Babette Babich
This essay highlights the default of questioning, along with logic and critical reflection, on techno-scientific principles and philosophical and theological questions. Heidegger's reflections on questioning and on technology are read alongside Günther Anders' reflections on the “antiquatedness” of the human being. In the wake of modern techno-science, what is most “question-worthy” is that we do not question – heightened in an age in which critique has come under attack and citizens are urged to “trust,” without questioning, what is called “the science.”
Das Zeitalter der gänzlichen Fraglosigkeit aller Dinge und Machenschaften hat begonnen.
The age of the thoroughgoing unquestionability of all things and machinations has begun.
Überlegungen V (GA 94: 315/229, tm)
Heidegger emphasizes the question “after” or “in the wake of” modern technology. Raising the question of the question at the outset of Being and Time, Heidegger tells us that “Every questioning is a seeking [Jedes Fragen ist ein Suchen]” (GA2: 6/SZ 5). John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson render Fragen as “inquiry” but Joan Stambaugh translates Fragen as I do, as “questioning.” A philosopher with an interest in sentences and categories, Heidegger explains that “Every questioning after … is in some fashion questioning of …” [Alles Fragen nach … ist in irgendeiner Weise anfragen bei…]” (GA2: 6/SZ 5.). In Being and Time, Heidegger's point is that almost immediately one overlooks the complex of what is involved in questioning. In “Die Frage nach der Technik,” as lead chapter in Heidegger's 1954 Vorträge und Aufsätze (followed by “Wissenschaft und Besinnung” [“Science and Reflection”]), a focus on questioning entails that one overlooks the meaning not of “Being,” as Tom Sheehan and a host of other Heideggerians might emphasize, but the small word ‘nach’: concerning or with regard to or after.
The reference to the order of time appears not only in Being and Time but also in Heidegger's 1938 “Die Zeit des Weltbildes.”1 William Lovitt and Harriet Brundage Lovitt advert to this temporal dimension,2 as do some others. Yet the Lovitts, even in the space of a two-volume “commentary,” say little concerning nach with respect to time. Thus, and typically, to question after something or someone undertakes an inquiry concerned with the given object (or person).3 Crucially, as I shall argue, Heidegger inquires into questioning following the epochal instauration of modern technology and to this extent his inquiry turns on the transformation, scientifico-pragmatic, anthropologico-instrumental, of questioning as such.
Seven years after Heidegger's Bremen lectures, two years after the publication of “The Question After Technology [Die Frage nach der Technik]” in Vorträge und Aufsätze, Günther Anders (born Günther Stern) publishes Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen [The Antiquatedness of Humanity].4 It is untypical to read Heidegger alongside Anders, his student, even when what is at stake is their shared concern with technology.5 Anders was also a student of Husserl's (we are told that Husserl invited Anders to be his assistant, an invitation he declined, but which underscores his phenomenological acuity) and Anders' writing efforts shadowed Heidegger's almost immediately, with Anders' book on having in 1928 and an essay on the question of Heidegger's “pseudoconcreteness” in 1948 in addition to his 1956 The Antiquatedness of Humanity, subtitled: Concerning the Soul in the Age of the Second Industrial Revolution [Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution]. Anders' monograph collating related thematic chapters emphasizes the specific time period [Zeitalter] of technology, framing his inquiry into the out-of-date quality of the human being factively “expired” in the sway of a serially dated (the “second” – we are today up to the fourth) industrial revolution.
In this light, we may read Heidegger as offering a reflection on the era, as Jacques Ellul also writes, of technicity [La technique] as the “gamble” or wager of the century [L'enjeu du siècle].6 For his part Heidegger speaks of Wage, “risk” or “venture.” I argue that Heidegger's lectures on technology reflect on questioning in the wake of technology. Such a focus on the temporal situatedness of Heidegger's reflection makes sense of his essay as a whole, including what Heidegger means by his initial reference to a “free” relation to technology (often misunderstood) and his reminder in closing that “questioning is the piety of thought [Denn das Fragen ist die Frömmigkeit des Denkens]” (GA 7: 36/QCT 35).
This approach to Heidegger's essay also argues that Heidegger matters for today's philosophy of technology, if it is true that the discipline increasingly brackets Heidegger, concerned as its practitioners are with AI (both ethics and ontology), that is, “big data,” but also robots, social and geo-locative media, and cybernetics, etc. Authors like Yuk Hui insert the title of Heidegger's essay into their monographs but shift discussion to other things, like China and the ethnographic impossibility of parsing “technology.”7
The observation that Heidegger has diminished influence in recent philosophy of technology is borne out by word or citation frequency, yet this does not mean that Heidegger is “unread” (how would one know this? what would this mean?). At issue in what follows is a hermeneutic engagement, as what it means to read a text is fluid, as we know after Heidegger and Gadamer and especially after Nietzsche. Not all readers are as hermeneutically minded as one perhaps ought to be to “read” either Heidegger or Nietzsche (this is philology),8 and “reading,” the very idea, is complicated as there are issues of popularity in technology studies which reflect what can/cannot be written about, and questioning per se tends not to be a theme in technology studies. Indeed, those who write on philosophy of technology skip a good many topics, including vaccine adjuvants and GMO foods and glyphosate, except in generic discussions of global injustice, such that for most philosophers of technology (I make an exception for Vandana Shiva and not her epigones), it is not about the technology (and arguably it should be). Today's philosopher of technology prefers to make “type II errors,” sidestepping anything so controversial as causal attributions, preserving one's professional “reputation” as Daniel Lee Kleinman argues.9 Kleinman explains why hermeneutics cannot but seem irrelevant for science/technology using a smoothly Lutheran readerly parallel:
The most traditional view of science understands knowledge to be the product of reading reality off nature. There is nothing between the reader and what is read, and a good reader produces something like truth.10
Most scholars who write about technology do not suppose that hermeneutic phenomenology or critical reflection, much less Heideggerian “questioning,” could be required. A similar argument may be made for discussions of chemical environmental contaminants, the physics of 9/11, 5g and other cell-phone radiation, and microwave ovens, etc., airport screening, chemtrails, weather and atmospheric modification under the cover of vaunted “climate change” (perhaps with the exception of Peter Sloterdijk),11 along with medical tech, including mRNA technology, lipid nanoparticles, and the politics of the compulsory inoculation of global populations. All too ontic affairs perhaps.
To this extent, Heidegger's essay can seem inapt, given his references to forest wardens (and forbears) measuring “cut timber” or speaking of a region's natural “resources” (Heidegger's Black Forest), along with coal districts, as he mentions these along with aerial transport of goods and military requisites along with passenger travel in the case of airliners “ready for take-off” on the runway and windmills and hydroelectric plants, not to mention “the supply of patients for a clinic.”12
Why is Heidegger's essay structured as it is? What is the relevance of Heidegger's analysis of causality? Heidegger gives us his own answer, rather different from popular readings of the “fourfold,” telling us that we cannot understand “causality” and, quite in combination with causality, “instrumentality,” and thus that to this same extent our standard, pragmatic definition of technology has to remain “obscure and groundless” (GA 7: 10/QCT 7). Here we recall that Heidegger had already explained technology – “die Technik” as “a contrivance [Einrichtung], or in Latin: an instrumentum” (GA 7: 8/QCT 5). How do we read that given our ongoing dedication to Aristotelian readings of Heidegger? Are these Aristotelian readings Greek (and Heidegger will insist that we need the Greek to begin to inquire into technology) or do they, as Heidegger seems to argue, fall under the dominion of the same Latinization: “what the Romans call causa” (GA 7: 10/QCT 7)?
Why Heidegger at all? In consumer, i.e., high-tech, society, as Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Ellul and Anders and Herbert Marcuse have analysed this, there is an enduring itch for the new, as Heidegger complains in his Black Notebooks (the quest for novelty should perhaps be central to technology studies). This infuses the field itself as newer names tend overwhelmingly to be preferred along with favored schools (Stiegler, Simondon as Ellul already emphasizes him, once, perhaps, Kittler), and a variety of theorists associated with cybernetics13 may be set against the gnomic quality of Heidegger's proclamation that “the essence of technology is nothing technological” or his invocation of “the danger” [die Gefahr] or, as Heidegger cites Hölderlin – himself already sufficiently gnomic – on “the saving power” [“das Rettende”].14
At a meeting of the Heidegger Circle convened in 2001 on the theme of technology and science,15 Don Ihde (1934–2024) asserted that Heidegger was “innocent” of the habitus of philosophy of science. The claim is inaccurate, and Ihde, arguably, knew this, given his association with his Stony Brook colleague, the Dublin-born Patrick Aidan Heelan (1926–2015), the Jesuit and physicist and continental philosopher of science who wrote on technoscience with respect to Heidegger (and Heisenberg).16 Ignoring Heelan (and Kockelmans and Kisiel) with respect to Heidegger, Ihde was concerned to make the rhetorical case that philosophy of technology should mirror philosophy of science.17 Heelan, more careful, would have recognized that this “should” would resonate with David Hilbert's “must” for students and theorists of mathematics: “We must know – we will know,” along with all its associated problems circa 1900, as this eventually leads to Husserl's crisis writings.18 So, far from writing on the Husserl of the crisis, Ihde misses the Kantian constellation for any philosophy of science as the idea of science served as muster, the “royal road” (logic, mathematics, physics), for any philosophy worthy of coming forth as a “science.” As it happens, philosophy of science (still conflicted between so-called “analytic” and so-called “continental” articulations)19 is not, pace Ihde, a “science” [Wissenschaft] to begin with. Thus, “philosophy of science,” no matter whether “analytic” or “continental,” is addressed only to like-minded philosophers of science but not the scientists themselves who remain unpersuaded that philosophy of science (analytic or continental) has anything to offer science.20 Here, too, the issue of time is key as Heidegger reflects on Ge-Stell, specifically “‘setting [stellen],’” that modern technophysics “sets” nature “up” to reveal itself “as a calculable coherence of forces [berechenbaren Kräftezusammenhang],” arguing that nature already, in a seeming inversion of history, was “set-up” to exhibit itself as “a coherence of forces calculable in advance [vorausberechenbaren Zusammenhang von Kräften]” (GA 7: 22/QCT 25).
