|
A
peer-reviewed electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and ISSN
1541-0099 24(2) – July 2014 |
Enframing the Flesh: Heidegger, Transhumanism, and the
Body as “Standing Reserve”
Jesse
I. Bailey
Sacred Heart
University
Journal of Evolution and Technology -
Vol. 24 Issue 2 – July 2014 - pgs 44-62
Abstract
I
argue that Heidegger’s account of technology as “enframing” is a helpful lens
through which to understand the possible effects and dangers of transhumanism.
Without resorting to nebulous concepts such as “dignity,” Heidegger’s analysis
can help us understand how new technologies employed to modify the body, brain,
and consciousness will enframe our own bodies and identities as something akin
to “standing reserve.” Under transhumanism, the body is enframed as an external, technologically modifiable
product. I indicate some of the problems that might arise when our own bodies
no longer appear as central to our identity as embodied beings. Further, I
argue that, by treating aspects of our own consciousness as technologically
modifiable, we will be driven into a commodified and inauthentic relation to
our identities. By examining the work of prominent transhumanists – including
Brad Allenby, Daniel Sarewitz, and Andy Clark – I show how the threat that
technology poses can be hidden when the essence of technology is not uncovered
in a primordial way. I argue that by threatening to obscure death as a foundational possibility for
Dasein, transhumanism poses the danger of hiding the need to develop a free and
authentic relation to technology, Truth, and ultimately to Dasein itself.
In
this paper, I argue that Heidegger’s account of enframing (Gestell) is a helpful lens through which to understand the possible
effects and dangers of unbridled transhumanism with respect to innovations in
Human Genetic Enhancement (HGE), cloning, and human cybernetic implementation of
nanotechnology to enhance cognitive and biological functions. Without resorting
to nebulous concepts such as “dignity,” Heidegger’s analysis can help us
understand how biotech will enframe our own bodies as something akin to
“standing reserve.”1 The body thus becomes an object present-at-hand
that is open to our manipulation. Heidegger’s analysis of technology also allows
us to speculate about some specific
problems that might arise with regard to the modified frame in which our bodies
will appear to us.
In
this paper, I draw attention to one of these possible problems. Death and decay may begin to appear as
events that occur to an enframed body; the body,
figured by transhumanism as an external
object open to mechanical alteration, will be what suffers decay and faces
death, and thus these are not possibilities that the self must face. Transhumanists often make one of two claims: Either
the body we inhabit now will be able to live for hundreds of years or our
consciousness will be “downloadable” into multiple bodies. Either of these
positions (in subtly, but importantly, different ways) alienates human
experience from central aspects of the
finitude of embodiment, and the proposed outcomes would radically alter our
existence. Mark Coeckelbergh offers an excellent
analysis of this aspect of transhumanism:
Transhumanists
have articulated visions that seem to aim at invulnerability and immortality.
Consider the writings of two well-known proponents of human enhancement: Nick
Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil. Bostrom has written a tale about a dragon that
terrorizes a kingdom and people who submit to the dragon rather than fighting
it. According to Bostrom, the “moral” of the story is that we should fight the
dragon, that is, extend the (healthy) human life span and not accept aging as a
fact of life [Coeckelbergh cites Bostrom 2005b, 277]. And in The Singularity is Near (2006) Kurzweil
has suggested that following the acceleration of information technology, we
will become cyborgs, upload ourselves, have nanobots in our bloodstream, and
enjoy nonbiological experience. Although not all transhumanist authors
explicitly state it, these ideas seem to aim toward invulnerability and
immortality: by means of human enhancement technologies, we can transcend our
present limited existence and become strong, invulnerable cyborgs or immortal
minds living in an eternal, virtual world. (2011, 1)
Aubrey
de Grey, of course, is also famous for advocating such alterations to our
temporal being (see de Grey 2008). In light of the importance of
being-toward-death, I will argue that this would, viewed from a Heideggerian
perspective, be a momentous change. Specifically, in Being and Time (and elsewhere), Heidegger locates
being-toward-death as central to the
call to authenticity, and away from lostness in the they-self (for whom
technological enframing holds sway); by threatening our awareness of our own
mortality, transhumanism thus threatens to occlude the call to authenticity, just as it occludes the need for it.
Further,
in the hypothetical future depicted by transhumanist thinkers we might lose
what I will call the “fleshiness of experience.” When we begin to see ourselves
as technological products of our own rational calculative control and creation,
we face a very real danger of being consumers
of identity (to an even deeper extent than is already the case), and we stand
to lose the orientation by which we discover the need to wrestle with our finite nature. This struggle plays an important
role in human behavior, and the technologies advocated by transhumanists hold
the promise of radically altering our relation to both our embodiment and our
mortality.
Humans
become what we are by struggling with a natural, physical world that does not
immediately respond to our desires. The world resists us, and demands that we
flow with it, and deal honestly with the organic. When we enframe the organic, transforming
it into more mechanical technology to be readily manipulated, we lose that
orientation. When our own bodies become enframed through a technology that
defies even death, what will become, for example, of the desire for
transcendence that has been one of the most historically powerful forces
leading to the creation of art, philosophy, and drives the need for making
interpersonal connections? What happens when the development of identity is
enframed within an economy of commodification in which we buy alterations of our identity?
By
way of preface: I do not think anything I write is likely to have any effect on
the evolution of technology or its incorporation into our culture, our lives,
and our bodies. I am largely in agreement with Brad Allenby, co-author of The Techno-Human Condition, on this
point. In a “conversation” on Slate.com, he states:
Nick
is worried that I am assuming that it’s already “too late.” Well, yes and no. I
think when that ape picked up the bone, and reconceptualized it as a weapon,
and developed a culture in which bones and stones were used as weapons, it was
in a meaningful sense already “too late,” if you wanted to avoid human
technological enhancement… I’m just trying to understand what’s out there, and
what it says to me is that a) rapid and accelerating technological evolution
across the entire technological frontier is here, and it’s already created
psychological, social, and cultural changes we haven’t begun to understand; b)
because these systems are powerful, and grant personal and cultural authority,
and have significant military and security implications, they are going to be
hard to modify or stop; and c) even if we could modify them, they are
sufficiently complex so at this point, with our existing institutions and
worldviews, we are clueless as to whether we are doing something ethical and
rational, or not. Tough world. But I’m not saying that it’s good or bad. Just
that it’s already here… (Allenby 2011)
This
paper, then, while clearly a call for exercising what I take to be reasonable caution in altering our bodies, is not
primarily intended to work against the inevitable progress of technology in the
direction of HGE or cybernetics. Further, I want to make it clear that I am
aware of the very real practical benefits of such technologies, including
prolonging the human healthspan and eradicating debilitating diseases. I intend
this paper merely to serve as another entreaty that we
might collectively begin to attend to the possible effects of these enormous
changes. I am certainly not qualified to comment on the technological feasibility of any of these
technological advances; further, while much has been written about the
terrifying likely social and political effects of advanced technologies, I will
focus on a few possible phenomenological consequences from a Heideggerian
perspective.
