Tag: Anthropocene

Iain D. Thomson: Heidegger on Technology’s Danger and Promise in the Age of AI

Heidegger on Technology’s Danger and Promise in the Age of AI Book Cover Heidegger on Technology’s Danger and Promise in the Age of AI
Elements in the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger
Iain D. Thomson
Cambridge University Press
Paperback
74

Reviewed by: Giorgi Vachnadze

 

“How exactly is technology transforming us and our worlds, and what (if anything) can and should we do about it?” This is the opening question in Thomson’s (2025) book: Heidegger on Technology’s Danger and Promise in the Age of AI. No doubt a very much needed and anticipated reflection on how the original ideas in, for instance, the Question Concerning Technology[1] would react with the contemporary discourse on Artificial Intelligence. No less importantly, Thomson combines the algorithmic anxieties of our age with fears concerning things that have been lurking in our globalized (inter)cultural unconscious throughout the 20th and 21st centuries: nuclear technology, genome engineering and synthetic biology. As we enter the new stage of the Anthropocene[2] with Utopian promises and Dystopian nightmares, Thomson’s work could give us a compact handbook to reanimate the Heideggerian call to start thinking and (therefore) acting in new ways through the use and abuse of technological artefacts.  

Thomson’s approach is both historical and philosophical, tracing the trajectory of Heidegger’s thoughts on technology while contextualizing them within modern advancements. The exploration of Gestell (enframing) as the operative mode of revealing that structures human perception of reality is central, as AI is situated within the larger continuum of destructive, panopticonic (Foucault, 1995) and subjectivating (Foucault, 2008) technological “advancements”[3]. Thomson addresses Heidegger’s notion of Gelassenheit (releasement) as a potential means of cultivating a more reflective, in some ways poetic engagement with technology, succumbing neither to its charms, nor rejecting it outright.

The review will outline Thomson’s key arguments, exploring how he applies Heidegger’s ideas to AI and other technological concerns of the present. We will explore the book’s central themes, discuss the main insights, and consider its broader relevance. By revisiting Heidegger in this context, Thomson invites us to reassess the ways in which technology not only transforms the world but also reshapes the very conditions of human thought and action.

Technology is a provocation to philosophical thought. Precisely in so far as it is a challenge to thinking itself. Technological thinking threatens to make thinking redundant by rendering it reductively computational. Philosophy is thereby cornered; if thinking is calculation, then philosophy as the art of thinking becomes obsolete – replaceable. If the simulacrum of thought (Baudrillard, 1994) becomes thought itself, then technological thinking would easily automate the philosopher’s job. But the real concern (Sorge) here is what happens to thinking as such in a technological age. And how can philosophers still think something that is relevant, new and most importantly; irreducible to algorithmic thinking (Vachnadze, 2024a 2024b) or “mere” calculation? Among many other questions, Thomson explores how Heidegger could help us step outside the confines of our episteme (Foucault, 2005) and think the thought of the Outside (Debnar, 2017) through technology.

In the chapter: From Atomic Weapons to Genetic Engineering and Artificial Intelligence the author takes on a monumental task of tracing the ontological shifts induced by three of the most consequential technological advances of the modern era. Thomson’s discussion of nuclear technology is one of the chapter’s strongest sections. Thomson frames the nuclear age not just as a political and military development, but as an ontological rupture—an epochal shift in how humanity relates to power in so far as it relates so to itself through the fundamental ontological structure of Dasein – anxiety. Major global catastrophes; more so their potential eruption, occupies a fascinating ontological space vis-a-vis the human psyche. The general sense of an impending doom, with no clear indication of which direction the destruction will come from, bears a strong resemblance, acting as pretext almost to the fundamental anxiety that structures human experience. What under different circumstances would have been “pure” anxiety, just the existential condition of being-in-the-world for Dasein, is now triggered by a material, yet no less ethereal threat of world-annihilation. But this time no longer only in the metaphysical, but in the literal sense as well.

Modern thought and its obsession with enframing (Gestell), an obsessive attempt to measure, optimize and calculate every aspect of the world, seems to find a kind of culmination with generative AI and Natural Language Processing software. ChatGPT tends to – or effectively does – turn thinking itself into a standing reserve. If we assume Cartesian dualism (another symptom of modern thinking), it seems then that genetic engineering would be enframing the body, whereas Artificial Intelligence would enframe the mind (through the enframing of language). Leading consequently to a total Neoliberal bio-commodification and the splitting up of the human lifeworld (Husserl, 1970). Nothing short of capitalist eugenics.

Returning to Thomson’s work; the author takes multiple moments to expose the distortions and ideological manipulations of both the utopian and fatalistic narratives around AI that have now reached eschatological dimensions (Vachnadze, 2024c). Heidegger offers a fruitful middle ground that avoids the pitfalls of both corporate hype and nihilist doom. In chapter 3 Thomson elaborates on Heidegger’s infamous diagnosis of the cybernetic age. The notion that the essence of technology – which strictly speaking is not an “essence” in the classical sense of a fixed abstract Platonic core, but more something along the lines of a process-philosophical understanding of the term – is something rather indeterminate. It is, one could say, an essence of becoming technological, a style of being. More importantly, as Thomson notes, quoting Heidegger, the essence of technology is “nothing technological” (2025). That is, the essence of technology is quite different from its material manifestation in the form of various concrete apparatuses and tools. It is thereby neither abstract nor empirical. It is a kind of thinking, a mode of “going about” in the world that precedes and establishes the conditions of possibility for technology. Thereby Thomson, via Heidegger, offers an insightful exposition of the contemporary episteme. In short, the essence of technology is precisely what we mentioned earlier: An enframing of nature that makes the world into a standing reserve ready to be exploited, extracted and used. One could go as far as to say that the essence of technology is a kind of ethical attitude, or more importantly perhaps, an unethical attitude or concern that Dasein exhibits toward the world, toward other Daseins, and toward itself.

