The Role of Technology and the Essence of Being Truly Human
Christine Carmela R. Ramos, PhD.
Christine Carmela R. Ramos, Ph.D., is the author of Introduction to the Philosophy of the human
person, Globalization and Technology, and Introduction to Philosophy. She obtained her Ph.D.
in Philosophy of Philosophy at De La Salle University, Manila, graduating with distinction (magna
cum laude). She presented papers locally and internationally. She received a scholarship from the
Women's Council of Great Britain, in Hertfordshire College, England, where she found the
inspiration to write her book about globalization. She had written numerous books and articles in
philosophy since then.
Dr. Ramos is currently teaching at Mapúa University. She was cited for her community
development contributions: giving women training to put up daycare centers in the outskirts of
Manila and facilitating students' alternative learning. Her current research interests include ethics,
yoga meditation, and trends in impactful online education.
This article focuses on Heidegger’s concept of technology. The analysis of his views pointed
back to the Greek tradition, criticized by Heidegger. According to Heidegger, the decline of the
West occurred as human Dasein lost touch with the awesomeness of the gift and responsibility of
the ontologically disclosive capacity. The author also looks at the four-fold benefits of technology:
earth, sky, divinities, and mortal. Finally, the paper relates the Heideggerian notion of technology
with globalization.
Keywords: bringing forth, calculative thinking, Four-fold, globalization, poetizing, science,
technology
I.
INTRODUCTION
To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a
star in the world’s sky.
-- Heidegger (1977)
Letter On Humanism
It is only in Aristotle where the distortion between episteme and techne the two is accentuated.
However, even with Aristotle, both words still mean knowing, but they differ concerning what and
how they know. Greek producing, even though quickly affected by the advent of productionist
metaphysics, shared in an ontological disclosure that was inaccessible to earlier people. In making
something, in other words, the Greek artisan knew that he was letting it be. The decline of the
West occurred as human Dasein lost touch with the awesomeness of the gift and responsibility of
this ontologically disclosive capacity.
There is no doubt that both Plato and Aristotle had significantly contributed teachings that
greatly impacted the early civilization's perspective and way of living. In fact, until today, most of
their shared wisdom and knowledge are still considered vital because it serves as the foundation
of countless philosophies and references to the newly discovered concepts. Heidegger and
Aristotle, and their achievements that benefit the global society, are somehow not entirely similar.
What we find in Greek poetry, medicine, and daily life, an awareness of the world in its full
vividness and qualitative complexity, an engagement in politics, art, and ideas, dims because it has
so little encouragement in our society. The paper explores the authenticity of the early Greeks and
Heidegger’s.
Specifically, this paper undertakes the task of understanding Heidegger’s discussion of
originative thinking from which, in his interpretation, all discovery is poetic. This work is
necessary particularly in envisioning globalization vis-à-vis technology that is not just limited to
calculative thinking.
In analyzing technology, Heidegger discusses its complexity as a necessary interplay of
revelation and dissimulation in the historical unfolding of Being (Langan, 1959, 196). This gives
Heidegger the conviction that what is revealed is necessary and dissimulation and that it is not yet
a catastrophe without exit. In this light, Heidegger (2010, 310) quotes Hölderlin:
Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächstdas Rettende auch.
Where the danger lies; however, there also springs the delivering thing.
Like everything else human, like every dissimulating revelation, technology presents a double
alternative, corresponding to the Wesen-Anwesen (presencing) relationship at the heart of
everything finite. Neither a blind absolute affirmation nor frightened, shrill rejection of technology
or science would be nothing more than a reaction to it, turning round, as Nietzsche did in his
rejection of the supersensory world, within the tight orbit of that which it rejects. Instead, we must
look for hope precisely in the fact that technology is the ultimate dissimulation (Langan, 1959,
199). For the ultimate dissimulation itself is an invitation to contemporary human beings "above
all, and more completely and more originally, to engage oneself in the essence of the unveiled and
its unveiledness and to experience the accustomed propriety of discovery as one's essence."
