Technology and modernity

Technology and the crisis of the modern age: Spengler, Jünger, Heidegger

Spengler was the first and the most influential of Weimar’s prophets of doom. The Decline of the West, which appeared in July 1918, shortly before Germany’s defeat, enjoyed a sensational success in Germany and Europe, doubtless due to its title that captured the anxiety and despair of the time with its prediction of the inescapable downfall of the West, prefigured in the fall of all previous civilizations. It is useless to struggle against the power of historical fate, Spengler declared. All that remains for Western man is to recognize the limit of his possibilities, to accept that the golden age of culture has given way to the iron age of mechanized civilization. In a passage that Cassirer will quote in The Myth of the State (Cassirer 1946: 292) Spengler concludes: ‘And I can only hope that men of the new generation may be moved by this book to devote themselves to technics instead of lyrics, the sea instead of the paint-brush, and politics instead of epistemology. Better they could do not’ (Spengler, n.d.: 41). In a book written as the Weimar Republic entered terminal crisis, Man and Technics (1931), Spengler tied in characteristically prophetic tones the fate of Western civilization and its Faustian culture to the ‘destiny of machine-technics’:

In reality, however, it is out of the power of either heads or hands to alter in any way the destiny of machine-technics, for this has developed out of inward spiritual necessities and is now correspondingly maturing towards its fulfillment and end. Today we stand on the summit, at the point when the fifth act is beginning. The last decisions are taking place, the tragedy is closing. (Spengler 1940: 90)

Spengler’s summary application in Man and Technics of Nietzsche’s Will to Power to the whole of animal and human history is of the crudest kind. Starting from the premise that technology is to be grasped as ‘the tactics of living’, Spengler’s ‘Contribution to a Philosophy of Life’ amounts to the bald assertion that life itself is identical with conflict (Spengler 1940: 10). No less than economy, war or politics, technology expresses the ‘one active, fighting, and charged life’ (1940: 11) – ‘life, indeed, in the Nietzschean sense, a grim, pitiless, no-quarter battle of the Will-to-Power’ (1940: 16). Early man is accordingly introduced as a beast of prey, the lone hunter possessed by a boundless feeling of power, who is the enemy of all and knows only the alternatives of victory or death. In Spengler’s Social Darwinist anthropology language is a latecomer. It appears as the indispensable instrument of collective action only after agriculture has led to settlement. As the master key to the technical form of all social life, language springs from the division between the rulers and the ruled, ‘the leaders and the led of life’ (1940: 64). The ‘fateful rift between man’s world and the universe’ (1940: 44) is older, however, than agriculture. What Spengler calls the culture of the armed hand had already set man against nature and launched him on the path that leads to ‘the destiny of machine-technics’.

Here Spengler introduces his second and main theme. Life’s perpetual struggle for power culminates in the ‘Rise and Fall of the Machine Culture’, the final act of the downfall of the West: ‘The Faustian, west-European Culture is probably not the last, but certainly it is the most powerful, the most passionate, and … the most tragic of them all’ (1940: 78, emphasis in original). The tragedy of the West is inherent in the Faustian drive to tame and harness the energies of nature. Not only has Faustian man mechanized and devastated nature (‘we cannot look at a waterfall without mentally turning it into electric power’; 1940: 94), he has been enslaved by his creations (‘The lord of the World is becoming the slave of the Machine, which is forcing him – forcing us all, whether we are aware of it or not – to follow its course’; 1940: 90). Nevertheless, there is for Spengler no alternative to the yoke of our tragic destiny. Spengler’s Nietzschean amor fati – ‘Optimism is cowardice’ (1940: 104) – is shared by Jünger, for whom the key to the destiny of machine-technics lies in the inescapable identity of politics, economy and war revealed in the Great War.

