Part A: Beginning to think philosophically--a break from calculative thinking
Biographical Note
Martin Heidegger was Born in Messkirch, Germany, on September 22, 1889 and died in the same town on May 26, 1976. He studied theology and then philosophy, the latter under the philosopher, Edmund Husserl who founded the method of philosophy known as phenomenology, rooting philosophy in experience. The idea, though, was not to make philosophy like science which grounds itself in the idealized schema of data of perception but to base philosophy on the richness of human experience as a whole, the experience of what Husserl called the life-world.. Heidegger took over the phenomenological method, changing it substantially by incorporating the idea of life and world as fundamentally historical. Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party in its early years, but became disillusioned with it and withdrew from any direct political party or position, remaining distant from politics for the rest of his life. He and Ludwig Wittgenstein are widely thought to be the most important philosophers of the 20th century.
[Calvin and Hobbes cartoons from Bill Watterson, It's a Magical World, Andrews and McNeel, Kansas City, 1996]
Our first task is to think about philosophy itself. What is it? Most university students come to the study of philosophy as something very new. Few high schools have courses in philosophy though you may have touched on philosophical questions here and there in other courses, in literature, history or science perhaps. Philosophers do not work in a lab. They do not go out and investigate the world using the methods of the sciences. Generally speaking, they sit in their offices, reading books by other philosophers, writing, teaching, and first of all, simply thinking. Philosophers think. "But everybody does that" you might say. Yes, but philosophers think in special ways and about special questions: "Is there an objective standard for right and wrong?" "How is it that we know things?" "Is beauty objective or simply in the eye of the beholder?" "What is it that makes human beings free?" "Is the mind simply the brain or is it a special kind of thing, perhaps related to soul?" "What gives life meaning and what is the significance of death?" These are some of the questions which have occupied philosophers for hundreds of years.
It is important, however, not to exaggerate the difference between philosophical thinking and ordinary everyday thinking. Our first text comes from Heidegger`s "Memorial Address" and argues on behalf of a basic kind of philosophical thinking which is not so far from our everyday lives; or at least Heidegger argues that it should be an important part of everyday life. He calls this meditative thinking and distinguishes it from calculative thinking. The trouble is that in the modern world we give very little attention to meditative thinking, spending most of our time in a thinking which calculates how best to achieve whatever goals we may have. *
Heidegger begins by calling our attention to this thoughtless way in which we live our lives:
Let us not fool ourselves. All of us, including those who think professionally, as it were, are often enough thought poor; we all are far too easily thought-less. Thoughtlessness is an uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere in today's world. For nowadays we take in everything in the quickest and cheapest way, only to forget it just as quickly, instantly. . . .
But even while we are thoughtless, we do not give up our capacity to think. We rather use this capacity implicitly, though strangely: that is, in thoughtlessness we let it lie fallow. Still only that can lie fallow which in itself is a ground for growth, such as a field. An expressway, where nothing grows, cannot be a fallow field. Just as we can grow deaf only because we hear, just as we can grow old only because we were young; so we can grow thought-poor or even thought-less only because man at the core of his being has the capacity to think; has "spirit and reason" and is destined to think. We can only lose or, as the phrase goes, get loose from that which we knowingly or unknowingly possess.
The growing thoughtlessness must, therefore, spring from some process that gnaws at the very marrow of man today: man today is in flight from thinking. This flight from-thought is the ground of thoughtlessness. But part of this flight is that man will neither see nor admit it. Man today will even flatly deny this flight from thinking. He will assert the opposite. He will sayand quite rightly that there were at no time such farreaching plans, so many inquiries in so many areas, research carried on as passionately as today. Of course. And this display of ingenuity and deliberation has its own great usefulness. Such thought remains indispensable. Butit also remains true that it is thinking of a special kind.
In the following paragraph think especially about what Heidegger means by calculative thinking. Much of the essay is meant to define meditative thinking. However, to understand that, we need to have a clear idea of calculative thinking. The basic idea is that when we think calculatively, we think about how best to achieve whatever goals we have in the circumstances. Thinking calculatively is thinking about how to get from point A to point B. It may be helpful here to think about the infomercials which we see so often on television these days. The basic message of an infomercial is that a better life is a matter of learning how best to achieve some goal, be it losing ten pounds, gaining financial security, communicating effectively, or simply, painting a room. But calculative thinking is much more extensive than this. It is at the heart of science and technology, both of which may be argued to be complex forms of calculative thinking. Some have even argued that achieving happiness is a matter of calculative thinking.
