since technology is a means used by human beings to achieve ends, this reveals a causal connection: “human being—(through)—technology—(realizes)—end.” The “end” is always the “result” of some technical activity, but what is the “cause”? In the structure above, the “human being” on the other end, the one handling the technology, is the “cause,” then? But Heidegger points out that this is one-sided. In Aristotle, the understanding of “cause” was far richer than it is today; in addition to the “efficient cause,” it also included the “material cause,” the “formal cause,” and the “final cause.” “These four causes are modes of responsibility (Verschulden[6]) that are closely bound together” (《演》7); together they are “responsible” for the coming-forth of a thing.

For example, the production of a silver dish is indebted to the silver as material, to the “look” as form, and to the “determiner” as end[7] (which can be understood as the final use to which the finished product is put). There is also another cause, namely the silversmith, usually taken to be the “efficient cause.” But Heidegger says: “The silversmith is not the efficient cause” (《演》7)[8], because “the silversmith does not produce an effect on the finished silver dish as a result of making it.”

“The silversmith considers and gathers[9] the above-mentioned three modes of occasioning (of bearing the burden).” In Heidegger’s view, “considering” means “letting… emerge.” The silversmith gathers together the silver as material, the dish’s appearance, and its use in sacrifice, thereby “bringing forth” the “thing” that is the silver dish. The difference between artifacts and natural things is that artifacts are brought forth by human beings, whereas natural things bring themselves forth, emerging spontaneously.

After this line of inquiry: technology as a means oriented toward ends is the bringing-forth of causes in order to realize an effect. In view of the fact that the result of “bringing-forth” is the state of things as “already-there and on-hand,” and “already-there and on-hand mark the presence of a present-at-hand being” (《演》8), causality becomes the “mode of coming-into-presence” of things. Thus “bringing-forth” also means “bringing out of concealment (absence) into unconcealment (into the open realm)” (《演》10)[10]

“Thus seen,” Heidegger says, “technology is therefore not merely a means. Technology is a way of unconcealment.” (《演》10) Technology appears where unconcealment and concealment are taking place, where [unconcealment] and truth are taking place (《演》12)

Here, how are the questions of “gathering” and “coming-into-presence” related to the question of “truth,” or unconcealment? Because the concept of “unconcealment” has always been a focal point for Heidegger, it is not developed in detail in “The Question Concerning Technology.” But if we pass over the question of truth, we will not be able to understand Heidegger’s interpretation of technology, and it will even be difficult to understand Heidegger’s characterization of the essence of modern technology. Therefore it is necessary for us to go back and take a look at Heidegger’s discussion of truth.

From his early philosophy onward, Heidegger consistently linked “truth” with “unconcealment,” emphasizing that truth is not some ready-made set of propositions, but an activity of revealing and disclosing (of course, in his later thought the concept of “truth” itself is also attenuated). Still, there is indeed a difference in emphasis between the early and the later Heidegger. The early Heidegger focuses on “equipment,” whereas the later Heidegger speaks more about “things” and works of art; the early Heidegger prefers to say “directing indications,” whereas the later Heidegger more often says “gathering”; the early Heidegger seeks the authentic state of Dasein that allows truth to appear, whereas in the later philosophy what allows truth to appear is the so-called “clearing in the woods” (Lichtung, or rather “clearing”[11]). These changes in terminology do not mean that Heidegger underwent any major philosophical betrayal; in essence, the referential nexus of equipment and the fourfold gathering of things are one and the same matter, and authentic state and clearing in the woods are likewise similar pursuits. It is just that the mode of expression in the later period tries more thoroughly to rid itself of the diction of traditional foundationalist and anthropocentric metaphysics. The directing indications of equipment still, after all, suggest a line extending outward from the human being as center, whereas gathering need not take the human being as its center—“human beings” are still an inseparable part of the world, but more as participants, having relinquished the central position that the early philosophy still retained after all.

