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From Heim, M. (1993) The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, New York: Oxford University Press:

What Heidegger called ‘the essence of technology’ infiltrates human existence more intimately than anything humans could create. The danger of technology lies in the transformation of the human being, by which human actions and aspirations are fundamentally distorted. Not that machines can run amok, or even that we might misunderstand ourselves through a faulty comparison with machines. Instead, technology enters the inmost recesses of human existence, transforming the way we know and think and will. Technology is, in essence, a mode of human existence, and we could not appreciate its mental infiltrations until the computer became a major cultural phenomenon.

Tags:cultural, Heidegger technology
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I’m continuing to work on my research proposal for my dissertation. Heidegger’s philosophical perspective is a significant part of my thesis, and I have been reading a lot of Heidegger lately. The following passage, from Lovitt’s introduction to The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, really spoke to me:

A destining of Being is never a blind fate that simply compels man from beyond himself. It is, rather, an opening way in which man is called upon to move to bring about that which is taking place. For man to know himself as the one so called upon is for him to be free. For Heidegger freedom is not a matter of man’s willing or not willing particular things. Freedom is man’s opening himself–his submitting himself in attentive awareness–to the summons addressed to him and to the way on which he is already being sent. It is to apprehend and accept the dominion of Being already holding sway, and so to be “taken into a freeing claim.”

…Man himself, through whom the ordering characteristic of Enframing takes place, may even be wholly sucked up into the standing-reserve and may come to exist not as the “openness-for-Being” (Da-sein), but as a merely self-conscious being knowing himself only as an instrument ready for use.

While I don’t have a solid grasp of what Heidegger refers to as Enframing, I understand the passages as speaking to the notion of emergence. In Heidegger’s ontology, the fundamental question he asks is: “What does it mean to be?” This is a fundamentally different question than the one Aristotle asks: “What is?” (in the sense of what “exists”). Our contemporary ontology tends to still work from an Aristotelian frame, where ontology becomes the theory and study of categorization, especially when it comes to computational ontology artifacts. Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis places Being within the realm of emergent phenomena, and Man’s being in particular as the ever-evolving state of emergent understanding.

Freedom, then, is the openning of being to that which is emergent and unfolding. It is not volition in the sense of exercising one’s will, for we are always immersed in an experiential world, and being thrown into the world as Dasein (man’s being), we are always emerging into(?) our being as part of the world, not separate from it. When we separate ourselves from the world–objectify it–we lose our being by transforming ourselves into nothing but commodities and tools that exist as objects within that world, albeit self-conscious ones.

Tags:Being, emergence, Heidegger, openness technology
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With all of the health problems I’ve had recently, I was surprised to find this in Mitcham’s Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy, in which he is discussing Heidegger’s conceptualization of technology:

When we suffer or are in pain, we are simply too close to what we are experiencing; we need distance, some self-knowledge, appreciation of who we really are and of our limitations. But this is acquired not through rejection or repression of the pain; it comes only with time and through naming the source of our pain by asking questions and talking about it, rendering our suffering or recalling its background of happiness in poetry and art, sitting quietly and experiencing its presence–or rather what is immediately and unobtrusively there, just on the other side of the curtain of our disturbed feelings–gradually standing back and becoming detached from the tossed surface of our conscious calculations.

Tags:cognition, experience, Heidegger, perception technology
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