Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), who was born in Messkirch, Germany, on September 26 and died there on May 26, was among the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. His significance for science, technology, and ethics may be approached from four directions.
Theoretical Science and Practical Activities
Heidegger's first and still most important book, Sein und Zeit (1927; English trans. Being and Time, 1962), is a cornerstone of the existentialism that became prominent after World War II. The book's major terms—anxiety, resoluteness, everydayness, authenticity, concern, care,and the like—are concepts Heidegger helps make intellectually cogent. Albert Camus (1913–1960) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) work on territory Heidegger opened up philosophically.
Heidegger's own goal, however, was not to outline a theory of human beings as radically insecure or irrationally committed, but to uncover the central openness of human beings to being as such. Humans are the entities for whom how to be is always an issue. This is true for everyone and not merely true generally or abstractly. Heidegger's goal is to clarify the question of being by working out what being is and how it matters for each human being.
Heidegger's analysis in Being and Time follows a path that begins with the significance of ordinary human concerns and concludes with the temporal meaning of being. The usual implicit meaning of being is that which is most fully or eternally present. As a result humans conceive all things as essentially static entities with fixed, general characteristics suitable for neutral measuring, spatially and temporally. People objectify even their own selves in this manner. The meaningful present, however, cannot exist apart from the ordinary worlds of significance into which people find themselves thrown. This richer temporality, not static presence, is the heart of being human, and the clue to being as such. There is a historical and temporal motion, indeed, a dizzying abyss beneath all presence.
The relation between theory and practice that Heidegger's analysis suggests has important implications for understanding scientific technology. Purely theoretical enterprises such as natural science or mathematics depend on views of time and space that flatten or narrow the rich meanings of being projected in the ordinary worlds of action and concern. Dealing with things as they are actually used is primary; theoretical and scientific analysis is secondary. The right time and place to use particular tools cannot be determined, for example, from the neutral coordinates of physics, but are inherent in use itself. Instead, physics abstracts from and narrows the richness of tools that do their jobs usefully in the appropriate place and time.
This narrowing does not mean, however, that what science discovers is false in its own realm. The relativism or inordinate human responsibility for meaning that is inseparable from Heidegger's understanding does not imply that everything is magically at human disposal. Rather, what natural science discovers may be correct, but humans must see how it is grounded on the broader truths of being and of human openness to being.
The History of Science
Many of the works of Heidegger and his followers include some notion that use, practice, and everyday concern precede the flattening on which modern science and technology are built. Indeed, this view has served as the basis for Heidegger's influence on academic studies in the history of science. Heidegger's teacher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and several of Heidegger's students or those he affected, such as Jacob Klein (1899–1978) and Alexander Koyré (1892–1964), made important contributions to the history of mathematics and science. Klein's Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (1934) and Koyré's Galileo Studies (1939) may even be said to have transformed the field, because Heidegger's procedure, which influenced them, involved a relentless search for the experience and understanding at the heart of worn-out philosophical concepts commonly employed by academic history.
To grasp the existential origin of scientific concepts was to uncover their meaning, power, and range. Heidegger himself explored in various places the original Greek understanding of nature (phusis) and the changed understanding of nature and motion that differentiates Aristotelian and Newtonian physics. His 1936 lecture course "Die Frage nach dem Ding" (published in 1962; English trans. What Is a Thing? 1967) is especially cogent in this regard.
The Technology Question
Heidegger's most direct discussion of scientific technology is in his "Die Frage nach der Technik," delivered in early versions in the 1940s and published in 1954 (English trans. The Question concerning Technology, 1977). His analysis became a basic text for those worried about the power and dominance of contemporary technology. Both directly and indirectly it has influenced thinkers and activists (such as the German Greens) who in the name of the environment opposed growing industrialization and mechanization. Here and in other works, Heidegger's prescient sense of the importance of information science and life chemistry also connects his views to pressing controversies of the day.
Heidegger argues that the essence of technology is nothing technological, that is, that technology is not itself a tool or implement. Rather, the essence of technology involves the manner in which things first present themselves in the contemporary world, namely, as "standing reserve" to be manipulated or rearranged at will. Everything approaches humans as a source of energy, a human "resource," a matter to be organized. Lost in this scenario are the independence of things, their distinctive presence and shape, and the way in which they take place in a meaningful world they help to form. The simple bridge across a river allows the river to meander and stand forth in its own power; the dam that helps to generate electricity transforms this river into an implement interchangeable with other energy resources. Because people see themselves so generally as resources to be manipulated, they become alienated from their roots and traditions, and from the significance of birth and death. Technology sunders human beings from the lifetimes and the times of life that give individuals weight and direction.
