ETHICS
IN TECHNOLOGY - AND THEOLOGY OF THE FLESH
Inspired
by a
book review of Daniel Cérézuelle's
La Technique et la Chair: Essais de Philosophie de la Technique
Lyon:
Parangon/Vs, 2011
by Kristo Ivanov, Umeå University, (April
2012, version
190727-1625)
The text that follows is a development of a section
on "Flesh as theology without God"
in my
review Trends in Philosophy of Technology (http://www8.informatik.umu.se/~kivanov/CerezuelleTechno.htm)
of Daniel Cérézuelle's
book (in French) on Technology
and the Flesh. Because
of reasons of space and focus I have moved the more detailed treatment of
this issue into this separate text, including Michel
Henry's approach, based
on the philosophy of Heidegger that the author of our book has been directly
influenced by. For a proper reading and understanding
the following text should be read within the context of the review.
The reviewed book
leads us to both phenomenology and symbolism. Regarding phenomenology
I adduce Karl Löwith's portrait at the Goethe Institute written
by Berndt Mayerhofer, and Löwith's famous statements quoted by John
Macquarrie in Heidegger and Christianity (p.
6) taken from Löwith's From Hegel
to Nietzsche (trans. by D.E. Green, 1967, p. 207). I will never forget
my reading it many years ago, namely that Heidegger's philosophy "is in its very essence a theology without
God". And, as Macquarrie observes (p.70f.) "we might blame
Heidegger himself for never having developed an ethical side to his philosophy...he
consistently avoided ethical questions...the ethical question is passed by." (I
think it is really so, except for some inconsequential statements in his Letter
on Humanism, found in Basic Writings, and see below about "values" and
blasphemy against Being.) Or, as Mayerhofer expresses
it for the Goethe Institute: Löwith (a contemporary student of Heidegger)
at least noted that "modernity, oriented to a this-worldly goal [cf. our book's flesh, my
note] and a philosophy of history obsessed with the idea of a successive
approximation of this goal [even if framed as survival or peace, my note],
depends upon theology or the theological view of history as a redemptive
process. This idea originates in the biblical belief in salvation and ends
with the secularizing of its eschatological model." And I would say that
despite Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, it is Friedrich Nietzsche behind them
who is the representative philosophical "father" of it all about
flesh and earth. In this sense the book is an outpost for Nietzschean thought
and it explains its seemingly paradoxical pulling ahead of this sort of Christianity.
In the context of Karl Löwith and his time it is interesting to note another contribution by Georg Lukács in his book with the intriguing and pertinent title of The Destruction of Reason (1980/1962). I give due consideration to the fact that the author was a problematic committed marxist whose criticism aims also at some of my own sources. He appears partially redeemed through his commitment to the critique of nazist ideology, and his admirable respect in taking into account theology. (Those who seek a reconciliation between Lukács' marxism and my own orientation should look for it in the type of analysis offered by Alain Besançon in his The Falsification of the Good: Solovyov and Orwell, orig. La Falsification du Bien, 1985.) Besides repeated references (e.g. pp. 173, 214f, 449) to "religious atheism" that Heidegger builds upon, and reference (p. 493) to his "epistemological hocus-pocus", Lukács writes (p. 506-507) that "Heidegger's ontology was turning into a moral doctrine, indeed almost a religious sermon...the methodology and content of Heidegger's philosophy are expressing in an extremely complicated (but above all, mannered) terminology the intellectual philistine's feelings in a time of severe crisis: the threat to personal "existence" is so deflected as to prevent its giving rise to any obligation to alter one's external living conditions or indeed to collaborate in transforming objective social reality." Furthermore, still about Heidegger (p. 834-835): "His terminological peculiarities are well known, as is his verbal hair-splitting. Now, as the crowning of Machism, phenomenology and semantics, he succeeds in making a philosophical method of language....In Hitler Heidegger greeted the dawning of a new age and thereby, to put it mildly, brought eternal disgrace upon himself...He expresses himself with caution, with a deliberate obscurity, but lets the idea of a new age glimmer through this twilight again." And later on in the text (p. 838): "Heidegger keeps his cynicism hidden behind a verbosity which flirts with obscurity and has pretensions to poetry. This cynicism is voiced quite nakedly by Hitler's former personal jurist and law theorist, Carl Schmitt."