The political complicates matters. This is all postwar, even mid-war (given Korea, etc.) thought. In addition, a Heidegger-phobic trend dominates the variously defined “post-phenomenological” turn. Also common, if wildly ahistorical, is the assertion (part of Ihde's rhetoric) that Heidegger propounds a pre-modern “criticism” of technology.21 This in turn is related to the political judgment of Heidegger as “Black Forest red-neck” in Richard Rorty's famous phrasing, recently cited as a direct communication to Tracy B. Strong (1943–2022) in his 2022: “Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt: Why Become a Party Member?”22
With rare exceptions, philosophy of technology tends towards the laudatory: isn't science wonderful? isn't nature grand? It is not about questioning, as it mimes the technological mind/machine or technological “actant” (Bruno Latour) in addition to making direct appeals to corporate interests, the better to garner external funding (i.e., support from industry, sometimes called “impact,” at least in the UK).
In a similar vein, it may be argued that today's digital regime has even less patience than Heidegger could imagine with “aletheic” truth, and newer ai dedication explicitly entails “that nature reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation [rechnerisch] and that it remains orderable as a system of information” (GA 7: 24/VA 26). But calculation excludes questioning and aspires to the instrumental (and anthropological) conceptions of technology that miss what Heidegger means to put in question as the “essence” of modern technoscience.
Crucially today, given the current “situation” (to use a term both Heidegger and Anders use), we live on the terms of current tactical/ practical complications in a regimen of local and world government overtly dedicated to silencing questioning and increasingly criminalizing critique/dissent. In the age of Covid, i.e., the pandemic/post pandemic era, one is advised to “trust” authority, both corporate and civic, and thus to “believe” in “the science.”23 Those who question are branded as “conspiracy theorists” or indeed, complete with legal sanctions, threatened as “domestic terrorists.”
Although a hermeneutic phenomenologist by formation, and although only rarely connected with critical theory, Heidegger is irrecusably critical as a thinker. Apart from the association with critical theory and the Frankfurt school, which is why I have argued that it is useful to read Heidegger with Anders (and Adorno), there is Heidegger's focus on Kant. To this same degree, Heidegger's reflection on questioning in his 1927 Being and Time may recall Hermann Cohen's 1902 System der Philosophie, where Cohen clarifies questioning in terms of the “self-sameness of Being [Selbigkeit des Seins]” qua “reflex of the identity of thinking.”24 Noting the inception of “scientific philosophy” with Parmenides by way of the precisely open ended question “Was ist?” (τί ἐστι), the philosophical project, for Cohen, proceeds as a matter of differentiation, i.e., making distinctions, whereby “the logical significance [Bedeutung] of the question … is the beginning of knowledge [Anfang der Erkenntnis].”25 Instructively for Heidegger, Cohen explains: “the question is the foundation of judgment, one might say, the foundation stone of foundation [Grundstein zur Grundlage].”26
Being and Time thus reflects on a specific question, the “Being question,” qua unasked and thus, as Heidegger tells us, forgotten and, to this end, as already cited, Heidegger unpacks “what belongs to any question whatsoever” (GA 2: 6/SZ 5). Similarly, reflecting on “the question” after modern technology, Heidegger invites us to reflect on the nature of questioning and thought itself, language, including the embodied mortality of the inquirer. In this way, Heidegger sets sense-directed reflection [Besinnung] for embodied, mortal beings against “calculative thinking,” as it is not a given that a mortal being dies its “own” death, as Heidegger emphasizes (to the discomfit of many commentators and for a number of reasons). Hence, Heidegger argues that not every finite being can die. They can “perish,” Heidegger says, they can be “liquidated” as Adorno says. In an alternative explication of what Heidegger means by “authenticity,” for Adorno, what is “expropriated” in Auschwitz is the victim's “poorest possession,”27 whereby it is “no longer an individual who died, but a specimen.”28
Anders continues Adorno's “specimen” explication, developing Heidegger's notion of the human as “standing reserve” in his 1980 volume of the Antiquatedness of the Human, here using language reminiscent of Heidegger, of the “manufacture of corpses,” observing that the
transformation of the human being into raw material (if we overlook the age of cannibals), began in Auschwitz. That from the corpses of the inmates of the concentration camps (which themselves were already products because human beings were not killed, but corpses manufactured [Leichname hergestellt]), certainly hair and gold teeth were extracted, probably also the fat rendered to be used as a raw material.29
Anders, who is already talking about cloning and gene manipulation, foregrounds the war booty brought home from the bodies of Japanese soldiers by American GIs, which booty he had seen, “with his own eyes,” emphasizing that these soldiers displayed these looted body parts as trophies or prizes “cluelessly [arglos].”30
The French social philosopher Paul Virilio (1932–2018) takes Anders' point with regard to contemporary technology, reminding us that genetic engineering as such began “already” in Auschwitz-Birkenau.31 In my study of Anders' philosophy of technology, I reflect on what Anders calls “Homo materia.”32 As Tracy Strong reflects on Heidegger, technology, and the political, he quotes Heidegger quoting Heisenberg: “it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.”33 If we note that Heisenberg is the exemplary scientist of the most technologically and elusively complicated kind of physics, namely quantum mechanics with its challenges to thinking objectivity and subjective observation,34 Strong's further argumentation comes into view:
It is for this reason that Heidegger thinks that the atom bomb, the factory slaughtering of animals for food, and the concentration camps (which “manufactured corpses”) are of a family. This equation is not consequent to an insensitivity but reflects his understanding that for a technician the difference between production and destruction is irrelevant.35
The prospect of non-being, death, and dying – the last on an ontic and everyday level regularly ignored/refused – frames the question of “authentic Da-sein.” A questioning reflection, should it be asked, would be (properly, actually) philosophical by contrast with the rational, calculative (and effectively unquestioning and hence unphilosophical because solution-informed and answer-driven) project of Western, technologically articulated, and advancing science. Reflective thinking would open its own way, just as “questioning always builds a way” (GA 7: 7/QCT 3) by its disclosive questioning advance (ground, object, and aim). To this same extent, Heidegger argues that questioning “is the unique habitat and locus of thinking” (GA 8: 189/185). Opposed to the transparent and calculative (and modern technological) inquiry that presupposes answers or solutions, such authentic (disclosive) questioning is rare.
Here is it worth wondering about that rarity.
Why is questioning so rare that Heidegger can indicate that it is for the “few and the seldom”?
We take ourselves to know what questioning is. Do we? Why does Heidegger need to unpack what belongs to any questioning whatever?
What are we doing when we question?
Philosophy is said to be about wonder and thereby would seem to have been all about questioning from its inception. This we know, Plato tells us so, demonstrating the tactic as he does by way of a range of various ironies.36 Yet given that questioning seems picture-book philosophy and given that everyone does tend to take themselves to be familiar with it, philosophical literature is less than overfull of inquiries into the nature of questioning. Perhaps this is a consequence of the circumstance in which one questions. Everyone turns into not Socrates but Thrasymachus. For the most part when one raises a question, the inquirer seems to be not so very much in search of knowing (thus the irony with respect to Plato in the passage from the Sophistes Heidegger quotes) as much as the inquirer can appear to (pre)suppose a circumscribed or likely answer that would count in advance as an answer, and to this extent it can seem one already “knows.” This can fit a Platonic epistemology as one is either in possession of the answer or supposes that one knows, actually or potentially, what a likely reply would look like.
Heidegger compounds the rarity of questioning by repeating that one can only be underway to questioning. Thus, Heidegger distinguishes “disclosive questioning” from what are typically regarded as “problems” (“puzzles” characterizing most scientific and philosophic “questions”), distinguishing the focus on calculating value at the same time from recognizing what is “worth” putting into question:
To deem worthy that which is question-worthy means to question – to place into the open realm – indeed to first found the open realm and set it up. Deeming worthy is radically different from valuing, which always remains a calculating. (GA 94: 504–505/367)
Heidegger saw this move toward conventionality as a matter of “valuing,” which in his own day, he also named “one-track thinking” and dogmatism, and we may recall that Nietzsche had argued this with some vehemence in terms of his own criticism of the “paper slave” (i.e., dedicated/devoted reader of the newspaper, today that would be the consumer of social media, Twitter, TikTok, etc) in Human, All-too-Human.37
Above I noted that already at the outset of Being and Time, Heidegger reflects on questioning, highlighted as Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being. If few books have been quite as carefully read, word by word, line by line, as Being and Time, surprisingly little attention has been paid to Heidegger's remarks on questioning.38 Straightforward, even overtly didactic, Heidegger's remarks seem as self-evident as “Being.” Of course, there are readings of Heidegger on questioning, such as Bernard Waldenfels' systematic register of questioning in his Antwort-Register, yet these are quickly diffused via different philosophical traditions.39
Among such readings, the Aarhus philosopher Pia Lauritzen has a book entitled Questions with a subtitle: Between Identity and Difference.40 Indebted to Waldenfels in addition to the Dutch philosopher of technology Vincent Blok, Lauritzen thematizes posing or setting [stellen] a question, following T. C. Oudemans' definition of the thetic essence of a question [“das sie gestellt … wird”], which, although celebrating the English “posing,”41 excludes the English idiom of “raising” or provoking, etc. Yet Lauritzen does not attend to the stylistic difference (this makes a difference when it comes to questioning) between analytic and continental modalities of philosophy.
