The Essence of Technology and Art#
When one wants to philosophy about a field where art and technology are intertwined, one can hardly ignore the philosophy of one of the most problematic and influential thinker, that is, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger, a thinker deeply engaged with the question of Being and the existential structures of human life, was at the same time a member of the NSDAP—a fact that must not be overlooked and which poses a serious ethical problem for any engagement with his work. And yet Heidegger’s reflections on technology and art are remarkable in their depth.
He did not understand technology merely as a collection of tools or procedures, but as a mode of unconcealment—a way in which the world discloses itself to us. Likewise, art was for him not simply a matter of aesthetic production, but a space in which truth comes into the open. From this perspective, art and technology are not simple opposites. Both are modes of unconcealment, ways in which we encounter the world.
At its core, technology has the power to disclose—but it also harbors the danger of enframing (Gestell), in which everything, including the human being, appears merely as a resource for optimization and control. Art, by contrast, has the capacity to interrupt this enframing—to open up a space in which beings can appear for their own sake, beyond mere usefulness. In this way, art provides a counterbalance to technological thinking, making visible the depths of our being-in-the-world.
The following text attempts to unfold these ideas through the interpretive transcription of the author. The aim is to understand how technology and art, often treated as opposites, are in fact intertwined within the structures of human existence. Heidegger’s writings are neither easy nor unproblematic—their mysticism and obscurity can be as frustrating as they are illuminating. Yet they resonate with an intuition that understands the world not as an objective collection of facts, but as the lived, finite domain in which we are always already embedded. It is the world in which we live, act, and ultimately die.
Although I distrust the dangers of Romanticism—especially when it slips into mythical essentialism or political idealism—I also recognize its enduring appeal. Heidegger’s poetic language and his focus, or rather return, to Being touch on a dimension of experience that resists cold rationality.
How, then, should we deal with this redescription? Here Richard Rorty offers us good counsel through Philosophy as Poetry [Ror16] and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity [Ror89]: he urges us to no longer view philosophy as the search for metaphysical foundations, but as an imaginative undertaking—as the practice of redescribing the world; as a useful activity through which better vocabularies are created, in the hope that these will lead to a less cruel world.
Rorty, drawing on both pragmatic and romantic traditions, invites us to see thinkers like Heidegger not as bearers of hidden truths, but as creators of vocabularies through which new ways of seeing and speaking become possible. Instead of seeking a definitive answer to the essence of technology or art, we are invited to engage in ongoing conversations that open up new possibilities of understanding. This perspective harmonizes the poetic impulse in Heidegger with a post-metaphysical humility: the acknowledgment that our interpretations are contingent, historical, and yet profoundly meaningful. Therefore, a better title of this essay would be: The Essence of Technology and Art: Heidegger’s legacy and its sublation
In this Hegelian spirit, I invite the reader not to revere Heidegger, but to think with and against him—to ask what his language of Being and unconcealment can still illuminate in our present technological epoch, and where it obscures rather than clarifies. As Rorty reminds us: philosophy, like poetry, is a conversation—one that never ends and never concludes.
Heidegger and the Nazis#
Before we go further, it is essential to address the deeply troubling aspect of Heidegger’s legacy: his involvement with National Socialism. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and served briefly as rector of Freiburg University, where he publicly endorsed Hitler and Nazism. His inaugural rectoral address spoke of the “inner truth and greatness of this movement.” He used his position to marginalize colleagues—including those of Jewish descent—though in other instances, he also aided some students in avoiding persecution. These contradictions do not cancel each other out; rather, they complicate an already fraught ethical record.
Most disturbing is that Heidegger never clearly renounced his Nazi affiliation. Even after the war, in his writings and interviews, he offered evasions rather than apologies—even as his mentor, Edmund Husserl, and his student and former lover, Hannah Arendt, were Jewish. In posthumously published texts, including the Black Notebooks, Heidegger voiced conspiratorial and anti-Semitic ideas, deepening the concern that his political views were not incidental but intertwined with his ontology.
Critics—including Karl Jaspers, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Kurt Tucholsky, and Karl Popper—have raised serious objections, not only to his politics but also to his style and substance. Popper famously mocked Heidegger’s writing as impenetrable and accused it of masking banalities behind mystification:
Heidegger is, so to speak, the Hegelian of our time, who was also a Nazi, among other things. The worst part is that in Germany and all over the world, for example in South America, France, and Spain, Heidegger is admired and imitated. […] He usually writes things that one cannot understand at all, and that too, for pages on end! – Karl Popper
Heidegger has been criticized for:
Lacking ethical grounding in his philosophy
Reinforcing relativism and the rejection of objective truth
Engaging in circular reasoning and tautology
Projecting personal moods onto metaphysics
Conflating Being with Germanness or rootedness, which some see as ideologically dangerous
Yet despite (or because of) these problems, Heidegger remains enormously influential—especially in France, where thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Tillich drew on his ideas, even as they often departed from or subverted them.
Some argue that Heidegger’s philosophy and politics are inseparable. Others believe that while his politics are abhorrent, his questions—about Being, technology, truth, and art—remain vital. Both positions demand serious engagement.
How is it that such a brilliant mind was taken in by the Nazis? How could Heidegger be so socially irresponsible? It is the same problem as with Celan: here is a wonderful writer who was a rotten anti-Semite […] I have shown Heidegger’s brain with a mushroom-like tumor growing out of it to make the point. – Anselm Kiefer
To read Heidegger today is to walk a dangerous path—not just intellectually, but ethically. His concerns with the threats of technology and the loss of authentic Being may have led him, ironically and tragically, into the arms of a regime that promised order and rootedness. Engaging with his thought requires vigilance, not just interpretation.
What is Phenomenology?#
Martin Heidegger was deeply influenced by his teacher Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology. Heidegger believed that to truly understand an entity, one must investigate its Being—not through abstract theorization, but by attending to how it shows itself in lived experience.
Before words, before expressions, always the phenomena first, and then the concepts! – Martin Heidegger
Phenomenology is both a philosophical method and a reflective practice that seeks to describe how things appear to us in lived experience—before we interpret them, explain them, or reduce them to scientific categories. Rather than asking what things are in some objective or abstract sense, phenomenology asks: How do things show up to us as meaningful? How does the world present itself to a conscious, embodied subject—not in theory, but in experience? It begins from the insight that we are always already embedded in a world of relations, habits, moods, and concerns. We do not encounter the world as a detached observer, but as someone already involved—seeing, using, caring, suffering, hoping.
To practice phenomenology is to bracket our assumptions and attend closely to how things actually show themselves in our experience—whether it’s the feel of a tool in our hand, the silence of a room, or the sudden anxiety of being watched. It is a disciplined return to the immediacy of lived meaning. In short, phenomenology is a way of doing philosophy that starts not with theory, but with experience—with the world as it is lived.