A better understanding of our reviewed book's theology of the flesh revealed as a
theology without God beyond or behind a cursory reference
to Merleau-Ponty would
also have dampened the final anti-climax at reader's meeting
the flesh as a sort of conclusion at the end of the text. At the same time
it would have enhanced the understanding that the connection to a name such
as Merleau-Ponty has not only an "academic" interest since he and
the existentialist tradition
(Sartre) has apparently
inspired important political activism at the edge of so called terrorism:
see, for
instance, Frantz Fanon.
Such an understanding is offered if one collates the book's terminology against
phenomenological
vocabulary as related to Heidegger. It turns out that the book's flesh corresponds
to what Michel Henry in his work on barbarism calls simply "life".
Life corresponds
Henry writes in La Barbarie (pp. 166-169) that if ethics is defined
as the relation between action and ends, norms, or values, one has already
left the site it belongs to, that is the site of life where there are no goals,
no purposes. Whoever conceives ethics as a normative discipline and a knowledge
prior to action will always collide with Schopenhauer's irony (in his The
World as Will and Representation, 1818-1844) stating that an ethics that
wants to model and correct human will [=life] is impossible. This is so because
doctrines act only upon knowledge while the latter does never determine the
human will. If there are ends and norms to be prescribed to life, i.e. a theoretical
or normative ethics, they can be only ends, norms or values originating
from life itself, by means of which life attempts to represent what
it wants. This auto-affirmation of life merges with life's own motion
in its effort to persevere in its being and to grow (also addressed on p. 125-127
in words that recall postmodern ideology). No surprise if Nazi-Lebensraum found
opportunities to appropriate the "spirit" of such survival ideology,
as Nietzsche's
and Richard
Wagner's. (Cf. my blog-reflections on "Wagner
faddism"). Interestingly, the coupling to religion is conceived by
Henry (also closely influenced by Heidegger) in noting (p. 220-221) that "religion
is rooted in the essence of life" since it cannot be the foundation of
its own being, as evidenced by the anguish of death. It originates the compelling
respect for life as in universal condemnations of murder, rape and larceny.
(But Henry does not account for an origin of at least some among the
other biblical commandments.) Art itself, having its origin in the sacred,
will decay
if it
loses its religious
content.
It is then remarkable, then, that Heidegger himself while considering art
as the source of salvific insights
Heidegger's own conception of God as related to ethics is probably most explicit
towards the end of his essay "Letter on Humanism" (also in Basic
Writings). There he endeavors to "think against values" because
every valuing is a subjectivizing. He sees the bizarre effort to prove the
objectivity of values as a proof that it [sic, the effort!] does not know what
it is doing: when one proclaims "God" the altogether "highest
value", this he sees as a degradation of God's essence. And he exclaims "Here
as elsewhere thinking in values is the greatest blasphemy imaginable against
Being." Blasphemy against Being: but who is the one that declares
this, and declares Being? I agree that it is not anonymous man's valuations,
but then who else sets the highest values and priorities if not the holy
books or the scriptures interpreted by the Church? I do not conclude that all
values are subjectively determined by human evaluations or a self-appointed
prophet of Being. A particular phenomenological thinker, Max
Scheler is very explicit on this point and it made him worthy of a doctoral
dissertation by Karol
Wojtyla, the becoming John Paul II. I conclude that for the author it is
Being that is the supreme God who auto-affirms that Being is the supreme objective
value. In such a context it is appropriate to note one of the possible sources
for this sort of unperceived tautological thinking.