Heidegger’s cryptic remarks on the possibility of surpassing the domination of technology
toward an essential grasp of the essence of truth in Dasein invite us to rejoin, the starting point of
the odyssey of destruction. It lies in understanding how it is that “man dwells poetically from out
of this earth.”
Many of Heidegger’s crucial ideas are influenced by Nicolai Hartmann’s turn from
epistemology to ontology. At the same time, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and Max
Scheler’s philosophical anthropology developed Heidegger’s critical engagement of Dasein. To
Soren Kierkegaard and Karl Jaspers, he owed the concepts of Existenz (existing as standing out),
Angst, and Augenblick (moment of insight). He also admires Wilhelm Dilthey’s and Yorck von
Warternburg’s historical dimension of philosophical thought. He is less eager to admit the
influence of Spengler on the notion of being.
Further, some commentators stress Heidegger's similarity to contemporary environmentalism,
such as these verses, which he quoted from Rainer Maria Rilke:
There outside all caring, This creates for us a safety – just there, Where the pure forces’
gravity rules; in the end, it is our unshieldedness on which we depend, and that, when we
saw it threaten, we turned it so into the Open that, in widest orbit somewhere, where the
Law touches, we may affirm it.
The poem bears no title but appeared in 1934 from the volume of Gesammelte Gedichte. The
“improvised verses” are designated to the “Open." Open means something that does not block off
because it does not set bounds. The Open is the great whole of all that is unbounded. Further, the
Open is the great whole as they are drawn, so that they variously draw one another and draw
together without encountering any bounds. They do not dissolve into void and nothingness, but
they redeem themselves into the whole of the Open.
For Heidegger (2013, 116), "by building the world up technologically as an object, man
deliberately and completely blocks his path, already obstructed, into the Open." Further, at the
age of technology, humanity opposes itself to the Open by this parting. This parting is not a parting
from. It is a parting against. More importantly, "the danger consists in the threat that assaults man's
nature in his relation to Being itself."
Nature, for Heidegger, is the ground for both history and art. Further, Nature, as understood by
him, echoes phusis, or life. Heidegger expounds that the nature of life is not conceived in biological
terms but as the phusis, that which arises.
This part takes into consideration the relationship between science and technology. Science
(Wissenschaft), explains Heidegger, is grounded in projection establishing determined regions of
objects, which are then investigated by methods corresponding to the various divisions. Scientific
research must be understood in the reciprocal, interlocking relationship of projections and rigor,
method, and instrumentation. Science then seeks not to let the entity show itself in ways
appropriate to the entity in question. Instead, it compels the entity to reveal these aspects of itself
consistent with the power aims of scientific culture (Langan, 1959, 174).
At The End of Philosophy, Heidegger (1973, 32) disputes:
The development of philosophy into the independent sciences, however, independently
communicate among themselves ever more markedly, is the legitimate completion of
philosophy. Philosophy is ending in the present age. It has found its place in the scientific
attitude of socially active humanity. But the fundamentally characteristic of this scientific
attitude is it's cybernetic, that is, technological character. The need to ask about modern
technology is presumably dying out to the same extent that technology more definitely
characterizes and regulates the appearance of the totality of the world and the position of
man in it.
The sciences will interpret everything in their structure that is still reminiscent of the origin
from philosophy following the rules of science that is technological. Every science
understands the categories upon which it remains dependent for the articulation and
delineation of its area of investigation as working hypotheses. Their truth is measured not
only by the effect which their application brings about within the progress research.
For Heidegger (2002), the central phenomenon of modern times is physical science:
The technological, scientific rationalization ruling the present age justifies itself every day,
more surprisingly by its tremendous results. But this says nothing about what first grants
the possibility of the rational and irrational. The effect proves the correctness of
technological, scientific rationalization. But is the manifest character of what is exhausted
by what is demonstrable? Doesn't the insistence on what is verifiable block the way to
what is?