Thomson argues that modernity consists of two distinct epochs continuous with one another: early modern subjectivism and late-modern enframing. Together they constitute the modern subject establishing Dasein’s fundamental concern with being and technology. The guiding question here is whether Heidegger’s philosophy allows for a postmodern alternative beyond the nihilism of late-modern technological enframing. Each epoch, Thomson continues, is temporarily stabilized through a unique ontotheology – a dual structure that anchors both an inner, foundational understanding of being (ontology) and an external, overarching framework that grants meaning to existence (theology). Throughout Western history, these ontotheological foundations have given successive epochs their coherence.

Late modernity marks a radical departure from the historical ontotheological pattern. The late-modern age is thoroughly Nietzschean. Dominated by the “metaphysics” of will to power and eternal recurrence. Here the Western tradition reaches an impasse: rather than anchoring reality to a stable ontotheological foundation, the contemporary episteme dissolves and gives way to a groundless, ceaseless flux of mere competing forces. As a result, modernity’s attempt to achieve mastery over being through rationality, science, and technology culminates in a paradox: Dasein that once sought control over reality becomes itself reduced to an object, stripped of all metaphysical or phenomenological privilege. Marking the transition from modern subjectivism to late-modern enframing[4].

This paves the way for a post-modern Heideggerian attempt to make a clearing for thought that could potentially escape both the constraining dispositif of computational reductionism as well as the threat of complete chaotic dissolution into non-sense. “When a metaphysics is truly “great” (in Heidegger’s terms), it quietly spreads a new “understanding of being” far and wide until it has settled into taken-for-granted common sense (Thomson, 2025). Ontotheology, far from a whimsical flight of the philosophical imagination, is what provides the most basic foundations for our understanding of the world. Despite being foundational, it is nonetheless subject to change, as each epoch reflects on its own conditions of existence quite differently. Thomson traces the emergence of subjectivism in early modernity, focusing on the Cartesian and Kantian traditions. Cartesianism establishes human cognition as the foundation of certainty, Kant further develops this framework and makes the rational subject the cornerstone of ethics, politics, and aesthetics. Subjectivism, Thomson argues, is Heidegger’s term for the modern drive to establish mastery over the totality of what-is – a metaphysical project that underlies the scientific and technological developments of the modern age.

At the same time Heidegger explains how this framework mischaracterizes human experience by treating the world as a collection of objects external to the subject, rather than an integrated network of beings. The subject, in the quest to master the world, inadvertently sets the stage for her own self-objectification. As modernity progresses, subjectivism increasingly loses its metaphysical coherence, giving way to the late-modern epoch of enframing. Enframing is a self-overcoming of subjectivism. The subject-object dichotomy is no longer viable. The will to mastery becomes an endless process of optimization, in which the subject loses its ontological distinctiveness and becomes indistinguishable from the technological systems it once used to steer.

The danger of enframing, and danger is an important component here, also creates the possibilities of thinking the Outside of the given epistemic formation. The very forces that threaten to enclose human existence within technological enframing might also contain the potential for an alternative mode of (thinking) being. The possibility for a post-metaphysical alternative that does not attempt to establish a new ontotheology but seeks rather to twist free (verwinden) from technological enframing would involve shifting from a mode of instrumental rationality toward one of meditative thinking (Besinnung), where being is encountered as something that both informs and exceeds conceptualization. Thomson argues that the postmodern revolution can already be traced through the works of figures like Hölderlin, Van Gogh, and Nietzsche. “Heidegger’s postmodern revolution began over two centuries ago” (Thomson, 2025). The dispersed and polysemic thinking offered by these and similar writers/artists; a thinking of multiplicities perhaps, contain insights that could help resist nihilistic-technological enframing.

The initial question returns in new and altered form as we reach the final culminating chapter: Thinking a Free Relation to Technology, or: Technology and the Other (Postmodern) Beginning. What in the beginning was posed as “How exactly is technology transforming us and our worlds, and what (if anything) can and should we do about it?” has now become: “How do we move beyond the nihilistic tendencies of late-modern enframing and into a genuinely free relation to technology?” Thomson weaves previous discussions on technology, metaphysics, and postmodernity together into a coherent Heideggerian response to the technological age.

Our relationship with technology has to be untangled or unframed from its original reductive-computational form not through reactionary rejection, but through a postmodern attunement to being. The phenomenological capacities of technology need to be reactivated in order to make an alternative clearing in Dasein’s relationship with the various tools at its disposal. This implies first seeing; noticing the said alternative potential of deterritorializing artifacts as immanent to technological becoming, and consequently – making use of this potential in a creative way. An event that would see technology as a site of ontological disclosure rather than a device for turning beings into standing reserves of energy is what Heidegger terms Gelassenheit (releasement or “letting be”). Gelassenheit entails the bracketing of the exploitative attitude of enframing by letting beings be and allow beings to reveal themselves differently; on their own terms. A fundamental change of aspect (Wittgenstein, 1953) where we cultivate an open and thoughtful engagement with technology, employing artefacts in new and meaningful ways while rejecting the optimization imperative. Heidegger offers us a techno-political aesthetics of difference.