For phenomenologists, truth is the presentation of things as they are. But how is such presentation possible? In fact, any presentation is mediating, or rather situational, that is, it is always “presentation through…” and “presentation within…”

When Heidegger interprets Plato’s “allegory of the cave,” he points out: “As Plato expressly says, the visible and the seeing are thereby necessarily yoked together under the same yoke. The yoke that first makes possible the mutual opposition of the two is the brightness, the light.” (《真》97) The meaning of “light” is of course symbolic. Heidegger points out that the word “light” derives from “loud,” and its characteristic lies in “penetration”—“light is not merely the penetrative, but penetration itself” (《真》54)

Beings are those present-at-hand beings standing there in the bright open, whereas the being of beings is not those present beings, but the appearing of beings, that by which we are able to penetrate the chaotic dense forest and gain access to things. “Truth is not something that is first and in advance there somewhere in a self-sufficient state and then places itself somewhere into beings. This is absolutely impossible, because it is the openness of beings that first provides the possibility of a somewhere and the possibility of a place filled with present beings. The clearing of openness and the setting-up within openness belong together. They are the same essence in which truth happens. The happening of truth is historical in its many and varied ways.” (《林》48-49)

That is to say, to seek truth also means to clear such an open field, so as to bring things forth into presence. This is exactly what was said earlier to be the essence of technology.

Then is truth merely the moving of some being that was originally standing somewhere all by itself onto a newly opened clearing? Of course not. Since it is precisely this clearing that makes it possible for beings to be disclosed, then before beings enter the site, where are we to bring them out from? The only answer can be: from the boundary between clearing and thicket, from the gap between clearing and concealment, to bring things in.

But once certain beings have been gathered onto the clearing and set up there, the clearing is no longer the original clearing. The disclosed standers take possession of the original clearing and become new veils, awaiting the next round of clearing. “This means that the open place among beings, that is, the clearing, is by no means an eternally opened stage on which beings may perform their little drama. On the contrary, the clearing occurs only as this double concealment. The unconcealment of beings is never a merely present-at-hand state, but a becoming-happenning (Geschehnis, or perhaps ‘event’).” (《林》40)

Therefore Heidegger says: “The essence of truth is the original strife (the conflict between clearing and concealment), and the open center is won in this original strife” (《林》41)

Light and shadow, clearing and concealment, heaven and earth (openness and closure) are always in struggle, and when either side overwhelms the other, human beings fall into confusion. Complete light and complete darkness are equally blinding. Moreover, excessive brightness can make one dizzy, causing one to close one’s eyes and not look, or to look without seeing. By contrast, concealment “can give what exists in possibility, darkness refuses visibility, and yet it can also preserve sight: in darkness we see the stars.” (《真》55)

Gestell and Interstices

Since the essence of truth is the “strife” of light and shadow, technology, as the happening of truth, carries this struggle within it. Every technology is both a kind of unconcealment and a kind of concealment; while technology illuminates some things, it always lets others slip into obscurity.

The question then is, what is different about modern technology? Is it not also a mode in which truth happens? A gathering and a clearing?

Indeed it is. Modern technology “is also a way of unconcealment.” (《演》12) Just as the shadows seen by the prisoners in Plato’s cave are also “unconcealment” for them, this does not mean that people therefore need not be liberated from their bondage. “Unconcealment has levels and gradations; ‘truth’ and ‘the true’ are not things that are universally available, fixed and unchanging in every perspective, for everyone in every case; it is not that any truth whatsoever belongs to anyone with the same rights and the same capacities without question. Every truth has its own time.” (《真》32)

“Truth is neither something ready-made and beyond man in every circumstance, nor something subjective and psychological in man. Rather, man is ‘in’ truth.” (《真》73) Thus, to seek truth is to reflect on one’s own situation. Through ceaseless reflection on our situation, we may be liberated from the initial truth and gain insight into a higher truth. This higher truth is not a negation of the lower truth, but a grasp of its conditionality. For example, the prisoner who breaks free of his chains and sees candlelight, by taking the images once seen on the wall as shadows, comes to understand the conditions under which those images could appear, and then further understands the conditions of the conditions that make shadows possible. This is more likely a repeated affirmation of the most elementary truth.

