Technology as Enframing
Or: Yet another deranged ramble.
In one of my classes this semester, we were assigned a final project wherein we had to critique a paper produced by a generative artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT. After some initial indecisiveness, I decided to write on the concept of the “Superhumanities”, a neologism coined by Rice scholar Jeffrey J. Kripal,1 and its manifestation in the environmentalist thought of late 20th Century German philosopher Hans Jonas.
However, as I continued thinking about this assignment — especially considering Jonas’ intellectual debts to his teacher, Martin Heidegger2, and their respective philosophies of technology — the ironic nature of the assignment began to dawn on me. Jonas was a critic of technology, yet my first encounter with him would have to go through technology.
The thread of technological skepti-criticism is perhaps most potently articulated by Heidegger in his essay “Question Concerning Technology”.
The essence of modern technology lies in enframing. Enframing belongs within the destining of revealing. … But when we consider the essence of technology we experience enframing as a destining of revealing.
-Heidegger, “Question Concerning Technology”, p. 3303
As one realizes when one spends some time with Heidegger, his writing is dense and obscure, often something that gives way to an appreciation of its profundity on further examination. Heidegger’s concern here is not with any particular piece of technology, but with technology as a whole — technology affects the way in which we understand the world, and understand ourselves. In Heidegger-speak, technology reveals things to us as a “standing-reserve”,4 where human beings now solely see the things in the world as a technical resource ripe for exploitation. In this way, technology destines revealing to a seeing-to-exploit, instead of an untarnished, un-enframed seeing. Put another way, technology prevents us from seeing and understanding authentically.5
Jonas too shares Heidegger’s skepticism towards technology and its capacity to reorient human understandings. As Jonas notes in The Phenomenon of Life:
Modern technology, going beyond the mere production and application of power, tends increasingly to couple the power engine with robot mechanisms — mechanisms that replace man’s perception and judgement in the serving of the machine, just as the power engines replaced man’s arms in supplying the moving force.
-Jonas, “Cybernetics and Purpose: A Critique”, p. 1096
In this way, Jonas’ view of technology is very similar to that of Heidegger, with technology serving to obscure human understandings of the world. To Jonas, this is the reason technology poses a problem: by obscuring human understandings and seeing the world as something apart from us, something that can be exploited and used. This centers the human being within the world, privileging them above the non-human entities of the world, a prejudice that Jonas claims ought to be re-examined (IR 46).7
Thus, technology to both Heidegger and Jonas presents an epistemological difficulty — it fundamentally affects the way we know, that is, affecting it for the worse. The irony of interpreting Jonas through a generative AI like ChatGPT lies in the very act of utilizing a technological medium to critique Jonas' philosophy, of which his critique of technology was a significant part. By employing a generative AI to interpret Jonas' ideas, we inadvertently reinforce the very technological framework that Jonas and Heidegger warn against. We rely on a tool that epitomizes the enframing they critique, where information is processed and produced algorithmically, divorced from the phenomenological approach characteristic of both Jonas and Heidegger. Insofar as Jonas was a technological critic, I believe that as a reader it is my duty to engage with him in the best way that I can — on my own, reading his words, not reading his words through the frame.
I want to state explicitly here. I hold no animus against the instructor of this course for assigning such a final. Indeed, on a more practical note, the rise of generative artificial intelligence has and no doubt will continue to have an impact on higher education, and even the human condition more broadly. It is undoubtedly important to grapple with this issue, and I am grateful for the opportunity to do so. I also want to say that my interactions with this particular faculty member have always been positive, and their comments both in class and in personal interactions have always been insightful and prompted further reflection on my part. One can ask little more of an educator. My sole motivation for this endeavor merely arises from a wish to first encounter Jonas, himself a skeptic of technology, without the technological frame.
On we go.
