Politics and Heidegger's Concept of Thinking in Contemporary Art

Louise Carrie Wales

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000439977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

Responding to Heidegger's stark warnings concerning the essence of technology, this book demonstrates art's capacity to emancipate the life-world from globalized technological enframing.

Louise Carrie Wales presents the work of five contemporary artists – Martha Rosler, Christian Boltanski, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and collaborators Noorafshan Mirza and Brad Butler – who challenge our thinking and compel a dramatic re-positioning of social norms and hidden beliefs. The through-line is rooted in Heidegger's question posed at the conclusion of his technology essay as understood through artworks that provides a counter to enframing while using increasingly sophisticated technological methods. The themes are political in nature and continue to have profound resonance in today's geopolitical climate.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, aesthetics, philosophy, and visual culture.

1
Heidegger’s Articulation of Care in “The Question Concerning Technology”

DOI: 10.4324/9781003173922-2

In what follows we shall be questioning concerning technology. Questioning builds a way. We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the way, and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics. The way is one of thinking. All ways of thinking, more or less perceptibly, lead through language in a manner that is extraordinary. We shall be questioning concerning technology, and in so doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology. When we can respond to this essence, we shall be able to experience the technological within its own bounds.

–Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”

1.1 Introduction

Heidegger opens his essay titled “The Question Concerning Technology” with an important statement: “In what follows we shall be questioning… questioning builds a way” and this way is “one of thinking” (Krell 311, emphasis mine). From this position, he sets forth the aim of his enterprise: to assure our “free relationship” to the essence of technology, thereby returning us to an open region of truth needed for our very survival. It is important to recognize in his careful choice of words a distinct focus, one which endeavors to guide us back to our authentic selves as demanded by Dasein. For Heidegger, our being-in-the-world allows Dasein to live out its ongoing interrogation of the meaning of Being. Despite Heidegger’s expressed resistance to any fixed claims or moral underpinnings, these introductory reflections suggest a deeply felt concern for the preservation of that which he believes will allow us to know truth in any meaningful way. From a place of questioning, through a piety of thought, Heidegger seeks to ensure our ultimate freedom by means of its capacity for opening us to truth – a truth that is challenged by the societal forces that enframe us, robbing us of our innate capacities. Furthermore, the particular freedom Heidegger suggests demands us to remain open, in a disposition he calls Gelassenheit. It is a challenge that proposes to eradicate the underlying problems born in our disposition toward merging with others or, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s parlance, adhering to the herd, for to practice freedom in the relationship to truth consists in thinking and questioning, particularly as a matter of rivaling enframing through an encounter with the creativity of poēisis.

These are certainly lofty goals, asserted at the beginning of a still profoundly prescient essay. His intentions establish the measure of what is to come for us as his readers. Questioning and thinking are fundamental to Dasein, which, for Heidegger, is defined by our interrogation of our very relationship to being – an interrogation we implicitly already live, yet one needing to be practiced more overtly. He concerns himself with its existential structures, or otherwise stated, the structures of our “hermeneutic” (as contrasted with “objectifying”) relationship to the immanent plane of life, including its projects, objects, and completeness. In short, if we question and think, remaining in the open region contemplative Gelassenheit, we are nurturing that which is essential to us and forges a space for freedom.

This chapter offers an examination of Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology” that focuses on how the essay is built firmly upon an ethical foundation, of which the explicit imperative is a call to return home to our authentic selves lest we remain imprisoned by our relationship to technology. His ethics is both understood and reflected in our existence as an ongoing process delimited only by our finitude. It must be made amply clear that Heidegger is not implicating technology per se, as we understand the term today. Rather, his writing aims to expose the illusion of control we believe ourselves to have vis à vis our relationship to the broader concrete lived experience. Miguel de Beistegui, in his book The New Heidegger, explains, “With the technological world view, man moves further and further away from his own essence, to which, from the very start, Heidegger was concerned to reawaken us” (110). This essence is not a metaphysical nor supersensible one, but one that is manifested in ordinary quotidian existence. As such, our ethical role is to return to the finite essence of Dasein.