For Heidegger, philosophy had too long forced beings into rigid metaphysical categories. He sought a return to the phenomena themselves—to what is disclosed in practice and use, rather than detached theorization.
Husserl asked: How do we experience the world in consciousness? Heidegger asks: How does the world show itself to us because we are already beings involved in it?
What is Dasein?#
Dasein is Heidegger’s neologism for the individualized, world-related existence that relates to itself, to others, and to things, while always already carrying with it an understanding of “Being”. Through a careful and accurate description of our existence, Heidegger hoped to gain a better understanding of Being as such, that is, what it means to be (at all).
Dasein is an entity—a being—just as dogs and cats, stones and paths are beings. However, Heidegger’s concern was not with the question of what it is like to be a particular being—for example, to be a Dasein—but rather with the question of what Being itself is at all. Since Dasein always already has an understanding of Being, Heidegger hoped that by investigating and describing Dasein, one might find an answer to the question of Being as such.
This approach appears circular: we investigate Dasein in order to understand Being, and thereby, among other things, come to understand Dasein better. But this hermeneutic circle, even if it may never end, is not a vicious one. According to Heidegger, we simply need to enter it in the right way. Being and Time [Hei08] is therefore a hermeneutical text.
A good analogy for such circular understanding is learning a new language. We must begin with certain words in the foreign language that mean something defined by other words in that same language. We first learn these words imprecisely or even incorrectly, only to learn them again later, more precisely. We interpret the whole through the parts, and the parts through the whole, back and forth. This process continues until we move from a vague to a clear understanding of a text.
The investigation of Dasein requires learning a new vocabulary, which means unlearning an existing one. Dasein is, in this sense, Heidegger’s term for what we all are. But it is not an isolated subject; it is not the human being as revealed by biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and so on.
Dasein is a being for whom its own Being is at issue, and which interprets that Being. Things encounter it primarily as equipment in use (ready-to-hand, zuhanden), not as neutral objects (present-at-hand, vorhanden). It always already lives within worldly relations (work, equipment, fellow humans, projects).
That is why Heidegger speaks of existentials (care, temporality, being-with) rather than of categories (properties of things). Dasein is neither pure consciousness nor merely an individual (it is always already being-with). It is not a subject or an “I-thing” set over against a world, but rather it is on the basis of a world and of others. It dwells in the world.
Certainly, Dasein can also approach the world as though it were separate from it, thereby disclosing it in a particular way. At times, such a theoretical stance may be necessary (especially in science and Heidegger is not against science). But most of the time, we do not experience ourselves as isolated subjects separated from the world. Most of the time, we do not even experience ourselves as subjects at all, but as a referential whole. For example, when we brush our teeth, change our clothes, open the door, wait for the train, clean the house, and so on, we do not reflect on or differentiate the simple relations that gather around us.
The Essence of Technology#
In Being and Time (1927) [Hei08], Heidegger argues from a phenomenological perspective that scientific and theoretical modes of understanding presuppose—and often obscure—a more primordial way of being-in-the-world. The natural sciences rely on abstract conceptions of space and time, but these are derived from a more immediate, lived experience of orientation, distance, and concern. It is only through our practical engagement with the world—what Heidegger calls our concernful dealings (Besorgen)—that space and time gain existential meaning.
From this perspective, science’s ‘objective’ viewpoint is not neutral but reductive. It strips away the meaningfulness that arises from everyday life and replaces it with a flattened, calculative framework. Rather than enhancing our grasp of reality, this scientific abstraction narrows it. Ordinary action, embedded in care and purpose, offers a richer path toward understanding Being than detached analysis can provide.
Heidegger deepens this critique in his later essay The Question Concerning Technology (1954) [Hei54]. There, he challenges the dominant instrumental definition of technology as a set of tools used to achieve human ends. While this definition seems intuitive, Heidegger argues that it is itself a symptom of a deeper technological mode of revealing—one that enframes the world as standing-reserve (Bestand), a stockpile of resources to be ordered and exploited.
Technology, then, is not just a collection of devices or applications. It is a way of understanding and relating to Being—one that prioritizes control, efficiency, and utility above all else. The danger lies not in technology per se, but in the dominance of this technological worldview, which increasingly constrains how we think, act, and perceive. Heidegger warns that when everything is seen through the lens of functionality, we risk losing sight of other, more poetic or meaningful modes of revealing.
To uncover a pre-scientific understanding of technology, Heidegger turns to the ancient Greeks. For them, the word téchne referred not only to what we would now call technology but also to art and craft. It described a form of knowing that involved the skilled bringing-forth of something into appearance—a process in which the artisan did not impose form upon matter but worked in concert with it. Téchne, in this sense, was aligned with poiesis—a revealing, a letting-be.
The causes bring something into appearance. They let it come forth into presence. – Martin Heidegger
The craftsman, in this older view, did not see themselves as the absolute origin of the created thing but as a participant in a process of emergence. The role of the artisan was to assist in allowing something to manifest according to its own essence.
In stark contrast, modern technology is no longer understood as a cooperative revealing. It is, as Heidegger argues, a challenging-forth (herausfordern), a mode of revealing that imposes order and extracts resources. We no longer see ourselves as stewards or collaborators with nature; rather, we perceive ourselves as its masters—as the origin of everything we produce.
This shift is not just a change in technique but a transformation in how we encounter Being itself. The modern technological worldview reveals the world as standing-reserve (Bestand): a resource to be optimized, stored, and controlled. In doing so, it conceals other, more poetic ways of encountering the world.
The essence of modern technology, Heidegger tells us, is not technological in a narrow sense. It lies in the framework of enframing (Gestell)—a mode of revealing that simultaneously unveils and conceals. It shapes how entities present themselves to us, and how we relate to them. Under Gestell, everything—from rivers to human beings—becomes something to be used, measured, and managed.
Importantly, Heidegger insists that this mode of revealing has deep historical roots. Although it becomes dominant with industrialization and modern science, its seeds were sown in Western metaphysics—in the idea that Being is something that can be grasped, represented, and mastered. Technologies such as the nuclear bomb are not merely threats in themselves; they are expressions of this deeper enframing. Thus, the danger of technology is not any particular machine or device, but the way it shapes our understanding of all things—including ourselves. Technology is challenging not just in its effects, but in its essence. It configures a totalizing perspective that transforms the world into a resource field, narrowing our openness to other forms of being and meaning.
[Because of technology] all distances in time and space are shrinking [and] yet the hasty setting aside of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in a small amount of distance. – Martin Heidegger
We seem to have become nearly incapable of experiencing nearness in its full existential sense—let alone comprehending it—as all things, including other human beings, increasingly reveal themselves to us in a technological mode. As Heidegger describes, they appear as standing-reserve (Bestand): inventory-like items, ready for mobilization, manipulation, and disposal. Objects are no longer encountered in their uniqueness or integrity, but only in terms of their usefulness—as energy sources or resources awaiting orchestration.
