Influences on Heidegger's View of Technology
Heidegger's pessimistic assessment of technology echoes a disillusionment about technological advances widely felt by others as well.[36] A deep unease about the relation between technology and philosophy surfaced early in the nineteenth century, in the wake of Hegel's system. In the middle of the century (1857), in a well-known study of Hegel, Haym complained that the time for system was past since the very bases of physical and spiritual life were in the process of being transformed by the triumph of technology.
Hegel's system and its hegemony was after the brilliant period of our classical poetry the last great and universal manifestation on the purely spiritual plane which our fatherland has produced. Nothing like that has occurred since that time. In fact, much to the contrary. We find ourselves for the moment in a great and almost universal shipwreck of the spiritual and of belief in spirit in general. Let us look at the most recent facts of naked truth! An unprecedented and simply decisive change has taken place. This is no longer a time for system, no longer a time for poetry or philosophy. This is instead a time in which, thanks to the great technical discoveries of this century, matter seems to have come alive. The most basic underpinnings of our physical and our spiritual life are being ripped apart and transformed by this triumph of technology [Technik].[37]
Nor was the distrust of technology confined merely to nineteenth-century thinkers. In 1931, toward the close of the Weimar Republic, Jaspers, who typically insisted on the importance of science, spoke for many others in evoking the threats posed by technology and the machine, as well as tensions between technical organization and existence.[38]
The breadth of Heidegger's reading means that his conception of technology could have been influenced by any number of writers. Here, it will suffice to mention merely Nietzsche, Jünger, and Spengler. Heidegger's interest in Nietzsche precedes, in fact necessarily precedes, Heidegger's theory of technology, which presupposes his reading of Nietzsche's view of nihilism. There is a natural progression in Heidegger's thought from his attraction to Nietzsche's idea that God is dead, to the nihilism it supposedly signifies, and the relation of nihilism to technology. Between the rectoral address, where he stressed the nihilistic implications of the alleged death of God, and the final series of lectures on Nietzsche, Heidegger's understanding of nihilism changed radically. The relative optimism present when he became rector was later transformed into a bleak pessimism about the possibility of surpassing what Heidegger, in the rectoral address, describes as "the forsakenness of modern man in the midst of what is."[39]
A darker understanding of nihilism emerged during Heidegger's lectures on Nietzche. Heidegger's theory of technology relates the technological phenomenon to nihilism. If the decisive step is the connection between nihilism and technology, it is not surprising that Heidegger only worked out his theory of technology when he possessed his reading of nihilism.
When Heidegger staked his claim to the hegemony of Nazism, he thought that in order to rescue modern man it would be sufficient to resurrect the authentic Greek idea of science in the ontological form of his fundamental ontology. At the time, he believed there was a single common solution to rescue modern man and to defend the university from the encroachment of, or the threat posed by, the so-called "Christian-theological interpretation of the world and the mathematical-technological thinking of the modern age."[40] Several years later, at the close of the Nietzsche lectures, Heidegger no longer thought that it was possible to cast off nihilism with ease, if at all. Heidegger turns toward technology to formulate an aspect of his increasingly pessimistic reading of the pervasive and persistent nature of nihilism that surrounds us.
In an important passage at the close of the Nietzsche lectures series, Heidegger points briefly to his understanding of the connection between nihilism and modern technology. For Heidegger, the mythical event of the withdrawal of Being results in the ongoing nihilism perceived only by Nietzsche. Heidegger diagnoses the result of nihilism within the tradi-
tional binary framework of theory and practice. On the theoretical level, there is a decline of the thought of Being manifest in what passes for metaphysics and in the theory of the worldview. On the practical level, there is a disappearance of the distinction between Being as such and beings manifest in the concern to rule over beings. For Heidegger, technology can be understood as the extension of the rule of human beings over beings, which occurs in the space created by the turn away from Being. He insists that with the completion of metaphysics and the decline of the thought of Being, technology flourishes as never before. "This is the basis of the fact that complete, unlimited, undisturbed and confused hegemony over being [Seiende] can develop only with the beginning of the fulfillment of metaphysics."[41]
Ernst Jünger's influence on Heidegger's conception of technology, which has been studied in the secondary literature,[42] is visible in a number of Heidegger's texts. We have already noted more than once that in his discussion of the rectorate Heidegger invokes Jünger as a mediator in order to understand the past and present in terms of Nietzsche's metaphysics.[43] Heidegger confirms this point in his article "Zur Seinsfrage"—originally intended as a contribution to a festschrift for Jünger on his sixtieth birthday—where further he credits Jünger with a description of European nihilism in the period after the First World War.[44] Heidegger specifically acknowledges the debt of his own thought on technology to Jüger's success, not in describing an already known phenomenon, but in making available "a new reality."[45]
Jünger described the so-called new reality in his book, The Worker: Hegemony and Form (Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt ).[46] This book was originally published in 1932, several months before the National Socialists seized power in the beginning of 1933. In the foreword to the first edition, Jünger describes his intention, in quasi-phenomenological terms, as an effort to describe the form of the worker, beyond party perspectives and beyond theory. Jünger perceived a new reality, in which the worker actively determined history and a changed world.[47] In the foreword to the second edition, more than thirty years later, looking backward, Jünger described his work as an effort to find a way to understand the present at a moment when the forces of change have clearly signaled the advent of a new period.[48] He further insisted that if the main actors had acted according to the principles he sketched, much could have been avoided, even the use of armed force.[49]