The optimization imperative is Neoliberal through and through; the reduction of all human activity to the extractive logic of cost/benefit analysis. We have seen the disastrous effects of technological enframing in every institutional domain throughout the world: labor, education, sexuality, jurisdiction etc. Teachers still see AI as an educational problem, rather than the symptom of making students into a standing reserve of labor and profit. The widespread use of AI in and outside the classroom is symptomatic of the optimization crisis. When students view learning as an obstacle between them and the labor market; as a tool of improving one’s credentials for employment rather than a transformative process, the use of AI to generate essays or answer exam questions, far from an ethical lapse or instance of academic misconduct, is rather an entirely logical response to a system structured around efficiency and productivity rather than meaning. A direct consequence of technological enframing.

Thomson’s meticulous engagement with Heidegger’s philosophy reveals a profound tension between the promise and peril of technology. At its core, Heidegger’s critique of enframing is not a reactionary rejection of technological progress but rather a diagnostic tool for understanding the historical shift in our relationship to being. This shift, as Thomson convincingly argues, has now reached a critical point with the emergence of artificial intelligence. As contemporary AI systems increasingly dictate the parameters of knowledge production, human creativity and thought risk being reduced to mere instrumental functions, evaluated through the capitalist diagram of efficiency and calculability. To repeat; however, the essence of technology is nothing technological – meaning that any escape from its grasp cannot be found in a simple reversal but in a transformation of our mode of thinking itself. Motion without movement.

Thomson’s analysis of late-modern enframing shows how AI, genetic engineering, and nuclear technology represent powerful forces that restructure the conditions of human existence. The danger of technological enframing is twofold: It positions human beings as mere objects within the Bestand (standing reserve), reducing all things – including thinking – to a matter of managing resources; and it obscures the possibility for an alternative mode of being, foreclosing Dasein’s imaginative and existential destiny. Gelassenheit opens up a path to the Outside – a way of inhabiting technology that neither facilitates the production of a Homo-Oeconomicus (Foucault, 2008)  nor retreats into the helpless nostalgia of a pre-technological age. In order to ‘let beings be’ one would require a form of thinking that resists the impulse to master and control, cultivating an openness to the unfolding of being in its plurality.

The implications of this stance are far-reaching. If modernity’s drive for mastery has led to an epoch of nihilistic enframing, then our task is not to overcome technology in the traditional sense but to reorient our relationship to it. Thomson’s invocation of Hölderlin, Van Gogh, and Nietzsche suggests that art and philosophy provide crucial sites of resistance – spaces for the emergence of alternative modes of world-disclosure. This is particularly relevant for recent developments in AI, where the optimization imperative has all but stripped language of its poetic function, making a standing reserve out of thought and all creative human activities through reductive computationalism. Can we re-infuse technology with a poetics of being? More so, can we achieve this with AI and not in spite of it?

The crisis of technological enframing is, once again, also an opportunity: “… where there is danger some salvation grows there too”  (Hölderlin, 2018). An opportunity for a philosophico-poetic clearing where philosophy can reclaim its role as a site of genuine thinking rather than mere calculation. A difficult undertaking. The Neoliberal structure of global capitalism is deeply invested in technological enframing, ensuring that resistance to optimization is met with skepticism, hostility and recently – open fascism. One must bear in mind, once again, that the ontotheological structures of our epochal thinking are not fixed; they are subject to transformations – ruptures, which those tasked with the work of thinking must uncover. We are indeed on the cusp of another major shift – an epochal flight that may only become legible in hindsight. Let us hope that the philosopher does not arrive too late.

Ultimately, the task of philosophy in the age of AI is not to offer prescriptive solutions but to cultivate a different attunement to the world. Heidegger’s concept of Besinnung, meditative thinking, offers a potential path forward – a way of engaging with technology that does not seek to dominate but rather to listen, to dwell, to allow beings to disclose themselves on their own terms, according to their unique internal logic. This is not a call for passivity but for a radical form of engagement – one that refuses the terms of technological enframing and seeks out new modes of relationality. In this sense, Thomson’s work is in many ways a call to reanimate our mode of being and to make it genuinely conducive to an ethical and political metamorphosis.

The book’s final provocation, whether a free relation to technology is still possible, remains aptly and intentionally open-ended. Following the path-marks laid down by Heidegger, one should bear in mind that every attempt to resolve the problem in advance would throw us back into the mode of enframing, leading to a foreclosure of the very openness that allows for genuine thinking. Thomson leaves us with anxiety –  the future of technology is, as it should be, undecided. The forces of enframing are what constitute power today; and thought must resist by twisting itself free from the algorithm. Whether we succeed in doing so remains contingent on our willingness to embrace the challenge that Heidegger and Thomson set before us: to think, in a world increasingly governed by calculation. What could it mean to stubbornly resist and philosophize today?

 

Bibliography:

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by S. Glaser. University of Michigan Press

Davies, J. (2016). The birth of the Anthropocene. University of California Press.

Debnar, M. (2017). Michel Foucault on Transgression and The Thought of Outside. European Journal of Science and Theology, 13(1), 59-67.

Ellis, E. C. (2018). The Anthropocene: A very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Foucault, M. (2005). The order of things. Routledge.

Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 (G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan.

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage Books. 

Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology, and other essays. New York: Garland Pub.

Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology: An introduction to phenomenological philosophy (D. Carr, Trans.). Northwestern University Press.

Hölderlin, F. (2018). Selected Poetry. Bloodaxe Books.

Lewis, S. L., & Maslin, M. A. (2018). The human planet: How we created the Anthropocene. Yale University Press.

Thomson, I. D. (2025). Heidegger on Technology’s Danger and Promise in the Age of AI. Cambridge University Press.

Vachnadze, G. (2024a, October 17). Cybernetic discourse analysis: “Mother was an AI”. Blue Labyrinths.

Vachnadze, G. (2024b). The incomputability of calculation: Wittgenstein, Turing, and the question of artificial intelligence. Newsletter on the Results of Scholarly Work in Sociology, Criminology, Philosophy and Political Science, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.61439/URSA3237

Vachnadze, G. (2024c). Christian Eschatology of Artificial Intelligence: Pastoral Technologies of Cybernetic Flesh. Becoming.