This logic extends beyond machines. Human capacities are also reduced to instruments within technological systems. A laborer becomes a component of the production process. Leaders and planners are themselves transformed into managerial assets—optimized, repurposed, or discarded according to need. The result is that everything—tools, people, our partners, even time and space—forfeits its autonomy, its inner form, and its capacity to disclose alternative ways of being.
The mode of revealing that prevails in modern technology is not the gentle bringing-forth of poiesis—the creative emergence once found in art and craft. Instead, it is a challenging-forth (Herausfordern), a forceful demand imposed on nature to yield energy, order, and efficiency. This challenge does not follow from modern science; it precedes it. For Heidegger, technological thinking is what first disclosed nature as something that could be challenged, extracted from, and quantified. It is this revealing—this essence of technology as Gestell—that gives rise to science’s calculative gaze. The technological worldview thus underlies not only the way we build machines, but the way we perceive existence itself.
Modern technology is not applied natural science, far more is modern natural science the application of the essence of technology. [Nature is therefore] the fundamental piece of inventory of the technological standing reserve—and nothing else. – Martin Heidegger
The nature of being-in-the-world (Dasein)—basically Heidegger’s concept of a human being—is such that we can never escape concerns about our concerns (Sorge), which originates from our finitude, but we frequently attempt to deny them.
We distract ourselves from our worries, the primary of which is death.
To live authentically means not to “live as you truly are” but to live with the certainty of the end of all possiblities on your side.
Death is not just an endpoint but a companion—a reminder that gives our life meaning and let’s us care.
Our relationship with technological tools, techniques, and devices can aid a distraction, diverting us from our fundamental experience and enticing us into a false sense of security.
This can be dangerous if it impedes the lived awareness of our ultimate existence
as beings in trouble in a world of uncertainty.
We become accustomed to the internet, smartphones, social media, platform economies, and the endless repetition of trivialities. As individuals, we can often feel powerless in the face of new technologies, and occasionally experience a lack of depth provided by the scattered and dissected elements of our existence. The essence of technology deprives us of experiencing nearness because to truly experience it, we must encounter things in their truth. And no matter how deeply we believe that science will allow us to engage with reality in its actuality, science only provides us with representations of things. It only ever encounters that which its manner of representation has previously admitted as a possible object for itself.
Today the representational character of the digital shapes the physical. Speaking in Baudrillardian terms: through the colonization of the last frontier—our immediate consciousness—companies are constructing a virtual yet hyper-realistic world that suggests that there is no truth behind it. This process is evolving so rapidly that meaningful analysis becomes impossible. Our children will navigate a “meta”-reality. They won’t believe that the world depicted on their screens and other devices is real—that is not the danger! I also doubt that they will consciously believe the fake stories of this realm saturated by advertisement. Instead, they run the risk of becoming cynical; of perceiving the real world as if it is virtual. Therefore, they may consider everything as a scene to be observed, and all their actions as performances that can be captured and reviewed at any given moment. This would deny them a life of moments and turn it into a plan for later presentation and peer evaluation.
Kids already sense the digital world in a peculiar, allusive, and meta-like state. This is why their memes are perpetually ironic, detached, self-referential, and buried beneath twenty layers of irony; the truth is completely dead to them. They look at a postmodern president and culture and ask: what on earth is this? They see Coca Cola advertisements that are knowingly winking and smiling at them, and they see through this nonsense. Advertisers realize this and put yet another layer on top.
But I digress. Let me go back to the challenging aspect of technology. It implies that functioning things lead to more functioning things. Everything is challenged to serve as a systematic resource for technological application, which we subsequently utilize as a resource for further applications, perpetuating a cycle. For instance, we challenge land to produce coal, considering the land as nothing more than a coal deposit. The coal is then stockpiled, always ready to unleash the stored solar heat it contains, which is then called upon for warmth, which subsequently is commanded to yield steam whose pressure drives the wheels that sustain a factory’s operations. The factories themselves are challenged to create tools through which machines are once again put into service and preserved.
Heidegger argues that this chain does not move toward anything that has its own presence, but, instead, “only enters into its circuit”, and is “regulating and securing” natural resources and energies in a never-ending fashion—one might call autopoietic (compare e.g. [Lov23, Rei11, ZonnchenDS25]). Heidegger’s argument is at least interesting. Given the complexity of modern life, we often lack a clear understanding of how our contributions to the advancement and “improvement” of technology lead to a “better” society. Beyond meeting basic needs such as housing, food, education, healthcare, social life, and intimacy, it is often difficult to discern how the introduction of new technological gadgets aids this objective.
For example, how does the newest iPhone, with its ability to take more refined pictures, contribute to a “better” society? The existence of the iPhone and the pressure to create appealing pictures for our profiles prompts many to purchase and use it. This, in turn, increases the demand for memory and computation, subsequently escalating the need for earthly materials. Many would probably be content if that new phone didn’t exist, primarily because they need it only because it exists, not because they truly desire it. In other words, the desire is constructed by a self-serving system.
I argue that our understanding of progress being equivalent to technological progress in the form of more and “better” technology is more a question of faith than an envisioned future based on rigid justifications. Luhmann might point out that technological progress is a value stabilized via communication. We communicate about the installation of nuclear power plants and buy new gadgets which is a kind of communication. However, this does not explain why we believe in this value. I would argue that many people would willingly hit the pause button on all technological progress, at least temporarily. No one asked for the Metaverse, but we will build it anyways because we are challenged to do so.
Luhmann probabobly would offer a more nuanced explanation: interdependent self-generating social systems which “feed” us into them. Heidegger’s argument seems quite reductive but it captures my personal feeling of a reality that feels thinner and thinner.
Marxists might argue that my feeling is more related to our socio-economic system. However, I find it hard to attribute the cause solely to capitalism. The origin of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism [Fis09] is not so much capitalism but a functional differentiated society. Of course, capitalism plays a huge role in shaping our social systems. Heidegger, on the other hand, might attribute capitalism and Luhmann’s functional differentiation to the essence of technology. These are different perspectives on our modern and technological-driven society.
A success is that type of consequence that itself remains assigned to the yielding of further consequences. – Martin Heidegger
As already mentioned, Heidegger thinks of technology as a mode of seeing where every “seeing” has its necessary blind spots. He expands on the example of the hammer to illustrate his thoughts about technology: when using a hammer (a form of technology), you don’t even think about the tool itself; instead, you focus on the nail. The hammer recedes from your awareness, and you concentrate on the task at hand. The hammer is ready-to-hand (zuhanden).
