Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav Kolkata event honours four Clergymen
Pope Francis asks businesses to support working women: They’re ‘afraid to get pregnant’
Study: Christianity may lose majority, plurality status in U.S. by 2070
Indian politician declines Magsaysay Award under party pressure
Like John Paul II, Pope Francis heads to Kazakhstan during time of war
Paul Thelakat
“Calculative kinds of thinking …do not fulfil all the requirements of man’s thinking nature.” – Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (1899-1976) the German philosopher’s study of modern science and technology is still very influential today with his famous comment, “Science does not think.”1 It is indeed a provocative critique. Heidegger’s critique of and attitude toward science-technology indicate his attitude against science. It is not blind prejudice but a consequence of the detailed philosophical analysis. The question of “thinking” is always forgotten according to him.
Science is not thinking but calculating or computing. He calls “science”, especially Newtonian physics he considers to be “modern science.” Science uses the method of mathematical character to grasp the being as an object. The language of science is mathematics. The basic stance toward things is that they already are. Things are given to us, they are the data. Heidegger’s later claim that “Modern science is grounded in the essence of technology,” expressed in 1976 in the form of a question: “Is modern natural science the foundation of modern technology—as is supposed—or is it …already the basic form of technological thinking?” All the beings are already understood in science mathematically. It is a projection of the thingness of things. What is the thing? We are so familiar with things that we no longer sense anything questionable behind them. A thing is that around which the properties have assembled. We speak in this connection of the core of things. Mathematics is a particular stamp on things, which is the consequence of mathematical projection. The use mathematical thinking, to understand how beings and the world appear, that is the essence of mathematics and modern science. The idea that the universe “is written in the language of mathematics “is as old as the Pythagoreans, and made definitive for modern physics by Galileo.” None of the new physics of the twentieth century challenges this mathematical projection. lf Heidegger is right that “modern physics is the herald of enframing insofar as “nature …is identifiable through calculation and …remains orderable as a system of information”
René Descartes pointed out “cogito ergo sum”, “I think therefore I am”. The modern scientific attitude itself is just a result of Cartesian subjectivism. Modern science needs an absolute and eternal foundation of knowledge beyond nature (meta ta physika, literlly. after the Physics).The absolute ground is sought for all knowledge by doubting everything, that is the cogito. So the ‘I’ or human subjectivity was declared the centre of thought. The modern era’s standpoint of the I and its subjectivism sprang forth from this. For Descartes, the Being of the ego is demonstrated in the act of thinking, and for the first time in the history of thought it is seen as a subject. Things are essentially what stand as other in relation to the “subject,” and lie over and against the subject as objects. Things themselves become objects. We can see why methods of modern science might be considered the result of Cartesian subjectivism. The absolute foundation of thinking in self-consciousness is that all reality is divided into subject and object.
In the technological age, for something to ‘be’ means for it to be raw material – part of the endless process of production and consumption. In the endless technological drive for efficiency, the earth, its creatures and our fellow human beings are reduced to the status of raw material – Heidegger’s word for this is ‘standing reserve’ (Bestand). The world as a whole becomes standing reserve. Now everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. To exist for the term das Ge-stell, the term Heidegger uses to describe the essence of technology is ‘enframing’. Enframing allows human being to reveal reality as standing reserve. In this sense, technology is totalising. It reduces the metaphorical, expressive powers of language and thinking, in order to make reality calculable and manipulable.
There are three respects in which the character of framing as the highest danger is manifest. Firstly, there is contained in it the impending possibility that human being may come to take the measure of all things. Man is the measure. Secondly, the framing represents the highest danger by the fact that it poses a threat to human being’s own relation to himself to the extent that provoking-uncovering is taken as the standard by which human being is measured. Human being is seen as reserve and yet he continues to give himself airs of being master on earth. Everything that comes into contact with technology becomes uniformly subsumed into a framework of sufficiently exploited resources. Thirdly modern technology has no boundaries or limits and so in the end, humanity itself becomes another element of technological ordering. Humanity as the only producer and consumer of technology becomes that which technology primarily produces and consumes. The horror of the technological age is that human beings are also seen as raw material. Thus, the ‘question concerning technology’ is ultimately a question about human dignity. The danger, therefore, is for Heidegger not the potential physical self-annihilation of humanity, but rather that intensive technological production will overpower man’s capacity for manifold modes of disclosure.
Philosophic thought would be replaced with utilitarian cognition; artistic creativity would atrophy as a result of endless innovative production, and political action would be obviated by social engineering. There is every-where the desire to conquer nature but in this process, the value of the conqueror himself, who is man is destroyed and his very existence threatened. Bertrand Russell affirms it when he says: “some of these scientific advancements create new fears and doubts as to the effects of science on human life”. This characteristic of technology is an objectification of its role as a door to man’s inauthentic existence. Since according to John Macquarie “whatever kind of relation to the other that depersonalizes and dehumanizes is an inauthentic existence”. It is clear that technology is not creating an atmosphere for authentic existence. That a hidden meaning touches us everywhere in the world of technology. Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. The rise of modern technology transforms human beings into standing-reserve raw material.