Hans Jonas as Superhumanist
The Environmental Humanities to Humanist Environmentalism
As Weber warns in his “Science as a Vocation”,8 the rise of disenchantment will lead to a worldview, one in which the sacred is no longer and all is seen as profane. The poignancy of Weber’s warning has only grown in the 21st Century when modern science, as empowered by technology, has only served to further disenchant the world. This phenomenon is not isolated to the natural and/or social scientific viewpoint but has in fact spread to the humanistic worldview too. One can find few better articulations of this topic than that of Charles M. Stang:
The humanities are not really interpreting the human as such, but a pale shadow thereof. They appreciate neither how we humans are in embodied communion with the non-humans or more-than-humans with whom we share this world – animals, plants, fungi, but also gods and spirits – nor how this world itself has dimensions well beyond those we immediately perceive and how many are the ways we know ourselves, others, and the world. In other words, the humanities do not have a sufficiently expansive anthropology, ontology or epistemology; the human, the more-than-human, the world, and our ways of knowing them do not exist in a flatland.
- Charles M. Stang, “The Dream of the Sphere”9
This notion of disenchantment, where the world is stripped of its intrinsic meanings and sacred qualities through the rationalizing effects of scientism, can be seen as a foundational crisis in the way humanity understands itself and its place within the cosmos. As many in the environmental humanities have pointed out, this distancing from the self and the cosmos inevitably leads to disenchanting positivism and anthropocentrism that can be held accountable for the human destructiveness towards nature — nature as a whole is no longer disenchanted, and hence no longer deserving of reverence and protection.10
It's within the intersection of the crisis of meaning and the environmental humanities that Hans Jonas's environmental philosophy becomes particularly relevant, with much of Jonas’ later work focusing on developing an enchanted view of the natural world. It is this enchanted view that forms the basis of Jonas’ environmental thought as set out in his Phenomenon of Life, The Imperative of Responsibility, and Organism and Freedom. In these works, Jonas develops a form of phenomenology that argues for the value of nature by recognizing the profundity of nature’s existence. What Jonas is calling for goes beyond the mere recognition that nature exists, but to come to appreciate the ways in which we see, understand, and engage with the natural world as its inhabitants. This existentialist perspective on nature entails a journey beyond the self, leading to a realization of what it means to be truly human. Following Sartre's assertion in Existentialism is a Humanism that existentialism itself epitomizes humanism, Jonas’s approach can be seen as a form of humanist environmentalism.11 In this sense of Sartre’s humanism, Jonas’ humanist understanding of the environment that we find an articulation of an environmental ethics.
Seeing the Superhuman
Jonas’ reimagining of humans’ view of the environment through an existentialist lens marks a radical departure from traditional humanism by advocating a deep ecological empathy that positions humans not as masters of the earth, but as integral parts of a broader ecological community. This perspective, which he elaborates on in his philosophical works, underscores a new way of understanding the world which might be described as ‘superhumanism’. This mode of ‘superhumanism’ — a derivative of ‘Superhumanities’ introduced in Jeffrey Kripal’s The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities — seeks a mode of understanding that Kripal describes as:
a radical new order of knowledge of an empircal-imaginal nature. Such an order moves beyond, outside, or to the side of the present distinctions or splittings between the humanities and the sciences, between the subjective and the objective, between the mental and the material, between the transcendent and the immanent, to something deeper that grounds, founds, and expresses them both.
- J. Kripal, The Superhumanities, p.62 (Emphasis in text).
These new modes of understanding, as articulated in Kripal's vision of the Superhumanities, challenge traditional dichotomies and encourage a holistic integration of human knowledge and experience, much like the phenomenological approach undertaken by Jonas.
In the context of Jonas’ environmental philosophy, this superhumanist approach emphasizes the ontological aspects of life and the view of these ontological aspects as transcending the material and hence can only be understood by the imaginal. In doing so, Jonas’ superhumanism offers a framework that aligns closely with Kripal’s ambitions for the Superhumanities, redefining our place in the world as one of active participation in a shared ecological community.
The Critique of Heidegger
It is important to understand that Jonas’ phenomenological environmentalism does not arise in isolation. Jonas was deeply influenced by his teacher Martin Heidegger, and his own philosophy builds on Heidegger’s foundations in numerous ways. In the third chapter of the first division of his Being and Time, Heidegger makes the following remark about the environment:
As the ‘environment’ is discovered, the ‘Nature’ thus discovered is encountered too. If its kind of Being as ready-to-hand is disregarded, this ‘Nature’ itself can be discovered and defined simply in its pure presence-at-hand. But when this happens, the Nature which ‘stirs and strives’, which assails us and enthralls us as landscape, remains hidden. … Thus along with the work [producing things from nature], we encounter not only entities ready-to-hand but also entities with Dasein’s kind of Being.
