The Confrontation with the Unbridled Beast

Heidegger and the Challenge of the Cybernetic Age

CYBERNETICS

kybernetes: the steersman

But where danger threatens
That which saves from it also grows.
Hölderlin, ‘Patmos’

There is a steadily widening rift between scientific knowledge and ordinary everyday experiences in the world; between “calculable nature” and the “poetic naturalness” of the world. The light that technology brings into the world is overshadowed by its violence and destructiveness towards the natural world. The world project that determines our time is usually measured only by the successful accomplishments attained by the technological mastery over nature. The fundamental objective of our epoch is to develop a relationship with technology that resists its devastation.
According to Heidegger, this is an extremely difficult task to which art may yet be able to give an adequate response. Art grows out of the danger of technology as the saving power.

In Heidegger’s last lecture, delivered to the Athens Academy of Arts and Science, “The Origin of Art and the Destination of Thinking”, the scientific world is determined as the cybernetic world. It is not that Heidegger does not acknowledge the accomplishments of technology: the question Heidegger draws attention to is its exploitive mentality. Today, world civilisation is dominated by modern European science and technology. “Our stay in the world is determined by scientific technology.” Although the Athens address alerts us to the deep need of our times, it does not spell out, however, any specific way art would address the problems of the cybernetic project but indicates a certain direction that art can embark upon.

In Heidegger’s view, the essence of art and the essence of technology are intertwined. Therefore, the project for art is not so much to be the counterpoint to the technological world but perhaps to enter a dialogue with technology. In this dialogue, the discussion of the limits to the technological grasp on experiencing the world can lead to a new path whereby human beings can once again dwell poetically. Heidegger’s view of technology allows him to find a positive relation to it, but only so long as we maintain skills for disclosing otherness and differences of local worlds.

Early Greek Thought and the Essence of Technology

For Heidegger, the essence of technology is a way of revealing that does not allow things to come forth as they are but literally provokes and demands that things come forth within a planned context. This is quite different from poiesis, which brings things forth in a manner that does not provoke.

Heidegger interprets technology not with an anthropological or instrumental perspective but ontologically. For Heidegger, technology is a way humans are disclosed. Accordingly, there have been a number of disclosures of being in the West, each focused by a particular cultural paradigm which he describes as a specific way that beings make sense of the world – “a method that makes possible for things and beings to appear in a certain way,” that is, creating a coherent mode in which the world is perceived.

For the Greeks, this relationship to being is decisive as perceiving nature as physis. Heidegger sought a “step back” to the early Greeks’ interpretation of physis that could establish a receptivity and attunement towards things. Heidegger’s approach was to let things be themselves.
The earthly and worldly appearance of entities is what the Greeks called physis; “the self-generating, bringing-forth of living things.” Moreover, physis also names the presencing by virtue of which such things come into appearance within a world. Physis is then twofold: generative and disclosive

Heidegger associated physis with the event of “self-emergence”. Moreover, he also linked physis to: “appearing, shining, showing forth”. The interpretation of physis, then, according to Heidegger, translates as “self-emergence and appearing”. The Greek experience, according to Heidegger, is not that things simply lie present, and the totality of things is given the name, but how things emerge, the “self-opening” and “rising” that at the same time returns to the emergence and thus closes itself “in that which gives presence to a present being”. This, then, is the Greek experience of “bringing to presence”.

Physis brings forth the human necessity to disclose what physis brings forth. The self-producing dimension of physis at work in living things at the same time resists the intrusions of the disclosive dimension of physis at work through human existence. Heidegger frequently cited Heraclitus’s saying: “Physis loves to conceal itself”.

Art, Techne, and Poiesis

Production is dependent on both aspects of physis: the self-producing aspect involved in the emergence of things of the earth, and the disclosive aspect involved in letting these things appear within a world. The name for physis in human existence is poiesis—the disclosiveness which makes bringing-forth (production) possible.

