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#22 Iain Thomson: Why Heidegger Thought Technology Was More Dangerous Than We Realize
33 Plays3 days ago
What if our deepest fears about AI aren't really about the machines at all—but about something we've forgotten about ourselves? In this episode, we speak with philosopher Iain D. Thomson (University of New Mexico), a leading scholar of Martin Heidegger, about his new book Heidegger on Technology’s Danger and Promise in the Age of AI.Together we explore Heidegger’s famous claim that “the essence of technology is nothing technological,” and why today’s crises—from environmental collapse to algorithmic control—are really symptoms of a deeper existential and ontological predicament.Also discussed:
– Why AI may not be dangerous because it’s too smart, but because we stop thinking
– Heidegger’s concept of “world-disclosive beings” and why ChatGPT doesn’t qualify
– How the technological mindset reshapes not just our tools but our selves
– What a “free relation” to technology might look like
– The creeping danger of lowering our standards and mistaking supplements for the real thing
– Why AI may not be dangerous because it’s too smart, but because we stop thinking
– Heidegger’s concept of “world-disclosive beings” and why ChatGPT doesn’t qualify
– How the technological mindset reshapes not just our tools but our selves
– What a “free relation” to technology might look like
– The creeping danger of lowering our standards and mistaking supplements for the real thing
For more info, visit ethicscircle.org.
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Transcript
Introduction of Ian D. Thompson
00:00:15
Speaker
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the A-Tech Podcast. Today, we are in conversation with Ian D. Thompson. Ian D. Thompson is an American philosopher at the University of New Mexico.
00:00:27
Speaker
He is a well-known expert on Martin Heidegger. And today, we're in conversation about his recent book, Heidegger on Technology's Danger and Promise in the Age of AI. Welcome to the show.
00:00:40
Speaker
Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me.
Ian's Philosophical Journey
00:00:43
Speaker
right, we're going to start with a little bit of background, Ian. So ah I guess, you know, we talked to some Heidegger scholars, but how does one become, ah how does one get steered towards becoming a Martin Heidegger scholar? Maybe you can tell us a little bit about yourself as we get going.
00:01:01
Speaker
Sure, I would guess that there's probably as many answers to that question as there are Heidegger scholars, a dwindling breed out there. um In my case, which is all I'll ill try and speak for, um I come from a small farm town. Well, it's pretty small farm town in Northern California, Davis, where the Cal Aggies, that's the UC Davis.
00:01:28
Speaker
um The campus was originally the agricultural branch of the UC system and it was where the farmers went to get educated in how to learn about the latest technologies.
00:01:39
Speaker
um On my father's side of the family, there was um my Gucher, my dad's dad, was a poet, and my father kept that up. So I had an attraction to, I'd written poetry my whole life, so I had an attraction to poetry and writing. I loved writing.
00:01:58
Speaker
And I thought I would probably be a writer of some sort.
Draw to Heidegger and Philosophical Challenges
00:02:01
Speaker
um I took philosophy when I got to Berkeley and because I, what's that big word philosophy mean? Never heard of that before.
00:02:09
Speaker
And um it was modern philosophy, which I figured was contemporary philosophy, but that's not what modern philosophy means. That means, you know, the period from Descartes to Comte or something. And um I didn't find it very interesting. I mean, my teacher was good, but it it was not for me.
00:02:29
Speaker
But I was doing poli-sci, and I came from a political family, and that was pretty natural and relatively easy for me. I got into political theory, and that's where I got into Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and that stuff I loved. So then I found out that there was this incontinental philosophy, and Berkeley happened to have Hubert Dreyfus, who was a well-known teacher of Heidegger, but also Foucault and others.
00:02:55
Speaker
And um I loved his classes. I loved the things we're reading in it. and I loved the other students who were in there arguing with me about stuff. So that got me into it. And then i basically chose, but I was choosing between i I thought I'd do law school. That's a case of what I call existential death when I realized that i actually didn't want to go to law school.
00:03:17
Speaker
And um I was then choosing between poli-sci and philosophy. And poli-sci was easier. I could get into more prestigious programs, but I wasn't interested it as much. So I went for philosophy. That was the tougher thing to do. And it was a struggle, actually. you know The market in philosophy, especially continental philosophy, has been bad for a long time.
Reconciling Heidegger's Philosophy and Politics
00:03:39
Speaker
But it was a good call on my part. I don't regret it. And the Heidegger stuff seems to have been, you know, what worked out best for me because, you know, a I think people realize he's very important and B, they can't understand him.
00:03:56
Speaker
So if you can understand something that other people have trouble understanding, but they they want to understand, you're in a pretty good position as a teacher. and kind of reminds me of like,
00:04:08
Speaker
clarifying poetry or something, you know, it's like being able to clarify Heidegger. It's probably kind of a thrilling experience as ah scholar to like and read something really obscure, kind of dense, and then bring some clarity to it.
00:04:24
Speaker
Yeah, no, I always loved reading poetry, talking about poetry. i was always good at it. I started with later Heidegger and then did early. I kind of the opposite way.
00:04:35
Speaker
And for later Heidegger, poetry is what we need to save us from nihilism. And I was very sympathetic to that view. So I was already kind of sold before I found out he was a Nazi.
00:04:46
Speaker
So then I had to struggle with the whole problem of what do you do that that the thinker whose views most resemble your own, was attracted to fascism.
00:04:57
Speaker
How do you work? And I'd gone through a version of that in high school where I was in love with and dating a black woman. I was reading Jefferson. The founding fathers were sort of my first philosophers and...
00:05:09
Speaker
And he's writing so beautifully about freedom that you know it's making me cry. And then I find out he has slaves. and And I just couldn't work through that contradiction at the time. So I spent a lot of time trying to figure that out in the case of Heidegger. And I i wrote, sort I think the first book saying, you can't just try and separate Heidegger the man from Heidegger the thinker. That's a facile move. it's As Gadamer said, it's an insult to a philosopher to say their life and their thought is disconnected.
