Wolfgang Schirmacher,
Universität Hamburg/Polytechnic University
Eco-Sophia – The Artist of Life.
Printed in: Research in Philosophy and Technology 9: Ethics and Technology. Ed. Carl Mitcham, JAI Press: Greenwhich/London 1989,pp.125-134.
I. Heidegger's Philosophy of Technology and the Alternative Culture
No other philosopher has so strongly shaken the foundations of modern science and technology as Martin Heidegger. Heidegger criticized not the symptoms of decay exhibited by science nor its instrumental use but rather the very scientific-technological horizon of our present life. Correctly understood, the criticism of the modern age predominant in Heidegger's existential philosophy is a radical critique of the metaphysical concepts of Being and Time, and not a peripheral critique of culture. By weaning ourselves from the idealistic and materialistic orders of Being and Time we abandon the human individual as the substance which became subject. It is precisely everyday understanding with its complacent orientation toward security and the present which Heidegger gives up. The madness of carrying on as if nothing has happened suddenly becomes as palpable as the anthropocentric misuse of language inherent in its seriousness with which it denies its lighter, playful nature.
Heidegger was not ignorant of the natural sciences, not an enemy of the machine and its technology, clinging nostalgically to the past. The partner in dialogue with such authorities as Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker was well versed in theory and practice of the most advanced sciences. But as a philosopher he was not impressed by the once unshakeable self-certainty of these "leading edge researchers". Decades of study into the history of philosophy afforded Heidegger an eminent grasp of the origins of contemporary science and technology, and he saw in both powerful machinations merely the finished product of the failure of that way of living befitting us as mortals. Heidegger did not lament the fact that science became basically technological and that from its beginnings as knowledge of theoria free of delimiting purpose or ends it then became restricted to a rationalistic, narrowly construed misappropriation of the world; instead, he was the first to analyze it. The technicalization of knowledge is the logical consequence of the "oblivion of Being", i.e., it conforms perfectly to that which we have become.Ý The "challenging disclosing of nature", as it characterized the beginning of modern science and took the place of the "unfolding of nature" (physis), has long since lost its original adventurous character. Today, external as well as internal nature, the spirit of research, and phenomena are trapped within the "enframing" (Gestell) which Heidegger described not only structurally but vividly as the essence of modern technology. Heidegger put it succinctly in "The Danger" ("Die Gefahr"), his unpublished lecture from 1949: "Enframing: the gathering together of the setting-upon in the sense of entrapping and ordering." The ubiquitous machinery of technology and the scientific standards mutually secure their stock of nature, their "standing-reserve" (Bestand), and have unceremoniously standardized human beings as well as things, reducing them to calculative terms. Given this universal "one-dimensionality" (Herbert Marcuse), specialness, the non-identical, openness (das Freie) is pure illusion - although in this function a thoroughly useful element of that standing-reserve, the humanistic idea we call the human world. Heidegger's criticism of modern science and technology, of its vacuous "will to will", its violence and anthropocentrism today no longer requires a detailed presentation. It is too well-known and falls upon too fertile ground for that. The aspect of Heidegger's criticism which has now become common property of alternative thinking need not concern us philosophers any longer - the locus of dispute has shifted decisively. We need involve ourselves just as little with the fact that Heidegger was apparently a bit shortsighted in his explicit philosophy of technology, projecting the "negative" of instrumental technology into the distant future. We now know better than Heidegger that we shall not have such a future if we do not succeed in the next decades in living technology as Ereignis, as the event, the "disclosure of appropriation" that brings technology into its own, instead of allowing it to degenerate to an instrument of suicide used by the human race.