A distinction Reiner Schürmann had already adverted to as long in the tooth in the last century,42 the “difference” between analytic and continental is stylistic not geographic. Yet analytic philosophers insist on finding issues of style “difficult” or “unclear” (at issue is complexity) despite detailed studies of style in aesthetics and in literature, etc. In Lauritzen's case, there is also a need to attend to the difference between German and Danish (quite, as Denmark has for a long time been as analytic as, starting with the 1970s, Germany).43 Thus Lauritzen mentions, only to dismiss as an oddity, the sustained reflection on the question in a Germanist and perforce socio-linguistic context, Aron Ronald Bodenheimer's Warum? Von der Obzönität des Fragens [Why? Concerning the Obscenity of the Question].44 Note that analytic philosophers happily suppose it perfectly reasonable to invoke Harry Frankfurt's 1986 On Bullshit, qua vulgar in-your-face tactic, which has everything to do with what John Austin argued, re doing things “with words.”45 For his part, Bodenheimer explains the conjunction between questioning and obscenity and how they relate to one another: shame is involved, risking or putting someone on the spot, and at issue is both psychoanalysis and the joke and things that go without saying.
As Nietzsche puts a reference to the obscene, the “indecent”46 – using the carefully polite unanständig – in the little question/answer dialogue between a mother and her small daughter on deity's omnipresence at the close of his 1886 preface to the second edition of The Gay Science, the “bad taste” of seeking to know or investigate everything for the sake of “truth at any price” (GS §iv) reflects on the obscenity of aletheic truth as such (Baubo/Βαυβώ). A certain irony is essential to read this in connection with Nietzsche's project given that he begins with the capacity for laughter with reference to both Plato (on the less-than-serious quality of human affairs) and Aeschylus.
For Lauritzen, questioning is “virtually unexplored.”47 And although “questioning” is a parallel theme alongside Heidegger's claims concerning the Seinsfrage, questioning as such is not typically the object of a hermeneutic. Here one could argue for an object hermeneutic (in terms of use) in Bodenheimer's Warum? – although Bodenheimer notes that raising the question concerning questioning, one cannot oneself question, a point highlighting Heidegger's specifically hermeneutic phenomenology of questioning.
Making his own intentions clear in the title of his book on the research traditions of questioning, for Waldenfels, we inevitably fall into the question (and thereby assume or presuppose the question) we are asking.48 In the case of the Being question, commentators are usually focused on Being (or in some cases on meaning). And, once again, it is easy to assume everyone knows what it is to question – like the assumption that one knows how to whistle and that doing so is simple, just to recall the line from the 1944 film, To Have and Have Not, in the exchange between Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart.
What is problematic for Heidegger, as he quotes Plato's Sophist concerning those who think they know, is that we do not question Being (or technology) and thereby assume Being (and technology). This assumption can lead us to dismiss the Being question as an issue for reflection:
Every questioning is a seeking [Suchen]. Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought. Questioning is a cognizant seeking for an entity both with regard to the fact that it is and with regard to its Being as it is. This cognizant seeking can take the form of “investigating [Untersuchen],” in which one lays bare that which the question is about and ascertains its character. (GA 2: 7/SZ 5)49
Laying out what belongs to questioning, Heidegger articulates inquiry qua investigation – this, Waldenfels says, has a detectivistic aspect (for the same reason, one might reference television's Peter Falk as Lt. Columbo). Questioning is always expressed in terms of what is inquired about, directed by whatever it is that we are asking after or inquiring into. In “specifically theoretical” or what Heidegger calls “investigative questions,” questioning both determines and conceptualizes “what is asked about.”
What technē does, what modern technology or calculative scientific methodology does, alters questioning. Today we no longer question, we google, the process rendering/engendering what will be regarded as AI.50 Thus, when Heidegger asks after questioning in the wake of technology, he emphasizes that modern technology frames (and to this extent outlines) “what is” – thus the title “Einblick in das was ist” (GA 79) – reduced thereby to problems and solutions. Morphologically, the interrogative form remains; the spirit of questioning vanishes.
To quote again from the outset of Being and Time:
Any questioning, as a questioning about something, has that which is asked about [sein Gefragtes]. But all questioning about … is somehow a questioning of … [Anfragen bei…]. So in addition to what is asked about, questioning has that which is interrogated [ein Befragtes]. (GA 2: 7/SZ 5)
Therefore, Heidegger reminds us,
in what is asked about there lies also that which is to be found out by the asking [das Erfragte]; this is what is really intended: with this the questioning reaches its goal. (GA 2: 7/SZ 5)
Lauritzen's socio-linguistic Questions Between Identity and Difference uses Heidegger's framework as inspiration for a series of interrogative sentence diagrams. In the formally related medieval tradition (and Heidegger begins with a thesis on the categorical doctrine of Duns Scotus, himself author of “Questions” on Aristotle's Categories, Metaphysics, De interpretatione),51 there are extensive reflections on questioning52 as in logic proper.53 Invoking Caputo's Truth, Martin Kočí reminds us (and note that we have more patience for this in an expressly theological as opposed to a philosophical context), “Questioning is the way of continual interruption.”54
We have questions, and, in an important sense, questions can have us. We do not say we “are” a question, at least not in the tradition, as the poet says we “are a conversation.” Thus, Anders/Stern publishes Sein und Haben,55 exemplifying the influence of his teachers: Husserl, Heidegger, and Scheler. If Anders' early book would be influential in French thought for Gabriel Marcel as well as Levinas and Deleuze, and influential in Italian and German scholarship, it remains invisible in Anglophone scholarship, particularly when it comes to Heidegger. Indeed, simply to mention Anders with respect to Heidegger in an Anglophone context can be risky, as I began by adverting to this. Nevertheless, Anders' study of having, especially his penultimate chapter “Satz und Situation,” is useful for understanding Heidegger on “Situation” both as questioning and as technology.
Following Heidegger on questioning, Anders adds his own reflections, listing in one of his footnotes (a preferred locus for Anders):
1. The question is asked.
2. The answer is sought.
3. Questioned or questioned about is the object, the area, the horizon in which something is in question.
4. Questioned – and that is what makes the question essentially communicative – is the addressed.
Ad. 2. Questioned is the objective (subsequently articulated in the answer), the fact of the matter; but, in a certain sense, however, also the solution, the answer itself.56
Tacking through Husserl with a reflection on “what is the case,” Anders articulates what becomes signal for his philosophy of technology, yoking as he does both Heidegger and Kant. Exemplifying a “concrete” hermeneutic phenomenology, what makes a question pressing as such? Attending to “the situation,”57 Anders highlights the “situational dependency” of any question, addressed in terms we may recognize from Heidegger's original grammatological reflection on von Humboldt, unpacking what is inherent “in the elements of the judgment itself: in the ‘here’, in the ‘I’, in the ‘you’, ultimately in the ‘there.’”58 At issue is to localize what makes a given question an “urgent” one.
