Sublime

For Heidegger, the threat of technology goes beyond the practical fears of the post-war years: machines running out of control, atom bombs exploding, radiation leaks, epidemics, chemical contamination. Instead, it is an ontological threat against reality, and against human being itself. We fear disaster, but the disaster may already be under way.

The essence of technology, he said, is ‘nothing technological’. To investigate it properly is to be taken to much deeper questions about how we work, how we occupy Earth, and how we are in relation to Being.

In so doing, we’ll make the classic Heideggerian journey away from Uneigentlichkeit to Eigentlichkeit (from Inauthenticity to Authenticity). We will, in essence, start to live for ourselves.

But Heidegger wrote at length about the ‘darkening of the world’ (Weltverdüsterung) and argued that this was connected with the darkening of spirit (Geist).

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.

As Charles Taylor puts it, in modernity we remade the human person into a “buffered self,” protected and autonomous and independent, free to determine our own good and pursue our own “authentic” path.

Buber était un philosophe juif allemand qui est mort il y a environ cinquante ans, et dont le travail porte sur la rencontre véritable entre deux êtres : la relation du Je-Tu, une relation pleine et profondément réciproque, qui s’oppose à la relation du Je-Cela, laquelle néglige l’altérité de l’autre et utilise plus qu’elle ne rapproche. Cette idée