64 Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

Heidegger has not as yet thematized this kind of instrumentality as problematic in its own right in Being and Time. Nevertheless, a life lived merely in the project-oriented, everyday world dominated by equipment, as a mere cog in a mass machine, was deemed ultimately inauthentic by Heidegger; one can surely then say that the seeds of his later thought were beginning to gestate here as opposed to the idea that the latter thought was a rejection or abjuration of this earlier discussion. In ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ Heidegger notes:

a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order [bestellte] appears differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain … Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use … The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It sets the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines turning. This turning sets those machines in motion whose thrust sets going the electric current for which the long-distance power station and its network of cables are set up to dispatch electricity. In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears as something at our command. The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station. (QCT: 14–16)

Spengler’s confident prediction of the imminent demise of technics/the technological world, however, seems a little naïve in retrospect and certainly is nowhere to be found in Heidegger’s eschatological outlook. As it turns out, technology has proved itself far more flexible and resilient than Spengler supposed:

The machine, by its multiplication and its refinement, is in the end defeating its own purpose. In the great cities the motor-car has by its numbers destroyed its own value, and one gets on quicker on foot. In Argentine, Java, and elsewhere the simple horse-plough of the small cultivator has shown itself economically superior to the big motor implement, and is driving the latter out.50

Heidegger was not nearly so confident of the imminent demise of technology. He was adamant of course that the technological nature of our world and the holding sway of Enframing was not ‘a fate that compels’, at the same time, even in his later proclama-tions concerning the prospects for humanity in the technological era towards the end of his life, Heidegger appeared anything but sanguine.

As we have seen briefly in Chapter 2 and has been discussed in detail elsewhere,51 Heidegger’s concerns with the technological age simply do not reduce to anything like what we find in Spengler. Heidegger is interested in the essence of technology which is nothing technological. His position is a philosophically sophisticated and