In the "Origin of the Work of Art" mentioned earlier Heidegger criticizes
the use of the "thing" and warns that "to keep at a distance
all the preconceptions and assaults of the above modes of thought, to leave
the thing to rest in its own self, for instance, in its thing-being"!
He seems to believe that by naming something as Being he has kept "at
a distance all the preconceptions" by letting Being rest on its being.
Some may believe that Heidegger in virtue of his superior intelligence has
been able to keep at distance his own preconception by means of what one can
perceive as a magic of words but it is apparent that his text does not disprove
that he has substituted what he perceives as Being for what the majority of
the world's religious humanity perceives as God.
How Heidegger because of some (interesting) reason insistently continues to influence
contemporaneous
academic thought
is
illustrated
by
the example of Hubert Dreyfus' and Sean Kelly's book All
Things Shining, with the much more informative subtitle Reading
the
Western
Classics
to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. What is remarkable in our context is that
they both, and especially Dreyfus, are known to me as related to the field of
computer
science, and in particular "artificial intelligence", from which I
was "cured"
by West Churchman's The Design of Inquiring Systems.
Amazon's
customer
reviews
confirm
my opinion that the authors' word-rich rhetoric is neither fully convincing
nor
appreciated despite of its mass media hype, e.g. in the Swedish
Radio, 14 October
2012 program on "The meaning of life in a secular culture".
Neither convincing nor appreciated, but it is fascinately confusing,
as
Heidegger
himself.
It
attempts
to revive polytheism through "existential thinking", experiencing and
sensitiveness
to
"sacred
wonder",
reliance
on
intuition under the guide of "gods" who are forces capable of putting
us in
mood and "create meaning",
in
order
that everyone finds his
own's
truth,
and
such, all with the help of literature and music. That is, backing the clock 2500
years
and
effacing
Christianity in search for a higher form of intelligence. And
what
about
the
problem
of
evil?
Yes,
they
seem
to
answer: in order to deal with evil you also need experience,
and if it upsets you you
will
try
to get out of it. And what's the difference between their version of "secular
polytheism" and
good old value nihilism?
Yes, it appears that they understand nihilism as the statement that nothing
has value, while secular polytheism tries to extract value
from whatnot - everything possible, i.e. "all things" which implies
the often
used word "presence"
-
being
present, i.e. "all things shining." Susan
Neiman in her book review in The
New York Times 20 January 2011 concludes her strainedly sympathetic valuation with
words that were possibly chosen unconsciously and at the same time illustrate
what I described
in my
review of Philip Zimbardo's impasse about evil in his The
Lucifer Effect. She writes: "Understanding
how development of character may prepare us to respond heroically to extraordinary
circumstances
opens
other
possibilities
for making
meaning than hoping to be called by the right god." It justifies a recall
of
the Latin saying "intelligenti pauca".
In the first part of Mark Lilla's review, "Ménage à Trois" (The
New York Review of Books, November 18, 1999) of the correspondence
between Hannah Arendt and Heidegger edited by Ursula Ludz, Lilla recalls
Heidegger's surprisingly religious Catholic background that receded progressively
but unprogrammatically into something difficult to grasp. Karl
Jaspers, almost lifelong senior friend of Heidegger and forming the friendship "triangle" with
Hannah Arendt, confesses that he did not grasp the "the position from
which his friend leveled his criticism" of Jaspers' Psychology of
Worldviews.
And Lilla continues, "The
married old professor and his younger student [Arendt] write to each other
about the nature of love" against the background of their prior affair.
It is indeed an analogy, if not perfect, when Carl Jung writes (with risk of
throwing stones from glasshouse) that "when, for instance, a highly esteemed
professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young-headed
actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim. This is how demonic
power reveals itself to us" (Collected
Works, CW 9 part 1, §62, p. 30) But despite rich use of "unconcealment" Heidegger
never mentions such phenomena. Returning to Lilla's review where he quotes
Jaspers' Philosophische Autobiographie (2nd ed., 1984): "I saw
his depth yet also found something else that I could'nt quite put my finger
on, something
difficult to take...It could sometimes seem that a demon had crept into him..." And
finally on his political engagement with Nazism, having "explicitly placed
his technical vocabulary in the service of the Nazi takeover of the university." (See
above, related to my reference to "survival ideology".)