Heidegger's radical critique of metaphysics exposes science and technology as being the consummation of a global behavior according to which the diversity of relations and perspectives has been reduced to one single criterion: only the factual, that which is present, measurable, claims validity. With this Heidegger voices a suspicion, pressing it into a certainty which leads to the crux of our present problems. Thinking with a critical turn toward language and contemporary times as well as ecological re-thinking is indebted to Heidegger for having been made aware of a "trace" so inconspicuous that it went unnoticed by pre-Heideggerian criticism of technology and culture. Heidegger himself must have had only a vague premonition initially that the odd-sounding "question concerning the meaning of Being" signaled the definite end of our way of life developed over the course of millennia. Today the ontic phenomena confirm ever more insistently Heidegger's ontological analysis that there is literally "nothing" to our establishing of Being and time. Critics of reason and alternative thinkers of all orientations from Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida, from Richard Rorty toHans-Peter Dürr - have fruitfully taken up Heidegger's initiative. If we scratch long enough at the glossy surface of the counter-designs to the world of today, or if we do not allow ourselves to be deterred by ideological controversies (as in the case of Heidegger's antipode, Theodor W.Adorno), it then becomes evident to what great extent Heidegger's critique of metaphysics forms the foundation of a "completely different thinking".Ý Is not precisely the agreement of so many independent minds in their critical disposition one of the few signs of hope for our generation? It does not seem overstated to characterize present-day avantgarde thinking on the whole as "post-Heideggerian". But we are hardly able to content ourselves with such a nice agreement in theory as long as a practice properly belonging to it is so conspicuously lacking! Heidegger
is today most certainly the directive force of an "existential philosophy of the human race" - expressly, through his own works, or indirectly through that of others, and we are quite familiar with its basic elements. Stated briefly these are:
- an ethics of "releasement" (Gelassenheit): thought and action unfettered by preposession
- endurance to resist the demands of the day
- mortal action: mindful of posterity and nature alike
- personally assumed responsibility for the whole rejection of anthropocentrism and the practice of an ascetic reason.
I. These have even become life technologies, realized in our society by individuals or small groups. This type of alternative culture is gaining in political influence, most notably in Western Europe. And this does appear to be beneficial. For how else but in successful, concrete realizations historically situated and borne by the good will of human individuals can what poets experienced aesthetically and philosophers conceived in the language of reason be translated into action? But at this point the decisive difficulty arises, and it becomes evident that our sense of relief was premature. For even the best insights cannot deceive us about the fact that the human race is dying now! Nowhere has our dying process been even significantly slowed down. In our joy over alternative philosophy we are presumably taken in by the original metaphysical division of theory and practice which has become such a part of us that we do not even notice it. Pursuing this suspicion means to wonder how Heidegger's revolutionary thinking can apparently be so easily cast into a global behavior whose form was always available and which is familiar to each of us through the history of life as nearness to nature. An ecologically oriented philosophy, and thus one critical of the times, is not an invention of the present, but rather can be found throughout the entire history of metaphysics - even if it has never held a dominant position. Instead of calculating, forcing nature into one notion or another and exploiting it to our own advantage, respect for, and an attentive and responsive listening to nature, letting it unfold as physis was as a rule a philosophical policy as well as a way of life for a few people. In particular, the Greek philosophy of cosmos, the influential German mystics, Spinoza, and thinkers of German Idealism such as Hölderlin, Schelling, and Schopenhauer should be mentioned.
But why should the fact that our present attempts at new thinking have had great precursors, and was even practiced by some, in itself be a problem? The answer is given by a technology now dominating the world whose successes (not failures) have fatal consequences for us. This begins with the so-called "green revolution" and the gigantic dams in the Third World, and in no way ends with nuclear power plants such as Chernobyl, or with the Star-Wars projects of industrialized nations.