Jünger's book reads like a kind of mad Spinozism in which determinism is freedom and the worker is free in submitting to a centrally organized dictatorship. The work is written in a tedious style and is certainly tedious to read. It mainly consists of a series of statements which, since they rarely develop to the stage of argumentation, are difficult to summa-
rize. Jünger develops his idea of the worker in opposition to bourgeois liberalism and, to a lesser degree, to Marxism.[50] Jünger's principal theme is the overwhelming importance of the worker as the key to a new form of society. He describes the Führer as the first soldier or first worker, and he further suggests that the contract is to be replaced by an organization along the lines of an army.[51] Accepting an organic theory of the state, popular among conservative thinkers, Jünger maintains that rule and service are one and the same.[52] Glorifying the importance of the worker, he asserts that the rise of the worker signifies the rise of the new Germany.[53] For Jünger, the possibility of reaching a deeper, richer, more fruitful world lies in an awareness of the superiority of the worker over the citizen (Bürger ).[54] On his view, the task of the worker is to show a total engagement (die totale Mobilmachung ), which is the will to submit to total dictatorship.[55] Jünger further stresses the emphasis on obedience in his claim that the demand for freedom is at the same time a demand for work.[56]
Jünger's book is intellectually very weak, difficult to take seriously, worthy of consideration here only because of its impact on Heidegger. It is hard to imagine that a thinker of any importance, much less someone often classified as one of the great thinkers of our time, could be influenced by the work of an intrinsically insignificant writer such as Jünger, much less form a group to devote considerable time to the study of his "thought." Heidegger is generous in crediting Jünger's influence on his own theory, although Heidegger appears to owe more inspiration than insight to Jünger's work.
The article Heidegger contributed to Jünger's festschrift is an occasion to rethink some aspects of his view of Being in reference to Jünger's writings. In his article, Heidegger concentrates his attention on Jünger's understanding of nihilism in relation to work (Arbeit ). Heidegger simply denies that we emerge from nihilism when we become aware of it.[57] For Heidegger, the fulfillment of nihilism is not its end, but rather its beginning.[58] Heidegger assimilates Jünger's problem to his own by comparing the work in which the form of the worker receives its meaning to the Being of beings.[59] We are meant to understand Jünger's view of technology as following from the mobilization of the world through the form of the worker—which Heidegger further reads as offering insight into the newly emerging metaphysics of the will to power—as basically connected to the problem of Being. Heidegger further links the question of how one emerges from nihilism with the question of how one knows Being. He suggests that the overcoming of metaphysics lies in getting over, or in recovering from (Verwindung ), it, roughly in turning one's back on the problem;[60] and he equates this result with the healing of the forgetfulness of Being (Seinsvergessenheit ).[61]
The third influence on Heidegger's comprehension of technology is Oswald Spengler. Heidegger's interest in Spengler, which has not often been studied in detail, is significant in the genesis of his thought.[62] Heidegger lectured on Spengler as early as 1920.[63] His repeated references to Spengler in his early lecture courses in Freiburg have been interpreted as one of the factors impelling Heidegger to transform his interest in individual authenticity in Being and Time to the authenticity of the Volk in his turn toward Nazism.[64] Spengler's concern with technology, already apparent in his well-known account of the decline of the West, is more sharply focused in his study of the connection between human being and technology.[65]
Heidegger's concern with Spengler can in part be attributed to a shared pessimism widely felt in German circles at the end of the First World War, just prior to the onset of the Weimar Republic. We have already noted that Spenglerian themes resonate throughout the rectoral address.[66] Such themes include the concern that Germany become the subject of history, the claim to understand the present and to foresee the future, the conception of the present as fraught with danger, German destiny as decisive for world history, and so on. Spengler's influence is equally obvious in Heidegger's theory of technology. A short list of themes concerning technology which Heidegger shares with Spengler would include at least the following: the relation between technology and the destiny of human being; the link between technology, culture, and history; the analysis of technology in terms of the concept of the instrument; the idea of struggle, including technological struggle, as ennobling; care as future-directed; the conviction that we have now arrived at a historical turning point, within which technology is a main component; and a condemnation of our enslavement by machines and technology. With respect to technology, the main difference between Heidegger and Spengler lies in Heidegger's resolutely antianthropological perspective, the result of his insistence on the question of Being and later move away from Dasein. For this reason, Heidegger declines to follow Spengler's generally anthropological perspective, apparent in Spengler's concern to study technology and the decline of the West in general in terms of the historical origins of man.[67]
Consideration of the influences on the formation of Heidegger's understanding of technology yields three results. First, here and elsewhere in his position Heidegger borrows, and, if necessary, rethinks, ideas that were in the air at the time. This in turn suggests the usefulness of knowledge of the immediate intellectual context for an understanding of Heidegger's thought. Second, it has been noted that Heidegger's view of technology emerges as a result of his long discussion of Nietzsche's view of nihilism. Third, we see that his understanding of technology is derived
from—or inscribed, so to speak, within—the framework of his pursuit of the question of Being. Technology is not a phenomenon Heidegger studies for itself, because of his concern with technological problems, or through an interest in the ongoing discussion concerning them. For Heidegger is never interested in technology as such, and always interested in it only against the background of his obsessive concern with Being.