Abstract
It has generally been recognized that while Bruno Latour’s and Martin Heidegger’s respective philosophies of technology converge on key points there is also a significant difference of attitudes towards the themes discussed. To better appreciate the similarities and differences, I suggest that we seek to understand both Latour and Heidegger as philosophers of the event, who seek to rescue the novel emergence of beings from the sedimentation of reductive, explanatory frameworks. I take up this line of thought and compare Latour’s and Heidegger’s theories of things and the types of experiences they presume. Latour’s metaphysics of the actant ensures that no actant’s activity is ever reduced to being the passive effect of another. Yet while the actant can be ‘applied’ to any entity, from a Heideggerian standpoint this strength is precisely its weakness. Latour’s metaphysics provides a horizon of thought that blocks an original experience of things that Heidegger’s thought points towards. By stepping back from the horizonal experience Latour’s metaphysical blueprint for entities imposes, one can enter into an original opening that stems neither from humans nor nonhumans, but an ineradicable mystery at the origin of being. This mystery is nothing more than the inability to give ultimate reasons for the presence of beings. While Latour’s actant as Ding is simply an actant with innumerable relations, Heidegger’s das Ding is the concrete experience of the dissolution of metaphysical reasons, first and last causes. Precisely because Heidegger’s das Ding emerges from a prior mystery that suspends any overarching causal or purposive schema, things can more freely presence from themselves.
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Notes
As some of his closest interlocutors have pointed out (Latour, 2003), Latour often employs apparently contradictory language, or doublespeak, to take a bi-directional perspective on the event-like tension in the phenomena he investigates. In The Pasteurization of France, he speaks of the irreducibility and the reducibility, the commensurability and the incommensurability of all beings. In Science in Action, he explains this in terms of the open and closed Janus face of scientific investigation and controversies. In We Have Never Been Modern, he talks about hybrids as both the products and causes of nature and society. In all these cases, it helps to keep in mind the prospective and retrospective viewpoints one can take upon the event.
I use the term underdeterminism in an ontological way, pointing to the relative contingency among beings in a causally conditioned field. I do not mean to use it in the same sense it has been used in constructivist social studies of science, which Latour has opposed (Kochan, 2017: 125–128).
Latour adopts this term from the work of (Serres, 2013).
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Zielke, D. The Modifier Within: Bruno Latour’s Actant and Martin Heidegger’s Thing Theory. Hum Stud 45, 629–652 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-022-09641-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-022-09641-7