Yeah, the first thing to say is
that I'm not against technology.
I've never spoken against technology,
nor would I demonize technology.
But I only try to understand the nature of technology.
When you quote this thought about the danger of the atom bomb
and the even greater danger of technology,
I'm thinking of what today is developing as biophysics,
that in the foreseeable future, we'll be able to do this with human beings,
that is, construct them in their organic nature as one needs them:
Martin Heidegger is one of the most well renowned philosophers of all time.
As he is primarily known for his work Being and Time,
there is a whole host of other work that
does not get the attention it truly deserves.
One of those underrated works is the Question Concerning Technology.
This video over the Question Concerning Technology
is a part two follow up to Being and Time.
While I want to make this video as accessible as possible
to all people who haven't really learned the theory surrounding Being and Time,
it is helpful understanding Being and Time and the backdrop he uses
in approaching the Question Concerning Technology.
So if part one and Heidegger's work Being and Time
interests you, feel free to take some time to watch that video first,
as I made Being and Time as easy as I could.
Yet, if this does not interest you, I will make this video as accessible
as humanly possible for you.
As Being and Time is one of the single most important
pieces of philosophy in the 20th century, I still find
Heidegger's essay on the Question Concerning Technology
to be one of the best works in philosophy and one of the
very best critiques of modernity that we have.
As Heidegger is really known for his phenomenology
and his existentialism, I find that this essay
really lends itself towards critical theory.
And as we see that this work is not a separation of
phenomenology or existentialism, it fundamentally
changes the makeup of how we view the modern condition
and how we view being with technology.
Our prior conceptions of technology was
one of exterior systems.
We ultimately saw technology as a mere separate entity from us.
As Heidegger rejects the separation of object and subject,
the separation of you and the world, Heidegger also
rejects the separation of technology and us.
To Heidegger, humans are questioning beings.
Within being and the fundamental care and interaction
as human beings, questioning and curiosity is woven within that framework.
This is why the fundamental meaning of technology is so important.
In a weird way, we are technology and technology is us.
So, what is technology?
And what does technology mean?
To Heidegger, to understand technology, we ultimately
need to understand the essence of technology.
When concerning technology, we don't typically think about the essence,
we think about how that technology affects us,
the utility of that specific technology at hand, and the like.
And while these questions are not bad questions,
and they are necessary to some extent.
Heidegger wants us to look directly at the essence of technology.
You may be watching this on a computer monitor,
you may be watching this on a smart phone, and
when asked about the essence of technology, you
may use a smart phone, you may use a monitor
as an example of the essence of technology.
But, an example of an actual physical form of
technology isn't actually the essence of technology.
To Heidegger, we as humans, are actually kind of blind to technology.
Heidegger quotes this as follows:
"We will never experience our relationship
to the essence of technology, so long as we
merely represent and pursue the technological."
Heidegger is trying to convey that so long as we remain
in a certain attitude towards technology, towards
its ultimate utility, its purpose, we will
never be able to truly understand technology, its essence,
and even its relation to us.
There is something else that Heidegger wants to dispel:
we have this common notion in society that technology is something neutral,
that it holds absolutely no moral baggage to it.
Heidegger rejects this outright and claims that technology
has all kinds of moral baggage to it.
Technology,
changes the entire trajectory of society as a whole.
And with that, in no possible realm could technology simply
be a means, in no realm could technology simply be a
neutral tool.
Its important to understand that Heidegger is approaching this question of technology,
as a metaphysical endeavor.
He wants to understand the fundamental essence of technology
while also not rejecting the prior notions of technology
actually being an external means and human activity.
In Heidegger's eyes, the metaphysical essence of technology
does not have to contradict the truth surrounding the means
of technology and the human activity around it.
Ultimately, he is trying to convey, that it is true that
technology is a means, and ultimately that technology
is a form of human activity.
Yet, he also wants to convey that actually doesn't get at
the essence of technology, and that both of these viewpoints
don't necessarily have to be wrong and
contradict one another.
So moving forward, there are three essential claims
Heidegger is making in the Question Concerning Technology:
One being, that technology is not a mere instrument,
its not a mere neutral tool.
It is ultimately a way of
understanding the world.
The second, is technology is not necessarily a human activity alone,
but ultimately technology develops beyond human control.
And almost beyond human comprehension.
And then the third, is technology is the actual highest danger.
