By: ALEXANDER GILMAN

The relationship between the liturgical, defined by Jean-Yves Lacoste as “the logic that presides over the encounter between man and God writ large,” and the ethical is deeply ambiguous. Throughout Lacoste’s phenomenological work, Experience and the Absolute, the call of man and the world is set in contrast with the call of the Absolute. In this text Lacoste begins with the Heideggerian notion of our being as being-in-the world-toward-death and explores how a liturgical relationship with the absolute subverts, but also sublates, our being-in-the-world in favor of a being-toward-God. Without rejecting Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, Lacoste aims to show how a liturgical relationship is a free choice of any Dasein. However, this turning-toward-God from being-in-the-world is not without complications. Since our ethical obligations and relationships dwell in the world, it may also be the case that ethics is subverted in the logic of the liturgical. Lacoste discusses ethics in many parts of the text, but nonetheless a thematized understanding of the exact relationship between ethics and liturgy is still necessary. There are several possibilities for how this relationship may manifest itself. The liturgical could be irreducibly separate and contradictory to ethics; the liturgical could ground ethics by creating the possibility of ethics; the liturgical could provide specific ethical content, such as virtues, laws, and commandments. In the end, we must especially look for specific ethical principles that could guide our behavior, not just a vague ethical space. I will thus maintain a basic definition of ethics as a system of moral principles that govern a person or group’s action. We must weigh these possibilities and definitions against Lacoste’s framework for the liturgical.

To help flesh out this relationship, I will also discuss Soren Kierkegaard’s philosophy of the religious and the ethical, giving a cross-reading of Fear and Trembling and Repetition guided by Dominic Desroches’ article “The Exception as Reinforcement of the Ethical Norm: The Figures of Abraham and Job in Kierkegaard’s Ethical Thought. I believe the relationship between the liturgical and the ethical is a fundamental problem in religious thought for it must be deciding factor in the legitimacy of any religious system. The boldness and rigor of Lacoste’s project to reconcile the Heideggarian phenomenological analytic of Dasein with the Christian commitment to being-toward-God must be weighed against a consideration of the ethical else it is in danger of being irrelevant to our own lives.

The first possibility for the relationship between the liturgical and the ethical, that they are in fact irreconcilable and contradictory, seems to be the momentum of the first several chapters of Experience and the Absolute. By chapter four, Lacoste brings to the fore what it is becoming a real problem in his analytic of the liturgical: subverting our relationship with the world in order to prioritize our relationship with an unknown Absolute. Liturgy appears from most of Lacoste’s accounts to contradict the logic of the world and consequently, possibly contradict our ethical responsibilities. Lacoste writes in summary, “We have defined liturgy as the resolute deliberate gesture made by those who ordain their being-in-the-world a being-before-God, and who do violence to the former in the name of the latter.”ii Although Lacoste is careful to say that liturgy transgresses and annuls rather than eliminates or destroys our relation to place, to history, and to the world, its implications are nonetheless disturbing.

Especially since in his framework we are subverting our relation to place in exchange for a liturgical ‘nonplace,’ our time for a ‘nonevent’ and our relationship to others or world for a ‘nonexperience,’ this free choice for the liturgical appears at first glance not only to be ethically suspect but also precarious in its logic. Lacoste even uses this latter word to describe the liturgical commitment, thus he is well aware of how it looks. On this point Lacoste expands, “Liturgy actually suffers from being in the margins and at a distance in two ways. It is removed from definitive realities, which it at best represents inchoately. And it is removed from all that which, in the domain of the provisional, justifiably demands that we take care of it.”iii It is suggested by this point that liturgy serves no reasonable purpose except as a diversion and distraction from the responsibilities of the ethical. The logic of liturgy is one “foreign to the logic of action.”iv

Thus, Lacoste must ask, “Is liturgy a form of divertissment?”v Lacoste’s answer will be a clear “no” but the question demands of liturgy to defend itself against the implications of subversion. In other words, why should we risk contradicting or distracting our ethical responsibility, which is tangible and concrete, for the precariousness of the liturgical?

Lacoste further complicates the issue by resisting an ethics gained solely from the logic of our being-in-the-world. By critiquing Emmanuel Levinas’ first philosophy and siding with Heidegger, he writes, “Yet the mute call that renders me “hostage” to others places no obligation on me that would emanate solely from the a priori conditions of my presence in the world.”vi Our initial condition of being-in-the-world is in fact also a divertissement from the ethical: “the world keeps the injunctions of the good veiled over.”vii Beyond the inferior ethics of the social contract, the ethical, similarly to the liturgical, aims to subvert the solipsism and existential self-centeredness of Dasein’s being-toward-death. Thus, we cannot simply disregard liturgy as irrelevant because our being-in-the-world does not grant us an originary ethics. Lacoste’s account of liturgy problematizes the ethical for believers as well as nonbelievers. We must then ask two additional questions: can the ethical be (re)gained through the liturgical and is there an alternate source for the ethical outside the liturgical?

In order to grant liturgy a positive relationship to ethics, either through grounding its possibility or providing ethical content, it must be through a paradox. If liturgy subverts our relationship to the world and diverts from the logic of work, but also provides something positive to the consideration of ethics, then the relationship is contradictory. This does not mean, however, that it is impossible. After thematizing the problem of ethics in liturgy Lacoste makes the bold claim that “The diversion that liturgy has as its task is perhaps alone in permitting us to rigorously ground the ethical meaning of our facticity.”viii This is indeed a surprising statement. First, it is claiming that the very diversion we questioned as ethically suspicious in fact grounds ethics. Second, liturgy is the sole ground for ethics. Third, the meaning of our facticity, our being-in-the-world, is, at least partially, ethical. Against the implications of liturgical divertissement, Lacoste wants to argue a strong, positive relationship between the liturgical and the ethical. There are three possibilities in Lacoste’s work for how the liturgical may ground the ethical. We must ask whether they are satisfying answers to the problems above.

First, Lacoste argues that time spent liturgically grants us a symbolic distance from the inherence of the world, thus unveiling the ethical from the divertissement of the world. Lacoste explores the logic of the “initial” versus the “originary” to flesh out this possibility. The initial, our everyday, already always being-in-the-world, as we mentioned above, “keeps the injunctions of the good veiled over.” The night of the vigil, the liturgical time par excellence, subverts our relation to world, brings us to the margins of our being-in-the-world in order to remove the world as a hindrance between ourselves and the Absolute. This turning toward God through the liturgical night, Lacoste argues, also has a morning in which we turn back toward the world, granted a distance that allows perspective and new clarity on the problems of our being-in-the-world. He writes, “The new day that concludes the liturgical vigil must be understood as the gift of the beginning given one again: the symbolism of the origin leads to the reality of a starting point, to the reality of a space opened to a freedom capable of willing, and indeed of doing good.”ix By subverting the inherence of the world we gain purity of vision, and possibly of intentions, prior to our initial thrownness. The liturgical returns us to our “originary” nature, suggesting a pre-Lapsarian symbolism, gives us back the possibility of being ethical without the distractions of the world. This is a useful starting place for developing a relationship between liturgy and ethics.

