Sublime

Heidegger believed that modern technology uprooted and dislodged man from his time and place and thus his spiritual grounding. When he said “only a god can save us,” he feared that something the pre-Socratic Greeks grasped was being lost or forgotten through the general triumph of technology. He called this “Seinsvergessenheit,” or the obliviousnes

And yet most of the time, for Heidegger, we fail dismally at this task. We merely surrender to a socialised, superficial mode of being what he called ‘they-self’ (as opposed to ‘our-selves’). We follow das Gerede (The Chatter), which we hear about in the newspapers, on TV and in the large cities Heidegger hated to spend time in.

Des heideggériens, à commencer par Hubert Dreyfus, ont écrit plus tard sur l’Internet comme l’innovation technologique qui révèle le plus clairement ce qu’est la technique1049. Son infinie connectivité promet de rendre le monde entier stockable et disponible mais, ce faisant, prive les choses de toute espèce d’intimité et de profondeur. Tout, à com

That’s why Heidegger suggests that “proximally and for the most part”—his favorite phrase for naming our cultural defaults—our “everyday” existence is an unreflective absorption and immersion in the defaults “they” have set for me.

Heidegger taught them to think, and thinking meant ‘digging’. He worked his way down to the roots of things,

That’s why Heidegger suggests that “proximally and for the most part”—his favorite phrase for naming our cultural defaults—our “everyday” existence is an unreflective absorption and immersion in the defaults “they” have set for me.

Heidegger suggests that the wake-up call of anxiety might be how we learn to hear “the Appeal” that comes from beyond us, a transcendence calling us to something—calling us to ourselves.