The instrumentalist orientation of Being and Time can readily be seen in the following statement: “Readiness-to-hand is the way in which entities as they are ‘in themselves’ are defined ontologico-categorially.” [SZ: 71/100] We have already noted some problems inherent in this claim that tools really are instruments for human use. Expanding on this instrumentalist attitude, Heidegger remarked apparently approvingly that for the peasant and worker in everyday life, “the wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power; the wind is wind ‘in the sails.’” [SZ: 70/100] More than two decades later, having arrived at his concept of modern technology, he said that in the technological era “the earth now reveals itself as a coal-mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit …. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the soil to [yield] ore, ore for example to [yield] uranium “ [GA7: 14-15/14-15]
At first glance, these statements seem to say the same thing. According to Dreyfus, however, Being and Time occupies an ambiguous middle ground between the full-scale technological understanding of being, on the one hand, and the early Greek instrumentalist understanding of being, on the other. The instrumentalism of Being and Time is not yet fully technological, because it portrays equipment not in terms of mathematically structured technology but instead in terms of the craftsman’s shop. Moreover, Being and Time does not speak of nature as undifferentiated standing-reserve. Nevertheless, despite whatever similarities the workshop described in Being and Time might have to a pre-industrial workshop, Heidegger located the workshop in a “world” that seems increasingly technological.
At first describing the workshop as a relatively autonomous “region,” Heidegger went on to explain that this region was an element in the totality of regions, the “worldhood of the world.” [SZ: 86/119] Dreyfus comments that Heidegger thereby “expands the local [workshop] context to a single over-arching totality. He recognizes that this tendency to totalize is a specifically modern phenomenon whose full meaning he realizes has not yet been revealed.” Early Heidegger discerned this totalizing movement in modern humanity’s way of being “close” to things. Only Dasein exists in a world; hence, only Dasein can be close to or remote from entities that show themselves within that world. A rock may be touching another rock, but it is still not ‘’close” to the other rock in the way that a person is to a family member, even if he (or she) is far away. Heidegger used the term ent-fernen, roughly translated as to “un-distance” something, to describe the ontological process of bringing things close. In modern times, this process has become a drive to vanquish remoteness altogether. The attempt to make everything equally close and available arises from the increasingly one-dimensional ontology of modernity: everything appears to be nothing but various kinds of matter which can be used and switched about at will. “All the ways in which we speed things up, as we are more or less compelled to today, push us on toward the conquest of remoteness. With the ‘radio,’ for example, Dasein has so expanded its everyday environment that it has accomplished an un-distancing of the ‘world’ — an un-distancing which, in its meaning for Dasein, cannot yet be visualized.” [SZ: 105/140]
Early Heidegger argued that uprooted modern humanity no longer “dwelt” authentically upon the earth. Later, in his lectures on Hölderlin, he said that dwelling occurs only when entities are “gathered” (versammelt) into a world in which the integrity of things is preserved. Such a world would be intrinsically “local,” bound up with place in a way wholly foreign to the planetary reach of modern technology. According to Dreyfus, Being and Time despite later Heidegger’s dislike of planetary technology anticipated “total mobilization” by conceiving of the local workshop-world as a region within the all-encompassing region: the referential totality.
