Johannes Achill Niederhauser

Heidegger on Technology
Online Lecture Course

Johannes Achill Niederhauser

Second Lecture:

The Danger and The Thing

The first lecture explicated what it is that Heidegger is after with his writings on technics and the
current epoch. As we have seen, Heidegger is not a luddite. Instead, what he is after is the
thoughtful understanding of what is today and what the origin is for that which is. This
understanding of the deep history, the hidden, is what Heidegger searches and wishes to bring to
the fore. It is crucial to point out again that Heidegger is convinced that technics will cast the
human being into a new or renewed relationship with being and the question what it means to be,
and what it means to be human. Still, Heidegger is greatly aware of the danger that technics and
modern technology pose for the human being. In this lecture we shall focus on the danger. But we
shall also focus on something rather simple, namely, a simple thing like a jug, a stone bridge or a
coffin, and how such things bear the horizon for salvation.
In many of his writings after the war and on technics Heidegger quotes a word from Hölderlin
which reads:
Wo die Gefahr ist
Wächst das Rettende auch
But where danger is, grows
The saving power also.
Hölderlin says this at the beginning of his hymn Patmos, in one of the later versions of the hymn.

Heidegger begins to speak of Gefahr, danger, in the technics essay when he notes something pivotal
about what it means to be human and how being-human is brought to the fore again in the epoch
of technics. Before I explicate “danger”, a term of art for Heidegger, let me, however, briefly digress
and say a few of words on Seinsgeschichte and Ereignis. Without a sound understanding of these two
notions we cannot gain a proper understanding or genuine access to Heidegger’s thinking.
Seinsgeschichte is usually translated as the history of being. On the face of it this is perfectly correct.
But “correspondence truth” which operates by finding correct statements or translations is not the
way in which this thinking unfolds. Heidegger’s thinking is aletheic, is at once one of presence and

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withdrawal, of disappearance in appearance, of simultaneous opening and closing. These are not
dichotomies, not two different moments or aspects. Instead, thinking presence or appearance
always already is only possible since non-presence and disappearance are also at play. Such is the
movement of being and of the Ereignis. The Ereignis is that which comes into its own as it withdraws.
As such it is not at all an event, or as it is usually translated “event of appropriation”. Ereignis is
rather the realm or region, Bereich, thanks to which and where being and human beings encounter
each other. If we understood Seinsgeschichte as the history of being, then we might assume, as many
scholars do, that what Heidegger here has in mind is just the different ways in which humans have
understood being over time. That is to say, Heidegger provides a more or less linear timeline of
the various understandings of that history. Hence, some scholars conclude that the history of being
ends with Heidegger and we need no longer worry about it. But, of course, for scholarly purposes
we can read what Heidegger has to say about this timeline and criticise him for not including one
philosopher or another, or for misunderstanding something according to what is currently deemed
correct and agreed upon in polite academic society. This is a very comfortable position to take
because it allows the continued production of output of critique. On a deeper plane this is also
existentially comfortable because the sudden weirdness that bursts open for anyone who seriously
reads Heidegger, can in this way be pushed away. One no longer has to deal with the simple fact
that even the linear history of being would not have been seen at all without Heidegger. No one
saw what Heidegger saw, precisely because he thinks at the limits and beyond the limits of
metaphysics. Heidegger thinks concealment, he thinks that which is absconding, the draw itself. It
is only from such a trajectory, on which the thinking path itself is, that the so-called history of
being lights up. Metaphysics itself never saw this. Thus, even the linearised version, which is
reductive, could not have been seen. How shall we think of Seinsgeschichte then? The problem is that
the English language does not know the difference between Geschichte and Historie. The language
only knows the word history, which, if we understand this from its Greek origin, means to be a
witness to. But to be a witness means not to be involved, to be at a distance to something that just
happens to happen in one’s vicinity. But we are involved in Seinsgeschichte, inevitably and necessarily.
Without humans no being, and without being no humans. We are always already closest to that,
which is at stake, yet we are – at once – also furthest removed. One likely translation, one that
invites us to think in such a way that we leave behind the all too ordinary understanding, which
always must be reductive and simplifying, which operates under the rule of the they, which always
already knows and understands everything, which never is caught in wonder or terror, one
translation that might throw open amazement though is to think of Seinsgeschichte as “the weirdness
of being”. There is nothing familiar here, but the weird is at work, and the way humans respond to
the weird, these responses are what bring about, disclose, set forth, possibilities of existence.