Consider a more modern example: the keyboard. As you become proficient at typing, your attention focuses on the words appearing on the screen—not on your fingers pressing keys. The keyboard becomes invisible in use. Furthermore, when you recognize a keyboard, you don’t just see a thing—you perceive the affordances it provides. The keyboard is not just an object; it’s an invitation, a call to explore, to write, to engage the world in a certain way. This phenomenological way of thinking—in which things appear with value, meaning, and purpose—was already present in Edmund Husserl, Heidegger’s teacher:
This world is not there for me as mere world of facts and affairs, but, with the same immediacy as a world of values, a world of goods, a practical world. Without further effort on my part I find the things before me furnished not only with the qualities that benefit their positive nature, but with value-characters such as beautiful or ugly, agreeable or disagreeable, pleasant or unpleasant, and so forth. Things in their immediacy stand there as objects to be used, the “table” with its “books”, the “glass to drink from”, the “vase”, the “piano” and so forth […] The same considerations apply of course just as well to the men and beasts in my surroundings as to “mere things”. They are my “friends” or my “foes”, my “servants” or “superiors”, “strangers” or “relatives” and so forth. – Edmund Husserl
Equipment vanishes from our world. Only if it breaks or fails to perform as expected it introduces itself again as present-at-hand (vorhanden). Otherwise, it simply serves as a medium through which we experience our world. Things in the world are not simply passive objects. They invite us to interact with them. Take a small child in an elevator, for example—notice how the child is immediately drawn to press the buttons. Or take the child to a lake and wait until it throws small stones into the water.
For Heidegger, equipment withdraws from our attention and becomes transparent as we use it. And if it does, it is all the more genuinely what it is. In that sense, it needs us to be; to act itself out. Furthermore, we don’t experience technology itself, but rather the world through it. Consequently, technology introduces its own mode of seeing.
When you drive a car proficiently, you develop a sense of the vehicle’s size and whether it can fit through a gap. Similarly, wearing nail extensions frequently can cause you to forget about them, even though they change how you interact with objects. Part of the allure of technology is found in the diverse opportunities it provides for unique forms of embodiment. Sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour posits that when technology becomes sufficiently transparent, it becomes an intrinsic part of our self-perception and our experience of the world, thereby giving rise to a new, compound entity [Lat92]. According to Latour, technological artifacts can act as social agents and if they become routine or transparent, they “disappear” from our conscious perception but remain deeply entangled in our actions and identities. Evidence from cognitive science supporting this viewpoint is substantial. Our enjoyment of driving stems from the fact that we transform into “the driver”, a being with speed and power surpassing any land creature. Likewise, our delight in operating digital devices arises from the sensation of becoming a being that can converse with someone on the opposite side of the globe at a speed comparable to a lightning strike. Similarly, a person wielding a hammer essentially evolves into a new being, equipped with its own unique way of perceiving the world. This newly formed being, as a result of the technology’s influence, experiences the world from a distinct perspective and possesses an individualized subjectivity.
Given that technology represents a mode of understanding the world, and acknowledging that our understanding of the world is not entirely self-determined, this perspective seems to envelop us; it is greater than us as individuals. Heidegger sees the highest danger of technology as its potential to erode our ability to interpret reality profoundly. The moment we start viewing ourselves as manipulable raw materials, we cease to see ourselves as the ultimate source from which fresh interpretations of the world can spring. Furthermore, technology can trap us in a specific worldview because as soon as we attempt to devise a new way of interpreting the world, we find ourselves trying to exert power over our inherent will to power. In essence, we attempt to control our very propensity for control. Every effort to overcome this will to power only serves to reinforce it. It is like the paradoxical effort to be mindful for the sake of optimization. Consequently, every attempt to break free from this technological mindset only propels us back into it.
The essence of technology is by no means anything technological. – Martin Heidegger
Forgotten Wholeness#
The self is a relation that relates itself to itself. – Soren Kierkegaard
Heidegger’s emphasis on ordinary life may seem trivial, yet, how frequently do we feel lost, overwhelmed, and alienated in the world, even though we are experts in navigating this chaos? Often, we forget that we are temporal beings in a world where we are deeply rooted. This fact becomes crystal clear when considering all the small habits our bodies carry out so effortlessly that we hardly give them a thought. All the smells we can perceive, all the various tactile experiences we can receive and give, all the sounds we can differentiate, and the ways in which we can walk, sit, run, and dance. Sometimes, when one feels lost in the digital spectacle, returning to the simplicity of the ordinary can offer a reassuring sense of home—and we are deeply home here and now.
Few would dispute that technology has transformed our self-perception. It is clear to me that we are more and more humiliated by what we see through science:
Copernicus: Earth is not the center of the universe.
Nietzsche: God is dead, implying that normative values are constructed and lack any metaphysical essence.
Darwin: Humans are not the apex of creation but part of an ongoing and contingent evolutionary biological process.
Freud: The human “ego” is not fully in control but is governed by unconscious processes.
AI: Machines can execute task that we thought require human thinking.
A scientific definition of beings will make us blind for their mysterious and unexplainable presence in the world. In Heidegger’s term: it will make us blind for Being. Importantly, this term refers not to a specitic being, that is, indivudual things like rocks, chairs, animals and humans but the condition or mode of existence that allows beings to be at all. Heidegger’s ontology is therefore not about what exists, but how existence shows up to us. To approach Being, he then analyzes a special kind of being: the human being, which he calls Dasein (literally, “being-there”).
Dasein is unique because:
It has a pre-understanding of Being.
It cares about its own being.
It exists in a state of thrownness.
It is being-towards-death—its temporality shapes its understanding of existence.
So, Dasein is the gateway to understainding Being in general. It is the being that has an understanding of Being. For Heiddegger, there is no such thing as an “inner self” divorced from the world. Therefore, ontoloty must begin with lived, situated existance—not abstract thought.
He also attacks the subject-object dichotomy by pointing out that, most of the time, we encounter things through use (they are ready-to-hand) not detached reflection (present-to-hand). Furthermore, for him, time is not just a succesion of “nows,” but a structure of existence:
Past (facticity): We are thrown into the world.
Future (projection): We are always projecting ourselves towards possibilities (we have projects).
Present (fallenness): We are often distracted by daily routines and the expectations of others (“the they”—das Man).
The danger, for Heidegger, is to lose the ability of seeing the world and its beings as they appear to us and to understand ourselves not as mere thinking subjects but as Dasein that is in the world in a mode of uncovering, i.e. disclosing other entities as well as ourselves. He intentionally used the term because he felt as though the words most often used by philosophers to designate human beings, words like “consciousness”, “self-consciousness”, “subject”, “soul”, etc., carried far too much metaphysical baggage, and, thus, found it necessary to come up with a new term for human beings.
