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October 24, 2006
Holger Schmid, in his paper "Heidegger: Logos and the Essence of Technology," given at the Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of The North American Heidegger Society, questions the interpretation of Heidegger as a romantic. We have to rely on Michael Kelly's interpretation of the paper. Kelly says that:
Rather than a form of romanticism, Schmid argues that Heidegger's fascination with the Greeks, particularly Aristotle and Heraclitus, results from his desire to uncover the relation between modern technology and the birth of metaphysics. In his essay on Heraclitus' fragment B 50, Heidegger talks of the forme''s notion of logos as a 'flashing' up of the primordial unthought essence of language, a laying-out or laying-before (lege), which constituted a unity of world and language, a unity upon which language was considered parasitic. Schmid maintains that with the extinction of Heraclitus' 'flash,' completed in Aristotle's De interpretatione where speech, semainein, first appears as knowing, the former's logos comes to take on the meaning of language understood as a tool of ordered, calculative reason. The apophantic dimension of the original encounter with being now is lost, and the course of the essence of modern technology, which, of course, is nothing technical, now is set (PHC 109-111). Schmid terms this new phase of logos under Aristotle the unpoetic, and clearly it imposes the limit of excluding the primordial relation between world (or being) and language, for it ensnares entities within its 'ordered' propositions. Hence, the essence of modern technology consists in the world showing itself in concealment only...
Do we need to return to Heraclitus to grasp the direct connection between the height of the technological age and the beginning of metaphysics through thinking, then rethinking Heraclitus' logos, the original connection of world and language? Why cannot we do the rethinking from the present technological domination from within technoscience?
Since few of us have the skills or the education to rethink a Heraclitean fragment in ancient Greek, why cannot we situate a critical philosophy in modernity's time-consciousness so that it understands itself as fully situated in its time with an ever-shifting and open-ended horizon of possibilities, to which it responds by disclosing alternative ways of thinking and acting. Isn't an alternative way of thinking within the technological enframing of technoscience a caring for the survival of the ecosystems that support human live? One that avoids the ecotopian project of 'returning to nature' ----fleeing the city or embracing wilderness.
Freya Mathews has a passage in her Reinhabiting Reality, which resonates strongly with the critique of technological 'enframing' (as distinct from poietic techne) developed by Martin Heidegger. She states that:
Modern society does not engage with world but encroaches upon it. It does not tend and cherish the ground of being, bringing forth in new poetic forms that which is already potentiality within it, but blasts and quarries the ground, imposing its own alien designs upon it. (RR, 23)
The result, as Mathews poignantly illustrates with regard to the industrial makeover of her own childhood home on the erstwhile urban-rural fringe of Melbourne, is a world rendered into blocks, devoid of the complex contouring and mysterious meanderings of natural becoming, utterly empty of meaning and stripped of grace.
She suggests that an alternative way of thinking and acting of conserving and cherishing the ecosystems that support human life: healing those things and places that are given to us here and now, such that they might become more conducive to the flourishing of more-than-human life.
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