Two decisive moments in the exponential growth of the modern industrial-military machine frame the bourgeois age: the industrial revolution of the late 18th century and the introduction of universal conscription in the French Revolution on the one hand, and the ‘war economy’ that developed in response to the demands of the First World War on the other. On the basis of his war experience, Jünger prophesied the imminent triumph of the Worker in the age of total mobilization, defined as the last stage in the struggle for world power. Jünger’s message was simple. Victory will fall to the state that has understood the lessons of the Great War, that is, the state that implements mobilization most ruthlessly. Jünger’s 1930 essay ‘Total Mobilization’ (Jünger 1980) was the trailer for his magnum opus, Der Arbeiter (Jünger 1981), a 300-page exposition of the new human type who would be equal to the demands of total mobilization, the Worker born from the spirit of war. ‘Total Mobilization’ and The Worker, Jünger’s blueprints for the coming War of the World, occupied Heidegger throughout the 1930s, at first with public approval in his Rectoral Address and in ‘The German Student as Worker’ (see Wolin 1993), subsequently with ever sharper rejection and critique. This did not alter his estimation of Jünger’s significance, summed up in his notes from 1939–40:

Ernst Jünger is the only genuine continuer of Nietzsche; his writings make the previous literature ‘on’ Nietzsche inessential and superfluous; for Jünger does not take over the Will to Power as a doctrine to be discussed and perhaps improved. Jünger’s cold and penetrating gaze sees being (das Seiende) everywhere as Will to Power. … Through his essential experiences of the First World War Jünger has intensified and hardened and spelled out Nietzsche’s metaphysical conception of the world in the light of his own independent view of the fundamental phenomenon of the world as the Will to Power, that Lenin first raised to consciousness around 1914 with the concept and the word ‘total mobilization’. (Heidegger 1990: 227)

The parallel to Heidegger’s distinction in Being and Time between authentic and inauthentic Dasein, between the few and the many (das Man), is evident. In each the deciding criterion is the resolute readiness to look death in the face. The contemplation of the modern world in all its dynamism and relentless discipline, Jünger tells us, arouses mixed feelings of pleasure and horror, as we are forced to grasp that we are inescapably caught up in this frantic process. We must submit to the total mobilization which seizes and rolls over us, it is the mysterious and compelling imperative of the age of the masses and machines. The last war with its war economy was but the preparation for the gigantic harnessing of energies already evident in Russia and Italy, a work process dictated by the pressure of the masses, which has cancelled all distinctions between soldiers and civilians, war and peace. The wars of the Worker, rational and merciless, await us (Jünger 1980: 123–8). In Jünger’s apocalyptic perspective progress, with its naïve cult of the machine, driven by the rival gods of socialism and nationalism, will pulverize the remnants of the old world and finally itself to reveal the identity of the ‘left’ and the ‘right’. This is the moment of destiny for Germany.

Jünger’s model of freedom and order is the army, not the social contract. The army knows neither individuals nor the mass, dismissed by Jünger as the twin faces of the identity of democracy and anarchy that characterizes the Weimar Republic. The individual is replaced by the Worker as type, the masses by what Jünger calls the organic construction, just as the Worker appears in the dual but ultimately identical form of the master, as in the elite military orders, or the slave, as in the labour battalions. In the Worker State the Work Plan takes the place of the constitution and total mobilization of the population from the cradle upwards conscription. Jünger would not have disputed Heidegger’s reference to Lenin. The Worker was written against the background of the first Five-Year-Plan in Russia, launched by Stalin in 1928. Jünger’s political allegiance was not to National Socialism but to Spengler’s ‘Prussian Socialism’ (Spengler 1919) and Ernst Niekisch’s National Bolshevism with its goal of wedding the mobilizing power of nationalism to the ruthless methods of the Bolshevik state. In this sense The Worker claims to express the underlying logic of the rival totalitarianisms beyond the ideological divisions of the bourgeois age. Jünger, Niekisch, Lukács and Wittfogel were all members of the Association for the Study of the Russian Planned Economy before 1933. It should be added that Jünger did not hesitate after 1933 to make it clear that he wanted nothing to do with the National Socialist regime. It was clearly neither aristocratic nor ruthless enough in his eyes. He greatly admired Ernst Niekisch, the leading National Bolshevik, for his steadfast resistance to the Nazis.

