Having now largely completed the first objective of the book to outline the movement away from Aristotle’s warning towards the Great Reversal of the judgmental and technical, this chapter returns to the work begun in chapter 1 in an effort to fulfil the second part of the second objective of the book, which is to consider how, in a technological society where human beings are treated as mere material, the practice of phronesis may be obstructed or barred.
As will be explained, the return of phronesis into the discourse is in large part spurred by a growing unease with the goals and consequences of the Enlightenment. The violence of the twentieth century made it all too clear that the Enlightenment project for a science of man and society did not bring us “everlasting peace” – at least not yet. While the project made great strides towards quantifying and controlling both human and non-human nature, the perfectibility and happiness Turgot, Condorcet, Quetelet, and Galton promised seemed only a distant dream of a past and naive age. If nothing else, the events that marked the first half of the twentieth century told us that the power of technology could as easily be turned to unprecedented destruction as it could to human flourishing. Free of an ethical compass to guide it, technology revealed itself as a potent amoral force.
But, even before the two world wars, the Holocaust, and the Great Depression, there was already a strong undercurrent of “counter-Enlightenment” thinking that pushed back against the early goals of the burgeoning technological society. The “dark Satanic Mills” that William Blake saw as a blight spreading across the early-nineteenth-century English countryside epitomized a growing anxiety that something intrinsic was being lost with each turn of a water wheel and each stroke of a steam-driven piston. In protest, poets and philosophers alike began to express a general worry that modern society as manifest through technology somehow was impeding or corrupting their capacity to live full and complete lives, and barring humanity from experiencing the world in same way as their pre-technological brethren.
As mentioned earlier, the idea that humans had become imprisoned by modern society and technology resonated in the anti-Enlightenment Romanticism of Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, the poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, and of course Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. On the other side of the Atlantic, the American transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed the same concerns.1 A common theme in all of these writings is that, while we may think we are directing technology towards the fulfilment of human-centred goals, technology is all the while forcing us to conform to its demands, and actually using humanity as a tool for its further advancement. This anti-technology sentiment was not limited to poetry and philosophy, but also worked its way down to the people who actually laboured in those same dark mills. The legendary nineteenth-century Luddites, textile workers who feared unemployment through the automation of their industry, directed their antipathy for technology by attacking and destroying the wool-spinning machines that would, despite their efforts, come to replace them.
This alternative tradition of counter-Enlightenment thinking continued into the twentieth century, becoming a sustained and more direct criticism of technology and its negative effects. In Germany especially, the devastation of the First World War, coupled with the global economic depression, saw the rise of a great wave of discontentment with modern life. More and more, the optimism of the Enlightenment gave way to profound disapproval matched by calls for a renewal of older ways of life that had been disrupted by the “quest for certainty” and “conquest of nature” that dominated the centuries after the Great Reversal. Conservative writers such as Ernst Jünger and Oswald Spengler, the author of the widely popular The Decline of the West (1918–23), tapped into this mounting sense of dissatisfaction and frustration with their sweepingly pessimistic ideas about the imminent decline of Western civilization at the hands of the out-of-control advance of technology. In 1932, Jünger lamented the spiritual void created by a “cult of progress” that “smashes even traditional ways of life.” He blamed the overwhelming and “enchanting” influence of technology, writing that “wherever man falls under the spell of technology, he finds himself placed before an unavoidable either/or. This means that either he accepts the particular means of technology and speaks their language, or he perishes.”2 Just the year before, in Man and Technics, Spengler warned, “This machine-technics will end with the Faustian civilization and one day will lie in fragments, forgotten – our railways and steamships as dead as the Roman roads and the Chinese wall, our giant cities and skyscrapers in ruins like old Memphis and Babylon.”3 For both men, technology was a “deal with the devil” that had put humanity under a powerful spell and was surely leading us all to disaster.
It is also around this time that Martin Heidegger began his analysis of technology. But, rather than criticizing or demonizing it, he attempted to uncover a deeper, hidden account of technology. For Heidegger, technology not only dominated contemporary life but also “enframed” nature and human civilization as a whole. The term “enframe” comes from the German word gestell, meaning frame, and indicates the way technology builds a new framework around existence, blocking the full expression of anything that falls outside of its boundaries. Everything becomes a product of technology or is “standing-reserve” – waiting to become a product of technology, just as the natural world, the human body, and human behaviour had become in the previous century.
