Heidegger ’ s radical critique of technology as an outline of social acts 1

The present text shows that the prevailing view of Martin Heidegger ’ s approach to society and technology is not only based on prejudice, but more importantly works to obscure a more relevant perception of reality. Heidegger ’s “phenomenological hermeneutic” sought to uncover technology ’ s hidden truth, beyond the appearance of technology as framing our existence ( Gestell ). Even if we acknowledge that technology has now reached a planetary and all-encompassing dissemination – becoming, in effect, the leading figure of our time – we still need to remain vigilant to the metaphysical notions embedded in such a characteristic. We should seek other ways of living with and within technology. A radical critique should seek topologies and “orders” that are universal and preliminary, so that by potentially exceeding every demarcation we can be liberated to a way of listening – a “hearing” ( Hören ) – to a “constellation” of a different “essence of technology”.


I. Heidegger's contribution to an understanding of technology and the problem of society
Today we generally consider the social problematic to provide the ground for our understanding. Even our treatment of science, technology and the human is given over to a socially conditioned decidability. Society is the site where under certain conditions historically constituted humans must realise where all sciences and technologies belong. 4 All the more astounding is it that one of the most influential bourgeois philosopher of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger 5 , International License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. didn't explicitly deal with the problem of society. 6 This state of affairs and Heidegger's idiosyncratic language are among the most important reasons that his social philosophy at most is regarded as providing a negative perspective. 7 What we will set out to do in this contribution is to show that such an interpretation is based on prejudice, making it more difficult to access to what remains a most remarkable conception of social interaction. Such ignorance is particularly dangerous in view of our increasing social and environmental challenges.

Inscriptions
Heidegger carried out a radical critique of the problem of society in his "The question concerning technology" [1954/1977]. In what follows we shall provide a broad outline of Heidegger's position.

Radical critique as a phenomenological hermeneutic
Critique has a double sense in its modern and definite expression since Kant: on the one hand it provides us with rules of reason through a demarcative measure; on the other hand it has a positive sense, by which all things that do not obey the rules of reason are rejected as unreasonable. 8 While it is true that such a definition is on the cusp of becoming dogmatic what is more crucial here is to acknowledge the way it obscures our approach to reality as a process. Consider by way of contrast Heidegger's emphasis on the "becoming" of reality which should be sought by "stepping back" from it. Terms such as "abyss" and "leap" convey an open-mindedness to the present which is oriented towards thinking. Therefore it seems reasonable that he designated his thought as a radical critique, a term which we first find in Marx. 9 In our usage the term "radical" should be taken to include a most decisive return to the "roots" as well as a ruthless willingness to abandon any present commitment.
Heidegger occasionally referred to his thinking as a "phenomenological hermeneutic". 10 By following his pointers to the significance of hermeneutics and his explicit demarcation of phenomenolog 11 we can briefly say that the phenomenological content reveals itself in language by bracketing (epoché) commonly held ideas, which goes against the idea that there is a given agreement between statements and being (subject and object). This revelation comes to us as if it was there in the phenomena themselves, i.e., that the state of affairs "is in itself such as is being shown in the statement". 12 However, this is not to say that the statement of being should always be taken to mean an "in itself", i.e., as revealed truth, but that when being is a "possible innerworldly encounter" it is also always "concealed (hidden) or obscured". Thus, according to Heidegger, "the existential being must expressly appropriate what has come to be revealed against appearances and pretensions, so as to reassure oneself of its hiddenness". 13 This constant phenomenological trait in Heidegger's thinking is not to be confused with mere habit. In other words when we clarify radical struggles 14 over the truth of Being we once more radicalise our hermeneutic expression of "historically" 15 interpreted facts. In Heidegger hermeneutics opens up a horizon he called "destiny" from whence states of affairs can be understood adequately. For instance, with regard to the common sociological approach by which phenomena are taken for what they are and referred to as phenomenological it should be emphasized that for Heidegger such phenomena are never simple and that their "historical" becoming 16 simply provides us with a necessary opportunity to break with common and scientific perceptions.
We can now see clearly that Heidegger's approach to technology works fruitfully as a radical critique and a phenomenological hermeneutic of the present. What we can also come to understand at this point is how difficult his perspective is to grasp in its often seemingly violent singularity.