With this conclusion, however, we have not gained a real ethic but only a possibility for ethics. There is nothing inherent in the distance gained by liturgy to return to the world with an ethical project. In another place, though, Lacoste suggests a way in which liturgy additionally alerts us to our responsibility through the liturgical unhappiness of consciousness. He writes, “The liturgical unhappiness of consciousness reveals, not only that liturgy prevents us from doing good during the time of entr’acte, but also that we have ignored the ultimate (though veiled over) stakes of our being-in-the world, and that we can no longer continue to do so.”x This unhappiness, the one that motivates this paper, stays with the person during the liturgical. He or she feels that the liturgical vigil is time taken away from the necessary exigencies of the ethical. This perceived deficiency in the liturgical combined with the distance gained throughout it perhaps gives a possible solution to how the liturgical may more rigorously ground the ethical. Lacoste continues, “liturgy enables us to dwell in the world and on the earth by superimposing on our facticity the order of an ethical vocation that alone authorizes us to let the Kingdom invest itself in world and earth in advance.”xi The liturgical, then, allows the transcendent ethical logic of the Kingdom, of the eschaton, to come to the world. We see in liturgy how far the world is from the Kingdom and thus desire to change the world.

Here, it seems, Lacoste has reconciled ethics to liturgy, but there are some problems still lurking in this answer, or at least an incompleteness. In response to the first claim that liturgy opens a space that subverts and gives distance from the world, it must be reemphasized that this gives nothing but the possibility of the ethical. Even when the liturgical unhappiness of consciousness imbues us with a sense of the irresponsibility of the liturgical, this desire to return to the world still lacks any specific ethical principles. We are called back to the world with a clearer vision but how can we go about bringing the Kingdom to the world? If our being is fundamentally duplicitous, how can our beingin- vocation during liturgy inform our being-in-fact, ethically or otherwise? At best, this grounding of ethics is the grounding of a desire for the ethical. Lacoste’s claim lacks the kind of ethical framework we have in Levinas. The liturgical need not give us dogmatic rules, but it should give a concrete foundation for how to be ethical. Since Lacoste disagrees with Levinas that the ethical relation is original to our being, it seems he shies away from providing an ethical system at all. Despite this incompleteness, a lot has been gain by grounding a desire for the ethical. It shows that the liturgical and the ethical have a positive relationship. But thus far this relationship is still unthematized. We do not, as Lacoste assumes, have any sense of the “ethical ground of our facticity” but rather simply that the ethical is possible and desirable. This desire should want something more concrete and specific.

Although Lacoste does not relate this next concept directly to ethics, I believe there is one moment in the text that may be read as a more specific way in which liturgy provides an ethical framework. The liturgical project of abnegation aims to subvert our consciousness, our subjectivity, and our will. With regard to the first, Lacoste describes liturgy as “disoriented consciousness.”xii Liturgy places us in a relation different from any other relation, to an object for example. Rather than being strictly intentional, in the Husserlian sense, in the liturgical relationship we do not gather objects around us as the subject but “make ourselves available before God.”xiii The subject is no longer the center of the experience. Lacoste continues, “The I [le moi] can content itself with being an I. Now, it is precisely liturgical (in)experience that provides the exemplary case of a decentering and marginalization of the ego.” Through this dislodging of the I we become the other par excellence of the Absolute. But since the Absolute is not an other in the same sense of an worldly object or person, the relationship is disproportionate. Our otherness subordinates our ipseity. Through liturgy we exist primarily in the mode of You. Although this is not as originary to our being-in-the-world as the mode of I, the liturgical disorientation of consciousness forces us into a relationship that can radically reorient our relationship to others.

Ironically, this kind of reorientation recalls the philosophy of Levinas that Lacoste rejects, although in a different form. By de-centering the ego through liturgy we achieve two things: first, a greater selflessness and realization of the limitation of our subjectivity, and second, a model for ethically “making ourselves available” for others. Levinas’ conception of being “hostage” to the other thus takes on a new meaning through the liturgical and can thus be a useful category without conceding to his first philosophy. The relationship we have to the Absolute, throughout the language of a relation rather than that of Kingdom versus world, gives us a framework for applying a liturgical (non)experience to a worldly, ethical experience. If this disorientation of consciousness is not just incidental but rather essential to the liturgical, we have gained a more concrete grounding for the ethical. Yet, there is still something dissatisfying in this conclusion. It lacks specific ethical principles that could help guide our being-in-the-world. It gives a model for becoming a You that can hear the call of the other, but this relationship must be fleshed out more. Moreover, Lacoste does not directly connect disorientation to ethics, so we only have implications. An ambiguity still ultimately remains.

In Fear and Trembling Soren Kierkegaard explores a similar tension between the ethical and faith through the analysis of Abraham attempting to slay Isaac on Mount Moriah. Kierkegaard develops a framework for comparing the action of Abraham as the Knight of Faith and the tragic hero, or Knight of Infinite Resignation. The drama that Kierkegaard lays out for consideration involves heroic acts that suspend ethics. In the case of the tragic hero, the ethical is suspended in order to accomplish a higher ethic, such as Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia in order to save the polis. He stays ultimately within the ethical even when he suspends it. Abraham, Kierkegaard concludes, does no such thing but rather entirely and radically suspends the ethical for his act of faith; “in his action he overstepped the ethical altogether, and had a higher telos outside it.”xiv For Kierkegaard, Abraham’s action, although not a part of everyone’s faith commitment, is fundamental to the religious attunement. Abraham mythically dramatizes the paradox and dangerous implications of intending something transcendent, just as Lacoste’s treatment of the liturgical necessitated such radical subversion of worldliness. Kierkegaard, however, presents the problem in even starker terms.

The example of Abraham expresses for Kierkegaard the basic religious act of faith. Kierkegaard, unlike Lacoste, gives a specific definition of the ethical that he then juxtaposes with the religious. For Kierkegaard to be ethical is to will the good for the universal: “the individual’s ethical task is always to…abrogate his particularity so as to become the universal.”xv In another way, it is to put the other, as an abstract totality, before the self. The ethical is that which applies to everyone at all times. He does not flesh it out more than this, but implicit in it is an ethical attitude more concrete than with Lacoste. The religious flows through this universal but ends above it. He writes, “Faith is just this paradox, that the single individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified before the latter, not as subordinate but superior…”xvi The religious person’s relationship to the Absolute supersedes his or her relationship to the universal, to the ethical. Thus not only do the faithful appear non-ethical or neutral, in that they intend outside the ethical, but they also appear unethical, in that they negate the universal.

The religious attunement’s utter contradiction with the ethical is irreducible and pronounced in Kierkegaard, and thus unlike Lacoste, there is within the religious little room for finding an ethic. At least Kierkegaard is hard-pressed to find one, as he remarks, “I can understand the tragic hero, but not Abraham, even though in a certain lunatic sense I admire him more than all others.”xvii There is not within the religious drama an obvious ethical logic, hidden away in a nice paradox. Here it is a stark betrayal of the ethical, not just as a diversion but as a positive act: “What we usually call a temptation is something that keeps a person from carrying out a duty, but here the temptation is the ethical itself which would keep [Abraham] from doing God’s will.”xviii Lacoste’s conception of the liturgical can be critiqued as a temptation in the first sense, as a hindrance to carrying out the ethical. Abraham’s act does not just subvert but negate the ethical. The knight of faith is unethical, and thus we have here an even more difficult and disconcerting problem.

