2.106
Technological enframing (§1.106) is a way that beings call and draw us into reductionism. Technology is a broader phenomenon that isn’t essentially reductive.[1] It becomes reductive when we take its way of engaging and responding to the world as the only or best way, when the world appears solely as technological problem: when it provides us with a prior way of knowing how to respond. For Heidegger, the way things call to us in technological enframing occludes our role in the presencing of things.[2] I also claim it occludes the role of things in their and our appearing. Technology, and its mode of response, isn’t just a way of approaching things, but is a way that things are taken up metaphysically.
We bracket off so many aspects of our experience: death, dreams, non-human animals, plants, the worlds of things, the worlds of others, our temporality and projection, poetic thinking, thisness, and experiences that leak around the edges of a managerial-capitalist-technological society, bolstered by various rigid binaries, overseen by a cosmic reduction: a reduction of the many gods to a unitary, onto-theological principle.[3] And, then, we’re surprised when phenomena double-back on themselves, catch us off guard, reveal a rupture, a suppression, a repression. These surprising episodes, however and unfortunately, merely appear to us as problems, frustrations, obstacles to overcome and assimilate through being technologically addressed, experiences to anticipate better. It rarely occurs to us that problems run deeper: to our denial of phenomena.
We turn away from things, the importance of which is difficult to emphasize, for the world is precisely a series of turning-towards. Of course, even our turning-away is a way of turning-towards insofar as we always let things be as the things they are. But things are called into (or call themselves into) question — they ask to be refocused.
There’s no technological solution to the ‘problem’ of respect, where respect lets particularities, gathering all things, shine forth. Respect cannot be determined in advance; it cannot be managed. — We enter the world as we enter a house into which we’ve been invited. Things wrap us in their clearing. Respect is to acknowledge this situation.
This doesn’t mean we should simply respect situations as we find them. We’re thrown into a stage of technology, capitalism, colonializations, and other violences. We also aren’t trying to return to some ideal, violent-free state prior to ourselves. Rather, we’re trying to respect things on their own terms, acknowledging that violences aren’t simply or primarily historical events, but are ongoing ways we’re entangled within relations; there’s a need to attend to and mitigate such violences (without being violent towards violence).
We don’t respect things as though we are not, were not, or will not be here (i.e., from the point of view of our disappearance, our death); we respect them as the entangled, thrown, relational beings we are (i.e., from the point of view of our appearance, our way of being), for we too are here, welcoming things into this home.
There is no prior way of knowing how to respond.
[1] Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy, LH121, LH123, LH147.
[2] Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” p. 27.
[3] How we understand ‘simplicity’ (§2.79) is onto-theological.