Heidegger does not seek to solve the problem of technology directly or to overcome humanity's technological leveling. To do so would make his own effort one more link in the strangling technological chain. Rather, he tries to show that as the predominant presentation of beings today, technology itself must open to and be placed in being as such. The apparent technological annihilation of all other significance becomes a clue to the source of meaning generally. The results of uncovering this source cannot be predicted. But being and human openness to it can be addressed and discussed in the manner of Being and Time, or in the more direct yet more elusive way of some of Heidegger's work from the mid-1930s on, in which discussions of poetry and gods come to the fore.
The Nazi Question
Heidegger's work is tainted by his association with the Nazis. He joined the National Socialist Party when he became rector of Freiburg University in May 1933, whereupon he praised Adolf Hitler publicly. The intensity of his support subsequently diminished, and some remarks in his lectures may be read as opposition to the views of Nazi ideologues. Other remarks continued to defend the Nazis, however, and he remained a party member throughout World War II.
The important question for students of Heidegger and of technology is whether his support of the Nazis flows from his philosophical arguments or, rather, stems from personal idiosyncrasy or political naïveté. It would be difficult to take seriously a thinker whose discussions of what it is to be a human being were in no way linked to political actions and judgments; Heidegger'sarguments do, in fact, display such a link. Heidegger's thought leads to immoderation and illiberalism because the standpoint from which he confronts issues is too encompassing to allow relevant ethical distinctions to matter or even become clear. Too many issues that to a responsible citizen or political leader involve significant differences between what is just and unjust look, from Heidegger's ontological point of view, to be the same. The substance of his understanding of human openness to being, moreover, with its emphasis on fate, authentic resolve, and the Volk (people), allows Heidegger to believe he has found essential links between his thought and the Nazis, and to accommodate his rhetoric to theirs.
It would be incorrect to claim that Heidegger's philosophical immoderation or basic concepts led him inevitably to support the Nazis or to approve all of Hitler's actions. The Nazis, he believed, ultimately failed to live up to what he called in 1935 "the inner truth and greatness of this movement." In the Introduction to Metaphysics, the version of 1935 lectures that he published in 1953, he described this "truth" and "greatness" as "the encounter between global technology and modern humanity. This same standpoint, however, led him not only (finally) to question the Nazis but to also treat the substance of Soviet Marxism, American democratic capitalism, and failed Nazism as essentially identical. The ethical and political immoderation to which Heidegger's view of technology can lead is strikingly captured not only in his political judgment but also in his identification of mechanized agriculture and the Holocaust: "Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, essentially the same as the manufacture of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockade and starvation of countries, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs" (Polt 1999, p. 172, translating from Heidegger's "Das Ge-Stell").
Heidegger's thought cannot be reduced to his connection to the Nazis. His understanding of being and being human revitalized the study of philosophy by encouraging an encounter with the phenomena that the great works of Western thought have in view. His central concepts stimulated many to rethink the true sources of human freedom, excellence, and happiness. His view of scientific technology captures its breadth and centrality in a novel and still cogent manner. The paths he helped to open, however, can become closed by dogmatic application of his procedures. Heidegger's politics, moreover, encourage more than ordinary caution in dealing with his insights.
MARK BLITZ
SEE ALSO Alienation;Arendt, Hannah;Existentialism;German Perspectives;Husserl, Edmund;Phenomenology.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blitz, Mark. (1981). Heidegger's "Being and Time" and the Possibility of Political Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. A commentary on being and time.
Heidegger, Martin. (1962). Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row. Translation of Sein und Zeit, 1927. Heidegger's major work
Heidegger, Martin. (1967). What Is a Thing? trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch. Chicago: Henry Regnery. Translation of Die Frage nach dem Ding, 1962. Includes a comparison of Aristotle and Newton.
Heidegger, Martin. (1977). The Question concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row. Translation of Die Frage nach der Technik, 1954. Heidegger's chief essay on technology.
Heidegger, Martin. (1993). Basic Writings, rev. edition, ed. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Includes "The Question concerning Technology," selections from Being and Time and What Is a Thing? and other works relevant to Heidegger's understanding of science and technology.
Heidegger, Martin (2000). Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Translation of Einfuhrung In Die Metaphysik (1953). Important lectures delivered originally in 1935.
Klein, Jacob. (1968). Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans. Eva Brann. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Originally published 1934. Early work in the history of science influenced by Heidegger.
Koyré, Alexandre. (1978). Galileo Studies, trans. John Mepham. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Originally published 1939. Early work in the history of science influenced by Heidegger.
Lovitt, William, and Harriet Brundage Lovitt. (1995). Modern Technology in the Heideggerian Perspective. 2 vols. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Discussions of Heidegger and technology.
Polt, Richard. (1999). Heidegger: An Introduction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Overall introduction to Heidegger's thought.