Besides the subtle, and ultimately unsatisfying, suggestion that Abraham must eventually descend Mount Moriah and return to the world, there is no reconciliation of the religious and ethical in Fear and Trembling. Abraham acts on the absurd and cannot be understood in terms of the universal, of the ethical. Even if we accept Abraham’s return home as possibly ethical, since his act was a negation rather than a subversion of the ethical, it is simply not enough to solve the problem. Dominic Desroches in his essay on Kierkegaardian ethics suggests a cross-reading of Fear and Trembling and Repetition to work out this problem. In the latter text, which was actually published before Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard compares the concept of recollection to that of repetition. In recollection, one returns to a past circumstance expecting similar feelings but is naturally disappointed. Recollection ends in melancholy. Repetition, however, is a return forward, a renewed will and passion to live in old circumstances in a fresh and invigorated way. When read through the lens of Abraham and ethics, a religious repetition is willing the particular over the universal, in order to repeat the universal with new vigor. Repetition suggests that faith is necessary for the ethical, a thesis similar to that of Lacoste’s, but Kierkegaard’s idea gives a more specific ethical framework.

Yet, this conclusion seems to fundamentally contradict Fear and Trembling: how does repetition succeed in this retrieval of the ethical? In the afterward to Repetition Kierkegaard addresses the reader in terms familiar to the discussion in Fear, “The exception thinks also the universal when it thinks itself, it labors also for the universal when it elaborates itself, it explains the universal when it explains itself.”xix The exception, the willing of the particular as in Abraham, in fact strengthens the universal by underlining the meaning of the universal. In its very absurdity and insanity, the exception reinforces the logic of the universal. He continues:

“In the course of time one grows weary of the perpetual patter about the universal, always the universal, repeated to the most tedious extreme of insipidity. There are exceptions. If one cannot explain them, neither can one explain the universal. Commonly one does not notice the difficulty because one does not think even the universal with passion but with an easygoing superficiality. On the other hand, the exception thinks the universal with serious passion.”xx

Similar to Lacoste, Kierkegaard makes the argument that the religious act grants a sort of respite and distance from the ethical that actually reinvigorates the latter. Yet additionally, repetition deepens ethical knowledge. By pushing the universal to its margins, its contour is regained. The religious repetition moves forward, adding richness and understanding, just as Lacoste says, “the circle that unites liturgical reason and ethical reason is the fundamental rhythm of existence, which transgressing its native conditions, desires the accomplishment of the human beyond what can be derived from our facticity.”xxi Thus Lacoste agrees with Kierkegaard’s model but we gain something concrete through Kierkegaard that is perhaps missing in Lacoste’s analysis. Placing the relationship between the religious and the ethical in the terms of the universal and particular, a specific ethical system is suggested. Because Kierkegaardian repetition reinforces the universal, rather than just returns us to our facticity with a new clarity, it brings with it an ethical framework, an attitude that suggests, through faith, how we may act ethically. The rigorous absurdity of faith provides logic to the ethical.

That is not to say that Lacoste provides nothing in filling out this complex relationship between the ethical and the liturgical. Combining the more specific Kierkegaardian language of the universal with Lacoste’s sophisticated logic of the vigil, originary, and Kingdom, as well as the liturgical disorientation of consciousness, we have thus gained a tenable possibility for how the liturgical may be reconciled to the ethical. Nevertheless, achieving such a reconciliation necessitated a creative reading of both writers in conjunction. Also, even with his additional and useful framework, there is a lot to be desired in Kierkegaard’s ethics. We in the end still lack the more practical guidance of how the liturgical may relate to a real ethical relationship. What if there is a question about what should or should not be willed as universal, such as the famous story provided by Kant of the murderer at the door for your friend? Do you lie and betray the universal for perhaps a higher ethic such as the tragic hero? The details of such a framework are not worked out.

Thus in the end, with Lacoste and Kierkegaard, we have three specific concepts that relate the liturgical to the ethical: that the liturgical vigil opens us an pure space for the ethical, that the disoriented consciousness provides a model for the ethical relation, and that repetition reinvigorates the logic of the ethical universal. In short, we have a suggestion for the relationship between the liturgical and the ethical, but not much of an ethics. In order for this problem to be truly satisfied, more work must be done to show what kind of ethical principles can be gained from the liturgical and thus why we should think the liturgical at all with regard to ethics. Moreover, the ambiguities and implications of the liturgical, such as its successful subversion of the logic of the world, also beg the disturbing question: why think the ethical at all? Why not stay in an indefinite vigil? Why return to the anxiety-ridden logic of being-in-the-world? Ultimately, we desire not just a relationship between the liturgical and the ethical but a meaningful synthesis that can guide our entire lives from the nightly vigil to our daily interactions with people and things.

End Notes

i) From Existentialist Thinkers and Ethics, ed. Christine Daigle (London: McGill-Queen’s
University Press), 2006.
ii) Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2004), 39, emphasis mine.
iii) Ibid, 68.
iv) Ibid, 78.
v) Ibid, 70.
vi) Ibid, 72.
vii) Ibid, 73.
viii) Ibid, 70.
ix) Ibid, 97.
x) Ibid, 73.
xi) Ibid, 75.
xii) Ibid, 149.
xiii) Ibid, 152.
xiv) Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 88.
xv) Ibid, 83.
xvi) Ibid, 84.
xvii) Ibid, 86.
xviii) Ibid, 88.
xix) Soren Kierkegaard, Repetition (New York: Harper & Row, 1941), 133.
xx) Ibid, 134.
xxi) Lacoste, 76.

Alexander Gilman (’11) is a History Major and a Philosophy Minor from Boston College

Image taken from deviantart.com

ABSTRACT: Many commentators are extremely critical of Heidegger’s ambiguous conflation of Being-with and das Man in Being and Time. The text of Division One, Chapter Four shifts between an ethically neutral and ontologically necessary account of Dasein’s Being-with-others and an ethically saturated and contingent account of the same phenomenon, leaving the reader confused as to whether Heidegger is accepting sociality as a necessary and inexorable condition of human existence or a pervasive yet ultimately contingent impediment to authentic existence. In this paper I identify the point of confusion in Heidegger’s text and survey the dominant exegetical treatment of the text, which usually only takes one of Heidegger’s two contradictory claims as true. I then posit an alternative hybrid reading of the text in which the two dominant readings are integrated. I argue that, though Heidegger’s text is confused, the underlying idea is consistent, and what manifests as a logical contradiction in the text masks what is evidently Heidegger’s actual claim that the human condition is inherently contradictory. Dasein is then necessarily fallen, yet necessarily strives for authenticity.

—

“And so I believe in improvisation and I fight for improvisation.

But always with the belief that it’s impossible.”

-Jacques Derrida.¹

Bracketing any differences between Derrida and Heidegger, and focusing on their similarities, Derrida’s claim about improvisation aphoristically captures the internal tension in Heidegger’s das Man quite nicely. In its open and clear contradiction it plainly demonstrates the internal tension stemming from the struggle between social existence and improvisation, and yet Derrida’s willingness to express this internal tension seriously suggests that the concept at hand is not entirely unstable, though in considerable tension. For Heidegger, this tension stems from the seemingly unintentional equivocation within the text of an existential/ontological das Man that structures intelligibility and communication, and an existentiell/ethical das Man that acts as a barrier to becoming an authentic Dasein. The reader is left unsure as to whether to interpret das Man as a necessary, positive condition of Dasein, or as a contingent and undesirable hindrance to authentic existence. Are we to condemn or embrace das Man?

I do not deny that the writing of chapter IV of Being and Time on Being-with and das Man is unmistakably confused, and even contradictory as it stands; nevertheless I do believe that a consistent theory of das Man can be extracted from the text which incorporates both the existential/ontological reading of das Man and the existentiell/ethical reading. The resulting picture of Dasein illustrates a kind secular fallenness² in the human condition, a necessary characteristic of Dasein against which it must fight aggressively in order to exist authentically, though this is a task it can never fully complete. For Heidegger, the human condition is fundamentally sick, though salvation paradoxically presents itself as a possibility.