In the second part of the review (idem, December 2, 1999) "The
Perils of Friendship" Lilla remarks that after a shift in Heidegger's
thinking in the Thirties he moved on to a new analysis of human existence that,
he claimed, took the standpoint of Being itself - "whatever that meant." He
also began writing in a self-fashioned mythopoetic language inspired by Hölderlin,
about "Being as a divinity revealing itself to man." In Heidegger's
manuscript of the Thirties there is much made of "the preparation of the
appearance of the last god." The review continues noting that Heidegger
was never able to confront the issue of philosophy's relation to politics,
while living with his lofty resolution "to refound the entire tradition
of Western thoughts" [sic]. My own impression of witnessing a case of
sheer hubris or "ego
inflation" or "perils
of the self" that today would be also related to some personality
disorder is reinforced by what Lilla reports: Heidegger considered himself
a victim of Nazism and "hence his astonishing remarks to Ernst
Jünger that he would only apologize for his Nazi past if Hitler
could be brought back to apologize to him." He felt that now all was lost, he
could only flee to his study, and "wait in serene expectation for a new
messianic epoch of Being." I would add my guess that he felt to be its
elect messianic prophet. And there belongs the famous phrase during the interview
with Der Spiegel in the Sixties, that "Only a god can save us
now." Lilla
continues observing that after the war Jaspers wrote that Heidegger's manner
of thinking, which "seems in its essence unfree, dictatorial, and incapable
of communication, would today be in its pedagogical effects disastrous." Later
he considers Heidegger to have been like a child incapable of understanding
what he had been doing, upon which Heidegger responded "with shameless
self-justifications and irresponsible political speculations." Heidegger is
quoted to write that "while modern man puts his faith in the political
realm, which is dead and now occupied by technology and economic calculation,
all we can hope is that a hidden 'advent' will burst forth out Germans' homelessness." Two
years later Jaspers concludes that Heidegger was a demonic antiphilosopher
consumed by dangerous fantasies. Regarding the hope for "advent" he
considered it to be utter dreaming and that Heidegger had stepped out as
a philosopher seduced away from reality, a prophet revealing the supernatural
from hidden sources. In my view Heidegger's obvious political disorientation
recalls what Alexis
de Tocqueville in his famous studies
of democracy (Democracy
in America, vol. II, chap. 5ff.) states
about the importance of religion
in the context of politics.
The second part of the review continues reporting that Hannah Arendt had
published an article (1946) where she pronounced his philosophy to be an
unintelligible
form of "superstition". As for his Nazism, she refused to attribute
it to a mere lack of character [an euphemism for immoral or ethical behavior?],
preferring instead to blame his incorrigible romanticism [without a justification
of the gratuitously pejorative use of the term] , "a spiritual playfulness
[cf. bricolage in
the postmodern spirit that he helped to found] that stems in part from delusions
of grandeur and in part from despair. Heidegger is reported to have continued
his contact with Arendt. In 1952 he writes to her "The world is becoming
bleaker...and the essence of history ever more mysterious...Only resignation
remains. Still, despite growing external threats in everything, I see the arrival
of new - or, better yet, old - secrets." And at this point I ask myself "what
are we to make of this, of all these prophetic visions from
obscure sources that in this case may have been directed in trust to only Arendt?
