Technos and Pathos

Heidegger's critique of the modern ethos concerning technology can perhaps also be read as lamenting the loss of roots and community, mourning the loss of a direct, non-exploitative relationship between man and nature. Certainly, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the omnipresent threat of nuclear war today have vindicated Heidegger's argument that technological man has appropriated, converted and exploited the majesty of nature into mere "standing reserve" for his own purposes. But there are other aspects of Heidegger's critique that also involve the discourses of melancholy, especially in terms of the overarching theme of cultural mourning. For example, although Heidegger never witnessed the rise of the computer and the internet in the post-modern age, I believe that he would have diagnosed the proliferation of this technology as contributing to the overall impoverishment of human community ("being-with-others").The following section of this essay to some degree draws upon the work of Hubert Dreyfus, who has written a number of important works on philosophical questions concerning computer technology, and has also astutely explicated Heidegger's critique of Cartesianism and its implications for the philosophy of technology. I will emphasize these themes explicitly in the context of "discourses of melancholy", as further examples of Heidegger's critique of the rootlessness and disconnectedness afflicting modern (and by extension, postmodern) existence.

In order to understand Heidegger here, we need to isolate some of the basic assumptions of his critique of Descartes' epistemology. The Cartesian separation of the subject from the world (mind / body) constitutes, for Heidegger, a basic misconception. It defines a person as a self-enclosed conscious mind, epistemologically disconnected from the world. Cartesian thought has thus led to a number of philosophical pseudo-problems, e.g., the "problem of other minds", orthe "problem of the external world." These are pseudo-problems because human beings do not first exist and then somehow have to "find the world." Human being is essentially and from the outset being-in-the-world. Being-in-the world and being-with-others are not contingent facts that somehow could be otherwise, or propositions that are in any ways in need of proof, but rather are our starting assumptions, necessary structures of the human condition itself.

Given this radically concrete, context-bound premise, Heidegger might well have viewed some variations of the current proliferation of computer technology as symptomatic of a deeper cultural dislocation. Consider children playing computer games in a "virtual" playground, staring at screens for hours instead of climbing on actual trees outside. What happens when people begin to spend more and more time online, slowly starting to live lives that are more "virtual" than "real"? At what point do virtual contexts become impoverished versions of (or inadequate substitutes for) face-to-face, physical interactions? What might Heidegger have said about other post-modern, technologically mediated phenomena such as distance education, where entire courses of academic study are offered online, rather than in a traditional classroom, not to mention even more curious developments such as online dating, or "cybersex"? Postmodernist thinkers like Baudrillard have famously described the "reductio ad absurdum" occurring when reality itself becomes indistinguishable from the simulations (or "simulacra") generated by image-based media. What will come next?

Contemporary developments in computer technology reflect advances in terms of efficiency and accessibility, but what has been lost? These experiences, as they are mediated through computer screens, involve a loss of immediacy and direct, face-to-face human connection/interaction. Computer mediated contexts involve a paradoxical kind of interaction in which one is simultaneously "being-with" and "not-being-with" others, as the other is somehow present in cyberspace but not physically "here." In this sense, they somehow are "uprooted", existing on one or more levels abstracted from physical reality. Just as cyberspace is "everywhere and nowhere", Heidegger would probably have viewed these new technologies as offering "everything and nothing", another symptom of a scientifically-advanced but increasingly rootless, disconnected and alienated post-modern world. This is thus another example of how Heidegger's thought can be read through anti-modernist lenses as a discourse of melancholy.

The discourses of melancholy explored in this paper therefore all implicate mourning and loss as reactions to modernist culture. These discourses of melancholy can be also seen as relevant to postmodern developments. They thus constitute an important aspect of our cultural inheritance, a theme which recurs universally whenever a society loses its foundations, whenever "a new philosophy calls all in doubt."