Heidegger writes Chapter IV in order to flesh out more fully the character of Dasein, his stand-in term for human existence. The provisional characteristics that Dasein (1) is able to question its own Being and (2) that it exhibits ‘in each case mineness’ were only provisional indicators of a general familiarity we had with Dasein, and now that Being-in-the-world has been phenomenologically described in greater detail, a fuller account of the “who?” of Dasein can emerge.

But how are we to begin to ask the question of the ‘who?’ of everyday Dasein? What preestablished and uncontroversial knowledge can we import? Heidegger initially entertains a Cartesian approach, positing the givenness of the ego in self-reflection. Surely this is indubitable? But the problem Heidegger finds with this approach is that in its everydayness, Dasein-qua-ego is far from indubitable; in fact, it is almost absent to awareness: “In clarifying Being-in-the-world we have shown that a bare subject without a world never ‘is’ proximally, nor is it ever given. And so in the end an isolated “I” without Others is just as far from being proximally given.” (BT 152/116)

Having discarded any kind of isolated Cartesian ego as a starting point for discovering the ‘who of everyday Dasein,’ Heidegger has taken one step backward; another potential starting point has been discarded. Where to begin? Heidegger suggests that the foregoing phenomenological account of the equipmental totality may provide us a clue: “In our ‘description’ of that environment which is closest to us—the work-world of the craftsman for example—the outcome was that along with the equipment to be found when one is at work, those ‘Others’ for whom the ‘work’ is destined are encountered too.” (BT 153/117) If this equipmental totality is so basic that it establishes the very framework of significance for Dasein³, then it seems that this ready-to-hand network is a fundamental, inextricable structure of the Being of Dasein. To bracket out the ready-to-hand from an account of Dasein would be to bracket the very source of significance and intelligibility. The remaining ‘Dasein’ would be beyond recognition. So Dasein is inextricably bound with its existential network of ready-to-hand equipment, as it coordinates the very topology of intelligibility.

But Heidegger recognizes that even prior to this network of ready-to-hand equipment, there is a concept of Others: “The Others who are thus ‘encountered’ in a ready-to-hand environmental context of equipment, are not somehow added on in thought to some thing which is proximally just present-at-hand; such ‘Things’ are encountered from out of the world in which they are ready-to-hand for Others [emphasis added].” (BT 154/118). For every piece of equipment, there is an antecedent undifferentiated Other, as its creator, as its user, as its designer, etc.. The ready-to-hand cannot be understood independent of Others. It follows then, that if the network of ready-to-hand entities, the existentiale source of significance and intelligibility, is equiprimordial with Being-with, then Being-with is an inextricable existentiale structure of the Being of Dasein. Dasein is necessarily a public being; it is always already with Others. Phenomenally, ‘Others’ manifest a presence more loudly than any isolated ‘ego’ of Dasein itself. The ‘Others’ are prior to Dasein’s reflective self in everyday comportment.

But since we form a part of the ready-to-hand totality, and since the roles Daseins play in this network are interchangeable, ‘Others’ are not differentiated from each other nor ourselves: “By ‘Others’ we do not mean everyone else but me—those over and against whom the “I” stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself—those among whom one is too.” (BT 154/118) In fact, rather than some indubitable ego, the who of everyday Dasein is “encountered proximally and for the most part in terms of the with-world with which we are environmentally concerned. When Dasein is absorbed in the world of its concern—that is, at the same time, in its Being-with towards Others—it is not itself.” (BT 163/125). Later on Heidegger reveals that “the Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self…In terms of the “they” and as the “they”, I am ‘given’ proximally to ‘myself.’” (BT 167/129) Heidegger is claiming that in everyday coping we understand ourselves from the point of view of society, as an undifferentiated constituent, rather than a unique ‘I’. We act, view ourselves, and judge our actions based on the perspective of the ‘they’, rather than a selfsame ‘me’.

Heidegger describes three interesting phenomena that illustrate Dasein’s discovery of itself in its everydayness as das Man: distantiality, averageness, and levelling-down. Together they are called ‘publicness.’ ‘Distiantiality’ is a constant, impulsive, and unconscious reference to the norms of das Man that Dasein uses to gauge the propriety of its actions: “In one’s concern with what one has taken hold of, whether with, for, or against, the Others, there is constant care as to the way one differs from them…The care about this distance between them is disturbing to Being-with-one-another, though this disturbance is one that is hidden from it.” (BT 164/126) ‘Averageness’ results from distantiality, and is its ultimate goal: “The “they” has its own ways in which to be. That tendency of Being-with which we have called “distantiality” is grounded in the fact that Being-with-one-another concerns itself as such with averageness, which is an existential characteristic of the “they”.” (BT 164/127) These first two are presented as value-neutral existentiale by Heidegger. For Heidegger they are neither to be celebrated nor condemned.

Levelling-down is the outlier in this laundry list of existentiale of das Man. Whereas distantiality and avergeness were described in value-neutral language, Heidegger’s tone promptly switches to poetic sorrow and even disgust in describing leveling-down:

In this averageness with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, [das Man] keeps watch over everything exceptional and thrusts itself to the fore. Every kind of priority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force. This care of avergeness reveals in turn an essential tendency of Dasein which we call the “levelling down” of all possibilities of Being. (BT 165/127)

There is an unmistakeable ethical import here. Das Man is not value-neutral in Heidegger’s eyes with respect to leveling-down. Individual human excellence is reduced to mediocrity, and true improvisation is reduced to mimicry of the norms inscribed by hegemonic das Man. Levelling-down renders human potential uninteresting, superficial, and pre-choreographed.

This lament of leveling-down prompts Heidegger to introduce ‘authenticity’ and ‘inautheticity’ into the text as ethical modes for Dasein to relate to das Man. Dasein is diffused into das Man and lost to itself in its everydayness.

In these [diffused] modes one’s way of Being is that of inauthenticity and failure to stand by one’s Self…The Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic Self—that is, from the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way…If Dasein discovers the world in its own way and brings it close, if it discloses to itself its own authentic Being, then this discovery of the ‘world’ and this disclosure of Dasein are always accomplished as a clearing-away of concealments and obscurities. [emphasis added] (BT 166/128-167/129)

Here it is clear that Heidegger advises ‘clearing-away of the concealments and obscurities’ imposed by das Man, and an autonomous discovery of the world ‘in its own way’ independent of das Man’s hegemony. But what are we to make of Heidegger’s earlier efforts to show that das Man is a necessary and inexorable existentiale of Dasein? How could we claim independence from a necessary structure of Dasein? How are we to treat this advice?

The traditional reading of das Man is an ‘existentialist,’ ethical reading. This reading highlights the Kierkeggardian influence in Being and Time. Das Man becomes an elaboration on Kierkegaard’s “the truth is never in the crowd.”⁴ This reading takes seriously the strong ethical language Heidegger uses to describe levelling-down, and they adopt Heidegger’s advice to actively resist the conformist leveling that das Man enforces, and to independently and authentically ‘take hold’ of their Being ‘in their own way’. Advocates of this reading, such as Frederick Olafson, recognize that this reading cannot be maintained if Heidegger’s claim is taken seriously that das Man is an inextricable existentiale of Dasein which governs all intelligibility. To solve this, Olafson seeks to undermine Heidegger’s argument for the equiprimordiality of ready-to-hand and Being-with. He claims that Heidegger has not shown that Being-with is an existentiale:

“[Heidegger’s claim] would have to take into account such facts as that what I uncover as a hammer, say, has been previously used (and thus uncovered) as hammer by others and it is normally from these others that I have learned what a hammer is and how to use one” ⁵

In the phenomena Olafson is raising, the individual exists prior to the socialization of practices, and so Being-with das Man must be added on later, rather than a necessary existentiale of Dasein. But this is a bad example. Olafson’s criticism cannot undermine the primordial social practices that are not explicitly taught, such as gender performativity and distance standing. Olafson’s critique of the primacy of Being-with is unsatisfactory.