Jaspers' comments that Heidegger really does not understand the Nazi period
and is hardly in a position to find out what devil drove him to do what he
did. I realize that such a kind of rhetorics repeatedly prevents the mention
of ethics: so much, then, for this devil's ethics, which prevented a development
of the relation between politics and philosophy, i.e. the once central issue
in Plato's philosophy that Heidegger so cheerfully left in his passion for
the pre-socratics. Or, then, that was the unconscious point of it all, to divest
oneself from ethics and politics. Lilla tells that Arendt eventually considered
Heidegger to be a pitiful creature, like a fox trapped in the lair of his ideas,
convinced that it was the entire world, and whose intellectual passion [whatever
that is] was unable to distinguish obvious truths. It was politically dangerous,
in need of distinguishing between thinking, willing, and judging. I would add
in guise of introduction to the next section that such kinds of distinctions,
besides of their valuable treatment in the philosophy rejected by Heidegger,
were being developed by some his contemporaries, e.g. in the field of analytical
psychology. In the meantime, Jaspers in his Notizen exhorted Heidegger
to take responsibility for his own gift, to place it in the service of reason,
of the reality of human worth and possibilities, instead of in the service
of magic [sic]. He felt betrayed by Heidegger's "intellectual sorcery" [sic], "as
human being, as a German, as a friend, and as a philosopher."
At this point we should remember that this overview aims at pointing out and "deconstructing" a
sort of "mysticism" that surrounds the vocabulary of Flesh=Life=Presence=Being. A symptomatic further example appears in gender studies such as those in the issue of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 23, no. 3 (2012), as described by Karen Barad in the article "On Touching - The Inhuman That Therefore I Am". Apparently influenced by the "Heideggerian" Jacques Derrida, she writes (p. 207): "Each of the essays in this special issue touches on questions of touching: coupling and decoupling, entanglement, sensation, immersion, visual hapticity, ciliated sense, the synesthetic force of perceiving and feeling, contact, affective ecology, involution, strange and wonderful intimacies, sensory attunement, arousal, response, interspecies signaling, affectively charged multisensory dance, technological intimacies, remembering, figuring, embodied mathematics." This kind of thinking eventually trickles down to trendy technological and "practical" fields such as the design of computer-human interaction (CHI) as evidenced in Caroline Hummel's and Ambra Trotto's Hephaestus and the senses (2013.) They state that inspired by phenomenology, pragmatism and embodied cognition, they explore how to use embodiment and skilful coping to connect people and to catalyse a constructive design "conversation" among people with different background. They developed six different interactive "Engagement Probes": open, creative and playful tools aimed at engaging people in a design process more concrete and effective than a brainstorm session. In an experimental workshop where participants were grouped in teams "every team started to meet and getting to know each other in a playful way using their bodies through one of the Engagement Probes." They conclude that "the results of the workshop show that the Probes stimulate engagement, help people to get familiar and connect in a short period of time, and inspire and boost a design process with an emphasis on embodiment and tangibility." All this is in line with other references by Michael O'Rourke in (pdf) "'Girls Welcome!!!' Speculative Realism, Object Oriented Ontology and Queer Theory" (in the Speculations Journal, May 2011) to queer terms such as posthuman performativity, queering of the normativities of queer theory and speculative realism, agential realism, and ethics of mattering. Similar terminological upheavals can be sensed in other papers such as Paul Reid-Bowen's on the "Speculative turn in the Study of Religion and Gender" (in Religion and Gender, vol. 1, no.1, 2011.)
The question is why do appear so many volatile "neologistic" terms,
or concepts, or whatever they are since "concepts" have with Kantian
insights acquired a very special connotation that does no seem to be applicable
here. Carl Jung states that he considers it to be wiser to acknowledge the
idea of God; for if we do not, something else is made God, usually something
quite inappropriate and stupid such as only an "enlightened" intellect
could hatch forth (CW 7, §110, p. 71). For instance, what West Churchman
in his The Design of Inquiring Systems refers
to as "the guarantor", and further to God (p. 241 and cf. word index)
is referred by Heidegger as "enduring" while he prophetically states
(in his The Question Concerning Technology) that "Only what is granted
endures. What endures primally out of the earliest beginning is what grants." Compare with Karen Barad's article mentioned above writing (p. 216, original italics): "What if it is only facing the inhuman - the indeterminate non/being non/becoming of mattering and not mattering - that an ethics committed to the rupture of indifference can arise?"