Wittgenstein, L., & Anscombe, G. E. M. (1953). Philosophical investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Basil Blackwell.

[1]  Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology, and other essays. New York: Garland Pub.

[2]  See; Ellis, E. C. (2018), Davies, J. (2016), Lewis, S. L., & Maslin, M. A. (2018).

[3]   Throughout the review I make several connections with Foucault’s work. These connections are my own, Thomson does not make these connections and he does not use Foucault’s texts in his work.

[4]      The two together define Modernity proper.

Agostino Cera: A Philosophical Journey into the Anthropocene, Lexington Books, 2023






A Philosophical Journey into the Anthropocene: Discovering Terra Incognita Book Cover




A Philosophical Journey into the Anthropocene: Discovering Terra Incognita





Agostino Cera




Lexington Books




2023




232

Vincent Blok: Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy of Technology: Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene






Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy of Technology: Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene Book Cover




Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy of Technology: Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene





Vincent Blok




Routledge




2017




Hardback £105.00




154

Reviewed by: Richard Fitch (Independent Scholar)

Ernst Jünger (1895-1998), was a problematic polymath whose life and work continue to discreetly haunt both German and European intellectual life. He was first a soldier, highly decorated and often wounded in the First World War. The Second War he spent as a staff officer occupying Paris where he mingled with the likes of Picasso. Both experiences were transmuted into literature, most famously in his 1920 memoir of the trenches, Storm of Steel, which made his literary name. He went on to excel in many literary genres, such as those of memoir, diary, novel, essay, science fiction, allegory, theoretical tract and in the forms of literary expression usually associated with the name of Friedrich Nietzsche. He stands alone, amongst German writers, with Goethe, Klopstock and Wieland in having had two editions of his collected works published in his lifetime. As if this were insufficient for a life well lived, he was also an entomologist of some distinction. So far, so wiki – he appears a figure of some note; but is he, or was he, of philosophical note?

There is a paucity of English-language secondary literature on Jünger, and little of that literature is of direct philosophical interest. Does this matter? Was Jünger more than a warrior littérateur entranced by beetles – if being philosophical would make more of that? In this book Vincent Blok sets out to provide an affirmative answer to this question. He proceeds in two keys: in that of the history of philosophy and in that of philosophical argument.

With regard to history, Blok’s strategy is to entwine Jünger with Martin Heidegger. This is no facile ‘x & y’ project. They corresponded, and Heidegger was a careful reader of Jünger, and more than a careful critic. Volume 90 of his Gesamtausgabe carries the title Zu Ernst Jünger ‘Der Arbeiter’. And in his celebrated essay collection Pathmarks the essay ‘On the Question of Being’ is a direct response to Jünger’s essay ‘Across the Line’. But even more than this Heidegger saw Jünger as the figure that stood between himself and Nietzsche. This in itself would seem to suffice to establish Jünger’s place, howsoever minor, in the history of thinking in the twentieth century. However, Blok desires even more than this. More than showing the influence of Jünger on Heidegger, and exploring Heidegger’s critical response to Jünger, Blok ventures to assert that Jünger goes beyond Heidegger. To ground this startling proposition a change of key is required, to that of philosophical argument.

With regard to philosophical argument, Blok initially uses the entwining with Heidegger to make an intervention in the philosophical questions of, not only, as the title suggests, technology, but also those of nihilism and language. And Blok entwines these questions as he entwines his leading men. And it is with regard to the question of language that Blok argues that Jünger goes beyond Heidegger.

The book consists of an argument in three interlinked movements. First, Jünger’s concept of the worker is explored as it is presented in his text with the most direct philosophical import: The Worker of 1932. Then Heidegger’s engagement with this concept takes the stage. Finally, Blok suggests how Jünger’s work might be understood to elude the critique that issues from Heidegger’s engagement, and thus be of continuing philosophical import. This book is an argument first. Readers after an introduction to Jünger’s life and work need to look elsewhere. In addition, at least a basic appreciation of the full range of Heidegger’s mature thought is probably a prerequisite for a fruitful engagement with Blok’s argument. The three movements will be tracked in turn.

Part One ‘The Age of Technicity and the Gestalt of the Worker’: The Worker: Dominion and Form, to give its full title, is a work written in the twilight of the Weimar Republic that seeks to explore how one can reorientate oneself in the wake of the shattering of the brittle maps of nineteenth century bourgeois liberalism by the brutal hammer of the First World War. Without much need for the gifts of prophecy, the implication is that the Weimar Republic sought to carry on as if nothing had happened and that is the secret of its coming disaster. Jünger with the form, or gestalt, of the worker seeks to articulate a more robust response to a world whose contours are formed by the ice and fire of technology and not by the ethereal legal fictions, then practically dispelled, of contracts and rights. Central to The Worker is a slippery conception of gestalt, and it is here that Blok’s focus falls. As Blok argues, for Jünger gestalt indicates that power that gives fundamental ontological form, and thus unity, to a particular epoch of human existence. Blok describes gestalt as “a summarising unity or measure within which the world appears as ordered.” (13) Gestalts can differ, so the world can appear as ordered in different ways. It seemed clear that the appearance of the order of the world changed in Germany, and in Europe, between the springs of 1914 and 1919. Reflecting on his experience of the trenches Jünger intuits a shift in fundamental measure from that of the Enlightenment to that of the worker. Evidence of this is that the War makes no sense in a world as ordered by the Enlightenment. It makes no sense, yet it is, thus something must have changed. But the shift is hard to discern, so for those without the eyes to see it is experienced as the nihilistic dissolution of bourgeois values and meaning-giving. It is hard to discern because, for Jünger, a gestalt cannot be perceived directly, but only through its effect on its world. The gestalt is not a product of history as even ‘the characteristic of time changes through the influence of the gestalt.’ (16). Blok argues that Jünger sees his task first to draw out the contours of the forms of life as work imposed by the new gestalt of the Worker, and then strive to find ways of being that might productively respond to this new fundamental ordering. In the gestalt of the worker, the world appears ordered as work, to the extent that even leisure is understood as a form of work. And the world is waiting for the task. Blok quotes Jünger to the effect that “The working world expects, hopes to be given meaning.” (12).

