Course Structure
Main Texts we will read and why
- "The Question Concerning Technology": Foundational for Heidegger's philosophy of technology, tracing the operations of 'Gestell'/enframing and how beings become 'standing reserve'.
- "Dialogue on Language with a Japanese": Introduces the danger of language, globalisation, the meeting and clash of different histories of being, and the colonisation of the planet by European civilisation and technology.
- "Science and Reflection": On the Relationship between the natural sciences, technology, and society including "culture".
- "The Turn": Here Heidegger addresses the possibility and necessity of a free relationship with technology. That is, how do we have to think, and what can we do in order to over-turn Gestell from within and not be enslaved by technology.
Course Curriculum
With the advent of LLMs and AI we are beginning to see the true face of technology. What Heidegger foresaw decades ago, the total technological enframing of the planet, is becoming increasingly our everyday reality. Our world is becoming ever more uniform and technicised. The essence of technology is Ge-Stell, the concentrated enframing of all beings — including nature, animals, and human beings — so that they stand ready for use at all times. Transhumanism promises that we might not only be able to extend our physical capacities but even live forever. Butto be trans-human means to be no longer human, and to become the plaything of technology, an extension of it.
Thus Heidegger foresees:
“An anarchy of catastrophes is upon us.”
And our question must be: How can there be a turning so that we can establish a free relationship with technology?
But Heidegger also foresaw something else and something entirely radical:
That technology may very well lead to an entirely
new experience of being!
In a conversation with Richard Wisser Heidegger pointed out: “I am not against technology. I do not think it demonic. Quite to the contrary. I see in technology, in its essence, that we are about to make a new experience with being.
This is what I call the Event.”
And in fact a major part of the new experience with being will be the encounter between Occident and Orient, between what was worlds apart but is now beginning to share in history.
“The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.”
Martin Heidegger
“Where there is danger, there the saving power grows also.”
Friedrich Hölderlin
Your Teacher:
Dr. Johannes A. Niederhauser
Johannes is the founder and Spiritus Rector of the Halkyon Academy.
His book, “Heidegger on Death and Being”, which was published by Springer in 2021, explores the relationship between being and negativity, concealment, and withdrawal — the most radical experience of which we can make because we are mortal. Heidegger’s diagnosis of technology is one of the four pillars of Johannes’ book and explores how in technics a new relationship with being is in the offing.
He understands his Halkyon Academy as a thoughtful active way of engaging with technology in a way that opens us out to experience, where technology disappears into the background, rather than replacing technology with experience.