II. A Critique of Ecology: Is Man a Natural Being?
Technology is our mode of living, yet today we are living, against our will, a death-carrying technology, one whose decisive characteristic is that it is theoretically as flawless as it is comprehensive. This does not mean it is immune to criticism. Worse than that, this death technology produces even its own counterpart without the slightest difficulty. Heidegger convincingly demonstrated that this counter-project remains dependent upon the foundation it strives to leave. It then follows that alternative thinking springs from the source of familiar metaphysics. Herbert Marcuse, probably Heidegger's best
student, responded to the unavoidable fact that alternatives possess no reality of their own with the call for a "great refusal" - a seemingly helpless gesture, but one whose inner truth has yet to be surpassed. And Adorno's philosophical achievement lies above all in refusing to accept any reconciliation in this irreconciliable society which is "false to the very core". Finally, "through willful non-willing life technology demands a transformation shattering all reason and cutting into the flesh", as I argued at the end of Technik und Gelassenheitï, a study taking its cue from Heidegger's later works. What does this mean? It reveals nothing less than the self-deception of our present efforts whose "small steps" we register with such satisfaction. The much-discussed "new start" is only a game, and death remains its director, now as ever. The "way back to nature", ecologically secured and now longed for by many as a new ethical alternative to the values of the times, is the wrong path. For the changed behavior and the new values which now want finally to acknowledge our being "embedded in nature" are subject to a double fallacy. For one thing, this nature-friendly attitude owes its possibilities to an advanced technology alone, to the "objective status of the productive resources" (Karl Marx) which made scarcity as a basic concept obsolete.Ý It is too late to make peace with nature, for this nature no longer exists - it has become landscape, our artificial product, not even the outermost reaches of the Amazon have been spared. For another, and here the implications are even more trenchant, the desire for a return to nature skips over modern technology and with it the human individual as he is. This remains true even when clearly "gentle" technologies, those protective of nature, are demanded exclusively. The idea of nature underlying such intentions is directed against the technology we must, after all, live. Technology is not to be used, but lived.
With the guiding concept of "ecology" we want to eliminate the difficulty into which we got ourselves by taking economy as our standard of measure. But in this way, according to Heidegger, we risk the greatest danger of once again failing, perhaps decisively, the essence of the human individual and his dwelling on earth, the original meaning of which is "ethics". "Good intentions" hopelessly entangled in metaphysics and guiding us today simply make the necessary self-criticism more difficult.
In the present world situation it is highly misleading yet nevertheless true to say - contrary to all pretense and ideology - that our oikos, as it is called in Greek, the house of human existence, cannot be understood by regarding the human individual as a natural being, and the logos which claims this, lies. Ecology then is the wrong answer to the right question: How do we live? Man is not the dilettante among creatures, wanting in ability and therefore satisfied in all things. The "professionalization of our global behavior and relations" occurring as instrumental technology and thus only in perverted form, reveals the core of our existence: We are the artificial beings by nature. The human individual lives in accord with the cosmic home as a worldly-wise technician and not as a nature-happy dreamer!
Learning from nature, finding natural ways of life, an ethics of partnership between human beings and nature - these are hopes necessarily betrayed. For we ourselves are the ones who suddenly take nature's standpoint so as to sneak a legitimation which can never be ours. We may strive for such an identification with nature, the phenomenon of the whole, but as individual beings our claim is insupportable. Hegel called such immediacy plain "terror". But is it not in fact possible, many might object, to learn quite a number of things from nature? The integration into the biotope, the alternation of tensing and relaxing, the feedback process, to name only a few elements of a possible "anthropology of technology" (Hans Sachsse). But does this withstand a critical inquiry?Ý Who is really learning here - is it not that pursuant and shrewd subject of metaphysics who sees and hears what he wants to hear and see?
III. Eco-Sophia - An Ethics for Man the Technician
We human beings cannot, however, resolve not to be subject any longer. From our eating habits to information satellites, our actions would still testify against us. For this reason Heidegger's radical criticism of subjectivity, a principal part of his thinking, remains as theoretically influential as it does in practice inconsequential. Even with an ecological ethics, we still remain interested îin ourselves; our "concern" (Sorge) is in no way for "Being itself", as would be proper for the human individual existing as "openness for Being", to overcome Being, according to Heidegger. And so the attempts to discover the other, the "wild one in us", are marked by an unyielding ambiguity. But what remains true is reviving the stifled senses and awakening those never discovered in us, and training our poetic sensibility which we systematically spoil and shatter in daily life. If we should succeed in this, at least to some small extent, we would then "feel" differently and experience a person seemingly worlds apart from that suspicious subjectivity. Everyone is capable of developing an "aesthetic self". By rejecting the habitual blocking out of the aesthetic perspective of the whole, and by admitting the inherited thin-skinnedness of our species we free ourselves from the prison of our perception in which our fear of the unknown causes us to live. We hold out bravely in openness, trust unconcealment, we are poets of life and we would not be "entirely different individuals" only in our daydreams if, yes, if only it were not for the technological world "disturbing" so violently and threateningly. To want to "switch off" this technology (at least occasionally) or to press it into our service, as we are unflaggingly led to believe possible, is a futile labor of love. That which disturbs and is also increasingly destroying our human world indicates (even if only negatively) how the human individual really lives as well as what his ethics should be like.
