The Philosophy of the Question

With his most famous question, the Being-question, the Seinsfrage -- a question essentially and not incidentally obliterated by the tradition of philosophic questioning, Heidegger proposes a phenomenology of questioning. This is not counter to the project of philosophy but it calls us to our own experience as questioners, even as those who ask, who can ask 'Why the why.'(1) For Heidegger, 'only because man is in this way, can he and must he, in each case, say, not only yes or no, but essentially yes and no.'(2)

A reflection on inquiry as such poses the interpretive question of the question. In this way, Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology inBeing and Time determines the point of departure for any inquiry as the prerequisite, orientation and anticipatory process or progression towards any possible fulfilled terminus. Heidegger's later question concerning technology is inaugurated in the same way with careful attention to the destiny of the question as a project and a possibility for thought.

But Heidegger's concern with technology is itself 'questionable' for ordinary philosophers of technology. After all, it seems patent that Heidegger is the anti-technological philosopher par excellence. Thus Heidegger's questioning concern with technology and science,sustained throughout Heidegger's life as the double to the Being-question, is routinely heard as a 'negative' account of technology, that is as a critically antagonistic and nostalgic assault against the modern technical world. This negative appraisal of Heidegger's thought is not a weakness on the part of Heidegger's readers and critics. Rather the questions concerning technology and Being-question have to be heard in such a negating, critical fashion. That is, as long as we fail to ask the question of the question.

In what follows I attempt to reflect upon the case, the question of the question after technology. Heidegger's phenomenology of questioning is important here because, I shall seek to show, the contemporary expression of technology condemns questioning to nothing more than a calculative convention (namely that of question and answer) rather than an open- ended or attentive project. Calculative questioning challenges and is content with nothing less than the satisfaction of the correct. It is the calculative character of the contemporary techno-scientific world which renders the questionable as such less and less question-worthy. Calculating technological questioning is revealed as a Ge-stell -- hyphenated to emphasize the enframing of modern technology as a set-up. This framing set up is the secret of technology (as the age of the world picture), the quantitative expression, that is the earmark of information-age technicism or what Heidegger called 'Americanism,' i.e., 'European' (see WP153; cf 135). Thus the achievements of modern technological advance depend upon calculable manipulation which in his day, Heidegger named 'cybernetics.' The danger here is that 'what can seemingly always be calculated completely, becomes, precisely through this, seemingly incalculable. The invisible shadow cast by this conviction is the result of the ascendency of man as subiectum' (WP 136). Technological potential is apparently infinite but the sacrifice of unimaginable infinity to the imaginary ideal of mathematical infinity is a token of what Heidegger calls aletheia.

Beyond the technological dreams of infinite calculation, the question of the question refers to the doubly-turned or yoked nature of questioning.(3) In Being and Time Heidegger writes, 'Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction from what is sought.' But the way inquiry takes direction can vary. What is sought can be interrogated by the question or what is sought can be attended to in the question. Attentive questioning attends both to what is asked as what is asked about what is asked and listens to that which is sought by the question. This last is also the piety -- the poetry -- of thought, a movement of thinking that is almost Eastern in aspect if not origin. The responding attentiveness of creative questioning (or authentic, genuine reflection or thought) directed to the sense of things -- Heidegger invokes in his 1954 essay, 'Wissenschaft und Bessinnung,' such responsive questioning forgets itself as questioning and as it loses 'the character of questioning,' becomes in the end 'simply saying.'(4)

The danger of mistaking the aletheic character of truth, regarding it as no more than what is correctly revealed by the enframing constraint or rule of modern technology (Ge-stell) is the danger that questioning will become no more than investigative inquiry. As the open adventure of thought that is the essence of questioning, before but especially after technology what is thereby endangered is the aletheic essence of truth.

Heidegger's own questioning in the wake of technology is a question set into the set up or setting upon that is the essence of modern technology or das Ge-stell. 'This incalculable can be safeguarded into its truth -- only in creative questioning and shaping out of the power of genuine reflection' (WP 136). The working effect of such creative questioning questions into the framework or set up of technology. Such a query must be 'safeguarded' or sheltered as the kind of subordinate questioning most at risk in the wake of the instrumental thinking of technology. This is the oblivion of technology: 'in this situation total forgotteness of being reigns, total concealment of being.' Stilted by our culture of technique and invention, we are anything but masters, we are not the originators or disposers of technology, but in this framed relation to technology, humanity is subordinated to technology, becoming , in Heidegger's words, 'its toy.' As Jean Ladrière argues, the technological scheme or logos 'becomes an exterior power' imposing 'its own law on humanity.'(5) This is not a an ontologically clouded variation on a Luddite theme but a phenomenologically articulated, existentially and pragmatically confirmable commonplace. To use any technological item, even simple machines like a lever or a wedge, the user must conform, i.e., the user must attune him or herself to the tool as such in order to use the tool as such -- and not the other way around. This is the hypothetical imperative of technology. If you want to surf the Internet (if you want to ride a motorbike), you must do so within the limits of the Internet including your particular provider/browser (motorbike) you happen to be using. Other tricks may or may not work: convergence or coincidence with the specific protocol determining success in every case. This rule of adaptation to the demands of the tool and the exigency of the task to be done is skill; it is the result of study or receptive, affine use.