Heidegger’s concern about technology, as well as the terms enframing and standing-reserve, only began to appear in his work after the Second World War in the 1950s, but these ideas find their source much earlier in the 1920s, while he was teaching at Marburg University. Much of this period before Heidegger became widely celebrated for his groundbreaking philosophical work Being and Time was spent studying and lecturing on the work of Aristotle. Through a somewhat unconventional reading of the Physics and Metaphysics, Heidegger decided that our contemporary understanding of the natural world as a static heap of trees, dirt, and water was starkly different than the ancient conception. According to Aristotle, nature or physis instead indicates the overarching movement of all things or beings as they are born, grow, and die or come into being and go out of being. In various places, Heidegger explained this movement as unconcealment (a creative translation of the Greek word for “truth,” aletheia) and concealment (from the Greek for forgetting, lethe), a disclosure and a hiding, or a presencing and an absencing. For Heidegger, an oak tree is unconcealed, disclosed, or presenced in the germination and growth of an acorn and concealed, hidden, or absenced once again as it falls and rots on the forest floor. Everything in one way or the other participates in this: trees, human beings, mountains, and massive stars as they form and die in deep space. In forgetting this movement, by viewing it as an inert thing, we were able to reconceptualize nature in the modern way Machiavelli did, transforming it into mere matter into which we could introduce whatever form we chose.
Heidegger was also convinced that originally techne was not opposed to this ancient understanding of nature. As touched upon in chapters 1 and 2, rather than coming into being through an internal efficient cause like an oak tree springing from an acorn, the external efficient cause of the craftsman “brings-forth” an artefact by working with the natural characteristics of its materials. And, as Heidegger agreed, the craftsman’s unique role bringing into being things that would not be otherwise also characterized humanity’s unique relationship with nature. Now, unlike ancient techne, Heidegger thought that technology does not “work with” nature but instead challenges it. So, the unconcealment of technology is characterized by the concealment of all other beings. Again, this overarching concealment or forgetting is what Heidegger calls enframing. Just as the hydroelectric dam on the Rhine conceals the movement of the river and submerges the river valley, turning it into a reservoir for power generation, technology as a whole obscures the entire planet, turning it into standing-reserve. The unconcealment of technology takes the diversified movement of nature and replaces it with the singular presence of technology.
All in all, Heidegger presented an extraordinary and upsetting vision of the world in the twentieth century. Everything, all of nature, was inexorably being incorporated, quantified and controlled, into the technological system. But, perhaps the most disturbing thing about Heidegger’s vision was the idea that our capacity to understand that this was happening was itself being threatened by the final taking up of human beings as standing-reserve. By the 1960s, Heidegger began to even more urgently warn that the rise of technology was intrinsically linked to our inability to think about technology outside of its terms. In one of his last essays, the provocatively titled “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” Heidegger argued that the concealment of human beings by technology meant that we would no longer be able to think about or even notice the effects of the enframing process. “The need to ask about modern technology,” Heidegger explained in uncharacteristically succinct terms, “is presumably dying out to the same extent that technology more decisively characterizes and directs the appearance of the totality of the world and the position of man in it.”4 So, in the end, rather than the threat posed by any particular technology, whether nuclear annihilation or environmental catastrophe, it was our silence, our inability to think, act or question the crisis of technological envelopment that Heidegger pointed to as the supreme danger facing humanity. The real crisis, in other words, is that we did not and do not realize that we are in a crisis. As we sit on the edge of the vast abyss of technological nihilism, we remain completely oblivious to the danger.
And so we had now come to the critical point where the rise of technical knowledge almost completely dominated human behaviour and thinking. The centuries after Hobbes’s articulation of the Great Reversal had seen the integration of technology into every aspect of our existence. And while we were clearly willing participants in the spread of technology as it delivered innumerable benefits and cures making our lives more pleasurable and less painful, Heidegger wanted us to realize that these products were only a corporeal manifestation of a much larger playing out of technology.
If the threat lies in the unlimited application of technical knowledge or the final ascendancy of kingly techne, then why not resurrect traditional limitations that had once kept technology in check? What about a phronesis revival?