We must accept this negative indication, whether or not it fits our customary notion of humanism. Eco-Sophia is wisdom, not knowledge, and as concrete intuition it precedes the division of theory and practice. Taking the road of science - and be it the new science of ecology - would still only lead us to the relation between man and nature and to a deontic ethics.- But this would present a deteriorated version of the human being and merely proves itself organically, not humanely. Our biological structure tells us nothing about our humanity.
Eco-Sophia takes seriously precisely that which is concealed, the nascent human being, still, and perhaps always, in concealedness. Moments of true humanness burst forth suddenly, briefly. This "flashing" (Aufblitzen) in the aesthetic experience as in the ethical process of fulfilling cannot be accommodated in a one-dimensional determination, in a definition of the human being that is, which includes only the obvious about us or what has been cleverly raised to a conscious level. On a metaphysical scale that aspect of the humane life form which does notï impose itself does not have anything human about it. This is true for the divine poet as well as for those devices by which we make a bare living. And that which is ecosophically of the greatest significance is then scorned as a tool and mere means to the preservation of life. Language and cities alike can speak of this from bitter experience!
How reluctant we really are to part with the traditional image of man despite our pretense at being severe critics of subjectivity is proven by our fierce resistance when computers and robots are called "flesh of our flesh". Ironically, this resistance intensifies the closer the cybernetic machines come to approximating those human characteristics which we have reserved for ourselves alone: thought, imagination, learning from mistakes. But by the advent of the fifth generation of computers at the latest, a generation which, despite independent programming, will actually still represent the computer stone age, by this time the game of hide-and-seek will end. For here will emerge without a doubt a new form of human intelligence; as "artificial intelligence" it will be as natural as breathing from a certain stage of evolution on. Within the confines of metaphysics îhowï human beings live appears distorted as a symbiosis of man and cybernetic machine.
IV. Test of Reality: Ethics Today
If ethics is to have a sense today it must mean a guide to action which will keep us alive. For this reason all those constructs have already been rejected which sound good in theory but are of no use in the practice of the technological world. Kant's categorical imperative comes under this heading as do the newest drafts of an ecological ethics, for they follow the logic of the human individual as a "privileged" being, one distinguished above all of nature, although they should resist precisely this presumption. The truth of a phenomenon remains true even in its distortion, throughout a false expression of its trueness. And so as perverse as it may seem to be in metaphysical categories, it nevertheless appears true that the basis of a humane ethics beyond anthropocentrism is beginning to emerge in the symbiosis of man and cybernetic machine. Understood ecosophically, the Ereignis Technik, the disclosure of appropriation of technology through which technology comes into its own, is this symbiosis; it is our attainment of maturity enabling us to live the cosmic form of life befitting us. Indeed, there is precious little of this to be seen in the Frankenstein reality of instrumental technology whose best artificial intelligence merely simulates atomic wars. The new, potential technicians would rather pursue biodynamic agriculture and celebrate archaic rites in wood and stone. The "New Age" disciples manage though to live quite comfortably in the niches of the old age!ÝTheir "No" to the present and "Yes" to the future is not without willfulness, violence, for even in resistance it is bound to the metaphysical way of life and its principle of reality. Nowhere is the absence of Eco-Sophia felt more painfully than in the fruitless opposition of the alternative culture to the most modern technologies. And yet, a genetic technician with the inner attitude of a Francis of Assisi (to give an example not at all eccentric) would never be in danger of committing acts in any way monstrously degenerate.
