Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.
-Marshall McLuhan,
in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
Introduction
For the contemporary thinker, the implications of technology are of the utmost importance. It is undeniable that today technology emerges to the foreground of our experience of the world to such an extent that it threatens to subsume everything else. If sensationalist prophecy and sectarian violence abound, it is because we react, legitimately, with fear and outrage to a technologically induced crisis at the foundations of our world systems. The planet speeds forward toward catastrophe with such inevitability that today the sensation of being on the verge of the end of some kind of epoch hangs strongly in the air for every worldview.
On the one hand, we live in a time when the earth and all of the life which inhabits it might dissolve into oblivion in a radioactive holocaust. Then again, the helplessly rapid collapse of the planet’s ecosystems might deteriorate so quickly that we become too impoverished to support the complex economic systems which make nuclear war plausible in the first place. At any rate, the truths and values which make human life worth living become so impossible to believe amidst the epistemological self-unraveling of science, art, and philosophy that humanity may just lose the will to go on altogether.
On the other hand, the linking together of all cultures into a decentralized network of information exchange threatens to topple traditional systems of economic and social domination. The super-empowerment of the individual through technical augmentation promises the power of self-expression to an extent never before imagined. Increasingly unfettered access to new wealths of information and experience is probably poising humanity for a leap into a meta-versal realm of unity with all digitally represented information.
In any case, the equilibrium of natural ecological systems, of which we have only a distant collective memory, slides wildly out of control as the artificial infrastructures of society augment the derailment in catastrophic resonance. The world is being brought to a point of crisis in its very foundations such that its continuance is necessarily conditioned by some kind of essential change.
If it was the case that technology was merely an isolated fixture within the context of our society and our personal views, then the situation, albeit threatening, would already admit of some hope simply by nature of having been recognized as problematic. But this would require some metaphysical grounding on which to support ourselves under the pressure of technology, some set of values to which technology could be referred. But, especially as a culture, we do not have these. The West conceives of technology as its absolute reference frame for the world. Truth, beauty, piety, teleological station are all groundless in the modern world. Yet technology forges ahead unquestioned not only as the essence of man and as his savior from ailment and calamity, but also as his servant. For our age technology is a panacea and the surest given.
We can recoil aghast at the calamity and destruction of the planet our race’s seemingly willful submission to its own dehumanization, but it will only grow more acute as long as we blindly think of ourselves as the masters of technology - of our values as the context for technology - and push forward with technological solutions to these problems.
The truth is, conversely, that technology is the context in which human action takes place. It has taken root so deeply and spread so widely that, in a substantial way, it has become the determining essence of the environment we call the world. As such, technology is no longer a mere tool, but a milieu. Understood in its full range of philosophical meaning, the word milieu denotes what is of unique importance to a given age, i.e. the question posed by that age to which it is allotted man to address himself if he wishes to find meaningful existence.
In a sense, the question is the same in every age. That is: what ought I do? Sentiment is and has been, whenever it has existence as such, meaningless without some authentically motivated corresponding action. Every knowing implies some act of doing. This doing, we call praxis. What is unique about the contemporary thinker’s formulation of this question - what ought I to do - is that it is asked with respect to the technological milieu. Thus the question of the age is: what ought I to do in response to the technological milieu? But praxis is the application of knowledge. Thus the first task of the contemporary thinker is to apprehend the truth about the technological milieu.
But the truth about technology must be apprehended from out a perspective which is grounded on some stable referent external to the technological milieu. Technology must exist with reference to something more primary for it to be evaluated, to have meaning, indeed to be apprehended at all. In order to stand out in clarity, it must be in focus against some background – otherwise it remains unnoticeably and unutterably ambient, remains a backdrop. Only when it is brought into focus through relation to some more primary referent, can a praxis with respect to it be formulated.
It is on account of this necessity that I selected Jacques Ellul and Martin Heidegger as two different lenses though which to focus the question of praxis in the context the technological milieu. Both thinkers approach this question having acknowledged the need for a critique grounded externally to the technological milieu. As both authors observe, this approach is not standard in the West around the middle of the 20th century, and it is arguably no better now.
Jacques Ellul was a French polymath known most notably for his contributions to sociology, theology, and political theory. He claims that technology is deterministically progressing towards a totalitarian system of efficiency (Technique) over and against human values, and that, as totalitarian, it can only be overcome by an act of total anarchic freedom, which can only originate from the transcendent God of Christianity.
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his influence both on the existentialist movement and the study of phenomenology, though his thought very much resists categorization of this kind. In an attempt to glimpse past the superficial shell of the technological phenomena, he asks in what way technology is a danger with respect to Being. He concludes that technology is the manifestation of a metaphysical framework which originates is the epochal concealing of the coming to presence of Being itself. In response to this, reflection on the essence of technology as this concealing is the way necessary to prevent Being’s further concealment.
Heidegger, through his peculiar way of posing the question, helps the patient reader to peer into the metaphysical foundations of technology with the lofty solemnity appropriate to a phenomena which threatens to change the essence of man’s relationship to the very Being of beings, and in doing so brings into clarity an insight the profundity of which is akin to the experience of the spiritual. Ellul, on the other hand, brings the question into focus sociologically, and in doing so demonstrates the powerful explanatory capacity of the theory of Technique with respect to the causes of disharmony in society. It is with Ellul’s analysis, which we begin.
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When Tzu Kung went south to the Ch'u State on his way back to the Chin State, he passed through Han-yin. There he saw an old man engaged in making a ditch to connect his vegetable garden with a well. He had a pitcher in his hand, with which he was bringing up water and pouring it into the ditch,— great labor with very little result.
"If you had a machine here," cried Tzu Kung, "in a day you could irrigate a hundred times your present area. The labor required is trifling as compared with the work done. Would you not like to have one?"
"What is it?" asked the gardener.
"It is a contrivance made of wood," replied Tzu Kung, "heavy behind and light in front. It draws up water as you do with your hands, but in a constantly overflowing stream. It is called a well-sweep."
Thereupon the gardener flushed up and said, "I have heard from my teacher that those who have cunning implements are cunning in their dealings, and that those who are cunning in their dealings have cunning in their hearts, and that those who have cunning in their hearts cannot be pure and incorrupt, and that those who are not pure and incorrupt are restless in spirit, and that those who are restless in spirit are not fit vehicles for Tao. It is not that I do not know of these things. I should be ashamed to use them."
— Chuang Tzu (369-286 BC)
Ellul
Ellul asserts that the only viable response to the technical milieu which constitutes the modern world is through the “negative” positation of the transcendent. In order to demonstrate this, it is necessary to understand Ellul’s three basic analyses of the world. The first of these is his conception of the Christian God and theology, which informs to a significant extent his fundamental beliefs about the purpose of life in this world and consequently the appropriate response to the technical milieu. The second is his secondary, secular metaphysical beliefs; in particular the theory of the dialectical quality of the evolution of history, political action and personal relation. The third is his sociological critique of the modern world as the age of Technique. Holding these beliefs in view, we will be able to discern his overall offering for a picture of the conditions of life in our age and for a prescribed course of action.
Christian Theology
With respect to his theological conclusions, Ellul speaks out of an ecumenical Christian paradigm. This has several implications. To begin with, God is fully “transcendent”. This means that there is a hard and fast division between the province of God’s being and that of the world’s. God exists completely outside of the mode of existence of the world; he is separate; he is different in kind. There is no ontological continuity between his realm and ours and therefore no ascension of man toward communion with or intellectual apprehension of God. Additionally, God is completely “unconditioned”. That is to say he is not bound by any kind of necessity in his actions or being; not subject to any laws conceivable by man. He is not a rational causal agent; he is the inexplicable origin of all this is, probable, possible, or otherwise; completely free. It may also be said that God is completely “other”, inasmuch as his nature is completely alien to man’s. The generation of a true idea of God from out of man is impossible because God is essentially different from man; man does not have the tools to furnish a God-concept; God is ineffable and unthinkable.
For these reasons, “revelation” plays an important role. God communicates himself to man even though he doesn’t make himself available to be understood through man’s extension of himself. He does this through revelation, which is the reaching down of God into the world to make himself evident, in whatever respect he chooses (e.g. his existence, his qualities, his expectations, etc). However, he indicates himself in the realm of concrete human possibilities rather than exposing himself directly in his God-ness. Hence revelation takes place in the form of the “Word” - human language - and also implicitly in the form of historical events. So for example, to those with eyes to see, God’s fulfillment of a promise can be seen in the timely appearance of a ram. (Perspectives On Our Age, pp.76-78)
In other words, the road descends. God descends to humanity and joins us where we are. This is the opposite of the religious movement, in which people would like to ascend to where God is. Hence we see a radical contradiction between all religions… and the fundamental path of revelation. (p.78)
The final theological concept at play here is Harmony. Harmony (the correspondence of two notes such that they resonate in a pleasing way) is not the “natural state” or “default mode” of the world. Despite a fallacious equation of nature unfettered by human intervention with perfect balance and equilibrium, on the part of both vulgar Christianity and the contemporary ecological movement, disharmony pervades the natural environment of which man is a part equally as much and probably more. As far as we can see, the universe is populated mostly by giant calamitous clouds of dust and plasma without even a soul in sight to see them. Only on this one small blue marble, due to highly exact and unusual circumstances involving heat, gravity, water, etc has life precariously bloomed. And on this planet we surely don’t see some permanent harmonious stasis. In the ongoing process of evolution, billions of different races adapt to constantly, sometimes catastrophically, morphing environs. It is only for mere blips of time that animal species and their environs sync up in the harmonious correspondence that allows them to flourish mutually. Then, with the passing of time and the morphing of one of the other element, this musical relationship corrodes back into the discordant chaos out of which it arose. As rapidly as the harmonious correspondence began, the disjunction of the species with the environment sets in, and it dies or mutates.
Humanity is no exception; except for that, somewhat uniquely, it is itself responsible for systematically effecting the rapid change of the environment to which it is adapted. Technology and civilization increasingly transition humanity into a new world of buildings, computers, and mechanics. In doing so they alienate him spiritually and physically; humanity is increasingly riddled with neuroses and cancer. There is no correspondence between him and the world. There is no harmony, because he dwells in a world which he has built up with no regard to for what he himself is.
This is why, I repeat, we cannot talk about harmony of the laws of nature. We cannot talk about economic harmony, the free play of the laws of the marketplace. Harmony is to be found when certain events come together, but above all it is to be made, created, invented, and produced. Harmony is our affair.