Recent exegetical work of Hubert Dreyfus and Taylor Carman seeks to question the purely negative and ethical reading of das Man. In contrast, they choose to preserve Being-with as an existentiale, and abandon its link to inauthenticity. Dreyfus in particular sees das Man as dictating and negotiating the shared social practices that Dasein is unconsciously socialized into. Dreyfus focuses on the numerous passages in which Heidegger emphasizes that authenticity has no ethical import⁶. He sees strong textual evidence that das Man is the ultimate source of meaning and intelligibility, focusing on passages such as “The “they”, as the “nobody”, is by no means nothing at all. On the contrary, in this kind of Being, Dasein is an ens realissimum, if by ‘Reality’ we understand a Being that has the character of Dasein.” (BT 166/128) Here Heidegger is identifying the social phenomena of God with the reification of das Man, with a similar idea to Durkeim’s “God is society, writ large.” In other words, das Man, as the outgrowth of Being-with, governs and writes the highest-order of truth available to Dasein (or any Being). Dreyfus sees passages like this making the same claim that Wittgenstein makes when he posits the ultimate grounding of knowledge on shared practices.⁷ Dreyfus advocates the abandonment of the existentiell/ethical component of das Man as the reading most charitable to Heidegger’s initial project as an existential analytic of Dasein.

Whereas Dreyfus acknowledges that there are some undeniably negative consequences of das Man, Carman attempts to suggests that das Man is ethically harmless and impeccable. He suggests “Being “lost” in the one and not being able to find oneself and grasp one’s self as one’s own sound like inauthenticity, and indeed it sounds like something bad. But in fact, as we have seen, in normative contexts Heidegger draws not a twofold but a threefold distinction between authenticity, inauthenticity, and an “undifferentiated” average everydayness.” Carman here claims that das Man has no ethical content, that the hegemony of das Man has no impact on one’s authenticity. However, he goes on to say with regard to the ‘leveling’ and loss-of-Self in das Man, “we might say civilization is founded on an act of violence—in this case the mundane violence involved in fitting my own self-understanding into the, as it were, “one-size-fits-all” concept of personhood.” So clearly even on Carman’s value-neutral reading of das Man, there is some lamentable impact on Dasein’s freedom of expression and individuality. Neither reading, the existential/intelligible nor the existentiell/ethical, has been able to fully distance itself from the other, and thus the contradiction remains. It seems as though Heidegger is making a claim that can only be read as Dasein expressing a necessary contradiction.

It seems to me that the best that we can do with this contradictory text is to step in for Heidegger and suggest a hybrid of his two conflicting das Mans, preserving as much from both as we can. Hopefully, this will reduce the contradictions in the text to carelessness and reveal what Heidegger actually believed, and would have said in moments of greater clarity. I suggest the following:

Olafson, Dreyfus and Carman claim that neither reading of das Man can incorporate the other without contradiction, but it seems to me that these interpreters are dogmatically unwilling to entertain the idea that the human condition may be internally contradictory. A distinction should be made between a logically contradictory theory and an observation that Dasein’s condition is in conflict with itself. Perhaps we can reduce the former in the text to the latter. One desires to smoke despite desiring to be healthy, one desires to eat more than ones fill, and one desires recreation more than a productive work schedule allows. Could it not also be true that one chases the specter of authenticity even though the human condition necessarily denies complete access to it? This would suggest that Dasein is born fallen, and can only marginally save itself, though not completely.

Das Man is the source of inauthenticity, but not the essential characteristic of it. Conformity, a natural quality we inevitably exhibit as social creatures, is the source of conformism, a dogmatic and panicked unreflective and unconscious adherence to the contingent expression of das Man in our particular society. However, becoming authentic, it seems Heidegger believes, is not to overthrow the fetters of essential conformity, but contingent conformism. We can never step out of the background of shared social practices that structure intelligibility and significance. What we can do is recognize the contingency of the particular form that das Man takes within our social world, instead of taking it as dogmatically and unreflectively correct. This makes the most sense of Heidegger’s closing claim that “Authentic Being-one’s-Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the “they”; it is rather an existentiell modification of the “they”—of the “they as an essential existentiale” (BT 168/130). This would mean that authentic Dasein stays within the realm of conformity, and thus Being-with, significance and intelligibility, but actively resists its tendency to solidify into dogmatic conformism, continually recognizing the contingency of shared social practices, and thus allowing Dasein some space for potential relative uniqueness and relative improvisation; though to completely overthrow shared social practices and to purely improvise from scratch would be ultimately impossible. One can only press against that limit inscribed by das Man.

As I have shown, Heidegger’s text on das Man is internally contradictory as it stands. Heidegger posits Being-with as a necessary existentiale of Dasein’s existence, and then asks authentic Dasein to step outside of it. Both the existentiell/ethical and the existentiale/intelligibility readings have not been able to eliminate this contradiction. I suggest that we make a distinction between conformity to das Man and dogmatic conformism as an attitude toward das Man. Heidegger recognizes the necessity of the former, but condemns the latter, though he does not make this adequately clear in the text. Recognizing this deflated claim, we can reduce Heidegger’s contradictory claim to a claim about the internal tension in Dasein’s condition.

References

Dreyfus, Hubert L. Being-in-the-World Div. I : A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. New York: MIT P, 1991.

Carman, T. ‘Autneticity.’ in Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Mark A. Wrathall, eds. A Companion to Heidegger. Grand Rapids: Blackwell Limited, 2008.

Dreyfus, H. ‘Interpreting Heidegger on “Das Man”’, in Inquiry, 37 (1995) pp. 423-30

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York: Harper San Francisco, 1962.

Mulhall, Stephen. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Heidegger and Being and Time. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Polt, Richard. Heidegger. New York: Cornell UP, 1999.

Joseph N. Rees (’10) is a Philosophy major at American University.

Photo courtesy of silvestru

Abbreviations for Heidegger and other works cited:

QT – The Question Concerning Technology

Ister – Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”

WAPF – What Are Poets For?

SR – Science and Reflection

OWA – The Origin of the Work of Art

PLT – Hofstadter’s Introduction to Poetry, Language, Thought

Zimmerman – Michael Zimmerman’s Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity

Ferry and Renaut – Heidegger and Modernity trans. Franklin Philip

—

Here the question of the saving power potential of art against technology’s worlding as the standing-reserve will be addressed. Section I will provide a grounding analysis of Heidegger’s notions of technology and art and their danger and saving potential, respectively. For the sake of brevity and to avoid pedantry, familiarity with the concepts of technology and art will be assumed allowing focus on technology’s danger, art’s saving power, and Heidegger’s expectations. Section II demonstrates that art cannot play the role of the saving power, primarily due to technology being inescapable as the culmination of western metaphysics and its progress in mastering the world over the past 50 years. The thesis, if you will, posited here is that the conceiving of art as the saving power would be the ultimate victory of technology, having formed humans into thinking of art as a mere means. Section III, following and expanding upon Michael Zimmerman’s work, concludes by tentatively allowing for a ‘way out’ of the metaphysical age through technology ‘taking lessons’ from art to set techne as the primary mode of production-revealing, a unison of production and art.