Its peculiarity consists in the fact that whenever we plan, research, and organize, we always reckon with conditions that are given. We take them into account with the calculated intention of their serving specific purposes. Thus we can count on definite results. This calculation is the mark of all thinking that plans and investigates. Such thinking remains calculation even if it neither works with numbers nor uses an adding machine or computer. Calculative thinking computes. It computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities. Calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself. Calculative thinking is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is.
There are, then, two kinds of thinking, each justified and needed in its own way: calculative thinking and meditative thinking.
The word meditation may suggest something you do when you go into the woods or out on a lake, trying to get away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. It seems removed from practical thinking and action. But Heidegger denies that meditative thinking is impractical. Moreover it is something that is not reserved for professional philosophers. The big questions that Heidegger must answer in this essay then, are: "What is the nature of meditative thinking?" and "What good is meditative thinking?"
This meditative thinking is what we have in mind when we say that contemporary man is in flight- from-thinking. Yet you may protest: mere meditative thinking finds itself floating unaware above reality. It loses touch. It is worthless for dealing with current business. It profits nothing in carrying out practical affairs.
And you may say, finally, that mere meditative thinking, persevering meditation, is "above" the reach of ordinary understanding. In this excuse only this much is true, meditative thinking does not just happen by itself any more than does calculative thinking. At times it requires a greater effort. It demands more practice. It is in need of even more delicate care than any other genuine craft. But it must also be able to bide its time, to await as does the farmer, whether the seed will come up and ripen.
Yet anyone can follow the path of meditative thinking in his own manner and within his own limits. Why? Because man is a thinking, that is, a meditating being. Thus meditative thinking need by no means be "high-flown." It is enough if we dwell on what lies close and meditate on what is closest; upon that which concerns us, each one of us, here and now; here, on this patch of home ground; now, in the present hour of history.
How does it happen that we have arrived at this point in history where we are so much in flight from meditative thinking? Or have people always been very little inclined in this direction? On the one hand, the explosion in science and technology is itself part of the explanation. But by itself that doesn`t seem to be an adequate explanation. Heidegger points to a fact about people in our century which suggests that the absence of meditative thinking has something to do with a loss of roots in traditional authority and ways of doing things. Calculative thinking has changed radically our way of life by comparison with that of a century ago. If you have roots, you have certain basic beliefs and basic life patterns and life goals. You are able to tackle problems and judge your situation according to how well it sustains these basic beliefs, life patterns and life goals. Heidegger was writing here in the 1950¹s. Now our lives are even more uprooted than were the lives of people then. A global information system, a global economy, increase in the demand to move and adapt to such changes at an ever greater rate: these things magnify the problem of rootlessness which Heidegger speaks of here.
Many Germans have lost their homeland, have had to leave their villages and towns, have been driven from their native soil. Countless others whose homeland was saved, have yet wandered off. They have been caught up in the turmoil of the big cities, and have resettled in the wastelands of industrial districts. They are strangers now to their former homeland. And those who have stayed on in their homeland? Often they are still more homeless than those who have been driven from their homeland. Hourly and daily they are chained to radio and television. Week after week the movies carry them off into uncommon, but often merely common, realms of the imagination, and give the illusion of a world that is no world. Picture magazines are everywhere available. All that with which modern techniques of communication stimulate, assail, and drive man‹all that is already much closer to man today than his fields around his farmstead, closer than the sky over the earth, closer than the change from night to day, closer than the conventions and customs of his village, than the tradition of his native world.
We grow more thoughtful and ask: What is happening herewith those driven from their homeland no less than with those who have remained? Answer: the rootedness, the autochthony, of man is threatened today at its core! Even more: The loss of rootedness is caused not merely by circumstance and fortune, nor does it stem only from the negligence and the superficia]ity of man's way of life. The loss of autochthony springs from the spirit of the age into which all of us were born. . . .
There is a close connection between calculative thinking and science and technology. We might say that science makes formal and extends the structure of calculative thinking. Technology gives it a material body. The new Jeep plant in Toledo is a good example of the way that science by way of engineering becomes technology. This process is one which invests in the building of factories, warehouses and an enormous web of related facilities. It is this material body of technology which makes it possible for calculation to succeed repeatedly and on a large scale.
However the question, then, is: "What does scientific and technological success really give us?" "Is it the road to greater happiness?" Heidegger says that calculative thinking is part of a modern revolution that sets free new energies, new powers from nature which we draw upon the way we draw upon gasoline to run our cars. In the twentieth century this revolution based in calculative thinking has given us first the atomic age and now, as Heidegger forsaw, the information age.