(What I believe p.51)
Ellul understands the biblical story of Genesis to provide commentary on this situation. Adam and Eve were given one imperative when placed into Eden: “tend and keep the garden”. In Eden, there existed harmonious correspondence between Adam and the garden, as can be seen, for example, in his naming of the animals, which represents an apprehension of them and their place in the world. The eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, as much a symbol of technology as of man’s insecurity with respect to God’s control, signifies the advent of man’s misguided domination of the planet and consequently, his disharmonious non-correspondence with it.
However, the imperative to tend the garden remains the same as it ever did. Amidst the prevailing milieu of alienation that human civilization manifests every day through ecocide and colonization, it must act to restore correspondence, keeping in mind along the way that must be ever vigilant. Harmony is intrinsically fragile in the context of the overwhelmingly entropic and constantly morphing cosmos. If harmony is to be found anywhere, it is in man’s ongoing antithetical positation of harmony over/against nature’s constant distortion and dissolution. This constant rebellion is an imperative because, indeed, it is what gives life meaning, gives man a role to play.
This is why is so important to destroy the idea of an independent, established harmony that goes with the package of the universe. This idea undermines human responsibility. I believe that our vocation on this earth is to establish harmony that includes all that we call justice, liberty, joy, peace, and truth. Our vocation is to set up harmony between people, between earthly things, between the elements that compose our universe. (p.51)
The inherent struggle of this vocation is for Ellul essential. Life is activity. It is the confrontation of novelty, the surmounting of challenges, and the creation of new relationships. Without the flux of living history, nothing would be worthwhile. No meaning would exist unless men were incomplete yet in a state of striving towards completion. “Our job is not to accomplish what is not yet accomplished (a regression to moralism).” He says, “An actual fullness of accomplishments goes hand in hand with an actual experience of total nonaccomplishment.” (p.39) For this reason, harmony can be found only in the undetermined, the potential, the spontaneous. A society which is structured to the very last in order to make it as just and peaceful as possible is “destiny, not harmony” (p.56).
Secular Metaphysics (Dialectics)
The next essential component of Ellul’s worldview is the “metaphysical” concept of dialectics, which he understands in a twofold sense. In one sense the concrete reality of history manifests the structure of a dialectic; in other sense reasoning and understanding must also proceed dialectically. This latter is a necessity because, of course, there must a qualitative correspondence between reality and understanding. As per Hegel and Marx (and originally Heraclitus), the world is constantly in flux, constantly undergoing progressive (though, Ellul emphasizes, not necessarily in the sense of positive “progress”) change. One implication of this is that simple logic, which proceeds linearly form terms to conclusions, is not quite adequate to describe reality. Indeed, in reality there are no truly fixed categories; it is a process of which temporality and therefore impermanence is an essential feature; truth and reality are dynamic, rather than static. Ellul believes that the modus operandi of this flux is dialectic, which is to say, it is the process of the constant negation of the status quo, the thesis, by an opposing force, which results in a qualitative transformation of both into a newly integrated whole, or synthesis, which in some sense changes, and in another leaves intact, the two opposing elements. For example, when negative and positive electrical charges combine, they form a flash of energy which encompasses both, yet is wholly new.
Reality includes not only contradictory elements but also a permanent process of change. If we relate two elements, it is easy to see that the negative element acts on the positive and that this action brings about a modification. In other words, contradictory factors do not relate to one another in a way that is inert or static. They are in interaction. The simple formula: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, implies already the trans formation of the first two factors into a third that neither suppresses one or the other of them, nor confuses them, nor adds to them. (p.31)
In order to intellectually grasp a reality that manifests in this way, dialectic must also be the modus operandi of human reasoning and understanding. This means that it must itself be dynamic rather than static; it must move through time and through categories along with the flux of history. In other words, it must be ready to integrate contradictory and logically insoluble, yet historically necessary, truth, into its current paradigm in order to bring about some transformative, yet still ongoing, understanding.
In other words, dialectic is not demonstrative reasoning or a system for the formal deployment of thought. It claims always to be dealing with reality, to be a means of taking account of reality. But reality includes positive and negative things. It includes contradictory things that do not exclude one another but coexist. Hence a system of vigorous thought ought to take account of both the yes and the no without ruling out either, without choosing between them, since every choice excludes one part of reality. (p.31)
The important point, however, is that the contradictory factors cannot exist without eliminating one another unless they are correlative in a temporal movement that leads to a new situation. On the one side, it is coexistence that in real history rules out any idea of an inert and immutable absolute, and hence that rules out metaphysical thinking. On the other side, the manner of knowing must also be in evolution if it is to keep up with the contradictions and evolution of reality, for even when I begin to think, reality is in a process of change. Thus there is no fixed state that I can impose on the object. The flux of time comes into knowledge itself. (p.32)
While this is essentially Socratic, Ellul believes it to originate implicitly in the faith of the ancient Jews and to be the key to understanding the biblical picture of reality. So, for example, the narrative of God - as that which is transcendent, unconditioned, and wholly other - humbling himself to manifest through the story of a people - limiting his own power, submitting to sin, changing his mind, etc - is the logically insoluble reality of a dialectic. The same may be said of the men being saved “by grace through faith”; or of the simultaneous contemporaneity and futurity of the “Kingdom of Heaven” and the kingship of Christ; or of the narrowing of the chosen people of God from the Jews, to the remnant, to Jesus, simultaneous with the broadening of the scope of salvation from the few to the recapitulation of all creation. Any true understanding of these biblical paradoxes must not relax the tension intrinsic in their incongruous realities; rather it must embrace their contradictions as complementary and seek to manifest their coexistence through living praxis.
Praxis, in the context of this metaphysical framework, takes the form of “negativity”. At any given time, the world-historical process exists (and can be understood) in a certain way, manifests as a certain cultural and economic milieu, posits a certain thesis. Because the modus operandi of change in the world is dialectic, human action, in order to effect any significant change, must catalyze the transformative recombination of two contradictory elements, through manifesting the element which confronts the status quo; he must posit the negation of the positive. Since the thesis of world-history is constantly in dialectical flux, man’s response to it must also be ever-renewed and reconsidered. Every age, every action, requires its unique dialectical counterpart in order to participate in the all-pervading consummation of dialectical tension.
This is how negativity induces and provokes innovation and the consequent history of the group or individual. One thus sees clearly that negativity has a positive aspect. Where there is transition from one state to another, we owe it to negativity. (p.33)
It is in this respect that negativity comes to the fore. In one of my books I thus adopted the well-known formula of Guehenno that our first task as human beings is to say no. (p.34)
Sociological Critique of Technique
The last aspect of Ellul’s worldview essential to undertstanding his formulation of praxis in the technological milieu is his sociological critique of the modern world, i.e. his analysis of the technological milieu. While the essence of his thought in this area is almost deceptively simple, the body of work he has written to describe it is voluminous. This is because, while the idea of Technique (which is central to his critique) is a simple one, its consequences are tremendously wide ranging. At times, Ellul seems to have the capacity to discern them all to the last detail, and often does. So what is Technique?
First of all, what it is not: Technique is not mere techniques. Techniques are methods for accomplishing a given task i.e. procedures intended to produce a certain result. These procedures can range from rational to ritualistic and anywhere in between. They can be chosen to be used or discarded. They are always isolated procedures that occur once at the time they are employed. They are subordinate to and dependant on the human agent employing them. Techniques are merely servants put to the use of manifesting human values. Examples include: rain dances, well digging, law making, melee, medicine, rhetoric, and virtually any other procedure the parameters of which are circumscribed in advance I order to secure the effectiveness of.
Technique, however, is the totalitarian consummation of the interrelation of isolated techniques at the scale of society, i.e. a fully fledged cultural milieu. It is the ecosystem of the modern world, which has grown out of more primitive societies because of the teleologically determined destiny of an ecology of techniques like that in primitive society. The final outcome of an ecology of techniques is a technical singularity (i.e. Technique), because the presence of efficiency in the dynamic interplay of techniques necessitates the escalation of the efficiency of technical means indefinitely. In order to expound on this definition, let us follow the narrative of the evolution from non-technical societies to Technological Society:
In previous epochs, prior to Technological Society (Technique), man inhabited a world wherein efficiency was only one consideration among many with respect to the choosing and implementing of techniques. The field of application was small in the sense of limited or isolated; only rare occasions and specific activities warranted calculated technical application (think rain dances, medicine, well digging, etc) and for much of man’s life he was free to act spontaneously. Rather than acting merely at the behest of efficiency or technical necessity, his local culture, his religion, and his aesthetics all informed and justified his techniques. When confronted with alternative techniques for accomplishing the same task, no universal standard of good existed. He was free to insist on his own techniques or to convert based on a whole complex of contributing values. The caprice of human choice entered decisively into the methods of production he employed. (The Technological Society – Chap.2)
The proliferation of society and culture occurred naturally given the natural resources at man’s disposal, and the proliferation of technology is a natural accompaniment to this. Man-made though it may be, pre-Technological technology (techniques) was a natural and healthy development of society, as long as it only served man’s ends. However it did not stay this way due to the concealed but inevitable factor of efficiency. This is because throughout this time period the rational that a reduction in input with respect to output (efficiency) is necessarily better was implicit, because techniques were primitive and efficiency was an unusual benefit. This allowed efficiency to pursue it natural course of ascendency unchecked by the exclusive prioritization of human values. This “natural course of ascendency” results from the reality of the fact that efficiency, and along with it efficient techniques, is intrinsically more effectual than inefficiency. So increasingly and inevitably the ecology of techniques comes to be dominated by those which are most efficient.
For example, consider the production of furniture. The artisan woodworker who produces his work by hand and sees it through from beginning to end surely produces a quality chair, but the progress is slow and the cost of reimbursement is substantial. The furniture factory can very simply produce more furniture more quickly, and with reduced cost in materials and labor. Inferior though the factory chairs may be (to say nothing of the spiritual condition of the people making them), in a cultural setting where the superiority of easier-quicker-cheaper is assumed, they dominate the market. This creates displacement such that artisanal manufacture of chairs can no longer even take place. Indeed, eventually, the would-be woodworker must submit to employment at the local chair factory in order to feed his family. The very same process of the proliferation of efficiency, very often at the expense of true quality, can be seen in almost every context. Of what relevance is the reflective thinker in the presence of the scientific researcher, decked out with a technically advanced laboratory and all? Or the old fashioned salesman in competition with the modern one, wired into his cell phone and social networks, not to mention his corporate employer’s widespread propaganda marketing campaign?