Using the medical category of the “urgent” deepens “situational dependence,” evading anything like a kind of “grammatical acuteness index, a situational indication, from every question.”59
In the wake of Anders’ influence, French existentialism highlights the phenomenology of the “urgent question.” For Anders,
the urgent question lurks [lauert]; the urgent question torments [quält]. Basically, both expressions mean one and the same thing – nevertheless from different aspects: the lurking is the movement of the question insofar as it tends towards an answer; torment is the movement of the question insofar as it strikes back at the questioner who evoked it.60
It is the question that presses on one that is connected to the body, being immediately, very personally, what is meant when I say, as Anders writes, shifting from the first person singular to the first person plural: “‘my body.’ We have a body. We have.”61 In the case of the urgent question, qua posed and framed as urgent, what is key is the pressing character of what is sought. This is what Anders means by the lurking (lauernden) or looming character of the question one has as it holds one, like the breath, in abeyance:
Looming [Die Lauer], the breath held back until the answer is given, is the intentionality of the question – essentially concretized in time. One remains in the question until it is no longer a question, while one cannot really linger in the judgment, the closed facts of which are lost in the mass of uniform judgments; or at least can only linger insofar as it still allows doubts, ambiguities, and depths to be suspected.62
Anders offers a phenomenology of philosophical or scientific research or querying impetus. This deserves separate treatment, but what should already be clear is that Anders, like Heidegger, remains in the framework of scholarly, even “scholastic,” reflection on the judgment to be made, affirmatively or negatively, affirmo/nego, as William J. Richardson, S.J., and others call attention to this parallel, all the while being attuned to what keeps a question a question and as such. Thus for Anders,
Only lingering and torture are capable of sustaining a question as a question at all. For a “pure sense of questioning” is not a unity; it actually consists in the “not yet” and has no being, if not by the grace of the urgent situation.63
Anders takes the question of the question to the issue of (the question for) that being for whom existence is an issue. For Anders, in this existential abandonment to the question as it presses on one, “to question” in this sense
means “looking for a way out.” Thus the question begins where despair becomes relative; [the question] determines itself in one direction, or at least allows itself an unquestionable level as fundamental for questioning; where it becomes doubt.64
The lived, bodily urgency of such questions is directly relevant to the thematic of Heidegger's reflection on Da-sein, to which Anders adds what he will maintain to be a more “concrete” reflection:
Within this level of one's own existence, which is recognized as a matter of course, the question is no longer just an absence, but itself, qua questionability, qua question situation, a positive existent. And this situation, if still directionless, but in relation to which the directed question plays about the same role of theoretical disambiguation as the correct answer in relation to the question – this situation, which one may call crisis, vacillation or despair, is the condition of questioning in general.65
For Anders, what remains at issue presupposes a Daseinsanalyse:
The “objective” determination of when a question is actually or really urgent, or more urgent than another, is still outstanding. Shall the fact that it “torments” one or that one is concerned with it be the criterion? Are there not seeming delusions about the degree of urgency, declarations of acuteness, torment, concerning the situational implication of a question to the questioner as being urgent par excellence, all the while others would “actually” be the most urgent?66
Picking up on Heidegger's articulation of the question, methodologically, Hans-Georg Gadamer explains that the “essence of the question is the opening up and keeping open of possibilities.”67 Thus, Gadamer highlights Heidegger's attention to modality as this has to do with the epochal suspension, as he says, of our own prejudice(s). For this reason, I emphasize Gadamer's expression of being “brought up short” by a text, a conviction, a supposition, even a technological or scientific apparatus or phenomenon.68 In such cases, Gadamer argues that this “asserts itself in its own separate validity,” and thus he can remind us that this kind of assertion has qua “suspension of judgments and hence, a fortiori, of prejudices, logically the structure of a question.”69
This is the effective hermeneutic that characterizes Gadamer's more Platonic reflection on the question by contrast with the Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan's more modern and Thomist reflection on what the Seattle philosopher Paul Kidder calls the “‘virtually unconditioned,’” that is to say, as Kidder explains, the “conditioned state of affairs whose conditions have been met,”70 which is to say, quite as Lonergan would (and did) say, just when there are no further questions. To say this is exactly to say that one is not questioning. Thus, what Gadamer understands as openness is not equivalent to the “virtually unconditioned” but, like Waldenfels' “interplay” between question and answer, a “dialectic” proceeding “by way of question and answer or rather, by way of the development of all knowledge through the question.”71 One has to want to question: one cannot begin by thinking (or supposing) there is an answer at hand or that one is in possession of it. This is the essential openness to the dialectic of dialogue or conversation as well as to the other, a Heideggerian insight as Gadamer explains:
The openness of what is in question consists in the fact that the answer is not settled. It must still be undetermined, in order that a decisive answer can be given. The revelation of the questionability of what is questioned constitutes the sense of the question.72
This directionality is what Heidegger means when he says at the outset of “The Question Concerning Technology,” “Questioning builds a way” (GA 7: 7/QCT 3).
Here we recall that Bodenheimer reminds us that it is Kant who insists – this is the very first sentence of the first edition of the first critique – on the oppression of questioning as a specific characteristic of human reason. I've argued that Kant may be regarded as a key source for Freud's unconscious, and here Heidegger's debt to Kant is evident. I cite here first in German and then in Kemp-Smith's translation:
Die menschliche Vernunft hat das besondere Schicksal in einer Gattung ihrer Erkenntnisse: daß sie durch Fragen belästigt wird, die sie nicht abweisen kann, denn sie sind ihr durch die Natur der Vernunft selbst aufgegeben, die sie aber auch nicht beantworten kann, denn sie übersteigen alles Vermögen der menschlichen Vernunft.
Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.73
Bodenheimer observes that “the talk is that of a burdening [Belästigung]”74 of reason by reason itself. This reflex is Kant's own as he explains that for the sake of a science of nature, reason cannot be content with studying nature but must direct questions of its own formulation, quite on the model of juridical cross examination, as he gives the illustration of a judge putting questions in a court of law, a Kantian reflection on the modality of philosophico-techno-scientific interrogation that Anders articulates as: “torturing things [die Dinge foltern] until they confess.”75
The “confession” in Anders' formula foregrounds the Kantian framework, quite as Kant wrote that physics, i.e., natural science, was an a priori accord consequent to the same logic of questioning:
They learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature's leading-strings.76
To echo Kant, questioning is the “royal road” to truth, but the legalistic compulsion,77 or techno-scientific “torture” as Anders foregrounds this, remains key. Reason requires the schematism, an architectonic, “with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason's own determining.”78
Heidegger's October 1931 Black Notebook features an epigraph drawn from Plato's Theaetetus, πάντα γὰρ τολμητέον, in Burnet's translation, as Heidegger favors it: “For all things are to be ventured” (GA 94: 3).79 With respect to questioning, Heidegger explains:
All questioning is disclosive questioning [ Alles Fragen ist erfragen ]; all investigating and analyzing a fortiori and in the first place, all projecting and forming of a work, constitute an effecting. (GA 94: 31/24)
In 1927, Heidegger had advanced the project of asking after as explicit “questioning into” or “concerning” what he claimed had been forgotten as a question throughout the history of philosophy, namely “Being,” here written as “Seyn” – “what is most question-worthy is beyng” (GA 94: 231/169). Also to be questioned for Heidegger would be Da-sein, along with hermeneutic phenomenological philosophic investigation and science and technology. In each case, Heidegger proposes a “retrieved questioning.”
Heidegger emphasizes “the question of Being and Time as a question” (GA 94: 264/193), by contrast with what is currently on offer as a “perversion” of questioning “into the serfdom [Knechtschaft] of self-absorbed science” (GA 94: 49/37). What is lost and must in consequence be regained, this is the point of a retrieve, is “the beginning,” which for Heidegger is possible only if we ourselves have “taken up the questioning” (GA 94: 51/39).
Heidegger means the eponymous focus on questioning as venturing as he writes: “Questioning is more rending and harder than all the empty sharpness of ‘thinking’; it is more rousing and provocative than all appropriated feelings” (GA 94: 85/63). The project, articulated in terms of his “concept of world [Weltbegriff],” underlines “questioning that pushes itself to its limits, where it experiences itself exposed to what is most question-worthy” (GA 94: 215/156). At stake, and here, again, we note that the notion of “venture [Wage]” is key, is disclosive questioning:
Every question not only desires an answer but above all demands a venture. And the ability to weigh and dominate the venture is already more than an answer: for the latter is just as impossible as a question for itself. (GA 94: 228/167)
The tension between question and answer goes back before Plato to Heraclitus and for Plato with all the resources of irony (and dialectic) with the immediate counterpoint already to be heard in the mouth of Thrasymachus who declared – it was not a debate on either side – as he challenges Socrates: “it is easier to ask questions than to answer them.”80
One may keep this contrast in mind as Heidegger writes concerning “Questioning [Das Fragen]”:
One is ill-humored, if not even indignant, over the attitude and demand for constant questioning. Those who behave in such a way do not realize that the muchcalled- for answer is always only the last step of questioning in a series of many previous question-steps [Frageschritte]. (GA 94: 234/171, tm)
If the focus on questioning is sufficiently plain that one translator takes the distinction to sidestep reflection (reminding us that we could be “asking for” or else “asking about”),81 then the point is certainly correct but shifts the focus from questioning as such to the intended aim (almost as Lonergan will define the “purposiveness” of the question), asking about or after or concerning. Heidegger, however, unpacks questioning qua questioning, telling us what belongs to, what is presupposed by and effected or enacted by, any question whatsoever in Being and Time well in advance of the interrogative titling of his 1951–1952 What is Called Thinking?, the course he gives upon his return to teaching after being banned from the university after the war. The focus on the question runs throughout the Black Notebooks, from 1931–1938 and onward, including the period of his greatest notoriety, including the era of his thirteen months as Rector at the University of Freiburg, the delivery of his Rektoratsrede, when he was commissioned, essential when considering his references to Nietzsche in these notebooks to Ernst Krieck and Alfred Baeumler (whom he names an “inverted Klages”), to serve on the editorial board for a Nazi edition of Nietzsche's works.
Here, in addition to his focus on technology and beyond his political ventures (on this, again, one should read Strong on Heidegger/Schmitt), beyond, as I have emphasized, his concern with the reception of his work (particularly Being and Time), Heidegger reads between Nietzsche and Hölderlin, quite as I have underlined, as has Schürmann.82 Questioning remains the guiding thread: “In the age of the ‘loudspeaker,’ all that can still essentially be effective is the unquestioning silence of the inconspicuous in the guise of that which ‘does not come into question’” (GA 94: 245/179).
