A Twenty-First-Century Retrieval
Theodore Kisiel
Martin Heidegger got as far as the atomic-space-cybernetic age in his meditations on technicity and modern technology. We ourselves have been able to experience the marvels of the twenty-first-century advance into the Internet revolution and its instantaneous global reaches, such that, for example, we and the entire world with us were virtual witnesses of the events in May 2011 that transpired in Abbottabad, Pakistan, almost immediately after they happened.1 We twenty-first-century citizens of the world take for granted the convenience of stratospheric transportation networks and the satellitic transmission of instantaneous media events that enwrap the “global village” at every hour of every day on video news channels. But modern technology had advanced sufficiently in Heidegger’s day for him to be struck by the same drastic foreshortening of time and space and its global reach brought on by the radio technology of his time. Accordingly, what he had to say to us about the essence of modern technology in the twentieth century appears to apply as well, with some minor adjustments in terminology, to the more enhanced and advanced technological realities of the twenty-first century.
Such adjustments can easily be made in the single hyphenated word by which he defines the essence of modern technology, almost as ingenious as the single hyphenated word that defines his entire way of thought, namely, Da-Sein. For modern technicity, his one word is of course Ge-stell. In the last three decades of his life, Heidegger repeatedly tells us what Ge-stell is, and repeatedly notes that it is to be sharply distinguished from the ordinary everyday senses of Gestell, as in Büchergestell (bookcase) and Brillengestell (frame for eyeglasses). It must therefore be emphatically stated that Ge-stell is simply not “frame, framework, or enframing,” the current English translations drawn directly from German-English dictionaries. What then is Ge-stell in its global essentiality? It is, in Heidegger’s breakdown of this single word, “die versammelnde Einheit aller Weisen des Stellens” (the collective unity of all modes of setting in place, positioning, positing).2
Im Ge- spricht die Versammlung, Vereinigung, das Zusammenbringen aller Weisen des Stellens. (The prefix Ge- speaks to the gathering, unification, bringing-together of all kinds of placing and positioning.)3
Das Ge-stell ist die Versammlung, die Gesamtheit aller Weisen des Stellens, die sich dem Menschenwesen in dem Maße auferlegen, in dem es gegenwärtig ek-sistiert. (Ge-stell is the gathering, the integration of all the modes of placing, positioning, and positing that impose themselves upon the human being in the manner in which the human being presently ex-sists.)4
Against the current English favorite of “enframing,” I therefore propose an etymological translation of Ge-stell from its Greek and Latin roots as “syn-thetic com-posit[ion]ing,” where the Greek-rooted adjective “synthetic” adds the note of artifactuality and even artificiality to the system of positions and posits. For me, Ge-stell as “syn-thetic com-posit[ion]ing” presciently portends the twenty-first-century globalizations of the Internet with its virtual infinity of websites in cyberspace, the Global Positioning System (GPS), interlocking air traffic control grids, world-embracing weather maps, around-the-clock world news coverage of cable TV networks, etc., all of which are structured by complex programming based on the computerized and ultimately simple Leibnizian binary-digital logic generating an infinite number of combinations of the posit (1) and non-posit (0). The synthetic compositing of computer logic thus maps out the grand artifact of the technological infrastructure that networks the entire globe of our planet Earth.
The phenomenon of technological globalization was already apparent by the time the so-called Great War of 1914–18 came to a conclusion, which was accordingly renamed the World War. One of the heroes of this highly mechanized war, Ernst Jünger, in his accounts of “totale Mobilmachung,” the total mobilization that occurred in the last year of the war, began to attribute this phenomenon to “planetarisches Technik” and its use in the struggle for “planetarische Herrschaft.” This becomes Heidegger’s word for globalization in this period to phenomenologically describe the human experience that results from the network of grids constructed by modern technology to guide and control the so-called airwaves that harness the natural electromagnetic radiation occurring across the surface of our planet Earth for human use and consumption. Globalization is essentially a time-space term, a dynamic term that spells out a quasi-infinite velocity in nanoseconds through its virtual abolition of space into bilocative simultaneity and its instantaneous reduction of all time differences. By the early twentieth century, radio technology had advanced sufficiently for Heidegger to be struck by the drastic foreshortening of time and space and its global reach. In the famous “pincers” passage of 1935, Heidegger dramatically describes the global geopolitical as well as philosophical situation of a postwar Germany being squeezed by two international movements, both of them technological juggernauts, on the Western front by American capitalism and on the Eastern front by Bolshevist communism:
Russia and America, when viewed metaphysically, are both the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and of the groundless organization of the average man. When the farthest corner of the globe [“der Erdball,” the terrestrial globe versus Heidegger’s beloved terra firma—TK] has been technically conquered and can be economically exploited; when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you [by way of radio—TK] can simultaneously “experience” an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from the Dasein of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for? — where to? — and what then? [in short, the question of be- ing in the twentieth century—TK]5