This results in an exponential quantitative increase in the proliferation of efficiency, the sheer number of which at a certain point gives rise to a qualitative change. The proliferation of technology combined with the unchecked assumption that technical innovation, or increased efficiency, is of positive benefit, results in a cultural-technological-ecological situation wherein the values, or end goals, of the infrastructure of society are converted into efficiency itself. Therefore, Technique may be understood as the epoch in which efficiency is ubiquitously valued as a means unto itself, or as an end; wherein the very infrastructure of society is oriented around the production of technical innovation. It is the same absurd and unavoidably escalatory cycle that Marx spied in economics’ money-commodity-money cycle, only converted to the technical means-end-means.
The great difference between the two is in their respective characters. First of all, there is the participation of the rational. Until the eighteenth century, technique was, purely and simply, a practical matter. In the eighteenth century, people began to think about techniques: they compared them and tried to rationalize their application, which completely changed the perspective. A technique was no longer merely an operation. Now, technique passed through a rational intervention, and it had a completely different object; its object was efficiency. When studying the old techniques, one is extremely surprised to see how unimportant efficiency was as a decisive or determining notion. Techniques were used for religious reasons, for purely traditional reasons, and the like. If one technique was more efficient than another, that didn’t trouble the users very much. The technical phenomenon, however, is characterized by evaluation of techniques, and comparison in terms of this criterion of efficiency. (Perspectives On Our Age, pp.29-30)
The internal governing logic of Technique inevitably secures it in its indefinite autonomous proliferation and eventual complete insubordination of human choice. Ellul assigns five characteristics to Technique, which I am calling its internal governing logic, that secure its dominance. They are as follows: automatism, self-augmentation, monism, the necessary linking together of all techniques, and monism. Respectively, these characteristics imply the following behavior. 1) The selection of the most efficient means possible happens automatically rather than contending with some alternative because the rational of Technique supposes that all operations have a “one best way” against which techniques can be measured in quantitative terms. The choice (of which technique to use) is made even before the option arises because there is always only one most technically streamlined operation and it must be selected. 2) Technique augments its own growth in two ways. First, every technical innovation makes possible technical advancement in an unpredictably multitudinous number of other fields. For example, technical innovation of the combustion engine implied the innovation of aeronautical, submarine, and automobile techniques. Second, every technical innovation creates unintended consequences which require resolution qua further application of techniques. So for example, monocultural agriculture implies the use of pesticides which implies the use of certain medications in the event of human illness. For both of these reasons, Technique augments its own growth at an exponential rate. 3) All operations ordered along the lines of technical rationalization come to the same essential end: efficiency. Therefore, all differences are accidental. It cannot be said that one the one hand, Technique may be put to the use of producing a good outcome, or one which manifests this or that value, or on the other hand that it may be put to some bad use. The outcome of all technical operations within Technique is the same holistic technical rationalization which can embody no other set of values. 4) All procedures operating along non-technically rationalized lines, i.e. with other values, are incapable of coping with Technique and cannot coexist with it. Any system contiguous to a technically structured one faces two options: rationalization or nullification. 5) Naturally, all systems integral to the ongoing proliferation and consummation of Technique will be rationalized and integrated, and those which are not will suffer extinction. (The Technological Society - Chap.2)
In brief this situation may be described as a complex system of positive feedback loops which force man - and everything else - to take part in the propagation of technical rationalization, even when it subverts more highly held values or the stability and health of the environment. This results in trenchant and sweeping absurdity.
Man was made to do his daily work with his muscles, but see him now, like a fly on flypaper, seated for eight hours, motionless at a desk. Fifteen minutes of exercise cannot make up for 8 hours of absence. The human being was made to breathe the good air of nature, but what he breathes is an obscure compound of acids and coal tars. He was created for a living environment, but he dwells in a lunar world of stone, cement, asphalt, glass, cast iron, and steel. The trees wilt and blanch among sterile and blind stone facades. Cats and dogs disappear little by little from the city, going the way of the horse. Only rats and men remain to populate a dead world. Man was created to have room to move about in, to gaze into far distances, to live in rooms which, even when they were tiny, opened out onto fields. See him now, enclosed by the rules and architectural necessities imposed by overpopulation in a twelve by twelve closet opening out on an anonymous world of city streets. (p.321)
Upon critical inspection, the myth that the technological society frees man from the stress and exigencies of the wild gives way to the macabre revelation that it merely replaces them with the less dignified, sicklier exigency of constant nervous agitation. The average civilized automaton, even though he spent his entire day seated on a cushion, given periodic bathroom breaks, and free from any kind of distracting variation in his environment, has nevertheless worked all day, relentlessly monitoring the same banal task under the pressure of watchful authoritarian eyes.
When he leaves his job, his joy in finishing his stint is mixed with dissatisfaction with work as fruitless as it is incomprehensible and as far from being really productive work as possible. At home he “finds himself” again. He finds a phantom. If he ever thinks, his reflections terrify him. Personal destiny is fulfilled only by death, but reflection tells him there has not been anything between his adolescent adventures and his death, no point at which at he himself ever initiated a decision or made a change.
Changes are the exclusive prerogative of organized technical society, which one day may have decked him out in khaki to defend it, and on another in stripes because he has sabotaged or betrayed it. (p.376)
The incomprehensibly large and frighteningly impersonal interlocking systems of the technological society threaten and always finally succeed in stamping man out for no reason at all that has any meaning to a man as such – only to the logic of the machine. His very life may hang in the balance – of a budget. His untapped capacity for ecstatic dance, love-making, and song is drained out until only an unwilling, vacuous inner core remains. Life is determined at every turn by the inhuman complex of number columns, sterile enclosures, and monotonous buzzing, and he has no way to change it.
He dreads the knowledge that everything ends “six feet under”. He could accept it the six-feet-under if, and only if, he could choose to, say, die. But when nothing makes sense, when nothing is the result of free choice, the final six-feet-under is an abominable injustice. (p.376)
Prescription (Negative Positation of the Transcendent)
Ellul combines these four premises – the transcendence and revelation of God; the biblical imperative to promote harmony in a chaotic world; the dialectical quality of world history and personal relation; and the absurd and totalitarian trajectory of western society’s preoccupation with techniques – into a picture of prescribed action that takes the following form:
The prevailing order of the day in this world, Technique, ever more rapidly approaches its teleologically determined consummation in the conversion of all human values into technical values. It is inherently chaotic, absurd, wasteful, irresponsible, tyrannical, in short: dis-harmonious. This situation may be understood as the positive side (thesis) of the dialectical opposition composing the modern age. If we have an imperative to promote harmony amidst this destruction, and if we must operate dialectically, then our action must take the form of a contradiction to the technical milieu. In other words, we must posit a negation of the Technical thesis; and not merely an a-Technical response (for this would be the dialectical situation prior to the positation of Technique) but a counter-Technique, a manifestation of that which Technique essentially lacks.
However, Technique is intrinsically more effectual than any countermanding force able to be brought against it at a parallel plain of existence i.e. in this world. Any merely political or technological action is destined to be less efficient and therefore less effectual in the production of its values than Technique is in its inevitable realization of total rationalization. Therefore, any negation of Technique must come from without of the Technical system and the realm in which it has preeminence, i.e. the world. The world’s salvation must come from and be the transcendent, which as an external referent, serves as a vantage from which to clearly observe and evaluate Technique. This is possible because God uniquely lies completely outside of the purview of technical application. (What I Believe, pp.45-46)
The integration of this transcendent into the world resolves into what Ellul calls the Kingdom of Heaven. That is to say, the synthesis of the transcendent and the world is the “new Heaven” and the “new Earth” envisaged by the biblical prophets. Everything that this entails is unclear, but Ellul understands this transformed world to be the end goal of human action and the ultimate manifestation of the “positation of the transcendent”. But how do we get from here to there? What kind of praxis could henceforth be manifested that would bring about this transformed world?
To begin with, this goal defiantly implies real material action within the present world. As per Ellul’s conception of dialectics, this world will be present in some sense in the Kingdom of Heaven. Though it will be transformed, it will not be destroyed; it is from out of this world that the next will be created. Therefore our activity is required in the sense of concrete world-action (political, personal, etc). We cannot escape into merely awaiting the afterlife. We must not simply reject Technique outright, in favor of some apathy or flight into isolation, yet leave Technique as it is. This course is not even tenable, as we have established that in the face of Technique the world and the individual faces either assimilation or destruction. However, given our understanding of God as God, we may revoke Technique’s status as an idol, as a value, and thereby revoke its power over us. In an act of the most subversive iconoclasm possible in our age, we must “destroy the religious deified character of technique” (POA, p.89) so that we may become “mutants… who can use techniques and at the same time not be used by them, assimilated by, or subordinated to them”. (p.66)
To become mutants means to evolve so as to adapt to the new environment in which we find ourselves. Technique and the world of the artificial which it has created cannot be abandoned, but it can be harmonized with in the sense that a species fleetingly harmonizes with its surroundings. But in order to do this we must evolve so as to correspond to the technical milieu in the appropriate way. Thus it must be determined in what respect man and the world can correspond. The realization of God as transcendent and of his promise of a restorative transformation of this world (“understanding of God as God”) dictates that man corresponds to the technical milieu such that as he places ultimate primacy on the realm of the transcendent. In doing so he simultaneously places the present world in its proper relation: inferior in the sense of being impermanent and incomplete. Thus Technique, and every human enterprise, is humiliated to a desacralized status and humanity is freed from the illusion that Technique is its salvation. So it becomes clear: to mutate in such a way as to adapt to Technique is identical with revoking for oneself and for humanity Technique’s status as an idol.
Technique’s reified status as savior is what gives it its power over man. But man must not hope for salvation in merely human enterprises, Technique or otherwise. The longer hope of this kind still exists, the longer and more precipitously he delivers himself over to that from which he needs liberated. Instead, given his understanding of God and revelation, he must acknowledge that the synthesis of this world with the transcendent will take the form of revelation from God. Any working-toward the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven is identical with the ineffectual “religious movement” upwards; only the condescension of the transcendent can catalyze the synthesis.
Yet simultaneously, we are called to action of the most imperative nature. For, in the face of the onset of total technological assimilation, man’s very receptivity to the revelation of God is threatened. The very possibility of a meaningful existence depends on man’s clearing away a space for himself wherein he may pay head to the revelation of God. Thus he must act at all costs to secure his freedom to understand and accept this revelation.
It is in response to this particular challenge that Ellul posits a concrete political formula: anarchism. The world approaches absolutely determined constraint under the dominion of Technique, the consummation of which is the totalitarian control of this world-realm. As such, Technique is the dominant “arche” of our time - the rule which informs the mode of order of society, the power which forcefully decides its outcome, the final authority.