Holding a hammer properly enables one to use the hammer to accomplish what one has to do with the hammer. But this is other than bending the hammer to one's own will. The hammer will do best what one will if one conforms one's use to the intrinsic design of the hammer, heft, shape, etc. (conformity with respect to the appropriate grip, the angle and arc of the swinging stroke, even the kind of nail employed, surely the position of the same). In the case of hammering, there is always a great bit of freedom -- one can use the side of the hammer's head or the shaft for hammering, if it is a claw hammer and one is a performance artist, say, one can use the sharp edge of the claw. But even here the condition of the range of use is 'decided' or constrained by the tool and the task even in the last unlikely because (not albeit) unwieldy case. This is what Heidegger in Being and Time referred to as equipmental totality (SZ 68). With more sophisticated machines, anything mechanically driven for example, especially all things electronic, the range of play is increasingly reduced.

Thus engaged on the terms of our tools in order to use them as our tools, we accomodate ourselves to the law of the techno-cybernetic world, harnessing our patience and our desire to the numbing constraints of modern technology, on the telephone, on the road, where the most ubiquitous example of modern technological constraint or fascination is cybernetic captivation, matched to the software and hardware limitations of our computer world, on line, on the Internet, on the Web. In Heidegger's words, again, we are the 'plaything' of our own technology, and once again: not the other way around. It is common to protest against Heidegger's esotericism when we hear him speak of technology, especially the technology of logic, the organon of Western rationality, as if it were imposing its law on us,playing with us. The idea is as paradoxical as anything that calls for thought or may be named question-worthy. Obviously too, we also hear this expression as mysterious or esoteric or even mystical because of Heidegger's style, his language. Where language is the technology of academic discourse, the rhetorical tool of the philosopher and the sophist, language is also the technology of science and reflection, poetizing and thinking. It is in this same alienating/alienated way that we become, in Thoreau's more direct formula: 'the tools of our tools.'

As the plaything of technology, fashioned in turn by what we make, we are ourselves transformed into the instruments of our own technologies, information and otherwise. Indeed, one way to regard modern humanity is as the practical and literal means of technology today: that is as the agency of all technological reproduction, mechanical reproduction and electronic reproduction. Regarding the historical essence of technology, we ourselves -- to use Joan Stambaugh's pragmatic translation of Ge-stell -- have been been 'framed' by what in Heidegger's image, 'frames' us.

In Nordic mythology, Odin's two ravens had powers embodying the technological dreams of the Western soul, as barbarian as civilized. To inform the All-Father, they moved at the speed of thought. And Odin was a god, as Oedipus was a man, who paid a consummate price -- but in Odin's case, deliberately and with an eye enough -- for knowledge. But in a world of multifarious heritage and influence, we are not quite Odin's children. Born according to one Greek myth, from a mixture of dust and titan's blood we have more in common with Prometheus who also carried the same promise of instant wish, will, and fulfillment in his own name but was condemned to endure the desolation of the failure of technology, as this failure testifies to what Reiner Schürmann calls the tragic condition of Being, what Heidegger names its withdrawal, we dare immediate fulfillment, like Prometheus, in violation of all measure. Our reward, like Sisyphus's perfect justice, is desire without end. Here, it is also instructive that even a storyteller like Camus remembered only Sisyphus's eternal destiny and not his original offense. In truth, Sisyphus was punished for a crime before he could commit it. He was guilty of no more than embracing a phantasm, the vaporous dream of the object of his desire, the mother of the gods. His fate was to play and replay the same endeavor: infinitely rendered, impossibly accomplished. Sisyphus won desire to infinity: as soon consummated, as soon undone. That is: frustrated, ungratified, a pursuit as eternal as Keats's own illusions.

The mischief of non-consummation, the human plague, is the numbing constraint of technology and science, whereby the question of essence as Heidegger poses it, taking a metaphor from the poet Stefan George, is the question of what frames us. This frame is the traditional question of love and freedom. And it is the same traditional romanticism that captures the enduring allure of the efficient technical mind. The same ideal of love and freedom betrays the history of the tradition and practice of magic and alchemy which (Nietzsche argues) functions as the paradigm and secret motivation for the whole of modern science and technology. If questioning has become insipid in the wake of technology or else in the placidity of the thoughtlessness of Western reason, we need to ask Heidegger's question once again. We do this not by questioning technology but by questioning questioning in the wake of technology.

