Understanding Heidegger on technology (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Understanding Heidegger on technology (2014)

thenewatlantis.com

54 pointspseudolus35 comments

Very interesting to see this on HN - Heidegger's theory of technology was ground-breaking then and has only become more timely.

If anybody has questions about this article, Mark Blitz was my advisor in grad school and I wrote an MA thesis applying Heidegger's theory to modern AI research. Happy to clarify any of the issues raised here since, even with Blitz's explanation, Heidegger can be a tough nut to crack.

Would love a short explanation/link to your MA thesis, that seems very interesting!

Hubert Dreyfus worked on Heideggerean critiques of AI while at MIT rubbing shoulders with Marvin Minsky and the like.

There’s a good documentary called “Being in the world”; last time I checked it had been posted on YouTube.

For sure! Of course, the official website has it paywalled, so here's a Google Docs link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WL1F-sEazLeo8uFjNpPyFLak...

The Heidegger stuff is in the fourth section, 'Artificial Intelligence In Technological Society', but a rough summary: Heidegger argues that the essence of technology involves a command to human beings to order the world as standing-reserves of resources. Our specific place in this schema is as the being who can do the work of ordering, of revealing the world as orderable standing-reserve and then actually putting it into a particular order (e.g. of a supply chain). However, modern AI, with its emphasis on pattern-recognition, search, optimizing for a goal, etc., is also working towards that function. This has two implications. First, it suggests why AI research heads in this direction, because it's the way human intelligence manifests in the technological framework (and, thus, suggests that AI research could potentially benefit from trying to replicate other aspects of the human mind). Secondly, it means that modern AI might affect a Heideggerian theory of technology by making it possible for humans to delegate the work of ordering to AI, which wouldn't have appeared a possibility in Heidegger's day. If we can in fact hand off the task of ordering to AI, how should we do that and what effects might it have on human culture? While it appears a loss of agency, it may even have a liberating effect in the same way other technologies have liberated us from previous forms of labour.

But Heidegger is against seeing the world merely as a standing-reserve of resources.

That's a utilitarian, reductionist, objectifying view that's the antithesis of the view that Heidegger advocates.

Heidegger is against it, yes, but he's also clear that we're stuck within technology as a historical destining of Being. We can't just escape technology by thinking differently about it, but must wait heedfully for the historical development of Being (as he lays out in The Turning, just after QCT). In fact, the fulfilment of technology's own reductionism is a necessary step, as only the full concealment of Being in technology allows us to recognize that oblivion for what it is and thus to overcome it. As such, I think it's a reasonable argument to make that AI taking away the work of ordering for humans may help us escape the incomplete agency of ordering the standing-reserve so that we're no longer forced to merely see the world as standing-reserve.

By the way, I saw your comment about Heidegger and Asian religious philosophy below - are you familiar with the Kyoto school? I've signed up for the Halkyon Guild's upcoming course on Nishitani Keiji, and am vaguely hoping his theory of the self-overcoming of nihilism can be brought to bear on the questions Heidegger raises about technology.

I have read briefly about the Kyoto school, but haven't delved deeply in to it yet.

In Heidegger I hear echoes of Buddhism, the Tao Te Ching, and Hinduism.

Recently I came across "The Book of Tea"[1], which Tomonobu Imamichi claimed Heidegger plagiarized. I've only just started reading it, and so far it seems nothing like Heidegger, but maybe it gets more interesting later.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_book_of_tea

I disagree. You can separate the author's observations (namely, the identified pattern of revealing standing reserve) from the author's intentions (standing reserve = bad).

However, one can easily conceive of an AI that "obsoletes" humanity from the supply chain, so-to-speak, which would theoretically allow humans unbridled opportunity to "be", as Heidegger envisions it. Once human labor is obsolete, what will become of humanity?

Will play also be obsolete? Because work can be play, and play can be work.

Work often has a negative connotation in today's world, but it can also be positive, fun, and rewarding.

The economic whip (ie. the incentive of working to survive) might become obsolete, but that doesn't mean that people will stop wanting to work for fun, fulfillment, or to make original contributions.

It's unlikely many people would willingly choose to be garbagemen and toilet cleaners, and we'll probably all breathe a sigh of relief when those jobs are finally automated, but will we stop wanting to make art or music when AI can make it "just as good"?

Even in more practical fields than art or music, it's more likely that we'll see AI-human collaborations rather than AI doing everything by itself without human input.

What is human is constantly in flux anyway. Even if we consider just technology's effect on the human, there are humans now with all sorts of prosthesis that make them "more than human" in some ways, and this trend itself will likely continue, with things like more and more advanced neural interfaces, memory upgrades, sensory enhancement, etc.