In acting thus, it is not only a source of disharmony and destruction, which does therefore merit our rebellion in the form of the antithetical positation of harmony, but it is essentially a binding, structuring, ordering force which seeks to rob man and his relationship with the world and others of its spontaneity, its caprice, its dynamic playfulness. It merits rebellion no less it this diabolical aspect because, without the freedom to choose, man’s relationship to the revelation of God is threatened. Thus it must be rebelled against qua arche. This is to say, its sheer quality as a force of order and control must be countermanded (thus by “anarchism” is meant “anti-archism”, wherein the arche in question is Technique).
What force is antithetical to order and control itself? Spontaneous acts of unruliness. The highest danger rests in our foolish belief that we are already free, that we are the masters of Technique, of technical progress, and of our destiny. In reality we are radically determined to enact a history that is – internally – totally hopeless; and to fail to recognize his is to destine it of our own volition. (Technological Bluff, p.411)
Yet not really, for the system does not stop growing, and thus far we have no examples of growth that does not reach the point of imbalance and rupture… Even without nuclear war or an exceptional crisis, we may thus expect enormous global disorder which will be the expression of all the contradictions and disarray. This must be made to cost as little as possible. (p.412)
Finally, not really, if we know how little room there is to maneuver and therefore, not by one’s high position or by power, but always after the model of development from a source and by the sole aptitude for astonishment, we profit from the existence of little cracks of freedom, and install in them a trembling freedom which is not attributed to or mediated by machines or politics, but which is truly effective, so that we may truly invent the thing for which humanity is waiting. (p.412)
If we wish find hope in that which is external (the transcendent) then we must safeguard our freedom to choose the revelation of God. Consequently, we must be “unruly”. We must exploit lapses in the structure of Technological Society, strive to act spontaneously, to introduce free play between the elements society, to move within the empty spaces. If within these strongholds we can foster the saving power of the open, spontaneous freedom to choose, we may secure the means which are “bearers of the presence of the kingdom of God” (POA, p.87) from out of the world.
▪▪▪
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things--
We murder to dissect.
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
- William Wordsworth,
The Tables Turned (1798)
Heidegger
The following analysis of Heidegger will be confined to his perspective in the collection of essays entitled The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. These expositions, written midway through Heidegger’s occupation as a thinker, suggest that the phenomenon of modern technology is a threat to humanity’s apprehension of truth. In response to this most arresting of possibilities, Heidegger proposes that reflection on the essence of technology is the course of action necessary to restore the appearance of truth and therefore rescue man from his course toward oblivion. This is because, properly understood, reflection acts as a necessary external reference point from which to engage technology.
In order to explain this with any clarity, it is necessary to lay bare a number of “metaphysical assumptions” upon which Heidegger builds his inquiry. In order to do Heidegger’s discourse any justice, however, one stipulation must be made: Heidegger is not building a metaphysical system. His goal is not to build another floor onto the tower of continental-analytic philosophy that precedes him - especially in the German tradition - after the same fashion in which those preceding worldviews were built, only more, higher. Instead, he follows a line of questioning directed toward, even in pursuit of an understanding of technology, thinking what is truly essential about the thoughts of his philosophical predecessors. In other words: From out of what phenomenological experience of the world did their theories derive? This means thinking about what their thoughts truly indicate about their relationship to Being. In order to do this, Being itself must be grasped. But Being cannot be grasped in the mode of the metaphysical thinking of his predecessors. Ergo neither can their can their thoughts concerning it. Accordingly, to attribute to his work some of kind of strict deduction from firmly held postulates would suggest more “contriving” and less “discovering” than Heidegger would appreciate. The analogy he uses for his own work is that each discourse is a path though the forest, in search of a clearing. In these essays, the essence of technology (which is to say technology as it relates to Being) is the clearing sought after. Nevertheless, whatever positive reasoning or critique he does employ is built upon some foundational premises that are held either tentatively or tacitly, and it will be necessary to bring to light what these are. The scope of this essay necessitates the articulation of six basic premises.
Metaphysical Assumptions
1) The first might best be denoted as a “value”, for it is assumed qua a desirable end, teleologically speaking. Heidegger values the state of human existence lost to oblivion with the advent of Western metaphysics. The most poignant illustration of this shift from one state to the next is in the Greek mind. Heidegger regards the ancient Greek way of existence, exemplified by, say, Homer, as inhabiting the full space of man’s essence, i.e. fulfilling his end. He describes ancient man as the one who is
gathered toward presencing, by that which opens itself. To be beheld by what is, to be included and maintained within its openness and in that way to be borne along by it, to be driven about by its oppositions and marked by its discord – that is the essence of man in the great age of the Greeks. Therefore, in order to fulfill his essence, Greek man must gather (legein) and save (sozein), catch up and preserve, what opens itself in its openness, and he must remain exposed (aletheuein) to all its sundering confusions. (p.131)
However Plato, with the employment of radically new concepts of the real some time later, signals a momentous shift in mindset away from the Homeric and toward the scientific. The existence of the pre-platonic Greek is something for which Heidegger is deeply nostalgic. The real difference between these two states of mind will come to light only when his analysis of technology has been explained.
2) The second premise underlies Heidegger’s “valuation” of pre-platonic humanity. This is his belief that the ”full space of man’s essence” is what he calls Dasein, which translates literally as “There-Being” and is sometimes summarized by Heidegger as “openness-for-Being”. He speaks of Dasein in so many words only once, in passing, in Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, but the idea is essential to and implicit in his whole take on the danger of technology. Dasein is man when man inhabits the state of mind in which he is openly receptive to the appearing of Being in its constantly fluctuating stream of changing forms. And this is not merely a passive reception but more accurately a solemn attentiveness which safeguards the appearance of Being safely inward so that it remains intact in the knowing of the man (Dasein). Thus Dasein is true existence in the original sense of to “ek-sist”, i.e. to “be-from-without”, i.e. to receive Being into oneself from out of oneself.
His essence is to be the one who waits, the one who attends upon the coming to presence of Being in that in thinking he guards it. Only when man, as the shepherd of Being, attends upon the truth of Being can he expect an arrival of a destining of Being and not sink to the level of a mere wanting to know. (P.42)
3) The third premise ties in closely with Heidegger’s understanding of Man’s essence of Dasein. This is that “the real” (what one might call “history” in the past tense, though not in the sense of historiography) is the “destining of Being”. Being is that which on account of participation in, things that are, be. (p.44) In other words, it is the final condition of everything, inasmuchas everything only is a thing when it is in Being. Even God is merely that which is most in Being. Being lays claim to the primal origination of not only all that is real, but the real itself. Destining is the giving of particular form to Being such that it appears in this or that way, i.e. manifests as this or that thing. When a river appears as the life-giving artery of the forest and not as a stockpile of hydroelectric power, it is destined to be one thing and not another. Being is always being concealed and unconcealed in ever changing ways, and every revealing of one aspect of Being obscures another, just as to speak of a thing in one way is to remain silent about it in another. This articulation of Being in one particular way is what is meant by Destining. Man’s experience of the real, i.e. Being, always takes the form of some particular destining. “Always the unconcealment of that which is goes upon a way of revealing. Always the destining of revealing holds a complete sway over man.” (p.25) Likewise, the milieu which a given age inhabits is made distinctive by its unique destining of Being, i.e. its revealing of Being as a unique array of beings.
4) The “real” and the “true” are essentially identical. This relationship comes straight out of the ancient Greek mind. To be real is to be in phenomenological appearance i.e. the immediate confrontation of Being itself with the thinking being when it enters into the purview of his senses in some particular form. This is called hypokeimenon in the Greek. But for the Greek (and therefore Heidegger) the immediate phenomenological confrontation of the thinking being with what appears before him is true, a.k.a aletheia. The phenomenal is the true – the real is the phenomenal - therefore the real is the true.
Bring-forth comes to pass only insofar as something concealed comes into unconcealment. This coming rests and moves freely within what we call revealing. The Greeks have the word aletheia for revealing. The Romans translate this word veritas. We say “truth” and usually understand it as the correctness of an idea. (p. 12)
Likewise, for the ancients (also Heidegger), to make or to do something, i.e. to bring something into appearance in Being, is to reveal truth, aletheia. In an essential way, both the poetical arts (poiesis) and the practical arts (techne) were thought together in one accord, as the revealing of aletheia. This is because teche and poiesis are both forms of Destining. Destining is a bringing into phenomenal appearance an aspect of the real. The real is the true. Therefore teche and poiesis are modes of bring the true into appearance.
The modes of occasioning, the four causes, are at play, then, within bringing. Through bringing-forth, the growing things of nature as well as whatever is completed through the crafts and the arts come at any given time to their appearance. (pp. 10-11)
5) Human responsibility and the determination of a higher power coexist. It follows from the primacy of Being that – ultimately – any destining of Being is going to be conditioned by Being itself, i.e. is going to be a performance of Being, by Being. The various forms which it takes are as postures which it assumes. Yet it follows from the existence of Dasein that the articulation of Being, the revealing of it in such a way as to unconceal one aspect and leave another concealed, is a function of man’s volition. These insoluble realities must be understood to act in accord, the way, for example, that Hegel understands the freedom of individual action as the modus operandi of the world-historical process of the self-revelation of the Geist. Heidegger’s proclamation that,
Man can indeed conceive, fashion, and carry through this or that in one way or another. But man does not have control unconcealment itself, in which at any given time the real has been showing itself in the light of Ideas ever since the time of Plato, Plato did not bring about. The thinker only responded to what addressed itself to him. (p.18)
implies that in an absolute sense, Being is the arbiter of what happens, though in some relative sense – in some sense meaningful for humans – man may act within it or even as it.
6) The final premise of Heidegger’s metaphysics is the “dialectical” quality of the Destining of Being. Dialectics, in the Hegelian sense, is not a concept that Heidegger invokes explicitly, but the essence of the theory makes its appearance implicitly when he invokes the maxim: where the danger grows is the salvation also. He says,
For what gives destining its character as destining is that it takes place so as suitably to adapt itself to the ordaining that is ever one. To take place so as to adapt means to set out in order to adjust fittingly to the directing already made apparent – for which another destining, yet veiled, is waiting. That which has the character of destining moves in itself at any given time toward a special moment that sends into another destining, in which, however, it is not simply submerged and lost. (p. 37)
As a general principle, what he means by this is that every situation or state of affairs (read: particular destining of Being) contains within itself the seed of its own qualitative reversal. In his language, every “turning about” of Being to reveal one aspect of itself, turns another aspect out of sight, yet also implies the continual turning about of Being such that eventually the present aspect will itself turn out of sight and turn another aspect into appearance. In essence, this indicates a picture of Being which is a) continually in a state of transformative flux (becoming) and b) continually resolving the crises resultant from clashing antipathies into new wholes. Thus, technology, for example, when it exists as the danger to man and truth is, as that selfsame event, the salvation, because the antipathy to its danger is man’s delivery.
