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Michael Kelly
The North American Heidegger Society gathered for its thirty-fifth annual meeting in Manhattan, NY, at Fordham University, May 11-13, 2001. Joseph O'Hare, S. J., president of Fordham University, and Dominic Balestra, professor and chair of philosophy at Fordham, provided welcoming remarks. Under the direction of society secretary, conference convenor, and Fordham University professor of philosophy, Babette E. Babich, participants both commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Martin Heidegger (May 26, 1976), and breached a twenty-five year rejoinder to his letter to the tenth convening of the society, April 11, 1976. In this letter, Heidegger called us to consider "The Relation of Modern Science to Modern Technology," which became this years theme. Certainly, our world has become exponentially further encoded by technology since the reading of Heidegger's letter twenty-five years ago. While this observation may seem trite, its banality exacerbates Heidegger's imploring that each thinker devote her attention to considering this relation from her own philosophical orientation.1 Accordingly, scholars at the thirty-fifth meeting considered the relation of science to technology through a myriad of philosophical themes - ranging from art to language, quantum physics to environmental philosophy, and Asian thought to genetic engineering - and across Heidegger's writings, from the relation of vorhanden (the present-at-hand) and scientific observation in Being and Time ("The Originariness of Presence-at-Hand," E. C. Boedeker, JR., University of Northern Iowa, USA) to the notion of the other of science and technology in Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe ("Science and Technology and Its Other," Ute Guzzoni, Freiburg Universitat, Germany). Highlighted by a dynamically debated book symposium on T. Glazebrook's recent Heidegger's Philosophy of Science,2 which featured P. A. Heelan, T. Kisiel and W. J. Richardson, S. J., and a notable plenary panel with T. Sheehan, M. Zimmerman and J. van Buren, the forty-one conference participants and some eighty odd total attendees attempted to accept Heidegger's invitation. What follows below recounts their efforts.
R. Polt's (Xavier University, USA) "Potentiality, Power and Sway: From Aristotelian to Modern Heideggerian Physics?" ushered in the spirit of the conference. Acknowledging his debt to, and desire to think beyond Heidegger, Polt examined the liberating and constraining dimensions of the notions of potentiality and power at work in Aristotelian and Cartesian epistemology (PHC 1). Polt argued that while we all too readily align classical epistemology with the now hackneyed Heideggerian notion of 'poor' unconcealing in the service of Ge-stell, a closer look reveals, paradoxically, the liberating dimension of a modern notion of power no longer confined by any particular telos, as Aristotle's epistemology would have it (PHC 7). This modern notion of power resembles more adequately Dasein, who, as Seinkonnen in her ownmost, also resists the oppressive dimension of Aristotelian actuality (PHC 10). Still, since the Ge-stell presides over all modern ordering, Polt condemns both the Aristotelian and Cartesian mode of unconcealing as impoverished. In their stead, he argues for a new 'science,' a physics of das Walten, sway, which might allow for the evolution of new forms constrained neither by a telos nor a mathematization that fails to respect the distinctive sway particular to each thing's nature.
For this listener, Polt's inaugural presentation, along with D. Idhe's (State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA) "Was Heidegger Prescient Concerning Technoscience?" provided a thematic framework to which other presentations would return. Ihde's lecture presented an historical account of Heidegger's relation to positivism and mathematical physics that culminated in a discussion of the unfulfilled promise of Heidegger's recognition that quantum physics is irreducible to classical physics. J. R. Watson's (Loyola University of New Orleans, USA) "Non-Local Reality 'in' the Region of Heidegger's Characterization of Modern Natural Science" picks up where Polt's work historically left off and discusses in greater detail the history adumbrated by Ihde. Watson considers Heidegger's philosophy of science within the challenge of quantum mechanics specifically, and suggests that rather than worsen the subject-object relation to Bestand, as Heidegger ultimately thought it to do, Bohr's quantum of action, which claims an incessant interaction between beings under observation with measuring instruments and/or the human eye, renders it obsolete.