Clearly, Heidegger was suspicious of this instantaneity and simultaneity of the time technologized by global communication primarily because it abolishes the time of situated history, the time of Da-sein. In 1935, this time-space abolition results from the medium of the radio along with the wire services of newspapers, but it just as readily reflects with uncanny foresight the more advanced digital-media systems of the twenty-first century. As Heidegger observes in 1949, by plane and by radio and soon by TV, “all distances in time and space are shrinking.”6 He calls this the phenomenon of the distanceless (das Abstandslose). Distant locales and exotic places are shown on TV or film so realistically that you may even feel that you are there (as we were, most recently, in Abbottabad, Pakistan) and everywhere in a technologically induced bilocative simultaneity. Heidegger asks: “What is happening here when, as a result of the abolition of great distances, everything is equally far and equally near? What is this uniformity in which everything is neither far nor near and, as it were, without distance? Everything washes together into uniform distancelessness [Abstandslosigkeit]. How? Is not this moving together into the distanceless even more uncanny than everything being out of place?”7
What Heidegger misses in this all-too-familiar modern experience is a genuine experience of nearness, the proximity of be-ing. Because the experience of nearness fails to materialize with this abolition of all distances, the phenomenon of the distanceless has come to dominate our lives in the twenty-first century.8
Heidegger’s own examples of Ge-stell begin in a farmer’s field about to be exploited for its mineral deposits, be it for coal or uranium ore. Instead of being cultivated, the land is now being challenged (gestellt) to yield energy, where we set upon the land in order to extract coal or ore from it, then store this energy resource in order to have it ready for use.9 The hydroelectric plant is set into the Rhine river, thereby damming it up to build up water pressure which then sets the turbines turning whose thrust in turn generates and sets the electric current going into the network of long-distance cables, where the systematic transforming, storing, distributing, and switching of electrical energy takes place.10 Be it coal or hydroelectric power or atomic energy, in each case “nature is positioned for its energy,” nature is forced to yield its energy. Nature, thus held up to yield energy, emerges henceforth as the “storage-place of energy,” like a global fuel depot or gigantic gas station. Storage of resources, be it energy or information, becomes a central feature of the Ge-stell, which Heidegger calls its fundamental unconcealment. “Everywhere, everything is ordered to stand by [es wird bestellt, auf der Stelle zu stehen], to be immediately in position for use, in fact to stand there to be on call for a further ordering [Bestellen]. . . . Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve [Bestand].”
And now comes the perhaps surprising denouement of Ge-stell from the philosophical perspective: “Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object.”11 “Thus when man, in investigating and observing, ensnares nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve.”12
Heidegger in a parallel essay also notes that the most recent cyclotron experiments in nuclear physics likewise encounter this phenomenon of the complete disappearance of the object, which hitherto had been the very hallmark of modern science. But “that does not mean that the subject-object relation vanishes, but rather the opposite: it now attains its most extreme dominance, predetermined from out of syn-thetic com-positing [Ge-stell]. It becomes a standing-reserve [Bestand] to be commanded and placed on order.”13
The subject-object relation now reaches, for the first time, its purely “relational” character, that is, its character of orderability (Bestellungscharakter), in which both the subject and the object are claimed as standingreserves (Bestände). The more modern technology unfolds and develops, the more objectivity transforms itself into disposability (availability, accessibility). Gegenständlichkeit is transformed into Beständlichkeit. Now there are no more objects (no more beings standing over against a subject that takes them into view)—there are only Bestände, standing reserves positioned to be available on demand (in short, beings held ready for plan-directed use). Political economists in fact no longer deal with objects but instead systematically order the space with an overall plan toward maximizing the utility of resources. Beings as a whole are aligned and ordered within a horizon of usefulness, domination or, better still, the disposability of all that needs to be placed under control. The planners themselves are no longer scientifically oriented toward a field of objects but now emerge in their true gestalt as technicians and even technocrats, that is, humans who see beings a priori in the horizon of making-them-useful and available on demand. It can no longer appear in the objective neutrality of an over-against. There is nothing other than reserve resources: warehoused stock, inventories of consumer goods, stores of material goods, banks of electrical power available on demand, energy reserves, capital reserves, federal reserve funds, not to mention the quasi-infinite store of information in the so-called memory banks of the Internet.14 Information has become our most globalized standing reserve, followed by electronic money kept “liquid” by global holders of reserve funds like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, followed by energy reserves made available by increasingly interlocking grids, electrical or otherwise; the last are material goods, called commodities by the markets.
The ontological definition of reserve stock is not the persistence of durable goods but their character of disposability, the constant possibility of being offered and ordered, i.e., of enduring availability and accessibility. Its constancy is not that of objectness but that of the standing reserve, a constancy defined in terms of syn-thetic com-positing. In disposability, the being is posited as being exclusively available from the ground up, accessible for use in the planning of the whole.15
There are no longer any objects but only “production resources” and “consumer goods” at the disposal of everyone, who themselves are put into service in the business of production and consumption. In universities (now called “knowledge industries”) as well as in corporations, personnel departments are now called departments of human resources. And since all resources are disposable, they are at once replaceable. This is clearly manifest in the industry of consumer goods with its abundance of substitutes and, in an era of mass production, leads to the tendency to replace rather than repair used goods.16 But extending the same attitudes to human resources is fraught with all manners of abuse, the extremes of which we have witnessed under the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.