With these six assumptions in mind, Heidegger’s analysis of the technological milieu can begin to make sense. Once the essence of the technological milieu is brought to light, then Heidegger’s assertion that reflection on its essence is the praxis necessary to deliver man from his course towards oblivion can be grasped clearly.
Analysis of Technology
Heidegger asserts that the essence which determines the nature of the modern technological milieu has been active in determining western technology since the very inception of the western mind as we know it – Plato.
Prior to Plato’s epoch-making pronouncements, art and craft were thought together in one accord by the Greek mind. Both Techne (technology, craft) and poiesis (poetry, art) were understood (if not consciously, then tacitly) as modes of revealing Being in such and such a way, and as such were considered vessels of the appearance of truth. Because, for the Greek, that which comes into appearance, or has aspect, within the purview of the senses of the thinking being, i.e. is immediately present and perceivable, is true (hypokeimenon = aletheia). For the ancient Greek, techne and poiesis were booth modes of aletheia, both modes of revealing hypokeimenon.
After Plato, and this includes up to the present day, technology is understood much differently. The modern conception of technology is as “instrument”, which indicates that it is a means for effecting a given end - a tool, a contrivance - but stops there. This definition is neither wholly alien to aletheia (which is a tool in the sense that it effects hypokeimenon) nor contradictory to it. But the merely instrumental definition of technology lacks the relationship to truth appropriate to an act of aletheia, and has thus diminished the purview of technique to the merely causal. Modern man has sequestered technique and craft off from any possibility of manifesting truth as surely as he has sequestered aesthetics into the realm of the impractical. This schism represents a narrowing and isolating of the full essence of each aspect and leaves both neglected.
Heidegger’s query is directed toward discovering the answer to the question: with modern man’s conception of technology as the destiny of this schism, what is its origin? As stated, its origin lies in the advent of metaphysics. By this Heidegger has in mind Plato’s pronouncement that eidos - which in the Greek means appearance, outward visual aspect, i.e. that which stands before unconcealed in clarity i.e. hypokeimenon – is precisely that aspect of it which cannot be seen with the physical eye and must be apprehended with the rational intellect. This radical reinterpretation of what it means to appear as hypokeimenon commences two essential shifts in the Western mind. The first is a shift away from the apprehension of the real entailing appearance before the senses (Heidegger’s language seems to suggest an emphasis on sight) towards apprehension of the real entailing appearance through a framework of mental categories. The second is the relocation of “realness”, i.e. Being, into the realm of the eternal, unchanging, and static. Whereas, when the real was understood to be what appeared before the senses it was understood to be in flux, the real when it is placed into the realm of universal thought-categories becomes that, and only that, which endures fixedly in the qualitative (universal) and temporal (eternal) sense. Hence the ground is laid for categorical divisions, logical relationships, and ideas in the sense of representations (i.e. those things which, unlike the fluctuating natural world, persist eternally and universally) to become that which is real, or true.
Descartes, directly inherits Plato’s thinking but drives even further towards the essence, or end, of which Plato is but a faint glimmer. Descartes articulation, “cogito ergo sum”, indicates an even further narrowing of the field of that which can be in Being (be real and true), to the phenomenological sphere of subjectness. This articulation brings to further fruition the two (related) phenomenological shifts commenced by Plato. First, it is founded on the assumption of the human condition wherein the real is divided into the two unequal spheres of subject (subectium) and object (obectium), into the schizoid antipathy of I and world. This conception of man as isolated from and juxtaposed to the real is completely foreign to Dasein. The second is the assumption of the preeminence of the subject. At its core, the reasoning being “cogito ergo sum” relies on the transformation of hypokeimenon from the otherness of nature and/or the realm of universals into subectium, or the experience of the self. Subectium, being the only certainty, becomes the standard measurement for the certainty (truth) of all that is in Being. Heidegger says “However, when man becomes the primary and only real subectium, that means: man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth. Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such. But this is possible only when the comprehension of what is as a whole changes.” (128) The “Enlightenment” of which Descartes is a member truthfully designates the age wherein man is freed from the intellectual bondage of the church, but also that wherein he is only freed into the enclosure of his own subjective cogitations.
The last significant stop on Heidegger’s guided tour through the evolution of Western is the atomic physicists, such as Heisenberg and Plank, and the “research science” of which they are the capstone. They represent a further enclosure of the thinking being into his own subjectivity and accordingly of his alienation from the self-revealing coming into appearance of the real from outside of the self, i.e. from “ek-sistence”. This is because, for them, the reassignment of hypokeimenon into subectium reaches its pinnacle.
How? Research science takes up as its purpose the express goal of representing all truth with prefect accuracy. This model of action assumes not only the division of the real into subject and object spheres, but also the phenomenological primacy of the subjective. It seeks to perfect a strict, rigorous adherence to the particular set of methodologies appropriate to its field of inquiry (physics, historiography, etc), which naturally narrow as the methodologies are honed. What appears as the object of this research, or what inhabits the object-sphere of a particular field, is determined and given form in advance by an a priori cognitive structure which anticipates phenomena and shapes its coming into appearance in the way appropriate to that science. For example, in physics:
This stipulating has to do with nothing less than the plan or projection of that which must henceforth, for the knowing of nature that is sought after, be nature: the self contained system of motion of units of mass related spatiotemporally… Every force is defined according to – i.e. is only – its consequences in motion, and that means in magnitude of change of place in the unity of time. (p.171)
Thus, research science is inherently normative, inasmuch as it actively determines what phenomena, as such, will come into being. In its devotion to observation of empirical fact it even becomes more so because experimentation is such that in order to produce more exact and more certain results, more and more exact laws must be sketched into the appearance of the real a priori. Heidegger says,
The methodology though which individual object spheres are conquered does not simply amass results. Rather, with the help of its results it adapts itself for a new procedure… In the course of these processes, the methodology of the science becomes circumscribed by means of its results. More and more the methodology adapts itself to the possibilities of procedure opened up through itself. (P.124)
These a priori cognitive structures are nothing other than the self-expression of the subject, and therefore manifest the almost complete in-turning of human perception away from the outward appearance of the real. Heisenberg and Plank signify the virtual consummation of this when they declare: “The real is that which can be measured.” (169)
The in-turning of Dasein away from Being (which is the essence of technology) culminates in the complete normative structuring of every appearance of the real. Heidegger understands this culmination to be the technological milieu and calls it “Enframing”, which he defines as “that challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the self-revealing as standing-reserve.” (19) The culminating preeminence of the subject qua that which is real leaves all aspects of Being not anticipated by the subject neglected, unrevealed. The objective becomes precisely that which can only slip into mysterious phenomenological absence, ala Kant’s noumenon, or worse, nothing. Thus every man increasingly, helplessly, slips further into subjectivism in the sense of epistemological, moral, and aesthetic individualism. But simultaneously, the world becomes more and more objectified, more put the unrelenting use of, more set up to be at, man’s conquering disposal. How does this occur?
When man gains ontological preeminence, he “makes depend on himself the way in which he must take his stand in relation to whatever is as the objective” and “there begins that way of being human which mans the realm of human capability as a domain given over to measuring and executing, for the purposes of gaining mastery over that which is a whole.” (132) In other words, when man rises to the position of “representative” of the real, he assumes a role which intrinsically culminates in complete mastery over its destining – the very nemesis of his true essence.
The struggle for dominion of the earth is in its historical essence already the result of the fact that whatever is as such is appearing in the mode of the will to power without yet being recognized or without being understood at all as that will. At any rate, the doctrines of action and the conceptual ideologies that are commonly subscribed to never utter that which is, and which therefore is happening. With the beginning of the struggle for dominion over the earth, the age of subjectness is driving toward its consummation. To this completion belongs that fact that whatever is – which is in the manner of the will to power – is, after its fashion and in every respect, becoming certain and therefore also conscious of its own truth about itself. Making conscious is a necessary instrument of the willing that wills from out of the will to power. It happens, in the sphere of the uprising of man into self-willing, through the ceaseless dissecting of the historical situation. Thought metaphysically, the “situation” is constantly the stage for action of a subject. Every analysis of the situation is grounded, whether it knows it or not, in the metaphysics of subjectness. (P.101)
Hence the stage is set for the critique of technology so widely intuited in the 19th and 20th centuries: its rapine dominance over nature. Just as science forcibly sets up the real to exhibit itself in certain ways by refusing to acknowledge it in any other way than how it has predetermined to measure it, and in so doing makes it into a stockpile of object-data to be measured in such and such a way, technology relentlessly sets up nature to exhibit itself as an object of instrumental manipulation. It “challenges forth” nature to appear as that which it determines that it needs in advance. In so doing, all of nature is converted into a “standing-reserve” of potential energy for the ordering about of the subject.
Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing reserve. This word expresses here something more, and something more essential, than mere “stock” … It designates nothing less than the way in which everything presences that is wrought upon by challenging revealing. Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object. (p. 17)
This is because the de facto value of instrumentality is efficiency; pure instrumentality is efficiency. Techniques qua instruments are absurd and even impossible without the escalatory accumulation of output with respect to input. Thus, when technology is stripped of its capacity as aletheia, it naturally reorients “toward driving on to the maximum yield from the minimum expense.” (p.15)
The result is a world of ongoing technological rationalization wherein every activity is robbed of its reverence, its novelty, and its poetry. Every appearance of the real comes in the form of sheer potential energy so that nothing of the constantly morphing spontaneity of the real is left. It accumulates in a monotonous, and therefore oppressive, way. The Rhine, once a quite place of solemn majesty, is dammed up by a hydro-electric power plant, behind which throbs a massive wall of potential energy to be endlessly stored up and ordered about by man, who is lulled into distraction by its deluge of mechanical humming. Likewise, whereas the peasant farmer of old simply “sets the land in order” in such a way that he places “the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase” (p.15), industrialized agriculture sets the land in order in a way that “sets upon”; air is nitrogen, land is ore, ore is nuclear power, and the spontaneous generation of novelty in the bursting forth of physis is replaced by acres of uniform rows of depleted crops. “Feeding potential” is unlocked from out of the ground.
The full scope of Enframing’s consummation ensures that the sucking up of everything into a standing reserve at the service of man is in no way limited to the external world; man himself is set upon by the unlocking utilizing. Yet he cannot escape Enframing. He is so caught up in the challenging ordering of nature into standing-reserve that he himself is ultimately challenged forth as such by the environmental matrix of Enframing. For example, the forester who walks through the woods to count felled timber no longer does so freely, spontaneously, reflectively. Instead, he is intractably ordered about by a complex of industries treating him as if he were merely a human resource. He is set to counting, which is set to the ordering of cellulose, which is set to making paper, which is set to making newspapers, which is set to making public opinion, etc. (p. 18) Technology and technological man resonate with each other in a mutually augmenting feedback loop until technology becomes the very environment man inhabits, the very medium through which he communicates. As such, it truly becomes milieu.