With its "non-local effects [that] do not provide for the possibility of the ultimate perfection of classical epistemology and its correlative principle of certainty" the new science points towards a non-totalizing science (PHC 52). Ironically, Polt and Watson find the overcoming of science as hegemonic ideology in the very form of science Heidegger believed malevolent. Their claims reminded listeners of Holderine's words quoted so fondly by Heidegger:
But where danger is, grows
The saving power also.3
The saving power may be found in the ways in which the new science's non-local effects resist being usurped by the totalizing course of classical science. No longer subject to the demands of perfection and certainty, the new science allows for sway, a certain aesthetic of unconcealing that lets a thing, to speak Heidegger's language. Moreover, as G. Shapiro (University of Richmond, USA) noted in his creatively interpretative "Theory at the Theater: Heidegger, Heisenberg, and Copenhagen," the new science's aesthetic of revealing teaches us something about the essence of the human that has been placed at the centre of things: " ... every observer is observed and ... no observer can observe himself" (PHC 61). What Shapiro refers to as the "blind spot of theoria" allows for the "play of presence and absence," or, stated differently, the aesthetic unconcealment that Heidegger hopes holds the possibility of the saving power (PHC 62).
Returning to Ihde's lecture, however, we find a challenge to this more optimistic stance on the efficacy of Heidegger's critique of science and technology. Ihde too sees promise in Heidegger's recognition that quantum mechanics outstrips the bounds of the classical model. From his own philosophical idiom Ihde detects this promise insofar as Heidegger's recognition concerning quantum physics comes on the heels of another insight: modern physics depends on technological instruments for its discoveries. Yet at the very point of his prescience concerning technoscience, Ihde argues, Heidegger undermines himself. Turning technology into "Technology," a mode of revealing antonymic to the Greek "bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis,"4 Heidegger's critique of technology betrays a romantic, premodern sentiment that precludes any nuanced account of technologies and results in a one-sided condemnation of technoscience (PHC 77). Ihde describes Heidegger's awareness of the histories of science and technology as "shallow" and his critique threatens to render trivial Heidegger's otherwise apparently insightful critique of technology. Must we, in the final analysis, reject the latter's critique of science and technology as one motivated by a naïve, romantic longing for the past?
Independent scholar, D. E. Skocz, ("Machination, Science, and Technology") agrees with Ihde that science and technology each give impetus to the other. Scokz suggests that we find the import of this relationship, however, not necessarily in prioritising the technological to the scientific, or vice versa. Rather, we must recognise that both science and technology constitute modes of what Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)5 terms "machination," the challenging forth of nature and the making of nature as product (PHC 147). Science (as experiment) and technology (as instrument) purse the common fate of the challenging forth of nature in such a way that the two blur together. Worse, Skocz suggests, the self-developing/perpetuating character of science and technology jeopardizes any clear distinction between physis and techne, thus revealing the ultimate domination of machination. If Skocz's dramatic speculation is correct, then how does Heidegger think we free ourselves from this domination, and can his reflections on freedom resist the critique of romanticism, levied by Ihde and others? These concerns receive responses from the perspective of Heidegger's reflections on machination itself (R. Gilliland, "Modern Science and Human Freedom in the Later Heidegger," Kent State University, USA), the power of art (V. Foti, "Imagining the Invisible: Heidegger's Meditation," Penn State University, USA), and Heidegger's thinking on the Greek interpretation of language (Holger Schmid, "Heidegger: Logos and the Essence of Technology," The University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany).