It is something that we must use extreme caution towards.
Not necessarily in a physical sense,
but in a metaphysical and conceptual sense.
That we risk seeing the world only through a
technological lens.
So technology as a means of understanding the world,
lets dive into that.
To identify the essence of technology, it is to ultimately lay bear
technology as a clearing.
In Heideggerian terminology, a clearing is something that
reveals itself to us.
Like when you are in the middle of
the woods and there is a clearing to an open field,
conceptually, a clearing is a way of exposing an idea.
A good visual of this is the human metaphor of
a light-bulb going off when you understand something.
Technology operates in this way.
Technology sways our being,
our Dasein, as a way of understanding the world.
As a
way of exposing more.
Heidegger quotes this as follows:
"Technology, is therefore no mere means.
Technology is a way of revealing.
If we give heed to this, then another whole realm
for the essence of technology will open itself up to us.
It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth."
It can reveal things about us.
It can reveal
things of technology, that we didn't once know.
Heidegger ultimately places a lot of emphasis on revealing
meaning for us as well through the lens of technology.
So as a technological revelation, Heidegger also
focuses on how we interact with the world
our being, in a modern technological context.
In this modern technological context, the world is
partitioned away into what Heidegger calls a
Standing Reserve.
What Heidegger means by standing reserve, is that the
world is essentially one large resource, waiting to be used,
waiting to be processed.
In the present, the resource focused world is already
so ingrained into our being, that even hearing something
like the world is one large resource, waiting to be exploited,
waiting to be used, does not even seem problematic
in the slightest to many.
Yet, lets take a step back and understand the potential
benevolence of this very outlook.
With Being and Time,
understanding the unity between you, the world, the plants,
the animals.
In this standing reserve context, in this
modern outlook.
We see that we run the risk of partitioning ourselves away.
In pre-modernity, there was a fundamental relationship that
Heidegger recognized between nature and people.
That the trees were my home, that ultimately
the trees were used to create a home.
That if I needed
to light a fire, that the trees were available to me in
that relationship.
In a standing reserve, not so much.
The trees, the resources themselves, become an abstraction.
There is no relationship to you when the only concern
is how much money am I going to make from these trees?
How much money and utility is going to come from
this plot of land?
Heidegger notices when there is no relational context to
how you interact with the world.
It festers elsewhere.
If the trees, if the soil, if the water, are all resources to be used.
How about people?
Given the unity between all.
What will stop us from looking at people in the exact same context?
As an abstraction, used to make money.
Used to garner utility.
This is an ultimate danger in what technology poses to us.
And what ultimately, modernity failed to grasp.
And these are only the most visceral of examples.
Modes of communication, organization, have all been
affected from this technological mode of being.
Friendly gatherings aren't mere friendly gatherings anymore.
These inner human affairs are partitioned away into networking.
They're partitioned away into career gain.
This removes
the same notion of friendly relationships, of
authentic companionship.
And while Heidegger would certainly admit that these
relationships can still exist, but, in this technological
mode of being.This realm of human stock,
this realm of hyper-productivity, we may only view humans
and companionship as a means of utility.
How about the semantics and language structure surrounding organizations?
We see businesses, we see corporations,
completely partition people away into resources.
We see that the departments that manage these people
are actually called human resources or HR.
In this context, we see that these executives, these CEO's,
these business owners don't really see their employees as people.
They see them as actual tangible resources.
In this way,
this is how technology is not a mere neutral tool.
It is a clearing, it is a revelation of human interaction in the world.
And an ultimate arbiter of change in this regard.
By revealing beings as no more than the measurable,
the manipulative, technology ultimately reduces beings
into not-beings, as Heidegger put.
As people, as plants, as animals, are standing reserve, we
lose the very core element of what makes us beings.
That is our relationship to one another, and our
direct importance to one another.
Because, if there is more of us, if there are more trees,
more water, we have a standing reserve of more.
Therefore, we lose our sacred elements as beings.
Not only this, but, we ultimately lose concern over the actual power that nature harnesses.
As we become more technologically adept,
as we grow as a species, we almost come into play as
a war like entity against nature.
Where the ultimate technological goal is to harness nature,
the ultimate technological goal is to control it.
Pre-industrial societies did not used to look at nature like this.
We looked at nature as a way in how we can work with it.
