The essence of writing: a technological difference in the communicative disclosure of being

ABSTRACT

In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Martin Heidegger argues that the essence of modern technology is a mode of disclosure that brings the world to a particular appearance. Through his understanding of essence, Heidegger develops a novel way to understand the impact of technology. In this essay, I use Heidegger’s understanding of essence to shed light on writing’s impact on the history of ontology, and specifically the historically dominant understanding of presence. For Heidegger, the essence of any phenomenon is tied to its own particular mode of disclosure. Using Heidegger’s understanding of essence alongside the work of Eric A. Havelock and Walter J. Ong, I exhibit the mode of disclosure proper to writing. I argue that writing discloses the being of entities and the world in terms of mere presence, which levels being down, and obscures a more fundamental sense of what it means to be. In closing, I argue for a “saving power” within the essence of writing. This saving power is literature and poetry, and I argue that although writing conceals some aspects of being, it also has the power to reveal a deeper sense of what it means to be through artistic production.

KEYWORDS:

• technology
• writing
• Heidegger
• essence
• presence

Acknowledgement

A version of the second section of this paper was presented at the “Approaching the Liminal: Pushing the Boundaries of Continental Philosophy” conference at Duquesne University on September 26, 2014.

Notes

1 I am indebted to Jessica Sturgess for my understanding of the connection between communication and ontology. Her brilliant dissertation and our many conversations together have made this important connection clear for me. Jessica Sturgess, “Saying the World Anew: A Philosophical Understanding of Communication as Testimony” (PhD diss., Purdue University, 2016), see especially 63–110.

2 This interpretation follows Bernard Stiegler’s characterization of technics as “nonorganic organizations of matter,” and as the “pursuit of life by means other than life.” Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 17.

3 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 34–35.

4 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 17. Enframing is the way modern technology presents the earth, entities on the earth, and other people as a standing reserve of resources waiting for use.

5 Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Routledge, 2012).

6 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 13, 21, 27–35.

7 Ibid., 4–5.

8 Ibid., 3, fn 1.

9 Ibid., 3n.

10 Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 59.

11 World is an important notion for Heidegger. It is not the earth we live on, but rather, the network of relations of significance that obtain between entities, which allow for the meaning we find in our environment. It is from out of a world that individual entities arise as meaningful. For example, there is the “world” of the workshop where the hammer arises as “too heavy” or “just right for the task” based on its belonging to the task that organizes this space of significance. For a more in-depth treatment, see Heidegger, Being and Time, 91–122.

12 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 19.

13 These words may be said aloud, or they may be said in one’s mind, as most readers are doing while deciphering this endnote.

14 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 217.

15 Martin Heidegger, “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 187.

16 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 5, 5n.

17 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 7–8.

18 Ibid., 32, 90.

19 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 12.

20 Dennis Overbye, “Third Gravitational Wave Detection, From Black-Hole Merger 3 Billion Light Years Away,” New York Times, June 1, 2017, https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/science/black-holes-collision-ligo-gravitational-waves.html. This article details the findings of a Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which is used to detect massive gravitational wave events throughout the universe. The article focuses on LIGO detecting the creation of a black hole three billion years ago.

21 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 8.

22 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 36.

23 Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English, 3rd ed., ed. Catherine Soanes and Sara Hawker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), s.v. “abstract.”

24 Martin Heidegger, “Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 132.

25 In section 33 of Being and Time, Heidegger gives three senses of the statement or utterance. First, there is the statement as a pointing out, i.e., a communicative disclosure. This is the statement that brings something out into the open. Second, there is the statement as a predication, and this corresponds to the objective determination of an object based on its predicates or properties. Finally, there is the statement as communication. The communicative statement can take the form of either the first or the second. Here we let others see what we have seen in the self-disclosure of some entity or state of affairs, and what we share with others depends on whether it is a pointing out or an objective predication. The discussion above focuses on the first and third senses of utterance. The following paragraph deals with the second. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 195–203.

26 Ong’s focus on representation and modeling takes things a bit further than I intend. I am concerned with Ong’s emphasis on writing as “secondary,” as opposed to its “modeling” of the world (Orality and Literacy, 74). One could replace the idea of modeling with the more basic notion of relatedness, and Ong’s general point still holds. Writing is the technological modification of a more basic relatedness to the world that is found in oral language.

27 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 74.

28 Ibid., 77.

29 Joshua Sokol, “The Thoughts of a Spiderweb,” Quantamagazine, May 23, 2017, https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-thoughts-of-a-spiderweb-20170523/.

30 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 11.

31 Ibid., 71.

32 Ibid.

33 Havelock, Preface to Plato, 223.

34 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 68.

35 The emphasis here is on the word “sustained.” People were capable of solitary reflection before writing, but writing allows one to sustain solitary thought at a level that is not found in strictly oral settings.

36 Havelock, Preface to Plato, 197.

37 Ibid., 198.

38 Although this is a more speculative claim, one could argue that this is partly why philosophers were viewed with such contempt at the beginning of Western philosophy. Here were these literate few, asserting the values of the individual over the community to an extent that made people quite uncomfortable. This type of move from community to individual is one that is indebted to writing and the way it affects thinking.

39 Heidegger, Being and Time, 67. See also 67–90.

40 Ibid., 48.

41 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 80.

42 Ibid., 81.

43 Havelock, Preface to Plato, 260.

44 Heidegger, Parmenides, 81.

45 Alexander Ferrari Di Pippo, “The Concept of Poiēsis in Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics,” Thinking Fundamentals, IWN Junior Visiting Fellows Conferences 9, no. 3 (2000): 5.

46 On this point, a parallel analysis of smart phones or social media could be quite interesting.

47 Friedrich Hölderlin, Patmos, qtd. in Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 28.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., 13, 27.

50 “Technē belongs to bringing-forth, to poiēsis” (Ibid., 13).

51 Ibid., 34.

52 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volume I: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1991), 82.

53 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 34.

54 Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volume I, 196.

55 Di Pippo, “The Concept of Poiēsis in Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics,” 32.

56 I am indebted to Donovan Irven and our many personal communications for this insight.

57 Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 123–139.