Jünger presents the Worker as the antithesis and successor to the understanding of the worker as a social class in capitalism and as the imputed universal class of a new society in socialism. Against this sociological conception, which stems from a world in which economy and fate are identical, he sets the concept of the Worker as Gestalt, by which is meant a whole greater than its parts, a totality. Bourgeois thought could never encompass the idea of totality, he declares, echoing Lukács’s refrain in History and Class Consciousness (1922). The revolutionary deed of the Worker lies in his claim to totality. The concept of Gestalt is thus Jünger’s own claim to totality. It is, he states, an organic concept, in exactly the same way that his term ‘organic construction’ signifies the machine made of human parts. Gestalt is governed by the law of the stamp and its vertical impression. Jünger’s term for impress/imprint/impression is Prägung, applied to the minting of coins and to the moulding or shaping of character. The law of stamp and impress expresses bureaucratic control, serial production, and the imposition of form on raw material. The strategic intention is clear: Gestalt is meant to assert the radical break with and invalidation of all the categories of bourgeois thought, from the individual and the mass, the twin faces of bourgeois anarchy, to historicism, progress, evolution and ‘values’. The Worker as type, replacing the individual, is struck like a coin, receiving the stamp and representing the impress of power. The Worker as ‘organic construction’, replacing the mass, collectivizes a topos of modernism, launched by Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto of 1909, that of the man-machine as the new human type in the service of the imperial ambitions of the state, whether Italian in the case of Marinetti or German with Jünger, but no less attractive to the Russian avant-garde or to Stalin, the man of steel (Süss 1985).

Power, in Jünger’s Nietzschean reading, is inherently totalitarian. The Worker mobilizes the world through technology, a process that declares war on all historical systems and religious institutions and reaches its conclusion with the destruction of all nation-states. They will all be swept away by the revolution of the Worker, which installs itself as the superior race. The machine, we may say, ends as with Spengler by emancipating itself from its masters because the Worker, the self-enslaving representative of power, ‘transcends’ the distinction between masters and servants, even if Jünger (like Hitler and Himmler) accords a privileged role to military orders as the vanguard of the Worker’s revolution. Since totalitarian power is its own end, Jünger can only escape the self-destructive cycle of the struggle for power by making the end purpose of planetary rule the bringing of history to an end through the transformation of chaotic conflict into the timeless order of space. The world, mobilized by technology, supplies the material setting on which an unchanging Gestalt is to be impressed.

The enormous significance Heidegger accords Jünger’s writings is evident in his interpretation of The Worker. Just as Machiavelli’s Prince stands at the beginning of the modern age, so The Worker represents its completion through its unconditional extrapolation of the Will to Power as the reality of the modern world. The Worker thus stands as key witness to the present as the completion of the historical crisis of modernity. Heidegger understands the Will to Power as the ultimate logic of the foundation of modern metaphysics in the subject, whether it appears as the ‘individual’ in liberalism, as ‘community’, nation or ‘people’ in nationalism, or as ‘mankind’ in communism. Hence the reciprocity of the definition of man, power and work in Jünger. Work defines man in terms of the work-process of self-mobilization, just as world-mobilization is defined in accordance with the elevation of work to the inmost necessity of the world. Man is comprehended through the three aspects of work: as the principle (praxis) of human being, as the life form (ethos), which accomplishes the transformation of the individual into type, and as style (poiesis), whose highest form is the art of state. Heidegger dismisses Jünger’s supposedly deciding distinction between the Worker and the bourgeois. Once we grasp that the reality Jünger is describing is that of the last 300 years, it becomes clear that the Worker is nothing but a more radical version of the modern planning, calculating spirit of control: in short, man the rational animal. All that Jünger adds to this image of man is the supplement of ‘demonic, Dionysian life’, the embrace of the ‘elemental’ as a last desperate act of subjectivity that reduces the human horizon to ‘realism heroism nihilism (organized devastation) elementarism (Nietzsche’s biologism)’ (Heidegger 1990: 87), where the elemental signifies the pan-anarchism of the Will to Power.