. . . In July of this year at Lake Constance, eighteen Nobel Prize winners stated in a proclamation: "Science . . . is a road to a happier human life."
What is the sense of this statement? Does it spring from reflection ? Does it ever ponder on the meaning of the atomic age? No! For if we rest content with this statement of science, we remain as far as possible from a reflective insight into our age. Why? Because we forget to ponder. Because we forget to ask: What is the ground that enabled modern technology to discover and set free new energies in nature ?
This is due to a revolution in leading concepts which has been going on for the past several centuries, and by which man is placed in a different world. This radical revolution in outlook has come about in modern philosophy. From this arises a completely new relation of man to the world and his place in it. The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought, attacks that nothing is believed able any longer to resist. Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. This relation of man to the world as such, in principle a technical one, developed in the seventeenth century first and only in Europe. It long remained unknown in other continents, and it was altogether alien to former ages and histories.
The power concealed in modern technology determines the relation of man to that which exists. It rules the whole earth. Indeed, already man is beginning to advance beyond the earth into outer space. In not quite twenty years, such gigantic sources of power have become known through the discovery of atomic energy that in the foreseeable future the world's demands for energy of any kind will be ensured forever. Soon the procurement of the new energies will no longer be tied to certain countries and continents, as is the occurrence of coal, oil, and timber. In the foreseeable future it will be possible to build atomic power stations anywhere on earth.
Thus the decisive question of science and technology today is no longer: Where do we find sufficient quantities of fuel ? The decisive question now runs: In what way can we tame and direct the unimaginably vast amounts of atomic energies, and so secure mankind against the danger that these gigantic energies suddenlyeven without military actionsbreak out somewhere, "run away" and destroy everything?
If the taming of atomic energy is successful, and it will be successful, then a totally new era of technical development will begin. What we know now as the technology of film and television, of transportation and especially air transportation, of news reporting, and as medical and nutritional technology, is presumably only a crude start. No one can foresee the radical changes to come. But technological advance will move faster and faster and can never be stopped. In all areas of his existence, man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technology. These forces, which everywhere and every minute claim, enchain, drag along, press and impose upon man under the form of some technical contrivance or otherthese forces, since man has not made them, have moved long since beyond his will and have outgrown his capacity for decision.
But this too is characteristic of the new world of technology, that its accomplishments come most speedily to be known and publicly admired. Thus today everyone will be able to read what this talk says about technology in any competently managed picture magazine or hear it on the radio. Butit is one thing to have heard and read something, that is, merely to take notice: it is another thing to understand what we have heard and read, that is, to ponder.
The international meeting of Nobel Prize winners took place again in the summer of this year of 1955 in Lindau. There the American chemist, Stanley, had this to say: "The hour is near when life will be placed in the hands of the chemist who will be able to synthesize, split and change living substance at will." We take notice of such a statement. We even marvel at thc daring of scientific research, without thinking about it. We do not stop to consider that an attack with technological means is being prepared upon the life and nature of man compared with which the explosion of the hydrogen bomb means little. For precisely if the hydrogen bombs do not explode and human life on earth is preserved, an uncanny change in the world moves upon us.
So the growth of technology has become a force over which we seem to have increasingly little control. Instead of it being our creation and a means to better control of life to achieve our ends as it started out to be, technology now increasingly creates the shape of our lives and thereby creates us. Increasingly it controls us. This is a basic fact of the modern world, Heidegger argues. There is something uncanny here, he says: a mysterious power that we don`t understand. It is a fact which we see vividly illustrated in the movie Matrix. But does this mean that we have no choice but to live in bondage to technology?
Yet it is not that the world is becoming entirely technical which is really uncanny. Far more uncanny is our being unprepared for this transformation, our inability to confront meditatively what is really dawning in this age.
No single man, no group of men, no commission of prominent statesmen, scientists, and technicians, no conference of leaders of commerce and industry, can brake or direct the progress of history in the atomic age. No merely human organization is capable of gaining dominion over it.
Is man, then, a defenseless and perplexed victim at the mercy of the irresistible superior power of technology? He would be if man today abandons any intention to pit meditative thinking decisively against merely calculative thinking. But once meditative thinking awakens, it must be at work unceasingly and on every last occasion. . .
Thus we ask now: even if the old rootedness is being lost in this age, may not a new ground and foundation be granted again to man, a foundation and ground out of which man's nature and all his works can flourish in a new way even in the atomic age?