Mechanized calculation methods also had their beginnings in the seventeenth century: the
prominent mathematical thinkers Blaise Pascal and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz each designed and
built machines. Mechanizing multiplication was the next step, and this Leibniz managed to do in
1671. When viewed under Heidegger's understanding, Leibniz's principle concerning the rendering
back to thinking of the sufficient ground discloses with impressive clarity how the reckoning,
representing thinking characteristic of the modern age, takes its course (Feenberg, 1999, 214). The
principle, which Leibniz started in full assurance of its loftiness and commanding power,
manifested the new self-confident perspective of contemporary thinking with inclusive and
compelling force (Lovitt and Lovitt, 1995, 430-432).
The correspondence between what is logically discovered and the reality to which the
conceptualizing of logic refers, which was presupposed by Descartes, is by Leibniz, directly
discerned and accorded unquestioned validity. Leibniz’s principle, rigorously stated, requires a
rendering, a providing, of the ground for anything whatever that is to be acknowledged as
something that is. This "rendering" is of a peculiar sort. It is no simple providing. The verb that
Leibniz uses is reddere, that for Heidegger means, to give back, to restore.
II.
Calculative Thinking: Domination of technology
For Heidegger (1959, 159), modern technology is also a mode of knowing but not in the same
way as techne for the Greeks. Current technology does not reveal and bring forth into the light.
Instead, it demands material things to yield their energy which modern humanity wants to
transform in a thousand ways. Authentic production, then, understood in terms of the Greek
insight, involves disclosing something appropriately, letting it come forth into its own, bringing it
into the arena of accessibility, letting it lie forth as something established.
For Heidegger, technology is still functioning in the Greek sense. It still reveals those beings
that remain in concealment. What is new in modern technology is how it shows Being. Looking
beyond instrumentalism, however, Heidegger discerned what he regarded as a deeper meaning of
producing hidden in the Greek term techne. The outstanding work of art, e.g., poetry, is the techne
that allows people to be at home with things. We understand in advance what things are so that
within this articulated and intelligible matrix of entities, people can produce things, bring them
forth, let them be. The primordial disclosure of the world-founding work of art makes possible the
productive disclosure of things within the world.
Modern technology no longer reveals in a poetic (derived from poiesis) and artistic way
(Heidegger, 1959, 16). It no longer shows the richness of Being in itself. It controls, structures,
and manipulates beings and lets them behave and manifest themselves according to humanity's
will.
To show these two kinds of revealing, Heidegger uses the Rhine River as an example.
Hölderlin’s The Rhine (Der Rhein) represents the poetic and artistic bringing forth of Being. It
simply brings to openness the Rhine River using elegant words in poetry. On the other hand,
modern technology reveals the Rhine River as a hydroelectric pressure that sets turbine turning
(Heidegger, 2017, 297). It is exploited and harnessed, and made available for our consumption.
Beings are arranged and fashioned so that they will be of use to us.
According to Heidegger (1969, 46), there are two kinds of thinking: calculative (rechnendes
Denken) and meditative (besinnliches Denken). Each is justified in its way. That contemporary
person is in “flight from thinking,” Heidegger (1969, 45) refers to meditative thinking. Some
people will say that this form of thinking serves no profound purpose or is worthless for dealing
with real issues.
Meditation is above the reach of conventional understanding. It does not just happen by itself,
and it demands practice. It entails a great effort and needs even more delicate care than any other
form of thinking or craft.
Nonetheless, we can follow the path of meditative thinking in one's manner and within one's
limits, because as persons, we are meditating beings. Contemplative thought need not be high
flown. For Heidegger, it is enough that we dwell on what lies close and meditate on what concerns
us here and now.
On the one hand, the calculation is the mark of all thinking that plans and engages in research.
Calculative thinking inherently computes more promising and latest economic potentials
(Heidegger, 1969, 46) ever. It races from one venture to another. More, it never rests and never
collects itself. It is not meditative thinking that contemplates the meaning that reigns in everything
that is (Kockelmans, 1985, 250).
Technological humanity, however, conceives of everything in terms of purposive or
instrumental rationality. Talk of producing as a "freeing" or as a "letting be" makes no sense.
Instead, to make something means to cause it to happen, to the will that it comes forth, to serve
some purpose within the technological system.