Part I – Heidegger, enframing, and biotechnology
There
is no way in the space available to give a full interpretation of Heidegger’s
work on technology. Heidegger speaks of technology in far too many places for
this paper to lay any claim to being comprehensive – from his discussion of tools
in Being and Time, to his essay on art,
his account of mathematics and science in What
is a Thing?, his work on architecture in Building, Dwelling, Thinking, and most obviously, the essay I will
be focusing on here, The Question
Concerning Technology. In lieu of any such adequate interpretation, I will
boldly make some general claims about Heidegger’s questioning concerning
technology and then consider what insights his work has to offer a world facing
such seemingly radically different forms of technology, such as HGE and
nanotechnology – radically different, that is, from anything in Heidegger’s own
time. After this too-brief look at the technology essay, I will return to Being and Time to argue that in his
early work Heidegger was already concerned with the dangers of enframing and
standing reserve (though not in those terms), and I will seek to articulate the
relation between these concepts and that of lostness in the they-self, and an
authentic relation to death.
Heidegger’s
central concern is stated clearly in the opening paragraph of The Question Concerning Technology. He
advises us that this essay is a questioning
concerning technology. He is not setting out to tell us “what technology is,”
nor to close the issue for posterity. His goal is plainly stated as opening “a
way.” He advises us to pay heed to the
way as opposed to fixating “on isolated sentences and topics”:
We
shall be questioning concerning technology. And in so doing, we would like to
prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens
our human existence to the essence of technology. When we can respond to this
essence we shall be able to experience the technological within its own bounds.
(Heidegger 1977, 287)
The
way he marks out for us begins with calling attention to our relation to technology. Our question,
then, is: In light of this way, what are the dangers to a free relation to technology posed by bio- and nanotechnology, and
HGE?
It is
crucial to understand that, for Heidegger, technology is not something we make or do. It is not primarily a set of instruments; it is not a “means”
or a “human activity.” Such a characterization would make technology seem to be
“external” to us, to our lives – technology would be just a bunch of things
that we use, and the techniques that some worker uses to produce them. It is
tempting to think of technology as “other,” as some activity “going on” out
there somewhere, or as a bunch of things
that one uses or not, based on free choice. Treating technology in this way –
as “instrumental” – is a misunderstanding
of it, according to Heidegger. Understanding that “technology is nothing
technological,” will help us understand that, despite radical advances in
technology, its essence remains the
same.
There
has been a huge amount of work done on Heidegger’s critique of technology. He
has been, perhaps correctly, deemed a “technophobe,” and even called a
“philosophical redneck” by Richard Rorty (1988). However, it is too seldom emphasized
that Heidegger’s concern is not simply with technological objects, but with ontology.
Iain Thomson puts it well: “… Heidegger’s critique of technology is not
primarily concerned with particular technological devices, but rather with
ontological technologization, that is, with the disturbing and increasingly
global phenomenon… by which entities are transformed into intrinsically
meaningless resources standing by for optimization…” (2005, 45). It is thus a
mistake to limit our ethical response to the dangers of technology to
encouraging its “responsible use” (though such responsibility is, of course,
necessary). If Heidegger is right, the phenomenological changes effected by technological
developments cannot be addressed at the level of autonomous subjects choosing
either to use or not use them.
Rather
than being an “external” activity or collection of products or techniques of
production, technology is “internal,” so to speak; that is, technology is
essential to the way “the real,” the world, appears to us. Whether the
state-of-the-art is a seemingly “external” hydroelectric plant, or a tiny chip inside our brain that alters the way we
see, technology is internal to each of our lives and our worlds, and hence to our
identities (Heidegger would not speak in terms of “internal” and “external,”
but using such imprecise terms will help us understand how use of technology to
alter our bodies is significant). Thus, it is essential to understand how
technology is a “global” phenomenon that alters Dasein’s entire world:
“Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing” (Heidegger
1977, 294). In order to understand how our reality is revealed “through”
technology, we must briefly address a few salient aspects of the much-discussed
concepts of enframing and standing reserve.
For
Heidegger, the essence of technology is revealed to be enframing (Gestell):
Enframing
means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e.,
challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as
standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the
essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological.
(Heidegger 1977, 302)
Technology
as enframing is the mode in which everything
comes into the open, and makes sense
for us. In ordinary German, Gestell
means frame, framework, or skeleton. Technology, as Gestell, “frames” the beings we encounter in the world, and thus
becomes the “backbone” of the appearing world.
As I
will highlight below, when we turn to “standing-reserve,” under the
holding-sway of enframing beings make sense only in terms of an ordered system
of items, present-at-hand, that exist for our manipulation and control. The
forest is there for us as lumber, the
river is there for us as electric
power. What, then, of our own bodies, and even our consciousness? I will argue
that enframing naturally tends toward obliterating every boundary, and will
fundamentally alter the way we understand our selves. Attending to Heidegger’s
“way,” our goal is to regain a free relationship to technology, such that we
can illuminate its proper bounds.
Why
is understanding technology as enframing central to understanding how Dasein
gathers the world into intelligibility? Dasein creates a world for itself; however, it is important to hear this
“creation” not as the “activity” of a subject. Dasein falls into a world that is open, cleared, and in which beings come
into their intelligibility. This is what it means to say that Dasein is
essentially “in the truth.” Dasein, in its very being, opens the world for
view; this opening in the being of Dasein is not to be understood as anything a
subject “does” actively.
In
fact, this very misunderstanding – i.e. thinking of Dasein as an active subject
that “makes” or “fabricates” its world – is precisely a symptom of
technological speech/thinking; it would be as if this creation of a world “by
Dasein” were an act of techne on the
part of a subject. This language of production is specifically the problem –
when we treat the world, the earth as something for us to use, manipulate, produce, we see we are lost in the discourse of
the they-self – we are not yet called to ourselves and to the nature of truth
and of Dasein.2 This is especially important for us on the verge of
technological manipulation of our own bodies. When Dasein (mis)understands itself
to be active “as a subject” in creating not only its world, but also its own body through external technological manipulation, when self-production becomes
buying a new cybernetic addition, or even a buying a new body, then the enframing of everything as standing-reserve
holds sway.
Whether
“good” or “bad,” this shift in which the body becomes an external object,
present-at-hand for our technological manipulation, will certainly be
momentous. We have reason to worry about it, and I am quite sure Heidegger’s
analysis of technology, if it was ever right, still has much to say about these
new forms of technology.3
Another
dimension of the danger of enframing can be seen in the way technology occludes
its own danger, and the contingency of the mode in which it reveals the world.