Heidegger refers to these different modes of revealing,
of working with nature, and controlling nature, as poiesis.
The poiesis of the past, the revealing of nature of the past,
was more in line with poetry in Heidegger's eyes.
And in the poiesis of today, it is much more brutal, it is
much more jagged, and it is much less human in his eyes.
To Heidegger, the pre-industrial trades of the past reflect this.
Heidegger writes:
"If he is to become a true cabinet maker, he makes himself
answer and respond above all to the different kinds of wood,
and to the shapes slumbering within wood,
to wood as it enters into man's dwelling
with all the hidden riches of its essence.
In fact,
this relatedness to wood is what maintains the whole craft.
Without that relatedness, the craft will never be anything
but empty busywork, any occupation with it will be
determined exclusively by business concerns.
Every handicraft, all human dealings, are constantly in that danger."
Heidegger is claiming that the poiesis of today,
does not concern itself with relationships.
It's concern is productivity.
It's concern is with utility, and ultimately it's concern is with business dealings.
Therefore, that direct relationship with nature is often lost.
Again, technology offers itself up as a revelation.
As a way and means of understanding.
Rather than just a neutral tool.
Further, it offers itself up as a state of mind.
A state
of mind that has completely encapsulated the west in Heidegger's eyes.
This mindset threatens the authenticity of our lives,
it threatens our relationships, and one of
the most important points according to Heidegger
is how it makes us complacent to existential danger.
With this mindset, we could ruin ourselves.
Think about 2020, how often do we hear every other month,
about the limited amount of time left we have to fix
climate change.
In this technological mode of being, we don't really
have to worry about climate change, because whenever
climate change happens in the next 30 to 40 years,
well, guess what?
We'll have the technological capability in dealing with that.
But, Heidegger would ask the question: how would you know that?
How would you know that we would actually have
the technological capability 20-30 years later?
In a paradoxical sense, he'd point out the sheer hypocrisy
in thinking this, while also abiding by science.
We create an almost unscientific worship of science.
Heidegger points out that there is an ultimate responsibility
in how we deal with technology today.
With our central attitude towards it, and our basic utilization of it.
Further, he would argue that our lack of understanding of
the essence and metaphysical way of technology
is even more harmful.
In the end, Heidegger is not anti-science, he's not
anti-technology.
Rather, he wants to fight against the actual technological
modes of being that encapsulate the west.
In a weird way, he believes that this technological way
of being will actually kill itself in the end.
Mimicking the Marxist accelerationism of capitalism,
ironically enough, Heidegger believes that people
will understand the sacredness of pre-industrial society,
and that even with our modern technology, we
will still be able to find a way to live like we did before.
The Question Concerning Technology ultimately is a critique
of our modern ways of being, and an inquiry into the
metaphysical nature of technology.
Its again important to note that Heidegger is not
anti-technology.
Rather, he is against the sheer attitude
around technology, the hyper obsession with resources
and the hyper obsession with productivity that comes with that attitude.
As Heidegger pointed out, technology is not technological.
Technology is a mode of being and its a mode of revealing.
We should view the Question Concerning Technology as a reminder to look deeper into something.
That the metaphysical may not be dead, and that
we should not become complacent with technology.
We should not rely on the idea that technology will
solve every single existential crisis.
And further, we should examine our relationships closer,
we should not partition important things like technology
away into a neutral arbiter, or a neutral tool.
As we can potentially jeopardize everything that makes us human,
and the very meaning that encompasses our humanity.
Hey, guys!
Thank you so much for watching.
I want to give a quick message: this video probably came out
a little bit later than what I would have wanted
as I have been doing a collaboration with the
YouTuber 1Dime, over a specific political topic.
And you guys will see that when it releases.
Ultimately, I have a really important video coming up
after this, and a really important announcement and request
for you guys.
So, be on the look out for that.
Ultimately, again, thank you very much for watching this.
This video was extremely difficult to make as in
traditional Heideggarian fashion.
It was super difficult to decipher through.
But, hopefully I pulled this off, hopefully I
was able to make something really easy to digest
without watering it down.
So, ultimately guys, feel free to check out my Twitch.
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I actually ran out of room on the board, which is wonderful news,
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Also, check out my instagram, I always post clips, stuff like that,
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So ultimately, thank you guys for watching!
Music: Kevin Macleod
All necessary resources and citations in the description!