This is the form of thinking employed in the sciences. The sciences, in diverse ways, claim to
present the essential form of knowing and of the knowable. However, to the degree that modern
humanity is in flight from meditative thinking, one exposes oneself to the dangers of nihilism
(Kockelmans, 1985, 250).
In this vein, globalization should not just mean a fast-food franchise is opening in some part of
the world nor simply acquiring the "latest" gadgetry; definitely, not tearing down ancestral
buildings for the site of a new "world-class" mall. More than these, Heidegger encourages us to
look beyond calculative thinking that arranges beings so that they will become comprehensible
and manipulable. Here the products of technology, while accepted into daily life, are in a more
profound sense to be let alone as things that are nothing absolute, but remains dependent upon
something higher, that ultimately proffers them and that always does so meaningfully, even though
the meaning in question may stay concealed.
Like technology, calculative thinking for Heidegger is also a human achievement and a
manifestation of human domination in the modern period. He attacks it, not because he wants to
get rid of it but to prove that it is not the only way of thinking.
III.
Other Beginning: The Bringing-Forth and the Revealing
Technology is a means to an end. Examining the technological objects, we can say that they
do have a practical purpose. The machines we have in factories, for instance, are directed towards
a particular end that will be of our benefit.
The English term "technology" stems from the Greek word "technikon," which belongs to
technology. In its original Greek sense, the word "techne" never signifies the activity of making
exclusively as it is understood nowadays. Rather it denotes a mode of knowing. However,
knowing in this context means to have seen and seeing here is taken in its broad sense, which
means apprehending what is present (Heidegger, 2017, 294).
Techne for Heidegger is still tied up with the experience of Being as physis. There are two
dimensions of physis that seem to correspond to the two aspects of poiesis, namely, the conflict
between physis understood as the event of disclosedness and physis understood as the event of
self-emergence. It is the bringing forth (Hervorbringen) of what is present in its unconcealedness.
Heidegger (1959, 159) expounds:
The Greeks called art in the true sense and the work of art techne because art is what most
immediately brings being (i.e., the appearing that stands there in itself) to stand, stabilizes
it in something present (the work). The work of art is a work not primarily because it is
wrought (gewirkt), made, but because it brings about (erwirkt), being in an essent; it brings
about the phenomenon in which the emerging power, physis, comes to shine (scheinen).
Through the work of art as essent being, everything else that appears and is to be found is
first confirmed and made accessible, explicable, and understandable or not being.
When an artisan produces something, what he does is to let something emerge as a thing. This
bringing-forth that Heidegger uses to elaborate techne should be taken in its broad sense
(Escalante, 1991, 65). It includes handicraft manufactures, artistic and poetic bringing into
appearance, and concrete imagery. Heidegger also mentions that above all these, physis is the
highest sense of bringing-forth.
We can see that the word "technology" originally refers to the bringing-forth or revealing of
something and not to the crafts worker's activities and skills. The crafts worker brings forth the
hidden form, beauty, and usefulness of a particular being. For instance, using his skill and tool,
the sculptor reveals the marble as a beautiful statue. To stress the profound relationship between
poetizing and producing, between art and technology, Heidegger said that technology is related to
poiesis and episteme.
In early Greek thinking, techne is closely linked with episteme. Both terms are used to mean
knowing in the broadest sense. Both words mean knowing something in the sense of being entirely
at home, understanding it, being an "expert" with it. Heidegger emphasized that episteme must
not be translated as "theoretical" knowing, which is somehow opposed to techne's allegedly
"practical" knowing. Whereas early Heidegger stressed the priority of practice over theory, we are
told that the practical is already the theoretical, i.e., that the practical presupposes the disclosure
of what things are (Zimmerman, 1990, 231).
It is only in Aristotle where the distortion between the two is accentuated. However, even with
Aristotle, both words still mean knowing, but they differ concerning what and how they learn.
Greek producing, even though quickly affected by the advent of productionist metaphysics, shared
in an ontological disclosiveness that was inaccessible to earlier people. In making something, in
other words, the Greek artisan knew that he was letting it be. The decline of the West occurred as
human Dasein lost touch with the awesomeness of the gift and responsibility of this ontologically
disclosive capacity.