Blok understands this meaning-giving in Nietzschean terms, specifically those of the will to power as art. And before proceeding Blok offers an intermezzo on Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism. The Nietzsche presented is a Nietzsche of the will to power. While this Nietzsche is currently interpretatively unfashionable, this is the Nietzsche that Heidegger sees Jünger as embodying, so it is contextually apposite. More problematic is Blok’s rather narrow understanding of nihilism which he takes to consist in the erasure of the “Platonic horizon of the transcendental idea.” (21).

Returning to Jünger, Blok now explores how the gestalt of the worker leads to the type of the worker, where the type is the way of life that fits best with the gestalt. One is already in the gestalt of the worker so, “Our transition to the type of the worker thus consists of a becoming who you are.” (32). Blok’s reading here is informed by Jünger’s 1930 essay ‘Total Mobilisation’. Being a worker-type is not a matter of personal industriousness or wage-slavery. It is an attunement to the situation that the new gestalt of work leaves one in. “In the epoch of the worker, ‘work’ would form the metaphysical measure of the world and men, in whose light the technological world appears as technological order and man finds his destination as the type of worker.” (35). Again, it is not a matter of a traditional work-ethic, or a class based analysis calling the workers of the world to unite. It is a recognition of the metaphysical ordering that currently dominates. It is a strange metaphysics which appears necessary while it dominates, but which can dissolve, and with it its necessity, in the blink of an eye. This shift to the worker means that what appears as nihilism is not the collapse of all value, or the highest values devaluing themselves, but the misrecognition of a shift in the metaphysical order of the values that themselves give order to the appearance of our world – a shift here from Enlightenment to Work. And to consciously create oneself as a worker is to most fittingly respond to the manner in which the world appears to be ordered when it is ordered by the gestalt of the worker. The analysis of the gestalt of the worker thus does not aspire to the utopian or normatively prescriptive but tries to be realistic and phenomenological. It is a response to the world, and one’s most fitting place in it, as they appear given. The ‘heroic realist recognises himself as the type of the worker’ (36). One may not like this world of work, but it is the world that appears.

How does the worker work? This work is, somewhat surprisingly, a poetic task guided by the gestalt: “The will to power is led as though by a magnet by the gestalt, which is not and only is in the will to power as art.” (36). It is a poetic task, bringing forth a language that allows the dominion of its gestalt ‘to emerge from its anonymous character’ (35). What then is the worker to work at? “The worker’s task is to transform the work-world of total mobilisation into a world in which the gestalt guarantees a new security and order of life.” (39). The task of the worker is to be bring to light how the world appears to be ordered in the epoch of the worker, where this bringing to light is guided by the source of that ordering, and results in the practical ordering of life. There is a suspicion that here Blok’s Jünger is too close to Nietzsche, but then that is where Heidegger also finds him so he is in good company.

Part Two: Heidegger’s Reception of Jünger – Work, Gestalt and Poetry: Blok identifies Heidegger’s key problem with Jünger as his apparent claim that nihilism can be overcome. Where Jünger sees two gestalt: Enlightenment and then Work, Heidegger only sees one nihilism. The gestalt of the worker is yet another occasion of the forgetting of the question of being. Furthermore the gestalt itself is platonic, still concerned with the search for certainty and security. And from this symptom Heidegger diagnoses that Jünger remains within the orbit of Nietzsche’s metaphysics. But Jünger is not minor satellite, but ‘the only real follower of Nietzsche’ (54). As ever there is the question of the trustworthiness of Heidegger’s interpretation, whatever its stimulating novelty. Blok notes that the likes of Günter Figal and Michael Zimmermann argue that it is Jünger that first provokes Heidegger to find his own response to the question of technology and to the modern world in general. A response that would lead to Heidegger grasping for both National Socialism and then Hölderlin.