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Humans respond to being and the waves and fates being silently sends our way, ecstatically, this
unfolds as being withdraws and abandons itself and pushes back at once. In this time-space mortals
are at play, are at stake, and their ways of responding to the task send waves back into being. Being
itself is that which self-conceals and to and by this weirdness we are summoned. The Old English
word wyrd means “fate, chance, fortune; destiny; and the Fates”. Literally wyrd means that which
comes. It is related to the German verb werden, which means “to become”. Wyrd is also related to
the verbs “to turn”, “to come”. The sense of “uncanniness” which comes about later in Middle
English has to do precisely though with the sense of turning, of withdrawing, of fate and that which
comes from a distance, that which dis-absconds and that which never can be grasped. This is what
Heidegger is after in Seinsgeschichte, the weirdness of being. Thus, epoch now no longer has a
historiographical connotation, but opens a different way of thinking: if we are concerned with the
epoch of technics we are not concerned with a certain linear time span, but with a dimension and
a horizon thanks to which a certain sense of “uncanniness” begins to take hold of us. This
weirdness is beginning to sink in even in ordinary everyday discourse. Weird is a word we often
hear. And as Ivo De Gennaro reminds us, an old English saying goes: After word comes weird.
And as Hölderlin reminds us mortals: language “is the most dangerous of goods … given to man
[who is the] destroying and perishing, and recurring [creature].” (GA 4: 35/ 54)
Heidegger reads this as saying that language “is the danger of all dangers because it first creates the
possibility of danger.” (GA4: 36/ 55) He continues: “Danger is the threat that beings pose to being
itself.” (GA4: 36/ 55)
None of this is to say that Heidegger is some sort of Romantic who simply believes that a bit of
world withdrawal and some fancy words will bring about a healing of the world. In an essay on
Trakl Heidegger warns that we should not understand his remarks as “dreamy romanticism, at the
fringe of the technically-economically oriented world of modern mass existence.” (GA 12: 76/
196). Such dreamy romanticism is misguided precisely because all that romanticism achieves is
escapist fantasies, transfiguration or idealisation. Heidegger’s profound reading of Hölderlin and
other poets, then, is not to be understood as escapism. Rather, these texts for Heidegger provide
something else. They hint at other ways of being and existing, of responding to what is and what
is perhaps to come. There is in Heidegger room for withdrawal and releasement, quite obviously
so. However, the withdrawal is a turning from within. One has to go inside what is and the current
horizon and overturn it from within. In German Heidegger therefore speaks of “verwinden” rather
than “überwinden”. It is not about getting over, or overcoming, but turning around and in such a
way that one does it from within. Hence no antagonism, no antithesis, but also no romantic
fetishization of some supposedly lost world. On the other hand, what is equally incapable of
bringing about this turning from within in thanks to which another dimension opens up, is to will

