Abstract
Marc Van den Bosche suggests that Heidegger’s conceptions of Gestell and Gelassenheit, taken together with his analysis of Nietzschean Nihilism (interpreted especially by Wolfgang Schirmacher), depicts our era in a way that “supplements” Andrew Feenberg and Don Ihde’s work. Weaving these sources together, he sees the possibility of our becoming (quoting Schirmacher) “technicians” that “live, in a released way, within the groundless.” Here, I raise some questions about whether the author has really fitted all these sources together and argue that his idea of becoming post-modern “technicians” appears to require that we first practice a very un-Heideggerian kind of “renunciation.”
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Notes
Citations for the German volume of his collected works (Gesamtausgabe), hereafter, GA, with volume and pagination, followed by the English translation. Thus here, GA 7/Question Concerning Technology.
Ihde (2010), 119, author’s emphasis. As evidence of Heidegger’s being overly influenced by the older, messier, machine technology, Ihde cites Gelassenheit’s characterization of Dasein as “encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technical apparatuses and automatic devices…[that] enchain, drag along, press and impose upon man under the Gestalt of technological installations and arrangements…[and] have moved along since beyond his will and have outgrown his capacity for decision” (GA 16, 524/Discourse on Thinking, 51; mistakenly cited, Vorträge und Aufsätze). Our computer-driven age is certainly not “beyond” such descriptions. Here Ihde suffers from a problem shared by many who want to be “concrete” and up-to-date about technology. The pull of the “empirical” short-circuits any real critique of ontological orthodoxy.
Ihde (2006), 277–80. His usual argument is that a postphenomenologist “begins with what is familiar, but then begins to move beyond that into more radical variational possibility,” and in this pluralizing process loses the impetus to lay down absolute ethical and political claims or develop a philosophical program (289).
GA 14, 75/ “The end of philosophy,” 437, my emphasis.
Schirmacher asserts that “we must, as the Buddhist saints exemplify,…enter naked, powerless, and unknowing into that place where, in the cryptic words of Ernst Bloch, we already always are and yet have never been: home” (Schirmacher 1987, 322).
GA 79, 76/Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 72.
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Scharff, R.C. On Living with Technology through Renunciation and Releasement. Found Sci 22, 255–260 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-015-9462-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-015-9462-7