As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve … In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion in turn gives rise to one final delusion; It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself … In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence. (p. 27)
This development is a portentous threat to that which Heidegger reveres as most dear: that archaic way of existence called Dasein. Enframing, for all its aggressive ordering about of the real, is characterized by Heidegger as the “injurious neglect of the thing” (p.45), underscoring, at heart, its carelessness. Technology is based on a phenomenological experience of the real (“the thing”) as instrument. This experience is based on a metaphysical orientation. Metaphysics is inherently based on an unreflective normative structuring of the appearance of the real. Thus Dasein - the safeguarding of the truth, through a basically receptive, yet attentive, harboring of the coming into appearance of the real inward into the mind of the thinker intact – passes more and more out of Being as metaphysics secures its establishment instead. Man’s very essence, not to mention truth itself, slips into obscurity behind the cloak of man’s representing.
The ordering belonging to Enframing sets itself above the thing, leaves it, as thing, unsafeguarded, tuthless. In this way Enframing disguises the nearness of world that nears in the thing. Enframing disguises even this, its disguising, just as the forgetting of something forgets itself and is drawn away in the forgetful wake of oblivion. The coming to-pass of oblivion not only lets fall from remembrance into concealment; but that falling itself falls simultaneously from remembrance into concealment, which itself also falls away into that falling. (P.46)
But what is the original cause of this receding of Being from out of the purview of man’s thinking? That is to ask, what catalyzed the first normative abstraction of the appearing of the real into an ideos, and destined it through history toward consummation in the form of Enframing? To assert that, at is source, this transformation is some doing of man, would be to misconstrue man as the master of Being. Ultimately, even the setting up of man into a position of mastery over the appearing of Being such that he shuts himself off from it, is a manifestation of Being and its sanction. This “shutting off from” Being is no refusal of Being by man, but rather, a self-withholding of Being’s revelation of itself to man. Thus the age of technology may be understood as the epoch of Being, in the etymological sense of the “self-mystification” of Being.
It would lie in Beings own essence, then, that Being remain unthought because it withdraws. Being itself withdraws into its truth. It harbors itself safely within its truth and conceals itself in such harboring.
In looking toward this self-concealing harboring of its own essence, perhaps we glimpse the essence of that mystery in the guise of which the truth of Being is coming to presence.
According to this, metaphysics itself would not be merely a neglect of a question still to be pondered concerning Being. Surely it would not be an error. Metaphysics, as the history of the truth of what is as such, would have come to pass from out of the destining of Being itself. Metaphysics would be, in essence, the mystery of Being itself, a mystery that is unthought because withheld. (P.110)
Given Heidegger’s assignment of the Being to absolute ground of reality, if any circumstance warrants the attention and effort of humanity, this is it. But what does Heidegger understand to be the appropriate human response to the concealing of Being manifest in technology? What form does praxis take in the face of Being’s epoch?
Praxis (Reflection)
Any praxis which intends to bring about some change in the state of Enframing through causal means, i.e. instrumental methods, only continues to move within the realm of Enframing. The technological milieu cannot be altered through the application of technology; since they are essentially identical, this can only augment it. Therefore it will never be defeated, in the sense of overcome by the sheer force of “good” technologies. All technology enframes.
And at any rate, the concealing of Being in the form of man’s enclosure into his own subjectivity was its own prerogative from the very beginning. Enframing is man’s destiny. But does man’s destiny terminate in Enframing? Probably – hopefully – not.
Being taketh away and Being giveth. Remember that for Heidegger every situation inherently contains the seed of its own reversal. The coming into Being of Enframing threatens with the possibility that in man’s revealing of the real, he will bring it forth as nothing more than “standing reserve”, and in so doing risks revealing himself as nothing but an orderer of standing reserve. Man exults himself to the lord of the revealing of Being, even while, truly, his very existence is threatened by the fact that he barely any longer fulfills his essence as that being who is a harbinger of the appearing of Being into himself from without. But from out this very situation the “saving power” comes to pass. As if cast into appearance in the negative - as if, in its sheer absence it becomes conspicuous - the fullness of Being so neglected by the destructively narrow focus on the instrumental of Enframing, shines through in the dimmest flashing of an insight. As man ever more rapidly approaches the brink of the great precipice which is the obliteration of his essence, Being urgently whispers out to alert him to the precipitous danger. This alertness - this flash of insight - is the cause for the hope of salvation. The danger of obliteration is reversed into man’s very salvation from it. Heidegger says,
Sheerly, out of its own essence of concealedness, Being brings itself to pass into its epoch. Therefore we must pay heed: The turning of the danger comes to pass suddenly. In this turning, the clearing belonging to the essence of Being suddenly clears itself and lights up. This sudden self-lighting is the lightening-flash. It brings itself into its own brightness, which it itself both brings along and brings in. When, in the turning of the danger, the truth of Being flashes, the essence of Being clears and lights itself up. Then the truth of the essence, the coming to presence, of Being turns and enters in.” (p.44)
From whence does this turning about, this flashing of insight, derive? It derives simultaneously from man’s action and from the dispatch of Being. Ultimately all insight will only be a self-revealing of Being. Insight into the essence of technology is never the kind of thing that can be effected instrumentally. Man may only “respond to that which addresses itself to him” – may only reflect on what is truly happening in his age, his milieu. Yet this is no small thing. Reflection on what is happening in the technological age is precisely what can bring about the flashing of insight.
When one reflects on the essence of technology – Enframing – it comes to light as the concealing of Being, as the “injurious neglect” of Being in the fullness of its self-revealing. When it comes to light as such, Being’s potential for unconcealedness is implicated – the same way that the sun becomes even more conspicuous behind the eclipse. When the essence of Enframing comes to light as the concealing and alerts man to its danger, man is freed up to relate to it differently, to manifest an alternative way of existing rather than just speeding towards his destiny in oblivion. Heidegger says, “…destining is never a fate that compels. For man becomes truly free only insofar as he belongs to the realm of destining and so becomes one who listens and hears, and not one who is simply constrained to obey.” In reflecting, man opens his mind to pay attention to the coming into appearance of Being in the mode Enframing. Such openness to Being is Dasein. Therefore, in reflecting on the essence of technology, man, even though he may not exactly effect the surmounting of technology and the restoration of Dasein instrumentally, fosters the growth of the saving power though the re-appearing of Being to man, by manifesting instances of Dasein, which is the very letting of that appearance happen.
What form does reflection take in the technological milieu? What does a merely nascent manifesting of Dasein look like? It must be a way of existing – of thinking and doing – which can apprehend the essence of technology, in order to foster the self-appearing of truth. Yet technology and technological thinking and doing cannot accomplish this. Therefore reflection cannot be technological. But technology is rooted in metaphysics – and not in merely a certain metaphysic, but in the very mode of thinking in which metaphysics is possible. Therefore reflection must be something other than metaphysical. Metaphysics and the mode of thinking in which it is possible are the epochal concealing of Being, the inability to think Being itself. Therefore reflection must able to “think Being” itself.
What is given to thinking to think is not some deeply hidden underlying meaning, but rather something lying near, that which lies nearest, which, because it is only this, we have therefore constantly already passed over. Through this passing over we are, without noticing it, constantly accomplishing the killing in relation to the Being of whatever is in being. (P.111)
To think Being means to exist in the sense of “ek-sist”. It means: safeguarding the appearing of Being qua Enframing inward into knowing intact, rather than continence in the normative representing of Being through thinking in the mode of Enframing, which makes its true appearance impossible. To reflect means to think Being, which means to ek-sist. All of these words denote the same basic thing: to be openly receptive to self-appearing of Being.
But does this amount to merely passive contemplation? Certainly not. The self-appearing of Being is truth. Therefore reflection, thinking, ek-sisting are ways of apprehending truth. But remember for Dasein, techne and poiesis are equally ways of apprehending truth, of aletheia, even though they are an active doing and not merely passive meditation. Therefore reflection may also take the form of the active arts and crafts. Truly, for Dasein there is no distinction between thinking and the arts & crafts. The division of human action into the intellectual the practical originates in the essence of technology. For Dasein, reflection is a way of being that combines thinking and doing into a single act of aletheia, which, even when it is making, is really carefully letting the real come into appearance in truthfully.
Reflection is not needed, however, in order that it may remove some chance perplexity or break down some antipathy to thinking. Reflection is needed as a responding that forgets itself in the clarity of ceaseless question away at the inexhaustibleness of That which is worthy of questioning – of That from out of which, in the moment properly its own, responding loses the character of questioning and becomes simply saying. (P.182)
Finally, reflection is no victory. The technological milieu continues to hold sway with great endurance. This manifesting of Dasein in the form of reflection must be content with floundering, with only faint glimpses of a more truthful existence now nearly forgotten.
Yet even where once, through a special favor, the highest level of reflection might be attained, reflection, would have to be content only with preparing a readiness for the exhortation and consolation that our human race today needs. (p.182)
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Recapitulation
The following discourse is a side-by-side summary of each thinker’s analyses as it is presented above. Its purpose is to render each comparable to the other, i.e. make apparent in what respects they are addressing similar themes. It is broken down in 6 basic parallels.
First, both Heidegger and Ellul believe the world and existence in it are expressions of and determined by an absolute power that transcends man.
For Heidegger, this power is Being, which is the absolute entity that informs every instance of happening. The advent of the technological milieu from out of pre-history and the consciousness of man that attends it in the form of metaphysics – in short, the epochal concealing of the coming to presence of Being itself, or Enframing - is a self-manifestation of Being in the form of a self-withholding from man. It is no merely human mistake or ecological imbalance; it is these things, but only to the extent that Being grants it the status of is. The same may be said for the possible future restoration of Being’s appearing i.e. man’s salvation.
For Ellul, this power is the God of revelation. This entity is also the absolute ground of all that is, and that from out of which everything that is, is determined. The coming into being of the technological milieu, which threatens man’s ability to demonstrate his will to perceive and respond to God’s revelation of himself, is an element of the narrative of history spoke into being by God for reasons not humanly understood, as God is the final unconditioned, capricious arbiter of all that is. The “fall” of nature into a state of disharmony (technological milieu) and subsequently the man’s salvation from it through the revelation - the illuminating condescension of God – was/will be an act of grace from the very beginning.
Second, both Heidegger and Ellul believe in the inherent dialectical flux of world history.
