Martin Heidegger: “Only a god can save us.”

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 interview, aptly titled "Only a God Can Save Us," provides a complex window into Heidegger's thought during his final decade.

The interview begins with Heidegger addressing the shadow cast over his philosophical work by his brief but significant tenure as Rector of Freiburg University in 1933-34. His explanation of how he assumed this role portrays himself as reluctant and primarily concerned with preserving the university's autonomy against political encroachment. He describes his rectorate as an attempt to assert the university's self-determination against the "politicizing of science" demanded by the Nazi regime. When pressed about his statements supporting Hitler, Heidegger acknowledges them but claims he stopped making such pronouncements by 1934, suggesting a relatively quick disillusionment.

Throughout the interview, Heidegger attempts to distance himself from anti-Semitic actions, claiming he forbade the display of anti-Jewish posters at the university and protected Jewish professors. (He also maintained relations with several Jewish friends and mistresses.) He addresses his complicated relationship with his Jewish mentor Edmund Husserl, offering explanations for the removal of the dedication to Husserl in later editions of Being and Time. While these explanations reveal Heidegger's desire to rehabilitate his image, they also demonstrate a certain evasiveness about his moral responsibility during this period. The fact is, Heidegger never expressed regret for being a card-carrying Nazi. He felt that the fact he became inactive in the party and withdrew to the mountains in 1934 was the proper answer to his Nazi past.

More philosophically revealing is Heidegger's discussion of technology, which he positions as the dominant force in contemporary life. His concept of "technicity" (die Technik) represents what he sees as the defining challenge of our era. For Heidegger, the essence of technology is not merely instrumental but constitutes a particular way of revealing reality that has come to dominate human existence. He argues that neither democracy nor any other contemporary political system adequately addresses this technological condition, dismissing them as "half-way measures."

Heidegger's assertion that "only a god can save us" is certainly one of the interviews most potent lines. This statement reflects his view that humanity's relationship to technology has reached a crisis point beyond political solution. By invoking a "god," Heidegger is not making a conventional religious appeal but suggesting that only a fundamentally different way of revealing Being – a new dispensation of Being itself – could transform our technological destiny. His notion that we must prepare a "readiness" for such a transformation through "thinking and poetizing" reveals the later Heidegger's more mystical orientation. Talk about “half-way measures.” That is precisely what he himself is offering along with a healthy dose of metaphysical vagueness.

The interview also provides insight into Heidegger's understanding of his philosophical project after the "turn" in his thinking. He explains that philosophy in the traditional metaphysical sense has reached its completion, and what is needed now is "another thinking" that might prepare humanity for a different relationship to Being. This other thinking is not a constructive program for social or political reform but rather a meditative questioning that might open new possibilities within our technological world. This is all obviously vague.

When pressed about the practical relevance of his thinking, Heidegger resists the journalists' desire for concrete recommendations. He maintains that thinking cannot offer immediate solutions to contemporary problems, emphasizing that the task of thought is fundamentally different from that of practical action. This stance reflects Heidegger's longstanding critique of instrumentalism and his resistance to subordinating philosophy to immediate practical concerns.

The interview also reveals Heidegger's cultural conservatism and his belief in a special mission for the German people. His comments about the "special inner kinship between the German language and the language of the Greeks" reflect his view that German culture has a privileged relationship to the philosophical tradition. These nationalist undertones sit uncomfortably with his critique of technology as a planetary phenomenon requiring a global response.

SPIEGEL: It is obvious that man is never [complete] master of his tools — witness the case of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. But is it not a little too pessimistic to say: we are not gaining mastery over this surely much greater tool [that is] modern technicity?

Heidegger: Pessimism, no. In the area of the reflection that I am attempting now, pessimism and optimism are positions that don't go far enough. But above all, modern technicity is no "tool" and has nothing at all to do with tools.

By rejecting the very framing of technology as a "tool" to be mastered, his response challenges the conventional understanding that sees technology as something humans create and control for specific purposes. For Heidegger, technology is not merely instrumental but constitutes a comprehensive way of revealing the world—a mode of disclosure that determines how beings appear to us in the first place.

When Der Spiegel presses the practical point that technological systems (in 1966) seem to be functioning well—providing electricity, increasing production, and creating prosperity—Heidegger's response is both simple and profound:

Heidegger: Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is awesome, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth.

As we have seen in previous posts, this functioning that Heidegger identifies is precisely what he elsewhere terms enframing—the essence of modern technology that orders all reality as standing-reserve, resources waiting to be optimized and exploited. What makes this analysis so penetrating is that it identifies the danger of technology not in its failures but in its successes—in the seamless functioning that perpetuates itself and reshapes human existence in the process.

I am surprised by Heidegger's reaction to the first images of Earth ever taken from the Moon. To me they were marvelous, though I only saw them years later, in high school, I think. They contributed to a gradual shift toward global consciousness. Heidegger was afraid of what that consciousness consisted.

Heidegger: I don't know if you were shocked, but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us] — the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today.

This observation was remarkably prescient for 1966. The images of Earth from space, rather than representing merely human technological achievement, signify for Heidegger a fundamental transformation in humanity's relationship to the planet. Through the technological gaze, Earth becomes an object, a system to be managed rather than a dwelling place. His insight anticipates contemporary discussions about the Anthropocene—the geological epoch defined by human technological impact on planetary systems.

His conversation with the poet René Char about launch facilities transforming the Provençal landscape further concretizes this analysis:

Heidegger: Recently I had a long dialogue in Provence with René Char — a poet and resistance fighter, as you know. In Provence now, launch pads are being built and the countryside laid waste in unimaginable fashion. This poet, who certainly is open to no suspicion of sentimentality or of glorifying the idyllic, said to me that the uprooting of man that is now taking place is the end [of everything human], unless thinking and poetizing once again regain [their] nonviolent power.

