This page contains links to items on the internet about technology and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).
The links below are ordered chronologically with the most recent additions at the top.
The recognition of the ineffectuality of a political or social response to technology leads [Heidegger] both to move away from the call for a violent recapturing of a primordial techne, and to suggest instead that within the enframing essence of technology lies an opportunity to once again experience the disclosure of a sense of limitation. As he explains in the passage quoted above, in the dominance of technology “something is being announced . . . namely a relationship of Being to man—and . . . this relationship, which is concealed in the essence of technology, may come to light someday in its undisguised form. I do not know whether it is going to happen!”
The enframing is not machines and it is not technological, it is rather the true essence of technology. The enframing is the gathering that reveals the being of man, in this technological age, as the being who orders the entities of the world as standing reserve. It is what reveals the being of man as orderer, and in turn reveals the other entities of the world as ordered. Enframing is the mode of revealing that holds sway, that is to say it is the mode that is chief and unassailable in the essence of modern technology.
The Heideggerian inversion replaces the Modern and Critical eras’ “observer” with a pragmatic and existential human “actor.” This actional being is, moreover, a materialized or existential being. Finally, this materialized being is also peculiar, in that he or she is technologically involved with and extended into his or her immediate environment. The Heideggerian existentialization of the human being simultaneously materializes and technologizes action. It is a distinctly non-Platonic perspective.
"To the things themselves" is not to be confused with the reductionist search for things-in-themselves. On the contrary, it means the search for the "whatness" of things as manifested on the stage of everyday life (Lebenswelt). It means the search for the manifold of meanings dynamically impressed on our "compromise" with the world. It means, as we shall see later, to study things "distinguishing" them from what they are not.
[Heidegger] argues that the practices in the background of understanding can function only if they remain in the background. The background itself opens up the very possibility of a foreground, for it is only against something that another something can be focused, or call for attention. Thus, that which is most vital in functioning must be that which is closest to us; so close, as not to be seen because it belongs to the background, not the foreground.
Why is it that "logic" - as found pervasively in Information Technology - cannot grasp essential thinking? Because logic cannot be other than itself. A system of logic defines its own boundaries and therefore cannot move outside those boundaries. In order to grasp essential thinking a sense of the same process by which humans are aware of themselves as self-conscious is required. It is a requirement for a way of thinking that can realise that it is thinking.
Decades of study into the history of philosophy afforded Heidegger an eminent grasp of the origins of contemporary science and technology, and he saw in both powerful machinations merely the finished product of the failure of that way of living befitting us as mortals. Heidegger did not lament the fact that science became basically technological and that from its beginnings as knowledge of theoria free of delimiting purpose or ends it then became restricted to a rationalistic, narrowly construed misappropriation of the world; instead, he was the first to analyze it.
The present death-bringing technology is, though in a totally distorted way, the selfsame life-sustaining technology of man conceived of originally. Heidegger's "event of technology" expresses therefore not a new phenomenon, but rather the hidden meaning of present-day technology.
[L]ife constitutes a sufficient existential condition for being a 'clearing' or 'opening', that is, a space of possible ways for things (including human beings) to be. While it might be conceded that the Being (sense or meaning) of beings disclosed by Dasein is of a significantly higher order than that disclosed by (other) beings themselves, it simply does not follow from the shareability of language peculiar to Dasein that disclosure of Being by other beings is impossible; human-centred meaning is not necessarily coextensive with meaning as such.
Capurro tries to theorize angeletics based on Heidegger's "pre-structure of understanding." This means that message is considered to have ontological character and therefore a relationship with the world of human existence.
Heidegger's essay is easily one of the most influential pieces of work concerning the subject of technology (and related issues) but is also the victim of a myriad of misappropriations and misreadings. It is hoped that this essay will help ameliorate the current situation where so many non-philosophers view Heidegger's essay as another variant on the prevalent themes of cultural pessimism and anti-modernism which dominated the European intellectual scene during the early and middle parts of the twentieth century.
The value of Heidegger's theory of technology consists in its ability to offer us an alternative way to conceptualize a rupture between a technological past and present.
[T]he potential value that any technical device might have would be contingent upon its context of use. From a Heideggerian standpoint, it would be inappropriate to claim that any technical device is intrinsically good or evil.
Systems Engineering seeks to transform the vision of the proposed system in its zuhanden mode of being into something amenable to thew methods of engineers, and thus to describe and analyse the system in a vorhanden mode of being.
Sloterdijk inflects Heidegger's assertion of ontological difference in the `Letter on Humanism' with a specifically technological bias. Identifying the condition for empathetic relationships - which structure relations of power through texts - he gestures towards the human genome as a kind of alphabet, a codex, from which human needs can be read and which can structure how they are met. His proposal is for a thorough technologization of humanity through genetic manipulation, generalized as a principle with which to govern the progress of society.
Heidegger sought to unveil the nature of thinking of the earth-bound man who is ruled not by the image of the sun, not by the light of reason per se, but by the logic of life depending on idiosyncratic circumstances of the moment for insight and practical wisdom.
When arguing for a philosophy of technology, which 'thinks' technology but thinks it technically, refusing the 'abyss of essence' between logos and techne, Stiegler is both working within a Heideggerian problematic and overturning it. The issues are the same (calculability, the incalculable, indifferentiation, temporal ecstasis); the way of situating and confronting these issues is, in the end, almost totally different.
In Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology, determining the absolute status or essence of an entity is, actually, prohibited by the movement of phenomenology. Hermeneutic means interpretive and if the entity is always given as interpretive rather than absolutely then the entity itself must be imbued with certain nonobjective character.
[A]s Heidegger points out in Being and Time, language is not normally used for the exchange of information. Rather language calls attention to some aspect of a world the language users already share.
Our organs are therefore not just of the same kind as they are embedded within another kind of capability that Heidegger calls 'behaviour' ("Verhalten") in contrast to animal 'dazed state' ("Benommenheit"). At the same time there is not a fundamental division between being human and other non-human organic life as far as we are also inserted in the 'ring-like' structure of "living nature" "which holds us as captive in a very specific way."The quote is from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.
Authenticity is a process rather than a state. After glimpsing many times what is truly appropriate for it, Dasein becomes absorbed back into the activities in its world. Dasein is called back into the world by caring.
[F]or Heidegger, we always remain subject to the public norms of intelligibility. It is they that we are trying to change through our commitment. Consequently, they can change in such a way as to make our commitment irrelevant.
Despite the inability of representational thinking to acknowledge the real beyond the objective realm, being reveals itself through the very inadequacy of science. The modern subject, surrounded by objects manufactured by the means of technology, experiences a lacking. This lacking cannot be accounted for through calculation, for it is an absence of presence.
'Given that the essence of modern technology lies in Enframing or revealing as challenging and ordering, till now we have not asked what it is that is revealing. In fact, it is Being or destiny, but [Heidegger] never indicates that these are a subject; rather they are presented as the process of revealing as such.'
'Heidegger holds that the essence of technology is nothing less than the ontological self-understanding of the age. In so far as we implicitly adopt the ontology of enframing, everything in the contemporary world will show up for us as reflecting the essence of technology, technological devices included.'
'How can Dasein, as a thrown being, respond to the call of conscience in a way that preserves the uniqueness peculiar to the moment of vision? How do we think the relationship of human freedom to the granting that is beyond its control? How do we enter into that which lies between arbitrariness and brute necessity? This rich yet difficult question is a constant theme in Heidegger's work.'
'...tapping Heidegger's questioning about the essence of technology, we will establish an intriguing agenda able to evoke a new "disposition" ("management" will appear by then too strong a word) vis-à-vis infrastructure, and find through another case of corporate networking the embodiment of such different disposition.'
'Herein we shall find that technology, as Heidegger sees it, has become the fundamental way of our dealing with the world. That said, I will take seriously Heidegger's claim that a certain destining is at work at the heart of modern technology and thereby delve back into the beginning of the modern era in an attempt to locate early indications of this destining. In doing so, I believe that we will find a conception of nature which is markedly and importantly different from the Aristotelian view which had previously dominated for centuries. I will thus conclude that something can be gained from Aristotle's view of the cosmos which inherently respects nature and thereby opens the way to an environmental philosophy not based primarily within the human subject.'
Just as present-day computer science celebrates object-oriented programming, it is possible to speak of the emergence of an object-oriented philosophy. The paper argues that the two central dogmas of contemporary philosophy are holism ("everything affects everything else") and anti-realism ("there is no access to anything that transcends human construction"). The root of these dogmas is arguably the continued dominance of _language_ as the philosophical paradigm par excellence in both the continental and analytic traditions. Any notion of the object as an independent force to reckon with tends to be muffled by the concept of language as a differential system in which each element co-determines every other. Likewise, any attempt to approach the object in its autonomous hidden power is discarded in favor of a meditation on the conditions of human _access_ to objects. While these suppositions have come to seem almost inevitable, they soon reverse into their opposites when pushed sufficiently far. Drawing on an unorthodox reading of Heidegger's famous analysis of tool-being, the paper argues that 21st century philosophy will revolve precisely around the question of the object: its surfaces, halos, profiles, and emergent subterranean currents. A systematic inquiry into all these facets of entities will be the explicit mission of the ontologies to come, as already hinted by certain tendencies of Deleuze, McLuhan, Baudrillard, Virilio, and more recently Latour. The paper ends by suggesting certain concrete steps that might be taken toward a fresh and concrete research into the secret contours of objects.
An anthropology of subjects and objects
From Heidegger's View to Feenberg's Subversive Rationalization
('Science does not think'; ed.)
in Tekhnema Journal of Philosophy and Technology
From Leonardo: Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology
and
in The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy .
Published in The Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence,
Stuart. C. Shapiro, editor, John Wiley &Sons, New York, 1987.
Abstract:
Discussions of the theoretical foundations of artificial
intelligence increasingly refer to hermeneutics, a branch of
continental European philosophy concerned with human
understanding and the interpretation of written texts. Dreyfus
and Winograd draw heavily on hermeneutics to question the
feasibility of AI and cognitive science. But, hermeneutics also
offers insights that may contribute to the understanding of
meaning, translation, architectures for natural language
understanding, and even to the methods suitable for scientific
inquiry in AI. After briefly reviewing the historical development
of hermeneutics as a method of interpretation, from its classical
use through the modern debates, this article examines the
contributions of hermeneutics to the human sciences. This
background provides perspective for a review of recent
hermeneutically-oriented AI research. This includes the Alker,
Lehnert and Schneider computer-assisted techniques for coding the
affective structures of narratives, the earlier positive proposal
by Winograd, and subsequently Bateman, the later pessimistic
Winograd and Flores on the possibility of AI, as well as the
system-building efforts of Duffy and Mallery.
A part of The Neutrality of Technology, a part of Media Determinism in Cyberspace, a hypertext by
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