For Heidegger, Being takes form through the revealing of particular manifestations of its potential infinitude of appearances through a process called “destining”, which is the giving of this form. This destining of the revealing of Being implies the sending of Being on a way through a narrative of appearance which begins with the sending and moves towards a destination which is the natural fulfillment of the essence of that destining. The destination of a given destining is always the sudden transformation of that way of destining into a new destining, a state change of the revealing of Being into some new revealing. Another way of articulating this is to say: the evolution of world history is driven along by an inherent tendency in world historical situations to bring to fulfillment their defining internal governing logic to a point of untenable crises which must give rise to a change, i.e. the dialectical theory of history.
Ellul specifically and explicitly takes up the position that history develops in the mode of dialectics. Every event or action which is significant, in the sense that it meaningfully is transformed or transforms, is or does so, because it participates in the conversation between thetical and antithetical world-elements. Civilizations and the men in them advance by transforming in the way necessary to surmount challenges to their continuance. Every world-situation develops into the fulfillment of its essence, which is in every case unstable and necessarily results in a change correspondent to the instability. This results in a newly stable situation, but one which, in the working-out of its inner logic, only results in a new crisis, and so on.
Third, both Heidegger and Ellul believe that the essence of the modern age is technological and that the increasingly technological furniture of the modern world is only the physical manifestation of a deeper problem in the way man relates to his environment.
For Heidegger, the technological milieu grows out of a change deep in the roots of human experience. It begins with the coming into appearance of the subject and his representations as that aspect of Being which is real in the sense of reliably true, instead of the immediate sensual experience of what is externally present. In the coming into being of the subject as that which is reliably true, that which is externally present comes into appearance as object, which is precisely that thing which, inasmuch as it is object, comes into being only as a standing-reserve for representational (in the case of science) and instrumental (in the case of craft) usage of the subject. Comprehended as pure or increasingly pure standing-reserve, the externally present is destined in such a way is to arrive at the destination of totally tuthless instrumentality. The natural outcome of instrumental manipulation sans the capacity to reveal truth, beauty, etc, is unchecked dominance over the earth, systematically organized along the lines of efficiency, which governs instrumentality.
For Ellul, the technological milieu, or Technique, grows out of a quality latent in techniques of the most primitive kind, namely, efficiency. While not initially a decisive factor in the preference of one technique over another, efficient techniques gain unchecked ascendency through a combination of human naivety (unquestioning preference for the efficient) and inherent efficaciousness. With human civilization carrying efficiency onward as the basis of its security and power, efficiency expands the breadth and depth of its purview in order to rationalize everything – a process necessarily entailed by the perfection of techniques for the sake of civilization’s security and power. At a certain point (around the advent of industrialization in the early 19th century) the increasing rationalizing of civilization’s institutions becomes a process essentially independent of human participation, and augments its own growth autonomously, even to the point of undermining whatever human values still exist. Every institution, every action, every value, that interferes with the efficient functioning of society is destroyed or rationalized.
Fourth, both Heidegger an Ellul are ultimately, if cautiously, optimistic about the outcome of the technological age.
For Heidegger, the destining of revealing which is Enframing, though it is the calamitous occlusion of man from Being and, what’s more, is probably the destining “most capable of enduring”, still sends the revealing of the real on a way towards the sudden advent of a new destining, a new revealing. Heidegger’s invocation of the principle “where the danger is so grows the salvation” implies that the newly resultant destining is in some sense dialectically corresponding. Hence, since Enframing is the occlusion of man from that which is the real – the externally present – by subjective representation’s erroneous supplanting of its truth-hood, Enframing’s ultimate destination must be the coming to light of Enframing’s essence, which would entail the restoration of man’s understanding of the immediately externally present as that which is true – the salvation of his expiring essence.
For Ellul, the development of history is dialectical. Every historical situation in the fulfillment its own internal governing logic moves towards state of unstable crisis, out of which a dialectically corresponding (i.e. antithetical) situation gains establishment. While this, in and of itself, implies no promise of qualitative improvement, it becomes optimistic in light of Ellul’s belief that the God of revelation is inherently all-powerful and plans everything for the good. Even if this world will not be improved, it will take part in the coming into Being of the Kingdom of Heaven, which is precisely the surmounting of the technological milieu via the positation of the transcendent. Thus the surmounting of Technique is as good as guaranteed by the goodness of God’s plan for the world.
Fifth, both Heidegger and Ellul believe in a desirable and attainable state of healthy correspondence to the world in the midst of the technological milieu.
For Heidegger, this is Dasein, or that state of unity between thinking and doing called reflection, wherein man reverently and attentively safeguards the appearing of the real into appearance intact and lingers with it. In thinking, this takes the form of questioning, of taking one’s own presuppositions up as that most worth of questioning, and in this way thinking on Being itself in relation to man. This provides a space in which to exist in a state of attentively receptive apprehension of the morphing presencing of the real. In doing, this takes the form of art and technology as forms of the revealing of truth, rather than instrumentality, which is to say as forms of creation which bring things into being, not for the sake of effecting some cause conceived by a subject, but as spontaneous realizations of Being’s full range of possibility – functional, beautiful, radiant, divine, etc.
For Ellul, this is Harmony. Harmony is the state of correspondence between man and his environment wherein he is in spontaneous equilibrium. Correspondence and equilibrium do not mean here static perfection or adherence to a set of natural laws. It means the condition in which man may thrive by exercising his free choice to think, create, and cooperate without constraint, so that he may choose to understand, accept, and act upon the revelation of God to the greatest extent possible.
Finally, both Heidegger and Ellul propose a course of action to take in the context of the technological milieu aimed at bringing about the above mentioned state of healthy correspondence, which is based on the necessity of an extra-technological reference point.
For Heidegger, this is reflection on the essence of technology such that what it is may come to light. Since what it is is, in a sense, an intellectual occlusion to the appearing of Being and in this an occlusion to its being an occlusion, this coming to light of its essence frees man to understand it, which means to be freed from it - or at least to cultivate the appearing of its essence through thinking, and therefore to cultivate the possibility of Being freed from it. The fulfillment of this reflection - freedom from Enframing - would be Dasein, in which state reflection is the mode of existence. In this mode of existence art and craft accomplish the revealing of being qua truth similarly to thinking. Thus, at the same time as thinking, art and craft are possible vessels of the appearance of Being, which means the appearance of Enframing as the concealing of Being, which means the opening up of space in which to be free, or to cultivate being free, from Enframing.
For Ellul, this is the antithetical resistance to the technical milieu with the positation of the transcendent. This means first of all thinking of technology from out paradigm which understands it for part of the merely finite and temporary world that it is, and placing one’s stake in the transcendent God and the Kingdom of Heaven. In doing this, Technique is demoted from the role of savior and can therefore be reoriented towards. This reorientation must entail the constant making secure of freedom in the context of the technical milieu because only in freedom can man choose to continually demote technique and accept the revelation of God. The revelation of God indicates that the world will be transformed (in all likelihood from out of the dialectical clash between Technique and the transcendent) into the Kingdom of Heaven. It also entails the other knowledge of God required to fulfill his role for Christians in bringing the Kingdom about. Thus to secure the freedom to respond to revelation is to secure the means of bringing about the Kingdom of Heaven, which is ultimately man’s only hope for delivery from the technological milieu.
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Comparison
The following section is a comparison of the three major features of each survey: metaphysical assumptions; analysis of technology; prescription for praxis. The first proves not to be significantly antagonistic. The second and third prove to be incongruous. In being so, they render each survey ultimately fundamentally different, despite strong parallels.
Metaphysics
The first significant parallel between the two paradigms is the reliance on some kind of absolute reference frame from which to evaluate technology. For Ellul this is the transcendent God. For Heidegger it is Being. But this difference proves to be mostly semantic.
Ellul insists on a strict and unbridgeable division between the realm of God and the world. Heidegger is more inclined see the two as a unity. This difference runs deep into the two traditions from out of which they are speaking and the questions to which they are responding. Ellul claims that the God of Christianity and the Word of his revelation must be understood dialectically. This means that it must be recognized as the insoluble tension between the finite and the infinite, the mortal and the eternal. This non-rational juxtaposition must be endured existentially and ultimately accepted on faith, rather than logically or historically comprehended. It entails an infinite qualitative distinction between God and man that can only ever in any sense be “bridged” by God’s inexplicable condescension into this world in a way in which he still remains infinitely God. This relation admits of no continuum of Being between the world and the transcendent. Sacred history and secular history remain (until the synthesis of the Kingdom of Heaven) separated. This idea Ellul takes to be originally and uniquely Christian, which is to say unique and original to the revelation of God to the Jews up to and including in the form Christ.
This persuasion does not directly influence Heidegger’s thinking. Heidegger is quite conversely the successor to the analytic tradition, which turns on the axis of Greek and European (especially German) thinking. This translates, from the very beginning, into a continuum between the realm of the world and the realm of the absolute. The Platonic conception of a world of corrupt shadows given form, to the extent that they are in being, by participation in eternal forms, which are that which are most in being, suggests a continuum of Being bridged by an ontological spectrum with the world on the bottom and eternal forms on top. This basic cosmic structure is the ground of philosophy through to Hegel, who wants to bring into unity the realms of Geist and world, by making them both parts of a single historical evolution. The realms of the mortal and the eternal exist as manifestations of each other; world historical events make up the self-apprehending of the Geist. Thus the secular history is deified. There is properly - meaningfully - no transcendent; everything is one. While it is true that in one sense Heidegger’s whole philosophical effort is to overcome the metaphysical systematizing of theories such as this, something of their presuppositions remains ambient for him; at risk of a misleading simplification, this presupposition might be called a form of Panentheism, which imagines the absolute and the world inhabit the same space.
It’s tempting to think that this presents an insoluble disagreement that will strongly color Heidegger’s and Ellul’s conclusions with dissimilarity. One may say: the reflecting of Dasein on the essence of technology in an attempt to assist the unconcealment of Being, within the context of an ontological continuum between man and the absolute is the “religious movement upwards” which Ellul criticizes as Being in conflict with the true nature of the absolute as absent from the world except in the form of revelation. But this is not true.
It makes no substantial difference if God “transcends” that which is in being (i.e. the ontological category that he inhabits is somehow greater than, beyond, or qualitatively different than that which the world inhabits) if Heidegger extends Being, as he does, even to that which transcends the mode of Being composing the world. The fact is that in both paradigms the absolute is something so lofty and alien that it far surpasses man’s ability to fully grasp it at any time. Even more striking than this is the fact that in both paradigms man’s relationship to the absolute is virtually identical: default occlusion with the possibility for correspondence if both a) the absolute chooses to make itself known and b) man chooses to be receptive to its making itself known.
