Love at First Sight The Stories and Science Behind Instant Attraction Book

In his lecture The Question Concerning Technology (1953), Martin Heidegger explores the status of technology and its relationship to human being and Being in general.

To put it simply: when natural philosophers like Parmenides and Heracleitos started asking questions about Being, they were able to penetrate to the fundamental ontological structure of everything. During these times, technology had a much broader scope than it has for us. Philosophy, science (the study of nature) and poetry all explored Being in its purity. Language was key.

The later Heidegger regarded language as the house in which human beings live. In other words, language is the way we understand the world and ourselves, and in this role is crucial. This explains his obsession with the degeneration of mankind, albeit not in a biological sense (like social Darwinists, the eugenicists-movement and the Nazi Ãœbermensch-programme) but in a philosophical sense.

According to him, this pure state of Ancient Greece got covered up under the rubble of two millennia of philosophical tradition. It all started with Plato and Aristotle, who shifted the attention to the world as it appears to us and its relation to a supposed real world. To quote Alfred North Whitehead: the whole western tradition of philosophy is a footnote to Plato. Up to Heidegger's time all of philosophy occupied itself with the same basic question about the status of beings that started with Plato. This tradition not only sprouted the delusional metaphysics, which dresses itself in ontological garments only to cover up its ontic body, but also the mighty powerful world-changing modern sciences - the study of the world of reality.

What does this have to do with poetry and Ancient Greece? Well, with Aristotle's conception of hylemorphism - the notion that all things are composites of matter and form (essence) - man started to look at the world in a particular way. This was a way that transformed nature into an endless stock of matter to be ordered - by human beings, at will - to use as energy for their worldly ends. By the way, this world, or nature, includes human beings themselves. The scientific revolution in the seventeenth century started a development in which mankind ever-increasingly viewed nature in a one-sided way: nature as a store of energy to be ordered at will and used as it pleases us.

It is important to note that Heidegger is not occupied with environtmental issues or the way this mechanistic-technological worldview leads to exploitation of human beings - Heidegger was no Marx. He is solely occupied with the status of Being: the dominance of the technological viewpoint was both a historical necessity that started in Greece with Plato and Aristotle and intensified with the new sciences; and leads to the covering up of both alternative views to look at the world of beings (like poetry) and the possibility of un-covering itself.

In short, modern man looks at mountains as stores of energy, as things to be ordered by human beings (whether in the form of iron ore or a ski resort); at rivers as stores of energy which can be transformed into other forms and be distributed and create more things. During his later years, Heidegger was obsessed with poetry and he uses the German poet Hölderlin as example of someone who can capture, e.g., the river Rhine in a way that explores the Being of this natural phenomenon, as alternative to the technological viewpoint. According to him, writing after two world wars (including atom bombs), mass industrialization and at the start of the computer age, the danger for mankind has never been as great as now, but - again quoting poets - it is during the times when danger looms large that salvation is nearest.

Of course, Heidegger's claims can be psychologized and this would lead us to conclude we here have a traditional, conservative man who grew up in the rural country-side and who looked at the industrialization and 'americanisation' of his Germany with sadness. In short, a man who rejects modernity and rather wants to return to the days of Ancient Greece - if not in practice, at least in his mind. But this is too easy. Heidegger strikes an important chord: there are many ways to view the world we live in, and the scientific-technological standpoint has increasingly - with ever-faster rates - blindfolded us. We live in times and places were all (qualitative) aspects of human existence and our world are reduced to mathematical relations. In this sense, science and technology house their own intrinsic existential mode, which increasingly represses all alternative modes into oblivion.

And it is this last point which Heidegger warns us about: due to technology we look at the world through a technological lens, looking all of nature as mere resources of energy. This lens is so useful and even pleasurable to us, that more and more we lose sight of alternative ways to view nature. If this process goes on long enough, who will still be able to realize that there are alternative ways to look at nature to begin with?

For Heidegger, the question of 'What it means to Be?' was central to his life, and the increasing dominance of the technological standpoint made asking this question (let alone answering it) more and more difficult. For Heidegger art captures Being its most purest form: its creations enlighten our life-worlds in ways that make things appear to us in ways that cannot be captured by any technology. And poetry, since it is based on language - the house we dwell in, as human beings -, is the most pure form of art. Modern technology makes us lose sight of the question of Being and in this is transforming our essence as human beings. We used to be occupied with the question 'What does it mean for me to be, as a being?' but more and more we have forgotten this question, the question of our essence as men, and view ourselves and our world as standing-reserves of energy to be used by us and for us, at will. We are immersed in the world of being.

This is definitely a very interesting little work of Heidegger, and captures his later thinking rather well. It also is much more accessible than (e.g.) his Letter on Humanism (1947). I'd definitely recommend reading it, since its core themes and theses are still relevant today - perhaps now even more than back then...