- Heidegger, Being and Time, I.3, p. 10012
It is important to situate this passage from Being and Time in Heidegger’s discussion of being-in-the-world (BT 91). Daseinden (pl. of Dasein, roughly “human beings”)13 live in a condition of being-in-the-world which, as David Storey claims, “does not refer to an ontological dimension or place or space different from or separate from human beings.”14 In this way, Heidegger can be seen as rejecting anthropocentrism, placing humans and non-humans in the same realm without privileging the former over the latter. In encountering this world, then, human beings come into with contact with nature. Yet Heidegger distinguishes between two ways of viewing nature — recognizing a “Being as ready-to-hand” and “pure presence-at-hand”. Heidegger disfavors the view of readiness-to-hand — where the world is seen in terms of its ends, in terms of what it can be used to make (BT 97-98). This contrasts the superior view of presence-at-hand which is the paradigm of theoretical understanding, appreciating a thing for what it is (BT 103). As Heidegger goes on to point out, viewing nature as something to be used and exploited obscures its capacity to be inspiring in its beauty. Though, even when this inspirational beauty is largely hidden, it is not completely hidden. Even in an approach that was meant to use the natural, its beauty and its Being can and are recognized. As Storey notes, the natural for Heidegger “seems to point to another, transhuman, extraworldly order of being.”15 Yet, despite this recognition of the transcendent within the natural in Heidegger, Jonas still found Heidegger’s environmentalism problematic.
The thrust of Jonas’ criticism of Heidegger’s environmentalism lies in his view that Heidegger’s notion of presence-at-hand did not escape the disenchantment and anthropocentrism that Heidegger sought to argue against. As Jonas notes in his essay “Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihlism”:
[Presence-at-hand] is what is merely and indifferently “extant,” the “there” of bare nature, there to be looked at outside the relevance of the existential situation and of practical “concern.” It is being, as it were, stripped and alienated to the mode of mute thinghood. This is the status left to “nature” for the relation of theory — a deficient mode of being — and the relation in which it is so objectified is a deficient mode of existence, its defection from the futurity of care into the spurious present of mere onlooking curiosity. … No philosophy has ever been less concerned about nature athan Existentialism, for which it has no dignity left.
- Jonas, “Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihlism”, PL, p. 231-232
Here, Jonas points out that Heidegger’s presence-at-hand — as a form of theoretical understanding — is not able to generate appropriate concerns for the natural. Understanding the natural for what it is through presence-at-hand, Jonas claims, seems to merely be a recognition that the natural is there around us, without consideration for its Being, without what Storey had previously referred to as the “transhuman” and “extraworldly”.16 This inevitably leads to a scientistic understanding of the natural, demoting it out of the realm of Being, turning it into a “mere onlooking curiosity”. Jonas goes on to draw an explicit connection between Heidegger’s understanding of the environment and scientism, proclaiming that the “existentialist depreciation of the concept of its spiritual denudation at the hands of physical science”, noting its commonalities with the view of nature presented in Gnosticism (PL 232) — an early Christian sect that was the topic of much of Jonas’ early work. This critical assessment of aspects of Heidegger’s existentialist-environmentalism sets the stage for Jonas to articulate his own project of environmentalist philosophy, which seeks to articulate an environmentalist phenomenology less susceptible to disenchantment.