Technology
The second main feature however - the essence of technology - admits of significant divergence. Both understand technological apparati to be the material outgrowth of a change rooted in man’s orientation towards the world. For both, this change is that the world comes to be understood in terms of, and treated as if it were, basically instrumental, which implies a non-understanding or a non-experience of the full scope of the world’s potential features, such as an aesthetic dimension, or the divine. But the depth and scope of this assertion in each thinker’s respective analysis is so different that it constitutes a qualitative distinction.
For Ellul, the supplanting of all other values with technical ones, while it has extreme consequences (such as the destruction of the natural environment or robbing man’s life of free choice and therefore purpose) always remains only superficial relative to Heidegger. Its deepest ingression is into the value system of man, when he takes on the perspective that efficiency is to be highly prized. Yet the largest part of the change entailed in human society’s conversion into technological society is attributed to the autonomous self-augmenting of the technically organized institutional milieu. In other words, in the rise of technology from simple techniques into a coercive milieu, the biggest change is that the societal systems which man inhabits undergo technical rationalization. In so doing, the reshaping of man into an amenable component of that system is required. But what Ellul has in mind here are things like his pacification, his propagandation, his accommodation to ongoing nervous stress, his normalization, his massification, etc, and most deeply and profoundly, the alteration of his values such that he comes to value efficiency above all else, even to the extent that it becomes his hope for salvation. This change is not essentially internal. It is an external, institutional, physical-environmental change, that forces man into a behavior-mold in order to function efficiently. This behavior-mold effects man most deeply in some of his beliefs, desire, and values.
Profound as this change is, it remains a less systemic problem than for Heidegger, for whom technology is but the physical-environmental manifestation of the very coming into appearance of Being before man’s apprehension as a technological phenomenon. Thus the rationalized institutional milieu, while it certainly exists in a physically coercive way almost identical to what Ellul observes (e.g. the furniture artisan vs. timber counter), is only the surface of a deeply rooted phenomenological issue. Even the coming into Being of the world qua world, i.e. as the representation of an object by a subject, is a symptom of the technological phenomena. This expresses something the depth of which does not occur to Ellul, who emphasizes foremost the interplay between society’s institutional elements as the predominate cause for technology’s growth and dominance, and ultimately takes the issue only as deep as an imbalance of man’s values (i.e. the conversion of human values into technical (instrumental) ones). For Heidegger, even “values” themselves move within the paradigm of technological thinking, inasmuch as they presuppose the striving of a subject towards the completion of some objective goal via instrumental means.
Only for Heidegger is man’s very existence truly at stake in the story of technology. (This admits of an ambiguity in need of clarification: inasmuchas Heidegger proclaims that technology is a threat to man’s ability to “ek-sist”, or to receive Being into himself from without, his analyses coordinates with Ellul’s, when Ellul proclaims that technology it is a threat to man’s ability to entertain the revelation of God, or the influx of truth into the world from the transcendent other. But this precise definition of “exist” is not what is meant here. What is meant here is more generally the makeup of man’s experience and understanding of the world.) For Ellul existence changes only non-essentially even with the advent of Technique; it never occurs to him that man can exist in a way so fundamentally different from the way he does within the technological milieu that even categories like subject/object, Aristotelian logic, and Kantian intuitions become inapplicable. The threat posed is merely to Harmony, or the correspondence between man (qua man as he is found in the technological society) and the environment. It threatens to completely close up the world into fixed rational relationships for the sake of efficiency and in so doing to completely obliterate the possibility of spontaneous, free action. But through all of this, man remains existentially the same. Heidegger’s analysis, on the other hand, is based on the idea that man can and ought to inhabit a radically different “makeup of experience and understanding” than that which he inhabits in the technological milieu. To wit, he can actually transform into one who does exist, rather than passing into oblivion. Heidegger’s vision of a man who forgets himself “in the clarity of ceaseless question away at the inexhaustibleness of That which is worthy of questioning – of That from out of which, in the moment properly its own, responding loses the character of questioning and becomes simply saying” (p.182) falls outside of the field of meaning captured by Ellul’s concept of man.
Praxes
On account of both this substantial difference in the scope of their analysis of technology and their metaphysical assumptions, Ellul’s and Heidegger’s prescribed praxes take essentially different forms. Respectively: political action and existential transformation.
For Ellul, the technological milieu is an institutional ecology, a system of economic and social entities which combine at a level many times higher than the order of the individual into a coercive force that molds him into the model technological citizen. Therefore, in response, action within the realm of economics, society, institutions, i.e. political action, is necessary. This is so, never in the sense of defeating Technique with some military counterforce or the like, for this is futile, but in the sense of anarchic unruliness, in shaking off the shackles of technical rationalization wherever it can be done in an effort to cultivate some qualitatively different future. When picturing this, it is difficult to gauge how provincial Ellul really is. These acts of unruliness almost certainly include the making of art and craft independent of technical concerns, and it is possible that he has in mind something like the spontaneous gatherings of ecstatic recreation seen circa 1968. Whatever the case, this action would have to be properly negative to be effective, and this means it would have directly address the demands of the technological milieu, have to synthesize something new from out of it. Thus, he would understand the “dropping-out” typical to the hippie movement to be escapism and resignation, and would prefer a more “direct-action” style approach, meaning the acting out of desired lifestyle particulars without respect to the prevailing system of authority. Of course, the antecedent step to this unruliness is the critical thinking needed in order to apprehend technology as a force of bondage and therefore to renounce its status as a soteric power. Once it has been desacralized, revoked of its status as the reference frame, a space is opened up for the transcendent to become the new stable ground. Consequently the capacity to negate the technical milieu is made possible.
Heidegger quite differently understands the technological milieu as the concealment of Being in its self-appearing by the normative structuring of man’s intellectual representation and instrumental manipulation. Praxis in this context takes the form of nascent attempts at manifesting Dasein. To attempt this is reflection. Reflection means: “the courage to make the truth of our own presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called into question”. (116) The presuppositions in question here are the ones essential to Western metaphysics (subject/object, Kantian Intuitions, etc). To call these into question is to open oneself up to the self-appearing of Being in the form of these presuppositions. This openness to Being is Dasein. Therefore to question after these presuppositions is to attempt to manifest Dasein. It is the hope that though such acts of reflection, Dasein will be fully restored, not in the sense of effected, but in the sense of being cultivated in its own self-appearance. Reflection is the seeking after of truth via the unconcealment of Being (aletheia), which requires the breaking down of the cloak of man’s representation. Since Dasein entails techne’s inhabiting of the realm of aletheia along with poiesis, reflection entails not only mediation but also art and craft, which likewise accomplish the unconcealing of truth.
But this making of art and craft fundamentally differs from Ellul’s conception of the same activity. The disagreement is the same here as it is in their analysis of technology. Namely, Ellul does not understand a return to the making of art and craft sans technical predominance as a fundamental revision of human existence, i.e. as a transformation of his relationship to Being. Rather, he understands it is a reorientation of values. Therefore he understands praxis as political action: the negative positation of the transcendent within the technological milieu directed towards effecting the goal of a qualitatively new synthesis. He would insist that this positing cannot be technological, else it merely augment the technological milieu. But his grasp of the technological does not run as deep as Heidegger’s, who would critique this positing-effecting as still only moving though the realm of the technological inasmuch as it is causal, and therefore instrumental.
Finally, their conceptions of reflection prove to equally as incongruous. The intellectual reflection envisioned by Ellul does not break free from the mode of instrumentality, and therefore is not akin to Heidegger’s nascent attempt at inhabiting a fundamentally different mode of consciousness called Dasein. For Ellul, thinking is still built of values, means and ends, subject and objects, even after it renounces efficiency. This, for Heidegger, is technology and violence to Being.
Conclusion to Comparison
Keeping these distinctions in mind, what can be discerned about each thinker’s contribution to the question of how to formulate a praxis for man within the technological milieu, in particular with respect to the necessity of an extra-technological referent?
Both perceive that the intrinsic nature of technology is such that it tends to become a virtually all-consuming environment, to first be implemented by man and then in turn to shape man and the world to such an extent it finally transforms from a mere implement into the very context in which implementation takes place.
Furthermore, both reason that this development is at once an extreme danger to the life and health of man and an opportunity for meaningful action. Through the rise of the technological milieu man no longer lives his life the way to which he is naturally adapted. He lives in disharmony and in a kind of ignorance and powerlessness that are progressively intensified by their own existence. Yet from out of this very situation arises the opportunity to respond and in so doing the meet the challenge allotted to man within this age to overcome - the opportunity to find meaning through the fulfillment of a calling. For Ellul this is the opportunity to pose a dialectical counterpoint to the present age and bring about the qualitative transformation of history. For Heidegger it is the opportunity to awaken from the forgetful slumber of technology’s “injurious neglect” of Being and commence apprehending pure Being in the mode of the ancients, only in a newly conscious, newly deliberate way called Dasein.
Finally, both conclude that the only way to respond to the danger of technology if it exists as an all-consuming environment, as a milieu, is through some kind of existential relocation out of said milieu, into something which can serve as a stable referent form which to contextualize technology, an action which accomplishes the iconoclasm of technology as an absolute by placing in relation to some other more primary reality in which man may thrive rather than be destroyed. For Ellul this is the act of renouncing technology as a soteric power and placing one’s stake in the transcendent God; subsequently cultivating lapses in the integrity of the technological system so that freedom may flourish; where freedom allows, remaining studiously open God’s revelation of himself into the world; and employing means in accordance with the character of God thereby gleaned to manifest the Kingdom of Heaven, which is the qualitative transformation of the world and the transcendent into a new whole; finally, throughout, understanding the presence of God in the world, the possibility of this world’s integration into the Kingdom, and the capacity of human political action to effect a synthesis with the transcendent, dialectically, which means enacting the imperative they imply in faith, without full understanding of why or how. For Heidegger, this is the act of thinking seriously about technology and the modern age, which means thinking about what it essentially is, which means calling to question one’s own most fundamental assumptions; this leads to the iconoclasm of one’s subjective representations as that which is true and a renewed understanding that truth occurs when man delivers the happening of Being into his purview unobscured by normative structuring. The technological milieu – understood as man’s enclosure into his reified subjectivity and the corresponding objectification of the world – is revoked of its status as the absolute. The role of the absolute is restored back into the Being, which is the dimension of truth, and man is restored to his role as that being which receives the revelation of truth from Being into himself. To reiterate, this action is grounded in a referent external to technology inasmuch as it is grounded in a kind of thinking (reflection) which is non-metaphysical and therefore non-technological.