. . . Perhaps the answer we are looking for lies at hand; so near that we all too easily overlook it. For the way to what is near is always the longest and thus the hardest for us humans. This way is the way of meditative thinking. Meditative thinking demands of us not to cling one-sidedly to a single idea, nor to run down a one-track course of ideas. Meditative thinking demands of us that we engage ourselves with what at first sight does not go together at all.
On the one hand in technology calculative thinking is sweeping over our world in a way which can't be stopped. It brings us many benefits. Yet at the same time it harms us if we come to be in bondage to it. If it can't be stopped, how can we both benefit from it and preserve ourselves from being a slave to it? Heidegger argues that meditative thinking can help us answer this question. Through it we can live in an attitude toward technology which says both Yes and No to calculative thinking and its product, technology. He calls this attitude, "releasement toward things."
Let us give it a trial. For all of us, the arrangements, devices, and machinery of technology are to a greater or lesser extent indispensable. It would be foolish to attack technology blindly. It would be shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the devil. We depend on technical devices; they even challenge us to ever greater advances. But suddenly and unaware we find ourselves so firmly shackled to these technical devices that we fall into bondage to them. Still we can act otherwise. We can use technical devices, and yet with proper use also keep ourselves so free of them, that we may let go of them any time. We can use technical devices as they ought to be used, and also let them alone as something which does not affect our inner and real core. We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature.
But will not saying both yes and no this way to technical devices make our relation to technology ambivalent and insecure? On the contrary! Our relation to technology will become wonderfully simple and relaxed. We let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside, that is, let them alone, as things which are nothing absolute but remain dependent upon something higher. I would call this comportment toward technology which expresses "yes" and at the same tirne "no," by an old word, releasement toward things.
Having this comportment we no longer view things only in a technical way. It gives us clear vision and we notice that while the production and use of machines demands of us another relation to things, it is not a meaningless relation. Farming and agriculture, for example, now have turned into a motorized food industry. Thus here, evidently, as elsewhere, a profound change is taking place in man's relation to nature and to the world. But the meaning that reigns in this change remains obscure.
If we are able to adopt the attitude of releasement toward things, we free ourselves to think about the meaning of all this technological innovation that surrounds us. This meaning is hidden behind all the machines, all the calculative thinking. We are dazzled by technological achievement and forget to think about what its significance really may be. This meaning often bursts upon us in the effects of technology we had not expected. E mail enables us to communicate quickly with friends all over the world. Yet we deal with so much of it that we seldom take time to sit in a quiet place and write slowly and carefully to a friend or loved one. Writing long hand suited such slow and careful expression of thought. Modern medical technology makes it possible for people to live longer. What should we do with those additional years? Should people retire at 70 rather than at 65 years of age? Releasement toward things makes it possible for us to be open to the mystery of this hidden meaning.
There is then in all technical processes a meaning, not invented or made by us, which lays claim to what man does and leaves undone. We do not know the significance of the uncanny increasing dominance of atomic technology. The meaning pervading technology hides itself. But if we explicitly and continuously heed the fact that such hidden meaning touches us everywhere in the world of technology, we stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself just in approaching us. That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery. I call the comportment which enables us to keep open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness to the mystery.
Releasement toward things and openness to the mystery belong together. They grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way. They promise us a new ground and foundation upon which we can stand and endure in the world of technology without being imperiled by it.
However things are not as easy as that. We live in a time of extreme danger, the danger that we may be so overrun by calculative thinking that we lose our very humanity in no longer valuing or making room for meditative thinking. Sometimes students resent having to take courses in history, literature and philosophy. They want to get on with learning the technical skills that they will need in future employment. They don`t see how these courses will help them achieve the goals they have set for themselves. What would Heidegger say to them?
But for the time being, we do not know for how long, man finds himself in a perilous situation. Why? Just because a third world war might break out unexpectedly and bring about the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the earth? No. In this dawning atomic age a far greater danger threatens,;precisely when the danger of a third world war has been removed. A strange assertion! Strange indeed, but only as long as we do not meditate.
In what sense is the statement just made valid? This assertion is valid in the sense that the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.
What great danger then might move upon us? Then there might go hand in hand with the greatest ingenuity in calculative planning and inventing indifference toward meditative thinking, total thoughtlessness. And then? Then man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature‹that he is a meditative being. Therefore, the issue is the saving of man's essential nature. Therefore, the issue is keeping meditative thinking alive.
Yet releasement toward things and openness to the mystery never happen of themselves. They do not befall us accidentally. Both flourish only through persistent, courageous thinking. . . .