Early Heidegger emphasized the primacy of an instrumentalist ontology to counter what he regarded as two basic problems of modernity: objectification and subject-object dualism. While scientists and philosophers asserted the primacy of the detached, cognitive ego-subject, Heidegger maintained that it was an abstract derivation from the practically oriented, socially defined “anyone” self. While liberal politicians insisted on the radical autonomy of the subject, Heidegger countered that authentic individuation was in part a collective decision of a generational cohort. Later Heidegger would concede that despite its atomism, subjectivism at least distinguished between the subject and the objects of its cognition and action. Self as ego-subject was characteristic of the modern era, but in the subsequent technological era the subject-object distinction vanished as subjectivism vanquished all “otherness.” Even humans came to be regarded as the most important raw material. Early Heidegger’s description of everyday life as role-playing within the all-embracing referential totality anticipated his later view that humanity had become raw material. While early Heidegger spoke of Dasein as the “for-the-sake-of-which” of worldly activity, he also seemed to discern the extent to which Dasein was submitting to the kind of life demanded by the character of modern production. Being and Time makes clear that instrumental activity is the basic way of being-in-the-world: “When concern holds back from any kind of producing, manipulating, and the like, it puts itself into what is now the sole remaining mode of being-in [my emphasis], the mode of just tarrying at …. In this kind of ‘dwelling’ as a holding oneself back from any manipulation or utilization, the perception of the present-at-hand is consummated.” [SZ: 61-62/88-89] Apart from the activity of manipulating and producing things, we are told, the sole alternative is to treat them abstractly: either as objects for ordinary curiosity or as objects for scientific scrutiny. In emphasizing the primacy of productive activity in everyday life, Heidegger was challenging the predominance of the constricted Cartesian disclosure of everything as present-at-hand objects for the theorizing intellect. Descartes’s metaphysics, Heidegger explained, was determined not by his preference for mathematics, but instead by his orientation “toward being as constant presence-at-hand, which mathematical knowledge is exceptionally well suited to grasp.’’ [SZ: 96/129] Cartesianism was a variant of Plato’s thesis that the “really real” is the permanently present eidos. Descartes claimed that for a thing “to be” meant for it to be re-presented by the self-certain subject. Descartes thus helped to define modern science as the quest to formalize everything, to make everything totally present for knowledge. Heidegger maintained that this drive to make everything wholly present for knowledge was an ingredient in the technological drive to make all things wholly present as standing-reserve.
More than one critic has remarked upon the utilitarian vision of human existence offered by Being and Time. Manfred S. Frings, for example, argues that Being and Time is “an expression of ardent desires for, and flamboyant glorifications of work and the work-a-day-world spawned by the political isolation of Germany after 1918.” Early Heidegger’s phenomenological description of everyday life disclosed it as ceaseless work broken only by occasional spells of distraction not so different from what Ernst Jünger was to say about the totally mobilized technological world. To be sure, the technological disclosure of things involved a still more radical instrumentalism than that found in Being and Time.
Nevertheless, early Heidegger spoke about the compulsive, anonymous, everyday character of work in a way which seems to have been at odds with his later conviction that authentic working and producing were somehow possible. It is not clear, then, whether for early Heidegger the craftworker in the shop was inextricably drawn into self-forgetfulness of the falling, inauthentic kind, or whether the craftworker could be “authentic.” Certainly in Division Two of Being and Time, Heidegger spoke of authenticity as a way of being that did not float above everydayness, but rather transformed everyday practices. Everyday practices, then, are not intrinsically inauthentic; rather, they are relatively “undifferentiated” and may thus be capable of becoming either authentic or inauthentic. Perhaps this belief that everyday practices could be transformed by authentic existence was what led him to call for an authentic retrieval of Germany’s possibilities, a retrieval that he believed, for a time, was being carried out by Hitler.
Early Heidegger’s “either/or” of readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand suggests that he had not yet clearly articulated what he came to regard as the predominant mode of disclosure in the contemporary era: modern technology. When he began examining this mode of disclosure in detail around 1930, he seems to have attributed to it certain aspects of the utilitarianism of readiness-to-hand, on the one hand, and the objectification of presence-at-hand, on the other. The pragmatic attitude of the artisan, supposedly basic to human existence, turned out to be the work mania associated with the technological era. As Prauss has remarked, we can only imagine “how disturbing it must have been for Heidegger to have seen that precisely technology, which he again and again sees drawing near as the greatest danger for man, is already laid out in the relation of man to being, which in Sein und Zeit he regarded as the primordial [relation], in circumspective dealings with the ready-to-hand.”
One consequence of Heidegger’s insight was that he changed his attitude toward science. Early Heidegger, as we shall see toward the end of this chapter, had a positive understanding of the nature of science. Later Heidegger, however, concluded that the objectifying tendencies of modern science contributed to the instrumentalism of modern technology. Far from being a disinterested, unpragmatic way of disclosing things, modern science is motivated by the urge to dominate things. The “objectification” at work in the scientific attitude, then, makes possible ever greater means of controlling and utilizing the thing being investigated.
SZ: