Highway bridges and feasts: Heidegger and Borgmann on how to affirm technology

Continental Philosophy Review

Volumn 30, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 159-178

  Dreyus, Hubert L ^a   Spinosa, Charles ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b MIAMI UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 53249134920     PISSN: 13872842     EISSN: 15731103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, (New York: Harper & Row, 1966) 54.
2. Heidegger's main example of cultural paradigms are works of art, but he does allow that there can be other kinds of paradigm. Truth, or the cultural paradigm, can also establish itself through the actions of a god, a statesman, or a thinker.
3. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. 4, (New York: Harper & Row, 1982) 28.
4. Martin Heidegger, "What are Poets For?" Poetry, Language, Thought, (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) 112.
5. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977) 5.
6. Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" 17.
7. Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992) 88.
8. Borgmann, Crossing 108.
9. Martin Heidegger, "Science and Reflection", The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays 173.
10. Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" 16 (emphasis ours).
11. See Martin Heidegger, &On the Way to Language& (1959),
12. trans. Peter D. Hertz On the Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) 132.
13. See also Martin Heidegger, "Memorial Address" (1959), Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper, 1966) 46.
14. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) 104-109.
15. Robert Jay Lifton as quoted by Michiko Kakutani, "When Fluidity Replaces Maturity", New York Times, 20 March 1995, C11.
16. Michiko Kakutani, "When Fluidity Replaces Maturity."
17. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995) 263-264.
18. Turkle, 180.
19. Turkle, 180.
20. Turkle, 185.
21. Turkle, 12.
22. Turkle, 192.
23. In his account of brief habits, Nietzsche describes a life similar to moving from one hot group to another. Brief habits are neither like long-lasting habits that produce stable identities, nor like constant improvisation. For Nietzsche, the best life occurs when one is fully committed to acting out of one brief habit until it becomes irrelevant and another takes over. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974) §295, 236-237.
24. Martin Heidegger, "The Thing," in Poetry, Language, Thought, 182.
25. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) 196-210.
26. Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking", Poetry, Language, Thought 149.
27. Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide 135.
28. Heidegger, "The Thing", Poetry, Language, Thought 178-179.
29. Heidegger, "The Thing" 182.
30. Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking" 152.
31. Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, 27-34.
32. Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life 196.
33. Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life 199.
34. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojecewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992) 85.
35. See Footnote #41.
36. Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life 200.
37. Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life 221.
38. In an attempt to overcome the residual nostalgia in any position that holds that technological devices can never have a centering role in a meaningful life, Robert Pirsig has argued in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that, if properly understood and maintained, technological devices can focus practices that enable us to live in harmony with technology. Although the motorcycle is a technological device, understanding and caring for it can help one to resist the modern tendency to use whatever is at hand as a commodity to satisfy one's desires and then dispose of it. But, as Borgmann points out, this saving stance of understanding and maintenance is doomed as our devices, for example computers, become more and more reliable while being constructed of such minute and complex parts that understanding and repairing them is no longer an option.
39. Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking" 152.
40. Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking" 152-153.
41. Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking" 153.
42. If we take the case of writing implements, we can more clearly see both the positive role that can be played by technological things as well as the special danger they present to which Borgmann has made us sensitive. Like bridges, the style of writing implements reflects their place in the history of being. The fountain pen solicits us to write to someone for whom the personality of our handwriting will make a difference. When involved in the practices that make the fountain pen seem important, we care about such matters as life plans, stable identities, character, views of the world, and so on. We are subjects dealing with other subjects. A typewriter, however, will serve us better if we are recording business matters or writing factual reports simply to convey information. A word processor hooked up to the Net with its great flexibility solicits us to select from a huge number of options in order to produce technical or scholarly papers that enter a network of conversations. And using a word processor one cannot help but feel lucky that one does not have to worry about erasing, retyping, literally cutting and pasting to move text around, and mailing the final product. But, as Borgmann points out, a device is not neutral; it affects the possibilities that show up for us. If one has a word processor and a modem, the text no longer appears to be a piece of work that one finishes and then publishes. It evolves through many drafts none of which is final. Circulating texts on the net is the culmination of the dissolution of the finished object, where different versions (of what would have before been called a single text), are contributed to by many people. With such multiple contributions, not only is the physical work dispersed but so is the author. Such authorial dispersion is a part of the general dispersion of identity that Sherry Turkle describes.
43. Heidegger writes in "The Thing": Man...now receives instant information, by radio, of events which he formerly learned about only years later, if at all. The germination and growth of plants, which remained hidden throughout the seasons, is now exhibited publicly in a minute, on film. Distant sites of the most ancient cultures are shown on film as if they stood this very moment amidst today's street traffic....The peak of this abolition of every possibility of remoteness is reached by television, which will soon pervade and dominate the whole machinery of communication. (165)
44. Martin Heidegger, "The Turning," The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays 43, where Heidegger claims that our turning away from a technological understanding of being will, at least initially, be a matter of turning to multiple worlds where things thing.
45. Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide 122.
46. Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide 141.
47. Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide 144.
48. Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life 199.
49. Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life 218.
50. Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" 33-35.
51. Heidegger, "What are Poets For?" 97.
52. Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, 212.
53. To put this in terms of meals, we can remember that in Virginia Wolfe's To the Lighthouse arguments about politics brought in from outside almost ruin Mrs. Ramsey's family dinner which only works when the participants become so absorbed in the food that they stop paying attention to external concerns and get in tune with the actual occasion. The same thing happens in the film Babette's Feast. The members of an ascetic religious community go into the feast resolved to be true to their dead founder's principles and not to enjoy the food. Bickering and silence ensues until the wine and food makes them forget their founder's concerns and attunes them to the past and present relationships that are in accord with the gathering.
54. Martin Heidegger, "Summary of a Seminar on the Lecture 'Time and Being,'" On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1972) 37.