Decartes view of the self as self-subsistent and worldless subject changes in Heidegger’s phenomenologically perspective because Dasein is always Being-(involved)-in-the-world. To be a self is to have a world. Like Husserl’s world, Heidegger’s world is a practical world of interconnected beings where equipment presupposes other equipment and is truly what it is only when it is being used transparently. We can reformulate Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” from a Heideggerian perspective: I am, therefore the world is.
We shall call those entities which we encounter in concern “equipment”. In our dealings we come across equipment for writing, sewing, working, transportation, measurement. […] Taken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment. To the Being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment that it is. Equipment is essentially ‘something in-order-to […]’. A totality of equipment is constituted by various ways of the ‘in-order-to’. […] In the ‘in-order-to’ as a structure there lies an assignment or reference of something to something. […] Equipment—in accordance with its equipmentality—always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. […] What we encounter as closest to us (though not as something taken as a theme) is the room; and we encounter it not as something ‘between four walls’ in a geometrical spatial sense, but as equipment for residing. Out of this the ‘arrangement’ emerges, and it is in this that any ‘individual’ item of equipment shows itself. Before it does so, a totality of equipment has already been discovered. Equipment can genuinely show itself only in dealings cut to its own measure (hammering with a hammer, for example); but in such dealings an entity of this kind is not grasped thematically as an occurring thing, nor is the equipment-structure known as such in the using. The hammering does not simply have knowledge about the hammer’s character as equipment, but it has appropriated this equipment in a way which could not possibly be more suitable. In dealings such as this, where something is put to use, our concern subordinates itself to the “in-order-to” which is constitutive for the equipment we are employing at the time; the less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment. […] The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. – Martin Heidegger
Heidegger’s concerns of technology also raise several difficulties. It tends to romanticize certain types of tools. His texts are filled with what we may call a romanticization of German country life that is hard not to relate to Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism. And isn’t the distinction between affirming (ancient Greeks) and dominating technologies (modern times) just a subjective preference. Why exactly does the hydroelectrical dam on the Rhine provoke nature whereas the temple doesn’t? Is the manner in which beings reveal themselves to us meaningful only in Heidegger’s terms, or can a rationale be provided for this meaning that simultaneously permits and even requires openness to Being beyond Heidegger’s limits? In other words, can a scientific view enrich the mystery of the world? The physicist Richard Feynman, at least, seems to think so.
I have a friend, who is an artist. And he is sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He hold up a flower and says: “Look how beautiful it is.” And I agree. And he says: “I as an artist can see how beautiful that is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a doll thing.” And I think he is kind of nutty. First of all the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too. I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is but I can appreciate the beauty of the flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can image cells in it; the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean it is not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there is also beauty at smaller dimensions; the inner structure also the processes; the fact that the colors and the flowers evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting. It means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery in the aura of a flower; it only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts. – Richard Feynman
It would be foolish to advocate for a return to some mythical naturalistic past or some elusive authenticity. This would only lead to disillusionment because such authenticity was never present to begin with. Nature is a splendid beast; it is the real that pursues us. It is not our tools, methods and techniques that are at the center of Heidegger’s concerns but our way of seeing the world. He sees danger in the domination of nature which, for him, ultimately leads to the domination of humanity. But is it a question of black and white? Is there room for both instrumental and non-instrumental thinking and seeing? Can we see the mystical whole—the world as it appears to us—and its no less magical parts, structure, and abstraction? I believe there is.
For all of us, the arrangements, devices, and machinery of technology are to a greater or lesser extent indispensable. It would be foolish to attack technology blindly. It would be shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the devil. We depend on technical devices. – Martin Heidegger
Let’s consider an analogy: the concept of free and instrumental play, as introduced by Wolfgang Iser in [Ise93]. Iser labels play in games with specific goals as instrumental play. At the other end of the spectrum is free play, a form of play devoid of definite endpoints, perpetuating the continuity of play. Instrumental play is a goal-oriented approach that values efficiency, expertise, and optimized strategies as components of play. For instance, if children engage with their surroundings, such as running around, this can be considered free play. However, when they introduce goals like catching one another, the play tends more towards instrumental play. The aim of playing isn’t solely to reach the end but to discover the most effective way of getting there. However, there’s no such thing as pure free or pure instrumental play. Playing chess to win money leans heavily towards instrumental play, while playing with a ball purely to enjoy the physical experience is predominantly free play. Furthermore, there’s no inherently “good” or “bad” style of play. In fact, the issue sometimes arises when we deem instrumental play to be the correct, or “good,” way to play. But here’s the crucial point: instrumental play isn’t the opposite of free play; instead, there exists a tension between the two. One can derive deep enjoyment from improving a skill, achieving goals, or uncovering solutions to complex problems. Similarly, we can perceive the earth and its inhabitants instrumentally (as a means to an end) or appreciate them for what they are (as ends in themselves).
Therefore, I favor the Kantian notion extended to all beings as well as things—never viewing anything merely as a means to an end, but always as an end in itself. But I also acknowledge Richard Rorty for pointing out that such an ethical principle can not be seen as an absolute rule but something we can consider when we try to make the right decision. There is no authority, no rule, no algorithm that will forever and in any situation provide us with the right answer. What we think is right or wrong is contingent on how we grow up—in our culture, history, and environment. The answer is neither absolutism nor absolute relativism but the willingness to acknowledge to myself, that my conscience is the internalized consciousness of a specific historical-contingent culture. Furthermore, just as instrumental play can enrich free play, such as by enabling other forms of free play via the acquisition of new skills and habits, I also believe that the scientific perspective, which necessitates objectifying entities and often neglects the broader context, can still enhance our appreciation of the whole.
Nonetheless, it remains challenging to dismiss Heidegger’s concerns especially if we keep in mind that, because of seeing earth as standing reserve, we are currently destroying the ground that feeds us. Can we become aware of our instrumental thinking, of our own will to power? We are at a point in time where the standing reserve seems to break under the pressure of dominance. We are likely to encounter significant issues if we believe that technology alone, i.e., further instrumental thinking will resolve all of today’s major challenges, while it undeniably contributes to many of them. Thinking in cause and effect to the end of day will not provide us with the wisdom to overcome the breaking down of earth. At the same time, throwing our tools away will not change the way we think and see the world.
It certainly is not a matter of condemning the industrial and technological fate of humanity. Rather, it is a case of reinventing this fate. – Bernard Stiegler
The Essence of Art#
If, at this point, you have an idea of Heidegger’s phenomenological thinking, it should be no surprise that for him, not only is the artist the cause of the work, but the work, in turn, is the cause of the artist.
The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other. Nevertheless, neither is the sole support of the other. In themselves and in their interrelations artist and work are each of them by virtue of a third thing which is prior to both, namely, that which also gives artist and work of art their names—art. – Martin Heidegger
Art, as a mode of Being, makes both artist and artwork ontologically possible. To discover the essence of art, we must investigate artworks phenomenologically. Yet here we encounter a strange loop: we must understand art through artworks, and artworks through the essence of art.