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some new era or epoch to come about. The fantasies of communism or liberal market democracy
are at their core the same. They both, and their respective proponents, fantasise about the best
possible way of organising and planning, i.e., willing into actualisation, human beings on a global scale.
This is why their entire theoretical constructs are hypothetical and conditional. If – then. Hence,
here we have a case of a fantasised utopia, a place that does not exist but is supposed to exist, if
only we, whoever we are, because this question is never asked, get all the conditions right, i.e., if we
set all parameters and conditions correctly so that once and for all, timelessness is lurking here, we
have found the perfect way of organising human existence. They both play the charade of talking
about liberation, freedom or emancipation, of course, each in a bit different ways, and, of course,
each of them sees the other as the deadly enemy. This also entails that they require each other as
mortal enemies. If not for the respective other “ism”, what could we liberated from? Note also,
and most importantly, that they both are at their core technical. That is to say they are at heart of
the will to will that wills more power for the sake of gaining more power. There is no room for
letting something come and show itself. Note, and this is crucial, that they both perfectly well know
how to organise. There can be no opening, there can be no other, hidden dimension. The course
of history, and they both want the end of history, is always already clear and obvious. This is quite
similar to the way in which transcendental cyber circuits operate. Self-referential positive feedback
loops that circle around themselves. Just like there are thousands upon thousands of conferences
and congresses, as Heidegger keeps mentioning, where action plans of organisation are discussed
and set in stone or rather paper. None of this will transform the world, for all of this always already
and necessarily operates from out of the same loop and always comes back to itself and that is to
say to the self-aggrandised human subject that assumes itself to be the ground of all beings.
And this is exactly the beginning of the explosion that we call modernity, that very epoch that
refers to itself “new” and “current”. In a seminar from 1961 Heidegger says something crucial (GA
15: 433). He says that there is in the dimension of technology, i.e., in positionality, Ge-stell, a process
at work that is destruction itself, a process called destruction, which is at the heart of modern
sciences. “The atomic bomb has long since exploded”, Heidegger says here. Yet, he does not mean
the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima by the US. Heidegger says that the atomic bomb
exploded the moment when the human being began to revolt against being. That is, the moment
made explicit by Descartes, when the human being began to represent, vorstellen, being as an object.
Since Descartes this is known. The revolt against being by the human being means that beings are
now objects of the representing, desiring, devouring subject. Heidegger also very clearly says here
that the coming age presumably will be a “uncanny”, unheimlich. Uncanny also because the process
that is underway is the “Europeanisation of the world”. That is to say the gleichschaltung,
homogenisation of all regions of the planet as according to the scientific worldview as it has

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originated from out of European philosophy and science. Technics, as the current prevalent and
exclusive horizon of possibilities, is the way in which being occurs and reveals beings in the present
epoch as standing resources standing ready at any time and any place for exploitation. Hence
technics is not of human making or will. Technics is a sending of beyng. Only by seeing that sending
as a sending, as the current fate, rather than by willing some effect or other, can there be an opening
from within. The atomic bomb explodes when the human being aggrandises itself to be the ground
of all beings because this is also the moment that the explosion of abstract, non-teleological
intelligent production sets off. The bomb explodes with the self-aggrandisement of the human
subject also because it atomises the human being. In What are Poets for? Heidegger writes: “Thinking
does not begin until we have come to know that the reason that has been extolled for centuries is
the most stubborn adversary of thinking.” (GA 5: 267/199) Abstract, calculative rationality stands
in the way of accessing, rather, of letting something else show itself by itself.
Note also that by the seemingly rather extreme notion that the atomic bomb exploded with
Descartes Heidegger does not only point to the explosion in abstract intelligence, against which
for example the telos, the limit of something, stood. No, he also points his listeners and readers
away from the visible destruction of the explosions of the atomic bomb. Not even those explosions
have been able to awaken us! Hence, for the few and rare who let themselves into thinking, this
hint is reserved. For only they will be able to hear what is at stake.
Heidegger writes in What are Poets for?:
“What is deadly is not the much-discussed atomic bomb as this
particular death-dealing machine. What has long since been threatening
man with death, and indeed with the death of his own
nature, is the unconditional character of mere willing in the sense
of purposeful self-assertion in everything. What threatens man in
his very nature is the willed view that man, by the peaceful release,
transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies of physical
nature, could render the human condition, man's being, tolerable
for everybody and happy in all respects. But the peace of this peacefulness
is merely the undisturbed continuing relentlessness of the
fury of self-assertion which is resolutely self-reliant.”
Heidegger here describes a version of Plato’s Cave, a self-relational cyber circuit, a positive
feedback loop that knows no negativity, no death, no unresolvable tragedy, but only homogenised
material happiness for all. That would be the death of human existence.
Yet, there is something else that happens in modernity and that has everything to do with
transcendental logic, with the logic that sets time and space as parameters, the logic by which the