While at Marburg, Heidegger considered the possibility of a return to phronesis as a way to respond to the quickly receding ability of human beings to intellectually understand and practically respond to the danger of technology. But he rejected the possibility of such a return. For the same reasons Heidegger concluded that existence is concealed by technology, he also decided that there remain insurmountable barriers to a revival of the practice of phronesis.5
Notably, he presented Aristotle’s phronesis not as good judgment, practical reason, or prudence, but rather as “the right and proper way to be Dasein.”6 This strange “translation” reflected Heidegger’s larger interest in not simply explaining the meaning of Aristotle’s philosophical texts, but instead in engaging directly in the same ideas from his unique vantage point in the twentieth century. The German word “Dasein,” which literally means being-there (da-sein), is a core concept for Heidegger implying an authentic relationship with existence. For the Greeks, then, phronesis was the “right and proper way” to experience the true nature of the cosmos, existence, or Being. However, Heidegger thought that human beings in his day and age were being pushed in the opposite direction towards the inauthentic.7 This inauthenticity is not simply a personal choice, but is reinforced by the social, political, and cultural institutions of modern technological society. A good example of our inauthenticity might be our refusal to embrace our essential finitude. Even though we may grudgingly accept the reality of our own mortality, our materialistic, youth-obsessed society pushes us to live our lives as though we should never age or are never going to die. In turn, we prioritize the accumulation of possessions and superficial good looks over our responsibilities to the next generation, whether through parenting, education, or as caretakers of the environment. It is as though our civilization insists that we ignore the fundamental contradiction at the heart of this inauthentic lifestyle. Therefore, in order to return to authenticity, Heidegger thought that we must either change the character of modern institutions or our relationship to them, or remove ourselves from them altogether.
The critical difference for Aristotle was that these institutional barriers “to the right and proper way” did not exist, at least not in the same all-encompassing manner. Instead, according to Heidegger, the virtue of phronesis allowed the ancient Greeks to constantly renew themselves, allowing them to overcome bad influences and bad habits that may have distracted them from their “right and proper” or authentic purpose and responsibilities. The “salvation of phronesis,”8 he explained, allowed them to put aside the everyday things that kept them from living full and meaningful lives. So, if people became so preoccupied with sex that they were unable to think beyond their narrow desire or suffered from such severe despair that they were unable to think, phronesis gave them the capacity to break through their obsessions and depressions. As Heidegger put it, “Insofar as man himself is the object of the aletheia of phronesis, it must be characteristic of man that he is covered up to himself, does not see himself, such that he needs an explicit a-letheia in order to become transparent to himself.”9
The unconcealment provided by phronesis was only required if there was first some need to clear some sort of obstacle. In other words, if the phronimos was never faced with personal, ethical, or political dilemmas, he would never be able to reveal himself as a person of good judgment. For the Greeks and perhaps even for us today, how we react to the problems and challenges of everyday life tells our family, fellow citizens, and ourselves what kind of person we really are. Without these problems, there really is no opportunity to distinguish oneself as virtuous. In fact, despite the many problems we may still have, there seems a shrinking supply of these types of opportunities for virtue in a technological society. After all, the whole push of technology has been to solve problems. Perhaps that is why the bar has been lowered so that almost anyone might be considered virtuous or heroic for the most mundane of acts: parents taking care of their children, a patient recovering from a disease, a victim suffering from a crime, or an athlete hitting a home run. We feel the need to call these people heroes and their actions virtuous perhaps because we yearn for real heroes and real virtue where there may be very few and very little.
In a surprising way, it is the great success of technology that makes it easy for us to relinquish the practice of virtue and makes the return of phronesis more and more unlikely. Rather than taking on the difficult task of moderating the passions and overcoming bad habits, it is has become commonplace to seek out techniques, treatments, and medicines for what are now diagnosed as diseases and syndromes. We have in various ways attempted to treat the ups and downs of the human condition as simply a “condition” that needs some sort of cure. The development and practice of good judgment seems quaint if not impotent in comparison to powerful and effective technologies that function as external efficient causes on the human psyche.