The disruption in the global flow of standing reserves caused by the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 illustrates another phenomenon unique to modern technicity, namely, that Heidegger’s broken hammer experience has apparently gone global. The widely adopted Toyota strategy of just-in-time inventories for its production lines led, as a result of the earthquake, to drastic disruptions in the supply lines of numerous automobile production lines around the world. Massive power outages and recent identity thefts of mega-lists pirated on the Internet are further examples of the broken hammer experience gone global. Recall the fears of massive attacks on the Internet by cyberterrorists in the millennial year of Y2K. Among other things, it conjures the image of the lightning-speed electronic circulation of vast sums of currency whipping around the world’s financial markets in a global cash flow whose reverberations sometimes verge on a cascading collapse. Such a globally impelled crash, whether by impersonal market forces or computer hackers, would make the worldwide depression of 1929, at least in its velocity of impact, pale in insignificance. To be sure, all of these examples of global disruption occur in the high-velocity time-space of modern technicity, which is not at all comparable with the lived-world time-space of the broken hammer experience. Recall that the broken hammer experience retrospectively reminds us of the background context and its referential connections that the broken hammer interrupts, say, in the work world of the carpenter. At one point, Heidegger asks what exactly is the “basic referential context” of a “world” of machination and notes its radical difference from the referential world of handwork and hand tools by pointing to the regulated and uninterrupted repeatability “in exactly the same way” of the “mechanical” motions of the machine and the more calculative referential relations necessary for its manufacture.17 The “machine is not an ‘imitation’ of handwork and natural processes but rather a self-standing organization of all the processes of beings.”18 And this “organization of all the processes of beings” in its deliberately calculated mechanical design is not even a world. Heidegger thus speaks of an “unworlding [Entweltung] and unearthing [Enterdung] of beings” in the machinations of Ge-stell, where beings stand in a state of total abandonment by be-ing (Seinsverlassenheit).19
We are accordingly moving from the epoch of objectivity (Gegenständlichkeit) to the epoch of disposability and availability (Beständlichkeit), the most extreme gestalt of the history of the metaphysics of constant presence since the Greeks. “Because we no longer encounter what is called Ge-stell within the horizon of representation, the view that allows us to think of the be-ing of beings as presence, Ge-stell no longer approaches us as something present and thus seems at first alien and strange.”20
As the most extreme gestalt of the history of the metaphysics of constant presence, and so the completion and fulfillment of this metaphysics, the Ge-stell assumes a strange absence which in effect serves to point it in another direction, to serve as a passage from metaphysics to another thinking governed by the properizing event, das Er-eignis. The Ge-stell is “Janus-faced, it is essentially double-sided . . . it is so to speak the photographic negative of the event of be-ing, das Ereignis.”21 Accordingly, “an outstanding way to draw near to das Er-eignis, the properizing event, would be to look deeply into the essence of Ge-stell.”22 The Ge-stell thus prompts Be-sinnung, a meditation on its meaning. It is therefore not a matter of regarding the emergence of technology as a negative event (and certainly even less as a positive event, as if it were a paradise on earth). “That in and from which man and be-ing approach and challenge each other in the technological world claims us in the manner of syn-thetic com-positing [Ge-stell]. In the reciprocal self-positing [Sichstellen] of man and be-ing we discern the claim that defines the constellation of our age.”23
With the Ge-stell, it seems that we are on the verge of overcoming the subject-object relation and entering into the mutual ownership of man and be-ing that the properizing event is.
The intimate be-longing together of man and be-ing in the manner of a mutual escalating challenge brings us in startling fashion nearer to that and how man is delivered over to the ownership of be-ing and be-ing is appropriated to the essence of man. Within Ge-stell there prevails a rare and exceptional ownership and appropriation. We must simply experience this owning in which man and be-ing are proper for one another, i.e., we must enter into what we call the event of enownment and properizing, das Ereignis . . . a singulare tantum . . . unique . . . What we experience in Ge-stell as the constellation of be-ing and man through the modern world of technology is a prelude to what is called Er-eignis. For in the event there resides the possibility that it may turn the sheer prevalence of Ge-stell into a more inceptive appropriating. Such a transformation of Ge-stell into das Er-eignis would by virtue of this event bring the appropriate recovery—appropriate, thus never to be made by man alone—of the world of technology out of its domination to servitude into the realm by which man reaches more properly into the properizing event.24
Presuming that we could wait in anticipation for the possibility that Ge-stell, the reciprocal challenge of man and be-ing in the calculation of the calculable, would address itself to us as the appropriating event that first expropriates man and be-ing into their proper [element]; then a path would be freed for man to experience beings in a more inceptive way—the totality of the modern technological world, nature, and history, and above all their be-ing.25
In Heidegger’s depiction, therefore, at the most extreme extremity of the history of the metaphysics of constant presence, we find ourselves poised at the very threshold of crossing over into an authentic experience of be-ing in the propriating event, das Er-eignis. But despite the apparent and tantalizing proximity of this experience, we are not given to expect a smooth gradual crossing over to it simply because of the extremities at which we are poised: the machinations of technology have resulted in the complete abandonment of beings by be-ing (Seinsverlassenheit) and the human being is in peril of not only forgetting his essential be-ing but even of having forgotten this forgetting of be-ing. “But in this extreme extremity of destining peril the most intimate relationship [of man and be-ing] shows itself, but shows itself only as a completely veiled hint.”26 It is necessary to push the ex-peri-ence of the peril of technology to the extreme to glimpse the e-vent emerging in the Ge-stell. Accordingly, Heidegger recommends not attempting to arrest or to master technology but to drive it to its extreme in order to ex-peri-ence it in its full peril to the human being, and at the same time to meditate on the meaning of its destining essence.27 To put this extreme experience in another way, technology in its essence is the “most extreme neglect [Ver-wahr-losung] of the under-cut of difference [Unter-schied]. . . . Technology—the neglect of [nearness], yet accordingly in this neglect [we find] the nearing of the turn of the forgottenness of the under-cut of difference.”28
Finally, Heidegger, following Hölderlin, prompts the “sons of the Alps” to make the perilous crossing “over the abyss on lightly built bridges” by invoking these encouraging lines from Hölderlin’s Patmos: “Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch” (But where peril is / also grows the saving). How the extreme peril of technology might allow us to glimpse “the growing light of a saving [power]” is suggested by the hint that the Greek word technē is the common root of both technology and art, even the fine arts.29 By way of this hint, Ge- Stell at its extreme of unworlding (Entweltung) and unearthing (Enterdung) may well be transformable into the world and earth of das Geviert, the fourfold world of earth, sky, gods, and mortals.
