Martin Heidegger

(1889-1976)

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Martin Heidegger is widely regarded as one of the central figures of the existentialist movement and has had a major influence in the areas of phenomenology and ontology. His seminal work, Sein und Zeit, affected the philosophical and cultural landscape of continental Europe for decades. Heidegger's contribution to philosophy is remarkably monolithic in its devotion to metaphysics and ontology. Time and again Heidegger returned to the question, "what is the meaning of being?" One of Heidegger's later works [18], The Question Concerning Technology (1977), deals with the issue of dehumanization in modern society, what Heidegger called the "darkening of the world." The book was based on four lectures delivered in 1949 and captured Heidegger's ontological approach to issues important to post-World War Europe. Heidegger was greatly concerned about technical nihilism, and for a time believed that Nazism could provide a solution. After the war, Heidegger described the catastrophe as, "the confrontation of European humanity with global technology" (Heim, 1993, p. 55). However, throughout his work, Heidegger is careful to approach technology with neither praise nor blame-neither as an optimist nor pessimist. Heidegger's concept of technology is not defined by things or processes. For Heidegger, "technology's essence is nothing technological" (1977, p. 4). Instead it is a system, Gestell, looming but undefined (Heim, p. 57). Gestell [19], literally "framing", is an all-encompassing view of technology, not as a means to an end, but rather a mode of human existence. As such, the real danger of technology for Heidegger was the process by which the machines begin to alter our existence. According to Heim,

What Heidegger called "the essence of technology" infiltrates human existence more intimately than anything humans could create. The danger of technology lies in the transformation of the human being, by which human actions and aspirations are fundamentally distorted. Not that machines can run amok, or even that we might misunderstand ourselves through a faulty comparison with machines. Instead, technology enters the inmost recesses of human existence, transforming the way we know and think and will. Technology is, in essence, a mode of human existence, and we could not appreciate its mental infiltrations until the computer became a major cultural phenomenon. (p. 61)

According to Mitcham (1994) "modern technology in particular is a revealing that sets up and challenges nature to yield a kind of energy that can be independently stored and transmitted" (p. 51). This is what other authors have referred to as "productionist metaphysics." This concept of "standing reserve", resources which are stored in anticipation of consumption, is conveyed by Heidegger's use of the word bestand.

Heidegger's ontological philosophy has seen renewed popularity as advances in communication technology continues to define new limits of human existence. Two recent example of works on Heidegger are: Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art (1994), by Michael Zimmerman, and, RUATV? Heidegger and the Televisual (1993), edited by Tony Fry. In RUATV?, Heidegger's metaphysics are used to explore television as a cybernetic medium. In the essay "Switchings", Tony Fry wrote,

With his notion of the "will to will" Heidegger prefigured much of the critical concern with cybernetics. He put forward an analysis that loaded technology with a determinate existence and an impetus of its own beyond any direct control of the "will to power." (p. 24)

Heidegger died in 1976, long before the personal computer and computer networks [20], such as the Web, became a reality. However, as early as 1957 Heidegger foresaw the computer, what he called the "language machine," or the sprachmaschine.

The language machine regulates and adjusts in advance the mode of our possible usage of language through mechanical energies and functions. The language machine is-and above all, is still becoming-one way in which modern technology controls the mode and the world of language as such. Meanwhile, the impress is still maintained that man is the master of the language machine. But the truth of the matter might well be that the language machine takes language into its management and thus masters the essence of the human being. (Heidegger, quoted in Heim, p. 8, see also p. 62-66)