[HN Gopher] Understanding Heidegger on technology (2014)
___________________________________________________________________
Understanding Heidegger on technology (2014)
Author : pseudolus
Score : 46 points
Date : 2021-08-08 15:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thenewatlantis.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thenewatlantis.com)
| [deleted]
| kaycebasques wrote:
| I don't remember the details but I recall _Philosophize This!_
| having an accessible series on Heidegger (with one episode [1]
| specifically discussing his views on technology).
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_BxMwRywEk
| [deleted]
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" In his landmark book Being and Time (1927), Heidegger made the
| bold claim that Western thought from Plato onward had forgotten
| or ignored the fundamental question of what it means for
| something to be -- to be present for us prior to any
| philosophical or scientific analysis."_
|
| No. _" what it means for something to be"_ is, for Heidegger,
| merely "ontic being", which he was not interested in. Instead,
| Hedigger was interesested in "ontological being", or "the being
| of Being".
|
| Now, what "the being of Being" is, is itself the subject of a
| multi-hundred page unfinished book of what is widely considered
| to be some of the most difficult writing in all of philosophy.
|
| Because Heidegger's writing is so difficult and so open to
| interpretation (and re-interpretation), many philosophers
| disagree strongly about what he actually meant.
|
| For example, what "Being" itself is, for Heidegger, is one of the
| biggest points of contention. The entire field of Christian
| Existentialism[1] crystalized around interpreting Heidegger's
| "Being" as God. But many other philosophers don't interpret it
| theistically at all.
|
| His other essays outside of _Being and Time_ are equally
| difficult to understand and open to interpretation. This includes
| _" The Question Concerning Technology"_, and I'd caution strongly
| against taking any one summary or interpretation of it as gospel
| or the final word on the subject.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_existentialism
| elefanten wrote:
| So what is the value of such work, which is so open to
| interpretation that 100 years later you will find diametrically
| opposed takes on its meaning?
|
| Does it not just devolve into a Rubik's Cube for literary
| nerds?
|
| I ask seriously. I was deeply enchanted with critical /
| Continental philosophy for a decade, but I don't think I came
| out of it with any unique insights. "Nothing can be proven to
| be objectively true" is an insight one can find many other
| places. Conjectures about what the driving forces of society
| are a dime a dozen, but any useful means of verifying and
| comparing them seems far out of our reach.
|
| So, why all this study of the Heideggers, the Lacans, the
| Derridas. What does it really contribute to humanity?
| atoav wrote:
| My take on it is as follows: Most of the thoughts we have day
| in and day out, even when tackling hard, existential or
| universal topics are constrained by the abstract aystems they
| are thought in. Think how language affects the way a person
| thinks. Of course you can also think mathematically,
| geometrically, in terms of pictures, colors, computer
| programes, small mechanical contraptions and so on.
|
| What philosophers like Heidegger tried to do (the reason for
| the often hard to read language) is to go to places, think
| thoughts and create systems of reflection that are hard to
| express with language alone.
|
| On top of that there have been certain philosophical
| movements who thought that thinking itself is more valuable
| than froming any coherent theory of the world into which all
| is forced to fit.
|
| So in short: they tried to expand on thinking all while
| jumping through various hoops and trying to avoid various
| pitfalls.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" why all this study of the Heideggers, the Lacans, the
| Derridas"_
|
| I can't speak for anyone else, but my interest in Heidegger
| dovetails with my interest in Asian and Indian religion and
| philosophy, and with my interest in the illusory nature of
| the world and what lies behind the world of appearances.
|
| I'm not interested in Lacan or Derrida, so will leave them
| for others.
|
| _" What does it really contribute to humanity?"_
|
| Is having one's eye's opened or seeking ways to open one's
| eyes useful?
|
| Does something have to "contribute to humanity" in order to
| be of value?