Heidegger's reference to the “age of the ‘loudspeaker’” seems to cement the crudity of Rorty's quip characterizing Heidegger's Black Forest reactionary sensibility, and this seems to resonate with Heidegger's own reflections on “foreignness” amidst his fellow Alemannic tribe (insisting on the Hölderlinian “zephyrs” surrounding his mother's ancestral farmlands).83 We raise our eyebrows perhaps (at best) or, still more likely, we may find this risible, noting a certain preoccupation with “noise” on Heidegger's part.84 Thus Heidegger goes on to denounce the Nazis, including the more assertive Nazi philosophers of his era, for their publicly orchestrated “exaggeration and out-screaming [Übertreibung und Überschreiung]” (GA 65: 131/91, tm). Elsewhere I (and others) discuss Heidegger's emphasis on stillnesss, silence, reticence, but his attention to “noise,” almost speaking in Anders' voice of a very effective and literal “‘prostitution’ into noisiness [»Prostitution« in das Gelärm]” (GA 96: 92), also fits his attention to the requirements for silence. Heidegger's sensitivity to sound, like Nietzsche's sensitivity (thus Nietzsche philosophizes with a “hammer”), is keenly personal, and academic readers, depending on their sensibilities, may be more/less sympathetic. Yet Heidegger is not merely (though psychologically, on a personal level, he may have been) excessively sensitive to those who “noisily” seek to outdo one another. There is an ontic component, and loudspeaker technology was a targeted political invention, like the radio receiver (Volksempfänger), deployed for the purposes of propaganda by party order, invented as a technology in 1933 (that would be Goebbels) in the “service” of National Socialism for the specific purpose of party rallies for shouting/outshouting.85
Following his 1938 reflections on science and world image/view and later in What is Called Thinking, Heidegger highlights the growing failure of thinking that is the attenuation of questioning. Built into “actual” questioning is the tendency, Heidegger argues, not to question: “questions as process – are more powerful than answers. With the answer, Da-sein comes to a stop” (GA 94: 251/184).
Some scholars suggest that the idea of Gelassenheit inspires Heidegger's meditation on the technoscience stakes of our setting-upon not merely of the Rhine (to recall Heidegger's example of hydropower) but the broader fuel industry, not “fossil” fuels alone but all fuels, even so called “green energy” as we say today (massively misleadingly given the mining involved, along with the damage to the land and its creatures, not to mention the dependency on an existing grid or energy set-up), in terms of what Heidegger characterizes as “the devastation, indeed the godlessness, the dehumanization of humanity into the animal, the using up of the earth, the speculating of world” (GA 96: 52/41, tm). The point of “sustainable development,” the political rhetoric of “climate change,” is ongoing exploitation, “development” without end, but within a new kind of set-up, the “reset,” imposing specific restrictions that enhance only certain industries and only certain profits.
To this same extent, questioning is out of the question. It is not a matter of becoming more or less “green,” more or less attuned to the environment, to other earthly beings, including animals and plants, the earth as such and itself, as the late Bruno Latour (1947–2022) has sought to argue, following Lovelock's and Margulis' bio-ecological Gaia hypothesis.86 Much rather, implicit in technology – and this is the benefit of speaking of Ge-Stell as a “set-up” – is the switching that for Heidegger excludes87 “hacking” the environment as we might imagine it, good Cartesians as we are, in our own image. The set-up can allow a coordination with setting upon, but it is far from simple: interlocked, it is not to be broken and thus, once again: questioning is out of the question.
In a series of examples in The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger highlights the energy industry when regions are re-defined, as they were post wwii, in terms of natural “resources,” expressed in economic terms: “driving on to the maximum yield at the minimum expense” (GA 7: 16/QCT 15). Thus the “demand” put to nature is that it “supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such” (GA 7: 14/QCT 14), and all the debates on climate change have altered nothing about this stockpiling demand.
Unlike new behemoths of wind farm technology, the same “demand” is not imposed because it cannot be imposed by old windmills: “the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it” (GA 7: 15/QCT 14). Old wind technology cannot stockpile energy on demand. This difference, that is, the Ge-Stell, makes the difference between old and new wind technologies. (That these new wind technologies are strikingly inefficient – once again: they require an existing “grid” and cannot function apart from it – has nothing to do with their political allure).
It is not a matter of ecological investment or household management, that is, of having something calculatedly on reserve “that it may simply be present somewhere or other,” but very precisely, and this is the point of standing reserve: to be “on call, ready to deliver the sun's warmth that is stored in it” (GA 7: 15/QCT 15). Thus, “being on call” is the “set-up” and this is what it is to be “stockpiled.” Heidegger uses the same term, lagern, he employs at the outset of his lecture on “The Origin of the Work of Art” when it comes to Beethoven's scores, similarly “stockpiled” in the storerooms of publishing houses so as to be available on demand and including the necessity to liberate space for the purpose. The “Raum” needed, as he specifies this here, is specifically appropriated, claimed or reclaimed, as Heidegger writes when speaking about “Autobahn bridges” in “Bauen Wohnen Denken”: “freigemachter Platz für Siedlung und Lager [a place cleared and freed for settlement and lodging]” (GA 7: 156/PLT 154). In the case of modern technology, “challenging forth” has a lock step ordering. The effect inevitably transforms nature as a whole into what he famously described as “a giant gasoline station.” For Heidegger
That challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed and what is distributed is switched about ever anew [das Gespeicherte wieder verteilt und das Verteilte erneut umgeschaltet wird]. (GA 7: 17/QCT 16)
This is a perpetual motion machine set in motion, which incidentally, but no less essentially, excludes questions.
Heidegger could not be more technical about the automatic, unthinking, unquestioning essence of modern technology. This is the heart of cybernetics and, thus, Heidegger's emphasis on “regulation”:
the revealing however never simply comes to an end. Neither does it run off into the indeterminate. The revealing reveals to itself its own manifoldly interlocking paths, through regulating their course. This regulating itself is, for its part, everywhere secured. Regulating and securing even become the chief characteristics of the challenging revealing. (GA 7: 17/QCT 16, tm)
Heidegger continues to articulate the ascendance of “subjectity” whereby even the automatic machine lacks, as he says, “autonomy”: “for it has its standing only from the ordering of the orderable” (GA 7: 18/QCT 17). Thereby, the human being is challenged or summoned to “reveal the real,” in the mode of ordering, “as a standing-reserve” (GA 7: 22/QCT 21).
It is in this sense, repeated throughout this 1953 lecture, that Heidegger can maintain that modern technology qua Ge-stell, enframing, that is: qua set-up, is revealed as “nothing technological, nothing on the order of a machine [Maschinenartiges]. It is the way in which reality [das Wirkliche] reveals itself as standing reserve” (GA 7: 24/QCT 23).
This, and here Heidegger will lose most commentators, Heidegger names “die Gefahr [the danger]” (GA 7: 27/QCT 26).
At issue is the loss of the object as such, the loss of things not the “subject,” things not about us and not about our needs, energy wise or otherwise. This Heidegger connects with the aletheic and its elision in calculation and what is measured and merely, as he will say, “correct,” but attesting to “the” danger:
As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns the human even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and the human in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standingreserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall, that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing reserve. (GA 7: 28/QCT 27)
In the age of the idealization of what Heidegger calls the “overman” in Nietzsche's sense (and what, following today's corporate (digital and ai) enthusiasms, we call the transhuman in our era of will to power), Heidegger can write,
All that is, is not either what is reality as the object [das Wirkliche als der Gegenstand] or what effects reality [das Wirkende], as the objectifying within which the objectivity of the object takes shape. (GA 5: 251/100, tm)
It is to this same extent that Heidegger maintains that the
earth itself can show itself only as an object of assault, an assault that, in human willing, establishes itself as unconditional objectification. Nature appears everywhere – because willed from out of the essence of Being – as object of technology. (GA 5: 251/100, tm)
For Heidegger, everything fits within this constellation, specifically, as he cites Nietzsche, including the authority of “fundamental philosophical doctrines” (GA 5: 252/101) by which the language of philosophy takes leave of “the doctrine of scholars” as “the truth of what is as such” qua “unconditional subjectness of the will to power” (GA 5: 252/101).
This again recalls Heidegger's definition of the “situation,” the same term invoked by both Anders and Adorno:
Thought metaphysically, the ‘situation’ is always the staging for the action of a subject. Every analysis of the situation is grounded, whether it knows it or not, in the metaphysics of subjectness. (GA 5: 253/101–102)
The last arch gnomic, provocative word of Heidegger's lecture on Nietzsche's “word” concerning the famous “death of God,” a “word” Nietzsche did not invent – he tells us it is an “old Germanic word” – known not merely from Hegel (as Hegelians will tell us) but from antiquity as any reader of Hölderlin would also have known. This is a variation on the being/not-being of all mortal, death-bound subjects: what it would be for a being that is, that exists, not to be, not to have been, never to have been: μὴ φῦναι. To this extent, we may hear Heidegger's word: “thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought” (GA 5: 263/112).
What can this mean?
Can we ever imagine, we thinkers, we “knowers,” as Nietzsche says, that “reason” as such might be stiff-necked? Reason, it seems, must be, if anything is, qua ratio, balanced and thereby neutral, even if technology as such is not (although we do tend to suppose that it is); we are confident that reason must be on the side of thinking, not its adversary.