Heidegger warns: “Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing” (1977, 309;
emphasis added). Thus, not only will our bodies be enframed, but any other
mode, any more authentic relation to our own embodiment, will become
unthinkable. This danger is heightened, within the Heideggerian framework, when
we attend to the way this particular technological advance will change our
relation to our own mortality.
Where
is there attested for us a demand that we, in our essence, resist the holding
sway of everything revealed as
standing reserve? That possibility – the call which allows us the possibility
of breaking free of technology and the they-self – comes precisely from an
awareness of our mortality. In threatening the anxiety of being-toward-death,
transhumanism threatens any possibility that we might free ourselves from the
enframing of technological thinking,
and thus covers over the only possibility for letting ourselves and the world
appear as it is, in its essence (wesen)
and phusis.
Heidegger
closes the essay on technology by quoting from Holderlin; the poet says: “But
where the danger is, grows / the saving power also”. . . and “poetically dwells
man upon this earth” (1977, 316). There is
hope, but only by a turning away from technology, from enframing.4
How can we turn away from that of which we are completely unaware? If the
nature of finite Dasein, as
possibility, as the “There,” as “in the truth” (and thus simultaneously
revealing and concealing beings) is concealed, from where will the call to
authenticity come? Where the enframing of technology holds sway, all other
modes of revealing – including the poetic – are concealed. Authentic awareness
of our own finitude and mortality can call us away from this holding-sway;
however, again, advances in biotech, cybernetics, and the possibility of
“downloading” (or “uploading”) our consciousness into multiple bodies pose the
threat of occluding even this saving power.
I am
reminded of the second chorus of Sophocles’ Antigone.
In this “Ode to Man,” Sophocles shows that humans are the naturally “homeless”
animals, and we are defined by the need to harness the powers of animals and
nature to build a place for ourselves. Hence, with “speech and wind-swift
thought” we alter the world around us to fit our needs. Despite “man’s” great
power, “Only against death has he at last no refuge.” What happens when, just
as we once harnessed the power of animals to plow our fields, we begin to yoke
our own nature to the whims of our desires, and find control even over death?
The
concern I am trying to raise in this paper is that when even our own selves,
facts about our cognitive orientation,
our emotions (notably empathy), etc., are technologically manipulated, our
deepest selves will give way to enframing; we will order ourselves and take an inauthentic relation to our identity. My
concern is that when this enframing holds sway over the self, any possibility
of what Heidegger calls a “free” relation to technology will be concealed. We
are on the verge of forgetting, as a society, the proper bounds of technology.
There is little we can do; these bounds cannot contain “progress.” But perhaps
we can echo the call of our finitude into the future.
We
can now turn to Heidegger’s concept of
“standing reserve” to become more clear about why technology poses this threat. How are the world, the real, and
ultimately our own selves revealed as
standing reserve?
Heidegger
shows that enframing reveals the world in a dangerous and problematic way – a
situation that will be exacerbated by the advances in question. “The revealing
that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to
nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and
stored as such.” Under technology, everything
appears as a “resource” to be exploited. We become blinded to the nature of the world around us. Beings
only come into the light, into the clearing, insofar as they answer to our
perceived “needs.” Everything is expected to answer, in its very being, to our
desires.
In
order to bring this mode of revealing
to light, Heidegger famously uses the example of the river Rhine as it appears
against the horizon posed by the hydroelectric plant that converts the flow of
the river into electricity. Heidegger places this mode of revealing in contrast
to the poetic (poiesis); while poiesis is a “bringing forth,” enframing
is a “challenging.” While the windmill’s sails turn in the wind, seemingly “just
as” the turbines in the plant turn in the flow of the Rhine, Heidegger claims
that since the windmill does not “unlock energy from the air currents in order
to store it,” there is a fundamental difference (1977, 296). The wind is
allowed to flow on its own – we might add that the birds are allowed to
continue in their flight. However, the hydroelectric plant changes the flow of
the river – and the paths of the fish in it. Another example is mining vs.
(traditional) farming: “… a tract of land is challenged in the hauling out of
coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil
as a mineral deposit” (ibid.). In traditional methods of farming (as distinct
from modern mechanized agriculture), the “peasant does not challenge the soil…”
(ibid.). In each case, it is essential to remember that the issue is one of revealing; the land the peasant farmer
cared for, and put in order, “appears different” under the cultivation of
mechanistic agriculture, just as the Rhine appears in a different light passing
under the old stone bridge than it does when obstructed by the power plant.
Following
the work of Otto Spengler, Heidegger notes that technology has this global
effect on how the world is revealed to us. In Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life, Spengler
writes:
…
all things organic are dying in the grip of the vice of organization. An
artificial world is permeating and poisoning the natural. The civilization
itself has become a machine that does, or tries to do, everything in a mechanical
fashion. We think only in horsepower now; we cannot look at a waterfall without
mentally turning it into electrical power; we cannot survey a countryside full
of pasturing cattle without thinking of its exploitation as a source of
meat-supply; we cannot look at the beautiful old handwork of an unspoilt
primitive people without wishing to replace it by a modern technical process.
Our technical thinking must have its actualization, sensible or senseless. The
luxury of the machine is the consequence of a necessity of thought. In last
analysis, the machine is a symbol, like its secret ideal, perpetual motion – a
spiritual and intellectual, but no vital necessity. (1932, 94)
In
order to understand the importance of this transformation of our understanding
of the world, and the effect that the enframing of the human body (and
consciousness) will have on human self-understanding, i.e. on how we are revealed to ourselves, we will look
briefly at the work of some prominent transhumanists. By looking at the claims
from these thinkers themselves, we
will be in a better position to understand the depths to which technological
thinking will, and indeed already has,
occluded itself as a contingent, and dangerous, mode of revealing. That is, by
looking at the way these new technologies are being championed by the people who are dominating public discourse on the
subject, we will be able to bring to light the extent to which Heidegger’s
thoughts on technology are, in fact, incredibly timely. We will find a deep
lack of awareness of the subtle dangers inherent in enframing – the revealing
of nature, and our own selves, as standing reserve.
II. A lot of worry over “nothing new”?
Brad
Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz, in their book The
Techno-Human Condition, and Andy Clark, in Natural-born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies,
and the Future of Human Intelligence, argue persuasively that we have, in
Clark’s phrase, “always been cyborgs.” Allenby and Sarewitz argue that
technology is not something “new” that is present only in power plants or coal
mines but absent in windmills or farming; for them, the human condition is, and always has been, what they call “The Techno-Human
Condition.” We are all already “enhanced,” and “some would say transhuman” (Allenby and Sarewitz
2011, 2). They argue that some have made the distinction
between “inner” and “outer” transformation of the body – e.g. the difference
between wearing eyeglasses to enhance vision, and some sort of HGE or
“artificial body parts” that ensure perfect vision. But, they ask: “is anything new really going on?” They,
of course, answer in the negative.
