The Spiegel Interview, Technology, and Nazism
In the context of the present inquiry, Heidegger's view of technology is important because of claims that it functions as a critique of National Socialism. Heidegger's conception of technology has received extensive attention.[1] The focus of the present discussion is not this conception as such, which has already been studied in the literature, but rather its relation to his Nazism. Yet it is not possible to analyze the connection between Heidegger's view of technology and his Nazism unless we understand his conception of technology. Accordingly, this chapter will need to devote substantial attention to an analysis of Heidegger's complex interpretation of technology.
The link between Heidegger's view of technology and Nazism is controversial. With a single exception, most observers consider Heidegger's view of technology as indicating his distance from National Socialism.[2] Heidegger himself calls attention to the relation of his theory of technology to Nazism in the well-known Spiegel interview. Heidegger's Spiegel interview is more significant than its designation as an interview suggests. It was not the result of a simple meeting with a journalist, but the product of careful planning, whose text was later worked over before publication. The interview records Heidegger's largely successful effort to influence the way in which his person and thought would be regarded after his death. Now the single most important theme of this interview consists in Heidegger's comments on the theme of technology which
emerges in his later thought. It is, then, useful to examine the text of his interview as an initial indication of the relation between his view of technology and his Nazism.
Heidegger's interview with Der Spiegel offers a simplified but not inaccurate access to his difficult theory of technology. In the course of the interview, Heidegger makes a series of points about technology, which are clearly related to his later thought:
1. His understanding of technology changed from the early idea of the confrontation between human being and planetary technology, in his lecture course on metaphysics, to the later idea of enframing (Gestell ).[3] Enframing is roughly a conception of horizon, as the limits within which something occurs. For Heidegger, the limit of modernity is technology.
2. The force of global technology as a factor in determining history can scarcely be overestimated.[4] This is a further form of the view, which emerges in Heidegger's later thought, that human being is powerless before Being.
3. At present, he is unconvinced that democracy is adequate as a political system in a technological age.[5] Heidegger here draws the political consequence of his later conception of Being as the real historical agent.
4. Human being is unable to master or to respond adequately to the essence of technology.[6] This idea is the corollary of the view that ultimate agency is lodged in Being.
5. The age of technology has brought forward a series of technological relationships in which man is uprooted from his tradition and his home.[7] Heidegger here returns to a form of his idea of authenticity, which he later develops in the direction of an authentic form of life.[8]
6. Metaphysical thinking, which ends in Nietzsche, is unable adequately to think technology.[9]
7. The essence of technology lies in the concept of enframing.[10] This is an indication of how Heidegger understands technology.
8. The situation of human being with respect to technology is not one of fate and it is possible to prepare for a reversal (Urnkehr ).[11] Heidegger holds out in this way the prospect of emerging from the hegemony of technology. This signals a residual role for thought beyond philosophy.
9. National Socialism was moving in the direction of reacting against technology although it fell short of the goal. [12] Heidegger
now disputes the view that Nazism was itself a simple manifestation of technology, or only that, since he insists that Nazism intended to react against the hegemony of modern technology.
10. We can prepare to counteract technology, although only a god can save us, through a new appropriation of the European tradition in which thinking transforms thinking.[13] This is a further formulation of Heidegger's conviction that after the death of God, which Nietzsche has announced, after the end of the old mythology, we require a new mythology.
