Heidegger at his desk sans typewriter
I mentioned in a note to a recent post that Heidegger was no fan of the typewriter; that he believed it tore writing away from the domain of the hand, which, along with the word from which it sprang, is the essential distinction of Dasein.
It is neither coincidental nor accidental, says Heidegger, that modern man - enframed as he is by technology - should sit before a keyboard and write with a machine (first the typewriter, then the computer). Now the word is no longer able to come and go by means of the writing hand; it's processed and passed along by mechanical forces, becoming merely an item of information and communication. This not only endangers thinking, it threatens the destruction of the world.
Today, says Heidegger, the handwritten text is not only regarded as antiquated, it is undesirable; something which, full of individual character, disturbs the homogeniety of the professional and commercial world and disrupts the ability of the reader to read quickly with the eye alone. The person who still writes by hand today is seen as either a loser, a madman, or a rebel; carrying a pen is almost as suspect as carrying a concealed weapon.
When writing was withdrawn from the origin of its essence, concludes Heidegger, and transferred to the machine, "a transformation occurred in the relation of Being to man" - and this wasn't a change for the better, no matter what advantages or conveniences were gained.
Should we, therefore, abandon the typewriter and the computer and the mobile phone with which we text and tweet and begin again to write by hand? Or is it not already too late; has technology not become so entrenched in our history and evolution - so much part of ourselves - that it is now of little or no importance that a few eccentrics choose to renounce and avoid it?
See: Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 80-81 and 85-86. Click here to read the relevant sections online.
To read part two of this post on Derrida, click here.
To read part three of this post on Nietzsche, click here.
Two things. I worked at a company once helping to sort through job applications. The boss gave interviews to anyone who had submitted a handwritten opening letter as she saw this as evidence if extra effort. Second, the machine has taken us even further away now as emoticons come to replace words. Although this is easy to ridicule on many levels, they can sometimes express more than a word. Is this dasein or does it in fact bring us closer to the original emotion. Everything is a step away from the original thought, even the written word, hence why some Greek philosophers refused to write anything down. But I do agree about information becoming packaged and processed and I witness this being increased in education through 'flipped learning' and other systems that invariably atomise classes. By the way, the predictive text in this comment box is so annoying, constantly suggesting irrelevant words, I give up. This takes dasein to another level...
ReplyDeleteA contemporary debate in education concerns whether children should even be taught handwriting any longer, rather than 'keyboard skills' - even though, as traditionalists argue, the art of handwriting, apart from its self-evident intrinsic value, also helps with things like spelling.
ReplyDeleteRe the phallic/explosive potential of poets and pens, Seamus Heaney's well-known poem, 'Digging' ('Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun') also comes to mind here.
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