Jünger’s Worker is thus the Nietzschean Superman, in whom a new Gestalt of man emerges, surpassing existing man to attain as type the self-certainty that is neither isolated in the individual nor dispersed in the mass. As type, the Worker participates in the highest, planetary totality at the price of the uniqueness of the individual, the sacrifice of the principle of individuation (Heidegger 1990: 194, 196). Technology and typology are the means by which man and matter are mobilized to produce the fusion of the organic and the mechanical: Heidegger’s example of organic construction is the SS (1990: 202). Totally mobilized man signifies the master as slave and, as such, the ultimate expression of the circle of subjectivity, for which the world functions as mere object. The circle of subjectivity completes itself for Heidegger in the pure destructivity of the Will to Power. Mobilization means the self-enslaving empowering of power, total mobilization the absolute empowering of power that recognizes nothing outside itself: ‘Because power is always overpowering, annihilation belongs to it; therefore where being as a whole unfolds the pure essence of power in the sense of total mobilization, there the processes of destruction grow of necessity gigantically’ (1990: 229). The drive to unconditional and complete domination therefore finds its most decisive furtherance in the total mobilization of world war that takes the form in Germany of the imperial dictatorship of unconditional armament for the sake of armament (1990: 222). (Heidegger is writing in 1940.)

Heidegger’s forceful critique of totalitarian mobilization is one with his critique of the destructive unfolding of the calculating rationality of the modern subject. In this sense, the active nihilism of Jünger that makes him for Heidegger the decisive continuation of Nietzsche manifests in the clearest fashion the ultimate logic of Western metaphysics as Will to Power. In Heidegger’s philosophy of history metaphysics reaches its completion in modern technology just as the crisis of Western history reaches its completion in modernity. Heidegger’s thinking on technology after 1945 is thus governed by the question: how in the age of the objectifying world picture and the technological domination of the earth is it possible to ‘overcome’ the fateful essence of modern technology? Heidegger seeks an answer in the recovery of the original meaning of techne that lies concealed within modern technology’s objectifying of beings and Being. ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ is therefore an enquiry into the essential original relationship of technology and art.

For Ernst Cassirer the question concerning technology was posed in the critical context of the Weimar Republic, of which Cassirer was a staunch supporter. His reading of the danger facing the modern world is diametrically opposed to Heidegger’s. It lies not in modern subjectivity but in the fundamental challenge of political reaction to the self-understanding and self-affirmation of the moderns. The closure of history that Cassirer fears is not that of the triumph of modern rationality as Will to Power but the overwhelming of rationality through regression to the fatalism of myth under the pressure of the crisis of the present. In The Myth of the State, Cassirer’s last work, written in English in American exile and finished shortly before his death in 1945, Spengler and Heidegger are singled out as fatalistic thinkers who helped pave the way for the Third Reich. With the prophetic insistence on the inescapable decline of the West, Spengler’s metaphysics of history exhibits all the characteristic traits of myth (Cassirer 1946: 290). Cassirer was not of course aware of Heidegger’s metaphysics of history as the unfolding of the destiny of Being, first developed in the Nietzsche lectures from 1936 to 1940 which were not published until 1961, but he does discern the same fatalistic tendency as in Spengler in Heidegger’s presentation of the ‘thrownness’ of human existence in Being and Time, a fatalism that paralyses human action (Cassirer 1946: 293). Modern science may have broken the power of magic, but the catastrophic course of European history since the Great War shows that we are still confronted by the fatal attraction of political myths. As humanist and defender of the Enlightenment against the ever present threat of regression to myth, Cassirer, it is clear, has no time for the understanding of technology as fate or destiny. On the contrary, in his untranslated 1930 essay ‘Form und Technik’ (Form and Technology) Cassirer focuses on the liberating possibilities in relation to human action intrinsic to the essence of technology. The essay also concerns – implicitly rather than explicitly – the question of the relationship between technology and art, but here too as with Heidegger this relationship has a direct bearing on their respective interpretations of modernity.