The separation of physis and logos, such that logos interpreted as the ratio has priority and
supreme domination over physis, has reached its extreme today. The essence of modern technology
provokes and orders nature to come forth only in terms of its usable energy. The unity between
physis and logos has become almost entirely forgotten and absent (Hoeller, 1984, 48).
From the etymology of technology, we can see that it is also related to the Greek experience of
Being as physis and the notion of truth as Aletheia. Its essence is really to reveal and bring forth
what is still in concealment. The crafts worker, the artist, and the poet, in this context, have the
same concern, that is, to bring-forth what is still in darkness. Whether what they reveal is valid or
not is already a secondary issue.
IV.
Art and Technology
Heidegger’s analysis seems more correct than ever. He did not simply give solutions to
problems but asked new questions that he perhaps, cannot answer. The difference between beings
and our representations is becoming harder and harder to keep. However, Heidegger now seems
to believe that in the modern age, everyday existence is so impoverished and corrupted that what
we need is a radical revolution in our relationship to Being itself (Polt, 2013, 145).
Heidegger maintained that even modern technology was so very dangerous, it was also,
ironically, the way to salvation. If we could step back from the constant purposiveness of
calculative thinking or instrumental rationality demanded by modern technology, we could
suddenly encounter its purposelessness. Further, we could ascertain that the technological world
is analogous to a work of art. There is a sense of being a disclosure of entities simply for the sake
of that disclosure, not for any “higher” or “ulterior” purpose. Debating the groundlessness of the
technological era likely makes the openness and the anxiety essential for the arrival of a new, postmodern age.
Heidegger showed slight notice in art until the mid-1930s. He argued that the work of art
transforms our ontological perceptiveness: it enables us to enter into a new relationship with things.
The work of art discloses to us what things already are but which we are unable to see. In this
respect, the great work of art makes no practical contribution to a given world but, as an alternative,
opens the way to a new one. As a result, all great art is genuinely revolutionary.
The world is the human environment in which we lead our lives: our tools, shelter, and the
beliefs we invoke. Earth is the natural setting of this world, the ground on which it rests, and our
source of raw materials. World and earth are opposites in conflict. The world strives for clarity
and openness in conflict, while earth shelters and conceals, tending to draw the world into self.
Each needs and sustains the other. The artwork straddles both contestants.
For example, a temple’s static repose results from the conflict between earth and the world. It
is a happening, an event -- the event of truth as unconcealment. Heidegger argued, only if beings
are unconcealed can we make specific assumptions and choices. However, as finite beings, we can
never wholly master beings cognitively or practically; there is also concealment.
Devoid of concealment, there would be no neutrality, no judgments, and no history. The past,
the present-day, and future outlook would be wholly transparent to us. There are no hidden depths
to things nor scope for choices with ambiguous outcomes. (The two pairs of opposites, earth-world,
and concealment-unconcealment, do not exactly coincide. Earth is partly unconcealed, and the
world is partly concealed.) Truth happens in work: "Setting up a world and setting forth the earth,
the work is the fighting of the battle in which the unconcealedness of beings as a whole, or truth,
is won” (Heidegger, 2017, 169).
Heidegger downplays the artist's role and regards the work as the product of an impersonal
force, such as truth or art itself that uses the artist to actualize itself. In great art, the artist effaces
himself. The artist is only a passageway that destroys itself in the original process for the work to
come to light (Inwood, 1997, 108).
In an interview, Saguil (1985, 16) opined that “a serious artist will eventually evolve a manner
of self-expression that is neither merely angry, nor violent, nor morbid. It can embody these
elements and surpass them, transcending them and elevating them to the sublime level. It is a
development that must evolve naturally and gradually in the course of artistic and personal
maturity.”
Understood in one way, an artisan is a skilled craft worker, sometimes a "technician," someone
whose abilities have reached such a point that their work is regarded as requiring talent analogous
to that of a fine artist. The artisan, however, is not an artist because the artisan produces things for
use, while the artist does not. In Heidegger's view, of course, the most crucial figure in society is
not the artisan, no matter how many "useful" things he or she produces, but instead the artist, for
the latter founds the world in which the activity or producing, letting things be, can take place.