00:05:38
Speaker
And in fact, they are connected. And then the question becomes, um
00:05:44
Speaker
so what do we do from there? like Are those ideas permanently um contaminated in some way by the evil of the Nazis? Or is there something there that's redeemable and salvageable? And and that was my first book.
00:05:59
Speaker
and and For the record, you answered that in the affirm are the latter, right? No, I just, I really love his Nazism. i know it's it's a It's a shocking thing that there are people in the world, you know, in... um Iran and and probably, i don't know, Russia, ah Dugan, I don't know. I've been read that guy's work, but there are right-wing Heideggerians. I think a lot of people think most Heideggerians must be right-wing Heideggerians. But in my all the Heideggerians I were was reading, Foucault and Derrida and Deleuze and all these people were far left-wingers. you know So the idea that Heidegger somehow led inexorably to fascism, I could tell that was false.
00:06:39
Speaker
because all the people who had read him the most went the opposite way. But there are people who think you know his anti-Semitism is a bonus. Yeah, we did an interview recently with a historian of political theory, kind of, I guess, maybe history historian of ideas, Carolyn Ashcroft.
00:06:59
Speaker
and And we talked about one you know her recent book called...
Heidegger's Influence and Technological Predictions
00:07:04
Speaker
I think it was catastrophic technology. Right. Anyway, it was, but it was, you know, B one point is like, there's a lot of people who were influenced by Heidegger. A lot of major thinkers, a lot of people were taught by him.
00:07:16
Speaker
Herbert Marcuse, Gunter Anders, Hannah Wendt, Hans Jonas. those are the some Those are some that she mentions. and And they took a lot from him. And obviously, you know, Herbert Marcuse was, you know, a more of like a Marxist than Marxist.
00:07:35
Speaker
Right. He was the guru of the new left. right and Angela Davis's teacher, Andy Feinberg's teacher. and Andy was my teacher. Marcuse was at UCSD where I i did my PhD and he died by the time I got there. but a lot of it you know One of the guys who supervised my work was one of his closest friends. so I kind of was chasing the ghost of Marcuse in a way because he was the figure who'd combined Heidegger, Marx, and Freud.
00:08:02
Speaker
which you know for me, I would say Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud are the three most important thinkers, but these are um very few people try to do that. You got a cool pedigree, Ian.
00:08:15
Speaker
I like it. Yeah, so maybe now turning kind of to the to the recent book. I mean, you have a few couple books on Heidegger, but the most recent one you know deals with Heidegger on technology.
00:08:27
Speaker
And I was just kind of curious, you know if someone asked you like in broad strokes, what, you know, what would you say is oh useful about turning to Heidegger when it comes to the to the to the philosophy of
Heidegger's Perspective on Technology
00:08:41
Speaker
technology? What would you say? Yeah. What's what's really useful about turning to Heidegger?
00:08:44
Speaker
Interesting question. Well, I would say um I'll answer the question in sec, but I would say that Part of what's useful about Heidegger is undermining the ubiquitousness of usefulness, like the very idea that things need to be useful.
00:09:02
Speaker
one of There's an interesting literature out there on Heidegger and Taoism, and one of the um
00:09:10
Speaker
stories from the Chuangzi, the middle Taoist period, um that Heidegger loved was about the bow tree and the use of uselessness. So he often emphasized the uselessness of ah being and of thinking. And I talk about that to some degree in the book, like stepping back from the demand that you be immediately useful.
00:09:32
Speaker
as a philosopher. Nonetheless, to do the Trojan horse move that I often do, I think he is very useful. um And he's useful precisely because understanding his thought has been like a crystal ball for predicting how technology would develop and unfold to this day and where it's going. So nobody better understood technology than him. And that's a fascinating thing that this kid from a little farming town and in New Germany, southern Germany would and you know end up being the most insightful thinker of technology.
00:10:08
Speaker
ah you might you there's There's other contenders for that throne, but they're all influenced by Heidegger profoundly. um and you know i Early in my career, had a series of debates with Feinberg, who I think is the leading Marxist philosopher of technology. and We went back and forth a bunch. and it's in It's very interesting, trying to figure out the differences.
00:10:29
Speaker
But yeah, the fact ill I'll get into why, but I think the fact that Heidegger understood where technology's coming from, let him grasp its inner logic. And once you grasp its inner logic, you can start predicting how it's going to play out historically in the world.
00:10:45
Speaker
And that's very powerful. That's an exciting foreshadowing for listeners as to where we're going here. um All right. So so let's let's kind of set up the conversation in in two chunks.
00:10:58
Speaker
um So there's Heidegger tells us about the the dangers of technology and and how they're actually symptoms of a deeper
Dangers of Nuclear, Biotech, and AI
00:11:06
Speaker
problem. So let's start with the former. Let's start just with the dangers. And we can be a little...
00:11:12
Speaker
a little selfish here and just kind of pick maybe our our favorite ones. And so I have couple that I want to ask you about, but I want to let you first tell us, Ian, what are the the technological problems and dangers that you see as most pressing?
00:11:28
Speaker
Interesting. Yeah. um I want to hear what you think are most important. So don't don't not do that out of modesty or whatever. But um in the book, I go through nuclear, biotech, and um large language but not just large language models, but deep learning algorithms led to both large language models and the advances in self-driving cars and other autonomous vehicles.
00:11:56
Speaker
So those four areas, I think, all have some really terrible... and frightening um consequences, as well as beautiful and promising and fascinating sides. So the title of the book is um Heidegger on the Danger and Promise of Technology in the Age of a i I might have shortened that a little. on Technology's Danger and Promise in the Age of AI. But Age of AI is also taken somewhat ironically, as you guys know, in the book.
00:12:25
Speaker
So um for me, I'm most troubled by nuclear. developments because those are so close to home here in New Mexico.
00:12:36
Speaker
You know, New Mexico not only invented the atomic bombs that we use to, um, wipe out, um, two, you know, i think 220,000 people or something in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also, um,
00:12:53
Speaker
launched us into this endless arms race that we're caught up in to this day. So, but in New Mexico today, the federal government gives more money for nuclear weapons research than it does for all other possible uses of money combined.