For
Allenby and Sarewitz, the technological modification of the body is simply
“fulfilling our biology.” The fact that we “never forget how to ride a bicycle,
or how to read, shows that allegedly external technologies do in fact have an
enhancing effect on our internal capabilities” (2011, 15). There would thus be no substantial difference between writing
down facts we want to remember, or using Google to “enhance” our memory, or
having a microchip implanted in the brain which has access to data that we can
consciously and immediately control. “The history of our species is a
history of redesigning ourselves, of fuzzing the boundaries between our inner
and outer worlds” (2011, 16). So, they argue, it “isn’t clear to” them that HGE
is “crossing some domain that humans have never entered before, a domain that
demands a new kind of debate or raises new moral considerations and dilemmas”
(2011, 17). We will see that Heidegger might agree, to some limited extent,
with this assessment: While enframing is certainly
not “fulfilling our biology,” it is true that the troubling alteration of human
thought began long before HGE became a foreseeable possibility.
Drawing
on what has come to be called the “extended mind hypothesis,” Andy Clark argues
that as soon as humans began writing we began incorporating technologies into
our consciousness (2004, 6). For Clark, this process is nothing new, and
nothing to be feared. This is not to say, however, that he does not recognize how
emerging technologies will increase exponentially the ways that human beings
will become cyborgs:
New waves of user-sensitive technologies
will bring the age-old process of cyborgization to a climax, as our minds and
identities become ever more deeply enmeshed in a non-biological matrix of
machines, tools, props, codes, and semi-intelligent daily objects. We humans
have always been adept at dovetailing our minds and skills to the shape of our
current tools and aids. But when those tools and aids start dovetailing back –
when our technologies actively, automatically, and continually tailor
themselves to us just as we do to them – then the line between tool and user
becomes flimsy indeed. (2004, 7)
While
this observation about the blurring of the line between humans and
technological products could easily have been written by someone who would
preach caution at such a merging with
machines, Clark is a vocal optimist about the momentous transition that he
describes.
Clark
is correct to suggest that this change, marked by a situation in which the
technological extensions of our powers begin to “dovetail back,” is
fundamentally important, and requires attention. There is a subtle
phenomenological difference between the situation of a blind person with a cane
(as described, for example, by Merleau-Ponty) and a situation in which the
enhancement is performed by a technological product, designed by other people
and purchased by the “user.” In both situations there is a dimension in which
there is a “flimsy” line between the hand and the tool; however, this facility
is developed by the blind person
through interaction and practice. All people develop organic relations with the
world – relations that are more noticeable in people with disabilities – in
which cane, pen, paper, eyeglasses, etc., are phenomenologically extensions of
the hand, the mind, and the eye. These organic relations, however, are
fundamentally different from a cybernetic attachment through which our relation
to the world is designed, marketed, and then purchased according to the whim
and will of the designers and the corporation that sells the cybernetic
product.
In
his book, Clark addresses several worries about these changes that he has
encountered in being a vocal proponent of transhumanism. In particular, he
discusses the concern that technology might come to “control” us: “Many feel,
for example, that increased human-machine symbiosis directly implies increasing
control. In an age of ubiquitous
computing must we be slaves to the whims of the machines that surround us?”
(2004, 175). Here, Clark addresses what
he takes to be the concern that if we become merged with machines, the
machines might “control” us; he is, however, operating on what I take to be an
extremely mundane and even naïve conception of “control”; he does not seem to
give any credence to the more subtle negative
forms of influence that merging consciousness with technology might have.
Thus, he responds: “… the kind of control we, both as individuals and as
society, look likely to retain is precisely
the kind we always had: no more no less… The fear of ‘loss of control,’ as
we cede more and more to a web of technological innovations is simply
misplaced” (2004, 175). Perhaps he is right to say that the kind of control we
have over technology – and the control it has over us – is no different in kind from the influence modern technology has over us; but if
Heidegger is correct, the extension of that control to our biology and to the
direct alteration of our consciousness and our genetic code is reason enough
for serious caution and reflection. In the Parmenides,
Heidegger writes:
Perhaps
the much discussed question of whether technology makes man its slave or
whether man will be able to be the master of technology is already a
superficial question, because no one remembers to ask what kind of man is alone
capable of carrying out the “mastery” of technology. (1998, 86)
In
any case, we see that Heidegger would, in a certain limited sense, agree with
Allenby, Sarewitz, and Clark that there is “nothing new” in these emerging
technologies (in contrast to the suggestions of Don Ihde, for example).5
Nano and biotech simply extend the reach of these technologies, without
fundamentally altering the issue – that is, the essence of technology as enframing. As we have seen, however, the
true danger of enframing lies in treating our technological relation to the
world as our basic, definitive, and indeed only
way of being: “Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing” (Heidegger
1977, 309; emphasis added). Accordingly, this specific extension of the reach
of enframing to our bodies and even our consciousness is momentous in that it
extends enframing to our own embodied identity while simultaneously altering
our relation to our own finitude and mortality.
Allenby
argues that we are fulfilling our biology, our nature – and that we have always
been cyborgs. Heidegger would clearly
disagree, and argue that there is a specific historical origin and tradition
through which this contingent mode of enframing has risen to prominence; he
would never accept that enframing is “fulfilling our biology.”
However,
insofar as they agree that there is “nothing new” in emerging technologies –
and even if we had “always done this”
– it is falling deeper into the danger of enframing to think that this is the only way to reveal the self. The work of
these transhumanists helps us see the concrete reality of the danger; that is,
transhumanists such as Allenby and Clarke seem incapable of thinking of any
other way human beings might relate to themselves. They explicitly claim that
there is no conflict or tension between our nature and technology, since our
nature has always been cybernetic. Even if they are correct that eyeglasses
make someone a cyborg as much as genetically altering our eyes or replacing our
eyes with machines, and thus there is “nothing new here,” Heidegger warns that
every “aspect” of ourselves that is subjected to enframing brings with it the
familiar dangers of enframing as standing reserve. For Allenby and Clark this
“nothing new” is not problematic because it is an extension of technology, and technology appears unproblematic to them.
To someone attuned to the essential dangers
of technology, “nothing new” is not sufficient cause for complacency, but
rather the extension of an established concern to new dimensions of life that
might previously have served as valuable sites of resistance. Further, the
inability of Allenby and Clark to see
the contingency of this danger indicates the heights to which the danger has
grown, obscuring any other mode of revealing.