All art, then, is essentially Dichtung (Heidegger, 2017, 184). Dichtung means “poetry” (poesie),
and poetry is Heidegger's other exhibit. Dichtung here has a broad sense and means something
like 'invention' or 'projection.' Both poetry and producing share this essential trait: both are modes
of disclosing. Poetry discloses the gods needed to order and find the world. Genuine producing
discloses things respectfully, under the vision of the poet. Heidegger warned, however, that works
of art can scarcely "work" in the technological era. A piece of art embodies a place within a preexisting historical world while simultaneously clearing a new place for itself out of which a new
world can unfold (Zimmerman, 1990, 233).
V.
Preserving Being’s truth
While Heidegger is discovering Hölderlin, he returns to poetic thinkers to trace out another
beginning. In the first thinker, Anaximander, Heidegger makes his strongest statement about
thinking concerning poetry. The first beginning with the early Greeks is repeated. It was immense
because it retained its poetic character and thus remained close to Being itself (Hoeller, 1984, 49).
Since the poetizing essence of thinking preserves the Being's truth, thinking is called for, which
poetizes. This is the poetic thinking of the early Greeks. We note that Heidegger, translating the
Anaximander fragment, the very beginning of the beginning, says that his own words poetize as
they think.
In Early Greek Thinking, Heidegger (1975, 19) propounds:
However, thinking is poetizing, and indeed more than one kind of poetizing more than
poetry and song. Thinking of Being is the authentic way of poetizing . . .
Thinking is primordial poetry, prior to all poesy, but also before the poetics or art, since
art shapes its work within the reality of language.
The poetizing essence of thinking preserves the way of the truth of Being. Because it
poetizes as it thinks. The translation which wishes to let the oldest fragment of thinking
itself speak necessarily appears violent.
In Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin, Heidegger shifts the site of “givenness” from the
effectivity of Dasein to the event of language as Dichtung or "poetry." Being-as-a-whole will
not be given in the anxiety of Dasein but the fundamental attunement (Grundstimmung) of poetic
discourse. These revisions are necessary if Heidegger is to overcome the apparent aporia of
Being and Time and renew his attempt to think the meaning of Being.
The Grundstimmung is an attunement of the poem rather than a mood phenomenally coloring
the affectivity of Dasein. For Heidegger, the poetic mood is the moment of givenness for Beingas-such (Seyn).
As Heidegger says in his reading of Germanien, “Poetry (Dichtung) is founding (Stiftung). . .
the poet is the founder (Begründer) of Being. This is the case insofar as a poetry is “a saying in
the way of any indicating disclosure."
More specifically, “The poet coerces and coaxes the lightning flashes of God into the word,
and places this lightning-charged word into the language of his people (Volk)." With this,
Heidegger introduces many new philosophemes into his discourse, taken directly from Hölderlin.
As Heidegger insists, Hölderlin is the “poet of poets," meaning that Hölderlin brings poetry
itself into utterance his poems. For Heidegger, this means that the Grandstimmung of Hölderlin’s
poetry will be the mood of givenness in poetry per se. This poetic givenness will then become the
basis for his renewed attempt to thematize Being.
For a long time, Heidegger hoped that Hölderlin’s poetry would help to prepare humanity for
that saving power. In contemplating the notion of techne as the disclosure of ourselves as
mortals, we move away from the idea of the work of art as a separate entity opening up new
possibilities (Zimmerman, 1990, 247).
Heidegger finds the fundamental attunement of Hölderlin’s poetry to be a mood of loss and
separation, a sense of mourning. In his reading of The Rhine, Heidegger summarizes the four
essential aspects of this mood (Aylesworth, 1988, 244):
1. The Grundstimmung carries us away (entrückt uns) to the limits of beings and places
us into relation with the gods, whether as a turning toward or a turning away.
2. The Grundstimmung draws us out of (rückt uns aus), and at the same time, in the rapture
(Entrücken), draws us into (rückt uns ein) the mutual relations with earth (Erde) and
homeland (Heimat). The Gründstimmung is always enrapturing (entrü ckend) and
in-drawing (einrückend) above all.
