Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 17:15:24 +0200
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)
Subject: Re: existentialism and nuclear war


Cologne 16-Jun-2001

Nate Goralnik schrieb  16 Jun 2001 11:42:59 -0000:

> Thank you very much Michael!! Where can I find these quotes in English?

Nate,
I'm glad my posts say something to you. Someone else will, I'm sure, provide the English edition of the Gelassenheit-Rede.

> I don't want to stop people from posting on my initial query, but I'd like to head out on a tangent with Michael's post. Michael says:
>
> << Any type of calculative or predictive thinking is technical. The pondering type of thinking which Heidegger counterposes to technical thinking cannot calculate nor predict and "is useless for coping with current business. It yields nothing for practical implementation." (S.13), nothing for political action or strategy. Such thinking is worth 'precious little'. But being worth precious little can mean precisely that such thinking is indispensable for averting the danger of forgetting where human being belongs. Both useless and indispensable, the kind of thinking Heidegger shows us how to do, if we are willing to learn, should be neither overestimated nor underestimated. >>
>
> Could this kind of thinking inform a post-humanist understanding of theory-as-practice? Could not this kind of pondering have political events as it keeps us from forgetting where we belong? To what extent might this ameliorate the effects of technology?

You may be thinking here of the beginning of the _Letter on 'Humanism'_, where Heidegger speaks of thinking itself as a kind of action, i.e. an activity prior to the traditional (metaphysical) distinction between theory and practice.

The pondering thinking practiced by Heidegger has all-pervasive effects, but not by way of providing a 'theoretical foundation' of some kind to guide a 'practice'. In the speech (presented to a broad, general audience) I have been quoting from, Heidegger sketches a way out of just blindly going along with the technical world with its totalizing tendencies:

"We can use technical objects and at the same time, whilst using them properly, nevertheless keep ourselves free of them in such a way that we can let them go again at any time. We can put the technical objects to use as they have to be put to use, but we can, at the same time, let these objects be as things which do not touch us in our innermost, propermost selves. We can say 'yes' to the indispensable use of technical objects, and we can at the same time say 'no' insofar as we do not allow them to make an exclusive claim upon us and thus distort and confuse our being and ultimately make it barren.      However, if we say 'yes' and 'no' simultaneously in this way to technical
objects, won't our relationship to the technical world become ambiguous and unsure? On the contrary. Our relationship to the technical world will become simple and calm in a miraculous way. ... I want to name this stance of a simultaneous yes and no to the technical world with an old word: letting things be (Gelassenheit zu den Dingen).     From this stance we no longer see things merely solely in a technical way." (S.22f)

It is the stance that is important here, which ameliorates the totalizing tendencies in technology. It has to be kept in mind that technology is not, in the first place, the myriad of technical devices that surround us in the everyday world, from microchip toasters to hydrogen bombs, but it is first and foremost a way of thinking, i.e. the predominant (Western) way in which the world opens up for human being. From the stance of letting-be "we no longer SEE things merely solely in a technical way." Our view is directed in another direction, things shape up differently before our eyes.

This change of stance inevitably and ultimately also has political effects in the narrower sense, because the world, in opening up differently, _is_ different. Our way of thinking, which we always share in some way, no matter how individually we think, lies at the foundation of our sociation with each other. In knowing where we originally belong as human beings (namely, 'simply' to being) and thus rescuing our being from oblivion, we have a better chance of getting our priorities right politically on issues ranging from the local to the global level.

Michael
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>
> Just thinking...
> Nate






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