Why any of this is important might come to mind, and to this I respond that it is absolutely essential to ensure that art is not used as a means. It is our highest dignity, to use Heidegger’s phrase in The Question Concerning Technology, to watch over the unconcealed and pay attention to technology’s revealing. To lose art and poetry to technology would be the final forgetting of Being and our complete transformation into will-to-power automatons, unaware of any world or Being other than the technological ‘one-ness’ we believe we control but are enslaved to. This will be discussed further throughout the following.

I. Technology is not a set of tools. It is not a mere means to further human ends for human benefit. Thinking of technology and science in this way, as a neutral mode of producing, only makes one blind to the essence of technology and its existential effect on us and our worlding (QT 4). Technology is a revealing of the world, humans, and things in the world; it is a mode of truth. However, it is not a revealing of ‘bringing-forth’ from concealment into presence, the process of aletheia as truth, the poiesis that is characteristic of art, techne, and anything that allows entities to reveal themselves on their own terms as one possibility of their being. No, technology is a revealing that orders, challenges, and gathers entities into a specific, exclusive mode of being Heidegger calls the standing-reserve (QT 17). As such, technology takes hold of things and nature in a specific way: As ordered to be ready for use at any time, as energy to be unlocked, stored, and utilized for further extraction and manipulation. This is accomplished through man, by setting-upon him this task of ordering. Thus man is compelled by the essence of technology to view nature and things in it as what technology reveals them to be, namely as resources to be extracted and things as equally substitutable. This whole process is the Ge-stell, the enframing, which calls man forth to order and assemble nature as ready-at-hand in a very restricted sense (QT 19). Enframing is the essence of technology and a useful word for thinking about how technology forms our worlding: It places upon us a framework of ordering-as-revealing that claims to contain within it all that is, and all that will ever be. Such is characteristic of technology, making it a revealing ‘one’ that reveals all Being in its own terms, unconcealing everything the world has to offer as standing-reserve, as truth. This is a very powerful and compelling kind of revealing, which explains why technology has gained so much power over the world, and why people eagerly adopt Ge-stell in their attempts to ease life and their anxiety in the face of the flight of the gods.

It begins to be clear in The Question Concerning Technology that Heidegger has a strong distaste for technology, especially in the passage regarding the technological renaming of the Rhine from its poetic name to one concerned merely with the production of hydro-electrical power. Even earlier in his thought this theme emerges, where in der Ister lectures technology is characterized not as a means but purely as a domineering, conquering kind of unfolding (revealing) that determines the possibilities of human comportment and the actuality of what is and what can be (Ister 53). Strongly influenced by past and contemporary anti-modern romantics such as his famous and controversial friend Ernst Jünger, Heidegger after the rectorship displayed consistent and penetrating insights into the ills of modernity and the problems of technology. The reasons for his disgust of the modern and the technological are manifold and complex.

Technology distorts man, his world, and presents the supreme danger. The Ge-stell of technology, rephrased but with the same meaning in many of Heidegger’s works, poses a great danger to man in that by viewing the world and entities as standing-reserve ready to be ordered, it is but a small and easy step to view man himself in this way; man as standing-reserve, as material, as a function of objectification, as a slave, losing his essence and fundamental relation to Being while encroaching upon nature a disrespectful ‘securedness’ (QT 27; WAPF 113, 115; SR 168; Zimmerman 199). Perhaps even worse than the transformation of the possible authentic man into the necessary inauthentic technological man is this transfiguration’s self-concealment and hiddenness. Heidegger’s discussions are threaded through by technology’s characteristic self-ignorance, a being-concealed of its method and workings that it is not aware of. This is one of the major problems of technology, that it claims to reveal everything but is unaware and passes over its own concealing/revealing, a lack of the understanding of the duality of concealing/revealing paradox that art has a grasp of (as we will see later). So not only does technology cover over the misery it causes, it is unaware of it’s doing so and of the basic Heideggarian notion that whenever something is revealed, something other is necessarily concealed (Ister 44). Closely related to this is another ‘monstrous’ characteristic of technology and science (which are mutually dependent), that of blocking all possibility except the one they reveal as truth. As mentioned above, the technological mode of revealing is extremely exclusive. All other ways of revealing, of aletheia, are dismissed as ‘pointless’, ‘useless’, or ‘without worth’, each accusation being imbedded in the sphere of technological-type revealing. By Ge-stell’s setting the standard for all that can be in terms of the standing-reserve, any other possibility of being is blocked and precluded from truth: Specifically, enframing conceals poiesis-revealing, blocking the ‘shine and hold’ of primordial, original truth and the possibility of its uncovering (QT 26, 28). This is perhaps an even greater danger than the misunderstanding of man himself mentioned above, for it would disfigure all things in nature, not just man. Not only is technology an (in Husserl’s words) ‘empty passing-though’ entities, but also is a doing violence to the very possibility of possibility, entities’ being and presencing.

As if this were not enough to make anyone an anti-technology romantic, let alone the man who thought it up, these aspects of technology’s hold over the world result in what Heidegger names in What Are Poets For? the ‘darkening of the world’ (PLT xv; Zimmerman 26). Having been transfigured into the technological, man loses authentic being and completes the forgetfulness of Being. The earth is destroyed in man’s quest for self-fulfilling power, the gods take flight and God dies as everything sacred (including life itself) loses meaning. Anxiety and unheimlichkeit become the predominant moods of humanity torn from its origins, and the spirit of the West declines as men become a mass fearful of the free and creative (there seem to be strong Nietzschean undertones here). This is modernity; this is the destitute time of the world that Heidegger so clearly despises. A change towards an authentic world must come from art, from poetry, that which still says what is in an appropriate, respectful way (WAPF 92). Clearly, the world is in a crisis from the domination of technology, and the only way out seems through art, poetry.

The world now in its deepest night, the night of destitution and ontological darkness, abandoned by the gods and wanting of poiesis, needs ‘saving’. It needs to be brought to the morning again, when the sun comes to bring light to entities in their own being. In the time of the destitution of the world, the ‘Now’ of the first line of der Ister calls for the time of poets to poetize, to tell something new and begin a new time, the post-technological poetical era (Ister 8). Thus Heidegger places poetry, and art more generally, as that which will bring the world back to the light, out of the night of the global domination of technology and productionist metaphysics. This is something he arrives at repeatedly in his writings, with different argumentation but the same conclusion. Most explicitly seen at the end of The Question Concerning Technology when he famously finds the ‘saving power’ to grow out of the greatest danger of technology, Heidegger clearly calls for poetry and the arts to confront technology and bring poiesis and aletheia back as the primal modes of revealing (QT 29, 35). Because it cannot grow out of nothing, the saving power does exist in a minimal form during the destitute time. Even with the night at its darkest, remnants of the holy stay behind the fleeing gods. The poet is he who attends to these remnants, giving them room to reveal themselves and caring for them against the darkness. This is what poets ‘are for’; the recognition of the traces of the flight of the gods, tracking and attending to them without doing violence, allowing the holy, the sacred, all that which has been covered over by technology, to show us the path out of the night towards the dawn (WAPF 92).