Ultimately, Heidegger’s ethics of thinking leads to an ethics of action and is extended further in Hannah Arendt’s project. To this end, the importance of Heidegger’s opening thoughts cannot be overstated. He prepares his reader for what he hopes will be a transforming revelation that we, as a species, are on a calamitous path of self-destruction. As de Beistegui further explains:

Far more extraordinary is our inability to take its full measure, to understand fully and reflect upon the “attack” with technological means that is organized on the life and nature of man. In comparison, Heidegger [stated], “the explosion of the hydrogen bomb means little.”¹

(107)

For those who have grown up in the shadows of nuclear proliferation, such a statement is startling. Indeed, as we watch world events unfolding, it is clear that technology, in its numerous manifestations, is a powerful driving force behind unrest and the proliferation of violent extremism, able to mobilize large portions of the populace.²

Our exploration will shed light on Heidegger’s concern for our being-in-the-world as an ongoing ontological process in balance and simultaneity with a cultural diagnosis. The two, while distinct in nature, can coexist and promote other thinking. Moreover, this balancing addresses the ethical undercurrent as a call for thinking and action in light of what Heidegger calls Gestell or enframing. It would be a mistake to perceive Heidegger setting forth normative rules to which we must adhere. Mandating behavior undermines the very essence of an ethics and would unsettle Heidegger’s understanding that there is no permanent essence nor code to which we can hold fast. And, yet, an inter-subjective responsibility lingers. Heidegger’s ideas point us to another way of existing that he subsequently connects with meditative or non-objective thinking – a modality strongly suggestive of Arendt’s later writing and ethics of thinking. Not only are we fully responsible for actualizing ourselves through our temporal lives but we must also become aware of the virtue inherent in fully expressing the essence of Dasein. This disposition relates dynamically to the property or substance of freedom, noting all the while the nature of “possibility” or “becoming” in Dasein’s being-in-the-world.

Heidegger’s consideration of the “Question Concerning Technology” is broad in its reach, returning us to Aristotle while simultaneously forecasting the slippage of meaning in post-modern culture. My study of his ethical appeal will be expressed in three parts. The first addresses both the methodology and terminology fundamental to Heidegger’s unique philosophical perspective. Understanding Heidegger’s radical departure from the norms of philosophical inquiry will help lay the foundation for later chapters, making accessible the terminology deployed to describe the necessity for our disentanglement via the art’s “saving power.” The second focus explores ethics as a long-standing philosophical tradition and will consider specifically the writings of Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Hannah Arendt. This brief overview is intended to shed light on some of the touchstones in philosophical ethics that resonate within the currents in Heidegger’s writing as distinct from purely technological concerns, though these touchstones are not repeated per se.³

Moreover, as we examine artworks in forthcoming chapters, the conversation will draw connections from the “Question Concerning Technology” to more recent ethical considerations, including those of Paul Ricoeur, Jean-François Lyotard, and others whose works carry traces of Heidegger’s ideas. Finally, I will utilize contemporary scholarship by (namely) Charles Bambach and Miguel de Beistegui to assist in interpreting Heidegger’s ideas within our current human condition. In sum, the combination of a genealogy of ethics and more recent philosophical thought will assist in carrying Heidegger’s ethics forward, exposing the steady continuum of our need for self-understanding and care while also undertaking a close reading of the Technology essay and its nuanced implications.