In
his Letters, vol.1,
edited by G. Adler and A. Jaffé, which probably were not envisaged for
later publication Jung allows himself to express himself bluntly and "blasphemously" when
referring to writers such as in the Heidegger school, who have an astonishing
facility with words, merely playing with verbal tricks, and juggling with
words which they endow with an almost magical efficacy (p.273). He finds (p. 330-332) that Heidegger is an example
of the mastery of complicated banalities, and that his philosophical style
is neurotic through and through and is ultimately rooted in his psychic crankiness,
an
example of intellectual perversion that is a German national institution.
Finally he concludes his letter with "Excuse these blasphemies! They flow from
my hygienic propensities, because I hate to see so many young minds infected
by Heidegger." In his Letters,
vol. 2, (p. 121) Jung refers further to approximations to "the Heideggerean
or neo-High German schizophrenic style (Auf-forstung, be-treten, An-rempelung,
Unter-teilung) as being hardly convincing (or con-vincing) to the reader."
Jung returns to a more serious and less blasphemous style when writing on
the nature of the psyche, and stating that (in CW 8, §359f., p. 170f.):
"Wherever
the spirit of God is extruded from our human calculations an unconscious
substitute takes its place. In Schopenhauer we find the unconscious Will as
the new definition of God [which, after Michel Henry's La Barbarie I
could have included in the equation Flesh=Life=Presence=Being],
in Carus the unconscious, and in Hegel identification and inflation, the
practical equation of philosophical reason with Spirit, thus making possible
that intellectual juggling with the object with achieved such a horrid brilliance
in his philosophy of the State. Hegel offered a solution of the problem raised
by epistemological criticism in that he gave ideas a chance to prove their
unknown power of autonomy. [cf. West Churchman's attempt of solution by passing
from Hegelian to Singerian inquiring systems in his The
Design of Inquiring Systems.] They induced that hubris of reason
which led to Nietzsche's superman and hence to the catastrophe that bears
the name of Germany. Not only artists, but philosophers too, are sometimes
prophets. - I think it is obvious that all philosophical statements which
transgress the bounds of reason are anthropomorphic and have no validity
beyond that which falls to psychically conditioned statements. A philosophy
like Hegel's is a self-revelation of the psychic background and, philosophically,
a presumption. Psychologically, it amounts to an invasion by the unconscious.
The peculiar high-flown language Hegel uses bears out this view:
it is reminiscent of the megalomanic language of schizophrenics, who use
terrific spellbinding words to reduce the transcendent to subjective
form, to give banalities that charm of novelty, or pass off commonplaces
as searching wisdom. So bombastic a terminology is a symptom of
weakness, ineptitude, and lack of substance. But that does not prevent the
latest German philosophy [text written in 1946 - my observation] from using
the same crackpot power-words and pretending that it is not unintentional
psychology." [My italics.]
These hard words are echoed by what the British philosopher Bernard Williams writes in his Essays and Reviews 1959-2002 as observed by Carl Rudbeck in his review "Filosofihistoria fångad i ögonblicket" [History of Philosophy caught in the moment] (in Swedish, Svenska Dagbladet, 12 March 2015): "Heidegger is the only world-famous philosopher of the 20th century about whom it can seriously be argued that he was a charlatan, not because he is obscure, but because it can seem that his obscurity is functional, and that his characteristic combination of an abstract metaphysical terminology with homely domestic metaphor (so that things 'stand in the clearing of Being' or such) is not a necessity born of the unequalled depth of his inquiry - something to which he insistently refers - but a purposive substitute for thought which in more perspicuous modes is harder." (Essays and Reviews 1959-2002, p. 183.)
And what about technology versus "to give banalities the charm of novelty"?