Blok begins his defence of Jünger by examining the development of Heidegger’s ontology of work in Being and Time and beyond. He argues that this development is provoked by his reception of Jünger’s work, but that, between 1930 and 1934, Heidegger was following Jünger rather than reacting against him, so that, for example, ‘following Jünger, Heidegger rejects economic conceptualizations of work and worker’ (70). For Blok it is only in 1934 that Heidegger develops his own response, and it only then that he turns his guns on Jünger. Only then does Jünger become captive to the unquestioning of Being, and becomes one who indicates but does not question. Where Blok sees Jünger as engaged in a poetic task, Heidegger sees him all ‘bound up with the will to power of representation’ (80). Jünger fails to enact the ‘new’ languaging of Being that is required. For his own part Heidegger begins to move away from the trope of work towards those of exposure and Gelassenheit. As Blok notes “According to Heidegger, our questioning is only really philosophical when this questioning recoils back from what is asked, back upon itself.” (88). One might speculate that Gelassenheit et al, the whole post-conceptual rhetorical apparatus of the mature Heidegger, with its negative and mystic overtones, be a recoiling back from not only Jünger’s world of work, but also from the world of the trenches (and perhaps even from their successors as the locus of extreme horror – the camps, though that is certainly too charitable to Heidegger) that was the midlife to the expression of this world? Blok examines Heidegger’s use of a conception of gestalt in his essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1935-6) with an eye on Heidegger’s emerging idea of the poetic tasks of language. Blok’s response is, by now, as expected. Whatever Heidegger’s idea of the poetic task, Blok argues that Jünger is up to it. Jünger’s is not the old language of will to representation or of the bad old subject. Blok quotes Jünger “It has far more to do with a new language that is suddenly spoken and man answers, or he remains silent – and this decides his reality… The clatter of looms from Manchester, the rattle of machine guns from Langemarck – they are signs, words and sentences of a prose that wants to be interpreted and mastered by us.” (104). Whence then this new language? From Engels’ Manchester or Jünger’s trenches, or indeed from their contemporary equivalents, or from sojourns at Todtnauberg? Jünger may lack Heidegger’s philosophical sophistication but perhaps he is not without judgement here. And howsoever Blok may overstate Jünger’s case, it is perhaps, against Heidegger of all thinkers, a case worth overstating. For Heidegger, the man of the university-machine, we are exposed off the beaten tracks of the Black Forest. For Jünger, the stormtrooper insect-fancier, we are exposed on the battlefield or the factory floor (it is all too easy to think of contemporary equivalents here). Wherever they both are, Blok asserts that Jünger is “on his way to an understanding of the essence of language that is no longer metaphysical.” (106). And that, all over the place, is the philosophical goal.

Part Three: The Essence of Language and the Poetics of the Anthropocene: In this final act Blok makes a case for Jünger as a properly post-Heideggerian poetic language-worker and thus not a pre-Heideggerian epigone of Nietzsche. It is the weakest part of the book, but that might be no bad thing. Why? Because of the structure of his argument and book, Blok has to connect this act to the preceding two, in particular the first act on the worker. In order to achieve this he examines texts such as Jünger’s 1963 essay ‘Type, Name, Gestalt’ where the link, via gestalt, is obvious. However, much as Heidegger did, in his later years Jünger moved far from some of his earlier work, and especially from anything that reeked of political engagement. This retreat might be seen, in print, as early as On the Marble Cliffs (1939), a thinly but artfully veiled allegory of the Germany of the time and its horror. By 1951’s The Forest Passage, Jünger is a ‘forest fleer’ or rebel, alone in the same German forests where Heidegger sought a different sort of solace. Jünger seeks a quiet but firm freedom, not the main event. And by his 1977 allegorical novel Eumeswil, there is the figure of the Anarch, not to be mistaken for the anarchist, who survives the world dominated by work not by embracing the fate of the worker but by cultivating a resolute scepticism and a careful if still quiet freedom. “The difference is that the forest fleer has been expelled from society, while the anarch has expelled society from himself.” (Jünger 1995, 147). This seems far from the trope of work, and Blok is aware of all this, he notes that ‘the poet must stand in opposition and not engage in the workshop landscape.” (113). But he also appears constrained by the logic of the argument he has already made. But when, at the close of a chapter that touches on The Forest Passage, Blok asserts that “In general, we can conclude therefore that Jünger’s later essays are in line with his early work on the gestalt of the worker.” (116) the effect is not altogether convincing as to whether Blok himself believes his own case. That said, there is much of interest in the case that he does make. And even if he is constrained by his earlier positions, this reader senses that, ultimately, fidelity to Jünger’s text wins out, hence the weakness of his argument might not be a weakness when it comes to exposing Jünger’s work.

There is also the problem, for Blok, of trying to demonstrate how Jünger manages to squeeze past Heidegger on their tight forest path to post-metaphysical language, in only 33 pages including notes. His case simply does not have room to breathe. For example, Blok asserts that the inaccessibility of gestalt necessitates poetic naming, but does not explore how this echoes the withdrawal of Being that Heidegger associates with clearing and event. And while Blok asserts that the “Geheimnis [secret] of the gestalt makes clear that the new epoch of the worker is not a matter of observation but of poetry.” (141) it is not always clear quite how we got from work, and the trenches, to poetry. While Jünger clearly was an skilful, experimental and promiscuous stylist, the suspicion remains that this is inadequate to merit the mantle of a new post-metaphysical language fit for the time of the worker. All in all the third act reads as a draft of an argument to come, and when it comes it will be welcome.

A complicating of the actual relationship between Heidegger and Jünger would also be welcomed, as would, though it is clearly outwith the task Blok set for himself, a questioning of the relationship of each, personal and intellectual, with another German master of the dark arts, Carl Schmitt. In an interview on the occasion of his 90th birthday Jünger reflected on what he saw as Heidegger’s political stupidity: “He thought something new was coming [in 1933], but he was terribly mistaken. He did not have as clear a vision as I did.” (Hervier 55) How might Heidegger have responded? In the same interview Jünger relates one of his brother’s Heidegger anecdotes: “One day, Heidegger was stung on the back of the neck by a bee, and my brother told him that that was excellent for rheumatism. Heidegger didn’t know what to answer.” (Hervier 55). In his final letter found in the collection of their correspondence Heidegger, on the occasion of Jünger’s 80th birthday, wrote: “My particular wish for you on this day is brief: Remain with the proven, illuminating decision on your singular path of saying. That such saying is itself already an act that needs no supplement by a praxis, only few still (or yet?) understand today.” (Heidegger & Jünger 61). Blok does aid in that task of understanding.

A few scattered comments: as is not uncommonplace the index is lamentable; the book’s connection, as promised in its title, with the workplace concept of the Anthropocene is slight, gratuitous and unnecessary to the argument (138-9); the style is repetitive but repetition of one’s place in the argument can keep one on track, and it ameliorates the effect of the inevitable typos and occasional infelicities in sentence construction.