In the scientific schematism that condenses every causality to a singular nexus, stripping the metaphysical and first, final, and fetishistic material causes, we have re-made, reworked (if in a thoroughly Roman or imperalist image) the causa efficiens. And yet only the causa efficiens, as a practical technoscientific observer might claim, only one out of the original quartet, was ever 'really' able to cause anything in the first place. This conviction is the scientistic myth of simple causality. In truth, in the round, real world, there is no such identifiably singular efficient cause, separable from the manifold interplay of the causal dynamic. The actual causal nexus is the chaotic interrelatedness of real events and processes: selectively, deceptively simplifiable, overdetermined from the start, in a chain of conditions and related qualifications. And every detail works its ultimate consequence, as Nietzsche would say, by necessity.

We do not simply accomodate ourselves to our technologies but we confine or limit our desires and so ourselves to them. What can be done becomes exemplary, worth doing, the only thing to do. From a phenomenological perspective, once again, we become our tools, project ourselves into and then, mirabile dictu, as Nietzsche liked to tease, we find ourselves in our things. Like the internet, like TV or MTV, but also like everything registered and so liable as stock, as reserve, technology becomes as resource the veritable mirror of our souls, insidiously benign like books or CDs, much more dangerously, in the illusory practice of writing in electronic media like email, or now reflecting our bodies in the idea of the genetic code, our "genes" that make us who we are. Beyond the negative threats of chemical plants and their waste, like nuclear powerplants and nuclear accelerators, like the plastic promise of contemporary cosmetic surgery, it is the ambition of the human genome project and the practical affair that is the cloning of an adult sheep that we ourselves are literally not metaphorically to be tooled by our tools.

This subjective fashioning is what it means to say that we are our tools. Clothes make the man (evidence of humanity: the first technology). If we are our mountain boots or our sandals, our choice of business suit or evening dress, we are also our hammers or indeed: we are our CD players, our computers, even our coffee-makers. And so it goes with tools, with cities and roads, with the communicational infrastructure of contemporary life in cellular and car phones (the latter providing social evidence of prime importance: the ultimate technology). In all these things, typically not exceptionally, the automobile exemplifies modern technological life. We do not need to speak of planes (though the example works far beyond Heidegger's 'waiting' plane on the runway) to see the backwards fashioning or working of the tool upon the user, the maker, the driver, the consumer. We recall the phenomenologically confirmable commonplace that a driver can and does become his automobile -- "extended" as the Husserlian cum Heideggerian analysis of the dynamic of motoring through narrow streets or on the open road, with power magnifying the force of the body, speed beyond any possible evolutionary anticipation, but a power controlled by the ordinary motorist and grand prix racer alike with delicacy, deliberate speed. But as Buadrillard has emphasised, we are both extended and restricted by the automobile. We go as fast the speed limit and police constraints permit. We go as fast as the economics of consumption allows but we also go as fast as the car itself, as the design of the road permits us to go. We are, we answer, the claim of the road. And in America this claim is sheer fantasy, a matter of the wide open spaces of the American West and the American Past: Chevy, T-Bird, Trans-Am. In Germany, to choose another land marked by its identification with the automobile, the claim and the fantasy are on more equal terms. For Germany, this fantasy has a different provenance and a different expression together with a different set of limitations. The Autobahn and the Mercedes were made for each other. The German motorist answers this complementary configuration of technical track permitting maximum speed and, for the most part, avoids the leftmost lane unless his own automobile makes it possible to ride down other knights of the open road: lights flashing, horns sounding, a jousting tailored for the streamlined, uni-directional vectors of the modern not the medieval era.

Not is it an accident that Germany shares its advertising preoccupations with the automodile with the North American public. Beyond speed, the erotics of the motor car "extend" us even more. This is not simply a matter of postmodern car crash fantasies. The feel of car works on the every day level and the more we are impressed by the design, the more able we are to drive the car like a second skin and this extension is more important than image. We can become via an exact bodily feel, the very edge of the automotive fender, in just the way Alphonso Lingis(6) describes this very visceral, sensual extension of the driver's car, or more prosaically, beyond Lingis's overt sexual metonymy, just in the way that Patrick Heelan's philosophy of (technologized or phenomenologically hermeneutic) perception(7)or Don Ihde's account of technological extension has it:(8) we are embodied indwelling beings, we are as Heidegger says, and here is the spacial crux of all technological revealing, in the world. And we speak of extended things and the talk of extended things as inaugurating modernity because we can extend ourselves, because we are inherently, quintessentially intentional beings, ahead of ourselves, beyond ourselves. Merleau-Ponty's account of the blindman's cane expresses the considerable versatility of intentional being in the world alongside and with the ultimately aesthetic or creative use of whatever may be to hand, be it a cane, an automobile, eyeglasses, telescopes, paintbrushes, or, for a teenager the electronic 'feel' and hype of surfing the Internet late at night, where in such web-dreams the computer screen absorbs the ever more Platonized images of adolescent fantasy and the Aristotelian desire to know.

In this context, we recall that for Heidegger well before this became common knowledge, cybernetics is named the 'ersatz for philosophy and poetry.'(9) In an age of virtual reality, it is important to remember that that all cybernetics, all computer or information technology is always, is essentially ersatz, i.e., unreal or virtual.