|
| What did the Mona Lisa or other great works of art contribute
| to humanity? Should Beethoven never have written a note of
| music because none of it is useful? Or does Beethoven's
| music's use in parades finally justify its creation?
|
| Can philosophy, like art and music, somehow connect us or
| open us up to the core of humanity or the world? Is that
| useful? Does it have to be?
| pnexk wrote:
| >So what is the value of such work, which is so open to
| interpretation that 100 years later you will find
| diametrically opposed takes on its meaning?
|
| Different takes to make sense of complex phenomena happen in
| many fields. It's not a co-incidence that it is especially as
| such in the realm of our culture where challenging existing
| interpretations is common place.
|
| >Conjectures about what the driving forces of society are a
| dime a dozen, but any useful means of verifying and comparing
| them seems far out of our reach.
|
| Indeed it is difficult, but I would highly suggest not being
| too empirically minded about abstract concepts like these.
| What conceptual frameworks and methods are useful in one
| field (e.g. quantification and measurements in the sciences)
| do not carry over to another necessarily. Human societal
| structures and phenomena are complex and would be more
| difficult to make sense of were it not for useful works like
| these.
|
| >So, why all this study of the Heideggers, the Lacans, the
| Derridas. What does it really contribute to humanity?
|
| One answer is tradition given these are thinkers part of
| significant and established schools of thought, and another
| is that there simply are contemporary scholars that find
| value in furthering and fleshing out the (usually dense)
| systems of thought and frameworks. Modern psychology for
| example has come about from philosophical and psychoanalysis
| frameworks, some of which are still explored and furthered
| alongside empirical investigations.
|
| I might be mistaken, but it feels as if your post fails to
| wrap itself around the idea that not all human knowledge need
| not be something that contributes to practical or immediate
| assistance to humans or their productivity. And that instead,
| sometimes, it can be simply related towards the pursuit and
| sake of knowledge itself.
| hmsshagatsea wrote:
| >Because Heidegger's writing is so difficult and so open to
| interpretation (and re-interpretation), many philosophers
| disagree strongly about what he actually meant.
|
| There's a bit of a joke out there about Heidegger's difficulty.
| "Heidegger is impossible to translate - especially into German"
| imbnwa wrote:
| Despite the actual historical research not being so hot or
| voluminous, I find Bataille's theory of General Economy a much
| more robust and more tangible way of describing the conditions of
| modernity while also indicating a specific response/solution,
| namely, that we have to re-learn to sacrifice, not accumulate,
| excess, like our ancestors did for most of human existence.
|
| We don't build ridiculously grand and inefficient structures like
| Pyramids and Cathedrals or practice ritual sacrifice because we
| no longer entertain the notion that human economy necessarily
| involves realms that require the destruction of excess production
| (and no, the destruction of excess dairy or agricultural
| production in the name of market controls on prices is not that).
|
| All the way up to early modernity humans unanimously understood
| economy like this to some extent, even if Abrahamic religions
| changed the flow around so that economy of surplus came to
| revolve around the excess of desire-production in humans
| specifically rather involving the entire realm of goods (Judaism
| still understood the older arrangement to a certain extent: we
| know that Cain and Abel burned produce to God, or that Jacob was
| on the cusp of sacrificing his only son to God; in Christianity,
| as Nietzsche noted, the debtor, God, pays himself back with his
| own flesh, and Christian practice proper is this immolation of
| the 'excess of the flesh', human desire, to our own more godly
| selves, our souls).
| kaycebasques wrote:
| What is Bataille's seminal work on the theory of general
| economy? _The Accursed Share_?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accursed_Share
| imbnwa wrote:
| Yes, those texts
| maxbendick wrote:
| Love to see Bataille and Heidegger on hn :)
|
| The concept of the accursed share seems pretty applicable to
| space races of the present. Maybe it's a sign the flux of
| capital is saturating?