Techne belongs to the rising and the abiding, that is, to the physis. In order for physis and techne to come together, an element is needed, which the archaic Greeks only cautiously touched upon: the lightning of Zeus, which directs everything. Lightning shows things in their specific outline, bringing to light the multiplicity of things. It is a bringing forth to appearance.
But this bringing-forth-to-appearance, which lighting accomplishes in entities, is also a steering intervention in the movement of things themselves.

The movement which brings-forth and establishes is the steering that determines everything. It corresponds to the lightning outbreak of light as a movement that brings forth. Physis for the ancient Greeks, then, “is a luminous eruption of living energy, inexhaustibly appearing and bringing things into the light”.

Thus, techne belongs to the rising and the abiding, that is, to physis. Art then, could derive its provenance from the role of the goddess.

Heidegger maintains that the artwork cannot be understood as arising from handicraft; instead, handicraft and equipment can only attain their ontologically disclosive power through the “world” opened up by the work of art . He had the following to say about this particular knowledge:
“To have that in view which is important for the production of a structure and a work.”.
There is another relationship between art and technology that Heidegger explores in The Question Concerning Technology: that is, the relation between poetising and producing. Heidegger quotes Plato’s Symposium:
“Every occasion for whatever passes beyond the non-present and goes forward into presencing is poiesis, bringing-forth.”

For Heidegger this is a “sighting in advance”; he claimed in his earlier writings on art that all art is poetic. “The essence of art is poetry, which is, in turn, the founding of truth”. The term poiesis (Hervorbringen) is a means of “bringing forth”, of producing. The Greeks used it to describe not only artistic production but also craft production; it was a matter of bringing something forth into manifestness. Poetry discloses the gods needed to order and found the world; genuine producing discloses things respectfully, in accordance with the vision of the poet.

The correlation between techne and poiesis lies in the interpretation assigned to a certain “looking in advance”. Heidegger stresses that such vision in advance forms the very center of the structure of production.

Heidegger shows how the determination of poiesis as production came to be called aesthetics. If the vision of the look, the idea, is central to the structure of poiesis, then in artistic poiesis the insight of the artist will be primary. The actual production of the work will be subordinate. <– Added a period.
Heidegger would undertake to rethink poetry outside the classical determination of poiesis as bringing forth into manifestation”.

The Rise of the Technological Worldview

In the Middle Ages, humans were perceived as being created by God. According to Heidegger, this final stage in the history of understandings of human beings in the West is technological. It replaces the world of physis and the Christians’ world with a world in which subjects control objects.

The technological world view encompasses a totalising, homogenised understanding of things, that is, an ordering of things that no longer leaves any room for reflection or “letting things be” (Gelassenheit). Heidegger calls this ordering of entities “enframing” (Ge-stell). Under the reign of the Gestell, the resources of the world are made to stand ready for the mastery and ordering of production. All entities, including humans, are reduced to a homogenised level of resources on hand to be ordered and used with maximum flexibility and efficient ordering, not to satisfy our desires, but simply for the sake of ordering. In 1950, Heidegger claimed that humans were entering a final epoch which he called the technological understanding of being. Humans become objects – a part of the standing reserve. Thus, Heidegger coined the term Enframing (Ge-stell). He writes:

Cybernetics and the Notion of Steering

Technology names a way of presencing that masters and secures all that comes to presence as an object for a subject. That natural science and life today become controlled by cybernetics in increasing measure is not accidental; rather, it is foreshadowed in the historical origin of modern knowledge and technology.

Heidegger traces the correlation evident in early Greek thinking to cybernetics (kybernetes). The Pre-Socratic thinker, Heraclitus of Ephesus, speaks of steering in the movement of lightning in which the transformation of fire occurs: the flash of lightning or the lightning bolt brings to light multiple entities appearing within the moment of brightness. Heidegger says that this “bringing-forth-to-appearance” which lightning accomplishes in entities, is also a steering intervention in the movement of things themselves. Thus, steering does not possess the characteristic of moving entities, but rather the character of installing movement in entities. “So, the steering bringing-forth-to-appearance of lightning gives entities not only their outline but their thrust.”

