Today’s Plan:
- Heidegger and the Question Concerning Technology
- Worsham and the Question Concerning Invention
- Break
- Catching Up Last Week
- Levinas and the Questions Concerning the Other and others
Heidegger
Preface: Heidegger was a nazi. Let’s read this. And this. Finally, let’s read what Levinas himself has to say about Heidegger.
To get us started, I’ll ask you to pick one of the following passages and think with it for awhile. What is it arguing? What does it remind you of (stuff we’ve read in class or outside of it)?
Page 316: What is lost?
Today we are too easily inclined either to understand being responsible and being indebted moralistically as a lapse, or else to construe them in terms of effecting. In either case we bar from ourselves the way to the primal meaning of that which is later called causality. So long as this way is not opened up to us we shall also fail to see what instrumentality, which is based on causality properly is.
Page 322 Unconcealment vs (yes, vs) Challenging
What kind of unconcealment is it, then, that is peculiar to that which results from this setting-upon that challenges? Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve [Bestand]. The word expresses here something more, and something more essential, than mere “stock.” The word “standing reserve” assumes the rank of an inclusive rubric. It designates nothing less than the way in which everything presences that is wrought upon by the revealing that challenges. Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object.
Page 323: Revealing vs Unconcealment (Take 2)
Who accomplishes the challenging setting-upon through which what we call the actual is revealed as standing-reserve? Obviously, man. To what extent is man capable of such a revealing? Man can indeed conceive, fashion, and carry through this or that in one way or another. But man does not have control over unconcealment itself, in which at any given time the actual shows itself or withdraws. The fact that it has been showing itself in the light of Ideas ever since the time of Plato, Plato did not bring about. The thinker only responded to what addressed itself to him.
pg 331: The Danger
The essence of technology lies in enframing. Its holding sway belongs within destining. Since destining at any given time starts man on a way of revealing, man, thus under way, is continually approaching the brink of the possibility of pursuing and promulgating nothing but what is revealed in ordering, and of deriving all his standards on this basis. Through this the other possibility is blocked–that man might rather be admitted sooner and ever more primally to the essence of what is unconcealed and to its unconcealment, in order that he might experience as his essence the requisite belonging to revealing. (Next paragraph: danger! For the nature of this danger, see 332, 337)
pp. 339: Revisiting the Essence of Technology
The essence of technology is in a lofty sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, i.e., of truth.
When we look ino the ambiguous essence of technology, we behold the constellation, the stellar course of the mystery.
But what help is it to look into the consellation of truth? We look into the danger and see the growth of the saving power.
Through this we are not yet saved. But we are thereupon summoned to hope in the growing light of the saving power. How can this happen? Here and now in little things, that we may foster the saving power in its increase. This includes holding always before our eyes the extreme danger.
p. 339 But, like, seriously, how is art going to save us?
There was a time when it was not technology alone that bore the name techne. Once the revealing that brings forth truth into the splendor of radiant appearance was also called techne.
At the outset of the destining of the West, in Greece, the arts soared to the supreme height of the revealing granted them. They illuminated the presence of the gods and the dialogue of divine and human destinings. And art was called simply techne. It was a single, manifold revealing. It was pious, promos, i.e., yielding to the holding sway and the safekeeping of truth. […]
Such a realm is art. But certainly only if reflection upon art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth, concerning which we are questioning.
(One other thing, thinking ahead to Latour: 326; does nature conform to science, or does science conform to nature?)
Worsham and the Question Concerning Invention
A few props:
Levinas, the Other, the other, and the face (to face)
One difficulty reading Levinas: French has two words for other: autre and autrui. (Levinas adds a layer of complexity by sometimes capitalizing these terms and sometimes using them lowercase, although most translators–inclduing Cohen in Ethics and Infinity, simply ignore this distinction). Put simply, em>autrui refers to another person, in their concrete materiality. L’autre is the more abstract sense of alterity in general, when (in French) Levinas capitalizes either term, it is often to mark off its (im)possible transcendence (the ultimate other as God, or the resonance of God that sounds in my perception of another human face).
Another difficulty: Levinas will often talk of the encounter with another person as an encounter with the face of the other. Face here is tricky. The French is visage, a word that has some resonance with our English word semblance. Levinas is also playing with the fact that (even in French) “face” can operate as a noun and a verb. As a phenomenologist, he is caught up in analyzing the affective contours in the encounter with another person. It doesn’t necessarily mean the fleshy, material thing on your head. Here’s how Bruce Young describes it:
By “face” Levinas means the human face (or in French, visage), but not thought of or experienced as a physical or
aesthetic object. Rather, the first, usual, unreflective encounter with the face is as the living presence of another
person and, therefore, as something experienced socially and ethically. “Living presence,” for Levinas, would imply
that the other person (as someone genuinely other than myself) is exposed to me and expresses him or herself simply
by being there as an undeniable reality that I cannot reduce to images or ideas in my head. This impossibility of
capturing the other conceptually or otherwise indicates the other’s “infinity” (i.e., irreducibility to a finite [bounded]
entity over which I can have power). The other person is, of course, exposed and expressive in other ways than
through the literal face (e.g., through speech, gesture, action, and bodily presence generally), but the face is the most
exposed, most vulnerable, and most expressive aspect of the other’s presence.
Which leads us to think about this seemingly hyperbolic line in Levinas:
[An] infinite resistance to murder, . . . firm and insurmountable, gleams in the face of the Other, in the
total nudity of his defenceless eyes, in the nudity of the absolute openness of the Transcendent.
(Totality and Infinity 199)
Of course I can murder someone. There is nothing in the injunction voiced by the face of the other that prevents me from beating them to death with a crowbar. But even having done so I will not be able to murder their face–nor counter my ability to master (know) them (hence, reading Young above, the infinity of the face). I wrote about this once.
For next class:
Read, Ethics and Infinity, translator’s introduction, chapter 2 (Heidegger), chapter 4 (solitude of Being), chapter 7 (the face), chapter 8 (Responsibility for the other). Chapter 5, Love and Filiation, has a problematic framing of masculinity and femininity (might be of interest for some).