| juliend2 wrote:
| I don't want to be too pedantic here ;) , but it was Abraham
| who was on the cusp of sacrificing his only son to God. But you
| were close; Jacob was his grand-son.
|
| And I'm not sure what Nietzsche said exactly about it but God
| is considered to be the creditor (not debtor), who pays for us
| the humans (indebted by our sins), to himself, with the flesh
| of his only son.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Yeah wrote all those out off the top of my head, a draft
| phase woulda been useful indeed, these corrections are all
| true
| [deleted]
| Mark_Kumleben wrote:
| Very interesting to see this on HN - Heidegger's theory of
| technology was ground-breaking then and has only become more
| timely.
|
| If anybody has questions about this article, Mark Blitz was my
| advisor in grad school and I wrote an MA thesis applying
| Heidegger's theory to modern AI research. Happy to clarify any of
| the issues raised here since, even with Blitz's explanation,
| Heidegger can be a tough nut to crack.
| maxbendick wrote:
| Would love a short explanation/link to your MA thesis, that
| seems very interesting!
| syntaxfree wrote:
| Hubert Dreyfus worked on Heideggerean critiques of AI while
| at MIT rubbing shoulders with Marvin Minsky and the like.
|
| There's a good documentary called "Being in the world"; last
| time I checked it had been posted on YouTube.
| Mark_Kumleben wrote:
| For sure! Of course, the official website has it paywalled,
| so here's a Google Docs link: https://docs.google.com/documen
| t/d/1WL1F-sEazLeo8uFjNpPyFLak...
|
| The Heidegger stuff is in the fourth section, 'Artificial
| Intelligence In Technological Society', but a rough summary:
| Heidegger argues that the essence of technology involves a
| command to human beings to order the world as standing-
| reserves of resources. Our specific place in this schema is
| as the being who can do the work of ordering, of revealing
| the world as orderable standing-reserve and then actually
| putting it into a particular order (e.g. of a supply chain).
| However, modern AI, with its emphasis on pattern-recognition,
| search, optimizing for a goal, etc., is also working towards
| that function. This has two implications. First, it suggests
| why AI research heads in this direction, because it's the way
| human intelligence manifests in the technological framework
| (and, thus, suggests that AI research could potentially
| benefit from trying to replicate other aspects of the human
| mind). Secondly, it means that modern AI might affect a
| Heideggerian theory of technology by making it possible for
| humans to delegate the work of ordering to AI, which wouldn't
| have appeared a possibility in Heidegger's day. If we can in
| fact hand off the task of ordering to AI, how should we do
| that and what effects might it have on human culture? While
| it appears a loss of agency, it may even have a liberating
| effect in the same way other technologies have liberated us
| from previous forms of labour.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| But Heidegger is _against_ seeing the world merely as a
| standing-reserve of resources.
|
| That's a utilitarian, reductionist, objectifying view
| that's the antithesis of the view that Heidegger advocates.
| Mark_Kumleben wrote:
| Heidegger is against it, yes, but he's also clear that
| we're stuck within technology as a historical destining
| of Being. We can't just escape technology by thinking
| differently about it, but must wait heedfully for the
| historical development of Being (as he lays out in The
| Turning, just after QCT). In fact, the fulfilment of
| technology's own reductionism is a necessary step, as
| only the full concealment of Being in technology allows
| us to recognize that oblivion for what it is and thus to
| overcome it. As such, I think it's a reasonable argument
| to make that AI taking away the work of ordering for
| humans may help us escape the incomplete agency of
| ordering the standing-reserve so that we're no longer
| forced to merely see the world as standing-reserve.
|
| By the way, I saw your comment about Heidegger and Asian
| religious philosophy below - are you familiar with the
| Kyoto school? I've signed up for the Halkyon Guild's
| upcoming course on Nishitani Keiji, and am vaguely hoping
| his theory of the self-overcoming of nihilism can be
| brought to bear on the questions Heidegger raises about
| technology.
| zelias wrote:
| I disagree. You can separate the author's observations
| (namely, the identified pattern of revealing standing
| reserve) from the author's intentions (standing reserve =
| bad).
|
| However, one can easily conceive of an AI that
| "obsoletes" humanity from the supply chain, so-to-speak,
| which would theoretically allow humans unbridled
| opportunity to "be", as Heidegger envisions it. Once
| human labor is obsolete, what will become of humanity?
