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July 15, 2004
Here is a quote that summarizes a good criticism of Heidegger. It is by Andrew Feenberg. He first says what is right about Heidegger:
"No doubt Heidegger is right to claim that modern technology is immensely more destructive than any other. And it is true that technical means are not neutral, that their substantive content affects society independent of the goals they serve. Thus his basic claim that we are caught in the grip of our own techniques is all too believable. Increasingly, we lose sight of what is sacrificed in the mobilization of human beings and resources for goals that remain ultimately obscure. If there is no sense of the scandalous cost of modernization, this is because the transition from tradition to modernity is judged to be a progress by a standard of efficiency intrinsic to modernity and alien to tradition. The substantive theory of technology attempts to make us aware of this. The issue is not that machines are evil nor that they have taken over....So far so good."
So what is the problem? Andrew refers to the passage in the previous post. He says:
"But Heidegger situates his argument at such a high level of abstraction he literally cannot discriminate between penicillin and atom bombs, agricultural techniques and the Holocaust. All are merely different expressions of the identical enframing, which we are called to escape through the recovery of a deeper relation to being. Surely this lack of discrimination indicates problems in his approach."
Feenberg makes two criticisms. He says that while Heidegger represents modern technology as a particular stage in a quasi-historical development, that development is contingent on a mysterious revealing of being rather than on human action. Furthermore, he seems to allow no room for a future evolution of modern technology which remains fixed in its eternal essence whatever happens next in human history. This essentializing tendency cancels the historical dimension of Heidegger's theory.
These criticisms are misplaced. I illustrated Heidegger's account in terms of the development of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electricity Scheme in the late 20th century. On this reading the account is contingent on human action not the mysterious revealing of being. What is revealed is the technological mode of being in modernity. This ontological condition requires a transformation of our understanding of Being-- to develop a new ontology
Secondly, we do not an eternal essence here. What we have is an account of the metaphysics of technology. This need not cancel the historical dimension as Heidegger is giving an account of technology in the mid-twentieth century. It is has changed in the 21st century with genetic engineering and the biosciences shift to human cloning.
Update
That is very cryptic. Too much so. A far better, and more thorough critical account is offered here. It supports my argument that Feenberg's claim, that Heideggers ontologizing approach to the history of technology entirely cancels the historical dimension of his theory, is not plausible.
Though Heidegger understands technology ontologically he also understands ontology historically. Heidegger's account of the history of Being divides the history of our ontological self-understanding into a series of unified epochs of intelligibility. What marks late modernity is that there is no subject left to do the controlling of technology and resources. The subject is sucked-up into the standing reserve.
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