Of course, for Heidegger, the point was that we cannot overcome the insurmountable barrier of technology in the same way the phronimos overcame the distracting pleasures and pains of everyday life. Where these things may have at one time been cleared away through good politics and ethics, we simply have no capacity to clear away technology.
For Aristotle, the presence of the phronimos assured that, even if the polis had lost its way, the bases of the good life could still be recovered.10 However, by Heidegger’s account, we had no phronimos, no repository for the good life to restore or return us to the right and proper way to be. Even if we wanted to return to the good life as the Greeks lived it, we would have to relearn all that had been forgotten with no teacher or exemplar to point us in the right direction. We, like archaeologists, would have to try to piece together a lost civilization from shattered artefacts.11
In turn, Heidegger’s call for authenticity was really quite a different thing than Aristotle’s discussion of the good life. Where a move to “the authentic” suggests the need to reject common standards, traditions, and institutions as fraudulent or corrupting, striving for “the good” requires a certain confidence in and loyalty to one’s community and fellow citizens. Indeed, the phronimos is a pillar of the community, whereas lonely Dasein fights against convention and remains outside the system, dissenting, rebellious, and even seditious.
For example, his search for authenticity led Heidegger to praise the actions of the young saboteur Albert Leo Schlageter, who was killed in 1923 fighting against the French occupation of Germany during the interwar period and who was later lionized by the Nazis as an early martyr to their cause. He also endorsed early war mobilization efforts, commending men of “new courage” in his address as the first rector at Freiburg University after Hitler’s election as chancellor in 1933.12 He later explained that he thought that National Socialism would bring with it “a spiritual renewal” of the world, where “the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man” had caused the “spiritual decline of the earth” and drained “the last bit of spiritual energy that makes it possible to see the decline.”13 Heidegger’s initial support of the Nazi party reflected his strong belief that the obstacle of modern technology had to be cleared away and that there was still a shrinking window of opportunity to do something to respond to the technological juggernaut that was crushing any and all possibility of a movement to a more authentic existence outside of the bounds of enframing.14 The Nazis, Heidegger thought, would destroy the centres of modern technological society and replace them with a new spiritually rich culture. It was time for a different kind of radical politics that would sweep away the detritus of the old world and make room for something else. In turn, instead of phronesis, Heidegger appealed to a different kind of action he called “resolve.”15 He thought that resolve or resoluteness would open up or unlock a new route to the right and proper way, giving the German people a renewed ability to be authentic. Unlike phronesis, resolve required no understanding of the world that waited once these barriers were removed. This is what he meant when he said in his speech as rector of Freiburg University that Germans should stand “firm in the midst of the uncertainty of the totality of being.”16 The point here is that Heidegger did not want to make the mistake of positing a prototypical future or blueprint for utopia that would be built on the ruins of modern civilization. He did not want to restart the technological project with an updated version of a metaphysical good.17 Instead, he demanded an acceptance of uncertainty or a total openness to whatever world would reveal itself from the rubble and ashes of what was to come. There was nothing practical or reasonable about Heideggerian resolve. It was creative destruction of the old order to make way for something new and as of yet unknown.
So, while phronesis and resolve are similar in their embrace of the spontaneous and unpredictable, the ancient virtue does not abandon certainty or the predictable altogether.18 At the beginning of the Ethics, Aristotle asked, “Will not knowledge of [the chief good] have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right?”19 The phronimos may have to be quick on his feet, able to adapt to changing circumstances on the ground, but he always keeps a general understanding of what these moves and modifications are aimed at. By contrast, Heidegger’s resolute heroes were shooting blind. Because technology concealed or enframed their vision, they could not aim at their target but only remove what blocked it.