Above I quoted Anders on questioning as an original adherent of the Frankfurt School.88
In his book on the “antiquatedness” or “outdatedness” of the human (the tendency to translate “Antiquiertheit” as “obsoleteness” repeats the industrial viewpoint that as a critical theorist Anders meant to criticize), Anders highlighted the ease with which one might coerce a speaker into silencing themselves “even before,” as Anders writes, “they open their mouths,” convicted of being “far and wide” the only (the isolating singularization is key) “reactionary.”89 Rather like calling someone a conspiracy theorist, the merest “suspicion” is sufficient. Suspect for Anders was the Maschinenstürmer [Machine-Wrecker],90 the title of Ernst Toller's 1923 drama.91 Today the threat of being named a Luddite might well elicit a countercall for “robot rights,”92 underscoring today's cultural dedication to the corporation that designs/owns robots or the ai/data-collection sets currently claimed to “know us better than we know ourselves,” as opposed to human, all-too-human “workers.”
Our era is still the era of Heidegger's “The Question Concerning Technology” and Anders' The Antiquatedness of the Human. At issue is the proprietary as Anders argues. This is a matter of what we have and still more concretely a matter of what we have done. Anders writes that whatever can be done, whatever tools can be developed or deployed, whatever bombs can be modeled and taken to their ultimate destructive limit (which, paradoxically, Anders argues, entails making the bombs less rather than more destructive – the reference is to the neutron bomb), whatever media may be broadcast and disseminated, all this must, thus the imperative, be done.
The post-war epoch in which Heidegger and Anders write frames the German economic miracle. Economically minded, Heidegger's concern is as technical as it is praxical as he offers a series of questioning lectures in 1949 addressed to the business interests that also concerned the Club of Bremen (apart from Anders, few scholars other than Kostas Axelos have discussed the economic with respect to Heidegger and technology).93 This same context frames the two lectures presented over the course of a two week interval in 1955: “The Question Concerning Technology” in Munich (originally Das Gestell) and the “Memorial Address” in Messkirch, typically called Gelassenheit.
Heidegger writes to explicate a certain reading of Nietzsche, as common in his day as it remains today – and thus as if he were alluding to the “proactionary” concerns of the futurists of his own era, enthusiasts and alarmists alike, not too-too different from today's proponents of transhumanism – in his cautionary word at the outset of his Bremen lectures:
The human being is paralyzed by what could transpire with the explosion of the atomic bomb. The human does not see what has for a long time now already arrived and is occurring, and for which the atom bomb and its explosion are merely the latest projection, not to speak of the hydrogen bomb, whose explosion, thought in its broadest possibility, could suffice to eliminate life on earth. What is this clueless anxiety waiting for, if the horror has already occurred? (GA 79: 4/4)
Dates are relevant for “The Question After Technology” and not less for Heidegger's Gelassenheit lecture, presented in 1955 in Messkirch to commemorate both the birth of the local composer Conradin Kreutzer and the ten-year anniversary of the end of World War II, punctuated, in Heidegger's words, with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Heidegger mentions a conference of Noble-Prize-winning scientists that had taken place the summer before, noting “the American chemist” who won a Nobel Prize for discoveries concerning the viruses that still occupy scientific attention today: Wendell Stanley, as Heidegger quotes Stanley almost as if he had anticipated today's DNA/mRNA technologies: “The hour is near when life will be placed in the hands of the chemist who will be able to synthesize, split, and change living substance at will” (GA 16: 525/DT 52).
It's difficult to unpack what Heidegger says here, and most discussions of Heidegger's Gelassenheit – and there are many – tend to prefer to discuss “Lebensphilosophie.” The insistence on archaic, expressly non-modern ideologies is part of the tendency to regard Heidegger on technology as irrelevant to contemporary debates on technology. The result is a certain scholasticism: one specific meaning is asserted (this is like the convention of rendering Hegel's Geist as “Mind” in the Cambridge translations or insisting that Nietzsche's words be translated uniformly, just one word across the board, in the Stanford edition, thus philosophy by fiat).
All of that is scholarship, and all of that is political.
Here I have been underlining, as Heidegger does, that we do not question. This parallels what remains thought provoking, as Heidegger writes again and again in his What is Called Thinking? that we are not thinking, especially not with respect to science. In the wake of technology, what is most question-worthy is certainly that we do not question technology, we mean, just as Heidegger says at the outset, “to bring the human being” (this is the theme Anders takes up for his part)
into the right relation to technology. Everything depends on our manipulation [Handhaben] of technology in the proper manner as a means. We will, as we say, “get” technology “spiritually in hand” [»geistig in die Hand bekommen«]. We will master it. (GA 7: 8/QCT 5)
The allure of ai corresponds to this lack of questioning, and it is in this unquestioning spirit that we marvel at the promise of “the science” in Stanley's advertisement of its future achievements, whereby, for Heidegger, concealed in this is an uncannily violent threat:
We do not stop to consider that an attack with technological means is being prepared upon the life and nature of man compared with which the explosion of the hydrogen bomb means little. For precisely if the hydrogen bombs do not explode and human life on earth is preserved, an uncanny change in the world moves on us. (GA 16: 525/DT 52)
To this same extent, Anders' reflection, published one year later, on human antiquatedness, that is to say, outdatedness, exemplifies Heidegger's claim as its exception. The difficulty of thinking the constellation between Heidegger on questioning and Gelassenheit with respect to technology requires Anders' critical theory together with Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology.94
Die Frage nach der Technik, Heidegger writes in the aftermath of the technologically-adumbrated conflicts of his age, following the conflicts following World War I, following World War II, accelerationist in nature and including the two atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the 6th and 9th of August 1945. Anders will observe that this exemplifies the atomic age as the age of annihilation, beginning with the “atom” as such, a word that had until then meant “indivisible” whereby to split the atom, that is, the unsplittable, raises a question (with Rutherford's prediction of the same in 1917 and Hahn's achievement in 1939).
In German we read, “Im folgenden fragen wir nach der Technik” (GA 7: 7/QCT 3). The “nach” is ambiguous where the English translation (“concerning”) is not: the questioning is “nach,” that is, after or “post” or it is “about” or “concerning” technology. The focus is on questioning – offset as such and here Heidegger tells us how to question:
We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the way, and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics. The way is a way of thinking. All ways of thinking, more or less perceptibly, lead through language in a manner that is extraordinary. (GA 7: 7/QCT 3)
Using a comparison to nothing less schoolbook-conventional than a “tree,” as we know our history of philosophy, having read Aristotle, Aquinas, or Descartes, Heidegger, seeking the essence of technology, reminds us that his question necessarily goes beyond technology:
Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology. When we are seeking the essence of “tree,” we have to become aware that That which pervades every tree, as tree, is not itself a tree that can be encountered among all the other trees. (GA 7: 7/QCT 4)
In one of the more gnomic of Heidegger's “reflections,” he writes “Only one who knows can question.” Presupposing Heidegger's explication of questioning in Being and Time, we read:
Genuine questioning seeks only that strangeness it already knows, without being the courage derived from it and without first unfolding it into truth. Questioning is displacement into the event of appropriation [Entsetzung in das Er-eignis]. (GA 94: 462/335)
For Anders' part, we not only fail to question technology but invent ourselves in its likeness and, quite on the model of psychoanalysis (both of Anders' parents were psychologists), we pay for the privilege of doing so.95 After the on again/off again of lockdown, repressions, and mask and vaccine mandates, Anders' point may be more obvious today, at least if we do not forget the willingness of the average person in the average social class in the average country across the globe to serve as his or her own jailkeeper – and that of others – monitoring his or her own activity, conforming to restrictions on activity but also submitting to testing regimes and submitting to not visiting/comforting friends and relatives at the hour of their death.96
We did this to ourselves as Anders would point out and this having done this ourselves to ourselves may be (should be) the most question-worthy aspect of our question-worthy era, expressed in terms of the distance/nearness Heidegger emphasizes, as Nietzsche underlines the point of distant proximity: “This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering. … This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars – and yet they have done it themselves.”97 We just did this and – this is a near certainty – we would do it again, on command. Beyond anything Foucault might have imagined, Bentham too, today's surveillance society is self-surveilled and self-administered.98
We are still not thinking. We are still not questioning.
The piety of thought is both ecstatic and fragile.
1 I argue for the importance of this essay in Babich, “Heidegger's Philosophy of Science: Calculation, Thought, and Gelassenheit” in Babich, ed., From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995), 589–99.
2 William Lovitt and Harriet Brundage Lovitt, Modern Technology in the Heideggerian Perspective, in two vols. (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995).
3 The title exists: cf. Christoph Hubig, Alois Huning, and Gunter Ropohl, eds., Nachdenken über Technik: Die Klassiker der Technikphilosophie und neuere Entwicklungen (Berlin: Nomos, 2013).
4 Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution (Munich: Beck, 1956).
5 Thus when the author attempted such a reading at the 2023 meeting of the Heidegger Circle in Boston, her commentator's response was baffled mockery, not uncommon, as Kate Manne tells us, when a male academic responds to a female academic. See Kate Manne, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (New York: Crown/Random House, 2020), which builds on her earlier Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). I have already thematized this as a problem besetting scholarly interaction in a lecture “Love Actually: Logic and Misogyny and Analytic Anger” at a 2020 meeting of SWIP in Spokane organized by Róisín Lally and other members of the Heidegger Circle. Online: https://vimeo.com/435110852.
6 Jacques Ellul, La technique, ou, L'enjeu du siècle (Paris: Colin, 1954). Cf. Patrick Troude-Chastenet, Introduction à Jacques Ellul (Paris: La Découverte, 2019).