This crossing over from Ge-stell to Geviert once again operates between extremes that, in their very contrast, provide clues for the crossing. How? Consider, for example, the abolition of time and space that comes with modern technology, where everything is equally far and equally near, inducing a uniformity in which everything is neither far nor near, is, as it were, without distance, such that everything gets lumped together into a uniform distancelessness. What is missing in this all-too-familiar modern experience of time and space is a genuine experience of nearness, the proximity of be-ing. But that very experience of missing the near in its relation to the far in their authentic presential sense is the beginning of meditative thinking—for which nearness can become conspicuous by its very absence—and of the turn toward moving beyond the essence of modern technology as Ge-stell, which in its essence does not admit of any qualitative nearness or farness.30 Ge-stell in its essence disallows nearness. And what nearness (Nähe) truly nears is the intimacy of a world as a neighborhood (Nähe) in which we can dwell meaningfully.31 “Ge-stell as the completed destiny of the forgetting of the essence of be-ing inconspicuously radiates a ray of the distant arrival of world. Insofar as world refuses its worlding, what happens with world is not nothing, but rather from refusal there radiates the lofty nearness of the most distant distance of world.”32
The arrival of a world as the meaningful context in which we can live means a return to Dasein as being-in-the-world, to our own Dasein as our historical situation. We thus come back to a central opposition that has already emerged in our first consideration of modern technicity, namely, the contradistinction between the technical time-space of the distanceless and the time-space of historical Dasein. In his summer semester 1928 lectures, Heidegger characterized the historical world as a temporal playing field (Zeit-Spiel-Raum) that grants Da-sein the freedom of movement within a finite world of distinct historical possibilities. One is tempted nowadays to compare this basic contradistinction with that between the cyberspace of virtual reality and the concrete space of historical reality, by way of the many recent crossovers from virtual to historical reality in organizing protest movements online, be it environmental, economic, and most recently, the viral spread online and in reality of the “Arab Spring” and the “Occupy Wall Street” movements. The most recent twenty-first-century technologies like the Internet, by and large, have had a liberating effect as compared to the twentieth century, which often employed technology as totalitarian tools of domination, such as the propaganda propagated by newspapers/radio/film and the leveling of das Man to uniformity and conformity. Has Orwell’s Big Brother become a figment of the past now overcome, at least on the global scale in which he was fictionally portrayed?
When we first introduced the single hyphenated word by which Heidegger defines the essence of modern technology, it was noted that the conceptualization of Ge-stell was almost as ingenious as that of the single hyphenated word by which Heidegger defines his entire way of thought, namely, Da-sein. The time has come to highlight that claim. Heidegger often remarked that every great thinker is defined by a single thought. If one were challenged to express Heidegger’s central intuition in a single word, I submit that one could do no better than the hyphenated word Da-sein. The old Heidegger himself, in the text cited in the publisher’s prospectus to introduce his entire Gesamtausgabe, identified the guiding star that directed his entire way of thought as the Seinsfrage, the question of being. But I myself prefer the more concrete and existentially charged Da-sein, which Heidegger himself early on in fact identifies with the question of being. Da-sein is the experience of “Here I am!?” Or “Here we are,” the simple raw experience of finding ourselves already deeply involved in be-ing, underway and caught up in existing willy-nilly, thrown into a world we did not make and a life we did not ask for, finding ourselves already situated in be-ing whether we like it or not—“I didn’t ask for this!”—where we are in fact on the receiving end of life, being put upon by life, the great fact of life, facticity. This initial limit situation of situationality, simply being situated in existence willy-nilly, is then compounded by the limit situation of death at the other extremity, and we who exist in-between are called upon individually to face up to the question of be-ing, our very own be-ing. We thus arrive at the distributively universal concept of Da-sein as situated ex-sistence, according to which each of us happens to have been rooted (born, thrown) into our own unique existential and historical situation, and each of us is called upon to own up to this particular situation that is most our own and that in fact constitutes our very identity and be-ing. “I am my time, you are your time.” Not a generic and common concept, applicable to all indiscriminately and uniformly, but rather a hermeneutically distributive and proper concept, applicable to each individually in accord with the unique temporal context in which each individual happens to be situated. In Being and Time, this distinction between generic/common and distributive/ proper universals occurs in the distinction between the what- and the who-question, between categories and existentials, between the uniform anyone-self of das Man and the proper self of a unique one-time-only lifetime. “All men are mortal” is generic and common, stating a neutral scientific fact, while “each of us must die our own death” is distributively selective and individuating, properly singling out each to come to terms with their very own facticity of being-here.