From the ancients to the moderns: Technology and art in Heidegger and Cassirer

‘Form und Technik’ was written against the background of a deep ambivalence and hostility to industrial-technological society in Germany, articulated in particular by philosophers of life such as Ludwig Klages and Georg Simmel, but also by proclamations of the inescapable destiny of machine-technics. The essay must also be situated against the immediate background of Cassirer’s famous debate with Heidegger in Davos in 1929. Although Heidegger subsequently turned even further against the scientific understanding of philosophy represented by Cassirer, opposing to the limitations of science and technology the richer modes of world-disclosure present in language and poetry, the essential difference between Heidegger and Cassirer was already evident in the 1929 debate. Peter E. Gordon writes in his comprehensive reconstruction of the Davos encounter: ‘At the core of the debate … was a fundamental contrast between two normative images of humanity.’ For Cassirer the unity of culture across the separate spheres inter alia of science, technology and art is given by the human capacity for symbolic self-expression, our capacity to create whole worlds of objective meaning. Cassirer derived from Kant this image of the human being’s constructivist or formative powers of world-making. Heidegger by contrast insisted on the image of the human being as gifted with a receptive openness to the world (Gordon 2010: 6–7). Receptivity is the attitude which allows things to appear rather than challenging them forth. The two normative images of humanity thus describe two fundamental relationships to the world, spontaneity and receptivity, and thus two fundamentally opposed understandings of technology, tied in the case of Heidegger to an originary ontology of disclosure and in the case of Cassirer to a ‘modernist ontology of construction’ (Gordon 2010: 206).

The historical connection between art and technology forms the premise of Heidegger’s ‘The Question concerning Technology’, first given as a lecture in 1953. In this essay Heidegger sets out to establish the essence of technology, since it ‘is by no means technological’ (Heidegger 1993: 311). It concerns rather the revealing of beings, and this power of revealing provides in turn the key to the essential relationship between technology and art, recognized by the Greeks, who used the one term techne to cover both arts and crafts. Heidegger distinguishes between two opposed but also related ways of revealing: the ancient as poetic bringing-forth and the modern as technological challenging-forth. Heidegger’s model for bringing-forth is physis:

It is of the utmost importance that we think bringing-forth in its full scope and at the same time in the sense that the Greeks thought it. Not only handicraft manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery, is a bringing-forth, poiesis. Physis, also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poiesis. Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense. For what presences has the irruption belonging to bringing-forth, e. g., the bursting of a blossom into bloom, in itself (en heautoi). (1993: 317)

The Greek term techne, from which we derive technology, applies to all the arts and crafts which bring something into existence. In Heidegger’s words, ‘techne is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poetic’ (Heidegger 1993: 318). It therefore follows that the essence of techne concerns revealing. It is ‘as revealing, and not manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth’ (1993: 319). Heidegger stresses the importance of the connection between techne and epistēmē. Both words designate knowing in the widest sense. ‘They mean to be entirely at home in something, to understand and be expert in it’ (1993: 318). This knowledge is a revealing, a fore-knowledge which determines the artifact to be constructed such as a ship or house (1993: 319). We find the same combination of cognition and production in the medieval theory of ars: ‘Art is a knowledge of rules through which things can be brought forth. Ars is a very broad concept, which also includes what we would call handiwork or technique, and the theory of art is above all a theory of craftsmanship in a wide sense’ (Eco 1993: 150–1). The term ‘art’ today still covers a wide spectrum extending from ‘a practical skill or its application’, a skilled profession, trade or craft, artifact, to artifice, the artificial, the fictitious, magic or occult knowledge, and the application of skill to the production of visible beauty (Chambers Dictionary). The absence of a distinction between the fine and the useful arts carried over into the Renaissance. The universal man of the Renaissance, embodied supremely by Leonardo da Vinci, was artist, artisan, architect, military engineer, inventor and so forth for his courtly employer. It is only with the emergence of the concept of autonomous art in the second half of the 18th century that the genetic link between art and technology disappears. Moreover, along with the modern concept of the arts, as distinct from the sciences, there also emerges a new conception of technology, underpinned by the scientific revolution of the 17th century and driven by the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