According to Gilliland, Heidegger sees the danger of machination in the loss of enchantment with the world, and within the context of enframing this means the loss of alternative styles of disclosing the world (PHC 173). Repeating Heidegger's cryptic prophecy that enframing contains within itself also the saving power to form a free relationship to technology, Gilliland suggests that liberation occurs when humans recognise the possibility that the Ge-stell is but one mode of destiny, not the final mode. Rather than submit to the totalizing constraint of the world picture, humans must remain open to the possibility that destiny will reveal itself in a more original way (PHC 174). In an argument that might approve of Gilliland's exegesis, Veronique Foti reminds us that, for Heidegger, a free relationship to technicity must arise out of technicity itself. To be sure, freedom will issue forth not from the technicity of the Ge-stell, but from the image or Gestalt revealed in works of art (PHC 152). The 'world picture,' she argues, presents a pre-scribed vision of the world, which, paradoxically, is not a genuine vision, since it occludes at the same time any form of appearance outside the one demanded in the service of human ends and universal calculability. What the 'world picture' renders invisible differs from the invisible gathered in man's original encounter with being, that is, the necessarily apophantic dimension of disclosure that intimates but never presences being's self-concealed enigmas. Foti maintains, then, that something created to bring out the openness of being - whether it be a windmill (and here we have a rejoinder to and repudiation of the critique of nostalgia in Heidegger's thought concerning technology) or a work of art - rebirths the visible of the original encounter prior to the Ge-stell and, as such, recognises the other (human, environmental, or otherwise), to the extent that it reveals an attunement to a thing's various possibilities for presencing itself (PHC 156).
In a theoretical and etymological tour de force, Schmid's reflections on Greek interpretations of language, particularly Heraclitus' notion of logos, make clear the root of this exclusory power of the Ge-stell that covers over the unthought in the original encounter with being. 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 former'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, and this is not surprising, claims Schmid, given the developments in Greek language. But could we not reopen the question of the Greek interpretation of language beyond logos as Heidegger does (PHC 110)? Schmid proposes just this, and risks an alternate reading of Heraclitus' fragment 93 (DK), "The Lord whose is the oracle in Delphi neither speaks (legei) nor conceals, but gives a sign (semainei)." Schmid writes that "if ... the oracle does not 'tell' in the way of logos [which Aristotle's notion of speech demanded], then this surely would encourage enquiring into the Greek interpretation of language beyond ... the Aristotelian fixations of both logos and semainein..." (PHC 110). If, as Heidegger suggests, we grasp the direct connection between the height of the technological age and the beginning of metaphysics only through thinking, then rethinking Heraclitus' logos, the original connection of world and language, i.e., thinking, should prove most fruitful.
P. A. Heelan's ("Heidegger's Children and Carnap's Children," Georgetown University, USA) and T. Kisiel's ("A Supratheoretical Hermeneutical Preprotoscientific Pursual of T. Glazebrook's Heidegger's Philosophy of Science," University of Northern Illinois, USA) reviews of Glazebrook's recent book began an intense symposium. Heelan and Kisiel agree that Glazebrook primarily intended to argue for the centrality of the question of science throughout Heidegger's philosophy, and, secondarily, to evidence this newly uncovered Heideggerian philosophy of science as compatible with Carnapian, analytic philosophies of science. Heelan and Kisiel, each in his own way, offered impassioned critiques of Glazebrook's ambitious project. Heelan found untenable Glazebrook's attempt to traverse the divide between the Heideggerian and the Carnapian, i.e., continental and analytic, philosophy of science, while Kisiel pejoratively described Glazebrook's primary thesis that leads her amiss from the start as, 'hyperbolic.'
Through a series of pedantic and scathing polemics against Glazebrook's scholarship and her reading of Heidegger's position on phenomenology and hermeneutics, Kisiel notes that her interpretation goes awry following her "imperfect grasp" of Heidegger's two phenomenologies: one concerned with eternal, eidetic truths and the other with the temporal, hermeneutic truths of unconcealment (PHC 32). Kisiel pursues Glazebrook's primary thesis back to her contestation of W. Richardson's claim - "On the longest day he ever lived Heidegger could never be called a philosopher of science" - that she challenged in her preface. In fact, Kisiel argued, one legitimately describes Heidegger as a philosopher of science only when one affixes the prefix 'proto' to the descriptor. Even then this descriptor is appropriate only for Heidegger's pre-1929 work, and only to the extent that we understand Heidegger's science as an "Urwissenshaft of philosophy itself," a primal science of being (PHC 28).
