"What is dangerous", writes Heidegger, "is not technology. ... The essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger." Developing this crucial point, he writes:
"The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in his essence. The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth."
In other words, the essence of technology - something that exists long before the modern machine age - is a way of revealing so monolithically powerful and expansionist that it threatens to overwhelm man and prevent him from discovering any other possible becoming. Heidegger calls this revealing Ge-stell, a term commonly translated into English as ‘enframing’. He argues that this revealing that rules with technology doesn’t allow anything to come forth in its own right. Rather, it acts as a ‘challenging’ or ‘provocation’ [Herausfordern] “which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such”.
Thus, for example, a tract of land “is challenged in the hauling out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district”. But, more than this, it also reduces man to the status of ‘human resource’ or ‘standing reserve’ [Bestand] in service to technological purposes.
Interestingly, Lawrence also illustrates his thinking on the question concerning technology with reference to the coal mining industry. In Women in Love, for example, Gerald Crich acknowledges his destiny as someone caught up in an ideal-material struggle “with the earth and the coal it enclosed ... to turn upon the inanimate matter of the underground, and reduce it to his will”.
Prior to this, in The Rainbow, we encountered Tom Brangwen, another coal boss of the view that men belong entirely to their jobs and that outside of the great social-industrial machine of work man had become “a meaningless lump – a standing machine”.
Ursula, fundamentally hostile to her uncle's thinking and keen to imagine a different human future, nevertheless understands the horrible fascination of lives subjected to technology and the power of money; aware that there is a perverse satisfaction to be gained from such subjection. Even, it is suggested, via machinic servitude man achieves his consummation and immortality, Lawrence arguing not that technology makes us less human, but, on the contrary super-human. Thus it is that Gerald Crich is transformed into a modern Prometheus and fulfils the great promise of science; namely, that man too can attain infinite power (or, perhaps more accurately, infinite knowledge, which, for modern man, is one and the same thing).
The question becomes: what will man do with this unlimited power-knowledge? Will he use it to transform himself and his world, or destroy himself and the natural environment? On the level of utility and abstraction we have made ourselves into lords of production, but we have also arrived at the very edge of an abyss: “Present-day man is of the lowest rank", writes Blanchot, "but his power is that of a being who is already beyond man: how would this contradiction not harbour the greatest danger?”
It is for this reason that Nietzsche predicts that modern nihilism will result in great wars and violent upheaval on an unprecedented scale. However, oblivious or indifferent as men like Gerald Crich are to such dangers, they press on in their quest to see life entirely dominated by mind and a will that is negative in direction and composed of predominantly reactive forces seeking the ego’s triumph over all that lies external to it. By bringing everything into the realm of knowledge and reducing the world to information, Gerald is able to master and manipulate existence, determining its truth via reference to his own learning. Thus, in this manner, as George Steiner correctly notes, the self becomes “the hub of reality and relates to the world outside itself in an exploratory, necessarily exploitative way”.
But no matter how much Gerald knows, still he feels strangely empty; “as if the very middle of him were a vacuum”. And as this feeling becomes increasingly acute, his voraciousness grows: “And to stop up this hollowness, he drags all things into himself”. Such rampant egoism and greed is condemned repeatedly in the writings of both Nietzsche and Lawrence and yet it remains almost definitional of modern man who, it seems, will not rest content until he has “killed the mysteries and devoured the secrets”.
Clearly, if a change is to be made to a new mode of living then modern man must find someway to overcome his conceit and what Keith Ansell-Pearson describes as his “paranoid and phobic anthropocentrism”. To do so will not be easy and will involve a self-overcoming and a confrontation with our deep-rooted idealism. And yet, to return to Heidegger’s text concerning the question of technology, we have already seen how hope lies precisely where and when we might least expect it; the hope of a radically different revealing to the one that presently holds sway.
Heidegger names this with the Greek term poiēsis and indicates by this a revealing that brings forth without provocation, having, as it does, an entirely different relation to matter. It is a revealing that may enable us to confront the essential unfolding of technology and survive our prolonged flirtation with nihilism.
However, to reiterate, it is the supreme danger of the above unfolding and flirtation which harbours the possible rise of the saving power. Thus instead of simply gaping at the technological as that in which we see our own diabolical genius reflected, we must attempt to glimpse that which is ambiguous and other contained in the essence of technology.
Of course, to simply catch sight of this does not mean we are thereby ‘saved’ - but we are “thereupon summoned to hope in the growing light of the saving power” and we are reminded that there was once a time and a place (i.e. ancient Greece) when poiēsis was also understood as belonging to technē and the fine arts, undifferentiated from any other technical ability, “soared to the supreme height of the revealing granted them”.
For Heidegger, as for Nietzsche, it was the arts that uniquely allowed the Greeks to enter into a direct relationship with the world of being and not merely a world of knowledge and representation; the arts which allowed them to dwell poetically on the earth and not merely live prosaically.
Can they do so again, now, for us? Heidegger is uncertain.
But, despite his pessimism, he seems to remain hopeful that one day the arts may once again be granted this highest possibility. Providing, that is, that there are still profound thinkers who remain astounded by and before this other possibility and who, via their questioning, may be able to incite a new becoming.
And so there remains a vital task for philosophy. For whilst the latter cannot itself provide the new, it can prepare the conditions under which the new might emerge. And whilst philosophy is neither able to predict or guarantee the future, still it allows for the possibility “that the world civilization that is just now beginning might one day overcome its technological-scientific-industrial character as the sole criterion of man’s world sojourn”.
But, despite his pessimism, he seems to remain hopeful that one day the arts may once again be granted this highest possibility. Providing, that is, that there are still profound thinkers who remain astounded by and before this other possibility and who, via their questioning, may be able to incite a new becoming.
And so there remains a vital task for philosophy. For whilst the latter cannot itself provide the new, it can prepare the conditions under which the new might emerge. And whilst philosophy is neither able to predict or guarantee the future, still it allows for the possibility “that the world civilization that is just now beginning might one day overcome its technological-scientific-industrial character as the sole criterion of man’s world sojourn”.
Bibliography
Keith Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life, (Routledge, 1997).
Maurice Blanchot, 'The Limits of Experience: Nihilism', essay in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison, (The MIT Press, 1992).
Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1994).
Martin Heidegger, 'The End of Philosophy and the Task for Thinking', essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994).
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', essay in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
George Steiner, Heidegger, (Fontana Press, 1989).