For Heidegger, modern technology no longer brings forth in the sense of poiesis. ‘The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such’ (Heidegger 1993: 320). This new mode of revealing as challenging-forth transforms living nature (physis, Heidegger’s model for poiesis) into a reified object under the regime of the ordering of the actual as standing-reserve, which in enframing nature enframes man (1993: 324). Modern man is enslaved to the illusion that he is ‘lord of the earth’. ‘The illusion comes to prevail that everything that man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct’ (1993: 332). Heidegger calls the modern technological will to mastery Gestell: ‘Enframing means the way of revealing that holds sway in the essence of modern technology and that is itself nothing technological’ (1993: 325). The parting of the ways between techne and modern technology occurred in the 18th century with the development of machine power, preceded by the rise of modern physical science in the 17th century.

Modern technology has thus decisively altered the relationship between art and technology. Art is now ‘on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology, and, on the other, fundamentally different from it’ (1993: 340). The kinship and difference between art and technology is summed up by the paradox inherent in the essence of modern technology: enframing entails challenging-forth, which is still a way of revealing but one that now conceals and holds in reserve the other saving way of revealing, poetic bringing-forth. ‘Above all, enframing conceals that revealing which, in the sense of poiesis, lets what presences come forth into existence’ (1993: 332). That is, enframing blocks poiesis because its mode of revealing conceals revealing as such (1993: 333). Precisely this fraught relationship destines art, according to Heidegger, as the realm where the ‘essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen’ (1993: 340). In other words, art is called to reveal and confront the essence of technology, which is nothing technological in itself. ‘The Question concerning Technology’ ends by affirming the inescapable yet mysterious bond between art and technology: ‘Yet the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes’ (1993: 341).

The question concerning the essence of technology directs us back to the essence of art: not only is the essence of technology non-technological, the essence of art for Heidegger is non-aesthetic – ‘in our sheer aesthetic-mindedness we no longer guard and preserve the essential unfolding of art’ (1993: 340). Why is the essence of art non-aesthetic? Because for Heidegger modern, aesthetic art, predicated on the distinction between subject and object, belongs to the world of Gestell. In ‘The End of Philosophy’ Heidegger writes:

The basic form of appearance in which the will to will arranges and calculates itself in the unhistorical element of the world of completed metaphysics can be stringently called ‘technology.’ This name includes all areas of being which equip the whole of beings: objectified nature, the business of culture, manufactured politics, and the gloss of ideals overlaying everything. (Heidegger 1973: 93)

In ‘The Question concerning Technology’ Heidegger is asking in what way modern technology is like but also unlike art, a question which is pushed into the background if we focus solely (as reception mostly has) on Heidegger’s reading of the essence of technology as enframing. Moreover, by reducing the essence of technology to enframing Heidegger obscures his own more fundamental and original question concerning what art and technology have in common: unconcealing as a way of revealing that brings forth and makes present. I do not wish to deny the power of Heidegger’s interpretation of modern technology. Enframing is clearly an ever present danger in our technological civilization. What I do want to argue is that the price of Heidegger’s totalizing reductionism is too high. We need to unframe Heidegger’s question because he closes rather than discloses the question of the essence of modern technology and modern art. Against Heidegger, I want to argue with Cassirer and Blumenberg that the essence of modern technology and art resides in the essential kinship of their way of revealing, and that the revealing Heidegger terms ‘challenging-forth’ needs to be rethought not only in relation to technology but also in relation to modern art with reference to the 18th-century discussion of possible worlds and the emergence of the modern idea of fiction.