The future of humanity will likely be as some sort of cyborg.

I think back to Calhoun's rat utopia experiments and wonder if humans could ever be happy in a post-work society.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-...

While the predictions made by the study regarding human behavior have since been called into question (and because a human version of these experiments would be horribly unethical), it does bear to think about what the world would look like if all work was performed by automated means free of human interaction.

On one hand, there are many jobs that would be seldom missed by most people. On the other, people can find fullfillment in just about anything.

I think the distinction lies in the fact that "play" activities are done for their own sake. This is an essential part of the experience of "being" (IMO) as it entails performing activities simply because one enjoys them.

Compare this to "work" in the sense of a problem that needs to be solved with the application of human resources as standing-reserve.

I agree that the concept of "humanity" is constantly evolving. I think the ways in which society will change in order to reflect this evolution in humanity are super interesting to explore.

I don't remember the details but I recall Philosophize This! having an accessible series on Heidegger (with one episode [1] specifically discussing his views on technology).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_BxMwRywEk

> “In Heidegger’s later work, he argues that technology in the modern metaphysical tradition tends to “provoke,” “force out,” and “challenge forth” the world, such that the primary intention is to “force” the world to yield energy. Heidegger calls this “the essence of technology,” and it is this essence, he says, that constitutes the “culmination of modern metaphysics.” The philosopher Bruce Foltz describes how this perceptual rupture plays out in Heidegger’s work: “[T]o be’ is ‘to be a resource,’ that is to be ‘in stock,’ in supply, ready for delivery.” To say that modern metaphysics culminates in technology is to say that there are tight and dense entanglements between the modern narrative of separation and technology. The perfectly-straight concrete road cut through a boreal forest is a thought structure “concretely” articulated, and in turn it seeds the imagination with opportunities of how to encounter (or use) that forest in ways unthinkable - and thus unreal - without the road. Likewise, a dam built into a salmon river is abstract thought physically articulated; in turn, the presence of the physical structure gathers the imagination around particularly mechanistic, utilitarian opportunities for encountering the river. Narrative and technology reinforce one another in powerful feedback loops, each contributing their share to revealing the world in a particular manner.”

— Being Salmon, Being Human: Encountering the Wild in Us, and Us in the Wild, by Martin Lee Mueller

Despite the actual historical research not being so hot or voluminous, I find Bataille's theory of General Economy a much more robust and more tangible way of describing the conditions of modernity while also indicating a specific response/solution, namely, that we have to re-learn to sacrifice, not accumulate, excess, like our ancestors did for most of human existence.

We don't build ridiculously grand and inefficient structures like Pyramids and Cathedrals or practice ritual sacrifice because we no longer entertain the notion that human economy necessarily involves realms that require the destruction of excess production (and no, the destruction of excess dairy or agricultural production in the name of market controls on prices is not that).

All the way up to early modernity humans unanimously understood economy like this to some extent, even if Abrahamic religions changed the flow around so that economy of surplus came to revolve around the excess of desire-production in humans specifically rather involving the entire realm of goods (Judaism still understood the older arrangement to a certain extent: we know that Cain and Abel burned produce to God, or that Jacob was on the cusp of sacrificing his only son to God; in Christianity, as Nietzsche noted, the debtor, God, pays himself back with his own flesh, and Christian practice proper is this immolation of the 'excess of the flesh', human desire, to our own more godly selves, our souls).

What is Bataille's seminal work on the theory of general economy? The Accursed Share? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accursed_Share

Yes, those texts

Love to see Bataille and Heidegger on hn :)

The concept of the accursed share seems pretty applicable to space races of the present. Maybe it's a sign the flux of capital is saturating?

I don't want to be too pedantic here ;) , but it was Abraham who was on the cusp of sacrificing his only son to God. But you were close; Jacob was his grand-son.

And I'm not sure what Nietzsche said exactly about it but God is considered to be the creditor (not debtor), who pays for us the humans (indebted by our sins), to himself, with the flesh of his only son.

Yeah wrote all those out off the top of my head, a draft phase woulda been useful indeed, these corrections are all true

Abraham was asked to sacrifice his son, Isaac, I think. (Ibrahim and Ismail in Islam?)

"In his landmark book Being and Time (1927), Heidegger made the bold claim that Western thought from Plato onward had forgotten or ignored the fundamental question of what it means for something to be -- to be present for us prior to any philosophical or scientific analysis."

No. "what it means for something to be" is, for Heidegger, merely "ontic being", which he was not interested in. Instead, Hedigger was interesested in "ontological being", or "the being of Being".