With these desiderata in mind, Jonas’ positive project is articulated as a hybrid of Heidegger’s existentialism and ancient natural philosophies. Jonas posits that the cause of the rupture between human beings and the natural world is one arising out of an ignorance of metaphysics and ontology (PL 234). By ignoring the Being of the natural — not appreciating the profundity of its existence — contemplation is merely of the material, leading to the scientism that Jonas is trying to avoid. Instead, by appreciating Being as Plato did through his theory of forms,17 “Immutable being is everlasting present, in which contemplation can share in the brief durations of the temporal present.” (PL 230) Unlike Heidegger’s understanding of nature as articulated in Being and Time I.3 where an understanding of the Being of nature is secondary to the view of nature as either ready-to-hand or present-at-hand, Jonas centers the Being of nature in his vision. This privileging of the Being of nature — as opposed to particular aspects of its being such as readiness-to-hand or presence-at-hand — grounds his natural investigations in the transhuman and extraworldly realm — the realm of Being. Yet, these metaphysical understandings do not come at the expense of physical ones. As Jonas notes following Heidegger, Being implies Being-in-the-world — metaphysical understandings entail physical ones. It is in these appeals of Jonas to the transcendent and immanent, through his synthesis of the imaginal realm of Being and the empirical world of science, that he is a superhumanist.
Life, Existentially
Perhaps the most important way Jonas claims we can come to an appreciation for the natural is through a renewed understanding of organismic life. Jonas’ claim is that organismic life — even at its most basic level — should be understood through the lens of freedom, noting that “even metabolism, the basic level of all organic existence, exhibits it: that is itself the first form of freedom.” (PL 3) He even acknowledges that such a claim would be puzzling at first glance since freedom is almost antithetical to the automated mechanism of metabolism (PL 3). Yet, Jonas goes on to reaffirm his claim, noting:
Even the trasition from inanimate to animate substance, the first feat of matter’s organizing itself for life, was actuated by a tendency in the depth of being toward the very modes of freedom to which this transition opened the gate.
- Jonas, “Introduction”, PL, p. 4
Hence, even at the most basic level, organismic life has freedom. As something that partakes in metabolism — as something that is alive — an organism is representative of a freedom in that being that allows a transition from the inanimate to the animate. This metaphysical claim can be thought of as analogous to emergent phenomena in biology, where the whole becomes greater than an amalgamation of its parts. He later clarifies:
For the ultimate condition for [freedom] lies in the paradoxical fact that living substance, by some original act of segregation, has taken itself out of the general integration of things in the physical context, set itself over and against the world, and introduced the tension of “to be or not to be” into the neutral assuredness of existence. It did so by assuming a position of hazardous independence from the very matter which is yet indispensable to its being: by divorcing its own identity from that of its temporary stuff, through which it is yet part of the common world.
- Jonas, “Introduction”, PL, p. 4
While this passage restates Jonas’ view of freedom in the Being of organismic life as a setting apart from mere physical being, it offers a further clarification on Jonas’ understanding of the organism. In this way, we can see the Being of the organism as twofold: as the Being of its substance, its cells, and constituent atoms, as well as a Being that is beyond its substance — even though the organism’s substance is a precondition for its Being beyond substance. This distinction between the organism’s (whole) Being as emergent from the Being of its mere substance posits an aspect of the organism that is transcendent, going beyond its materiality.
As Jonas goes on to argue, contained within this beyond-material aspect of an organism is its teleology, a purpose, which in turn shapes their physical, material traits. For Jonas, “the teleological structure and behavior of an organism is not just an alternative choice of description: it is, on the evidence of each one’s own organic awareness, the external manifestation of the inwardness of substance.” (PL 91) It is teleology that is the avenue through which interactions between the beyond-material and material parts of an organism occur. He notes:
For (with apologies for the truism) eyes do have in their physical make-up a reference to seeing, and ears to hearing, and organs generally to their performance, — and, more generally still, organisms to living. This is not just an additional aspect of them, or an optional mode of interpretation: it is their own teleological nature.
- Jonas, “Is God a Mathematician?”, PL p. 90
For Jonas, the central role teleology plays in understanding the organism and its facilitation of interactions between the beyond-material and material aspects of the organism makes it a crucial part of his philosophy of life.18 The purpose, or teleology, of a part of an organism lies beyond its constituent cells — and carbon, nitrogen, and other types of atoms that make the cells up — but is a material manifestation of that organism and part’s purpose. Conversely, within the materiality of a part of an organism, one can come to understand its purpose, even though its purpose is not contained within the materiality of the part. As Jonas scholar Coyne notes, “purpose is not imparted by a Being that transcends the instantiation of that purpose … but is instead identical with that instantiation.”19 Taking the example of sight, an animal that is supposed to be able to see has sight in its teleology — serving as the “reference to seeing” that is in the “physical make-up” of an eye — even though sight is itself not contained within the material of the eye. This interaction between the material Being of the organism and its beyond-material teleology (which is emergent from its materiality) serves as the basis on which Jonas understands both individual organism’s lives, as well as the phenomenon of organismic life as a whole.