With the start of the Second World War, Heidegger gradually realized that his grand hopes for the Nazi movement were not going to be met.20 While the matter is still a subject of great controversy, it is clear that he slunk away from his calls for resolve and began to consider different ways of properly responding to the challenge of technology. However, his earlier ideas are still reflected in much of today’s anti-technology discourse. The “Neo-Luddite” movement, for example, seems to embrace similar tenets of Heideggerian resolve. Unlike their Luddite predecessors, who directed their ire at a particular technology, this collection of radical environmentalists and deep ecologists, groups like Earth First! and the vigilante Earth Liberation Front (ELF), the back-to-nature movement, the no-growth school, and strident anarcho-primitivists view the whole of technology as a danger and seek its quarantine, restriction, or total destruction. On a par with Heidegger’s rejection of reigning institutions in the name of authenticity, these neo-Luddites seek alternative and often violent methods outside of contemporary politics and laws to achieve their goals.21
Ted Kaczynski is probably the best-known contemporary advocate of this kind of aggressive response to technology. In his manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future, he denies all possibility of reforming technology so that it would “prevent it from progressively narrowing our sphere of freedom.” He instead calls for the complete overthrow of the whole technological system. Of course, Kaczynski’s notoriety does not stem from the eloquence of his anti-technology theories, but from his twenty-year terrorist campaign as the Unabomber. Like Ernst Jünger and Oswald Spengler, the Unabomber envisioned a society that lay in ruins with only the strong and capable able to survive. But, rather than early-twentieth-century German idealists, Kaczynski was more likely inspired by fictional characters like George Hayduke, the protagonist from Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang.22 In this striking passage, Hayduke describes his vision of a post-technological world similar to Spengler’s:
When the cities are gone, he thought, and all the ruckus has died away, when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of the forgotten interstate freeways, when the Kremlin and the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for generals, presidents and other such shitheads, when the glass-aluminum skyscraper tombs of Phoenix Arizona barely show above the sand dunes, why then, why then, why then by God maybe free men and wild women on horses, free women and wild men, can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom – goddammit!23
Perhaps Tyler Durden, the anti-hero of Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel Fight Club, will be inspiration for the next generation of neo-Luddites. In this speech, Durden describes a similar scene, left in the wake of the terrorist attack he dubbed “Project Mayhem”: “Don’t think of this as extinction. Think of this as downsizing … You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon forest around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five degree angle. We’ll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what’s left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night.”24
These post-apocalyptic, post-holocaust scenarios are distinct from anything described by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics of science and modernity. More anarchists than fascists, the neo-Luddites share the same vicious defiance of the Nazis and the violent atavism of the twenty-first-century Taliban and jihadist movements. Unlike George Orwell’s character Winston Smith from Nineteen Eighty-Four or Aldous Huxley’s Bernard Marx from Brave New World, Kaczynski and his fictional doppelgangers react to technological utopianism with visions of non-technological dystopia.
While crude and contradictory, the Unabomber’s lengthy manifesto expresses many of the attitudes shared by more eloquent neo-Luddites such as Kirkpatrick Sale. Sale explains the common bond that links the movement together: “Wherever the neo-Luddites may be found, they are attempting to bear witness to the secret little truth that lies at the heart of the modern experience: Whatever its presumed benefits, of speed or ease or power or wealth, industrial technology comes at a price, and in the contemporary world that price is ever rising and ever threatening.”25
So, whether it is the danger of mass hypnosis through television or mass sickness through industrial pollution, the neo-Luddites agree that technology is a threat to human and non-human life. In her short piece “Notes toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto,” Chellis Glendinning writes: “The worldview [the Luddites] supported was an older, more decentralized one espousing the interconnectedness of work, community, and family through craft guilds, village networks, and townships.” She explains, “Like the early Luddites, we too are a desperate people seeking to protect the livelihoods, communities, and families we love, which lie on the verge of destruction.”26 Just as the introduction of new technology threatened the Luddites’ way of life and community, Glendenning thinks that it also threatens ours. She goes onto to call for the dismantling of “destructive technologies” such as nuclear, chemical, genetic engineering, television, electromagnetic, and computer technologies. For her, these technologies serve as obstacles to the “life-enhancing worldview,” whereas other technologies such as solar panels and wind power are somehow less problematic.
This highlights one of the more perplexing things about this faction of the contemporary anti-technology movement. The fantasy of returning to a primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle or a decentralized medieval socio-economic structure would of course mean the abandonment of modern technology holus bolus, including solar panels, wind turbines, and hydrogen fuel cells. Obviously, these are no less, if not more, technological than any of the other technologies that Glendenning identifies as destructive. But, despite their various claims that they seek the obliteration of technology as a whole, every neo-Luddite has a long list of particular technologies that he or she love to hate, whether genetically modified organisms, internal combustion engines, or email.