Now, what "the being of Being" is, is itself the subject of a multi-hundred page unfinished book of what is widely considered to be some of the most difficult writing in all of philosophy.

Because Heidegger's writing is so difficult and so open to interpretation (and re-interpretation), many philosophers disagree strongly about what he actually meant.

For example, what "Being" itself is, for Heidegger, is one of the biggest points of contention. The entire field of Christian Existentialism[1] crystalized around interpreting Heidegger's "Being" as God. But many other philosophers don't interpret it theistically at all.

His other essays outside of Being and Time are equally difficult to understand and open to interpretation. This includes "The Question Concerning Technology", and I'd caution strongly against taking any one summary or interpretation of it as gospel or the final word on the subject.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_existentialism

>Because Heidegger's writing is so difficult and so open to interpretation (and re-interpretation), many philosophers disagree strongly about what he actually meant.

There’s a bit of a joke out there about Heidegger’s difficulty. “Heidegger is impossible to translate - especially into German”

It intuitively seems to me like "what it means for x" is not clearly one or the other, ontic or ontological. At a kind of indirect approach, the ambiguity whether we are actually investigating something ontically or ontologically is kind of a problem for the ontic approach... are we picking out Natural Kinds, or are they just the categories with the greatest utility and/or intelligibility to us?

Anyways, MH says 'so if we should reserve that term "ontology" for that theoretical inquiry which is explicitly devoted to the meaning of entities' (page 12 of the German edition). Wouldn't the meaning of being, as one of those theoretical entities, be an ontological question? Ontic being, on the other hand, would be ontic man, or the subject of the sciences? It could also be presence in the Derridean sense, but that is not really meaningful in the ontic register, since negation necessitates a Being...

I am not really a Heidegger guy so I would love some insight here.

So what is the value of such work, which is so open to interpretation that 100 years later you will find diametrically opposed takes on its meaning?

Does it not just devolve into a Rubik's Cube for literary nerds?

I ask seriously. I was deeply enchanted with critical / Continental philosophy for a decade, but I don't think I came out of it with any unique insights. "Nothing can be proven to be objectively true" is an insight one can find many other places. Conjectures about what the driving forces of society are a dime a dozen, but any useful means of verifying and comparing them seems far out of our reach.

So, why all this study of the Heideggers, the Lacans, the Derridas. What does it really contribute to humanity?

"why all this study of the Heideggers, the Lacans, the Derridas"

I can't speak for anyone else, but my interest in Heidegger dovetails with my interest in Asian and Indian religion and philosophy, and with my interest in the illusory nature of the world and what lies behind the world of appearances.

I'm not interested in Lacan or Derrida, so will leave them for others.

"What does it really contribute to humanity?"

Is having one's eye's opened or seeking ways to open one's eyes useful?

Does something have to "contribute to humanity" in order to be of value?

What did the Mona Lisa or other great works of art contribute to humanity? Should Beethoven never have written a note of music because none of it is useful? Or does Beethoven's music's use in parades finally justify its creation?

Can philosophy, like art and music, somehow connect us or open us up to the core of humanity or the world? Is that useful? Does it have to be?

>So what is the value of such work, which is so open to interpretation that 100 years later you will find diametrically opposed takes on its meaning?

Different takes to make sense of complex phenomena happen in many fields. It's not a co-incidence that it is especially as such in the realm of our culture where challenging existing interpretations is common place.

>Conjectures about what the driving forces of society are a dime a dozen, but any useful means of verifying and comparing them seems far out of our reach.

Indeed it is difficult, but I would highly suggest not being too empirically minded about abstract concepts like these. What conceptual frameworks and methods are useful in one field (e.g. quantification and measurements in the sciences) do not carry over to another necessarily. Human societal structures and phenomena are complex and would be more difficult to make sense of were it not for useful works like these.

>So, why all this study of the Heideggers, the Lacans, the Derridas. What does it really contribute to humanity?

One answer is tradition given these are thinkers part of significant and established schools of thought, and another is that there simply are contemporary scholars that find value in furthering and fleshing out the (usually dense) systems of thought and frameworks. Modern psychology for example has come about from philosophical and psychoanalysis frameworks, some of which are still explored and furthered alongside empirical investigations.

I might be mistaken, but it feels as if your post fails to wrap itself around the idea that not all human knowledge need not be something that contributes to practical or immediate assistance to humans or their productivity. And that instead, sometimes, it can be simply related towards the pursuit and sake of knowledge itself.

>And that instead, sometimes, it can be simply related towards the pursuit and sake of knowledge itself.