Cybernetics’ fundamental trait is steering, that is, “bringing-into-control” movement. A specific direction is conveyed to things by applying force. Plato uses the analogy of the helmsman for illustrating the power of rationality. A ship without a rudder and helmsman is a plaything of the seas and winds. A desired course is forcibly brought about. Thus, steering can be described as an intrusive, transfiguring movement that exerts a desired course or control over something. It is characterised by the moment of coercive and precalculated regulation, bringing into control a movement by force with the disposition of violence in itself.

Steering is then an intervening influence upon movement that brings something onto a desired course. “The human phenomenon of steering is characterised by the coercive and precalculated regulation.” The cybernetic project has in advance the supposition that the fundamental trait of all calculable world processes is steering.

Technology and Society: Feedback and Control

When Heidegger speaks of cybernetics, he is directly recalling the point that mathematical physics cannot be sustained without challenging the role of a paradigmatic science. The cybernetic world mastery places technology above social institutions as the constructed sphere of the lived world.

The world relations of modern man, and with them the whole social existence of man, is locked in the realm of domination of cybernetic science.

Machines, in a postmodern context, control themselves. They are self-regulating systems which work automatically. The cybernetic function of feedback manifests in the machines’ self-organising processes. For example, a computer now has the capacity to undergo deconstruction and reassembly; disk defragmentation and other self-diagnostic capabilities. However, the original concept of cybernetics as information feedback for control goes well beyond the application of computer systems. Cybernetics provides a framework for many scientific disciplines such as bionics, robotics, and genetic engineering.

For Heidegger, steering has become so fundamental that it occupies and determines the whole of natural science and the behaviour of humans.

The birth of the cybernetic age was the day when dependence upon computers and communications systems and high-tech gadgetry exceeded the ability to live without them. Machines are now linked together globally, forming systems and networks that inform one another. Automation has become the mode of production replacing workers. The purpose of technology today is the increased flexibility and efficient ordering of resources, not to serve as objects to satisfy our desires, but simply for the sake of ordering. For Heidegger, technology determines a new understanding of being. The purpose of technology today is to increase flexibility and efficiency so that the fixity of even the past can be conquered; flexible ordering for the sake of more ordering and reordering without limit.

The cybernetic project encloses beings and their relations to the world in the most extensive feedback control system. Technologically advanced societies are themselves seen as complex systems. Thus, the feedback cycle connects theories to culture and culture to theories through the medium of technology. The relationship of beings to the world is understood according to the paradigm of the feedback control system and ‘the complete calculability of the organic and inorganic world.’

This futurology brings that captivity into the programmable, and the industrial society exists only on the basis of its incarceration within its own constructs.

For Heidegger, it is important for humans to think about being locked in the technological scientific world project. He advocates a thinking concerning itself with the origins of global civilisation. The task is to overcome forgetfulness, that is, seeing the scientific world project as the only possible way of perceiving the world.

We are thinking of the possibility that the world civilisation which is just beginning might one day overcome the technological-scientific-industrial character as the sole criterion of humanity’s world

Heidegger’s Challenge: Rethinking Our Relationship with Technology

Heidegger views the contemporary world in terms of the development of modern subjectivity as rapidly becoming the dominant form of subjectivity. This means industrial societies force their way of seeing onto other societies and determine how beings are to be understood and the criteria for an appropriate association. The criterion for success is economic efficiency regardless of what is happening to nature and humans. Progress is usually measured only by the successful accomplishments attained by the technological mastery over nature.

The Path Forward: Questioning and Poetic Dwelling

There is emerging today a discourse concerned with the extent to which nature can be controlled. There is a steadily widening rift between scientific knowledge and ordinary everyday experiences of the world, between “calculable nature” and the “poetic naturalness” of the world. The light that technology sheds onto the world is overshadowed by its destructiveness towards the natural world.

The fundamental objective of our epoch is to develop a relationship with technology that will be resistant to its devastation. According to Heidegger, this is an extremely difficult task.

The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the saving powers begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought.

For Heidegger, discussion concerning the limits to the technological experience of the world can lead to a new path as long as we maintain awareness for disclosing otherness and differences of local worlds. Gaining a free relation to technology – a way of living with technology that does not allow it to “warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature.”