We can now turn to Cassirer’s 1930 essay (Cassirer 2004). The title indicates that ‘form’ is the key concept for Cassirer: it denotes the historical-civilizational process of world-making by which humans shape and give form to their world. Cassirer’s starting point in Form und Technik is an equation between the function of technology and the function of language (in contrast to Spengler’s primacy of technology – the armed hand – over language in the struggle for life). We need to recognize, Cassirer says, not only language as the ‘tool of the spirit’ but equally the ‘spirit of the tool’ at work in technology. The word and the tool represent the two fundamental acts of the grasping of reality, by which humans give form to the world. The giving of form is an active process: speech involves a genuine act of world-creation, tools open up the possibility of a new aspect or dimension of the world (Cassirer 2004: 8–9). Cassirer argues that the use of tools signified a break with magical practices but also continuity: ‘All “real” actions, if they are to succeed, need … a magic preparation and anticipation. A war or plundering expedition, fishing or hunting can only succeed if each phase is anticipated magically and as it were “rehearsed”’ (p. 11). To anticipate and rehearse is to picture to oneself, to make an image, to imagine what could or should happen. (Heidegger’s distinction between the revealing ‘fore-knowledge’ of poiesis [Heidegger 1993: 319] and the objectifying world-picture of the modern subject may be read as a critique of and correction to Cassirer.)

Although the magical wish or image contains, according to Cassirer, the seed/germ of world-making, it operates in a medium that does not transcend subjectivity. Nevertheless, the magic wish represents a first decisive step in the liberation from the dominance of the given. With the advent of technology, wish is replaced by will, magical spell by the discovery of nature, inherent in the use of tools. The step from magic to technology does not mean that the world has lost its plasticity but it does mean that the former metamorphic world of myth and magic is tied now to certain conditions of the possible. ‘This discovery [of nature, Entdeckung] is disclosure, uncovering [Aufdeckung]: it is the grasping and appropriation of an essential and necessary connection, which was hitherto concealed’ (Cassirer 2004: 12). For Cassirer, the basic constellation of tool-use already goes to the philosophical core of the question concerning technology. The first tools contained the seed of a new mastering of the world and a world-historical turning point in knowledge (p. 13). The human intention objectified in the tool grounded the possibility of goal-directed action in relation to the spatially absent and the temporally distant. Even though these liberating capabilities of language and technology long remained cloaked in mythical and magical world views, in which tools were seen as gifts of the gods or of culture bringers, worshipped as demi-gods, they eventually led to a recognition that the world can be formed and re-formed in a potentially endless process. The art historian Pierre Francastel explicates the connection between art and technology:

Through images, man discovers both the universe and his need to organize it. Thus art and technology are not set against each other … It is in technology that art and other human endeavours converge. Art’s domain is not that of the absolute but that of the possible. (Francastel 2000: 25)

Like Heidegger, Cassirer answers the question concerning technology in terms of revealing. Unlike Heidegger, however, he does not set two distinct modes of revealing against each other: poetic bringing-forth as opposed to technological challenging-forth. If Cassirer offers us a modern answer, it is not one premised on a distinction between ancient and modern technology. On the contrary, the very first use of tools set in train an ongoing process of revealing as unconcealment, that is, the uncovering of what is present but hitherto concealed in the world. The nature waiting to be shaped and given form by technology is thereby revealed as essentially incomplete. From the beginning technological ‘discovery’ signifies the experimental path of formation and transformation mediated by the essential plasticity of nature. The spirit of technology therefore resides for Cassirer in its capacity to reveal the latent in nature, waiting to be actualized. This spirit requires an attitude capable of withdrawing from a given reality in order to posit the possible. Cassirer terms this ‘possibilization’ of the world ‘the greatest and the most remarkable achievement of technology’ (2004: 24). He compares the technician with Leibniz’s demiurge, who creates neither the essence nor the potentialities of objects but chooses rather the most perfect of the available possibilities, the best of all possible worlds, constrained by the limits imposed by the general laws of nature.