These loops evoke Hofstadter’s concept of self-reference in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid [Hof79]. Similarly, Husserl (and to an extent Kierkegaard) thought of consciousness as a strange loop—a structure that relates to itself in a back-and-forth motion between perception and self-relation. In systems theory, cybernetics, and especially Luhmann’s social systems theory, this oscillation becomes the movement between self- and other-reference—between system and environment.
Heidegger was indeed circling around something profound, though his writing on art can feel incomplete or vague. But this may be intentional. His goal was not to create a theory, but to uncover a process. We are thrown into a process already underway. We enter the circle and move within it, gradually revealing both artist and artwork—but never definitively.
To understand art in a Heideggerian sense, we must first revisit his distinction between things, tools, and equipment. Heidegger differentiates between substances—present-at-hand (vorhanden) entities such as stones or water—and equipment—ready-to-hand (zuhanden) things integrated into practical networks of use.
Interestingly, Heidegger treats artworks as present-at-hand—they have a strong thingly character. At first, this may seem reductive. Are great works of art no more than purposeless stones in a sea of things?
There is something stony in a work of architecture, wooden in a carving, colored in a painting, spoken in a linguistic work, sonorous in a musical composition. – Martin Heidegger
This mirrors Luhmann’s distinction between form (e.g., building) and medium (e.g., stone). Great artworks, in my view, unveil a mystical truth that resists conclusion. They invite questions but refuse final answers. They offer an internal logic alien to our world—untranslatable into language or abstraction—yet they speak through structure and form.
If the essence of technology is enframing (Gestell), then the essence of art may be the opposite: that which cannot be enframed, and which opens a new horizon of possibilities. In The Origin of the Work of Art [Hei50], Heidegger claims:
to be a work [of art] means to set up a world. – Martin Heidegger
Setting up a world is essential to the Being of a work of art. This resonates with Luhmann’s view that art reshapes its medium to present an alternative version of reality.
What does Heidegger mean by “setting up a world”? He turns to the Greek temple. The temple doesn’t merely represent something—it institutes a world. It gives meaning, order, and orientation to human existence. The temple provides a world in which the lives of the Greeks were organized. Similarly, cathedrals structured medieval Christian life, and mosques shaped Islamic civilizations. Heidegger chooses the temple because it is non-representational—it does not symbolize, but discloses.
Van Gogh’s painting of a peasant’s shoes is another example. The painting doesn’t merely depict the shoes—it reveals the peasant’s life-world.
World, for Heidegger, is not the objective cosmos but the network of significance through which Dasein relates to Being. It is the cultural, historical, and meaningful context that makes things intelligible. The temple “gathers” the possibilities and outlook of a historical people—giving structure to their destiny.
Heidegger’s use of the term “world” carries with it the sense not only of life-world (Lebenswelt) but of historical epoch as well, with the suggestion that the life-world is an historical structure. – Sandra Lee Bartky
Husserl viewed the world as a universal, shared horizon—the Lebenswelt. Heidegger, however, was less concerned with its universality and more with its existential specificity. For Heidegger, the world is disclosed through practical engagement, not theoretical abstraction. In Being and Time [Hei08], Heidegger shows that the world is not a set of objects but a phenomenon saturated with meaning, understood pre-reflectively. The objective world is derivative—it abstracts from a world already lived in.
The world is always in progress. It orients, guides, and structures Dasein’s existence. A temple, by organizing existence, also opens a world—and closes another.
In contrast to world, earth (Erde) is concealment—the material basis of things; their hidden, resistant, mysterious side. Earth is the rock, the soil, the material—not simply nature, but the mysterious ground. It bears resemblance to Lacan’s “real”—that which resists symbolic representation yet constantly presses against it. The earth is always there—stuck to us like dirt on our shoe. It cannot be fully absorbed into world. Earth and world exist in strife—a productive, irreducible tension. While tools disappear in use, artworks do the opposite. Art reveals earth by presencing it.
In fabricating equipment—e.g., an ax—stone is used, and used up. It disappears into usefulness. The material is all the better and more suitable the less it resists vanishing in the equipmental being of the equipment. By contrast the temple-work, in setting up a world, does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time and to come into the open region of the work’s world. The rock comes to bear and rest and so first becomes rock; metals come to glitter and shimmer, colors to glow, tones to sing, the word to say. All this comes forth as the work sets itself back into the massiveness and heaviness of stone, into the firmness and pliancy of wood, into the hardness and luster of metal, into the brightening and darkening of color, into the clang of tone, and into the naming power of word. – Martin Heidegger
Earthly elements are transfigured in artworks. They remain stubbornly material—unassimilable. A great artwork makes the earth shine forth. It is precisely in this strife—between conceaxlment (earth) and unconcealment (world)—that truth happens. The artwork sets up a world (order, meaning), but simultaneously sets forth the earth (materiality, opacity). The tension between them is what allows the artwork to reveal truth. The artwork, unlike a broken tool, cannot be fixed—its resistance is ontological. Earth reveals itself only through the transparency of the world that cannot fully contain it.
Earth is something, which makes up everything around us and gives our reality a context for us to sort our place in the world, by gaining reference from its physicality. However, we can never see this earth for what it is, except in the special instance of when it is presented in an artwork.
Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws up out of the rock the mystery of that rock’s clumsy yet spontaneous support. Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence. The luster and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, yet first brings to light the light of the day, the breath of the sky, the darkness of the night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air […] The Greeks early called this emerging and rising in itself and in all things phusis. It clears and illuminates, also, that on which and in which man bases his dwelling. We call this ground the earth. – Martin Heidegger
So, because we see the temple as an art-thing, and also experience the world it creates, this highlights to us that it is made from something. The rocks that may have been concealed from our attention before, because they used to be mixed in with nature, are now something else all together. They are at one with the temple, but still we know they are rocks. They shine out at us. Their true nature is revealed in the tension between the rocks trying to be a temple but remaining rooted as earth. Again, this is similar to Luhmann’s claim that the form (the temple) reveals the medium (earth).
The world is usually invisible or transparent to us in our everyday activities. It becomes visible through the opacity of earth in an artwork. In a great work of art there’s always a strife between transparent intelligibility (world) and opaque unintelligibility (earth). In that sense, earth is like the breakdown of equipment: The equipment withdraws from us (ready-to-hand) but it introduces itself as present-at-hand if it breaks or is missing. But, unlike a breakdown of a tool, earth is unfixable.
The artwork ‘holds its ground’—it is there as itself, resisting instrumental thinking.
Furthermore, it is only through the transparency of the world that earth can strike us as unintelligible, perplexing and mysterious. The happening of truth in the work of art and the Being of the work of art is essentially the instigation of the strife between world and earth. A great work of art intensifies this strife while establishing it.
Art can be thought of in terms of Being, truth, world, earth and strife, and according to Heidegger, the two essential features of great artworks are setting up of a world and setting forth of earth. Furthermore, an epochal understanding of Being and a particular world are opened and held opened in Dasein’s clearing by a specific being, i.e., a work of art.
I think, for Heidegger, art has more to do with truth than beauty. He wanted to understand the ontological “function” of art: what art does in relation to truth and Being. Truth and art are deeply interconnected—not mutually exclusive. Art is a way in which truth happens.
Artworks don’t just show us objects—they open a world.
But, of course, I am not talking about the truth as correspondence or agreement (adaequatio) but truth as unconcealment or uncovering. Like the objective world is based on Lebenswelt, for Heidegger, the former is based on the latter.
From Being to Distinction#
I feel a great tension between Heidegger’s description of technology and my own relationship to it. Technological tools have saved my life, and they make it less cruel. Equipment enables me to explore the world on my own terms. Many technologies serve emancipatory purposes, alleviate suffering, and expand human potential—a development that certain reactionary forces would like to undo. They try to smuggle fears of transhumanism into public discourse, using arguments that uncannily echo Heidegger’s texts. At the same time, there is a certain kind of transhumanist who is more preoccupied with overcoming their own mortality than with making the world less cruel. They have a questionable (and antisocial) understanding of progress. What they may share with Heidegger is nihilophobia—a fear and rejection of nihilism that continues to shape Western thought today. It is the fear that behind everything there is, in fact, nothing at all, not even Being.
When the alphabet was introduced, Plato feared it would destroy memory. In some respects he was right; oral traditions declined. Yet writing at the same time allowed memory to be externalized and preserved in a new way. So was the alphabet a “bad” technology? Most of us would disagree.
At the same time, it is equally reductive to portray technology as passive and controllable—that is, essentially neutral and dependent only on what humans make of it. This is a humanistic view that is no longer tenable. It attributes to humans a control they do not in fact possess and is then surprised when unintended consequences arise. To cling to the myth of control, conspiracy theories appear as a result (So too in Heidegger, who, through his own philosophy, should have known better.).
I can agree with Heidegger in his description of the web of equipment and our place within it; also in the humbling insight that we have far less control than we think, and that every new tool reconfigures the totality of “in-order-to” relations. We inhabit a world shaped by technology—culturally, ecologically, epistemologically. Technological artifacts are part of our memory. This demands continuous reflection on the essence of technology and its danger, even if such an essence is merely the invention of the author, who at least provides us with a new vocabulary to see things differently. Just like our language—another technology–technological artifacts not only sustain the functioning of society; they generate new worlds and let old ones disappear. They form self-reinforcing feedback loops.
And yet emancipatory currents must always resist binary distinctions between “natural” and “unnatural”. Is the wind turbine, for example, truly less controlling than the dam, which tames and constrains the river? Indeed, it might be better if we bid farewell to essences altogether, for—here Fisher and many other revolutionaries are right—we call things “natural”, “essential”, or “absolute”, even though they are in fact constructed and thus artificial: things, processes, and rules that worked in the past (for many or for some), but that can be changed for a different future.
History has taught us to expand our moral imagination, to include more beings within our circle of care—not because of unchangeable principles, not because of God or some inner truth we have discovered, but because of the vitality of our imagination; not because of transcendental or transcendent truth, but because of lived and imagined experiences that have been narrated and inscribed into our cultural memory. We have invented a less cruel world. That is something we can, and perhaps even should, be proud of; it is a project worth continuing by widening the circle still further, rather than narrowing it again.
Turning away from, or being saved from, the danger is therefore not about unconditional acceptance or total rejection. Instead, we need an informed ambivalence, a conscious withdrawal, and a vigilant anticipation. Here irony, which I have (in Heidegger’s name) criticized, has its place—not in its modern, sarcastic form that ends in cynicism, but in a playful and at the same time serious way, to reveal something profoundly meaningful through contradiction and wit, as the Daoists prefer.
Take, for example, the story of the “useless” tree that the carpenters ignored. The tree pretends to be worthless in order to live its natural life. The tree’s act is utterly convincing—it deceives humans so that they spare it—and the reward is genuine survival.
Now you, Sir, have a large tree, and you don’t know how to use it, so why not plant it in the middle of nowhere, where you can go to wander or fall asleep under its shade? No axe under Heaven will attack it, nor shorten its days, for something which is useless will never be disturbed.– Zhuangzi, The Book of Chuang Tzu
Today even the near future seems radically unpredictable. We no longer imagine the future with the same confidence as ancient societies did. Hence we need more flexibility in identity formation, without abandoning attachment. In fact, unpredictability and complexity almost push us into a paradoxical mode of serious pretending. The boundary between “real” and “performed” is not fixed; new attachments can be found, and, when lived, identity becomes real: pretend deeply enough, and the boundary between appearance and being dissolves. But instead of pretending authenticity or being true to an inner truth—a technique that no longer works in our time—we can look for serious actors. We cannot find ourselves; we can only invent ourselves. Where there is attachment, meaning can still be found.
The cynical alternative is a superficial layer of pretending, where consistency lies in style, not in playing oneself; a show or brand, where doing is a toolbox to be picked up or put down depending on the audience.
Our way of seeing the world can change; it is not fixed. If technology is a mode of unconcealment, then we must remain open to other modes of unconcealment, as well as to other approaches to truth and being. Artists play a decisive role in this. They not only critique the present, but they open spaces for possible futures. Through aesthetic forms they unconceal reality in ways that neither science nor politics can. Their task is phenomenological: to show how things appear, not merely what they are. Art teaches us this “other seeing”—a poetic dwelling and preservation of the work. The artwork opens a non-instrumental world and thus limits the interpretive sovereignty of the technological.
We need not meet this process with cynicism or fear, but with sincere engagement. We should not fear technology and its artifacts. Technology is ambivalent: it enables education, memory, and culture, but also alienation, consumerism, and forgetting. It shapes our technological consciousness of time and our memory. And that which co-evolves with us is guided by the horizon of possibilities that technology itself, as enframing, helps determine. Artistic works have the potential to reveal this enframing, to illuminate the stage on which our futures unfold—not to construct them, but to preserve and make available the possible, so that we can endure meaninglessness—not in despair, but with awareness.
We must relearn how to see and to think, that is, to enter the domain in which beings (and systems) reveal themselves in ways not reducible to function, efficiency, or control. We must resist the automatic embrace of the technological challenge and the illusion of inevitability with composure. Neither nostalgia nor minor reforms will suffice, but we can nevertheless preserve the dignity of beings. Rephrasing Mark Fisher:
I am not afraid of a zombie apocalypse; I am afraid that people find it easier to imagine the end of the world than a less cruel world. – Mark Fisher
The true horror is our lack of imagination; that we keep grasping for simple answers and charismatic saviors instead of daring new visions.
Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human meditations and endeavors. Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god. – Martin Heidegger, Spiegel interview, 1966
For Heidegger, the danger does not lie simply in technology obstructing our access to Being—but in its making us forget Being altogether. He points to cybernetics (the science of systems, control, and information flows), which has replaced philosophy as the dominant framework for understanding the world: today our worldview is shaped not by wisdom or metaphysics, but by data and systems theory, and decisions are made by algorithms, economics, and optimization. In Heidegger’s eyes, this is the ultimate enframing: the culmination of a view that sees the world purely as a resource, as a system to be controlled, not as a mystery to be lived.
Yet precisely the danger he points to carries the seed of salvation, for parts of cybernetics—through the emergence of second-order cybernetics [] have already recognized that control in the modern sense is impossible, and have begun to undermine the objectivity claims of classical cybernetics. If there is one thing we can take from Heidegger’s thinking and writing, it is that our worn-out vocabulary stands in our way.
His ontological vision remains bound to essentialist, foundational thought. Yet one could argue that his critique of representational thinking, his redefinition of truth, and his questioning of metaphysics laid crucial groundwork for the postmodern turn and posthumanist turn—even if his own position remained tied to an earlier philosophical epoch. He sought to overcome the metaphysical tradition by unearthing the Greek “beginning” that predates Plato. But as Jacques Derrida later observed, he did not fully escape it through the attempt at destruction; rather, this culminated in a transformation (deconstruction)—not a dissolution—of metaphysics [] (Heidegger probably recognized this himself, which is why he never finished Being and Time and instead sought to approach Being poetically). For example, the retreat to an original beginning is itself a longing for origin, which is a metaphysical gesture.
Every discourse about the “beyond of metaphysics” uses its concepts, distinctions, and grammar. The attempt to speak “outside” reenacts what Heidegger wanted to break from. What he undertook was an inner deferral and displacement (différance) within thought itself, which undermines every firm foundation, yet without stepping outside.
There is simply no standpoint outside from which metaphysics can be “switched off”. But there is an endless practice of shifting, which inverts, unsettles, and rereads its concepts—a movement that opens toward the à venir (the “yet-to-come”), without claiming a final exit.
The thinking of the event displaces metaphysics, but it does not escape it. This does not mean that one should dismiss this displacement. On the contrary: in it opens the task of philosophy today. – Jacques Derrida
It was Niklas Luhmann (cf. [Luh98]) who developed this thought further, linking it with second-order cybernetics and thus understanding deconstruction as a technique of second-order observation. Every observation now separates, through a distinction (form), a marked side from an unmarked one [SB69]; deconstruction reveals the blind spot of this form and can invert the side chosen.
Luhmann systematically integrates this into his theory of self-referential, autopoietic social systems. For him, every sense-making system generates what it excludes as its blind spot. Paradoxes are unavoidable and must be temporarily resolved—through procedures, programs, and decisions—so that the system can continue to operate. Deconstruction provides the paradox-awareness, for example that the legal system cannot ground its own legitimacy (A crime can be marked as illegal by the legal system, but there is no instance outside the system that could mark it itself as legal). In this way, Luhmann initiates a further displacement of metaphysics: metaphysical concepts appear as system-internal semantics, produced operatively and historically varied.
Although there are fascinating parallels between Heidegger’s and Luhmann’s views on art—particularly in that both understand art as a mode of unconcealment or sense-production—their underlying philosophies are profoundly different. Heidegger’s often romanticized conception of art and his emphasis on the ontological priority of Dasein stand in contrast to Luhmann’s post-metaphysical, systems-theoretical approach, which abandons anthropocentrism in favor of autopoietic sense-making systems. Yet I consider Luhmann’s vocabulary to be highly viable, and without Heidegger there would probably be no Luhmann.
Ironically, then, we find a new vocabulary precisely in the field that likely most troubled Heidegger: cybernetics and the systems theory of self-referential systems that emerged from it. With the introduction of second-order cybernetics, this field distanced itself from domination and control and from our metaphysical baggage, embodied in terms such as “essence”, “intelligence”, “identity”, “subjects”, “objects”, “truth”, and “Being”. It is a shift from Being to becoming; from identity to coherence, repetition, and autopoiesis; from truth to observation and validity; from control to resonance, viability, and attunement; from presence to difference. Instead of asking: “How can we control this?”, the question shifts to: “How does this system observe, and how can we intervene in ways that are recursively viable?” In this vocabulary (cf. [WB25]), existence begins with distinctions, and the world no longer consists of objects with inherent qualities, but of distinctions that differentiate themselves recursively through recurrent perturbations of an Other (through structural coupling). It is a matter of enduring undecidability—for example, of “justice”, which is an impossible, but at the same time necessary, thing.
Finally, perhaps the god of whom Heidegger spoke was not divine at all, but earthly—Gaia, returning, though not as a benevolent mother. In this sense, climate change is not merely a scientific fact or a political failure, but a metaphysical event: the Earth reclaiming its withdrawn presence, breaking our illusion of dominion, and exposing the futility of control. A wholly different way of dwelling may open up. For the path there we need a suitable vocabulary—a displaced metaphysics that permeates society as a whole and fundamentally alters action, that is, from rulers to stewards. Gaia will become the greatest danger, but as Hölderlin wrote:
[…] where the danger is, there also grows the saving power. – Friedrich Hölderlin
A Fictional Daoist Parable#
In the southern state of Chu, there was a river that once ran cool and clear. The fish darted in the shallows like silver needles, and the people drank from its banks without worry.
But one summer, the river began to warm. The fish swam deeper. Algae bloomed like an untended garden.
The villagers held a meeting. Some said, “We must build great machines to churn the water and cool it.” Others said, “We must move the river north!”
They argued for many days.
At the far end of the village lived Old Pine, a fisherman who had not fished for years. He was found sitting under a crooked willow, watching the river flow.
“Old Pine,” they asked, “what should we do about our warming river?”
Old Pine smiled. “Why do you ask me? I have no machines, no river to move, not even a net.”
“But the fish are dying!” they cried.
“Then make the river a home for the ones who like it warm,” Old Pine said. “Shade the banks with trees, so the sun’s hand is softer. Feed the roots instead of the fires. And if the river still changes, then we will change with it. What does not change is that the river is our kin.”
The villagers grumbled—this sounded too small, too slow. But a few began planting trees, weaving reeds along the banks, and leaving the warm-water fish in peace.
Years later, the river was not what it once was, but it was alive in a new way. Those who had learned from Old Pine drank its water with joy.