Martin Heidegger uttered those words in a 1966 interview, mourning the state of the world as he saw it. Our fallness, both existentially and spiritually, compounds our lostness. Human beings are thrust headfirst into a chaotic world not of their making. To fill what appears to be the crater-sized hole of emptiness, we build, invent, and harness the power of nature. One would think this would mean no one goes hungry, thirsty, or is without a place to lay their head at night. Sadly, we are far from any semblance of such a notion.
Human beings erect new towers of Babylon, erecting phallus to represent their splendor. Billionaires shoot off into space, sifting between a night sky full of satellites that allegedly connect us all. Even our virtual spaces are being encroached on, seized. Nothing is left, no River of Doubt to navigate, no Garden of Gethsemane to ensure the salvation of our souls. Heidegger saw enframing as the enemy that is utilizing nature to its limit, often for purposes to be determined in the future:
"Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve."
For example, instead of using a river to bathe, fish, swim, and spend time away from the hustle and bustle of the city, it is dammed up. It is seen as a near-infinite resource. That can be exploited for future profit. I only see this problem exacerbating, a symptom of a capitalist and spiritually decrepit zeitgeist.
Heidegger’s views on technology are complicated; sure, he idolized peasants and is the definition of cottage core, but he is no Luddite. Technology can be useful and effective; it frees up our time for finer pursuits such as philosophical speculation or poetry. Methods that attempt to unconceal being, turning us into its shepherds.
"The essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it."
Technology's essence is far from our smartphones, Alexa's, and Teslas. It is something beyond the ontic manifestations of technology, i.e., physical/existent. As far as I am concerned, we have not improved much in our understanding or inquiry into technology. We blindly create and consume, as children slaves mine rare earth gems for our smartphones. Allowing virtue signaling, tweets that express our disdain, as we head to the Verizon kiosk for the next upgrade.
I believe Heidegger is correct that at this point "only a god can save us." Not in the sense of Divine Intervention, though that would speed up the process. He means that we need to once again rekindle a relationship with the sacred with Seyn, i.e., Being. If we see nature once again as a clearing, a place that truth and being show themselves, we have a chance.
This clearing has been explored by the earliest philosophers:
"The Greeks called the emerging open region in which the presence of all the beings shows itself and in which each particular being can come forth into shining appearance, truth. The nature of this emerging open region we call the clearing (Lichtung)."
How can we let things reveal themselves if we are too busy chopping down the trees and swiping incessantly on Tinder? We are grieving the loss of the shining things and attempting to replace them with the profane. This is partly why so many people feel empty, disconnected, and anxious.
What keeps me awake at night besides the noise of the city, its machinations, seductions, and ugliness is that we are too far gone. I know Heidegger was a brilliant man, who also was quite fallible. Do not ask him what he was doing from 1939-1945. Aside from his politics, I wonder what he would think today? Obviously, we keep accelerating the process. Modernity has been replaced with post-modernity, cynicism, irony, and apathy. It has severed our connection with being.
We live in a post-human world, where algorithms even turn people into standing reserves. The attention economy has hijacked all of us, giving an endless stream of desires, fears, anxieties, and complexities. People intrinsically know how bleak things have gotten; the glow of the smartphone is the only warmth we know. We do not even cut down the trees for physical warmth, the connection of the fire. Why bother? Alexa will sing us a lullaby, and we can walk the Redwoods in VR while hitting our vapes.
The only hope we have is to step on the brakes, quickly before it is too late. Rejecting the forbidden fruit of nihilism. Embrace what is most human: love, poetry, art, music, and relationships. After his attack on enframing, Heidegger turned to the artists and poets. They are God’s disciplines, showing us ways to find the clearing.
The flash of light in a painting that shows the hiddenness of God even in the dark, stanzas that ennoble the reader in the process. Artists and the like are elevated not because they are better than us mortals but because they show us our potential. The beauty and earnestness that reside in us all.
Instead of wishing upon a star for Heidegger’s God, I will read poetry, write, look at art, and disconnect from the trivial. It is the only form of protest that is left and is viable. Everything else is for the birds.
Nice post. I havn't read Heidegger and I hear he is extremely difficult to read, so I bought an idiot's guide to reading him which is on my bedside table, lol. But I just finished Jacques Ellul's "The Technological Society", which was also a complex and painful read, and he attributes the problem to the ascendancy of technique (which encompasses but is broader than technology) which seeks the most efficient means for any process without consideration of other factors such as religious, moral, pragmatic, cultural or environmental factors. As Ernst Junger said, "“Technique is the magical dance that the contemporary world dances. We can only participate in its vibrations and oscillations if we understand technique. Otherwise we are excluded from the game.” And Julian Assange agrees with this, that technique has transformed the world (sorry, long quote):
“I’m quite interested in the philosophy of technique. Technique means not just a piece of technology but it means, say, majority consensus on a board, or the structure of a parliament - it’s systematized interaction. For example, it seems to me that feudal systems came from the technique of mills. Once you had centralized mills, which required huge investments and which were easily subject to physical control, then it was quite natural that you would end up with feudal relations as a result. As time has gone by we seem to have developed increasingly sophisticated techniques. Some of these techniques can be democratized; they can be spread to everyone. But the majority of them - because of their complexity - are techniques that form as a result of strongly interconnected organizations like Intel Corporation. Perhaps the underlying tendency of technique is to go through these periods of discovering technique, centralizing technique, democratizing technique - when the knowledge about how to do it floods out in the next generation that is educated. But I think that the general tendency for technique is to centralize control in those people who control the physical resources of techniques.
Something like a semi-conductor manufacturer is, I think, the ultimate example of that, where you need such order that the air itself must be pure, where you need a construction plant that has thousands of people in it who have to wear hairnets to keep every little skin flake, every bit of hair away from the semi-conductor manufacturing process, which is a multi-step process that is extremely complicated. And there are literally millions of hours of research knowledge possessed by the semi-conductor manufacturing organization. If those things are popular, which they are, and they underpin the internet, then coded within internet liberation is semi-conductor manufacturing. And coded within semi-conductor manufacturing is the ability for whoever has physical control of the semi-conductor manufacturer to extract enormous concessions.
So underpinning the high-tech communications revolution - and the liberty that we have extracted from that - is the whole neoliberal, transnational, globalized modern market economy. It is in fact the peak of that. It is the height, in terms of technological achievement, that the modern globalized neoliberal economy can produce. The internet is underpinned by extremely complex trade interactions between optical fiber manufacturers, semi-conductor manufacturers, mining companies that dig all this stuff up, and all the financial lubricants to make the trade happen, courts to enforce private property laws and so on. So it really is the top of the pyramid of the whole neoliberal system.”