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human subject operates this planet as a massive matrix control grid. In this system there can be
access to beings as they are, to things in themselves. Things in themselves are noumenal, beyond
the scope of reason. There is a profound reason why Kant has to set up his system as he does. In
order for critique to work, in order for the subjectivity of the subject to be capable of setting,
positing, the objectivity of objects – which is what Kant calls the Copernican revolution, the mind
becomes the sun – the subject cannot, must not, have access to things as they are in themselves.
All the human subjects have access to is representations of appearances of things in themselves.
Hence, as a side note, also this deep boredom of our epoch. For all we know, for all we ever see
and perceive, taste and feel and touch, are mere phantasma of appearances. Hence also our thirst
for real food, real things, real experiences. We have no access to things as they are in themselves.
Hence Heidegger returns to The Thing explicitly in his writings surrounding his essays on
technology. One such essay is entitled “The Thing”. There Heidegger writes:

“Science's knowledge, which is compelling within its own

sphere, the sphere of objects, already had annihilated things as
things long before the atom bomb exploded. The bomb's explosion
is only the grossest of all gross confirmations of the longsince-
accomplished annihilation of the thing: the confirmation
that the thing as a thing remains nil. The thingness of the thing
remains concealed, forgotten. The nature of the thing never comes
to light, that is, it never gets a hearing. This is the meaning of our
talk about the annihilation of the thing.” (GA 7: 172/ 169)

What we deal with are simulacra. Yet, the profound reason for this lies in the shift that occurs with
Kant’s critical philosophy and the nearly perfect cybernetic system he sets up. The thing remains
nil, Heidegger says. That means, all we have access to is appearances, rather our representations of
appearances, and – at will – we can produce, i.e., position in front of us, what we represent. Here
– if we care to listen carefully – we also see that the response by Heidegger is a simple one. No
grand programme or scheme, plan or mass organisation. Instead, the nearly silent, the humble
attempt at beginning to see and hear again. To see again the simple thing and leave behind the
abstractions of science.
If we wrest ourselves free from those abstractions that interfere with our relationship with the
world, we do make a leap, Heidegger says, but we do not leap into the abyss! Rather we leap “onto
some firm soil. Some? No! But on that soil upon which we live and die, if we are honest with
ourselves.” (GA 8: 44/ 41) What Heidegger argues for here is not some naïve realism or any realism

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at all for that matter, if realism simply means that all that exists is what it means to exist. The proper
things Heidegger has in mind do not just fall from the heavens as (new) realism assumes. Instead,
we encounter the tree insofar as the tree and we are always already in a relation to each other. In
this sense, Heidegger says, “the tree and we are.” (GA 8: 44/ 41) That is to say, the tree stands
there and it is insofar as it grows from the earth as that which gives by sheltering and withdrawing.
The tree is left alone but also the tree only is insofar as we are. The tree is not just given, but fully
comes to be when we each are introduced to the tree, when we disclose the tree. But this disclosure
is only taking place insofar as the tree “be-things” us, uns be-Dingt, conditions us, as Heidegger
strangely puts it in The Thing (GA 7: 182/179).
In this humble response a gathering takes place. A gathering that is an invitation and a simultaneous
letting-go of the supposed absolute certainty of abstract science, and the supposed absolute
certainty of those who believe they can see the future in the various “unforms” of the end of
history.
Heidegger also very clearly says that the grid of transcendental logic not only bars us from seeing
things, but destroys beings, destroys genuine things. Another language, poietic, is required so as to
no longer be as destructive. Nevertheless, it is not in the power of human beings to change what
is occurring at will. Yet, we are not simply to wait passively for a sudden turning. There is something
we can do. It has to do with response, and hence with language.
Things, Heidegger says, are attacked in positionality. They are not let be as what they are, released
into their free play. Instead, they are ordered and managed as standing resource. The human being
himself becomes standing reserve, but he is also challenged to organise and order all things as
standing reserve. The human being can do so because of his unique relationship with beyng. That
is to say the human being is always already cast into and up against an unconcealedness which he
cannot control or even totally perceive. We have to think and see what is in order for us not to be
simply functionaries of technics. For our essence, rather who we are, our being, the dimension we
inhabit as humans is such that we are dis-covering, un-concealing beings and hence we are needed
by beyng. Beyng requires us for unconcealing. Any unconcealing always works by the law of
simultaneous unconcealment and concealment. The task of man, Heidegger says, is to experience
his belonging to unconcealment, to the original wellspring that lets beings appear in the first place.
In the epoch of unrestrained reign of technics the most visible danger is that the human being
simply and only effectuates further and further the reorganisation of the entire planet and nature
as stock and standing reserve. Put differently, the human being then only deals with material,
including himself. Moreover, we then only see the world and increasingly so as a transcendental
feedback loop system of effective causality. Nature appears as a linear system that can be calculated
and controlled. Yet, whence causality came, even though effective is taken for granted and used to

