Read this article, which explores the anti-modernism present in Heidegger's work. Do you agree that the anti-modernist movement longs for the traditions and certainties before modernity? Does this longing equate to the principles of existentialism? Do most of us wish to return to a world that no longer exists?
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."