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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Heidegger & Technology#2 « Previous | |Next »
July 14, 2004

There is a famous paragraph in Heidegger's essay, The Question Concerning Technology, that gets people's back up. It says:


"Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and death camps, the same thing as the blockades and reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs."

The political force of the historical associations still resonates. How can human beings and pigs be the same? This is Heidegger's Nazism surfacing, say those who now live in the world of human cloning by continue to see technology merely an instrument of human control, as a means to an end. Heidegger , in contrast is thinking of (the essence of ) technology as an autonomous organizing activity within which humans themselves are organized; rather than as an object standing objectively and passively ready for our direction and control.


Babette Babich says in response to this kind of objection:


"Technology, according to its instrumental, humanist ideal, is neutral. Thus nuclear energy can destroy or else it can yield life. Recoiling from Heidegger's comparisons, deploring his associations as outrageous, condemning his lack of taste, his crassness, we stubbornly refuse to connect agriculture, however modernized and bio-technized (which it has been for quite some time, especially and rather dramatically in the USA: land of no-holds-barred capital opportunism), with the enduringly horrible phenomena of gas chambers and death camps. We will not see anything 'the same' in the 'manufacture of corpses' and the meat processing industry, which last includes and which was in fact the motor of the experimental procedure of cloning as an advantage or progressive improvement over even such a mechanical means of reproduction as artificial insemination."

Yet modern technoscience (modern technology as applied physical science) does treat human beings as a standing reserve can and so comes to include human beings as a resource, to be managed--just like water is treated by as a resource by agribusiness.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:02 PM | | Comments (0)
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