Needless to say, the distinction between common and proper universals is precisely what is operative in our central distinction between our two ingenious hyphenated words, Ge-stell and Da-sein, which then appears in the distinction announced in the title of this talk between technological globalization and indigenous localization. On other occasions, Heidegger describes this contradistinction in terms of technical-functional relations versus vitally lived relations, or, a bit more deeply, as the contradistinction between a technical “world” of functionality and a lived world of meaningfulness, which are the topics of two radically different kinds of thinking, calculative thinking and meditative thinking (be-sinnendes Denken). The latter accordingly meditates on the meaning (Sinn) of our be-ing: Be-sinn-ung takes us back to the hermeneutic situation of factic life and original experience, where we as humans live in a linguistically articulated world of multifarious relations spontaneously charged with human meaning, and it is this background context of meaning that we seek, by way of Besinnung, to bring to the fore in coming to terms with our be-ing.
In the Der Spiegel interview of 1966, for example, where Heidegger admits to being frightened (erschrocken) when he first saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon, he remarks: “We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us]—the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today.”33 He finds it uncanny to be living in a world in which everything is pure function, and this functioning simply leads to more and more functioning, and this technicity increasingly dislodges humans and uproots them from the earth and their native roots. This takes us to another formulation of our contradistinction, that of the global versus the local, which came into currency with the generation that lived through the personal-computer revolution but is quite apt to the old Heidegger’s concerns, as he meditates on the impact of technological giganticism on local traditions and on the rhythms and ways of life of the “good old days.”
Heidegger assumes a less terrified and more meditative and placid (gelassene) tone toward Ge-stell in his 1955 talk in Messkirch memorializing the hometown composer Conradin Kreuzer, published under the title Gelassenheit but whose original title for the hometown crowd that first heard it was “Bodenständigkeit im Atomzeitalter” (Autochthony in the Atomic Age). He notes here that it is not only Swabian “Boden” (soil) that has produced great poets and thinkers, but also the soil of Central Germany, East Prussia, Silesia, and Bohemia.34 What is this ground that produces great poets and thinkers? Nothing less than the native language in which one finds oneself rooted and which imparts meaning to our local situation, the earth of language in its dialects in their tonality, rhythms, and song, in short, the down-to-earth language of original experience.35
To come to terms with the inexorable onslaught of modern technology on his hometown and environs and the inevitable change it is bringing about, Heidegger recommends that his countrymen should strive to cultivate two basic comportments to meditatively confront the flood of technical devices that were already working their way into the life and fabric of the town and gradually making themselves more or less indispensable. The first comportment involves affirming the unavoidable use of technical devices but denying them the right to dominate our lives, that is, of letting technical things be what they are but then of willing to let them go to avoid becoming slavishly dependent on them. Heidegger identifies this yes-no comportment toward technical devices as the releasement toward things (Gelassenheit zu den Dingen).
Having this comportment we no longer view things merely in a technical way. . . . We notice that while the production and use of machines demands of us another relation to things, it is not a meaning-less [sinn-los] relation. Farming and agriculture, e.g., have now become a motorized food industry. Thus here, evidently, as elsewhere, a profound change is taking place in man’s relation to nature and to the world. But the meaning [Sinn] that reigns in this change remains obscure.36
The issue here, accordingly, is to make sense of all this high-tech infiltration into our lives by way of meditative (be-sinnendes) thinking. For example, what are we to make of the fact that “Nature is becoming a gigantic gas station, an energy source for modern technology and industry,” a storage-place for energy, thus a “natural resource” subject to the calculations of those wishing to exploit it for profit or conquest.37
There is then in all technical processes a meaning [Sinn], not invented or made by us, which lays claim to what we do and leave undone. We do not know the significance of the uncanny increasing dominance of atomic technology. The meaning pervading technology hides itself. But if we explicitly and continuously heed the fact that such hidden meaning touches us everywhere in the world of technology we stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself just in approaching us. That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery. I call the comportment that enables us to remain open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness for the mystery [Offenheit für das Geheimnis].38
Releasement to and from technical things and openness for the mystery of the meaning of modern technology: these two comportments combined serve to promote meditative thinking and so to counter the threat of becoming so enamored by the marvels of modern technology that calculative thinking comes to be accepted as the only way of thinking. Humans would thereby deny and throw away their essential nature of being meditative beings in search of meaning and no longer nurture their capacity for meditative thinking.39 In our present situation, we are called upon to be open to the mystery of the global domination of technology and to meditatively ponder the profound changes that it is exacting upon our relations with nature and the world in order that we might find meaningful ways for us to live in this new world. For these two comportments
grant us the possibility of truly dwelling in the world in a totally different way. They promise us a new ground and foundation [Boden] upon which we can stand and endure in the world of technology without being imperiled by it. . . . They give us a vision of a new autochthony [Bodenständigkeit] that someday might even be fit to bring back the old and now rapidly disappearing autochthony in a transformed gestalt.40
If releasement toward things and openness toward the mystery awaken within us, we might arrive at a path that will lead to a new ground and foundation [Boden]. In that Boden the creativity that produces lasting works could strike new roots.41
From this, it is clear that the old Heidegger is not a Luddite, rejecting modern technology and calling for a return to the good old days and simpler ways of life. In fact, his call for openness to the mystery of the radical changes in our ways of life and our relations with nature and world being exacted by modern technology goes so far that he is open to the possibility of truly dwelling in the world in a totally different way, which amounts to a new autochthony, which in effect means a new way of life, a new Brauch, a new custom, tradition, praxis, and habit of one’s habitat “that might even see fit to recall the vanishing old autochthony, the old way of life, the old custom and tradition in a transformed gestalt!”42
The adjective bodenständig is typically translated as “indigenous, native” so that the more abstract Bodenständigkeit, often translated as autochthony, etymologically suggests being native to a land or a nation and, even more starkly (and mythologically), having one’s roots in native soil. An autochthon, aborigine, or native is someone who supposedly sprung from the earth that he in-habits (a favorite topic of ancient myths), whence the clear possibility of using this term for nationalistic and even for racist ends, as was the case in Nazi Blut und Boden propaganda. And Heidegger here is speaking directly to a postwar native German audience. But it should be noted that Heidegger first used the word often enough in the twenties in a phenomenological context to connote the reduction “back to the origins, roots, native ground” of original experience as this is expressed in a native language. “This re-duction is nothing other than the overhearing of the speaking of natural Dasein to its world, of the way the communication of Dasein speaks with itself about beings that are there, of what be-ing means in this natural intelligibility, which gives us the possibility of understanding our basic concepts in their raw native character [Urwüchsigkeit].”43
Heidegger’s favored example of this is Aristotle’s basing his term for beings and their being on an expression that was prevalent in the everyday language of his world, namely, ousia, which originally referred to property: possessions, goods, real estate. In living in the native language that imparts intelligibility to his world and all that is experienced within it, Aristotle draws on that natural intelligibility of experience to form his philosophical concepts that accordingly remain indigenous (bodenständig) to that intelligible world wherein they are rooted and from which they are drawn.44 This indigenous intelligibility is situated at the level of our initial familiarity of beings that comes with our natural and spontaneous understanding-of-being (Seinsverständnis) as human beings in our native habitat.