Jonas’ unified understanding of organismic life as a whole arises from a teleology that he claims is shared by all organisms. He notes:
But there is always a purporsiveness of an organism as such and its concern in living: effective already in all vegitative tendency, awakening to primordial awareness in the dim reflexes, the responding irritability of lowly organisms; more so in urge and effort and anguish of animal life endowed with mobility and sense-organs; reaching self-transparency in consciousness, will and thought of man: all these being inward aspects of the teleological side in the nature of “matter".”
- Jonas, “Is God a Mathematician?”, PL, p. 90
Jonas makes clear here that all organisms have a purpose: a “concern for living”. This proposition is justified by the observation that even the most basic organisms possess the ability to act in ways that fulfill their needs. For example, a plant needs light and, given its concern in living, it will grow towards the direction of the light when placed in a room that is brighter on one side than another. For Jonas, this does not refute the theory of phototropism — the biological phenomenon where the plant grows toward the light — but complements it, the material process of phototropism is an instantiation of the plant’s teleology — in its concern for life as a light-seeking organism. More generally, as illustrated by Jonas’ comparison, this concern for living and the capacity to respond is shared by all organisms, even if at times that response may not be sufficient to maintain life. In this way, the teleology of concern for living is the hallmark of a living organism, serving as a foundation for Jonas’ environmentalist philosophy.
It is therefore from this understanding of life having a concern for itself that Jonas begins to develop an enchanted view of the natural world. As Jonas goes on to note in Imperative of Responsibility:
But more still than in the extensiveness of the generic spectrum, the interest manifests itself in the intensity of goal-striving of the living creatures themselves, in which the natural purpose becomes increasingly subjective, that is, increasingly the individual executants’ very own. In this sense, every feeling and striving being is not only an end of nature but also an end-in-itself, namely its own end. And precisely here, the self-affirmation of being becomes emphatic in the opposition of life to death. Life is the explicit confrontation of being with the not-being.
- Jonas, “The Good, the ‘Ought’, and Being”, IR, p. 81
Having shown that all living organisms share a concern for living, Jonas considers how this teleology manifests in particular organisms. As he explains, these organisms are able to set goals that are unique to the organism’s time, place, and environment and attempt to actualize these goals. However given the circumstantial nature of these goals, they cannot be considered simply as the natural purpose of a concern for living. They must instead be understood as a synthesis of natural purpose and purpose specific to this particular organism. In this way, the organism affirms the importance of its own good that is distinct from yet intertwined with the good of all organisms. A particular organism pursuing its good can then be understood not as a mere mechanized acting out of the common purpose of living organisms but as a decision informed by this universal trait as well as the organism’s own circumstances, an actualization of the organism’s agency. Moreover, this affirmation of good is a metaphysical act with the Being of the organism staving away death and non-Being by meeting its needs and goals. Through this rich ontological understanding of the relationship between living organisms and any particular living organism, Jonas provides an understanding of the natural world not as mechanized and merely material, but as one enchanted by imaginal Being — an understanding only reinforced through each organism’s self-affirmation over non-Being.
From Metaphysics to Ethics
Jonas argues that this beyond-material Being and the teleology of organisms endow these organisms with value. He writes:
We can regard the mere capacity to have any purposes at all as a good-in-itself, of which we grasp with intuitive certainty that it is infinitely superior to the purposeless of being. … Now, it follows already analytically form the formal concept of the good-in-itself that, whenever this first, self-validating good happens, in any of its individuations, to come under the custody of a will, it addresses an “ought” to this will.