00:13:09
Speaker
So we're in a, in a situation where our economy is very reliant on really problematic technologies, oil extraction, natural gas extraction, and nuclear weapons.
00:13:20
Speaker
And there's some interesting things happening um around like nuclear fission and these fissions of clean nuclear energy that I think Heidegger thought we we'd solve our energy problems through nuclear fission.
00:13:33
Speaker
And it looks like we, I just read the headline today that we had some $1 billion dollars investment in a nuclear fission company coming to Albuquerque. So, you know, that's, he was, he predicted that and I thought, oh, maybe he was too optimistic, but we'll see. I think the, you know, the jury's still out on that one.
00:13:51
Speaker
On biotech, it's so fascinating. i mean, there's all this amazing stuff we can do, but there's also all these like the return of eugenics is quite alarming. um The possibilities of using it for bio war, bioterrorism. you know There's this thing called a gene drive where you can force a um a gene or a gene combination for infertility throughout, say, an insect pollinator population.
00:14:17
Speaker
in order to make it so your enemy country or region can't grow crops. And of course, the likelihood of that spreading throughout the world would be high. That's why that's listed up there as just as dangerous as nuclear weapons.
00:14:32
Speaker
um AI, that's kind of the most pressing one, the one we talk about the most, especially in the humanities, where we've become extremely alarmed by large language models and how they're threatening traditional ways of understanding and practicing education.
AI's Impact on Society and Ethics
00:14:48
Speaker
um Self-driving cars is fascinating. And, you know, various self-driving trucks, self-AI driven fighter pilots, drones, this kind of stuff, warfare, all of these things. I talk about a bunch of them in detail in the book and I find them, ah most of them have positive applications as well, but we um their downsides are are pretty dark and um much more alarming than most people realize.
00:15:19
Speaker
the The main alarm has been in large language models and the idea that AI is on the verge of becoming intelligent and a tro in a true sense of intelligent or even super intelligent and wiping out humanity, or in the case of the techno ah technophiles, often called the technobros, of saving humanity. That's the mission of OpenAI i that Sam Altman and and and friends are all in on that somehow we're going to create a new God that'll be so smart it can save us from the problems of global warming and atomic weapons and, you know war that we haven't been able to save ourselves from.
00:15:58
Speaker
And Heidegger, of course, speaks frequently about the temptations to create a new God will be strong, but we need to resist them. And they have this kind of view that i I lampoon a bit as it's as if they're taking Heidegger saying that only ah only another God can save us and imagining that we can you know cook up that God in a large language model lab.
00:16:24
Speaker
Yeah, you hit on all the ones that I'm most worried about. i will say as you were speaking about this, um I remember the, I don't know his his name, but that the Chinese geneticist who just you know decided upon himself to to edit, ah make the first you know CRISPR edited babies.
00:16:45
Speaker
and and When you see the interviewer, I guess it's like ah sort of like an interview, when you see the presentation, he seemed almost confused as to why everyone was up in arms. There's a dearth of understanding the gravity of what the whole thing, the catastrophic potential for the whole thing.
00:17:07
Speaker
So i think I think he needs to read a little bit of Heidegger, first of all. but That's funny. Yeah, I talk about how the famous moral imperative in Kant, you can because you must.
00:17:19
Speaker
Meaning like if you have a moral duty to jump into the river to save the kid, then you you can do it. Even if you can't do it, you can do it. And gets inverted through scientism and this dominance of technology into an unforgiving demand that we develop all possible technologies that if if you can, then you must.
00:17:42
Speaker
So his view is just, we can do this now. We can make better, stronger, faster kids. And, you know, the kids in that case, um it's an interesting one because he spent four years in jail and in China and came out ready to get back to work on the same stuff.
00:17:59
Speaker
So he still wants to do it, but he um didn't tell the parents. that So I think the father was HIV positive and he genetically modified the fetuses to turn off the receptor that would make it so they could get so that HIV could be transmitted to them.
00:18:16
Speaker
But there's actually other protocols and different ways to prevent HIV transmission from parents to child in utero. And um if you wanted to use gene editing to do that, at the very least, you should tell the parents, tell the hospital, subject it to an ethical oversight review board. There's all these protocols in place in contemporary research and he didn't follow any of them. That's part of why it was so scandalous and part of why it led to a lot of countries forbidding um genetic modification of germline embryos or ah or or making changes that could be genetically transmitted to the next generation because
00:18:56
Speaker
even though we've made big advances with CRISPR by changing the way we deliver the modifications. We used to use a virus and now we're using RNA. That's Moderna, which of course Trump's at war with, but it was a big ah big thing and extremely promising research coming out of that using mRNA to transform DNA. and is one of the, you know, we can do that super easily.
00:19:24
Speaker
It's almost like word processing software lets you rewrite the genetic code of a living organism. So the what that makes it possible to do and what the long-term consequences of that are not, neither of those questions is fully understood. And it's a very exciting frontier to get into if you're a biology researcher.
00:19:42
Speaker
But you know what will this modification that turns off the kid's ability to catch HIV, what and unknown side effects might that have later in life or even like down through the genetic generations, five, 10, 20 generations from now, what could that do?
00:19:59
Speaker
We don't know. So there's this huge unpredictability and yet there's tons of enthusiasm. And I'm on the editorial board of this post-human studies journal where I'm the only critic and they never send me anything, but it's always, um it's always a calls for how to transcend this, this rotting meat s sack that we're stuck in using, you know, technologies and, know,
00:20:26
Speaker
That's the Nietzschean program as Heidegger saw it, being carried out with cutting edge technologies. that This reminds me of something that to bring up Ashcroft again, that she mentioned in her book, this idea that like in um in the history of the West, there's this sort of Faustian strand where, you know so Faust,
00:20:49
Speaker
it that refers to the legend of Faust where, and that's a guy, you know basically the legend is a guy who trades his soul for um limit, limitless knowledge and power, that sort of thing. And, um and just this idea of like refusing to accept any limit.