There is a clear connection between Heidegger's Nazism and his approach to technology. Heidegger describes his theory of technology as an effort to go further down the road traveled by National Socialism, understood as an initial but intrinsically insufficient effort to come to grips with the problem of technology. [14] Numerous commentators have insisted on the role of technology in Nazism, in particular on the integral way in which it furthered Nazi genocide.[15] Heidegger takes a completely different, in fact opposite line. For Heidegger, National Socialism opposes the rule of technology; but in virtue of its supposed incapacity to think, Nazism is unable to break away from it.[16] Heidegger presents his own thought as an improvement on the "inadequate" effort of Nazi thinkers to face technology. In answer to a question raised during the interview, Heidegger states:
It seems to me that you are taking technology too absolutely. I do not see the situation of man in the world of global technology as a fate which cannot be escaped or unravelled. On the contrary, I see the task of thought to consist in helping man in general, within the limits allotted to thought, to achieve an adequate relationship to the essence of technology. National Socialism, to be sure, moved in this direction. But those people were far too limited in their thinking to acquire an explicit relationship to what is really happening today and has been underway for three centuries.[17]
Here, in his own way, Heidegger is signaling, as clearly as he can—candidly, and accurately—that his theory of technology is meant to carry out the ideas which the National Socialists were too limited to develop through a theory of technology with political consequences. What does it mean, in the era of technology, to achieve an adequate relationship to the essence of technology, an explicit relationship to what is happening today and has been under way for three centuries? One thing it means is to confront modernity. Now in the period after Being and Time , most explicitly in the Nietzsche lectures, Heidegger came to
understand his own thought of Being as confronting modernity, and the rule over beings, in the name of Being. Nazism, too, he tells us in this passage, made a similar attempt, although it fell short in its inability—which Heidegger criticizes in a variety of texts, such as the Nietzsche lectures and the Beiträge —to think Being authentically. Now part of the authentic thought of Being is authentic human being, or Dasein, as the vantage point from which to comprehend Being. Authentic human being is what Heidegger since the rectoral address has in view through the idea of the historical realization of the Germans as German. Although Heidegger has undertaken to deconstrust subjectivity in order to consider Being without Dasein, in another sense Dasein is still central to his thought in his concern with resistance to the loss of tradition and of the place to dwell.
If this is correct, we can anticipate that Heidegger's theory of technology, which he intends as a carrying out of the confrontation of technology which the Nazis were too crude to perform, continues to share the insistence on the authentic gathering of the Volk . Like his theory of Being, the theory of technology which derives from the theory of Being is intrinsically political, where politics is directed toward the authenticity of the Germans and, beyond the Germans, toward knowledge of Being. To miss this point, to understand his theory of technology merely as an analysis of technology, even more precisely as a scrutiny of the essence of technology, is simply to miss the central thrust of Heidegger's view.
I have brought together Heidegger's remarks on technology in his interview in the form of a connected argument. Taken together, these remarks yield an informal sketch of Heidegger's later understanding of technology as an all-encompassing, global phenomenon, beyond the control of human being, including the metaphysical form of thought said to end in Nietzsche; these comments further provide an insight into Heidegger's insistence that the spell of technology can be broken, or reversed, by a form of thought, such as Heidegger's, different from metaphysics, which goes further than National Socialism in order to reappropriate the Western tradition in a new way.
According to Heidegger, a reversal can only come about through a thorough rethinking of the Western tradition. He states that
it is my conviction that a reversal can be prepared only in the same place in the world where the modern technological world originated, and that it cannot happen because of any takeover by Zen-Buddhism or any other Eastern experiences of the world. There is need for a rethinking which is to be carried out with the help of the European tradition and of a new appropriation of that tradition. Thinking itself can be transformed only by a thinking which has the same origin and calling.[18]
The view of technology sketched in Heidegger's interview, and which only appears in Heidegger's later work, has an obvious connection to his preceding writings. Ideas that reappear now in this extension of his position include the concern with Being, the supposed incapacity of ordinary thought to comprehend the "situation," the claimed need to break with the metaphysical tradition which purportedly draws to a close with Nietzsche, the reference to fate, the alleged connection between nihilism and technology, and Heidegger's suggestion that he intends to carry further the effort begun, but not completed, by National Socialism. Since the roots of Heidegger's concept of technology lie deep within his earlier writings, we will need to consider its emergence within the position as a whole before we turn to its mature form. A grasp of Heidegger's understanding of technology will enable us to envisage its relation to his Nazism.