To sum up: Cassirer defines the spirit of technology as a relationship to the world through which man expresses his creativity in shaping and forming both self and world. There are three key differences to Heidegger’s interpretation of technology. First, Cassirer’s starting point is the human capacity to give form to experience through symbols. Since for Cassirer there is no ‘being’ of any kind except by virtue of some particular form-giving intention (artistic, religious, scientific, technological, etc.), when Heidegger argues that modernity is technologically enframed, this needs to be understood as a cultural and not as an ontological determination. That is, Cassirer is a relational and not an ontological thinker, who belongs in the structuralist tradition of Leibniz, Kant, Marx, and Durkheim (Jolly n.d.: 159). Second, as we have seen, Heidegger reduces the modern technological relationship to the world to the one, totalizing act of enframing, which conceals the more primordial receptivity of revealing. Andrew Feenberg’s theory of technology allows us to clarify the difference between Heidegger and Cassirer regarding the question of the world-disclosing power of technology. As we have seen, the crux of Heidegger’s critique of modern technology is the charge that it strips objects of their inherent potentialities by reducing them to raw materials. This is a process of deworlding in stark contrast to the poetic revealing inherent in techne’s bringing-forth. Conversely, Cassirer emphasizes the form-giving and world-disclosing capacity of technology. Feenberg combines the two opposed interpretations in his instrumentalization theory of technology. He argues that the precondition of disclosing new worlds is the deworlding inherent in technical action. Thus when Heidegger illustrates his discussion of poetic bringing-forth by reference to a silver chalice he fails to take into account the technical process of deworlding by which silver is obtained. Theorists of modernity such as Heidegger ‘simply fail to recognize that the deworlding associated with technology is necessarily and simultaneously entry into another world’: deworlding ‘no longer stands opposed to culture as such, but appears as a more or less creative expression of it, disclosing new worlds’ (Feenberg 2003: 96, 102). Third, Gestell is defined by the subject-object relation that objectifies and reifies nature through the act of placing and positing (stellen) things. Cassirer does not understand technology’s relationship to the world in subject-object terms. Technology is for him rather the means and medium through which humans define themselves and the world. Werner Rammert argues that in Cassirer the ‘material relation between humans and world should be conceived as a symbiotic and mediated relationship instead of a divided and instrumental one’ (Rammert 1999: 30).

Cassirer raises the question of the similarities and differences between technology and art only at the end of his essay. The similarities flow from his understanding of technology:

Technical creation (Schaffen) never ties itself … to the given aspect of things, but stands under the law of a pure anticipation, a prospective view, which anticipates the future and brings about a new future. … With the insight into this state of affairs the actual centre of gravity of the world of technical ‘form’ moves further and further from the purely theoretical sphere into the sphere of art and of artistic creation. (Cassirer 2004: 24–5)

Herbert Marcuse’s attempt in the 1960s to rethink the relationship between art and technology provides an appropriate conclusion because it reads as the attempt to combine the opposed positions of Heidegger and Cassirer. Feenberg interprets Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964) and his Essay on Liberation (1969) as a continuation of Heidegger’s critique of modern technology, whose goal is a new techne that will reintegrate art, technology, and ethics (Feenberg 2004). This new techne, however, derives as much from Cassirer’s ‘possibilization’ of the world as Heidegger’s critique of modern technology as the two following quotations from One-Dimensional Man make clear:

Today domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology but as technology, and the latter provides the great legitimation of expanding political power, which absorbs all spheres of culture. (Marcuse 1964: 158, emphasis in original?)

The rationality of art, its ability to ‘project’ existence, to define yet unrealized possibilities could then be envisaged as validated and functioning in the scientific-technological transformation of the world. (Marcuse 1964: 239, emphasis in original?)