Heidegger also has no intention of denying the unconcealing power of modern technology; he does not deny that modern people, within the “cave” built by technology, have precise, reliable, and genuine knowledge of the things appearing on the canvas opened up by technology.

It is precisely because these nearest truths are so clear and reliable that this becomes the danger. Like Plato’s prisoners, modern people simply do not want to shift their gaze away from that “which can be handled without pain, without forming obstacles, without bringing frustration, without producing confusion” and “which they can cope with” (《真》35).

Modern technology is not the whole of the happening of truth; “science is nothing more than an extension of an already open realm of truth, and it extends that realm by grasping and proving the correct things that appear within it as possible and necessary.” (《林》49)

And how is this realm of truth opened up?—“Enframing governs and dominates modern technology through and through. But in this dominion, … the reigning unconcealment is a challenging-forth. This challenging-forth puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such.” (《演》12) “We name that challenging claim which gathers man together and orders him to order the self-revealing as standing-reserve, ‘Gestell.’” (《演》18)

What is the difference between “challenging-forth” and “gathering,” between “ordering” and “bringing-forth,” between “demand” and “summons”?

The key is not things like humans’ destruction of the environment—ancient peoples also destroyed the environment; nor is it even simply the amount of interception and storage—dams intercept and store river water, but ancient peoples long ago already used canals and even artificial lakes to store river water. The key is not how great technology’s power of control is, but how much “room to spare” there is, how much “space for maneuver” there is in the interval between light and dark.

In Heidegger’s view, modernity has entered “the age of the world picture,” in which all things are presented as a flattened image, placed before us without reservation: “‘We know our way around something’ means not only that beings are in general placed before us, but also that beings—in all that they contain and in all that coexists within them—stand before us as a system. The phrase ‘in the picture’ has the sense of ‘having understood something, being prepared, having made preparations for something.’ Where the world becomes picture, beings as a whole are determined as that for which man has made preparations…” (《林》91)

But why did we say at the outset that the danger of this age lies in people losing the capacity for “preparation”? Because what we are prepared for is nothing more than the static world picture, the things presented under the specific unconcealment of modern technology. So we are like the prisoners in the cave, “stubbornly turned toward what is conveniently accessible,” while “turning away from the mysterious” (《选》230). We are only willing to face things for which we are already prepared, and thus we lose the capacity to understand and respond to change.

The difference between “bringing-forth” and “ordering” is that the former merely calls other things forth at the border between light and shadow, in the ambiguous and mysterious place, calling forth their gift (and thereby becoming indebted to them); whereas the latter, like a slaveowner, orders slaves to hand over what has been demanded in advance—and what is brought as tribute will never exceed the preset design. The slaveowner never wants to see anything unexpected in the tribute; everything has already been prepared, with no pain and no confusion. Of course, the real slaveowner may not be any human being at all, but modern technology, which lies beyond human control.

Because things in the technological world are all gathered together through pre-ordered demands, they lose their ambiguous boundaries. They lose distance, and thus also lose true intimacy. The image of things is grasped so clearly that there is no room for any ambiguous “interstice.” Things no longer open toward one another or point toward one another; instead, they are all placed into a total, single framework. The waterwheel merely carried flowing water to the millstone; the millstone gathered wheat and flour, linking field and table… but the dam intercepts the whole river without reservation, and all the water flow is revealed without reservation as joules—the meaning of things has been set from the very beginning.

The reason all things in the modern world appear as ordered products and no longer seem ambiguous is not that we have really eliminated their respective “interstices,” but only that we rely on only one medium to disclose things, namely modern technology, which turns the world into images. Heidegger sighs: “Everything is being driven into this homogeneous state of being without distance, everything is being mixed together, so what? Is it not more terrifying to push everything into a state of being without distance than to make everything fragmented and shattered?” (《演》173)

Destiny and Salvation

Of course, no matter how overwhelming this world picture may be, just like the prisoners in the cave, we may ultimately be liberated. So how is freedom possible? By carrying out a new social policy? By launching a political revolution?