The leading character of technology and its ambiguity
Most often we understand technology, as an everyday term, to mean techniques. They are considered to be man-made means that are used as aids in satisfying our needs and liberating us from the force of nature. Our technological command is still largely undisputed in this view.
From the perspective of scientific theory technologies are considered applications of the natural sciences, which are so diverse that we only with some difficulty can find a common denominator. 17 Both views regard technologies as surface phenomena which nevertheless are disseminated everywhere and which have become indispensable to modern life.
When we take stock of both views, i.e. when we include their grounds and relations, then what remains is that technology now is so widely disseminated that there no avoiding it. Technologies intervene everywhere in our human lives, our problems have become technical concerns, and things appear to us largely as technical objects. 18 This planetary dissemination of technological culture, whose mastery encompasses almost everything, forces us to ask whether the most concrete character of this apparent surface phenomenon lies in its ability to direct our present age.
Reality is challenged on the grounds of its objectivity 19 , situated as an idea and thus turned into an object of calculation and operation. 20 This, in turn, is only possible when "the objectivity of reality" 21 meets with the challenge, i.e., when reality itself makes demands. Such a delimitation of technology would suffice where we to restrict our analysis to the present and it was technology's leading character alone that would serve to establish our horizon of acts and thoughts. 22 However, such a delimitation of technology would obscure its becomingness and historicity and raise it to the level of the timeless. A radical critique must set itself against such a notion by recalling the continuity between the ancient Greek notion of technique as craft and our modern idea of industrial technology. To the Greeks technological objects were still ready-to-hand, i.e. embedded in the life-world of being. As soon as they had been isolated in theory they intensified the transformation of modern technology from something that had been equally challenging to people and objects into "objectively present-at-hand". 23 Still the modern world was present already to the Greeks as the necessary challenge posed by all thinking.
This not unproblematic outline nevertheless shows that modern technology can be conceived as the completion of the Greek notion of techne, is it seems inconceivable to further intensify its "challenging uncovering". 24 We should also note that technology isn't self-evident, but that it represent a "historical figure" of truth. Its claim to totality is critically questioned along with its demand that we unreservedly acknowledge technology as framing our existence (Gestell). 25 Technology becomes ambiguous. 26 This follows from the recognition that if it is biased and merely conditioned (given) then technology also refers to other potential ways of living with and within it. Technology cannot be reduced to a metaphysical leading figure to our present. 27 It is also a potential and necessary guide to a transition to a new way of acting in our world.
We demand of a philosophy that takes as its concern a time so strongly affected by the negative impact of our relations to people and nature 28 that it no longer restricts itself to a choice between technocracy and a romantic return to nature, but that it designates possible other, non-metaphysical beings of technology that would enrich our human acts.
So as not to get bogged down in cultural criticism and abstract utopianism it is imperative for an attempt at such a philosophy to de-structure the metaphysical grounds that shape our present understanding of technology. 29 What we suggest here will soon be realised: most solutions considered today -and that includes radical proposals -are contained within a metaphysical frame, and therefore they are from the outset incapable of instigating fundamental change.

The necessary destruction of the basic tenets of metaphysics a) The human as subject and the question of a social ethic
The demarcation of the human as subject, with its mathematically operationalizable and objectifiable correlate, continues to play a key part in the denomination of our relation to the world. 30 The human subject stands against the objective world. He wants to understand how the world works; however, his acts in it will change the world. Understanding how acts are grounded in will 31 is simply a different way of describing the "challenge" effective in technology. Ethics are given through how subjects are instructed to act correctly. 32 This is the manner in which we often hear of a plan for an "Ethic for a time of technology". 33 On the other hand we can also observe many failed contemporary attempts to realise a human ethic. Either our ethical models have no effect and circumvented when they encounter unforeseen contexts 34 , or they reveal an unquestionably dogmatic, violent and inhuman character in their elitist and undemocratic pretensions. 35 These considerations give expression to the familiar condition that the subject (Individuum or person) has an ever-decreasing part to play in society, so much so that it is on the verge of becoming an ideological chimera. Usually attempts to bypass this tendency make references to a principle of humans' social character, providing a ground for an analysis of social conditions that includes requisite instructions for how persons should act.

b) The intersubjective character of language: conditions for society as communicative community
One influential way to avoid the problem of the subject in a time of technology is to propagate a model where language realises a communicative community. As Marx noted, "language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men." 36 Habermas gives expression to this theory in his assertion that our communicative competency precedes our linguistic skills. 37 In programmes quite given over to social change it becomes a theory which propagates the idea of a "communicative society as the transcendental condition for social sciences". 38 Language continues to be interpreted instrumentally, only now as a "social" subject that nevertheless still acts as self-consciously on nature as the isolated subject once did. 39 The onto-theological condition of metaphysics 40 cannot be denied. Here a brief reference to it must suffice: the law of non-contradiction secures the identity that provides the ground for both science and social acts. The human world is divided and our mastery (Herrschaft) is abandoned in dichotomous terms. 41 Yet, the principle of sufficient reason grounds a hierarchical structure that is given as much in the question of our transcendental condition as it is in the priorities' necessary "validity". 42 A destruction of these metaphysical conditions in order to prepare the ground for a new technological reality would limit the law of non-contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason to their one-sided meaning. We shall in what follows merely make a brief remark on the question of whether a Marxist approach to technology can respond to this requirement.

c) Materialist-dialectic conditions of society and the problem of technology
In dialectical materialism desubjectivation appears to have progressed to the utmost. "Contexts" and "people", "nature and history" are dialectically interconnected terms. Hegel's followers "suspend" the dichotomies of our understanding and thinking in their dialectical approach. 43 Even language is no longer approached as an instrument. 44 It is nevertheless clear that the Marxist treatment of the problem and social effects of technology is curiously "naive". Within their optimistic view of social progress technology is limited to an in principle unproblematic component of socialist society. 45

III. The consequences of a radical critique of technology for anoutline of social acts
A radical critique of the metaphysical dichotomous structure of our conception of reality should not deny the diversity of our world; it merely seeks to question the legitimacy of an approach to the world conceived in contradictory terms (e.g., subject-object, theory-practice). By absolving ourselves from these dichotomies we can engage with a topology closer to reality. 46 With such an approach we will appraise our issues in accordance with their contexts, or, to put it more precisely, as their contexts. They are not primarily forced into conditions (relations) but are allowed to unfold from their "contexts". 47 Such a social course of action clearly acts radically against the present. 48