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compute all desired outcomes, is concealed. Beings are insofar as they appear to be exploitable. The
unconcealment that sets itself into work in positionality is such that it wants to be appear as totally
and completely unconcealed without any concealment. Hence, we begin to conflate the simulated
nearness of things on the screens that structure our worlds and experience. As a hint for those who
would like to be initiated into thinking, remember Plato’s Cave and its shadows. The technical
world is an instantiation of the Cave and its shadows. As Heidegger writes in Das Ereignis: “[t]he
“cave” is the genuine world, the one and only world, but is now illuminated by the light of
planning.” (GA 71: 107/91)
The danger above all then is the destining, or fate, of revealing, of unconcealment. In this sense the
human being is always already in danger, for the human being is always already participating in
unconcealing and disclosing. To be responsible, “to be men, not destroyers” to quote Ezra Pound,
means to be aware of this our essence, our being, i.e., that we always already disclose in co-
respondence with the current exclusive and prevalent way beyng discloses itself and that we are
play, at stake in this. In technics this danger is greatest precisely because of the destructive ways we
can now access, manage, rearrange beings seemingly at will. And yet, things slip through our hands
and nothing feels real any more and the human being is the most important resource material for
this entire uncanny unhuman process. The human being will be technologically and industrially
produced as material needed by whatever unholy forces are at work. The emptiness of our epoch
is what we try to fill with more and more produced stuff, which is aimlessly produced for the sake
of consumption and consumption is required in order to keep production going. But this emptiness
cannot be filled. What can the human being do?
He can begin again to allow himself to think in ways outside the computational dimension. In ways
that cannot be formalised or formatted, labelled and hence outsourced. Instead of responding to
the current age with the continued attempts to secure and plan, man can begin to show releasement
towards things. In his essay The Thing Heidegger hence asks “What is the thing in itself?” And also:
what is really near to us? A return to simple things, it seems, for Heidegger is the response. It all
has to do with a certain Haltung, a stance we mortals take. I will say more on the mortal stance in
the third lecture. For now let us focus on simple things, as Heidegger does.
While this may appear as a rather simplistic approach and almost benign, it shows its force when
we realise that this is a direct response to Kant and what ensued after him.
As Stephen Houlgate notes in a book on Hegel, the Kantian position on nature is not too far away
from Nietzsche who argues “that the world which we experience is made up of layer upon layer of
human interpretation or fiction.” (Houlgate 2009: 5)