Perhaps
it is true that there is no substantial difference between getting liposuction,
or taking a pill that causes weight loss, or reprogramming the nanobots in our
blood to store fat or burn fat at a different rate; but, I argue, each of these is fundamentally different
from an authentic relation to our own bodies and to our selves. These are
“external” manipulations of the self, and thus fundamentally different from the
self-relation that arises from developing self-discipline in the face of a
world and a body that do not immediately behave the way we might want them to.
Maybe there is nothing new in nanotech, as opposed to taking pills to solve
what is wrong with us, but it is surely an extension of something about which
people like Heidegger were already deeply concerned one hundred years ago – an
extension of the process of enframing to new
dimensions of ourselves.
III. Dasein and death
What
will become of us when we no longer fear death? I argued above that, from a
Heideggerian perspective, our understanding of our own bodies will be radically
changed by technological modifications; our bodies will seem to be “external”
objects answerable to our “needs” and desires. While this can have obvious
benefits, about which the transhumanists have hypothesized widely, I argue that
by turning the body into an external object, enframed as standing reserve, we
fall into the danger of misunderstanding the essentially embodied nature of
existence. Here, I will argue that the danger is extended to deeper aspects of
our self-understanding when death
becomes an event that occurs not to
Dasein, not to the self, but merely to the body, with which we will no longer
identify.
While
it is true that Heidegger himself says nothing in The Question Concerning Technology about death calling us to a free
relationship to technology, I believe that his earlier insights into how
anxiety calls us from the they-self can be fruitfully applied. When a comparison
is made between the ideas about technology and nature in Being and Time and those in the technology essay, we can begin to
see the depth of the danger we face.
I am
aware that, given Heidegger’s “turn,” it is dangerous to bring together the
work of the much-later technology essay with the analysis of death in the early
Being and Time. However, while
caution is warranted, death continues to be a central theme for Heidegger’s
work after the kehre, and I argue
that Heidegger never abandoned the centrality of being-toward-death for the
analysis of Dasein as the “There” in which beings are disclosed. Insofar as the
essence of technology is a mode of disclosing, death and technology must be
thought together, even if Heidegger does not explicitly make this connection in
the essay. Sallis has an excellent analysis of this situation in Echoes:
…
the words death and mortal never cease to reappear. Not that
the later discourses on death replace, revise, or even reopen the analysis of
death completed in Being and Time. On
the contrary, all the later discourses serve constantly to confirm the earlier
analysis by reinscribing it within contexts that otherwise decisively exceed
that of Being and Time. (1990, 135)
Sallis
then looks at this confirmation in the later Heidegger with reference to the Beitrage zur Philosophie (1936-1938),
“The Thing” (1950), The Principle of the
Ground, (1955-1956), and The Essence
of Language (1957-1958). While death is not explicitly an issue in The Question Concerning Technology, it was
written in 1954, when being-toward-death was still explicitly a concern of
Heidegger’s; as Sallis argues, the analysis of the centrality of death to
Dasein remains unchanged since the composition of Being and Time.
In
his famous discussion of the hammer in Being
and Time, Heidegger is calling our attention to worldly beings in order to
make clear the “worldly character of the world”; he accomplishes this by
looking at the “everydayness” of Dasein, who is always engaged with things. For the most part, these beings
appear to us as handy, as “ready-to-hand.” In that light, the being of beings
appears as for us – everyday things
appear as being for our use. It is
important to note that this appearing is not simply limited to any particular
object, but is indicative of a larger sphere
of activity; i.e. the hammer is not simply a hammer, but it appears as handy
within the project of building some structure for some human purpose. Beings
come to light in their being in virtue of a larger sphere of concern – just as we saw above in the case of technology.
Again, here we are concerned with the effects
of the apparently unlimited character of technological holding-sway over the
mode of appearance of beings – specifically, our own bodies.
In
the context of that discussion, Heidegger makes a reference to the appearance
of “nature” that is remarkably similar to his later work on technology. He
explains how “materials” (and tools)
are obscured in the process of work, in favor of the goals of this work. In
that connection, he explains how “nature” comes to light not in its own wesen, but
rather in virtue of how it can be manipulated and put to work for our purposes.
“Nature” comes to light in the work
as “steel, iron, metal, stone, wood”:
But
nature must not be understood here as what is merely objectively present, nor
as the power of nature. The forest is
a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock, the river is water power,
the wind is wind “in the sails.” As the surrounding world is discovered,
“nature” thus discovered is encountered along with it. We can abstract from
nature’s kind of being as handiness; we can discover and define it in its pure,
objective presence. But in this kind of discovery of nature, nature as what
“stirs and strives,” what overcomes us, entrances us as landscape, remains
hidden. The botanist’s plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow, the river’s
“source” ascertained by the geographer is not the “source in the ground.” (Heidegger
1996, 66, H70):
Here,
we see not only that technology and work provide the horizon against which
beings come into presence, but also that scientific observation of nature, by
treating objects, including the human body, in their mere “objective presence,”
cannot stand as part of the “saving power.” But if this is Dasein in its
everydayness, how can we be called from lostness in the world of handy
technological projects, in which the “nature” of beings appears ready-made as
standing reserve and commodities for our concernful use?
For
Heidegger the answer lies in anxiety:
That mood in which we understand our finitude, and are called to an authentic
relation to our mortal nature. For the most part, Dasein evades encountering
death. When such an encounter appears, it is dismissed as something that
happens “to someone else,” or as an “event” that will happen “sometime in the
distant future.” Dasein thus hides from itself its ownmost truth as
“being-toward-death.” An authentic
being-toward-death reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and calls
us from our everydayness into an uncanny awareness of our own nature. For our
purposes here, it is important to see how this authentic relation to death has
the possibility of challenging enframing by calling us to realize the essence
of Dasein (as the clearing); thus, we can see how these new technologies, in
threatening to further hide from us our mortal nature, pose the threat of
universalizing enframing.
How
does awareness of death call us from the they-self, and thus from the idle talk
that treats beings as standing reserve? It accomplishes this by calling Dasein
to an awareness of its own uncanny
nature. Being and Time is oriented,
from the beginning, toward the attempt to get Dasein into view in its wholeness. The movement to Part
II of the text marks this shift, and problematizes the issue of drawing this
being which is always “ahead of itself” into view as a whole. How do we get such a being to come into view as a whole? In order to accomplish this,
Heidegger must articulate how death as our “ownmost possibility” calls into the light our nature as possibility.
“Possibility” is not to be confused with factual “possibilities” for Dasein –
e.g. it is “possible” in this vulgar sense for me to get a different job, eat
better, join the army, be a coward, etc. Rather, “possibility” must be
understood as an existential, and as equiprimordial with understanding; that is, possibility
is always a mode in which beings come into the clearing in their being: “We
must remember that understanding does not primarily mean staring at a meaning,
but understanding oneself in the
potentiality-of-being that reveals itself in the project” (Heidegger 1996, 243,
H263).
