Ummagumma

  Note: Reference posts on Yuval Noah Harari here , here , and here . Martin Heidegger here and here and here . Hopefully, my last several posts (links above) have set up our ability to now combine two brilliant thinkers that no one would usually attempt to discuss collectively - a 20th century philosopher who was also a Nazi and a 21st century Jewish historian who philosophizes. But that is precisely what I want to do here. It seems to me that the works I've discussed by Heidegger have an almost collaborative quality compared with the concerns raised in Harari's Nexus . In brief, I think Harari is describing the contemporary conditions for enframing in a way Heidegger could not have foreseen but which, nevertheless, accentuate Heidegger's relevance today which, in turn, properly contextualizes Harari's concerns with AI information systems. Heidegger's concept of "Enframing" is one of the most penetrating insights into technology ever formulated. In h...

SPIEGEL: Now the question naturally arises: Can the individual man in any way still influence this web of fateful circumstance? Or, indeed, can philosophy influence it? Or can both together influence it, insofar as philosophy guides the individual, or several individuals, to a determined action? Heidegger: If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline. At his request, Martin Heidegger's 1966 interview with Der Spiegel , was not published until shortly after his death in 1976. I have read it many times in my life. This...

But where danger is, grows The saving power also. Though it troubled him, Heidegger did not despair at enframing . He felt there was “saving power” to deal with it. However, when confronted with the reality of how enframing has evolved and intensified since Heidegger gave these lectures and wrote these essays, his notion of a "saving power" growing alongside the danger seems tenuous. Heidegger introduces the concept in “The Question Concerning Technology” by quoting a line from a poem by Frederich Hölderlin. For Heidegger, this means that within the very essence of technology—within enframing itself—lies the potential for salvation. He explains: "the coming to presence of technology harbors in itself what we least suspect, the possible arising of the saving power." (page 32) This saving power is connected to a shift in human awareness and relationship to technology rather than a technological fix or rejection of technology. Key aspects of this saving power inclu...