We already know Heidegger’s position: “If the essence of technology, enframing as the danger in Being, is Being itself, then technology can never be controlled by a merely human action that relies on itself alone, whether positively or negatively. Technology, whose essence is Being itself, cannot be overcome by human beings. If it could, that would mean human beings were the masters of Being.” (《同》110)

Only those who are blindly arrogant, sunk deep in the logic of technology, would dare to covet mastery over everything; but for Heidegger, “technology cannot be overcome artificially,” and will only be “endured (passed through),” “yet an endurance of the destiny of Being always occurs in step with the arrival of another destiny, and this other destiny can neither be precomputed by logical-historical means nor fabricated as a sequence of historical processes by metaphysical means.” (《同》111)

That is to say, the desire to overcome modern technology comes precisely from the coercion of modern technology itself—insisting on ordering everything in advance, calculating everything in advance, making everything without any room for maneuver, without room to spare—“all at a glance.”

Then, once we have recognized our own situation, we will fundamentally change the direction of questioning—not how to control destiny, but how to understand and follow destiny.

We mentioned that Heidegger does not take destiny to mean “the inevitable character of some unalterable event”; destiny is not an event or a string of events, but the historical situation into which we are thrown, the limits within which we must find ourselves. Heidegger says that “the projective forethrow of genuinely poetic creation is the opening up of that into which historical Dasein has already been thrown. That into which it is thrown is the earth. For a historical people it is his earth, the self-closing ground” (《林》63)—note that Heidegger’s “earth” does not simply refer to some pastoral or rural life, but more to our historical situation, that is, necessity (in the Platonic sense) or limitation. And the opening up of “earth” of course does not mean jumping out of our historical situation and returning to a rural age; it means precisely confronting and bearing our historical situation.

To acknowledge limitation also means to recognize the dimension of possibility. A dimension is also always a “limit,” and vice versa. Heidegger believes that the task of thinking lies in “being able, within its limits, to help establish a sufficient relation between human beings and the essence of technology.” (《选》1311) To undertake this task, one must first acknowledge the finitude of thinking, rather than endlessly expanding its promises. We must, within our own limitations, within the limits that the destiny of our age can allow, seek the “ground of the future”—“what we seek with this question may be very near at hand; it is so near that we overlook it.” (《选》1238)

The modes of action Heidegger points out to us as potentially effective are “letting beings be” and “open receptivity to mystery.”

“Letting be” refers to such an “attitude that says both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to the technological world”—“we can use technical objects, yet at the same time as all practical use, preserve a position independent of technical objects. We can always detach ourselves from them.” (《选》1239）

And “open receptivity to mystery” refers to the attitude by which we remain open to the meaning concealed within the technological world (《选》1239).

Both of these attitudes are in some sense attitudes of “letting go,” but neither of them means laissez-faire in the sense of simply turning away and not looking; rather, they are attempts to keep a distance from things in order to contemplate them more truly and more intimately.

After all, the flattening of the world, the removal of mystery, the filling-in of interstices—these too are just wishful notions of people under the logic of technology. If one can exercise some restraint and consciously and gradually open one’s field of vision, then it may become possible to open up new spaces of meaning.

Of course, the attitude of letting-be or open receptivity to mystery is not something one can simply have just because one wishes to have it. How, then, can this attitude be discovered and cultivated? Heidegger turns his gaze toward “art.”

Why is art so important? We have already said that the danger of modernity lies precisely in modern science’s flattening of the world “without room to spare,” and in modern technology’s prior ordering and fabrication of all things, in the filling of “interstices” and the loss of maneuvering space. Art is precisely an activity of “leaving room to spare” or “setting up space.”