We
can develop a free relationship to technology only when we see that it is itself
“nothing technological”; that is, the free relationship to technology is
possible only when we realize that the essence of technology is a gathering of beings in which beings are
cleared, and understood, by virtue of a particular mode of the being that is
Dasein. In Being and Time (and, I
will argue, for the later Heidegger as well) being-toward-death is that through
which we come to realize our nature as Dasein, and thus put ourselves in a
position where it becomes possible to understand the essence of technology.
Anticipatory
resoluteness – the mode in which Dasein is fully aware of its mortality –
reveals to Dasein both its lostness
in the they-self and their idle talk, and
its own nature as possibility:
Being-toward-death
is the anticipation of a potentiality-of-being of that being whose kind of being is anticipation itself. In the
anticipatory revealing of this potentiality-of-being, Dasein discloses itself
to itself with regard to its most extreme possibility. But to project oneself
upon one’s ownmost potentiality of being means to be able to understand oneself
in the being of the being thus revealed: to exist. Anticipation shows itself as
the possibility of understanding one’s ownmost and extreme
potentiality-of-being, that is, as the possibility of authentic existence. (1996, 242, H262)
Authentic
existence appears as a possibility only when we understand ourselves as the
being defined by possibility. As
anticipatory, we are always ahead of ourselves – just as enframing is “ahead of
us” in revealing beings as standing reserve. Until we understand this
ontological structure of possibility, and its equiprimordial connection with
language, understanding, concern, thrownness, etc., we cannot understand the
essence of technology. In speaking of death here, Heidegger directs our
attention back to Section 31, “Dasein as Understanding,” to help make clear the
place of being-toward-death in revealing to Dasein the way its nature as possibility gathers the world into
intelligibility, and allows beings to come to light (including the possible
mode of enframing).
In
order to produce a free relation to its own nature, and thus, possibly to the
essence of technology, Dasein must “become what it is”: “Because of the kind of
being which is constituted by the existential of projecting, Dasein is constantly
‘more’ than it actually is…” (Heidegger 1996, 136, H145). This aspect of
self-understanding is central to understanding the being of the “there,” and
thus the way beings are cleared in their being, including enframing:
[Dasein]
is existentially that which it is not yet
in its potentiality of being. And only because the being of the there gets its
constitution through understanding and its character of project, only because
it is what it becomes or does not
become, can it say understandingly to itself: “become what you are!” (Ibid.)
We
fundamentally are what we become; what
we understand ourselves as being in
the mode of possibility – that is, what we see as possible modes of being – is
circumscribed by our projects and our
understanding. In the world in which
technology holds sway, our projects and the mode in which we understand beings
in their being has been taken over by enframing. That is: Technology’s true power lies in delimiting how we understand ourselves.
“Project always concerns the complete disclosedness of being-in-the-world. As a
potentiality of being, understanding itself has possibilities which are
prefigured by the scope of what can be essentially disclosed to it” (Heidegger
1996, 137, H146). Thus, technology, by delimiting our projecting understanding
of our own nature, prefigures its own
appearance. It is thus not at all to be wondered at that transhumanists do not
see technology as a threat to authenticity; it is written into the very nature
of enframing as a totalizing disclosing of beings (as standing reserve) that it
occlude its own essence as such.
Lostness
in the they-self and idle talk, which speak always within the horizon of
technological disclosure, covers over the truth of Dasein as possibility, and
also hides the truth of our ownmost possibility from us; thus, by presenting
the world as nothing to be anxious
about, enframing and the concerns of the they hide the ground of the
possibility for a free relation to technology. Transhumanists claim that nano
and biotech, HGE, etc., will be able either
to extend the life of this body indefinitely
through mechanical manipulation of it as an object present-at-hand, or to re-frame death as an event that
occurs to a body with which I will no longer be identified (since my
consciousness can be downloaded). In subtly different ways, both of these
approaches fall directly into the enframed conception of nature and the body
characteristic of the they; both approaches threaten to disguise our ownmost possibility,
and thus disguise our nature as
possibility. In this world, enframing will hold total sway over my conception
of my body and my identity.
IV. “Null ground of a nullity,” religion
and humanity 2.0
Technological
alterations of the body are, of course, not the only mode in which a person can
hide their ownmost possibility from themselves. Heidegger tells us that the
fact that most people live as if they are unaware of the significance of their
mortality is no argument against the fundamental
nature of this “fact”; rather, Dasein “fleeing from [being-toward-death],
initially and for the most part covers over its ownmost being-toward-death”
(Heidegger 1996, 233, H251). This is the result of existing primarily in the
mode of “falling prey,” and the condition of being “always already absorbed in
the ‘world’ taken care of” – a world that is increasingly revealed by
technology (ibid.).
Traditionally,
of course, the primary form in which people flee from this resolution (in
addition to remaining immersed in worldly tasks and idle talk) has been religion. If God is there, and each of
us has a purpose, there is no reason
to face this ownmost possibility – death is just an event, however, momentous,
that marks our journey into a greater set of possibilities.
But
what of a technological world in which belief in God seems almost quaint? Ray
Kurzweil reveals how the transhumanist relates himself to this situation by
proclaiming that we will create God through technology! For the transhumanists,
we will make ourselves gods; we
create ourselves in our own image, from our own imagination. There is a sense
in which the transhumanist becomes the causa
sui – the one who erases and transcends her humanity, her mortality, her
physicality, and creates herself.6 In so doing, the creator grants meaning, the ultimate “existentialist”
act of self-creation in the face of the void. There is no God, we will create
God, we will create ourselves, etc. In the face of Dasein, revealed in anxiety
as the “null ground of a nullity,” the transhumanists want to design and erect
a present ground, and become their own creator.
What
does this mean for our purposes? Heidegger characterizes Dasein, in its “thrownness,”
as a “null ground of a nullity”: “as care, Dasein is the thrown (that is null)
ground of its death” (1996, 263, H285). Our thrownness is finding ourselves
always already caught up in a world with pre-established talk, stories, a
horizon, a set of symbols into which we are thrown, and through which we are to
understand ourselves, other people, our proper roles – what it means to be a man, what is a “good woman,” a good American, etc. Today, more and
more, we are thrown into a world guided by the essence of technology. This
thrown, “null” ground is the “other side” of our finitude, so to speak: We come
into an always-already-established world, with the body we happen to be born
“into,” in a specific time and socio-economic position, and a concomitantly
limited set of possibilities.