The "step back" through metaphysics, following Heidegger's thinking, in no way leads to a "Being" renovated by temporality. For the "danger" which threatens to destroy us is one of Being itself. Not surprisingly, this insight of Heidegger's is suppressed more often than not. At the end of "The Danger" Heidegger says: In the "entrapping" of modern technology "Being itself (Seyn) pursues its own essence (Wesen) with the oblivion of this essence"; and rarely in the history of philosophy has this been said so harshly. A new destining, a sending forth of Being, if it were possible and if it were called "self-referential structure" (Heinrich Rombach) would not escape the fatal pull of an imposing, willful process. "Fourfold thinking" and the finite disclosure of appropriation which shapes our life would actually remain a philosophical glass bead game if the disclosing in the fourfold were not also "inscribed" in the cybernetic machines. For these are - perhaps more clearly than their more primitive predecessors - the beginning of differentiated responses to the humane life situation and not merely makeshift solutions. As mad as it sounds, the military-industrial complex holds the intellectual reserves of humankind, and in the destructive instrumental technology lies our life technology. The once unimaginably complex web of our actions and sufferings can become our own through various techniques which know no rift in theory and practice, through a simultaneous understanding and integration, for the diversity of masks and fashions alters nothing in the finite disclosure of appropriation of human beings. The "biocybernetic network" (Frederic Vester) is certainly never strong enough for reality, not strong enough to capture its sense, but for us it may suffice in discovering whether our life technology keeps its promises.
What status do such deliberations have, how real are they? Are we not dealing with mere superficial post-metaphysical dreams which make concrete action more difficult? A test of reality would actually have to have devastating results. No technician of today would agree to surrendering his instruments, he will concede only their improvement. No society, no matter how democratic it purports to be, will do without socio-technological thought control. The political systems are at irreconciliable odds with one another and bristling with arms; there is no lack of "small wars". The sovereignty of states, this disastrous counterpart to the subjectivity of the individual, is defended more jealously than ever. The Third World has fallen desperately ill with ecological problems but is capable of little more than aggressive begging, thereby dying of hunger at the end of the outstretched arms of the industrialized nations. A world government is nowhere in sight, whereby the question remains open whether this would be truly desirable. As long as there are states there will be no true knowledge about the human individual, for we are keeping ourselves concealed and fear the sanctions of the rulers. Our private life is a defense technology necessary against the crude political technology - the state! The ignorance of the essential questions of our time has increased despite, or perhaps precisely because of, the flood of information. The over-informed citizen now chooses the assumed security of traditional solutions but will still only gain an ever more apparent ungovernability in public matters. But institutions and artifacts are long-lived; the walls will still be standing and the advertising billboards will still be legible when there is no longer anyone alive who knows their meaning. Does only a negative ethics remain for Eco-Sophia, does it rest with this bearer of wisdom to teach us as a species to die and to issue the death certificate for humankind with the exact date to be filled in later?
The situation is hopeless, but this is our conception. This does not claim that the idea of our imagining with all its consequences is easily abandoned, or even could be. For Arthur Schopenhauer this was an irrevocable part of the condition humaine. But it is just as true, and Schopenhauer did concede this for the life style of the saint, that each new generation is capable of radically changing the conditions of human life. Never has this been simpler and more obvious than in the technological world in whose headlong rush to change the end of our desire for security is proclaimed - against our will perhaps, but in accordance with our life technology. Basis technologies which are as "natural" as breathing for us grant security unrequested and thus allow us those "turnings" up against which no signature of any age, no matter how distinct, can remain recognizable. The leap without a net, the renunciation of substance, the ease of thought are metaphors of the artist's existence, foretold us by Friedrich Nietzsche in Zarathustra. What once only the mystics dared and what had to destroy them will become common practice in the technological world. Zarathustra's brothers and sisters are the dancing technician, the joyful saint, the anarchic ethicist. They leave no stone standing, and so we finally begin to live as human beings.