2 Answers

  1. There is a huge literature on this topic, which continues to increase; moreover, the situation is as in the well-known aphorism of Jerzy Lez: “The research of many commentators has already shed enough darkness on this subject…”. Therefore, my answer does not pretend to put all the dots over the “e” here – it is, rather, a small exercise in translating from a philosophical language into a common one. Moreover, I will confine myself to Heidegger's article “The Question of Technique”, where his thoughts on this problem seem to be presented in the most concentrated form. So.

    Referring to the ancient Greek tradition, Heidegger asserts that truth is αλήθεια (“aletheia”, i.e. “non-concealment”) and that, thus, the knowledge of truth is ποίησις (“poesis”, i.e.” deducing from concealment “or”pro-knowledge”). He also notes that poetry is divided into 1) Fσσις (“fusis”, that is, self-disclosure of truth, “pro-growing”, which was translated into Latin as “natura”, the Russian tracing paper for which, in turn, is” nature”) and 2) τέχνη (“techne” – bringing out of hiding through external effort, that is, both skill in any kind of activity and art as an artistic development of reality).

    To denote the essence of modern technology, which serves as a tool for exploiting nature, using it as a supplier of resources for maintaining and globalizing human domination over it, Heidegger introduces the concept of “Gestell”.

    Moreover, the philosopher specifically stipulates that the” supply installation ” is also characteristic of European science, which initially focused on obtaining extremely accurate, unambiguous knowledge, and it is most easily instrumentalized: for example, the creation of high-precision equipment, including military equipment, relies on exact sciences.

    Heidegger emphasizes that this also applies to methods of revealing the hidden, achieving truth, only in this case it acts as, let's say, “estina”, that is, scientific truth, the content of which, in Heidegger's formulation, is “existing-in-existence”, in other words, that in reality that can be systematically accounted for and cashed out.

    Where the latter [supply, supplying production] dominates, every other possibility of revealing the secret is banished. … The domination of the post threatens the danger that a person will no longer be able to return to a more original disclosure of the hidden and hear the voice of an earlier truth.

    By saying that science threatens to replace all other ways of revealing the hidden (i.e., fusis too), Heidegger actually anticipates the arguments of modern transhumanists and others like them about the displacement of the biosphere by the technosphere, and the “biosphere man” by the “technosphere”.

    At the same time, referring to his favorite quote from Holderlin's poem (“Where there is danger, there grows the salutary”), Heidegger sums up that the essence of modern technology (art) is not something technical, which means that in principle all the dangers that are associated with it can be avoided not necessarily at the cost of abandoning technology. Moreover, it is even possible to oppose postav, which threatens to turn us into an appendage to technology, to the technique itself!

    To do this, according to Heidegger, it is necessary to get rid of the supplying attitude (subordination to utilitarian goals and bare calculation) through the convergence of technology with art.

    Art will also benefit from such a union, because once again, as in antiquity, it will be perceived primarily as a way of knowing (revealing the hidden), and not primarily as a sphere of “aesthetic pleasure” and a form of escapism.

    Unfortunately, Heidegger does not make it clear exactly how this convergence of technology and art (“understanding the essence of technology in art”) should take place, allowing them to regain the high meaning of the ancient Greek “techne”. Therefore, I will take the liberty to suggest that the means of neutralizing the depersonalizing impact of cyberspace, proposed by Bruno Lanir in the book “You are not a Gadget: Manifesto”, can be considered precisely as the liberation of technology from the supplying installation by subordinating it to aesthetic criteria, that is, not to the logic of content production, but to the logic of a work of art:

    1. “From time to time, post a video that took you a hundred times longer to create than its duration.
    2. Write a blog post that took weeks of thought before you heard an inner voice demanding self-expression.
    3. If you write on Twitter, invent ways to describe your internal state, not just external events. This will avoid the danger of believing that objectively described events define you, just as they define the car.”

  2. Heidegger should have been asked how he connected it. Personally, I think that if the logic of judgments in the construction of a technique does not have a basis for truth, then it is insignificant.

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