By carefully establishing Char's credentials as a resistance fighter unsuspected of naive romanticism, Heidegger lends weight to this diagnosis. The transformation of culturally and historically significant landscapes into mere functional spaces exemplifies how technological thinking reconfigures human relationships to place, time, and Being.

Heidegger's proposed response to technological enframing leaves much to be desired. His suggestion that "thinking and poetizing" might counterbalance the overwhelming force of planetary technicity appears strikingly inadequate when measured against the scale and power of the phenomenon he diagnoses. Again, his answer are “half-way.”

This disconnect is particularly evident given Heidegger's own acknowledgment elsewhere in his works (notably in "Discourse on Thinking" in 1949) that humanity is "fleeing from thinking" and that "thoughtlessness" is the defining condition of our technological age. If this flight from thinking is itself part of technological enframing, how could thinking possibly serve as the solution? This creates a circular problem: the very capacity needed to address the technological condition is precisely what technology has undermined.

In that same essay Heidegger writes: “Still we can act otherwise. We can use technical devices, and yet with proper use also keep ourselves so free of them,that we may let go of them any time. We can use technical devices as they ought to be used, and also let them alone as something which does not affect our inner and real core. We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp,confuse, and lay waste our nature.

“But will not saying both yes and no this way to technical devices make our relation to technology ambivalent and insecure? On the contrary! Our relation to technology will become wonderfully simple and relaxed. We let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside, that is, let them alone, as things which are nothing absolute but remain dependent upon something higher. I would call this comportment toward technology which expresses "yes" and at the same time "no," by an old word, releasement toward things.”

Is this how things turned out since 1949? Far from it. Apparently, we cannot act otherwise. Apparently, we cannot keep ourselves free of technical devices, they devour our attention span. Apparently, we cannot avoid using them. Apparently, our relationship to technology cannot be “wonderfully simple and relaxed.” Apparently, we cannot leave them out of our daily lives. Heidegger's “comportment toward technology” is just plain silly. He is right about the danger of technology but wrong about our relationship with it because he did not foresee what a special danger digital technology is compared with industrial technology.

The historical trajectory since Heidegger's interview largely confirms my skepticism. Poetry and meditative thinking have become increasingly marginalized in cultural discourse, while technological systems have grown only more pervasive and powerful. Smartphones, social media, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology have extended the enframing process far beyond what Heidegger could have imagined, reshaping human consciousness and social relations at a planetary scale.

Moreover, technological systems have demonstrated a remarkable capacity to absorb and neutralize potential sources of resistance. Even poetry and art have been largely incorporated into digital platforms and market mechanisms, becoming content to be optimized for engagement rather than vehicles for authentic revelation. This suggests that Heidegger underestimated technology's capacity to assimilate forms of expression that might once have stood outside its logic.

Despite the questionable adequacy of his proposed response, Heidegger's diagnosis of technological enframing remains extraordinarily relevant to our contemporary situation. His insight that the essence of technology is "nothing technological" but rather a particular way of revealing reality continues to offer a profound framework for understanding developments from artificial intelligence to climate change.

When Heidegger states that "everything is functioning" and identifies this perfect functioning as precisely the problem, he anticipates contemporary concerns about technological systems that function too well—algorithms that optimize engagement at the expense of human well-being, surveillance systems that perfectly track and predict behavior, production systems that efficiently extract resources regardless of ecological consequences.

His observation that "all our relationships have become merely technical ones" has only grown more accurate in an age of digital mediation, where human interactions are increasingly structured by technological platforms designed to extract data and maximize engagement. The "uprooting" he identified has accelerated as digital technologies further attenuate connections to place and transform how we experience time, attention, and presence.

Heidegger's insistence that the question of technology transcends "pessimism and optimism" remains one of his most valuable insights. By rejecting these categories, he points to how thoroughly technological thinking has shaped even our responses to technology itself.

Optimistic views that emphasize human mastery over technology and pessimistic views that emphasize technology's dangers both remain trapped within the technological framework, assuming that the question is merely one of control. Heidegger's analysis suggests that the challenge is more fundamental—it concerns how we understand the relationship between humanity and Being itself.

This insight offers a way to move beyond both techno-utopianism and techno-apocalypticism in understanding of our technological condition. The question is not simply whether technology will save us or destroy us, but how technological understanding has already transformed what it means to be human and what possibilities remain open within this transformation.

The Der Spiegel interview captures both the remarkable prescience of Heidegger's analysis of technology and the limitations of his proposed response. His identification of enframing as the essence of modern technology—a self-perpetuating system of optimization and functionality that transforms all beings into resources—continues to provide profound insights into our technological condition.

However, his suggestion that "thinking and poetizing" might counterbalance this planetary force is an epic fail given the trajectory of technological development in the decades since. The interview thus reveals both the enduring value of Heidegger's diagnosis and the need to move beyond his specific prescriptions in developing meaningful responses to technological enframing.

I should not fault Heidegger for not coming up with an adequate solution to the problem he raised without knowing the extent to which the problem would evolve. He was no prophet. Nevertheless, his framing of the problem seems spot-on. Technology constitutes not merely a collection of tools but a comprehensive way of revealing reality that fundamentally shapes human existence. This insight continues to challenge us to consider how we might develop a free relationship to technology when our very modes of thinking have been shaped by its logic—a question that has only grown more urgent in our intensely technological age.

(Assisted by Claude.  Illustration by ChatGPT.)