3. As such, it opens beings as a whole as a thoroughly charged domain, as the unity of a
world.
4. The Grundstimmung thus delivers our Dasein over to Being (Seyn), so that (Being)
must accept it, bear it up, and give a shape.
Heidegger shows that the Grundstimmung of Germanien is one of pain and suffering (Leiden)
and lamentation. However, the poem does not mourn the loss of anything or anyone in particular.
On the contrary, poetic mourning is a sense of loss that is before all particulars. It is, as it was, a
sense of negation before all positions. The mourning of Hölderlin's poetry is a suffering of the
"loss of the flown gods and the missingness." Only by experiencing the unsettling truth about our
mortality and surrendering to the healing power of pain will we awaken from technological
compulsion.
Death anxiety and pain seemed to us that we are the ontological difference that both divide the
world and things and gather them together; only then can the Fourfold (earth and sky, divinities
and mortals) and proper dwelling on the earth begins. Heidegger used the term "dwelling" to
describe the mode existing involved in the mutual play in which everything is allowed to show
itself appropriately.
His account of the world as Fourfold (Geviert) was borrowed from Hölderlin, which is poetic
and is captured in abstract terms: the essential elements of the ritual structure of the thing, persons,
and the world we inhabit. Further, the Fourfold refers to a particular system of practices and things.
It reminds us of what all such systems have in common insofar as all human lives are rooted in the
enacted meaning of some sort (Feenberg, 1999, 195).
The world of the Fourfold means the coming to pass of the heavens, the earth, the gods, and
mortals. The "heavens" signifies not the outer space explored by modern technology but the sky
that gives the measure of our days and seasons. The "earth" is not the substances studied in geology
but the support of our step, the source of our nourishment, and the material womb to which we
return to death. "Mortals" are those who live under the heavens and upon the earth. They are the
children of the earth, not masters of it, not aeronautical engineers, but human beings who look
meditatively upon the evening sky. In that traditional etymology of the world, they are humans,
born out of dust and destined to return to dust (Caputo, 1993, 182).
The appearance of the gods is itself made possible only within the dimension of the divine. The
divine is itself made possible only within the dimension of the Holy. Only from the truth of Being
can the essence of the Holy be thought. In the present age of the Gestell, the appearance of the
god is prevented by the call to manipulate and enframe the earth. The times have become unholy,
and the divinity has withdrawn. The gods have flown -- we are too late for the gods.
However, in this hidden fullness and wealth of what has been, there lies the possibility of a
"coming destiny of Being," of a New Age, a Coming Dawn, the Other Beginning, a new
dispensation of Being and the Holy in which the last god will go passing by and make a new
manifestation of the Holy possible.
It should be pointed out that Heidegger does not mean only the work of art, but also the
everyday things such as bench, bridge, plow, pond, etc. A footbridge, for instance, helps to gather
into a shared place the constituents of the Fourfold. The mutual appropriation of earth and sky,
gods and mortals both occur within and give rise to the region that constitutes a particular world.
VI.
Conclusion: Technology as a double alternative
The separation of human Dasein from the notion of truth became a story of power through the
essence of technology. Consequently, calculative thinking became a hallmark, occurring until our
present malady. This means both an achievement and, at the same time, domination. As we step
back from instrumental rationality, humanity sees the transformation of ontological
perceptiveness. The paper analyzed Heidegger’s Four-fold thinking: gods, mortals, heaven, and
earth. In terms of the poetic, Heidegger sees that “humanity can surpass the domination of
technology” and invite us to “dwell poetically from out of this earth.” How are we to assess the
significance of Heidegger’s questions?
In this paper, I realized, globalization is "the goal of self-authentic self-determination by the
individual is to be stripped of technological rationality, in its exploitative feature, that is the sole
standard and guide in planning and developing the available resources for all." This erudition is
also based on Herbert Marcuse’s thoughts. I am not rejecting rationality per se, but the dominant
tendencies of modern culture toward an ever more rational world. In its ever-greater expansion,
the rational mind increasingly devalued that which was not logical and claimed that reason was
synonymous with the rational (Featherstone 1995, 271-272).