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In this world of fiction we live today. Let me try to be a bit clearer on Kant. This will also make
clearer from another angle, why Heidegger speaks of the dimension of technics as Gestell. Perhaps
I should here also mention something else that is crucial on language. Heidegger uses words in a
very particular manner. Namely in the manner of all great thinkers. Thinking makes itself free from
the immediate meanings of words and hears something else in them. All great thinkers have done
so. Most prominently perhaps Plato who turned the meaning of idea into something radically
different than its original meaning. Idea used to mean the outer appearance of something, how
something appears. Plato radically changed that. All thinkers have done this. Heidegger even writes
to one of his students saying that he finds it a bit weird why he gets so viciously attacked for his
use of language and that he asks the question of being. Plato, Heidegger points out, did not have
to defend his use of the word idea or his thinking. We live in a time of transition, a crudely
unphilosophical, non-thinking time, where thinkers constantly have to justify their “positions” at
best! At worst philosophers simply fight over “isms”.
Let’s return to Kant. On the one hand, Kant is the first thinker who questions the presupposition
thought had made since Parmenides. Namely that being is identical with thought. This is incredibly
crucial and this is ultimately the project of Critical philosophy. On the other hand, Kant must of
necessity, in order to be able to construct objects without contradiction, bar us from any genuine
access to things as they are in themselves. What we disclose then are never things in themselves
but merely representations of appearances. What’s more is that in this system of a logic of positing,
time and space are parameters by which the human subject controls its world of functional
appearances, where the mind and its categories are the sun, the question what we can give back to
nature never even as much as occurs to the subject. In many environmentalist discourses, at least
those that dominate the mainstream, the question what we can and should give back to nature, is
not raised. Rather, what we can observe is the Apocalyptic horror of late modern subjectivity
pushing against the uncanny, against limitation finding itself incapable of accepting the finitude of
being and the necessity to give back to the earth – which also means to limit oneself and one’s
desires. In the Cartesian-Kantian paradigm which we have inherited, we do not belong to the world,
but we are divided from it. Still, this is a mode of disclosing and unconcealing, but one in which
concealment is concealed. Hence One in which the safeguarding of the earth and world is not
respected. In this forceful disclosing more and more energy, more and more power and force are
necessary even to keep systems going. And this might sound strange but the phenomenon of
negative interest rates is an indication of this, too. Of this tiredness at bottom. But also of the fact
that the abyss is opening up and only with the most cruel methods any kind of “growth” is still
attainable.

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What the human being needs to do, more than anything hence, is to accept limitation and finitude.
In one word the human being needs to accept death. This is why Heidegger calls death the Ge-
Birg des Seins, the mountain range of being, or the concentration of all concealment, sheltering,
harbouring of the finitude of being. Into the darkened valley of the mountain range of being we
shall enter now. For we must learn to speak again in a language that does not attack things, but lets
them be. The inaccessible that is death is what we need to learn to appreciate again. Only then do
we gain access again to the world, to us, to things, to the earth. “The ordering belonging .to
Enframing sets itself above the thing, leaves it, as thing, unsafeguarded, truthless. In this way
Enframing disguises the nearness of world that nears in the thing,” Heidegger writes in The Turning.
This then, Gestell, enframing, positionality, is the forceful positing and placing by means of the
transcendental logic which uses space and time as parameters in order to manage and calculate all
cause and effect relationships. In such a world, where all we deal with are precalculated effects
including experiences, there is no nearness. In The Thing Heidegger importantly writes the
following: “Yet the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not
consist in shortness of distance.” Just think of the uncanny distancelessness, loss of distance on
the internet, where we seem to have access to anything at any time, and anyone at any time. But
this destruction of distance brings us no nearness, no neighbourhood, no community precisely
because we always already forget and conceal that at the heart of genuine nearness there is
something inaccessible, there is something that does not fully show and disclose itself, and which
precisely for its self-refusal is that which draws nearer and retains the mystery necessary for the
exuberance and inexhaustibility of the gift.

But where danger is, grows

The saving power also.
Wo die Gefahr ist
Wächst das Rettende auch

Death perhaps is where the danger is most intense. But might also be where the saving power
grows.

HIER JETZT AUS GA7 WIE DIE SPRACHE DIE DINGE ANGREIFT
ES BRAUCHT EINE ANDERE SPRACHE UM DAS ZERSTÖRENDE ABZUWENDEN
VON INNEN ZU KEHREN!

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