But is what we get from Heidegger "knowledge"? Or is it the intricate and imprecise fantastical construction of one (perhaps brilliant) mind? Does it amount to anything more knowledge-producing than a Jackson Pollack painting?

I meant my response generally since you listed some thinkers I'm more familiar with.

For Heidegger, perhaps you would find this overview (and related videos) interesting for some context: https://youtu.be/eDAyhsZ-Gs4

My take on it is as follows: Most of the thoughts we have day in and day out, even when tackling hard, existential or universal topics are constrained by the abstract aystems they are thought in. Think how language affects the way a person thinks. Of course you can also think mathematically, geometrically, in terms of pictures, colors, computer programes, small mechanical contraptions and so on.

What philosophers like Heidegger tried to do (the reason for the often hard to read language) is to go to places, think thoughts and create systems of reflection that are hard to express with language alone.

On top of that there have been certain philosophical movements who thought that thinking itself is more valuable than froming any coherent theory of the world into which all is forced to fit.

So in short: they tried to expand on thinking all while jumping through various hoops and trying to avoid various pitfalls.

With regards to Lacan, Heidegger, and Derrida— each in their own way, they hold off philosophical decision. Lacan stylistically (he sucks, but is pretty structural and emphatic about his registers, sexual distinctions, mirror stage, etc) and Heidegger and Lacan through their interrelated development of the problematic of closure and archi-writing, right? But Heidegger doesn't consign himself to closure, he very emphatically sees a way out in death, the condition of possibility for the authenticity of being. Derrida does not take a way out, but also does not write or reason arbitrarily, his process rests on the simultaneous articulation of a straightforward and historically oriented commentary, and a counterpoint exposed through the repetition of the language of the commentary back at itself until underlying confusions are revealed. This is the basic knowledge I assume you have after 10 years. If you are not familiar, I recommend Simon Critchley's 'Black Socrates', and 'The Ethics of Deconstruction' in addition to the Seminars, Being and Time, and Violence and Metaphysics obviously.

The way it reckons with your question, is that these points of tension, even when they are not fully resolved, allow us to come to a place of improved understanding about the systematic and historical functionality of the language and culture that produced them. This is really nothing new: we do not need to come to the same conclusion about any other subject, anthropological, historical, even hard-scientific, to deploy our provisional understanding. A concrete example of this is talking about moral reasoning- considering similarly non-philosophical work by Levinas, I have come to the conclusion that many of the ethical dilemmas I struggle with in my health care work are not neatly decidable, and are frequently more a question of how much of myself am I willing to sacrifice for my clients... or how much I can hold back for myself in good conscience, rather than a logically and arithmetically guaranteed minimum or maximum fair ratio. This is why deconstruction + pragmatism is such an interesting subject for people like Brandom and Rorty, I imagine.

“ Experiencing technology as a kind — but only one kind — of revealing, and seeing man’s essential place as one that is open to different kinds of revealing frees us from “the stultified compulsion to push on blindly with technology or, what comes to the same, to rebel helplessly against it and curse it as the work of the devil.” Indeed, Heidegger says at the end of the lecture, our examining or questioning of the essence of technology and other kinds of revealing is “the piety of thought.” By this questioning we may be saved from technology’s rule.”

The article assumes a strange contorted definition of ‘technology’ to try to jam a certain point in.

By most definitions, human language would be considered as part of ‘technology’, certainly the written word would be considered so by nearly all. From that understanding, to question at all requires ‘technology’ thus making the final sentence absurd.

Common sense definitions are useless in philosophy.

Not an expert, but Heidegger on technology (1950s) seems very similar to Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment from 1944. Funny given their differences.

He and Husserl has similar "differences" from my memory. The same for Arendt, I think.

> Whatever the full and subtle meaning of “in essence the same” is, Heidegger fails to address the difference in ethical weight between the two phenomena he compares, or to show a path for just political choice.

The first half of the article has some neat summaries of Heidegger’s thought and it’s reception, but I’m alarmed about Blitz’s sudden jump into the ethical and political at this point. I know he’s a political philosopher, but these texts, especially QCT, are about where and how it us possible to experience the world as itself any more. You can’t defer to ethics to adjudicate a crisis of perception. A good reader of the essay would need, at this point, to go back and understand what is meant by the phrase “prepare a free relationship” with technology.

It’s just… odd. This turn by Blitz. He knows grouping these things is a provocation. He knows the provocation is to help us try to grasp the extent to which the fate of things is determined by the “enframing” in which they (may) appear. Then he just appeals to a normie’s average sense of the ethical difference between agriculture and genocide?

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