- Jonas, “The Good, the ‘Ought’, and Being”, IR, p. 80 (emphasis in text)
Jonas’ claim here is that the capacity to have a purpose, a telos, is itself indicative of value since we must recognize its repeated overcoming of non-Being. Indeed, through this universal presence of individual organisms’ goods, the good transcends each individual subject leading to a good for organisms as a whole. Coyne also adopts this reading, noting “Courtesy of their immanent-teleological constitution, all organisms have the capacity to value both instrumentally and intrinsically. And as the organism’s organization and much of its behavior are oriented towards its continued existence, each living being earns the status of an end-in-itself.”20 This is supported by human intuition, Jonas claims, since an understanding of the metaphysical affirmation of Being over non-Being characterizes human beings (PL 2-3). Being and teleology hence endow living organisms with value, setting up Jonas’ claims about environmental responsibility.
Jonas’ environmental ethics rests on the contention that human beings have a responsibility towards the environment through humans’ approach towards the environment as vulnerable. He proceeds by making a phenomenological argument for stewardship, noting:
First comes the “ought-to-be” of the object, second the ought-to-do of the subject who, in virtue of his power is called to its care. The demand of the object in the unassurednessof its existence, on the one hand, and the conscience of power in the guilt of its causality, on the other hand, conjoin in the affirmative feeling of responsibility on the part of a self that anyway and must always first actively encroach on the being of things.
- Jonas, “The Good, the ‘Ought’, and Being”, IR, p. 93
Jonas connects the teleology — the “ought-to-be” — of the object with the responsibilities of the subject — human beings. Since humans are more powerful, with the ability to act causally on such objects in a way determinate of their Being and non-Being, they have a responsibility to steward that which falls under their sphere of influence. He goes on to identify the environment as something that fits this criteria:
It has the precarious, vulnerable, and revocable character, the peculiar mode of transience, of all life, which makes it alone a proper object of “caring”; and, moreover, it shares with the agent subject the humanum, which has the first, if not the sole claim on him. … In this, man has nothing over other living beings — except that he alone can have responsibility also for them.
- Jonas, “The Good, the ‘Ought’, and Being”, IR, p. 98
Jonas distinguishes here between types of responsibility. Since living organisms have a good through their teleology, humans can care about them in themselves — as opposed to non-living things that lack a good that humans can only care for instrumentally, to serve some other good. In this way, Jonas not only re-enchants the natural world with a view of Being but argues that this Being entails substantive moral obligations from human beings in a philosophically rigorous way. This provides a potent refutation of threads of disenchantment, reminding humanity of their communion with the non-human in the world we inhabit.
Reimagining the Environment
Jonas’ project is especially prescient in the 21st Century. As Jeffrey Kripal notes, such claims of imaginal Being in nature are paradigmatic of the superhumanities. Kripal explains:
The superhuman here, after all, does not refer to some kind of glorified and arrogant Western ego. Quite the exact opposite. It conjures an always availible field of cosmic consciousness that is everywere, everyone, and everything.
- J. Kripal, The Superhumanities, pp. 198-199
The renewed understanding by Jonas serves as a vital remedy to prevailing currents in the zeitgeist. Kripal notes that such understandings:
challenge and transform our cultural imaginations, which have been running on mechanistic and materialistic assumptions about a “dead” natural world that is there for our economic gain and explotation; or, alternatively, on theistic assumptions that place all ultimate agency and meaning in the supernatural — that is, outside or above the human natural order — which then becomes a place of absence or non-meaning.
- J. Kripal, The Superhumanities, p. 201
Jonas’ philosophy threads this thin line, enchanting the world with Being, but providing rigorous philosophical arguments in support of it. His work proposes a radical shift in how we perceive and interact with our environment. His philosophy, infused with a profound ethical concern, offers a counter-narrative to the dualistic tendencies of modern thought, which often depict the natural world as inert and exploitable. Instead, Jonas envisions a world where nature is vibrant and full of Being, worthy of respect and ethical consideration. This approach aligns with Kripal's critique of the prevalent mechanistic and materialistic views that see nature merely as a resource for economic gain or, in theistic frameworks, as a realm devoid of intrinsic meaning where ultimate agency resides beyond the human sphere.
