/lit/ - Literature

>For Stiegler, the history of Western philosophy can be also read in terms of the history of technics, in which the question of Being is also the question of technics, since it is only through technics that the question of Being is opened to us. A similar reading of Heidegger was proposed by Rudolf Boehme in his 1960 essay Thinking and Technics: Preliminary Notes for a Question Regarding the Heideggerian Problematic’ which, as we touched upon in Part 1, concerns the interpretation of Heidegger’s 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics. Boehme shows that techne is always present not only in Heidegger’s thinking, but also as Occidental philosophical thinking. Indeed, it is this technics that characterises the metaphysical mission of the Ionian philosophers. Boehme shows that, in Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger interprets technics in the Ionian Philosophers as an activity that produces a radical opening of Being through the confrontation between techne (that of the human) and dike (that of Being). We have attempted to recover the concept of techne in Presocratic philosophy in Heidegger’s Introduction and Metaphysics, and we have seen how Heidegger translated dike not as Gerecht (justice), but rather as Fug (fittingness); in war (polemos) or strife (eris), Being reveals itself as physis, logos, and dike.

>For Heidegger, however, this reading of technics as the origin of philosophical and practical activities that opens the question of Being is foreclosed in Platonic-Aristotelian Athenian philosophy as a declension (Abfall) and a fall (Absturz)— the beginning of onto-theology. According to Boehme’s reading, Heidegger believes that Plato and Aristotle opposed technics to nature, and therefore excluded technics from its original meaning, as developed by the Ionian philosophers (an omission that Stiegler undertakes to correct). For Heidegger, then, if the danger of modernity consists in the rise of technology, this technology is essentially different from the techne of ancient times. Technological development, accompanied by its rationality and driven by the desire for mastery, forms a gigantic force that is in the process of depriving the world of any other possibility and turning it into a giant standing reserve, as adikia or Unfug (un-fittingness). Technology is the destiny of Western metaphysics, and indeed this is even clearer when we recall Heidegger’s famous assertion that 'cybernetics is the completion or the "end” of metaphysics’. The question here is not that of judging whether or not this critique is just, but rather that of seeing it as a contribution to a movement away from the technological unconsciousness of the modern.

i know, you probably want to play some classic bullet hell shooters now instead of meditating on the forgetting of Being. i do too. such is the power of tumblr gifs.

>For Stiegler, the history of Western philosophy can be also read in terms of the history of technics, in which the question of Being is also the question of technics, since it is only through technics that the question of Being is opened to us. A similar reading of Heidegger was proposed by Rudolf Boehme in his 1960 essay Thinking and Technics: Preliminary Notes for a Question Regarding the Heideggerian Problematic’ which, as we touched upon in Part 1, concerns the interpretation of Heidegger’s 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics. Boehme shows that techne is always present not only in Heidegger’s thinking, but also as Occidental philosophical thinking. Indeed, it is this technics that characterises the metaphysical mission of the Ionian philosophers. Boehme shows that, in Introduction
to Metaphysics, Heidegger interprets technics in the Ionian Philosophers as an activity that produces a radical opening of Being through the confrontation between techne (that of the human) and dike (that of Being). We have attempted to recover the concept of techne in Presocratic philosophy in Heidegger’s Introduction and Metaphysics, and we have seen how Heidegger translated dike not as Gerecht (justice), but rather as Fug (fittingness); in war (polemos) or strife (eris), Being reveals itself as physis, logos, and dike.

>For Heidegger, however, this reading of technics as the origin of philosophical and practical activities that opens the question of Being is foreclosed in Platonic-Aristotelian Athenian philosophy as a declension (Abfall) and a fall (Absturz)— the beginning of onto-theology. According to Boehme’s reading, Heidegger believes that Plato and Aristotle opposed technics to nature, and therefore excluded technics from its original meaning, as developed by the Ionian philosophers (an omission that Stiegler undertakes to correct). For Heidegger, then, if the danger of modernity consists in the rise of technology, this technology is essentially different from the techne of ancient times. Technological development, accompanied by its rationality and driven by the desire for mastery, forms a gigantic force that is in the process of depriving the world of any other possibility and turning it into a giant standing reserve, as adikia or Unfug (un-fittingness). Technology is the destiny of Western metaphysics, and indeed this is even clearer when we recall Heidegger’s famous assertion that 'cybernetics is the completion or the "end” of metaphysics’. The question here is not that of judging whether or not this critique is just, but rather that of seeing it as a contribution to a movement away from the technological unconsciousness of the modern.

i know, you probably want to play some classic bullet hell shooters now instead of meditating on the forgetting of Being. i do too. such is the power of tumblr gifs.