Why is heidegger a critic of technology

Within each historical metaphysical age, there is a particular understanding of being in terms of which entities show up and make sense. This understanding of being is universal, meaning it determines every entity as such. It is also total, meaning it also governs every way that entities can relate to and interact with each other.

In accordance with this thesis, the technological understanding of being is one such "universal and total" ground that determines entities in its own particular way: everything shows up and makes sense as what Heidegger calls Bestand resources or stock that can be ordered and re-ordered in ways that maximize efficiency and, as Wrathall puts it, keep our "options" open.

This is the way things are primarily understood in the modern age, according to Heidegger. The difficulty that concerns me has to do with squaring this kind of master thesis -- Heidegger's historicism -- with the kind of critical leverage many commentators read him as providing when it comes to the ways the technological understanding of being distorts or effaces what various kinds of entities really are. The question, in other words, is what that last phrase -- really are -- means when considered in conjunction with Heidegger's historicism.

Consider what Wrathall says in the midst of a long footnote: "Each entity can show itself as what it 'really and actually' is only within the world or perhaps set of worlds that allows it to be. Leaving that worry aside, the more serious one is that Wrathall's formulation risks emptiness or, barring that, begs the question.

Regarding emptiness, his formulation can be read more fully as saying that "each entity can show itself as what it 'really and actually' is only within the world or perhaps set of worlds that allows it to be what it 'really and actually' is. What would save it from vacuity is providing a way of determining just which world or set of worlds that is in the case of various entities or kinds of entities. And here is where the question is begged, as a proponent of scientific realism, for example, will want to know why some other world or set of worlds offers more in the way of "allowance" than the natural sciences in terms of revealing what the entity really is.

But even without resorting to scientific realism, which after all is a critical perspective external to Heidegger's own, it is not clear how to square such a claim to "really and actually" with the point of view that Heidegger himself seems to offer, at least according to several essays in this volume.

In both of his contributions, Wendland rehearses the broad contours of Heidegger's conception of the being of entities, whereby "the being of an entity is determined by a set of theoretical assumptions and practical norms that undergird a particular goal-directed activity. Take a lump -- or even a molded piece -- of silver: if its being -- what it is and that it is -- varies according to different "theoretical assumptions and practical norms" that correspond to different human-historical worlds , which one of those worlds "allows" the silver to be what it "really and actually" is?

Each world "allows" it to be something different -- something sacred, something with exchange value, something with very specific physical properties, to use Wendland's three examples but there could presumably be more -- but which one of those is the silver's own? Which way for silver to be belongs to the silver such that we can say about that way -- and that world or set of worlds -- that silver is there allowed to be what it "really and actually" is?

Wendland, for his part, singles out the technological mode of revealing -- Gestell enframing -- as reductive insofar as the techno-scientific understanding of being precludes "an openness to non-reductive ways of relating to entities. I have already suggested that this claim is apt to appear question-begging. But further attention to the contours of Heidegger's views reveals a deeper problem here. As Wendland himself acknowledges, for Heidegger every cultural-historical understanding of being -- every normatively charged practical-theoretical way in which things are understood to be -- is both revealing and concealing.

Every understanding leaves something obscured, such that it cannot be brought to presence from "within" that understanding. As Wendland notes, being has both "light" and "dark" sides, such that any given paradigm both reveals and conceals or obscures: "A physicist, for example, may know that silver has an atomic mass of Each of those obscure something brought to presence by and in the other, but both in turn obscure what is revealed from the techno-scientific perspective.

The question thus arises as to how it is that only the techno-scientific understanding is singled out as "reductive. Thus when Wendland complains that "in modernity. For example, offices and persons are no longer indissolubly linked in a modern civil service. Modernity involves the generalization of such distinctions. Differentiation is more or less complete depending on the domain. For example, the separation of offices and persons is considerably more effective than the separation of business and government.

The differentiation of knowledge of nature from other cultural spheres leads to the development of modern science, based on rational procedures and experiment and validated by an expert community. Under this dispensation science achieves considerable independence of other social institutions. Something similar happens to technical know-how. It is gradually formalized in technical disciplines that resemble and are enriched by science.

This gives the illusion that technology is just as autonomous as science, but in fact technology is far less differentiated. All technical activity is deeply marked by culture and this is just as true of modern technology as of the crafts of premodern societies. But the mark of culture on technology is much harder to identify, at least for us who belong to the modern world. In the first place, the cultural context shows up in design.

Since modern design emphasizes function and functions appear self-evident to us, it is easy to overlook its dependence on culture. But cultural limitations become obvious when devices are transferred to alien cultures, for example, when a computer with a Roman keyboard is exported to China or Japan where the language cannot be represented easily by our alphabet. The necessity of adaptation testifies to the cultural relativity of Western computer design. Separated from values, technology appears to be a product of pure rationality.

But this appearance is illusory. Value freedom is a tendentious way of signifying the differentiation of technology from the ethical and aesthetic values that restricted it to culturally secured designs and goals in premodern societies. As such, technology is available for any use whatsoever.