To be sure, this familiarity of beings in the Dasein of human being has its own history. It is never simply there as neutral and constant throughout the history of humanity, but is itself rooted in what we call the autochthony of humans: in what nature, history and beings as a whole are to humans and how they are this.45
When the familiarity of beings in its immediate power is uprooted to this degree as it is today, it is certainly difficult to awaken a real understanding for the unmediated perceiving of beings and their immediacy.46
It is only the autochthony and force of the Dasein of humans that can decide the meaning of the objectivity of objects. This originality of the understanding of being and the power of the familiarity of beings are one and the same, they belong together. The more originally the understanding-of-being comes from the depths of Dasein, the more grounded is the right to the concept of be-ing, i.e. the necessity of philosophy to bring be-ing to conceptual expression.47
Heidegger is quite open about his own Bodenständigkeit. A 1934 vita begins by noting that he “stems from allemannisch-schwäbisches peasant stock, on my mother’s side residing on the same farmland uninterruptedly since 1510.”48 And a year before, he links his own work to the same affinity: “The intrinsic belonging of my own work to Schwarzwald and its people [Menschen] comes from a centuries-long allemannisch-schwäbischen irreplaceable indigenous autochthony.”49 This is where his work truly turns local, one might even say provincial, notably in his examples. In 1935, van Gogh’s “shoes” become the shoes of a peasant woman such that his painting gathers her world in the “cumulative tenacity of her slow trudge” as she wearily turns home after a day in the fields. “Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes resonates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain. . . . The shoes are pervaded by the uncomplaining anxiety over the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once again withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death.”50
Then there is the two- hundred-year-old Schwarzwald farmhouse situated on the wind- sheltered side of a mountain, with the roof slanted just right to bear the burden of snow whose walls shield the rooms with an altar corner, and the hallowed places of the childbed and the “tree of the dead”—coffin—in a house “thus serving the different generations living under one roof to accommodate their journey though time.”51 That is to say, that was our custom and tradition back then, in the old autochthony. And that was living a deeply meaningful life.
But what would the “lasting works” created out of the new autochthony look like? Would they involve some sort of fusion of technology and art, some sort of “tech art,” or would it be a leap from technology to art, which is the way Heidegger takes the ambivalence of the Greek technē, which means both art and technique/technology? At one point, Heidegger does hint broadly that an autobahn bridge might be a candidate for gathering the fourfold.52 Can a Boeing-787 taking off ever gather the fourfold? We know that Heidegger developed an appreciation for Paul Klee and modern art later on in life. Would it perhaps also include an Eastern approach to art, like the Taoism that comes into play in the jug that jugs? Then there is the feng shui approach to architecture, which Heidegger spontaneously applies in his account of how a Schwarzwald farmhouse gathers the fourfold.53 Since the resolution to modern technicity is bound to pass to some extent through art, it is worth concluding by examining Heidegger’s sense of the artwork for clues to the possible transition from Ge-stell to das Er-eignis.
Heidegger’s early use of the word Gestell in 1935 as it operates in the gestalt of an artwork evokes a 1956 cautionary note from him to distance this more focused “local” sense from the modern meaning of the hyphenated word Ge-stell operative on a global scale in modern technology. But it also opens the opportunity for us to examine the different sort of gathering of modes of Stellen, the different kinds of settings and positioning that are operative in an artwork. It may even provide some clues on how a global Ge-stell might be transformed into a local Gestell that could open a path toward das Er-eignis in the new autochthony.
First of all, “To be a work means to set up [aufstellen] a world.”54 In setting up the world, the work sets forth (her-stellt) the earth, with herstellen (to produce) being taken in the strict etymological sense of the word. The work sets itself back (sich zurückstellt) and thereby sets forth (her-stellen) the earth into the openness of a world.
