Abstract
In this paper, I explore Martin Heidegger’s and Herbert Marcuse’s critiques of technology, and their suggestions on how to neutralise the negative effects of technology, in order to articulate a potential path to an authentic, unalienated life. Martin Heidegger’s view of technology and its negative effects are first explored before presenting Marcuse’s critique of Heidegger. The dissimilarities between Heidegger’s ‘Gestell’ and Marcuse’s ‘Technological Rationality’ are then explored, before then examining the differences between Heidegger’s and Marcuse’s ideas of how one may overcome the alienating impact of technology. Favouring Marcuse’s suggestions, Hans Jonas’ work on technological ethics is then posited as a necessary guide for Marcuse’s vision of a post-alienated existence. I conclude that the continued appropriation and integration of Heideggerian thought into critiques of technology could be valuable for the field, especially when answering questions concerning individual authenticity in the context of rapid technological progress and ecological decline.
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Notes
This point is one that is also made by more recent critiques of technology. Perhaps, most explicitly by John Gray: “There is a deeper reason why ‘humanity’ will never control technology. Technology is not something humankind can control. It is an event that has befallen the world.” (Gray 2003: 14).
Like Heidegger, Richard Rorty is also hostile towards the loss of interpretive diversity. See Rorty 1979., ch. 7 and 8.
It is not just in a social sense that this warning applies—consideration of the work of synthetic biologists that seek to manipulate our genetic make up for various functional ends (see Schyfter 2011) or the role that technology has in our evolutionary history (see Idhe and Malafouris 2019) reveals that Heidegger’s warning also applies in a very literal sense.
So much so that it seems that Heidegger’s Gestell could have directly influenced Marcuse’s idea of Technological Rationality, but this does not actually appear to be the case. The notion of Gestell was introduced by Heidegger in his 1949 lecture Positionality and was later developed in his 1954 The Question Concerning Technology. Marcuse’s notion of Technological Rationality was first introduced in 1941, in his Some Implications of Modern Technology. One could speculate that Heidegger’s influence on Technological Rationality originated from Marcuse’s development of related ideas found within Being and Time—such as Heidegger’s exposition of equipment—but one cannot know this for certain, nor can one rule out the possibility that Heidegger’s own thinking was influenced by that of his former student.
Heidegger is not invoking history in the sense of “that which is chronicled” (Heidegger 1954: 329)—i.e. in its historiographical historisch sense—but rather in its ontological geschichtlich sense, as “the process of human activity … [that becomes] accessible as an object for historiography” (ibid).
Here, there is resonance between the telos of Marcuse’s and Jonas’ work and the vital interests identified by J. S. Mill: “The moral rules which forbid mankind to hurt one another (in which we must never forget to include wrongful interference with each other’s freedom) are more vital to human well-being than any maxims, however important, which only point out the best mode of managing some department of human affairs” (Mill 1863: 96).
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Brayford, K.M. How to Live a Life of One’s Own: Heidegger, Marcuse and Jonas on Technology and Alienation. Philos. Technol. 34, 609–617 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00417-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00417-4