Heidegger, however, did not really pick and choose which technologies to criticize or admit some were better than others. He thought that technology itself was enframing the planet and everything on it. He later clarified his position on whether it made sense to criticize particular technologies, writing: “For all of us, the arrangements, devices, and machinery of technology are to a greater or lesser extent indispensable. It would be foolish to attack technology blindly. It would be shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the devil.”27 He is even blunter in this interview: “I want to say that I am not against technology; I have never spoken against technology, nor against the so-called demonic elements in technology … So, above all, the misunderstanding that I am against technology is to be rejected.”28
There is no inconsistency here. After all, Heidegger’s initial embrace of the Nazis was not the product of a naive hope that they would reject the technological as such. Obviously, he could never have had the expectation that the Nazis would fight the Russians and Americans with farmer’s pitchforks and scythes.29 Still, how can we reconcile Heidegger’s call for resolute action against spiritual decline with these later statements? In his address as rector, Heidegger called for a recapturing of “the original Greek essence of science.”30 This recapturing entailed a move away from the contemporary effort to control nature through scientific research and technology and a return to the ancient Greek understanding of making or techne, which, he claimed, worked in cooperation or in partnership with nature.31 As mentioned in chapter 1, he did not disparage the products of the ancient craftsman in the same way he did contemporary technology because they are “scenes of disclosure” for overpowering nature and draw our attention to the nature of existence.
This did not mean that Heidegger favoured a return to the simple, nostalgic world of the rural farmer of the Black Forest or the authentic ancient craftsman toiling away in his workshop.32 Despite the fact that Heidegger often posed wooden bridges against hydroelectric dams and peasants farming against open-pit mining, the point for Heidegger is not “what” we build but rather “why” we build it. Indeed, the Pyramids and Parthenons of the ancient world were not quaint or modest projects by any estimate, and yet would still, for Heidegger, qualify as authentic artefacts. Therefore, Heidegger’s post-technological world could still be grand and technically advanced in the same sense as these noble monuments. This seems to be what Heidegger is addressing when he proclaims that “the beginning exists still. It does not lie behind us as something long past, but it stands before us,” it “has invaded our future; it stands there as the distant decree that orders us to recapture its greatness.”33 Rather than the aggression and violence associated with resolve, this moderate response does not require the destruction or restriction of technology, but instead a return to the building of authentic artefacts.
We get a further understanding of the possibility of authentic artefacts from Heidegger’s discussion of a rural farm in his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking.” He warns, “Our reference to the Black Forest farm in no way means that we should or could go back to building such houses; rather, it illustrates by a dwelling that has been how it was able to build.”34 Here he explicitly rejects a nostalgic return to some pre-technological age. In this same essay, Heidegger provides a remarkable analysis of a contemporary technology that seems to suggest the possibility of authentic technology: “The highway bridge is tied into the network of long-distance traffic, paced and calculated for maximum yield. Always and ever differently the bridge initiates the lingering and hastening ways of men to and fro … The bridge gathers, as a passage that crosses, before the divinities – whether we explicitly think of, and visibly give thanks for, their presence, as in the figure of the saint of the bridge, or whether that divine presence is obstructed or even pushed wholly aside.”35
Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa, two leading Heidegger scholars, explain that this unique passage shows Heidegger accepting that technological things such as highway bridges may allow for a “plurality of communities of focal celebration.”36 The modern highway bridge can open us up to a similar experience as the artefacts of the ancient world. At least in part, this answers what Dreyfus and Spinosa call “the question for our generation”: “How can we relate ourselves to technology in a way that not only resists its devastation but also gives it a positive role in our lives?”37
The highway bridge can be taken as an example of Heidegger’s claim that “we can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse and lay waste our nature.”38 While there is still an obvious antagonism here, the idea that we can “affirm” technical devices suggests that we can live with technologies while avoiding enframing and dehumanization. Then again, considering all that Heidegger has said, it remains unclear how we can live, work, and think in a technological society while not becoming dominated by technical devices.39
As described above, Heidegger understood Nazism as a route to respond to the challenge of technology. And, while he moves away from this aggressive response, this should not be taken as an admission that it was non-viable. His unwillingness to explicitly disavow the goals of the National Socialist revolution suggests that he held out the faint hope that some time in the distant future a similar planetary effort to knock back and destroy the technological establishment would again be possible. In an oft-quoted interview given well after the war, he cryptically explains that the Nazis were “far too limited in their thinking” to fully realize or take advantage of the opportunity presented to them.40 However, Heidegger does come to critique the Nazis because their revolution became a furthering of the “dreary technological frenzy” that led him to consider new ways to respond to the immediate challenge of technology.