Anyone who reads Heidegger’s later works will appreciate his romanticism, his desire to escape the alien world of modernity to a world defined by art and the letting-be of entities to reveal themselves freely and poetically. This is manifest even in his own physical comportment, as he adopted whenever possible the rural lifestyle, dress, and parlance of the Black Forest folk. His translators and interpreters take this romanticism to town, making it abundantly clear that the saving power is meant to be art, the poetry that attunes man to the curse of technology and opens up the possibility of authentic revealing, aletheia (PLT xv; Zimmerman xx, 77, 93). However clear this might be, we would do well to briefly compare the revealing of art and poetry with the restricted and concealing revealing of technology discussed above to fully show why Heidegger is such a romantic.

The way of revealing of the work of art is well typified by the Greek temple in The Origin of the Work of Art. As opposed to technological revealing which forces upon all things the requirements of the standing-reserve and usefulness, the temple reveals entities in an open and respectful manner. By gathering around and in it the different aspects that make up human experience and life, it gives a relation and context to entities around it by interacting with them, on their own terms, so that they are allowed a space in the context of and in relation to the temple in which they can emerge and appear in themselves as they are (OWA 41). This kind of artistic revealing has one major advantage over technological revealing, other than the fact that it does not exclude other modes besides itself: The understanding of the revealing/concealing duality. As is recurring in Heidegger’s thought, the nature of revealing necessarily entails concealment of something other. One cannot cast light upon something without throwing something else into shadow. Technology does not understand this, so when it casts light and reveals everything as standing-reserve, it ends up concealing itself and its own workings. Art, on the other hand, is ‘aware’ of the paradox of revealing/concealing because its kind of revealing contains within it and reveals both earth and world. It is not necessary to go over all the dynamics of earth and world and their interaction with each other in the rift, for what is important here is that earth is the dimension of concealment, while world is the disclosing openness (OWA 47; Zimmerman 121). Because the revealing of art consists in the duality of earth and world, of concealing and revealing, it has an understanding of its own revealing that technology completely lacks. This is what allows art to ‘let things be’ to reveal themselves self-emergently, the essence of aletheia as truth ‘happening’ in a work of art that refers what the work is ‘about’ in a contextual wholeness that gives it a great breadth of meaning and significance (OWA 54). The ‘letting-be’ and aletheia of art’s revealing is in direct opposition to the kind of revealing of technology, and this is what makes it so attractive to Heidegger, especially since art-revealing is oppositional in the exact ways (open and respectful revealing, awareness of own revealing/concealing) that make technology dangerous, as seen above.

It should be clear by now how and why Heidegger despised technology so, and why art as poetry was his answer to the ills of modernity. He was so strongly invested in his own blend of romanticism and anti-modernism that he was reported to become physically ill when approaching a big city, disturbed by the social displacement and pollution modernity had wrought (Zimmerman, 210). This raises the question of whether his distaste of the modern was a real result of his phenomenology into the essence of technology and art, or whether these were motivated by his own thrownness, his own personal tastes and being-in post-industrial Germany saturated by war, political strife, economic hardship, social unrest and displacement, and all the other problems that rapid, late industrialization brings. This would explain a lot, and would give an explanation for his romanticism and association with conservatives such as Jünger and the early National Socialist movement.

II. Be that as it may, Heidegger clearly posits art and poetry as the saving power against the domination of technology. But this cannot be so. Art cannot ‘play the role’ of the saving power; the reasons why come from Heidegger’s own philosophy of technology and art. First, technology is absolutely global and inescapable, a necessary part of our existential being and how we put the world before ourselves. Secondly, as the culmination of western productionist metaphysics, the essence of technology is an inevitable result of history, one that requires history to be ‘started over’ if we are to escape it. Thirdly and perhaps most powerfully demonstrating technology’s hold over us is that as a kind of revealing, no matter what kind, technology is truth, truth as aletheia, uncovering. All around us and throughout the history of the 20^th century we see the gradual strengthening of technology, its rapid ascension to global domination, which combined with the preceding aspects totally forms humanity in to technological beings. Because we have been distorted so, art cannot be the saving power; for we, as Heidegger does with his nostalgic romanticism, would invoke it as such, as a saving power, which in our technological age and mindset would amount to using it as a mere means for the romantic goal of turning-past technology.

Here it is accepted as established that willing, as a futurally oriented projection of personal plans and projects upon the world (thus constituting the world, ‘worlding’), is a primordial and defining characteristic of man. Willing in the modern age is the will to power, the willing of a pure will over and against the world that is taken to exist for the will’s purposes. The essence of technology is inherent in our average everyday being towards the world, in das Man, in all existentiality except authenticity, which technology has basically excluded the possibility of. Both deriving from and necessarily containing the technological attitude, human willing is the objectification of that which is before us, forcing it under our control and into our supposed dominion; willing, in an act of will, has always already put forward and assumed the world as a realm of producible and manipulable objects (WAPF 108). This kind of attitude is basically inauthentic being-towards the ready-to-hand, which having been man’s predominant mindset was taken by western metaphysics as the ultimate way of being human, most powerfully exemplified by Nietzsche’s will to power.

Heidegger takes Nietzsche, with the will to power, to complete western metaphysics begun by the Greeks (WAPF 111). Technology, as the manifestation of this metaphysics, determines the way we interpret the world. Beginning with the Greeks, metaphysics has gradually identified what is with what is produced. In their conception of truth from whence we get aletheia and their ‘producing’ that freed and released entities, the underlying assumption was that these processes, however closer to Being they are compared to ours, were ultimately something useful for human ends: Plato’s idea of forms was based on blueprints and plans of physical, produced things. (Zimmerman xv, 157). When they looked at things in the world, in their more respectful ‘letting-be’ of entities, the Greeks nonetheless projected a framework upon nature. As this is just the way humans encounter and put themselves in the world, they can hardly be blamed. The thesis-experiencing of the Greeks was a fixing-into-place of entities, making them understandable and approachable, is the origin of the Ge-stell of technology as the founding mode of perception that Plato and Aristotle used in their metaphysics (OWA 83). From there, due to a lack of insight for millennia until Heidegger came along, philosophers built off this productionist metaphysics to gradually, continuously, and more compellingly see all the things in the world and nature itself as ordered and produced for consumption. In Roman and Medieval philosophy the things of the world were seen as ‘objects’ for a ‘subject’, conforming to a principle of rationality that brought them under the control of and existing for a will, epitomized by Kant’s ‘will to will’ (Ferry and Renaut 58-9). This will is concerned only with itself and the categories it ultimately creates (however a priori Kant thinks them to be) that it throws upon the world, supposedly making any experience possible, setting the stage for a fully technological interpretation of the world. Finally Nietzsche comes along and nails the Ge-stell into place with the will to power. Just this phrase ‘the will to power’ alone gives one the sense of the intensely utilitarian, dominating, conquering attitude that Nietzsche elevated to the highest of human virtues, the human telos even, that would inevitably lead to viewing the world as a mere means and material for meeting selfish ends and further propagating power. As this slowly got ingrained into popular and philosophical consciousness, western productionist metaphysics and its embodiment as the essence of technology was completed, as was the Cartesian project of the ownership and control of nature (Ferry and Renaut 59). As the end of metaphysics, technology becomes an inescapable withdrawal from Being that in itself is Being: For Being itself is self-concealing, constantly withdrawing when it reveals beings. Technology is just an ‘artificial’, extreme way of the forgetting of Being over beings. Technology is Being for modern man, the unavoidable consequence of our history, the ultimate framework pulled over our eyes by millennia of intellectual tradition gone awry. Thus technology is inescapable, even with art’s proper revealing on our side, for we always fall back into technological Being: Such is our Being.