00:21:09
Speaker
um And so, you know, like if, um if
00:21:21
Speaker
if if there's a limit related to something being ethical or natural, or even a limit connected to like a political society, it's like that must be transcended if it's going to mean ah gains in power or gains in knowledge.
00:21:37
Speaker
Anyway, that just kind of reminds me of what you're saying would when you said we, we can, we must, because we can, you know, ah it seems like we must, know, ah it when it comes to a potential increase in our knowledge, a potential increase in our power. It's like we have no ability to say no in those kind of
Critique of the Technological Mindset
00:21:59
Speaker
situations. Nice. Yeah.
00:22:00
Speaker
The Faustian bargain. It's also another great image is the one, and they they're both from Goethe, but or at least he drew on them and popularized them, the idea of the sorcerer's apprentice.
00:22:12
Speaker
who yeah we got it in disney and but it goes back to i traced it back a couple thousand years um the it's like the sorcerer's apprentice enchants the broom to do their work for them or the bucket or whatever it is and then they don't know spell to turn it off that's us like we unleashed technology but now we're and very much like tools of what we're supposed to be our tools the idea that So there was a, the future of life was a, is a nonprofit institution that, that called for a a moratorium, a temporary halt on the development of all, uh, large language models faster than, or more powerful than chat GPT four or four zero.
00:22:55
Speaker
And, um, Elon Musk, who is one of the founders of, of open AI. before he took his money and went home when they wouldn't let him be CEO when they started succeeding. um he He was one of the signatories along with a bunch of other quite respectable people, Andrew Yang, this interesting presidential candidate.
00:23:13
Speaker
um ah one of the original three founders of Apple, all and then like hundreds of thousands of other people signed it calling for this halt. And it had no effect. Like it didn't, it made all sorts of headlines.
00:23:26
Speaker
Jeffrey Hinton, the guy, he's like the godfather of ah modern AI. He is often called, he got the Turing Award, which was the Nobel Prize in computer science because there's no Nobel Prize in computer science. And then he got the Nobel Prize in chemistry or biology, I forget which one. So he's gotten every award you can get for his development of these these large language models.
00:23:47
Speaker
And he's the one saying, you better and i quote him in the book, you better enjoy the time you've you've got because there might not be much left. ah ha Like this thing is about to become super intelligent and then all bets are off. are you know That'll be like ants trying to predict what humans are going to do.
00:24:06
Speaker
we don't We just don't know what will happen next. And I try and deflate that fear. I think that's overblown and we are nowhere near ah the super intelligent large language models that are either going to save us as the technophiles want or or destroy us as these displaced vanatological urges are suggesting.
00:24:28
Speaker
Instead, I think that the dangers are just that we are leveling everything down to um what can be understood by most people. Heidegger talks about that as averageness.
00:24:42
Speaker
it So can I jump in here real quick, Robertus? I know you're about to, I just wanted to say something real quick, like as a kind of way of, so, you know, cause we just brought up this idea that like for Heidegger, there's all these, you know, well,
00:24:55
Speaker
In Heidegger's time, you know, it's kind of maybe the more the nuclear threat. That's the ah primary form of alarming technology. But I think also he considered World War II in a way to be like a sort of outpouring of the technological mindset as well. right At any rate, so we have all these alarming technological things. And then in Heidegger, though, it's like, actually, this is sort of a symptom. these are These are all symptoms of something deeper, ah sort of ontological predicament.
00:25:24
Speaker
um Now, what do you think about, this might be like a, is a way into that. What about this kind of different idea? Cause I'm just thinking about, okay, one problem we seem to have is the ability to say no to gains and efficiency and so forth. And, and I had this idea of like, well, you know, maybe what explains that is the fact that we evolved in environments of scarcity. You know, it's like our brain, I mean, what, what about like kind of naturalistic explanation? like, you know, our brains, they were just,
00:25:54
Speaker
they they meant They were attuned to kind of conserve effort, to seize quick gains, to avoid losses. And so we have trouble saying no to these technologies that um seem to increase efficiency. And it's sort of um it seems like a almost like a biological problem. I don't know. like What do you think about that kind of perspective?
00:26:20
Speaker
Intriguing hypothesis. Is it true that all humans evolved in science? Positions of scarcity? or I don't know. I don't know. I really don't know anything about it. Roberto knows a lot more. anyway I'm just speculating here. that If that was the cause, then we could, and it was genetic, then we could rewrite those genes in principle and CRISPR. Yeah. cri who say that you know What could go wrong with that? i don't if you've seen the firefly.
00:26:51
Speaker
uh series that or the movie where they basically try to turn off the gene for aggression or anger and they they end up turning off the gene for desire and everyone just like sits down and dies so none of them had red freud they just skipped that more heidegger more importantly i would say but yeah i'm not against science obviously but yeah heidegger saw that um his explanation is more that The way humanity, especially in the West, understands being is something that shapes everything else.
00:27:24
Speaker
And it's something that we're primarily receptive to. We don't get to decide to change how we're going to understand what things are. We can't make the desire for a new understanding of being the goal of a long-term project like a moon landing, as Dreyfus used to like to say.
00:27:42
Speaker
you know we couldn't just If I became president, I couldn't say, okay, direct everyone to but within five years, we're going to understand being differently. but you just assign You could just assign being in time to everybody. Everyone has to read being in time now.
00:27:54
Speaker
Being in time doesn't do it because that's early Heidegger. who's still He's still in metaphysician. You need later Heidegger. Actually, i think you need the thinkers who go beyond Heidegger.
00:28:04
Speaker
and know Heidegger heidi was always... and note like Americans invited him to a Heidegger conference and he hated America. He wasn't going to come. But he said, you shouldn't have a conference on Heidegger.
00:28:16
Speaker
should have a conference on the matter of thinking where you take it further. Don't get obsessed with like the words I wrote. Think about the phenomenon that I'm talking about and develop it further for yourselves.
00:28:28
Speaker
And that's the that's the view of the American Heideggerians, who are often dismissed for that very reason as like not true believers by the Orthodox Heideggerians, who ironically, nonetheless, don't seem to understand the words very well because they're not heavy they're not focusing on the phenomenon. They're trying to just put words together and deduce their meaning.