7 See Yuk Hui's post-Heideggerian (because Stieglerian but also because advocating a non-Occidental shift): The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (London: Urbanomic, 2016) and see, too, as he begins with Heidegger: Byung-Chul Han, Hyperculture: Culture and Globalisation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022) but also see – because most philosophies of technology leave out critical theoretical perspectives, which means they leave out the politics embedded in everyday technological practice – the volume co-authored by Vincent F. Hendricks and Camilla Mehlsen, The Ministry of Truth: BigTech's Influence on Facts, Feelings and Fictions (Frankfurt: Springer, 2022).
8 Politically, Richard Wolin and others have spearheaded the campaign to, just to vary the title of just one recent book, “ruin” Heidegger. Don Ihde (1934–2023) offered his reservations for a number of years, repeated every so often, for example in a book: Heidegger's Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), and see, too, his “Can Continental Philosophy Deal with the New Technologies?” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2012): 321– 32. For a different reading, see Babich, “The Essence of Questioning after Technology: Technē as Constraint and Saving Power,” British Journal of Phenomenology 30, no. 1 (January 1999): 106–24 and more recently, “Constellating Technology: Heidegger's Die Gefahr / The Danger,” in The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, eds., Babette Babich and Dimitri Ginev (Frankfurt am Main: Springer, 2014), 153–82.
9 Type I errors require that a researcher retract his or her findings if they turn out to be erroneous, as Kleinman gives the example of epidemiologists assessing the carcinogenic impact of an environmental contaminant, whereas and by “contrast, a type II error would lead a scientist to mistakenly miss a discovery but his/her reputation would not be harmed.” For Kleinman, however, the social (and political) is relevant: “Unlike professional epidemiologists, one could imagine that citizens in a community that might have been affected by an environmental carcinogen would have preferred scientists to err on the side of caution and make a type I error instead of a type II error.” Daniel Lee Kleinman, Science and Technology in Society: From Biotechnology to the Internet (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2005), 8.
10 Kleinman, Science and Technology in Society, 5.
11 I discuss Sloterdijk in “Talking Weather from Ge-Rede to Ge-Stell” in Sustainability in the Anthropocene: Philosophical Essays on Renewable Technologies, ed., Róisín Lally (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), 51–64.
12 Thus Ihde's great enthusiasm, just after his appreciation of Lewis Mumford, for Samuel G. Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (New York: Macmillan, 1976).
13 One of the early theorists of cybernetics (or what is today named AI), Warren Sturgis McCulloch (1898–1969) is typically mentioned along with Gotthard Günther (1900–1984), author of Das Bewusstsein der Maschinen – Eine Metaphysik der Kybernetik (Baden-Baden: Agis-Verlag, 2000). Both of these thinkers are emphasized by Peter Sloterdijk in his interview with Éric Alliez, “Living Hot, Thinking Coldly: An Interview with Peter Sloterdijk,” Cultural Politics 3, no. 3 (2007): 307–26.
14 See Babich, “Heidegger and Hölderlin on Aether and Life,” Études Phénoménologique, Phenomenological Studies 2 (2018): 111–33.
15 Babich, Convenor/Editor, Heidegger on Science and Technology: Proceedings of the Heidegger Conference, (New York: Fordham University, 2001).
16 See for a discussion of Heelan's thinking on Heidegger and technoscience, Babich, “Material Hermeneutics and Heelan's Philosophy of Technoscience,” AI & Society 35 (14 Apr. 2020). Online: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-020-00963-7.
17 Don Ihde, “Was Heidegger Prescient Concerning Technoscience,“ in Heidegger on Science and Technology: Proceedings of the Heidegger Conference, ed. Babette Babich, Convenor (New York: Fordham University, 2001), 64–80.
18 See, for citation and discussion, including with reference to Heelan, Babich, “Early Continental Philosophy of Science” in The History of Continental Philosophy, Vol. 3: The New Century: Bergonism, Phenomenology, and the Responses to Modern Science, eds. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Alan Schrift (Durham: Acumen, 2010), 263–286, here: 266 as well as Babich, “Crisis and Twilight in Martin Heidegger's ‘Nietzsche's Word “God is Dead”” in Martin Heidegger: Holzwege (Klassiker Auslegen), ed. Holger Zaborowski (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2023).
19 See on this: Babich, “On the Very Idea of a Philosophy of Science: On Chemistry and Cosmology in Nietzsche and Kant,” in Epistemologia, special issue of Axiomathes 31 (December, 2021): 703–26.
20 See further, specifically on Nietzsche and Kant on science, “Kant Between Chemistry and Alchemy: Cinnabar, ‘Now Red, Now Black,’” Kant-Studien 114, no. 4 (2023): 1–18
21 Thus, see Ihde on “Heidegger's Romantic and Nostalgic Pre-modern Preferences” in Ihde, “Was Heidegger Prescient Concerning Technoscience,” 77.
22 Strong cites the communication as “Schwarzwälder redneck.” See Tracy Burr Strong, “Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt: Why Become a Party Member?” in Heidegger und das Politische, Heidegger Jahrbuch 13, eds. Michael Medzech and Holger Zaborowski (Baden-Baden: Alber, 2022), 92. Rorty's language is associated with Heidegger post-Farías, but, again, challenges to Heidegger's politics are long-standing.
23 See for reflections on the tactical requisites for this Babich, “Pseudo-Science and ‘Fake’ News: ‘Inventing’ Epidemics and the Police State” in The Psychology of Global Crises and Crisis Politics: Intervention, Resistance, Decolonization, eds. Irene Strasser and Martin Dege (London: Springer, 2021), 241–72.
24 Hermann Cohen, System der Philosophie. Erster Teil. Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1902), 94.
25 Cohen, System der Philosophie, 83. Emphasis added.
26 Cohen, System der Philosophie, 83.
27 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1997 [1966]): 362.
28 Ibid. See for further references and discussion, Babich, “Adorno's ‘The Answer is False”: Archaeologies of Genocide” in Adorno and the Concept of Genocide, eds. Ryan Crawford and Erik M. Vogt (Amsterdam: Brill, 2016), 1–17.
29 Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 2. Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution (Munich: Fink, 1980), 22.
30 Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 2, 22.
31 See, for references and discussion, Babich, Günther Anders' Philosophy of Technology: From Phenomenology to Critical Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).
32 See, for references to Virilio's works and for an extended discussion of Virilio on manufacture and art, with specific reference to homo materia, Babich, Günther Anders' Philosophy of Technology: From Phenomenology to Critical Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 129, 260. Cf. Paul Virilio, Art and Fear, trans. Julie Rose (London: Continuum, 2003).
33 Strong, “Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt,” 101.
34 It is for this reason that Heelan writes the hermeneutic and phenomenologically reflective Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity: A Study of the Physical Philosophy of Werner Heisenberg (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965). See Heelan, The Observable, ed., Babette Babich; intro., Michel Bitbol (Oxford/Berlin: Peter Lang, 2016 [1970]).
35 Strong, “Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt,” 101.
36 This is the substance of much Plato scholarship, but for an accessible discussion, with useful indications of some of the relevant literature, particularly foregrounding his own teacher Gregory Vlastos, see Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), especially his first two chapters: “Socratic Irony” and “Platonic Irony.”
37 See my contribution to the art event: Field|Guide, QR-code driven video remixes based on my “Heidegger and Hölderlin on Aether and Life,” Aaron Michael Smith and Jordan Kokot's collaborative multimedia art project, published in 2023. https://jdkokot.com/art. Text and video lecture prepared for the project. https://youtu.be/3-5L8xG7rtE. The video remix reprises a lecture given at the Heidegger Circle in Walla Walla, convened by Julia Ireland.
38 Of course there are exceptions if these are indirect readings, such as Vincent Blok, “Heidegger and Derrida on the Nature of Questioning: Towards the Rehabilitation of Questioning in Contemporary Philosophy,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 46, no. 4 (2015): 307–22, and, a decade and a half earlier, Babich, “The Essence of Questioning After Technology: τεχνη as Constraint and the Saving Power,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 30, no. 1 (1999): 106–25.
39 Bernard Waldenfels, Antwort-Register (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994). See, too, with respect to phenomenology, formally and methodologically regarded, Witold Plotka, “The Value of the Question in Husserl's Perspective” in Phenomenology and Existentialism in the Twentieth Century, ed. Anna Theresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2009), 75–91.
40 Pia Lauritzen, Questions Between Identity and Difference (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2017).
41 Lauritzen, Questions Between Identity and Difference, 68, 81, etc.
42 Reiner Schürmann, “De la philosophie aux États-Unis,” Le temps de la réflexion 6 (1985): 303–21. In English as “Concerning Philosophy in the United States,” trans. Charles T. Wolfe, Social Research 61, no. 1 (Spring, 1994): 89–113.
43 I argue that the stylistic distinction between continental and analytic remains crucial when it comes to reading Heidegger even as there are fewer “classically” or conventionally continental voices, given the socio-anthropological context of academia and the relevance of style, just as, stylistically speaking, parsing a question (or posing or raising it) also depends on language. See Babich, La fin de la pensée? Philosophie analytique contre philosophie continentale (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2012) as well as Babich, “Sur les « pseudosciences ». Vers une ethnographie socio-historique de la science et avec une postface sur Nietzsche” in Diversité – Langues – Cultures / Réception – Appropriation – Comparaison / Réflexivité – Qualitativité – Expérientialité. Actes Colloques de Tours, ed. Isabelle Pierozak. Forthcoming.
44 Aron Ronald Bodenheimer, Warum: Von der Obzönität des Fragens (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984).