Modern technology falls under the formal norm of efficiency, but efficiency does not determine the particulars of design and use. Liberated from such particulars, technology can be designed to serve temporary and shifting purposes. This suits it for employment by organizations, another cultural constant of modernity. Like technologies, organizations are generally defined by rather narrow formal goals such as profitability.

These goals are no more able than efficiency to determine any particular outcome of production. For that, the leaders of organizations must rely on their understanding of the market and their interpretation of legal and administrative rules. In the absence of specific cultural direction, these considerations decide what to make and how to make it. In so far as such decisions lack a stable basis in the culture, technology pursues ends that appear more or less arbitrary.

This strange cultural void is itself the culture of technology we hardly question. To us it appears universal but it is not compatible with most cultures, but uniquely with ours.

The community prized the stone axes made by its adult male members. These axes were not available as pure means in our sense but were bound up with various rituals of ownership and use.

Men alone were authorized by the traditions of the tribe to own and loan out the axes to women and children for their customary tasks. When missionaries distributed steel axes to anyone who helped with the work of the mission, this system broke down. The social hierarchy, the trade and social relations, even the cosmology of the tribe collapsed and its members were demoralized. Thus replacing a product of craft by a modern technology implied a profound cultural change and not merely an increase in efficiency.

But is this a problem for us as well? The criticism of technology to which we are accustomed generally focuses on the use of technology to achieve particular ends of which we disapprove. We would like to reform the organizations that command the technology and make them serve public purposes. Social movements and state regulation aim to achieve this.

But the philosophical critique of technology goes considerably further. In so far as the differentiation of technology belongs essentially to modern culture, this criticism appears strange.

Can it be that the philosophers want us to return to the premodern past? Yet the reason for their general discontent is not so hard to understand. Modern societies are fraught with meaninglessness, manipulation, and rationalized violence. Dystopia and Apocalypse beckon as surveillance and nuclear technologies advance.

The long run survival of modern society is very much in doubt. Could it be that our technology, or at least, the way in which we are technological, threatens us with early self-destruction?

This is the question of the radical critique of technology. This question provokes many others in turn. We would like to know what it is about differentiated technology that leads to such disastrous consequences.

After all, many good things flow from technological advance as well. Why is the issue not simply the bad uses to which technology is put? Why is a total critique necessary? If the radical critics do not want to give up the fruits of modern technology, what is their alternative?

For example, might criticisms of specific technologies be combined in some package that addresses the larger issues raised by the critique? If not is there some other escape from technological disaster? In what follows I will address these questions through a presentation of some of the basic ideas on technology of Heidegger and Marcuse. Heidegger's critique of technology is ontological, not sociological. This ontology is so contrary to common sense that it is very difficult to understand.

We tend to think that reality is "out there" while our consciousness is an inner domain that gains access to things through the senses. Heidegger rejects this model. He invents his own vocabulary in which terms such as revealing, disclosure, Dasein, and world substitute for concepts such as perception and consciousness, culture and nature.

As Heidegger explains it, our most basic relation to reality is not perception as we usually understand it. That is a theoretical construction. Abstracting from our actual experience, we tell ourselves about such things as light rays entering the eye and activating the retina, sound waves causing vibrations in our ear drums, and so on.

But we originally encounter our world not through causal interaction between nature and the senses, but rather through action directed at meaningful objects. These primordial encounters later become objects of reflection, but Heidegger rejects the notion that we can explain them in a philosophically significant sense from that standpoint.

Instead, we need to start out from what is first, our actual experience, and treat it as an irreducible ontological basis.

Heidegger argues that the subject of action is not consciousness or the mind, but what he calls Dasein, a German word that can refer to human being. It is our whole self that engages with reality, not a specialized mental function. His examples are tools which we encounter in use through grasping them and setting them to work. In this context we do not focus on the objective properties of tools but rather on the correct way to handle them.

By world Heidegger means something like what we refer to metaphorically as "the world of the theater" or "the Greek world. They are an aspect of what truly is as revealed from a perspective. Perspectives open aspects of reality to view while concealing other aspects.

They are not so much creative as disclosive and what they disclose is a meaningful complex of some sort. The world is a network of ready-to-hand things in a system of such meanings. While Heidegger would certainly reject the concept of culture introduced above, it is helpful for understanding this concept of meaning. You can read four articles free per month.

To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please. In December , William Faulkner mailed his New York publisher the fourth and final part of a forty-thousand-word short story from his home in Mississippi. Eleven years later, in November , Martin Heidegger stood before an audience of students and teachers at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, and delivered a lecture he had reworked from a talk delivered four years previously to a group of businessmen in Bremen.

That both, living nearly five thousand miles apart, with wildly different upbringings and without contact between or influence over one another, would arrive at essentially the same critique of technology, says a lot about the zeitgeist of the Twentieth Century. The story follows the hunt for Old Ben over several seasons. We learn that the hunting party has disbanded, its annual pilgrimage ceased. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dreyfus, H. Heidegger on the connection between nihilism, art, technology and politics.

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