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Will play also be obsolete? Because work can be play, and
| play can be work.
|
| Work often has a negative connotation in today's world,
| but it can also be positive, fun, and rewarding.
|
| The economic whip (ie. the incentive of working to
| survive) might become obsolete, but that doesn't mean
| that people will stop wanting to work for fun,
| fulfillment, or to make original contributions.
|
| It's unlikely many people would willingly choose to be
| garbagemen and toilet cleaners, and we'll probably all
| breathe a sigh of relief when those jobs are finally
| automated, but will we stop wanting to make art or music
| when AI can make it "just as good"?
|
| Even in more practical fields than art or music, it's
| more likely that we'll see AI-human collaborations rather
| than AI doing everything by itself without human input.
|
| What is human is constantly in flux anyway. Even if we
| consider just technology's effect on the human, there are
| humans now with all sorts of prosthesis that make them
| "more than human" in some ways, and this trend itself
| will likely continue, with things like more and more
| advanced neural interfaces, memory upgrades, sensory
| enhancement, etc.
|
| The future of humanity will likely be as some sort of
| cyborg.
| mandeville wrote:
| Not an expert, but Heidegger on technology (1950s) seems very
| similar to Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment from 1944. Funny
| given their differences.
| 50 wrote:
| > "In Heidegger's later work, he argues that technology in the
| modern metaphysical tradition tends to "provoke," "force out,"
| and "challenge forth" the world, such that the primary intention
| is to "force" the world to yield energy. Heidegger calls this
| "the essence of technology," and it is this essence, he says,
| that constitutes the "culmination of modern metaphysics." The
| philosopher Bruce Foltz describes how this perceptual rupture
| plays out in Heidegger's work: "[T]o be' is 'to be a resource,'
| that is to be 'in stock,' in supply, ready for delivery." To say
| that modern metaphysics culminates in technology is to say that
| there are tight and dense entanglements between the modern
| narrative of separation and technology. The perfectly-straight
| concrete road cut through a boreal forest is a thought structure
| "concretely" articulated, and in turn it seeds the imagination
| with opportunities of how to encounter (or use) that forest in
| ways unthinkable - and thus unreal - without the road. Likewise,
| a dam built into a salmon river is abstract thought physically
| articulated; in turn, the presence of the physical structure
| gathers the imagination around particularly mechanistic,
| utilitarian opportunities for encountering the river. Narrative
| and technology reinforce one another in powerful feedback loops,
| each contributing their share to revealing the world in a
| particular manner."
|
| -- Being Salmon, Being Human: Encountering the Wild in Us, and Us
| in the Wild, by Martin Lee Mueller
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| " Experiencing technology as a kind -- but only one kind -- of
| revealing, and seeing man's essential place as one that is open
| to different kinds of revealing frees us from "the stultified
| compulsion to push on blindly with technology or, what comes to
| the same, to rebel helplessly against it and curse it as the work
| of the devil." Indeed, Heidegger says at the end of the lecture,
| our examining or questioning of the essence of technology and
| other kinds of revealing is "the piety of thought." By this
| questioning we may be saved from technology's rule."
|
| The article assumes a strange contorted definition of
| 'technology' to try to jam a certain point in.
|
| By most definitions, human language would be considered as part
| of 'technology', certainly the written word would be considered
| so by nearly all. From that understanding, to question at all
| requires 'technology' thus making the final sentence absurd.
| nathias wrote:
| Common sense definitions are useless in philosophy.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-08-09 23:01 UTC)