enowning
Saturday, July 16, 2005
 
Ten Theses on Heidegger


10. The in-principle unlimitedness of takings-as and occurrences-of-being likewise makes possible unlimited technology.

a. One form of unlimited taking-as is unlimited using-for -- for example, the adapting and reshaping of entities into commodities, into means for achieving human ends, etc., ad infinitim.

b. As with scientific knowing, such in-principle unlimited using-for need not entail Seinsvergessenheit or stand in an inverse relation to Entschlossenheit, Eigentlichkeit, die Einkehr in das Ereignis, or die Überwindung/Verwindung der Metaphysik.

c. Overlooking human finitude and the Welt/Lichtung/Da that hold open is not the cause, or even a contributing cause, of the globalization of technology.

d. Heidegger's published thought provides no good arguments for limiting (much less opposing) the endless spread of technology. While such arguments might well be made, Heidegger's philosophy fails to do so.

e. There is no necessary connection between the self-assertion of the technologically efficient self (sc., Jünger's "worker-dominating-the-world") and Seinsvergessenheit. Aquinas could just as easily have overlooked and forgotten the Welt/Lichtung/Da during his mystical vision at Fossanova, as Stalin could have understood and embraced his essential finitude while industrializing the Soviet Union.

Glossary:
Seinsvergessenheit: see yesterday's post.
Entschlossenheit: resoluteness.
Eigentlichkeit: ownmostness or authenticity.
die Einkehr in das Ereignis: turn in enowning. I don't know how this is different from the Kehre in Ereignis.
die Überwindung/Verwindung der Metaphysik: the overcoming/twisting free of metaphysics.
Welt/Lichtung/Da: world/clearing/there.

Fossanova is the Cistercian monastery St. Thomas Aquinas died in. I am not familiar with his vision there.

The reference to Jünger refers, I think, to this bit from The Question of Being, where Jünger is directly addressed in the second person regarding his essay The Worker (1932):
The Worker belongs in the phase of "active nihilism" (Nietzsche). The action of the work consisted--and in a changed function still consists--in the fact that it makes the "total work character" of all reality visible from the figure of the worker. Thus nihilism, which at first is only European, appears in its planetary tendency. However, there is no description in itself which would be able to reality in itself. Every description, the more sharply it advances, moves that much more positively in its own way within a definite horizon. The manner of vision and the horizon--you say "optics"--appear for human conceptions from the basic experiences of being in the whole. But they are already preceeded by a vista [Lichtung] never to be made first by man, of how being "is."
P. 41-43
Technological work does not require the oblivion of being. The clearing is already there and need not disappear in inverse proportion to technology.
 
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