In conclusion: Blok benefits from the lack of a substantial body of existing English-language secondary literature, in that it is easier for a novel perspective to stand out when the field is not crowded. Though he might soon have company with the publication in late 2017 of an English translation of The Worker (Jünger 2017). Although details and arguments might be disputed, he clearly establishes Jünger as a significant interlocutor with Heidegger and thus as someone who cannot be philosophically ignored by readers of Heidegger. Likewise, much as Heidegger cannot be ignored by those engaged with the philosophical questions of technology, nihilism or language, neither now can Jünger. In short and to repeat: Blok succeeds in making sure that his Jünger can no longer be ignored by philosophers, especially by those who care about the same philosophical questions that propelled Martin Heidegger’s mature work.

References:
Heidegger, Martin & Jünger, Ernst. Correspondence 1949-1975, translated by Timothy Sean Quinn (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
Hervier, Julien. The Details of Time: Conversation with Jünger, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Marsilo Publishers, 1995).
Jünger, Ernst. Eumeswil, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (London: Quartet Books, 1995).
Jünger, Ernst. The Worker: Dominion and Form, translated by Bogdan Costea & Laurence Paul Hemming (Northwestern University Press, 2017).

Antonio Cerella, Louiza Odysseos (Eds.): Heidegger and the Global Age, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017






Heidegger and the Global Age Book Cover




Heidegger and the Global Age




New Heidegger Research





Antonio Cerella, Louiza Odysseos (Eds.)




Rowman & Littlefield International




2017




Hardback £90.00




338

Vincent Blok: Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy of Technology






Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy of Technology: Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene Book Cover




Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy of Technology: Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene





Vincent Blok




Routledge




2017




Hardback £105.00




154

Reviewed by: Salvatore Spina (Università degli Studi di Messina/Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg)

Il volume Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy of Technology. Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene di Vincent Block non è semplicemente uno studio sulla filosofia di Ernst Jünger e sull’influenza che questa ha avuto sul pensiero di Martin Heidegger. Naturalmente i presupposti teorici e le basi concettuali del lavoro di Block affondano le proprie radici nell’analisi dei testi fondamentali dei due autori in questione, ma nelle pagine del volume è possibile trovare molto di più; esso propone, per parafrasare l’espressione di Michel Foucault, un’ontologia dell’attualità. In maniera programmatica, proprio come incipit dell’introduzione al volume, scrive l’autore: «This book studies how Ernst Jünger – one of the greatest German authors of the twentieth century – envisioned the technological age we currently live in» (1).

In altri termini lo scopo dell’autore è di mostrare come l’armamentario filosofico utilizzato da Jünger nel secolo passato risulti, nonostante i cambiamenti storici, politici e sociali, ancora attuale per descrivere la nostra epoca che, mutatis mutandis, presenta le stesse caratteristiche descritte ne L’operaio. Epoca che ha come suo attore protagonista l’uomo della tecnica, la cui incidenza sulle trasformazioni del pianeta Terra è tale da determinare il passaggio ad una nuova era geologica: l’antropocene. Scrive l’autore: «The […] reason to study Jünger’s concept of the age of  technology is, therefore, that he provides concrete strategies and methods to envision the future. Furthermore, Jünger  is one of the first authors who conceptualize this future in terms of the anthropocene» (2).

Tuttavia Block non si limita semplicemente a proporre un’analisi dettagliata del pensiero di Jünger, al fine di mostrarne il carattere profetico e attuale. Nelle pagine dell’autore tedesco egli scorge, andando al di là dell’epocale interpretazione proposta da Heidegger, la possibilità di una considerazione non metafisica dell’essere e del linguaggio filosofico; concezione che, secondo Block, è affine al pensiero di Heidegger, dello Heidegger post-svolta, più di quanto quest’ultimo sia disposto ad ammettere.

La prima parte del volume presenta un’attenta disamina dei lavori jüngeriani degli anni Trenta. In particolar modo vengono presi in considerazione due testi capitali della riflessione del giovane Jünger: L’operaio e La mobilitazione totale.

Secondo l’interpretazione di Block la Grande Guerra, esperita in prima persona da Jünger nella battaglia di Lagemark e poi raccontata nelle pagine del testo Nelle tempeste d’acciaio, non è per il filosofo tedesco un semplice evento storico; essa è piuttosto il nome di un mutamento epocale, rappresenta cioè una vera e propria categoria filosofica. Nella Prima Guerra Mondiale avviene, secondo l’interpretazione di Jünger, un vero e proprio ‘scossone nell’ordine del mondo’, così da prospettare il declino tanto dei valori borghesi, che avevano retto l’ordine sociale della modernità, quanto delle categorie filosofiche di matrice platonica, che, nonostante vari mutamenti e correzioni, avevano lo scopo di fornire un senso al divenire. Scrive Block: «Total mobilization thus primarily has the effect of engendering ontological indifference, since every connection to the transcendent essence of thing is destroyed – Jünger also speaks of a “decrease of types” –  in favor of dynamization or potential energy» (11).

In altre parole, la Prima Guerra Mondiale funge da grimaldello per scardinare un ordine divenuto ormai vetusto che aveva edificato le proprie certezze intorno all’interpretazione dell’uomo come animal rationale. Distrutta ogni connessione con l’essenza, svincolata l’interpretazione dell’umanità dell’umano dall’attributo della razionalità (almeno così come questa è pensata nell’ambito della modernità), l’uomo nell’epoca della tecnica dispiegata è da considerare in relazione a criteri del tutto inediti: l’efficienza, la funzionalità, la riproducibilità.