In navigating these complex philosophical landscapes, Jonas not only re-enchants the world by imbuing it with a sense of Being but also grounds this vision in philosophical argumentation. He transcends mere materialist interpretations, advocating for an understanding of nature that appreciates its profound interconnectedness and existential depth. By redefining the relationship between humanity and nature, Jonas steps into the role of a superhuman philosopher, one whose ideas pave the way for a more ethical, sustainable, and spiritually attuned interaction with the world.
Hans Jonas, a superhumanist indeed.
The photograph in the preview is my own, taken on a hike in Saddle Mountain State Natural Area in Seaside, Oregon, United States, 30th December 2023.
See the first footnote of On Child-Like Thinking. I told you so.
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was a deeply influential and equally controversial philosopher of the 20th Century within the post-Kantian/Phenomenological tradition. Much of the controversy surrounding Heidegger owes to his involvement with the German National Socialist Party in the 1930s, though an involvement that he is said to later have regretted in a private conversation with Heinrich Wiegand Petzet. My discussion in this post is primarily on Heidegger’s writings about technology. The extent to which Heidegger’s thought can be removed from his involvement with National Socialism is unclear and remains a topic of active scholarly investigation. Regardless, I believe engagement with Heidegger on this topic of technology is fruitful, and can be sufficiently divorced from his involvement in the National Socialist Party insofar as similar philosophies of technology have been articulated by some of Heidegger’s liberal (and Jewish) students (vis. Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse). I point the reader interested in the intersection of Heidegger’s philosophy and political involvements to Burrell’s translation of Heidegger and Nazism of Farias’ French text of the same name, as well as to Wolin’s recent Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology.
Heidegger, Martin. “Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings. Edited by David Farrell Krell. Harper, 2008.
Ibid. 329
Here taking “authentically” in the colloquial sense, not in the sense of Heidegger’s “authenticity”. For the latter, see Heidegger’s Being and Time and Paul Gorner’s chapter in Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’: An Introduction.
Jonas, Hans. The Phenomenon of Life. Northwestern University Press, 2001.
Jonas, Hans. The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Translated by Hans Jonas and David Herr. University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation” in Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. Oxford University Press, 1946.
See the section on new animism in the entry on environmental ethics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-environmental/#DisNewAni
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism is a Humanism. Edited by John Kulka and translated by Carol Macomber. Yale University Press, 2007. pp. 52-53
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson. Harper, 1962.
I also point the reader to the Wikipedia page on Heideggerian Terminology.
This was a topic of some philological discussion when I took a course on Heidegger (in translation) in the Spring of 2023. The plural of Dasein is not Daseine, as one might assume from typical German grammar, but Daseinden as Heidegger uses on p. 156 of ibid. I refrain from further commentary on this topic due to my utter lack of German philological knowledge.
Storey, David E. Naturalizing Heidegger: His Confrontation with Nietzsche, His Contributions to Environmental Philosophy. State University of New York Press, 2015. p. 58
Ibid. p. 58
Naturalizing Heidegger. p. 58
See the entry on Plato’s middle-period metaphysics and epistemology in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
There is an unmistakable parallel here with Aristotle’s theory of hylomorphism as introduced in his Physics, and Jonas does cite Aristotle at the end of the preceding edition of this essay. See the entry on Form vs. Matter in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for more information on hylomorphism.
Coyne, Lewis. Hans Jonas: Life, Technology and the Horizons of Responsibility. Bloomsbury, 2020. p. 48-49
Some clarification is due here given the use of “transcendent” to describe the beyond-material aspects of an organism. Prima facie, the reading I present seems to conflict with that of Coyne since in this sense the teleology of a part of an organism is distinct from its materiality. However, like the organism it is part of, the part has both material and beyond-material Being — with the being of this organism’s part as a whole constituting both this material and beyond-material Being. Hence, while the teleology of the animal part is beyond its material Being, teleology is a part of the animal part’s Being — here understood comprehensively as encompassing both the material and beyond-material aspects of its being. In other words, while the teleology is transcendent with respect to the material Being of the organism and/or part, but not transcendent with respect to the Being of the organism (as a whole). In other words, teleology is transcendent in the colloquial sense, but not in Jonas’ sense since the beyond-material constitutes part of an organism’s being.
Hans Jonas: Life, Technology and the Horizons of Responsibility. p. 115