Though he praised the 'diligence' and 'detail' with which Glazebrook analysed Heidegger's meditations on modern science, Heelan nevertheless also rejected Glazebrook's challenge to Richardson. Heelan does not believe that Heidegger's philosophy of science can be made to fit either of Glazebrook's visions for it. For Heidegger's philosophy of science never amounted to anything more than an element of his thought, and it certainly never became an element sturdy enough to bring analytic and continental camps into dialogue on the matter of science (PHC 17). Heelan concluded that Heidegger lacked the practical engagement with science necessary for an alternative philosophy of science, suggested that we should think Heidegger's thoughts on science as a propaedeutic to an 'authentic' philosophy of science, and offered his thoughts on what a Heideggerian hermeneutic of science might look like.
The conference's Saturday panel discussion began with a controversial and, perhaps according to traditional readings of Heidegger and technology, paradoxical thesis from T. Sheehan ("Eleven Theses on Heidegger and Technology," Stanford University, USA). Sheehan offered the claim that Heideggerians should move away from the word 'being' as a maker for die Sache selbst, since Heidegger quite clearly contends that things have no sense apart from human beings: it is not the "is" of being, but instead the as of being, Sheehan argues, that guides Heidegger's thought. That is, rather than 'constituting' beings in conformity with our concepts, Dasein's finitude, its lack of full presence to itself, requires an openness to beings and, as it were, entails a taking-as/understanding of entities through their being (PHC 120). From his discussion of this being-the-open that derives from our lack of full self-presence and marks our essence, Sheehan rereads Heidegger's notion of Ereignis as our openness to the open that results from the self-concealment in which our being hides. Being-the-open makes entities not just available to us, but, Sheehan claims, language [that might sound heretical to traditional Heideggerians], "endlessly available to human engagement and manipulation" (PHC 122). Having grounded the theoretical portion of his project with an etymological exegesis equalled in its density and originality by its lucidity and rigor, Sheehan concludes by risking the potentially morally irresponsible claim that "far from having a philosophically negative valence, the global spread of technology is the positive force of Ereignis" (PHC 122). That we in the twenty-first century have witnessed the mendaciousness of modern, cybernetic technicity (that until now almost undeniably appeared as the fulfilment of Heidegger's prophecy concerning technology), however, should cause us to pause before championing Sheehan's scholarship - as may conference attendees seemed quick to do. It is possible that we have misunderstood Heidegger's thought on technology. Perhaps Heidegger's own philosophical framework does indeed preclude his critical portrayal of technicity. Sheehan's bold claims, however, not only seemingly sacrifice the moral to the intellectual, but they fly in the face of decades of scholarship concerning Heidegger on technology.
In an important, and in this listener's opinion unduly neglected presentation, M. Zimmerman ("Heidegger's Phenomenology and Contemporary Environmentalism," University of Tulane, USA) attempted to work through the tensions in Heidegger's view of nature and humankind with those of environmentalists, and on the way objected to Sheehan's rereading of Ereignis, remarking that Sheehan ultimately claims "that from their own side beings 'want' to be disclosed and utilised by humankind," and such utilisation denotes progress ("technological domination," to use Sheehan's words (PHC 122)) (PHC 134). No one will argue the benefits of technological advances, and perhaps our being is such that entities appear as 'endlessly available' to us. Yet, Zimmerman asks: does Ereignis, the gift of openness from finitude, exculpate humankind from the crimes it has perpetrated against animals, ecosystems, and peoples of the third world, as Sheehan's reading implies (PHC 135)? What gets lost amidst the force of Sheehan's erudite exegesis, Zimmerman notes, is that "[e]ndowed with great disclosive capacities, Dasein is also burdened with unparalleled responsibilities to 'care' for beings" (PHC 135).
Most of us at some time or another have revisited a letter from a friend since deceased or absent from our present life. And in recollecting such memories most of us find ourselves with more to say than when we first heard our friend's voice in our mind, yet, lamentably, no one remains to share our words. Fortunately for those present, the thirty-fifth meeting of the North American Heidegger Society summoned a community of scholars and offered them an opportunity to revisit a letter left - to the scholars in particular and our technologically saturated civilisation more generally - twenty-five years earlier by their friend and mentor, Martin Heidegger. As is the case when old friends are fortunate enough to meet once more, there was much to discuss.
Mike Kelly, Fordham University
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