When we look at the thingness of beings, the meaning of being itself is hidden. The apprehensibility and the objectivity of a thing is grounded in the encounter of the world, but objectivity is not a presupposition for the encounter. This relationship is also inverted if things in nature are revealed as a particular thingness, then are subsequently given certain value predicates, such as “good, bad, plain, beautiful, suitable, unsuitable, and the like”2 Although it may seem that the value is the result of an encounter with being in the world, in reality this value is entirely a product of subjectivity. For value necessarily implies validity for a particular subject, “what is valid does not have validity because it is in itself a value; rather, a value is a value because it has validity. It has validity because it has been posited as valid.”3 Therefore, “values ‘are’ only where there is reckoning, just as there are ‘objects’ only for ‘subjects.’”4 In Heidegger’s view, such valorization caused by this inversion has taken a terrible toll on modern society. When Nietzsche declared in 19th century Europe that God is dead and that all values were nothing but a form of nihilism, Heidegger heard this declaration and interpreted it in terms of Being-forgotten.
Should we require science to have the ability to think about existence? Is Heidegger actually criticizing science itself, or is he talking about the limitations of science? Is this “non-thinking” of science an advantage? The point to be made is that it is not science itself that Heidegger is criticizing, and even the assertion that science does not think is not a shortcoming in Heidegger’s view. What Heidegger criticizes is the fact that humans, as subjects, do not think, and instead use science, so that the meaning of their own life world is forgotten. The advantage is that science’s inability to think allows it to remain neutral and does not regard creation as inherently superior or inferior to God’s “created thing”, as medieval scientific theology did. Therefore, it also means that this unconditional scientific thinking should have nothing to do with what is good or bad for humanity. Scientific knowledge does not think about any meaning, Being, or even human existence itself. If we take modern science seriously, that is, if we accept that it constructs its own objects while destroying meaning, we should also agree to some extent with the following claim. Something is nonetheless certain: if ethic exists, science has nothing to say about it, and, without doubt, qua science, it can do nothing with it. The technological advancement in nuclear weapons seriously threatens the continued existence of humanity and even the whole range of living things. A third world war would almost certainly be the last war…our planet would be completely devastated and almost all forms of life, animals, plants and bacteria would suffer the same fate. Modern medical science is often accused of reducing patients to a bundle of anatomical sites and physiological processes, each with its own scientific model at the chemical, molecular, or physiological level, with little consideration of the human life in how they affected our life world. When we use medical technology, do we need to consider the meaning behind the case? Or, furthermore, if science is thinking about the thingness of Being, should the meaning of Being be allowed to instruct or qualify scientific thinking? The fundamental problem, then, the problem of thinking, is not science do not think, but humanity, the very subject who should think, has not thought. “What is most considerable shows itself in our considerable age in this: that we are not yet thinking. We are not yet thinking because what is to be thought turns away from the human and not at all only because humans do not sufficiently turn themselves toward [or devote themselves to] what is to be thought.”5 It is not important that the objectivity of scientific thinking allows science to maintain its purity. What is important is that we do not unthinkingly invade the world of our lives with scientific thinking, impoverishing it. “Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?” is simply forgotten issue.
The homelessness of contemporary human being is related to the ‘dis-essencing’ of language and thinking. The framing does not coincidentally occur in the age of homelessness. It is the root from which this condition grows. The problem of homelessness is a by-product of man’s failure to address the question of existence. The uprooting engendered by modern technology precludes the possibility of undistorted face-to-face interaction. In the technological epoch, all individuals are compelled to present themselves as standard-reserve. We cannot ignore the social, cultural, psychological and ontological significance of homelessness in our contemporary world. Humanity has been uprooted from the traditions of land, language, ethnicity and religion, and it has found no substitutes for them. The question we are asking today is whether humankind is losing its capacity to find a home on earth. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology. Heidegger says: ‘We are too late for the gods, and too early for Being.’ And yet, ‘ Being’s poem, just begun, is man. This hope that Heidegger hints at rests on the possibility for a fundamental transformation. To be truly homeless is to lose one’s ability to reveal the world as the place for human dwelling. To be truly at home is to exercise one’s ontologically disclosive capacities. Being at home in the world and being free are the same thing. To be at home everywhere is to experience the freedom that allows our disclosure of Being. The world is moving away from all of its acquired conditions of truth, sense, and value. Heidegger claims that this technological/ cybernetic concealment of poifisis is the supreme danger. He also says where danger is, grows / the saving power also. As Heidegger writes, “the threat does not come from something at hand and objectively present, but rather from the fact that everything at hand and objectively absolutely has nothing more to ‘say’ to us.”6 “Calculative kinds of thinking …do not fulfil all the requirements of man’s thinking nature. Poets demand of us another kind of thinking — less exact but no less strict.”7 Heidegger himself once said that “the most extreme sharpness and depth of thought belongs to genuine and great mysticism”8 “A science of ultimates… The science of self- evident Reality, which cannot be ‘reasoned about’…”9
Notes
Leave a Comment