I myself have found more about science and technology in a couple of pages
by Carl Jung than anywhere else in "high-flown language": to make
it short: see Jung's about the "sovereignty the idea" (CW 5, §§ 106-114,
pp. 72-78) that I have in part quoted elsewhere in a paper on Belief
and Reason (note 49). It includes an explanation of why the world
and its beauty historically had to be shunned because love of created nature
soon makes man its slave: It is not merely a question of sensuality and of
aesthetic corruption, but of paganism and nature worship that in me recalls
contemporary fads and adoration of Design, as well as design trends
in consumer behavior and in postmodern academic research, which recall Heideggerian
aesthetics
in the contemplation of van Gogh's "pair of shoes". Because of
space limitations here
I will pick
up only a few words from another
piece
of
work
(CW 11 §§ 442ff., pp. 289ff.) that deals directly with technology: "[The
development of our modern consciousness] so far has made it emancipated enough
to forget
its dependence on the unconscious psyche. It is not a little proud of this
emancipation, but it overlooks the fact that although it has apparently got
rid of the unconscious it has become the victim of its own verbal concepts
[...] Our dependence on words is so strong that a philosophical brand of 'existentialism'
had to restore the balance by pointing to a reality that exists in spite of
words - at considerable risk, however, of concepts such as 'existence' [cf.
'Being'] , 'existential', etc. turning into more words which delude us into
thinking that we have caught a reality. One can be - and is - just as dependent
on words as on the unconscious. Man's advance towards the Logos was a great
achievement, but he must pay for it with loss of instinct and loss reality
to the degree that he remains in primitive dependence on mere words. Because
words are substitutes for things, which of course they cannot be in reality,
they take on intensified forms, become eccentric, outlandish, stupendous, swell
up into what schizophrenic patients call 'power words.' A primitive word-magic
develops, and one is inordinately impressed by it because anything out of the
ordinary is felt to be especially profound and significant [...] Neologisms
tend not only to hypostatize themselves to an amazing degree, but actually
to replace the reality they were originally intended to express. [...] And
just as the intellect subjugated the psyche, so also it subjugated Nature and
begat on her an age of scientific technology that left less and less room for
the natural and irrational man. Thus the foundations were laid for an inner
opposition which today threatens the world with chaos. To make the reversal
complete, all the powers of the underworld now hide behind reason and intellect,
and under the mask of rationalistic ideology a stubborn faith seeks to impose
itself by fire and sword, vying with the darkest aspects of a church militant."
Please compare with programs like those summarized by the International
Humanist and Ethical Union and ongoing "Wars
on Terror". And Jung continues (CW 11, § 869f., p. 534f.) with
something that anticipates the conclusions of our reviewed book, without the
need of a problematic philosophy of the flesh: "The power of science
and technics in Europe is so enormous and indisputable that there is little
point
in reckoning up all that can be done and all that has been invented. One
shudders and the stupendous possibilities. Quite another question begins
to loom up: Who is
applying this technical skill? in whose hands does this power lie?
[...] Our technical skill has grown to be so dangerous that most urgent question
today [1936] is not what more can be done in this line, but
how the man who is entrusted with the control of this skill should be constituted,
or how to alter the mind of Western man so that he would renounce his terrible
skill. It is infinitely more important to trip him of the illusion of his power
than to strengthen him still further in the mistaken idea that he dan do everything
he wills. The slogan one hears so often in Germany, 'Where there's a will
there's a way,'
has cost the lives of millions of human beings."
To all this I wish only to add one again "Intelligenti pauca",
while noting that Heidegger does not seem to have anything to say about love except
for some words
in his usual vocabulary and his sheer behavior as induced from his correspondence
with Hannah Arendt (cf. the 2007 study in the Harvard Review by
Maier-Katkin about their "Love
and Reconciliation").
I think that the above analysis illustrates how and why ethical questions
tend to be
deleted from technological research and from research on technology and how this
process invalidates the final conclusions or hopes of our reviewed book about
the
salvific
power of the flesh. At the same time I discover that I have unconsciously returned
to, detailed and confirmed some results I already had obtained in 1998 when writing
a research paper about Management of Information Infrastructure. It can contribute
to the understanding of the issue seen from another point of view.