00:28:49
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned Hubert Dreyfus. I feel like that was kind of his thing, wasn't it? That he wanted you to really think about the phenomenon in view. like if If Heidegger's writing about death, like we actually do have to think about death to like really appreciate what he's saying. and Anyway.
00:29:05
Speaker
and we to We have to think about death to the point where we realize that he's not talking about death. like This is my book that came out a month before the technology book is one I've been working on for 20 years or more.
00:29:19
Speaker
And it's about death. And it's making the argument that is still facing massive resistance that death in being in time doesn't mean croaking. It doesn't mean kicking the bucket. It doesn't mean what we mean in English by death.
00:29:33
Speaker
That's what Heidegger calls demise. And he, for very specific reasons, distinguishes what he's talking about, existential death, the collapse of your practical world, from demise, from the whatever happens when you reach the end of your life, whatever happens to your self.
00:29:50
Speaker
That's a paradoxical thing. But anyway, that's maybe for another podcast. thats so please is that the ah So you were mentioning in the book that we're in an existential predicament or maybe ah an ontological predicament.
00:30:04
Speaker
So does that tie into those comments on on death? Maybe can you just tell us about that a little bit? Sure. um I'll have to think about how it ties in. But the... um So the ontological predicament that we're in is that the understanding of being that attunes us all in increasingly in this late modern age is one that makes us feel like life is um increasingly meaningless.
00:30:36
Speaker
has no
Essence of Technology and Postmodern Views
00:30:37
Speaker
meaning. So that's the problem of nihilism, the problem of meaninglessness. And um some people want to be hipsters, I know, on the internet and say, like, nihilism's great. It's not a problem. It frees you up.
00:30:49
Speaker
But we're seeing all this kind of weaponized nihilism, like school shootings and people who, you know, troll. They don't care about the truth. They just want to, like, make people angry and all this stuff.
00:31:00
Speaker
So there's a sense of people no longer experiencing things as full of meaning. but instead experiencing everything as what Heidegger calls bestand.
00:31:11
Speaker
That's like a meaningless resource just standing by to be efficiently optimized. And that's what he called the technological understanding of being. So when we're trapped in this technological understanding of being, we increasingly see everything.
00:31:24
Speaker
around us the world has stuff just waiting to be used as efficiently as possible to be brought into its um optimal condition where we get the most for the least and we increasingly apply that to ourselves as well so my students come in they've been raised by the society this is the ai problem and they think what you know The goal of an education is to get a degree so you can make as much money as possible.
00:31:53
Speaker
You should get the degree that you can do that will let you make the most money. where What you can do and includes what you can do with AI. And why would you spend hours reading a chapter when you could feed it into the AI model and have it spit out a summary?
00:32:08
Speaker
Why would you spend days, months writing a paper when you could have ai write it or draft it or revise it and and do it much faster? right And that's the issue of, it gets talked about as cheating, but cheating isn't what matters.
00:32:23
Speaker
What matters is that it's um cheating people out of the chance to learn how to live a meaningful life. I have a feeling that both Sam and I are about to give stories about how we're becoming like just data, you know, pieces of like makers of data. That's how we treat ourselves.
00:32:42
Speaker
Because I agree that the, you know, obviously the instrumentalization of education, very pressing problem, but like, even yeah there's even more so like subtle versions of this. Like i start, this is ridiculous. i've I've talked on the show before about my sleep app and how I don't even really try to sleep well anymore.
00:33:01
Speaker
i try to get a high score on my, so that's ridiculous. So yeah, my wife. What's your sleep app? I use Aura now. Ah, there you go. So yeah. Almost all the Heideggerians I know are using Oura rings.
00:33:14
Speaker
The difference is that we're reflexive about, but very as you are, about how it um transforms your relationship to things.
00:33:24
Speaker
Mm-hmm. So yeah, if you're just trying to get a good score and not paying attention to how your body feels, that's bad. and But if the score actually correlates with what's happening in your body and helps put you in touch with your body in a way that maybe you're experiencing as quantification, that could be good.
00:33:44
Speaker
just You've got to get past thinking of it just as a score and think about more as like, how do I feel? Yeah. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. and But it, you know, um I think the the the gamification portion of it sort of lulls you into not doing that. But um that's one thing. I do have one other example. I'm sorry, i I have an obsession with wine, as Sam well knows, and basically anyone that listens to the show knows.
00:34:08
Speaker
So um I think we talk about it in every episode, Sam. It's imperative. Yeah. Yeah. And now I have an app that helps me, you know, kind of keep track of what I taste and all that and and quiz me and all that. And and I'm with you.
00:34:21
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. it's so It's a very good app. um And so what's happening, though, is that, you know, my wife is pointing out like, you're not even enjoying drinking this wine anymore. it's just like, can you can you you know guess the region or whatever? So wow is that true?
00:34:36
Speaker
um I think I have a couple of different modes. I have like when I start, um I want to make sure that ah you know, I try to quiz myself and and, you know, the do the blind tasting.
00:34:46
Speaker
But after, you know, I input that, i you know, that's the right. I still got the whole rest of the glass. Right. So that's ah that's pure Dasein. Is it quantified on a zero to 100 scale?
00:34:59
Speaker
ah yeah Yes. Well, one to 10, but yes. and but That's a problem. Yeah.
00:35:07
Speaker
Yeah. Because what, there's no such thing as the perfect wine. you know there's There's the wine that connects to your palate in the state that it's in now.
00:35:20
Speaker
and you know Someone one could give you the most amazing wine in the world and if you don't have a well enough developed palate, it's not even going to taste good to you, right? And then at a certain point, you start feeling like expectations to really enjoy this very fancy bottle. And if you don't, you shouldn't feel like your need to learn to appreciate that palette to continue moving up this quantified scale.
00:35:45
Speaker
I think that's got to be ah instead of recognition that pushes you to develop your own sense of what's good. Right. and And articulate that in your own way.
