How Can Understanding Our Relationship to Technology Save Us?
Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology: Explain Like I'm Five
Explain Like I’m Five will be a series whereby I try to explain complicated ideas simply in order to understand them better. The idea is stolen from the ELI5 subreddit that I glance at on occasion. If I’m wrong, or not as correct as I should be, I’d hope future subscribers can help me! Of course it won’t be in actual kindergarten speak, but we’ll do our best to get right to the crux as simply as possible. Essentially, I’m trying to explain it to my self in order to ‘get it.’
OK, so I have somehow become obsessed over the years with understanding the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Maybe some of you are much smarter than me and picked up Being and Time in school and just got it. I have a feeling that’s not most people. He specifically wrote not for the plebeians, but for those philosophers already steeped in the epistemology of Western philosophy. With his work, he felt he was completely changing the Western trajectory after 2,000 years of error. In order to break with that tradition he created an entirely new lexicon within philosophy that sometimes uses what appear to be nonsense words, or even words that stay untranslated from German in English text. His philosophy is deeply rooted in his understanding of Aristotelian and medieval metaphysics—something most of us casual philosophy readers probably are not emerged in regularly. So, I’d argue his philosophy is made to be opaque to a normie like me.
He has lots of paragraphs and sentences that go like this:
[B]eyond what is, not away from it but before it, there is still something else that happens. In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting…..This open center is… not surrounded by what is; rather, the lighting center itself encircles all that is.... Only this clearing grants and guarantees to human beings a passage to those entities that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are."1
I think because Heidegger’s work is so difficult on first (second-third-fourth) glance, it has always challenged me to try harder. Not just for the sake of knowing what the big deal is, but to understand what it is from Heidegger that can actually help us navigate the existential challenges of today’s world. There’s a reason he is considered by many, including his critics, to be the most important Western philosopher of the 20th century, essentially paving the way for the great Continental philosophers we know of today.
To attempt to know him, I’ve read countless hours of Heidegger’s works; I’ve watched a slew of YouTubes; listened to hours of college lectures given by the US’s preeminent Heideggerian experts; read many academic articles, essays, and webpages; etc.; etc. Still I often feel I’m not quite getting something as sharply as I had hoped.
To help myself, I want to embark on understanding Heidegger more deeply by trying to break it some of his thought into the most basic chunks without ruining it. I believe that when something is dispelled and simplified and explained, it can be understood more by the person doing the dispelling, simplifying, and explaining. Even if some errors around the margins exist in my attempt, if I can get the gist out in a simple way I may contribute a little more to myself than just keeping it in my head or staring at a wall trying to make sense of it all.
I have been thinking a lot lately about one of Heidegger’s later works, an essay called “The Question Concerning Technology.” I think I’m interested because of today’s post-modern condition of technology being so fundamental to our lives, as we are lashed to technology nearly every moment of the day, both personally and globally. It’s always looming either in my pocket (iPhone connected to a vast cyberspace), or over my head like a Sword of Damocles (weapons of mass destruction controlled by global politicians).
So here I am going to try to explain what Heidegger’s point was regarding technology, and why understanding him can help lead us toward a more fulfilling life vis-a-vis technology. But I’m going to try and explain it like I’m talking to anyone. The mantra these days is to fail forward, so let’s see how this goes… Scroll down for the TL;DR summary.
So… what was Heidegger saying in “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954)?
We have a technological way of being a Western human. This means we see things and ourselves as resources that can be ordered efficiently in a calculated manner. This way of understanding can be termed our “technological understanding of being,” we’ll abbreviate as TUB.
So our TUB has both a positive and negative impact on us as humans. It’s positive in that we have needed technology and our TUB through human history in order to get things done or to create things, it is a negative in that this way of being a human and using technology to solve all of our challenges is not our natural state of being in the world. Therefore, Heidegger was concerned about technology not simply because of its ecological, consumer, and nuclear potential for destruction, but because of its potential to undermine our nature as humans.
On one hand we should see our TUB as a modern revelation that has been received through history and made its way into the practices that make us human, but on the other hand we should step outside of this calculated and efficient way of being in order to stop applying mechanical thinking to all challenges in our lives. We step outside of the confines of calculated thinking for its own sake by recognizing this TUB has been received through living history and is not inherent in our nature. The simple recognition of our TUB helps us to overcome the restrictions it puts on us to live in this technological manner. TUB, while helpful to live, is not our nature and therefore should not be applied to our entire way of living.
How do we step outside of our TUB? We do so by first recognizing it, and then by attempting to find ourselves gathered, or brought in, by things rather than seeing things as something to control. For instance, we can take even a technological device and experience it as something that brings in our cultural practices rather than something we need to control.
Applied to our typical lives, social media may not simply be a means to and end to order the perception of my life to others, or to keep in touch with the world through the most efficient means, but perhaps I can resist the need to order friendships and how I am perceived by technological means and instead return to the space of my essential humanness by gathering with those friends and experiencing a closeness (emotionally and physically in the world) that resists calculative technological thinking.
Now apply this idea on a societal level to things like nuclear weapons or exploitive means of Capitalism. If the societal mind could step outside of the calculated way of our technological understanding of being, perhaps we would be able to focus on other more-human options that prioritize less technologically ordered ways of solving things.