Heidegger says: “Because a work is a work, it sets up space for that spaciousness. ‘Setting up space for’ means here especially: opening up the free expanse of openness and setting up this freedom in its structure. This setting-up derives from the erection spoken of above. The work as work establishes a world.” (《林》31)

Of course, any implement, and even any thing, will leave some room to spare. That is to say, apart from appearing as “usefulness,” there remains something else in them. For example, their material, their maker, their appearance, and so on—these things that gather toward the implement still appear within the implement and draw forth an entire world of referential relations. But the more useful an implement is, the more hidden these grounds accompanying it become—“Stone is used to make implements, for instance to make a stone axe. The stone then disappears into usefulness. The better and more suitable the material, the more unresistingly it disappears into the utensility of the implement.” By contrast, the work of art “does the opposite: because the temple-work establishes a world, it does not let the material disappear; rather, it first causes the material to appear, and causes it to appear in the open realm of the world of the work: rock can bear and sustain, and thus only then is it rock…” (《林》32)

Because things are always measured by their usefulness, whereas works of art are born precisely where usefulness breaks off. Because as a work of art, a work of art is precisely meant to stand out, to astonish and draw attention. “The more handy a piece of equipment is, the less conspicuous its ‘how’ becomes, and the more uniquely it remains within its equipmental being. As a rule, in every present-at-hand thing we can discover the fact that it exists; but even noticing this is quickly forgotten again in the habitual way. Still, what is more ordinary than the being of a being? By contrast, in the work, that it exists as such a work is an extraordinary thing…. The more this impulse enters essentially into the open region, the more unexpected, the more solitary the work becomes.” (《林》53)

McLuhan has a proposition to the effect that new media will turn old media into works of art. We can understand this more easily now. Because the emergence of new media reduces or eliminates the usefulness of old media, and once the transparency of a medium is obstructed, people’s gaze may linger more on that medium itself, and only then do they discover its mediativity.

An art often arises in precisely such an obstructed mediating field. For example, Chinese characters cannot reach sounds as directly as alphabetic scripts do; thus, in the interval between using brush and paper to express sentences, a greater gap appears, and calligraphic art is precisely what opens its space of meaning in that gap. This space has its own rules of play and no longer takes the transmission of sentences as the sole measure. The meaning of poetry is similar: poetic language does not directly and precisely indicate things, but its true meaning does not lie in arousing feeling and emotion either; rather, it lies in the fact that poetry can open new spaces of meaning in the ambiguity of words.

What is called the attitude of letting-be has a similar significance: that is to say, I could originally have completed these things with the nearby tools without any obstruction, but I intentionally do not let myself depend on them too much, so that I only summon them when I occasionally need them.

Is Heidegger a technological pessimist? The answer to this question is not important in itself. In any case, Heidegger points out a path of salvation to us. And for Heidegger, the so-called paths of salvation—poetry, earth, art, and so on—are neither some pastoral fantasy of fleeing reality nor some unruly romantic sentiment; they are indeed a way of dealing with the predicament of modern technology. It is just that this way of dealing does not seek to overcome or defeat, but to endure and pass through; it does not seek to provide a blueprint for a new age, but to open up space for the arrival of a new age.

References:

Craig Hanks (ed.), Technology and Values: Essential Readings. John Wiley and Sons, 2010.

Yaron Ezrahi, Everett Mendelsohn (ed.), Technology, pessimism, and postmodernism, Univ of Massachusetts Press, 1995.

Martin Heidegger，The Question Concerning Technology – and Other Essays ;Translated and with an Introduction by William Lovitt, Garland Publishing, 1977.

《林》：《林中路》，孙周兴 译，上海译文出版社2004年。

《同》：《同一与差异》，孙周兴 译，商务印书馆2011年。

《选》：《海德格尔选集》，孙周兴 译，上海三联书店1996年。

《演》：《演讲及论文集》，孙周兴 译，三联书店2001年。

《语》：《在通向语言的途中》，孙周兴 译，商务印书馆2004年。

《真》：《论真理的本质》，赵卫国 译，华夏出版社2008年。

 

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.

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