Those in the world of science and technology should not merely justify the existence of
intelligent human life but fully enroll science and technology in the effort to preserve and improve
life on earth. Technology should not be used to exploit or subordinate people; neither should it be
used for warfare and destruction (Feenberg, 1999). Nothing is at stake in the struggle to make
science and technology successful in the cause of humanity.
In other words, Heidegger wants to think about Being without basing his thoughts on beings at
all, and he wants the question of truth to form part of this project. Globalization is not about
amassing material things or people but our relationship with others, ourselves, and nature. This
paper suggested that philosophy should not retreat from the leading aspects of daily life and
experience. Instead, philosophical discourse could facilitate envisioning a global community that
emphasized a non-violent social and political transformation vis-à-vis science and technology.
As Heidegger believes, we are not only locked into a world of our own, but the world is ours
in such a way that we share it with others like ourselves. Instead, we must feel a sense of social
consciousness, a being with others. It is, in a sense, a universal world, since no matter what age or
society, or under what particular condition of human being lives, one cannot, as it were, bypass a
world that is first and nearest to him.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gary Aylesworth, “Heidegger and Hölderlin,” Philosophy Today vol. 32. (1988): 244.
Bradley, Stephen et al. Globalization, technology, and competition. The fusion of computers and
telecommunications in the 1990s. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1993.
Brumbaugh, Robert. Plato for the modern age. London: Muriwai Books, 2018.
Caputo, John, Demythologizing Heidegger: Aletheia and the myth of Being. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1993.
Escalante, Rene. “Martin Heidegger for Ecology.” An exposition of some Heideggerian themes
relevant in ecology.” Masteral thesis. Ateneo de Manila University, (1991). 65.
Featherstone, Mike. Global modernities. London: Sage Publications, 1995.
Featherstone, Mike, and Roger Burrows. Cyberspace, cyber bodies, cyberpunk : Cultures of
technological embodiment. London: Sage publications, 1995.
Feenberg, Andrew. Questioning Technology. London: Routledge, 1999.
Germain, Randall, ed. Globalization and its critics: Perspectives from political economy. UK:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Glazebrook, Trish. “Heidegger on the experiment,” Philosophy Today vol. 42. (Fall 1998).
Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on thinking (Gelassenheit). Translated by John Anderson and Hans
Freund. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1969.
________________. The end of philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.
______________. Early Greek Thinking. Translated by David Farrell Krell and Frank Capuzzi.
New York: Harper and Row, 1975.
______________. Letter on humanism. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
______________. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2000.
_________________. On Time and Being. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
_____________. Basic writings: Martin Heidegger. Translated by David Farrell Krell. New
York: Routledge, 2010.
_______________. Poetry, Language and Thought. New York: Harper Publishers, 2013.
_______________. Heidegger and the question concerning technology and other essays.
Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper Torch books Publishers, 2017.
Hoeller, Keith. “Role of the early Greeks in Heidegger’s Turning: Repetition of the first beginning
as a prelude to another beginning,” Philosophy Today. Vol. 28. (Spring 1984): 48-49.
Inwood, Michael. Heidegger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Kockelmans, Joseph. Heidegger and science. Washington: University Press of America, 1985.
Langan, Thomas. The meaning of Heidegger: A critical study of an existentialist phenomenology.
New York: Columbia, 1959.
Lovitt, Charles William and Harriet Brundage Lovitt. Modern technology in the Heideggerian
perspective. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-dimensional Man. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1964.
Merk, Roni. “Navigating a landscape full of risks,” The Philippine Star, 2000: 15.
Polt, Richard. Heidegger: An introduction. New York: Cornell University Press, 2013.
Saguil, Nena. “All serious art is calm,” The art collector. Vol. 1 (July-September, 1985): 16.
Zimmerman, Michael. Heidegger’s confrontation with modernity: Technology, politics, art.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Christine Carmela R. Ramos, Ph.D.
[email protected]
Mapúa University