At basis, the defeat of the Nazis brought Heidegger to question the very possibility of any contemporary political response to technology. He asks in a 1966 Der Spiegel interview, “How can a political system accommodate itself to the technological age, and which system would this be? … We still have no way to respond to the essence of technology.”41 Heidegger is led to explore a far more passive approach. The recognition of the ineffectuality of a political or social response to technology is why he moves away from his call for a violent destruction of institutions to clear the way for authenticity and instead suggests that by accepting or realizing that technology dominates us we will once again know what it is to be in the grasp of a fate beyond our control. In other words, by realizing that technology is out of our control, we will move away from the technological impetuses to quantify and control.42
This call for passivity requires a stepping back from any and all activist effort to defeat or moderate technology. Heidegger comes to recognize that no politics and no programs of reform could themselves steer humanity away from the consequence of the challenge of technology: until we ourselves are taken up as standing-reserve we will not recognize the danger of our age. In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger writes: “The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become.”43 Only when we become fully cognizant of the supreme danger of technology will we be prepared to take a new course away from technological nihilism. Whether this will happen, what that course might be, and where it might take us remain a mystery.
We see similar calls for resignation and acceptance in many important twentieth-century thinkers. Lewis Mumford, for example, calls for “quiet acts of mental or physical withdrawal – in gestures of nonconformity, in abstentions, restrictions, inhibitions.”44 In The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul argues that we still have an opportunity to respond to the challenge of technology: “The challenge is not to scholars and university professors, but to all of us. At stake is our very life, and we shall need all the energy, inventiveness, imagination, goodness, and strength we can muster to triumph in our predicament.”45 But, like Heidegger, Ellul comes to give up this activism. In the later The Technological System, he questions whether it is at all possible for man to “‘take in hand,’ direct, organize, choose and orient technology,”46 and decides, “Man in our society has no intellectual, moral, or spiritual reference point for judging and criticizing technology.”47 Marshall McLuhan has the same concern and, like Ellul, seems to straddle the moderate and the passive positions. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, he writes: “Far from being deterministic, however, the present study will, it is hoped, elucidate a principal factor in social change which may lead to a genuine increase of human autonomy.”48
In both Ellul and McLuhan, there seems a small but quickly shrinking window of opportunity to do something to avoid or mitigate the onset of the technological system, or what McLuhan calls the global village. By contrast, George Grant argues that the window closed decades ago. Influenced by Heidegger, Grant contends that “the planetary technical future” is our “fate” and that there is nothing we can do about it.49 He clearly states that “those who would try to divert, to limit, or even simply to stand in fear before some of [technology’s] applications find themselves defenceless.”50 These thinkers decide that the activist effort to subordinate technology to human concerns is itself an outgrowth of technological thinking and actually seeds the way for further enframing. That is to say, protest and criticism of the “failures” of technology simply highlight the need for new methods to incorporate human needs into technology.
For Heidegger, passivity is simply another way for us to become open to the revealing of technology. By stepping back from the technological frenzy, we remove the primary obstacle to recognizing revealing. This is what he means when he quotes his favourite poet Hölderlin:
But where danger is, grows
The saving power also.51
So, even though technology is what threatens us the most, it is also the thing through which we might once again return to authenticity. When we come to realize through our own taking up as standing-reserve that we do not control the revealing of technology, but merely participate in that revealing, we may be able to return to a more authentic or free relationship with technology. Therefore, while passive, this approach is not also deterministic. In a sense, it is passivity with a purpose, helping to express the playing out of technology, whether or not it will overwhelm and conceal the essence of all other things, including ourselves.
Of course, we may find this approach frustrating: we should take to the streets, lobby for change, and take a proactive approach against the effects of technology. But, according to Heidegger, in order to escape all-encompassing technology, we must do nothing. Otherwise, our actions will be sucked into the dynamo once more and turned out anew on the other side.