Can
the transhumanist escape the mortal nature of Dasein by “designing” the self,
both body and consciousness? Can transhumanists escape the need for Dasein to
recognize itself as the “null ground of a nullity” by technologically modifying
the body and consciousness, and by willfully projecting the ground for their
own existence? A transhumanist might claim that in erasing, or radically
mitigating, the fear of death, we erase the inauthentic reasons for conforming
to communities – without the fear of death, there is no reason to fall into the
they-self in the first place, since there is no anxiety to escape! Thus, far
from being the highest form of the total domination of the enframed they-self,
the world the transhumanist promises will free us from this all-too-human
situation altogether. As Kurzweil and de Grey, for example, argue, there is no
reason to attach ourselves so strongly to the identity of a group to accomplish
symbolic immortality – for the self
can achieve real immortality!
Is
this the case? In becoming the causa sui,
will the very situation that causes
anxiety and inauthenticity fall away in this utopia? I argue no. As much as
Kurzweil might want to become immortal, he cannot become infinite (even though
we hear him talking this way in moments that seem even more inspired by science
fiction than usual). He cannot go back and raise himself, cannot go back and
erase the struggles of puberty in his specific culture. Even if he changes
bodies, becomes female or adopts some biologically-designed genderless or
multi-gendered body, he still will have been raised a man in a specific time,
with a specific set of roles, expectations, anxieties, etc.
The
transhumanist might counter that in a thousand years – when gender and race are
no more, when bodies are exchanged and mean as little as clothing, or the color
of hair – we will achieve total freedom from finitude. Will we? No. Rather, it
will mean, for the children of this dystopian future, a thrownness into a false
image of freedom. The freedom to
choose which body to inhabit, etc., might seem like a perfection of “freedom”;
however, this “choice” is as false a sense of freedom as the freedom of a
consumer to buy their identity at Hot Topic rather than the Gap. We must
remember that very few people will
actually be engaged in the process of designing these new technologies. The
vast majority of people will simply be consumers
of body and identity modifications. This is not the venue to perform a Marxist
analysis of such a transhumanist situation, but it is easy to see how quickly
corporations would take control of the market in the interests of profit rather
than human freedom. Real freedom can only come with Truth, and enframing will
hide the truth of Dasein.
What
will become of the authentic call to action, the meaning and purpose that we
create and feel, when we give ourselves over to the “real” as enframed by
technology? That meaning will be taken over, fully, by technology.
Technological enframing – life as standing reserve – will reign supreme.
Instead of coming of age in a world in which we face the unrelenting resistance
of the organic, in which we live in the fear and terror and anxiety of the
flesh, we will seek to create our own ground. The transhumanist seeks to be the
causa sui, to avoid anticipatory
resoluteness (and the authenticity that comes only from facing this truth) by
becoming the ground of their own existence. But
this existence, and the terms in
which they understand “freedom” already come to them enframed by technology. In
seeking freedom from mortality by becoming cyborgs – through technologizing the
biological, the self, and the soul (and, ultimately, the other, and our
relation to them, as well!) – we become
free of death by enslaving ourselves to the technological enframing of the
world as standing reserve. Enframing becomes the mode through which the roles
that we are expected to play in order to develop self-esteem appear to us.
Further,
this supposed “freedom” from inauthentic conformity to the they-self, driven by
aversion to the anxiety rising from an awareness of our mortality and finitude,
will not lead to genuine diversity.
Rather, “freedom” from death through technological modification of the body
will lead to radical conformity, and
toward homogenization. Rather than the erasure of the fear of death leading us
away from clinging to the death-denying illusions of the they-self, this
already-enframed concept of authenticity and “individuality” (as commodity to
be traded) will throw us into radical conformity. For Heidegger, death
“individualizes” Dasein. Death is our “ownmost” possibility; that is,
transhumanism will cover over what is most our own. It will obscure that which makes us aware of ourselves as
radically individualized: In facing death, “Dasein stands before itself, all
relations to other Dasein are suspended.”7 It is death that pulls us
from the they-self, and thus anticipatory resoluteness is the condition for the
possibility of conceiving of oneself as an authentic, free individual; there is
nothing that technology can do to alter this situation. Without authenticity,
technology can allow us only more exciting and appealing chains.
One
might reasonably object that, while this might be true of facing death, there
are certainly many other experiences that will still be open to the undying
(or, incredibly long-lived) post-human that will allow her to understand her
own nature as Dasein, as possibility, and to become an authentic individual.
Why give anticipatory resoluteness, facing our own death in a recognition of
being-toward-death, such privilege? John Sallis explains:
Why
the privilege? Why is Being-toward-death the most originary among those forms
of disclosedness structured by projection? What can originary and origin (ursprunglich, Ursprung) mean here? One
direction is clearly marked: because death is the possibility that suspends all
others, thus suspending also Dasein’s relations with others in the everyday
world, disclosure from this possibility serves to draw Dasein back before
itself alone, to recall it from a dispersion in the world back to a certain
unity with itself. A certain wholeness. (Sallis 1990, 129)
For
Heidegger (as well as for other existentialists such as Kierkegaard, Beauvoir,
and Sartre, not to mention the existential psychologists they inspired, including
Ernest Becker, Erich Fromm, Otto Rank, etc.), true individuality does not come
from anything “external.” True individuality and authenticity arise only in
some form of anticipatory resoluteness. It is in coming to grips with our
mortality that we become who we are as individuals, and develop a sense of
independence and self-possession against the darker image of our nature (as
meaningless, momentary aberrations) presented by our anality and physicality. I
argue that in the world predicted by transhumanists we might lose the
fleshiness of experience. When we begin to see ourselves as technological
products of our own rational calculative control and creation, we lose the
orientation by which we discover the need to wrestle with our dual nature: we
are both “spirit” and transcendence, and also a finite, eating, defecating, and
decaying body.
It is
this struggle that has always, according to these thinkers in the
existentialist tradition, defined human endeavors. In a transhumanist future, the
struggle will continue to define us, but it will always already be enframed by
HGE and nanotech – it will appear against the horizon of the holding sway of
technological enframing. We have always become what we are by struggling with a
natural, physical world that does not immediately respond to our desires, but
which strikes against us, resists us, and demands that we flow with it and deal
honestly with the organic. Heidegger warns that the Rhine, enframed by the
power plant, “appears to be something at our command” (1977, 297). When we,
through transhumanism, (attempt to) turn the organic into more mechanical
technology, we lose that orientation – not just the world, but the self, our very
identity, is given over to enframing. When our own bodies become enframed
through a technology that defies even death, we are not freed for genuine individuality. Living in the truth of our
finite, thrown, null, “guilty” (in Heidegger’s sense) nature is essential for
authenticity; this nature is covered over, not
eradicated or fundamentally changed. We cannot escape finitude or embodiment –
but its nature can be obscured. In this concealment, we lose the ground upon
which, in wrestling with our dual nature, we strive to become authentic
individuals.