00:35:55
Speaker
Get out of, break out of Das Mahan, as high early Heidegger would say, break out of these ubiquitous norms of propriety, which are often connected to and reinforce markets. you know, in ah in our capitalist economy. Yeah, it's so you can pay you to take a test to be a a SOM, right? So, yeah. oh And there's a right answer on these tests and the right answer is the more expensive ones, the better one?
00:36:20
Speaker
ah Yeah, i mean, most of it is can you can you blind taste a varietal and get the region, maybe get even the vintage, the year, right? So that's that's mostly what it's about.
00:36:32
Speaker
Interesting. I have a friend who's at the Harvard Society of Fellows and it's like a very high level finishing school for philosophy PhDs and other PhDs.
00:36:43
Speaker
And one of the positions you get assigned there is like the sommelier. And your job is you get $2,000 a month or more and you have to pick the wine that goes with the meal and pleases the palates of the very high level ah wine aficionados who are in attendance. And it's fascinating because that any world like that is fascinating, right? I think Nietzsche says homo sapiens.
00:37:12
Speaker
Sapiens means taste. We are the beings who like learn to make fine differentiations in our tastes of things. The mistake is thinking there's some universal right answer and that and trying to like adapt your taste to that answer rather than recognizing that as you develop a finer sensitivity to things, it becomes a way to cultivate your own talents and capacities in a way that allows you to come into your own.
00:37:39
Speaker
And it's that latter path, not trying to fit into this universalized, uniform vision of perfection that enables you to lead live a meaningful life.
00:37:49
Speaker
Again, this is chapter in the death book. But yeah.
00:37:55
Speaker
Yeah, the the whole, all this like quantified self- stuff is super interesting. And I feel like that that would count as like kind of data points in favor of the Heidegger's theory that treating everything as a um a resource to be optimized. I mean,
00:38:15
Speaker
the habit trackers, yeah the sleep productivity apps that we were just kind of mentioning. And then I think you know you can see that kind of phenomenon and other domains, like the obsession with innovation, like every, I don't know, every corporate environment, you know it's just like everything has to be upgraded constantly.
00:38:36
Speaker
It's like a ceaseless right permanent search for yeah Yeah. The military too. And think of like Doge, which is ongoing, right? The Department of Government Efficiency, the Musk thing.
00:38:49
Speaker
I mean, that was driven by this optimization imperative, get the most for the least. And what that really meant in practice was, firing the high-paid, well-educated, white-collar civil servants who went to Georgetown, et cetera, and got good degrees and had these good jobs with a retirement and health insurance. And they get an email from an AI firing them.
00:39:11
Speaker
It used to be you had to bring in like an executive team that would fire for you because nobody wants to be the one firing people. That's an uncomfortable human situation to crush someone's life like that, right? So they'd bring in a team who was like the professional life crushers.
00:39:24
Speaker
These people have made that even more efficient by just doing it by AI. And then they put in the AGI, as they as Musk and others like to call it, which was the name they originally using for like a truly intelligent AI, which doesn't exist.
00:39:38
Speaker
And they're claiming that now a true a and AGI, or artificial general intelligence, which again is a misnomer, but it's the one of the terms they use in that in those circles is something that can kind of pass the popularized Turing test where the person who calls in like, why aren't I getting my social security check?
00:39:58
Speaker
Doesn't know they're talking to an AI. Like it passed. They think they're talking to human, but anyone who's actually spent much time dealing with insurance companies or any group that's trying to minimize their payouts and maximize their profits knows that this is in the,
00:40:14
Speaker
that animated superhero movie where Mr. Incredible is is the guy helping people get the get the insurance they need. It's only when you find the high-level person who's been working there long enough to know how um to actually advise you and goes off script and isn't just following the algorithms about how to help you that you can resolve your problem. Otherwise, it's a giant waste of time and just frustrating and you go you quit because it you just give up.
00:40:41
Speaker
And that's the world we're increasingly heading into. So it's not it's like false optimization or it's optimizing profit, but it's minimizing the successfulness of these bureaucratic organizations. And that's going to have massive repercussions down the line when people can't get their money, they can't get their health insurance, and there are more people on the street, more people dying out in public. And that's all right. don't know where you what it's like where you all live, but it's a big issue here.
00:41:08
Speaker
yeah So what ah just real quick, what would you say to a kind of devil's advocate type of thing where it's like, all right, it's one thing to claim that there's a trend of treating so much of life as a sort of standing as a resource to be optimized, something like that.
00:41:29
Speaker
It's one thing that's claimed that's a trend, but to say that's like the reigning understanding of being, that seems like a more of much stronger claim. And, you know, someone might be like, you know, isn't that a little bit of an exaggeration? Cause like, I'm pretty sure I don't,
00:41:46
Speaker
Like at some level, like my children, like i don't, I'm pretty, you know, I think they are real. I count them as inside of being, but also I really hope I'm not treating them as like resources to be optimized at least all the time. Anyway. How how old are your children?
00:42:01
Speaker
three in one. Maybe later they can be optimized. They're just not ready for it do you try and like give them the healthiest food? and like Are you giving them like those mobiles that maximize their cognitive development?
00:42:13
Speaker
um I just give them bread. you know we shall he yeah He just said, give your children bread with lots of butter on them. Most of the Heideggerians I know, we're not claiming to critique the technological world from outside it. We're like,
00:42:27
Speaker
We're the residents of the insane asylum diagnosing the the world we're in. So for me, i with my kids, we were, you know, oh, we got to get them the mobile with this maximally cognitively stimulating. And, you know, um oh, they're taking a bath. You can't just like enjoy talking to them. You got to like help them learn the ABC's song.
00:42:49
Speaker
So there is this tendency, I think. the bottom Use the bath bubbles that has vitamin C in it, you know. that That'll optimize That's since my time. But, you know, it undermines your ability to meaningfully connect to your child, where meaningfully connect to them means something like notice what they're genuinely good at and help them figure out fun, enjoyable ways to cultivate and develop that.