That into which the work sets itself back [sich zurückstellt] and which it lets come forth in this setting back of itself we called the earth. . . . In setting up a world, the work sets forth the earth. . . . To set forth the earth means to bring it into the open as the self-closing.55
The setting up of a world and the setting forth of earth are two essential traits of the work-being of the work. They belong together in the unity of being a work.56
The world is the self-opening openness of the broad courses of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of a historical people. The earth is the spontaneous coming forth of the continually self-closing and accordingly covering and sheltering. World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated. The world grounds itself upon the earth and the earth towers through the world.57
The opposition of world and earth is a strife.58
Inasmuch as the work sets up a world and sets forth the earth, it is an institution of this strife.59
The work-being of the work consists in the strifing of the strife between world and earth.60
The strife here is between the self-opening openness of the world and the self-closing closedness and so covering sheltering of the earth, in short, the strife between unconcealing and concealing, the happening of truth. “Truth happens only by establishing itself in [both] the strife and the space of play [Spielraum] that it itself opens up.”61 “Truth establishes itself in the work. Truth comes to presence [west] only as the strife of clearing and concealing in the opposition between world and earth.”62
One final setting (Stellen) must be made for the work to do its work as a happening of truth. Having set itself up (aufstellt) as world and set itself forth (her-stellt) as earth by setting itself back (zurückstellen) into the earth, the work must now set and fix in place (feststellen) the strife of truth in the gestalt. Put another way, the truth must establish itself by being fixed in place in the gestalt of an artwork. “Art is the setting and fixing in place of self-establishing truth in the gestalt.”63 The Greek sense of morphe as gestalt or form is made clear by Ge-stell, understood as the gathering together of the various settings of truth in the rift-design of the bounding outline (peras) of the gestalt.
In creating the work, the strife as rift must be set back (zurückgestellt) into the earth, and the earth itself must be set forth (hervorgestellt) and used as the self-closing. Such use, however, does not use up or misuse the earth as matter, mere stuff, but rather frees the earth to be just itself. This use of the earth is a working with it that indeed looks like the employment of matter in handicraft. Hence the appearance that artistic creation is also craft activity. It simply is not. But it is always a use of the earth in the setting and fixing in place (feststellen) of truth in the gestalt. In contrast, making by way of tools and equipment is never immediately the effecting of the happening of truth. The production of equipment is finished when a material has been sufficiently formed to have it ready for use. The equipment’s readiness for use means that it is released beyond itself to disappear into usefulness.64
In the artwork, by contrast, its matter is not used up and does not disappear but is rather set forth as earth into the openness of the world. Rather than using up words in the manner of everyday discourse, the poet uses the word “such that the word truly becomes a word and remains a word” in all its glory and brilliance. This is the autochthony or earth-rootedness of language so cherished by Heidegger. “The poetizing project of truth, which sets itself into the work as a gestalt, is never enacted in an indeterminate void. Rather, the truth in the work is projected to the coming preservers, i.e. to a historical humanity.”65
The preservers in their Dasein now take their place in the middle of the strife of world and earth, of unconcealment and concealment. With the artwork we are in a historical world of a historical people in search of its destiny, not in the uniform technological time-space of the distanceless, but rather in the time-space of historical Dasein. It is the temporal playing field (Zeit-Spiel-Raum) of history that grants us freedom of movement in and through a historical world of distinct finite possibilities. And the work of art itself is just one of the forms of the historical happening of truth, along with philosophical questioning, state-founding deeds and essential sacrifice, like the “people-saving death” of Albert Leo Schlageter. “The world is the self-opening openness of the broad courses of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of a historical people.”66 Such a historical world with its tradition of deeds and sacrifices and concepts offers a people an appointed task (Aufgegebenes) which points them to their future world of possibilities. This appointed task unique to a people at once discloses to them a native endowment (Mitgegebenes) already given to them on the basis of what they have been. Clearly, the appointed task of today’s historical humanity is to ponder the profound change that is taking place by way of the essence of modern technology, Ge-stell, and to ready itself to cope with these changes in a way that remains true to our own unique proper situation of be-ing, in which life itself lays itself out, interprets itself, explicates itself. This domain of original meaningfulness which precedes the subject-object relation is what must be repeatedly retrieved and retained so that we may once again learn to live poetically on the earth in a post-modern world of technology.
From his works of the 1930s, one gets the impression that Heidegger did not think much of Americans. After all, the technological juggernaut of American capitalism was the force squeezing poor old Germany on the Western front in concert with a flank on the Eastern front by Russian communism. He constantly equated the -ism that is Americanism with technological giganticism, its fabled worship of bigness in its building of skyscrapers, large dams, and other gigantic technological exploits. But after the war, he met some non-technocratic Americans who expressed an interest in his philosophy (and, perhaps more importantly, spoke fluent German) and he began to realize that they too could be quite good at genuine thinking. This appreciation reaches its apogee in a letter written in April 1976, a month before his death, to the Heidegger Circle meeting at DePaul University in which he poses his question of the end result of modern natural science evolving into modern technology to the participants: “The rapidly increasing efficiency of these [forces of modern science and modern technology] drives the forgottenness of be-ing to the extreme and thus makes the question of be-ing appear irrelevant and superfluous.”
He asks the group to find ways to make the question of be-ing more compelling in our technological age “and thereby to prepare the possibility of a transformed abode of humans in the world.”67 The next year’s meeting of the Heidegger Circle at Tulane University devoted itself to this question and several of the papers moved in the direction of what might now be regarded as one of the most genuine and sustained American responses to Ge-stell: the environmentalist movement. Can this be our appointed task? Is it our native endowment?
1 This talk, first delivered in abbreviated form on May 25, 2011, to the Heidegger Forschungsgruppe meeting in Messkirch, Germany, took as its example of virtually instantaneous global communication the raid on the compound of Osama bin Laden that took place in the early hours of May 2, 2011, East Asian time.