For instance, fusion energy is a necessary technological advancement to help eliminate the globally destructive reliance on fossil fuels, but as soon as mankind could frame the challenge of global catastrophe as also a challenge to take on with our humanity, we would have an almost immediate shift and focus on the gift of our humanness to guide us as well. In practical terms, perhaps this human way of being related to the global challenge could manifest itself alongside of the technological advances by creating a greater connection among mankind as we are gathered together by the challenge. We could then recognize the humanity within all of us in the world and solve these crises of the global catastrophe with policy that changes behavior to help one another and to save ourselves.
Phew, well the exercise worked for me to better understand Heidegger’s essay and some larger concepts, I think. I’m not sure if I’d get the first chair of philosophy at Harvard, but perhaps it’s a passing grade on a quiz. And I’m likely missing the much more deep ideas of “enframing” and things being in “ready reserve” to be exploited. My application of him to today’s global crisis almost makes Heidegger sound like a mystic and dreamer, but I think it was a foundation of his thought to try and recognize our restrictions we created to benefit ourselves, in order to break free from them and get back in touch with our human ways of being in the world that could lead to more meaningful directions for mankind.
I think his concepts can be fleshed out more, but not here. But with all of that above, I’m not sure I made it make sense for another reader. To accomplished the goal set out to ELI5, let’s try one last simple swing at it!
TL;DR summary:
Humans prioritizing the calculated efficiency of technology over our non-technological, non-efficient ways of solving problems threatens to overcome our natural state of being and pull us into being inauthentic to our human essence. We see everything as in reserve for our exploitation. A river is not a river, it’s something to generate electricity, for instance. We should recognize technology is not to be rejected, in fact without it there would not have existed ways to be humans in the world, but this calculated and efficient technological way of being in the world was something received through history and is not our fundamental nature. If we refuse to recognize this our humanness can be overcome by this and a technological and efficient way of being a human will become superior to any other way of being. Therefore, we must sidestep the restriction of our technological understanding of ourselves and things in the world as resources to be exploited. We do this by the simple act of being aware that we, and all other things, are not simply resources to be efficiently exploited, and that this way of being human does not need to represent the only way, superior to all other ways of being human. Seems simple, right? By recognizing this, it will immediately release us from this technological way of being human and bring us to a path of self reflection, connecting and rooting with nature, nearness, community, etc.—things that are essential to being human. A new understanding of being human through these acts could coalesce around new human activities and practices outside of the efficient technological way of being and perhaps save us in a more human way. The things that mean the most to us are not calculated and efficient, so by sidestepping our technological selves we can live a more fulfilled life in greater balance with our human essence.
Now follow-up questions like “what are background practices” or “what exactly is “being”? Um, well, that may be a different post… And I tried to steer clear of Heideggerisms in order to keep it as clear as I could, which introduces some likely problematic words that Heidegger and real scholars would hate. But I tried to humanize this transcendental thought as best as I, a mere mortal, could. Perhaps I have to assume some level of basic understanding for my audience. I also know that I did not touch upon Heidegger’s discussion of how practices are gathered and what changes our practices to save us, but that’s a grander discussion. Perhaps another ELI5, if they’re appreciated. But I’d love to see comments with feedback, or to teach me more.
I wonder, how would Heidegger perceive our technical world today? He was writing in the post-WWII era where these new magnificent technologies were being born on a grand scale every day. The future was rushing toward the modern world, and there were great concerns alongside the awe of it all. Capitalism was mostly industrial still, and not a fully psychological way of being in itself that we have embodied today. I would argue that nowadays technology is an even greater part of our understanding of being—we live our whole lives focused on efficiency and calculation in order to survive the modern way of being in our hyper-Capitalist society.
To me, Heidegger’s understanding of technology in today’s world could be particularly anti-Capital in its current state of financialization and neoliberal political economy. Not that he was particularly Marxist but because the way Capital has harnessed technology to force upon us this ontology. I think our current way of being in the world is shaped by an ignorance of Heidegger’s warnings about how the technological understanding of being can overwhelm our humanness. That our leaders have steered us into an even more restrictive ontological life. We have simply become part of a technological system that which moves toward the total mobilization of all beings, simply for its own sake.
Of course at this point the world will not embrace Heidegger’s warnings and prescription to shed us of our inauthentic selves (most of us can barely understand it), but perhaps as individuals we can use this technological understanding of being as a tool to guide us in finding meaning in our own lives, or to perceive how to engage with the post-modern innovations happening around us? Yes—that’s what I’ll try to do.
Dreyfus, Herbert. “Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology,” Readings in the Philosophy of Technology. Among the many sources I’ve tried to soak up, I’m grateful to this text specifically for its clarity.
Great explanation, although I doubt that actual five year olds would listen to this for more than two sentences :) I'm happy to see that there's at least one other person who has the same attitude towards Heidegger: fascination paired with a deep regret about one's own inability to make sense of his thoughts. Often it seems like humanity falls neatly apart into two classes: those who naturally get Heidegger and have no issue masterfully framing, enframing, gathering and clearing their way through his prose -- and those who think that it's all a pile of meaningless rubbish. I've rarely found anyone who would admit that there is something here that's worth understanding but really hard. Thanks for that!