WHY TECHNOLOGY IS NOT A HUMAN ACTIVITY?
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so you are talking about Heidegger. Others spurn him as an obscurantist and a charlatan, while still others see his reprehensible affiliation with the Nazis as a reason to ignore or reject his thinking altogether. But Heidegger’s undoubted influence on contemporary philosophy and his unique insight into the place of technology in modern life make him a thinker worthy of careful study.
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. He sought to clarify throughout his work how, since the rise of Greek philosophy, Western civilization had been on a trajectory toward nihilism, and he believed that the contemporary cultural and intellectual crisis — our decline toward nihilism — was intimately linked to this forgetting of being. Only a rediscovery of being and the realm in which it is revealed might save modern man.
In his later writings on technology, which mainly concern us in this essay, Heidegger draws attention to technology’s place in bringing about our decline by constricting our experience of things as they are. He argues that we now view nature, and increasingly human beings too, only technologically — that is, we see nature and people only as raw material for technical operations. Heidegger seeks to illuminate this phenomenon and to find a way of thinking by which we might be saved from its controlling power, to which, he believes, modern civilization both in the communist East and the democratic West has been shackled. We might escape this bondage, Heidegger argues, not by rejecting technology, but by perceiving its danger