2 Martin Heidegger, Vier Seminare, ed. Curd Ochwadt (Gesamtausgabe 15) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977), 104 (hereafter “GA 15”), translated as Four Seminars: Le Thor 1966, 1968, 1969, Zähringen 1973 by Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 60; the citation is taken from the seminar at Le Thor in 1969.
3 GA 15: 129 (75), Zähringen 1973.
4 GA 15: 126 (74), Zähringen 1973. The same point was already made in a rich note circa 1955, whose first sentence reads: “Im Wort ‘Gestell’ spricht die Versammlung des Stellens, in der ‘Versammlung’ spricht das Echo zum Logos, im ‘Stellen’ spricht das Echo der Thesis (Poiesis).” Martin Heidegger, Leitgedanken zur Entstehung der Metaphysik, der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft und der modernen Technik, ed. Claudius Strube (Gesamtausgabe 76) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2009), 320; see also 327 and 365 (hereafter “GA 76”).
5 Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953), 28, translated as Introduction to Metaphysics by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 40. {2nd ed., 41}
beyng.com: The references to Introduction to Metaphysics page numbers have been updated to link to the corresponding page in Introduction to Metaphysics, 2nd edition, 2014.
6 Martin Heidegger, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge, ed. Petra Jaeger (Gesamtausgabe 79) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1994), 3 (hereafter “GA 79”), translated as Bremen and Freiburg Lectures by Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 3.
7 GA 79: 4 (4).
9 Here, stellen is translated in various idioms of “to set.” The typical translations of stellen are “put, place, set, stand,” with strong overlaps with the verbs setzen and legen.
10 Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 23–24, citing the 1953 version of “Die Frage nach der Technik,” translated in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays by William Lovitt (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977), 16.
11 Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, 24 (17).
12 Ibid., 27 (19).
13 Ibid., 61 (173), citing the essay “Wissenschaft und Besinnung.”
14 GA 15: 105–6 (61–62).
15 GA 15: 106 (62).
16 GA 15: 107 (62).
17 GA 76: 307 and 302: “Grundverweisungszusammenhang.”
18 GA 76: 308.
19 GA 76: 307 and 297.
20 Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), 28, translated as Identity and Difference by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 35.
21 GA 15: 104 (60).
22 Ibid.
23 Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, 27 (35).
24 Ibid., 28 (36).
25 Ibid., 32 (40).
26 GA 76: 327.
27 GA 76: 255.
28 GA 76: 370.
29 Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik,” 36–43 (28–35).
31 GA 79: 46 (44).
32 GA 79: 53 (50).
33 “Spiegel-Gespräch mit Martin Heidegger,” in Martin Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges 1910–1976, ed. Hermann Heidegger (Gesamtausgabe 16) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000), 669–70 (hereafter “GA 16”), translated as “‘Only a God Can Save Us’: The Spiegel Interview (1966),” by William Richardson in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent, 1981), 56.
34 Martin Heidegger, Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), 16, translated as Discourse on Thinking by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 47.
35 It might be noted here that Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who was born and raised not too far from Messkirch, also developed his poetic sense of the Germany for which he was willing to fight and die directly from Swabian soil, inspired especially by the poetry of Hölderlin and Stefan George.
36 Heidegger, Gelassenheit, 25 (54).
37 Ibid., 20 (50).
38 Ibid., 25 (55).
39 Ibid., 27 (56).
40 Ibid., 26 (55).
41 Ibid., 28 (56).
42 Ibid., 26 (55).
43 Martin Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, ed. Mark Michalski (Gesamtausgabe 18) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002), 41 (hereafter “GA 18”), translated as Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy by Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 30.
45 Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet, ed. Hermann Mörchen (Gesamtausgabe 34) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1988), 208, translated as The Essence of Truth by Ted Sadler (London: Continuum, 2002), 150.
47 GA 34: 210 (151).
48 GA 16: 247.
49 Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens 1910–1976, ed. Hermann Heidegger (Gesamtausgabe 13) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983), 10.
50 Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in his Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1957), 23; translated as “The Origin of the Work of Art” by Alfred Hofstadter in Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 34. {2001, 33}
beyng.com: Links to PLT pages are to the 2001 edition. Where the page numbers differ the 2001 page numbers are in curly braces.
51 Martin Heidegger, “Bauen Wohnen Denken,” in his Vorträge und Aufsätze, 160, translated as “Building Dwelling Thinking” by Alfred Hofstadter in Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 161.
52 Heidegger, “Bauen Wohnen Denken,” 153 (152).
53 Ibid., 161 (160).
54 Ibid., 33 (44). {2001, 43}
55 Ibid., 35 (46). {2001, 45}
56 Ibid., 36 (48). {2001, 46}
57 Ibid., 37 (48). {2001, 47}
58 Ibid., 37 (49). {2001, 48}
59 Ibid., 38 (49).
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid., 49 (61). {2001, 59}
62 Ibid., 51 (62). {2001, 60}
63 Ibid., 59 (71). {2001, 69}
64 Ibid., 52 (64). {2001, 62}
66 Ibid., 37 (49). {2001, 47}
67 Martin Heidegger, “Modern Natural Science and Technology: Greetings to the Participants in the Tenth Colloquium [of the Heidegger Circle on] May 14–16, 1976, in Chicago,” Research in Phenomenology 7 (1977): 3–4.
Theodore Kisiel - How Heidegger Resolved the Tension between Technological Globalization and Indigenous Localization
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