Detto in maniera esplicita, dalla descrizione di Jünger emerge un nuovo tipo umano; inizialmente la sua forma viene associata a quella del guerriero, successivamente, e in maniera filosoficamente più pregnante, dagli anni Trenta in avanti questo nuovo tipo umano, svincolato dall’ordine che egli stesso contribuisce a distruggere con la propria azione, avrà la forma dell’operaio.

Partendo da queste considerazioni Block si muove seguendo due vettori ermeneutici fondamentali, che in qualche modo gli studi jüngeriani danno per acquisiti da qualche decennio. Da un lato emerge chiaramente il riferimento di Jünger alla filosofia di Nietzsche, tanto nell’interpretazione del proprio tempo come nichilismo, quanto nella declinazione della mobilitazione totale (forse accostabile all’attivismo di cui parlava Nietzsche) come trasformazione della vita in energia; dall’altro lato il pensiero di Jünger non viene affrontato semplicemente nella sua dimensione narrativa, poetica, descrittiva, bensì indagato nella sua radice squisitamente filosofica ed essenziale. Utilizzando il lessico heideggeriano, potremmo dire che Block mette in evidenza lo spessore ontologico delle analisi di Jünger, non limitando l’analisi all’indagine ontica che, in qualche modo, è largamente diffusa nelle pagine del filosofo di Wilflingen.

Nella seconda parte del testo Block presenta un confronto tra la filosofia di Jünger e quella di Martin Heidegger. Il grande merito del lavoro di Block è quello di non limitarsi ad analizzare i testi in cui avviene un confronto diretto tra i due autori sulla questione del nichilismo – Oltre la linea di Jünger e La questione dell’essere di Heidegger. Da un lato, Block analizza Essere e tempo e i testi di Heidegger degli anni Trenta a partire da una prospettiva inedita, ovvero la questione del lavoro; egli mostra come tra la visone jüngeriana e quella heideggeriana vi siano dei punti di contatto ma anche delle divergenze enormi che in qualche modo rimandano al contesto generale entro cui si svolge l’intera riflessione filosofica dei due autori.

Dall’altro lato, Block focalizza la propria attenzione sul volume 90 della Gesamtausgabe in cui Heidegger si confronta direttamente ed esplicitamente con Jünger e in particolar modo con il testo L’operaio. Il lavoro filosofico di Block si muove in due direzioni parallele, mostrando sia la centralità del lavoro ermeneutico di Heidegger per poter comprendere lo spessore ontologico del pensiero di Jünger sia la possibilità di un superamento dell’interpretazione heideggeriana in virtù di una considerazione diversa della riflessione dello stesso Jünger.

Il limite della prospettiva ermeneutica heideggeriana consisterebbe, secondo Block, nell’incapacità di comprendere fino in fondo la dimensione non metafisica della riflessione di Jünger; spinto dalla necessità di far rientrare ad ogni costo anche il pensiero jüngeriano nei limiti propri della metafisica occidentale, accostandolo in tal modo a Nietzsche, Heidegger avrebbe fornito, dunque, un’interpretazione parziale e per alcuni versi faziosa. Scrive l’autore: «It will become clear that Heidegger’s reception of Jünger is biased. Because he takes Jünger’s writings a priori as philosophical reflections in light of Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will to power, Heidegger does not see that Jünger is under way to a non-metaphysical method to en vision the turning of Being, and to a non-metaphysical concept of language that is much closer to Heidegger’s than he would admit» (56).

Questa riconsiderazione del pensiero di Jünger in una prospettiva non nichilistica, al di là dell’orizzonte della storia della metafisica tracciata da Heidegger, viene condotta da Block – nella terza ed ultima parte del volume qui in esame – attraverso un’analisi del linguaggio e della poetica del pensiero di Jünger.

Come accennato in precedenza, in questo contesto il pensiero di Jünger presenta delle assonanze con la riflessione dello Heidegger post-svolta. Attraverso un’analisi puntuale del testo Al muro del tempo, Block ricava dall’opera jüngeriana una riconsiderazione fondamentale dell’essenza del linguaggio e del dire poetico, l’unico in grado di parlare realmente nell’epoca della ‘perfezione della tecnica’ in cui anche il linguaggio si riduce all’efficienza e alla funzionalità.

Nella poesia si realizza quel ‘passaggio al bosco’ che caratterizza la forma di resistenza propria nell’era del dominio incontrastato della tecnica; non una negazione dei caratteri propri della tecnica, ma un attraversamento poetante che in tal modo fornisce forme inedite di libertà. Scrive Block: «The freedom of the individual is to resist the threat of the perfection of technology and to find a way beyond the nihilist reduction and the perfection of technology, based on this individual freedom» (115).

In ultima istanza, al di là delle apparenti differenze terminologiche e contestuali, per Block risulta evidente come tanto per Jünger quanto per Heidegger l’unico modo di corrispondere all’Essere e al suo mistero nell’epoca del nichilismo dispiegato sia la poesia: «This Geheimnis of the gestalt makes clear that the new epoch of the worker is not a matter of observation but of poetry» (141).

Il volume di Vincent Block è un ottimo strumento per confrontarsi con una delle questioni fondamentali del Novecento, quella della tecnica, la cui onda lunga caratterizza il nostro tempo in maniera forse ancor più pregnante che in passato. La chiarezza espositiva, i riferimenti puntuali alla bibliografia primaria e secondaria lo rendono un segnavia essenziale, uno dei primi in lingua inglese, da un lato per comprendere la disamina filosofica della questione della tecnica e delle declinazioni che ne hanno dato Jünger e Heidegger, dall’altro per confrontarsi con le problematiche che danno forma al nostro oggi e ‘provocano’ la nostra storicità e il nostro essere nel mondo.