1.2 Heidegger’s Themes and Undercurrents

To begin, it is important to note the methodology Heidegger chose as a philosopher. His phenomenological hermeneutics of fundamental ontology allowed him to radically challenge the long-standing metaphysical structures of thinking upon which modern philosophical movements were built. Heidegger believed that the Cartesian interpretation of a divided man was a grave error, noting that we cannot help but be-in-the-world and in an interpretive relationship with all we encounter. His ontological vision was of a whole and dynamic being whose entity was always already in relation to the world. He explains, “[T]he expression ‘phenomenology’ signifies primarily a concept of method. It does not characterize the what of the objects of philosophical research in terms of their content, but the how of such research” (BT 2010, 26). His use of the word “research” is noteworthy as a reflection of his phenomenological approach. It accentuates the interpretive nature of hermeneutics and the possibility for openness as fluid truths emerge. Following Edmund Husserl, he continues, “The term ‘phenomenology’ expresses a maxim that can be formulated: ‘To the things themselves!’” (BT 2010 §28, 26). Conceptualizing the Greek origins of the term, he identifies the root of phenomenon as “showing itself”, “thus φαίνεσυαι means: what shows itself, the self-showing, the manifest” (BT 2010 §28, 27). He continues by describing the “coming to presence” that ultimately establishes his notion of truth as alētheia, something we positioned in the Introduction and will explore in more detail throughout this project. Heidegger follows up on the “self-showing” by exposing the nuances of Greek language with respect to differences in root meanings. He shows us, in the very way he approaches language, the hermeneutic methodology at work, notably its interpretive nature and disclosive capabilities.

The second underlying word related to the method of phenomenology is logos, λόγος. Its original translation is “discourse,” a conduit by which knowledge might be shared. Discourse points to an open exchange of ideas that, by default, implicates thinking. It is a term Heidegger believes gathered divergent meanings after Plato and Aristotle, thereby complicating our understanding of its initial intent. He states, “The later history of the word λόγος, and especially the manifold and arbitrary interpretations of subsequent philosophy, constantly conceal the authentic meaning of discourse – which is manifest enough” (BT 2010 §7, 30). If we combine the terms, the word phenomenology implies a revelation of discourse and ongoing interrogation of that which, quite simply and entirely, is.

Heidegger shifts phenomenology to its ontological space in which hermeneutic investigation fosters disclosure. He elaborates:

Ontology and phenomenology are not two different disciplines which among others belong to philosophy. Both terms characterize philosophy itself, its object and procedure. Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, taking its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein, which, as an analysis of existence [Existenz], has fastened the end of the guideline of all philosophical inquiry at the point from which it arises and to which it returns.

(BT 2010 §7, 36)

If we come to understand phenomenology as self-showing through discourse, its methodology gives us license to pursue and investigate more open-ended questions without requiring any purported assignment of fixed ontological or epistemic “facts” or final, definitive answers. Phenomenology maintains the fluidity of our living structures and permits the openness Heidegger believed so important to our nature. His method of “fundamental ontology” (BT 2010 §40, 182–183), in turn, consists in a kind of recalibration of our default thinking that, in a way, prepares for the ethical component underpinning the Technology essay.

This ontological exploration of the structures of Dasein yields a new approach to our being. It acknowledges the existential structures that drive us in our interactions. Throughout the first half of Being and Time, Heidegger’s investigation of these “existentials” exposes the nature of our existence:

Anxiety reveals in Dasein its being toward its ownmost potentiality of being, that is being free for the freedom of choosing and grasping itself. Anxiety brings Dasein before its being free for… (propensio in), the authenticity of its being as possibility which it always already is. But, at the same time, it is this being to which Dasein as being-in-the-world is entrusted.

(BT 2010 §40, 182)

Thus, anxiety, for Heidegger, is an “attunement” – a mode of knowing quite distinct from objectivist or subject/object modes. It is a motivating force driving much of our momentum in being-toward-death, defining us as finite beings. de Bestegui explains:

Step by step, little by little, Heidegger introduces his reader to the reality of nothingness, which he locates in the state of mind or, better said perhaps, the “mood” or “attunement” (Stimmung) we call anxiety. Unlike fear, which is always fear of something, anxiety is the feeling generated by the experience of the withdrawal and the vanishing of all things.

(10)

Anxiety manifests itself within the abyss created by notions of emptiness and void. It is within this open region that we might best come to encounter ourselves – this is the crux of what evades us in our currently enframed state. Accordingly, we will examine how Heidegger exposes the freedom Dasein needs to live authentically with its inherent anxiety and underlying “potentiality.” The bracketing of certainty, of correspondence and fixity, fosters a constant and pressing concern leading to the possibility for living fully and authentically. This shif...