45 See for discussion of these “remnants,” Babich, “The Analytic-Continental Divide: ‘An Idea No Longer of Any Use … Superfluous … Let Us Abolish It!’,” Borderless Philosophy 5 (2022): 1–47.
46 “‘ist es wahr, dass der liebe Gott überall zugegen ist?’ fragte ein kleines Mädchen seine Mutter: ‘aber ich finde das unanständig.’” Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 3 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), 352.
47 Lauritzen, Questions Between Identity and Difference, 38.
48 Waldenfels, Antwort-Register, 22.
49 To be recommended on Heidegger and science is Ewald Richter, the Hamburg philosopher and student and colleague of von Weizsäcker, and philosopher of logic and science, to name one of his books: Heideggers Frage nach dem Gewährenden und die exakten Wissenschaften (Berlin: Duncker & Humblott, 1992).
50 See my forthcoming: “On ‘Truth and Lie’ and Thinking with AI” in Thinking with ai, ed. Hannes Bajohr (Frankfurt am Main: Springer, 2024); a shorter version appears online in The Philosophical Salon: “Nietzsche and AI: On ChatGPT and the Psychology of Illusion”.
51 GA 1. In English as Duns Scotus's Doctrine of Categories and Meaning, trans. Joydeep Bagchee and Jeffrey D. Gower (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022). See, on Heidegger and Duns Scotus, Matthew Rampley, “Meaning and Language in Early Heidegger: From Duns Scotus to Being and Time,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 25, no. 3 (1994): 209–28 as well as Philip Tonner, “Haecceitas and the Question of Being: Heidegger and Duns Scotus,” Kritike: An Online Journal of Philosophy 2, no. 2 (December 2008): 146–54 in addition to, from an even more patently analytic orientation, Sean J. McGrath, “Heidegger and Duns Scotus on Truth and Language,” The Review of Metaphysics 57, no. 2 (Dec., 2003): 339–58 in addition to a more historical reading by Ethan Knapp, “Medieval Studies, Historicity, and Heidegger's Early Phenomenology” in The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory, eds. Andrew Cole, D. Vance Smith, Stanley Fish, and Fredric Jameson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 159–93. For a concise discussion of Scotus himself see, if only for the beauty of his ninth footnote, Giorgio Pini, “Univocity in Scotus's Quaestiones super Metaphysicam: The Solution to a Riddle,” Medioevo 30 (2005): 69–110.
52 The question “as such” runs throughout Augustine's Confessions and belongs to the theological tradition of Talmudic argument, retained as Anders argues in his reflection on “Being Without Time” in negative theology today. See, in addition, Martin Kočí, “God in Question: Questioning as a Prerequisite for Theology,” Theologica 4, no. 1 (2014): 51–64 as well as the more technically/ rhetorically minded Paloma Pérez-Ilzarbe, “Disputation and Logic in the Medieval Treatises: De Modo Opponendi et Respondendi,” Vivarium 49, no. 1, “Usus loquendi, discretion audientis, intentio proferentis: Pragmatic Approaches to Language During the Middle Ages” (2011): 127–49 and see generally the contributions to Questions and Questioning, ed. Michel Meyer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988).
53 Andrzej Wiśniewski, “The Logic of Questions as a Theory of Erotetic Arguments,” Synthese 109, no. 1 (Oct., 1996): 1–25 and see, too, J.J. Katz, “The Logic of Questions,” Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics 52 (1968): 463–93 in the tradition of A. D. Ritchie, “The Logic of Question and Answer,” Mind 52, no. 205 (January 1943): 24–38, which Ritchie in turn traces to Collingwood and which could to be sure go back to Aquinas, and again, see Pini.
54 Kočí, “God in Question,” 62.
55 Günther Stern (Anders), Über das Haben. Sieben Kapitel zur Ontologie der Erkenntnis (Bonn: Verlag von Friedrich Cohen, 1928).
56 Stern/Anders, Über das Haben, 173.
57 I discuss Anders' ‘Situation’ as concept in a broader context in Babich, Günther Anders' Philosophy of Technology. Heidegger discusses “Situation” in his Black Notebooks.
58 Stern, Über das Haben, 176.
59 Stern, Über das Haben, 176.
60 Stern, Über das Haben, 176.
61 Stern, Über das Haben, 171.
62 Stern, Über das Haben, 176.
63 Stern, Über das Haben, 178.
64 Stern, Über das Haben, 179.
65 Stern, Über das Haben, 179.
66 Stern, Über das Haben, 179.
67 Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garret Martin (New York: Continuum, 1975), 266.
68 Babich, “Understanding Gadamer, Understanding Otherwise.” Agora Hermeneutica,.
69 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 266.
70 Paul Kidder, “The Ultimacy of Question in Lonergan's Philosophy,” Ultimate Reality and Meaning 31, no. 4 (December 2008): 307–8, cf. 310.
71 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 326.
72 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 326.
73 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Raymund Schmidt, 3rd ed (Hamburg: Meiner, 1990), A vii. For the English, see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 7.
74 Bodenheimer, Warum?, 20.
75 Ernst Schraube takes this citation to title his own essay on the philosophy of technology. See Schraube, “‘Torturing things until they confess’: Günther Anders' Critique of Technology,” Science as Culture 14, no. 1 (March 2005): 75–85.
76 Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B xiii.
77 Here it is worth reading Howard Cagyill in the context of English law, “Taste and Civil Society” in Reading David Hume's “Of the Standard of Taste,” ed. Babette Babich (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020), 177–212.
78 Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B xiii.
79 Citing Plato, Theaetetus, 196d2, Platonis Opera, ed. John Burnet (Oxford: Clarendon, 1900).
80 Plato, Republic, trans. Francis Macdonald Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), 15, 336c.
81 Richard Rojcewicz, The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 127f, here: 128.
82 See, for context and further references, both Schürmann and my essays cited above.
83 I take this very seriously indeed as analytic colleagues in philosophy of technology do not (quite). See again, “Heidegger and Hölderlin on Aether and Life.”
84 It was the same for Adorno, it was the same, so Paul Deussen tells us, for Nietzsche, whose first encounter with Deussen was as a pupil at Schulpforta (Nietzsche was a “Primus” or head boy, responsible for keeping order among his peers, and Deussen recollected that Nietzsche's first word to him was to tell him to chew less noisily).
85 See John Snelly on Albert Speer in The Nazi Revolution (Boston: Heath, 1959) as well as, very specifically, Cornelia Epping Jäger, “Lautsprecher” in Handbuch Sound: Geschichte – Begriffe – Ansätze, eds. Daniel Morat and Jans Jakob Ziemer (Frankfurt am Main: Springer, 2017), 396–400. I discuss this with additional references in Babich, Günther Anders' Philosophy of Technology.
86 See Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (London: Polity, 2017). Latour draws on James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, “Atmospheric Homeostasis by and for the Biosphere: The Gaia Hypothesis,” Tellus 26, no. 1–2 (1974): 2–10.
87 This case is relevant and deserves a parenthesis as I argue elsewhere speaking of Patrick Aidan Heelan and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger in the context of a Heideggerian hermeneutics of experimental laboratory science: Babich, “Material Hermeneutics and Heelan's Philosophy of Technoscience.”
88 See, for a discussion, Babich, Günther Anders' Philosophy of Technology.
89 Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, 3. See, too, already cited above, Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 2. Although neither text has been translated to date, already in 1956 Anders had published part of his first book in English: Anders, “The World as Phantom and Matrix,” trans. Norbert Gutterman, Dissent 3, no. 1 (1956): 14–24, and other portions are also available, in part. See further, my Günther Anders' Philosophy of Technology.
90 Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1, 41.
91 Ernst Toller, Die Maschinenstürmer (Vienna: E. P. Tal & Co. Verlag, 1922). For a discussion of the origination of the term “Luddite,” owing to one Ned Ludd, see Clair Hayden Bell, “Toller's Die Maschinenstürmer,” Monatshefte für Deutschen Unterricht 30, no. 2 (Feb., 1938): 59–70.
92 It also at the same time helps robotic functioning as the user is obliged, now for “ethical” reasons, to make things go as well as possible, eliminating user error/violence.
93 See, with respect to Nietzsche and Marx, Babich, “Between Nietzsche and Marx: Great Politics and What They Cost” in Nietzsche and Critical Social Theory: Affirmation, Animosity, and Ambiguity, eds. Christine Payne and Mike Roberts (Amsterdam: Brill, 2019), 226–76.
94 I have tried, of course, many times, but it takes a community to articulate such a reflection, and this is not something that can simply be done by offering an argument or pointing to a salient quote. But see for a beginning my reflections in, particularly with respect to the questions of style and the insularity of reception, Günther Anders' Philosophy of Technology and in addition, more recently, Babich, “Überlegungen nach Heidegger. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben” in Heidegger und das Politische, Heidegger Jahrbuch 13, eds. Michael Medzech and Holger Zaborowski (Baden-Baden: Alber, 2022), 118–31.
95 See Anders, “The World as Phantom and Matrix” and my essay, “Günther Anders' Epitaph for Aikichi Kuboyama,” Journal of Continental Philosophy 2, no. 1 (October 2021): 141–58.
96 Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now? (London: Eris, 2021).
97 Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 480–81.
98 I discuss this with further references in Babich, “Necropolitics and Techno-Scotosis,” Philosophy Today 65, no. 2 (2021): 305–24.