00:43:15
Speaker
rather than trying to impose some open-ended framework of expectation on them, which is 99% of like elite society is about, like you you have no second to wait. If you're not optimizing your children all time, they won't get into the right preschool, and then they won't get into the right and elementary school and then they won't get in the right middle school high school right they'll never end up on the right law firm or whatever it is and that whole i have friends who are in that world and it's it's a it's a waking nightmare to me to see it but in society's terms that's success that's like the best life what could be better than that yeah
00:43:55
Speaker
I feel like my my teacher side is ah is coming up and and I just want to ah tie a couple of things that we're saying to some like pretty choice Heideggerian phrases here.
Non-Technological Nature of Technology
00:44:07
Speaker
Good. um The essence of technology is nothing technological. so We've been talking about this basically this whole time. So the idea is that um essentially this, but what um we've another way we've heard it described is as it's totalizing, right? It's it's logic is such that it pervades, it seeks to access every part of reality.
00:44:30
Speaker
ah So that's that's one phrase, and maybe I'll just give you another one so you can kind of um maybe talk about a little bit. But the essence of technology pervades our existence. And this is not merely the claim that all day long we use technology, although in my waking life, I'd say 90% it.
00:44:48
Speaker
I'm on some device, but that's not exactly the claim. The claim is is something deeper. um it Technology changes our way of seeing reality itself, right? or of It's a frame of mind.
00:45:03
Speaker
As you said, we're in the insane asylum diagnosing the patients, right? Yeah. Yeah, and that's the second point you just made, Roberto, is the one Samuel was devil's advocating me on.
00:45:16
Speaker
Because the idea that we're um our lives are increasingly pervaded by the essence of technology, essence of technology is there meant in the sense of in framing. And in framing is this optimization imperative, to put it simply, to get the most for the least, to treat everything increasingly as meaningless stuff standing by for efficient optimization.
00:45:37
Speaker
But that there's, as I say in the book, I go through what that The essence of technology is nothing technological means. And it has three senses. The first, the second is that one, the one we just talked about that it's in framing.
00:45:50
Speaker
And we live in that world. It's not just that it's devices, but that we tend to, but you know, it's like, I got to go get get my score on on sleep. You know, like we're we are optimizing all the time. Increasingly, that wasn't even a thing 10 years ago, right? But now now it is what's going to be the case 10 years from now.
00:46:08
Speaker
You know, what will we be optimizing? Our breathing or whatever. start You can easily start imagining examples that can lead to profitable corporations, you know.
00:46:19
Speaker
But the um the first sense of the essence of technology is nothing technological, is that um the essence of technology has nothing to do with any it's not it's not like the essence that all technological devices share in common.
00:46:33
Speaker
So it's not like we look at, you know, Aura rings and Apple phones and desktops and and everything and then think, what do they all have in common? It's rather the way of understanding what it means to be that was in place in order for those technologies to get developed and that kind of pushed their development.
00:46:51
Speaker
And that's the in framing. sense, the second sense. And then the salvific sense we haven't talked about is that there's a third sense of the essence of technology, which is that the second sense of the essence of technology, where it's the technological understanding of being, the understanding of being as um nothing but meaningless stuff to be optimized,
00:47:13
Speaker
That is an understanding of being. So being is the ultimate essence of technology. And being has been understood very differently throughout Western history in at least three to five different ways.
00:47:27
Speaker
And that we are caught up in this technological one, which for Heidegger is grounded in The metaphysics that Nietzsche was the first to articulate, but that we're caught in this late modern Nietzschean technological metaphysics and that all the technological stuff we're complaining about is just symptoms of that.
00:47:47
Speaker
And if we really want to um move out of this growing nihilism, this growing malaise and sense of the meaninglessness of things, we need to transform the underlying understanding of being that's ah motivating all that.
00:48:03
Speaker
So for Heidegger, are we like all kind of secret Nietzscheans? And then i also wanted to ask like, What's bad? Someone might be like, oh, what are you talking about?
00:48:17
Speaker
I don't like Nietzsche. When I read in Nietzsche, i put that I put that down in a minute. like i think i but I think there's real moral values. like I don't think you can just... Anyway, like whatever. You might not be a subjectivist or a perspectivalist.
00:48:28
Speaker
you know There's plenty of philosophers who are not perspectivalists. But maybe I just had the thought of, like isn't there this kind of idea that, well... well there's a way in which our philosophy is like built into our everyday practical actions. Like, yeah, you might think you're not a Nietzschean, but maybe like you do all this, you buy your kids all these like weird things that like enhances their productivity. and and Exactly. We're all wearing Nietzschean glasses that we don't notice because we're seeing through them. We don't see them.
00:48:59
Speaker
So I remember seeing a car drive by with a bumper sticker that said, Nietzsche's dead, signed yeah And I laughed, but then I thought, okay, but here you are using your car as like a means to get out the message that you still believe in God or whatever it is.
00:49:17
Speaker
So you're optimizing your religion in some, you're using what for Heidegger is Nietzscheanism at its core. And your but yeah so the anti-Nietzsche person can still be like metaphysically Nietzschean.
00:49:34
Speaker
Now, Nietzscheans get mad and Heidegger because they will say there's much more to he to Nietzsche than what Heidegger sees. I mean, Heidegger is basically...
00:49:46
Speaker
blaming um the Holocaust on Nietzsche. And they'll say, but Nietzsche wasn't a Nazi and Heidegger was. So how is how is it that Heidegger the Nazi is tarring the non-Nazi Nietzsche with the Nazi brush? Kaufman was driven insane by this and but his first book is like a a denazification of Nietzsche.
00:50:09
Speaker
which we still have to, you know, the truth is that Nietzsche is a much more problematic feature figure than we've acknowledged in order to make him like a philosopher, which Heidegger was among the very first to do. Nietzsche was like a crazy literary maniac.
00:50:24
Speaker
The idea that he was an important philosopher was something that had to be established by philosophers like Heidegger, then later like Kaufman. Interesting. Yeah. So... I've got a paper coming out on this. I've written about it a lot, but like Nietzsche and Heidegger mean different things by nihilism.