The
world will come to reveal itself just as modern science represents it (under
the originary influence of technology): “as a calculable coherence of forces”
(Heidegger 1977, 303). We can already see the effects of this on empirical
psychology. Hence, Don Ihde says:
…
it then appears that the human response to the world seen as enframed is the
activity of calculatively ordering the disposition of resources. Thus, just as
nature appears, within enframing, as standing-reserve, so the human task
appears as a kind of command of nature through technological means. (2010, 38)
In
this situation, all mystery will fade
from the world, as everything will seemingly lend itself immediately to the
calculation and control of scientific technology.
Technology
provides a semblance of mastery over
objects, even over death:
…
where beings are not very familiar to man and scarcely and only roughly known
by science, the openness of beings as a whole can prevail more essentially than
it can where the familiar and well known has become boundless, and nothing is
any longer able to withstand the business of knowing, since technical mastery
over things bears itself without limit. (Heidegger 1977, 131)
In
untruth, we conceal that we are
concealing truth, and conceal that we
are distorting beings in their being. Untruth becomes obscured as well. This
distortion (and with it the subsequent concealing of the distorting
concealment) comes when we hold to what is readily available, when we hold to
the frameworks in which things make sense
(e.g. technology). From within these frameworks, the “mystery” that Heidegger
claims is necessary for Truth appears only as momentary lapses, as obstacles
soon to be overcome, since the framework itself is never in question, and
expands itself to reveal all beings as standing reserve and answerable to our
conceptions (cf. Heidegger 1977, 128-137).
To be
human is to respond – in Alphonso Lingus’ terms – to “an Imperative” (1998).
The world makes demands on us: the demand for objectivity, truth, etc., is
precisely a response to a hugely diverse, non-reducible set of imperatives
offered by every situation, every culture, every individual, every piece of
wood for the carpenter, or this piece
of stone for the sculptor – that is the irreducible nature of the world, and
more, of our own selves. To face
nature is to face an otherness that
resists our conceptions as well as our will. As indicated in the Second Chorus
of the Antigone, we encounter the
otherness in dealing with animals and in the wind and the stone and the ocean,
and even in our own bodies in illness – but all these elements can now be
overpowered. Only over death have we no such power; only in anticipation of death
do we realize the absolute resistance of the world to our enframing. This
resistance – again, the fleshiness of experience – is covered over in the technological
conquest of death, and of the body. When even the flesh is enframed as standing
reserve, everything will seem to
dance to our tune. In this danger lies the danger of the absolute forgetting of
nature, experience, and the self.
The
seemingly limitless power of self-manipulation that will be frame and horizon
for consciousness will occlude this truth, and with it, the truth of the world.
As Heidegger says in Being and Time,
nature as what “stirs and Strives,” as what “overcomes us,” is not apparent in enframing. The uncanny alterity
of nature is obscured along with the “nothingness” at the heart of our being that is revealed in facing
mortality. Everything appears as familiar,
as controllable and answerable to our desires. We will overstep our bounds not
because there is some “God” with a plan, or some trans-historical human
“essence” to be violated, etc. – we will overstep our bounds because the frame
will not allow us to see that we have limits at all.
Notes
1. My
concerns here are also fundamentally different from the practical concerns about HGE expressed by thinkers such as
Fukuyama, who writes:
There are good prudential reasons to
defer to the natural order of things and not to think that human beings can
easily improve on it through causal intervention. This has proven true with
regard to the environment: ecosystems are interconnected wholes whose
complexity we frequently don’t understand, building a dam or introducing a
plant monoculture into an area disrupts unseen relationships and destroys the
system’s balance in totally unanticipated ways. So too with human nature. . .
(2003, 97–98)
Cf. Parens 1995.
2.
Cf. On The Origin of the Work of Art
for a discussion of this danger to the Earth.
3. Obviously,
then, I am disagreeing with Don Ihde’s claim that Heidegger’s analysis of
technology is outdated. In Heidegger’s Technologies:
Postphenomenological Perspectives, Ihde argues that Heidegger’s
“mythologized” and “romantic” understanding of technology is not able to deal
with emerging technologies, specifically, in the fields of genetics,
nanotechnology, and communications. He criticizes Heidegger for treating all
forms of modern technology, from “the mechanized food industry” to “the death
camps” and the “hydrogen bomb” as “in essence” the same (Ihde 2010, 114). “To
attend to the ‘essence’ of technology, I argue, blinds Heidegger to the
differing contexts and multidimensionalities of technologies that pragmatic-phenomenological account can better
bring forth” (2010, 115).
While
it is true that Heidegger’s concern operates at a level in which the
specificities of the effects of different forms of technology are not attended
to, his concern is not intended to work at that level. Heidegger is interested
in revealing the essence of technology, as Ihde recognizes; if this level of
analysis “blinds” the reader, that is their own failing. If, on the other hand,
a reader wants to show that forms of technology that have emerged after
Heidegger’s own time have revealed that Heidegger was wrong about the essence
of technology, or that no such essence exists, the burden of proof is on the
reader. Ihde has attempted this, but has, in my opinion, failed. I will not be
engaging his analyses directly here, but I argue in the text that Heidegger’s
analysis of the essence of technology has much to teach us about the momentous
nature of the changes to human life that HGE and cybernetics will effect.
4. The
“saving power” and poetic thought are central to understanding Heidegger’s
struggle with technology; I will, unfortunately, not be addressing those issues
in this relatively short paper.
5.
Feenberg accuses Heidegger of ahistoricism
for looking for a seemingly ahistorical account of the essence of technology (1999). I entirely agree with Iain Thomson’s
replies to each of Feenberg’s criticisms (Thomson 2005, 58–77).
6.
Hannah Arendt writes, in the Prologue to The
Human Condition:
This
future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a
hundred years, seems to be possessed by a
rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from
nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for
something he has made himself. … The question is only whether we wish to use
our new scientific and technical knowledge in this direction, and this question
cannot be decided by scientific means; it is a political question of the first order and therefore can hardly
be left to the decision of professional scientists or professional politicians.
(1958, 3)
7.
Campbell notes a distinct political
dimension to Heidegger’s insistence that individuation is threatened by
technology in his analysis of “proper” and “improper” writing in Heidegger’s
work – specifically, “proper” writing as with the hand, and “improper” as
mediated by the technological apparatus of the typewriter: “The idolatrous
nature of improper writing is that it awards a power to the collective capable
of persuading men and women that they more properly belong to a collective”
(2011, 6). Campbell goes on to show the deep connections between Heidegger’s
criticisms of technology and his attack on Leninism, in which both cause “the
degradation of the relation to Being to man” and “where all [people] are made
the same” (2011, 7).
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