There is no thwarting of or rebellion against technology. Because it is the result of completed productionist metaphysics and is the natural way of Being for modern man as a result of this frame of thought, technology is truth. Simply put, technology as a revealing (although in a certain restricted way) has the same characteristics of revealing that aletheia as revealing-truth does. Hence, in its own restricted way, technology is truth. Because technology is the primary mode of Being for man, it is the primary, and sole in our age, mode of truth. When it determines the essence of everything as standing-reserve, technology acts as truth, and when there is no alternative it is truth. Furthermore, man has no control over the unconcealment of technology (QT 18). It is the result of processes wholly outside of mankind’s control: The inevitability of productionist metaphysical history and our own way of being-in-the-world. Unfortunately, decades after Heidegger wrote on technology, we see his worst fears have been realized. Inattentiveness to the unconcealed and the lack of artistic, primal revealing have led to a world where technology dictates the coming of total truth (QT 35). Americanism and the annihilation of the foreign as the way to arrive authentically at oneself have secured the global domination of technology.

Given during the height of the Second World War, Heidegger in der Ister lectures somewhat randomly mentions the entrance of America into the war as the ultimate ‘ahistorical’ act as the intended destruction of Europe, the commencement of western culture and its ‘foreign’ (Ister 54-5). America is presented, perhaps for political and personal security purposes, as the ultimate evil, that which seeks to destroy all roots and origins. However radical this may sound, Americanism is only the reflection of the culmination of European metaphysics in the will to power (WAPF 111). Following the destruction of Germany, the best chance for an authentic artistic era to arise, America was free to spread its ideology and its worship of technology across the globe. The communism of the U.S.S.R., being on an ideological level metaphysically the same as capitalism, did the same in its own geopolitical sphere of influence. Having destroyed Germany, the two technological giants were free to grapple for the technological domination of the earth (Zimmerman 91). Little did they realize that technology was dominating them, turning us into slaves of production and utilitarianism. Today, the specifically American brand of Ge-stell has won out and been cemented by globalization, the final tearing down of all boundaries, traditions, originality and dissent before technology and leveled-down ‘culture’.

Heidegger’s worst nightmare has come true, exemplified by a campus newspaper Macbook advertisement I saw while researching this paper. I was immediately seized by the desire for power (albeit in a limited, cyber sense) it claimed to offer, using the language of the will to power to coax me into a lust for the heightened abilities and capabilities it would give me. Why bother interpreting a poem, or gazing upon a painting, or taking a walk in the woods (whatever ‘nature’ is left in the world) when you can access all the world’s art works and natural locales via a screen connected to millions of other screens across the earth? In our day, with the advent of the internet (which my grammar checker demands be capitalized!), technology has truly become global and dominant, framing our every thought and general being. Because of this art can no longer, if it could have anyway, be the saving power: Our thinking on art will inherently be technologized, we will conceive of it as a means.

A means that might very well serve to deliver us out from technology, but that will only be a superficial freedom. The underlying metaphysical attitude will hold even stronger, only fooling and bringing us further away from Being. The above has shown that people these days are completely technologized, with perhaps a select few (the good folk in our conference, at least) barely poking out of the cloudy mass of Ge-stell, the majority of their being still submerged. Subsumed into the essence of technology, the notion of art as the saving power would collapse in our average everyday understanding, how we normally exist, to just a means by which we can achieve our desire for a more artistic, respectful, primal world. Thus technology achieves its ultimate triumph; the domination of art, the transformation of the poetic from the open letting-happen of truth to a mere method by which people can serve their interests be it self-expression or supposed liberation from modernity. This is clear from modern art, the abstract nonsense Heidegger abhorred, in its celebration of subjectivism and servitude to commercialism (Zimmerman 237). At best, we seem to be doomed to an existence of vicious self-willing and doing-violence, ending in the eventual destruction of the earth some decades from now.

III. Humanity has become irreversibly disfigured as the result of technology. However this does not mean we cannot hope for a better world. While technology’s global domination is for all practical purposes permanent, we can change our attitudes towards it, shielding our essence and dignity from technological revealing. The best we could hope for is that said revealing ‘takes lessons’ from artistic revealing, learning its own limits and respecting (as much as it can) the coming-to-presence of entities.

As a revealing, technology is truth, aletheia. Aletheia is the unconcealing act of bringing that which is concealed into the light, into appearance. The problem with technology is that the being, the appearance, that it brings things into is constrained and disrespectful; the standing-reserve. Originally, with the Greeks, all human creating be it art or craft was called techne. Techne was not just a mode of creation or production, but it was a way of knowing; an episteme that consisted in aletheia, an open revealing of the concealedness of entities (OWA 57). Here the respectful ‘letting-happen’ of revealing by allowing a space for beings to reveal themselves as themselves of art was combined with the power of technology, and here we must return. Modern technology wholly lacks the ‘knowing’ of aletheia aspect of techne, only containing the power and usefulness aspect. What technology as a bringing-forth needs to learn from art is the aletheia-knowledge: The knowing of the concealing/revealing dichotomy, the ability to set entities free into their own presencing (QT 9). So while art itself is not the saving power, it can help us light the way to the combination of production and art. It can allow us the distance and perspective necessary to ‘step back’ from technology to realize its meaninglessness and arbitrariness (perhaps a connection between ‘arbeit’ and ‘arbitrary’ is not so unfathomable), its being as just another historical world that is fundamentally unjustified (Zimmerman 235-6). Indeed, techne is the saving power if there is to be one at all; the fusion of art and production is best for it combines allowance for entities’ own coming-to-presence with truthful disclosure of ourselves, ‘letting ourselves be’ as the necessarily technological and inauthentic beings we are. Here Zimmerman and I are in complete agreement, although he places less stress on our total and permanent domination under technology.

Although I do not see the coming of a ‘post-metaphysical’ artistic age that Heidegger called forth and Zimmerman thinks as possible unless we can convince every person on earth to radically change their metaphysical attitudes or travel back in time to correct every major philosopher with a copy of The Question Concerning Technology, nonetheless great works of art such as Hölderlin’s poetry can still allow us a certain critical distance from technology. Hopefully, while not the saving power itself, art and poetry can allow us the chance to save ourselves from the nihilism of the now near-eternal technological age.

Some personal concluding remarks on Heidegger and technology seem appropriate. While I see where he is coming from and its appeal to the displaced and unassimilated among us, one cannot help but feel an elitist, almost übermensch, mentality behind Heidegger’s romanticism. The desire for a poetic post-metaphysical age marked by the poiesis of art is intimately connected to the rejection of the popular and the easy, technological way of life the majority of us lead. Such rejection of the mass of humanity was clear enough in Being and Time when Heidegger explains and criticizes das Man. This is a major point of contention I have with Heidegger’s philosophy; that it is not really universalizable, and offers ‘salvation’ to only a few. Of these few I have met, many often carry a smug attitude. Furthermore, as Heidegger himself taught us (as well as Fichte’s ‘no I without ‘thou’ critical philosophy), Dasein is never without mit Sein, the self is never without the other. Das Man is an existential and unavoidable mode of being for man. So Heidegger himself was not completely outside his ‘others’, the romantic anti-modernists such as Jünger and poets like Hölderlin that his thought follows closely from. It is important to take philosophies with a grain of salt when their thinkers do not fully apply it to themselves and subscribe to the ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’ attitude.

Nestor Bailly (’09) is a Philosophy major at McGill University.