00:50:40
Speaker
They mean different things by metaphysics. So when Heidegger says Nietzsche is still a metaphysician, even though he dedicated his thought to overcoming metaphysics and Nietzsche is a nihilist, even though he dedicated his whole life to overcoming nihilism, the Nietzscheans get mad.
00:50:55
Speaker
But part of it is understanding that they mean different things. So Nietzsche could in his own terms be right that he's not a metaphysician. I think he Might be, actually. I have problems with that one. But he could be right in his own terms that he's not a nihilist.
00:51:09
Speaker
Again, I think there's problems. But um that wouldn't touch Heidegger's critique. Because Heidegger's critique is that Nietzsche was the first to articulate the ontotheology that we're still in.
00:51:22
Speaker
So for Heidegger, the essence of metaphysics is ontotheology. And Ananto theology is an attempt, it basically goes all the way back to Thales and Anaximander and first comes together in Plato.
00:51:34
Speaker
It's an attempt to grasp all reality by getting like the innermost core and the outermost perspective at the same time and linking those two together. So you doubly ground reality in the inside and in the outside.
00:51:47
Speaker
The outside in, that's the Theo, and the inside out, that's the onto. So we're still doing this, even if we're you know if we are um cosmologists trying to understand where the big bang come from came from, what banged the big bang. or worst That's the Theo.
00:52:03
Speaker
So even if you think, I'm an atheist, I don't believe in God, you're still trying to get outside the hole and explain it and so from the outside in. And people are still you know trying to do the ontological thing there that Thales started when he said the archae is water, when they say you know it's it's subatomic particles or it's superstrings.
00:52:23
Speaker
you know They were still trying to find the tiniest little... building blocks that everything else is made of. And the way, heide so in Heidegger's history of being, there's different ages.
Ontotheology and Historical Understanding of Being
00:52:34
Speaker
And what stabilizes the ages is are these ontotheologies. They provide kind of the anchors that allow what I call constellations of intelligibility to take hold and spread.
00:52:45
Speaker
you get these relatively durable ages and they're unified by their shared, even if not explicit, their shared common understanding of what it means to be anything at all. And because everything intelligible is, in some sense, when we change our understanding of what it means to be anything, we end up changing our understanding of everything, more or less. And that's what we're doing. We're caught up in this transformation where we're increasingly treating everything as eternally recurring will to power is the nietzschean way to put it that is nothing but force striving against force to keep force in force as long as possible that's bashtan that's everything getting reduced to meaningless resources and if you're it's interesting to think about what we don't treat that way like is there something in your life your children whatever your your loves that you don't treat that way and then ask can it resist
00:53:38
Speaker
will it continue to be able to resist being optimized? Or is it increasingly going to fall under the purview of these of this technological optimization imperative? And think Heidegger thought the latter, although he believed in cultivating these marginal practices, Dreyfus emphasized that.
00:53:55
Speaker
I think Heidegger's view is the only way out is through. We have to push this understanding. It's not accelerationist exactly, but it's the idea that when we see where this understanding is going,
00:54:06
Speaker
then the worst the very worst scenario becomes, it like opens up a view that lets us understand something that can save us. Would you say the whole like way in which, I don't know, it seems to me based on personal experience and what other people have said that like students often are in like a default ethical relativism kind of, that's like the default student position. um And I was just kind of wondering, would that also be sort of,
00:54:37
Speaker
evidence in favor of what heidegger is saying because like it seems like if everything is just will to power it's like yeah there's no objective morality it's just like you get to decide whatever it is is right and wrong it's just up to you uh do your thing and like if you think it's right it's right don't know is that kind of speaking to this It's a good good it's good question, and it's a big, complicated issue.
00:55:06
Speaker
um I think a lot of people would resist the reading of Nietzsche as a relativist, but Heidegger does read him that way and shows textual evidence that Nietzsche thought even like the principle of non-contradiction was relative to the organic form of life that we are and that some massively different other kind of organism like a planet sized being might not need to believe that either a or not a ah um instead could you know function perfectly fine without that so for Nietzsche truths are just the prejudices we the form of life that we are can't live without in that reading of Nietzsche that's very grounds everything and will to power in my experience of students
00:55:47
Speaker
Students, this is 27, eight years now teaching. Students come in, freshman absolutism. They believe what they've been told by their parents and preachers. And then they become sophomoric relativists where anything goes. And then junior level nihilists where they think nothing matters anymore.
00:56:04
Speaker
And then if you make it all the way through, you become a senior level pluralist where you realize that there's different ways of understanding things. And each of them, if they're genuinely meaningful, has their truth.
00:56:16
Speaker
That doesn't mean they're relativistic in the problematic way in most cases. It means you have to be sensitive to the frameworks of meaning that you're bringing with you or that you're encountering in order to not try and like squeeze some different framework into your own.
00:56:33
Speaker
I think you just described my the narrative arc of my undergrad. I write it on the board sometimes. just There's just more wine and Yeah.
00:56:45
Speaker
yeah Interesting. ah Sam, should we get into the ethics? ah Getting more closer into that? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, maybe, i don't know, like, it'd be interesting to talk about, like,
00:56:58
Speaker
okay, you know, if if putting that bumper sticker on your car is sort of expressing, even in a subtle way, um this this sort of technological worldview or this worldview where you reduce everything to a resource.
00:57:14
Speaker
um What, yeah, what would it look like to be more free with, not, yeah, not, What's what's like a more positive vision?
00:57:26
Speaker
ah Writing poetry, being in the Black Forest? like I don't know. like what yeah What is like a more positive thing? Tell us what to do, Ian. thats can Tell what to do. Great guru, Ian.
00:57:36
Speaker
We've hiked to your mountaintop. through the magic of technology. We're confused and need help. Yeah. So I do talk about that at the end of ah the technology book, that my art book. I wrote a book, Heidegger Art and Postmodernity.
00:57:51
Speaker
Postmodernity, that's a very... um misused label. The way that was used in the 90s is what Heidegger's calling late modernity. It means sort of this relativistic view in which there's no meta narratives, etc.
00:58:05
Speaker
And I go through that in the book. But Heidegger's sort of the father of postmodernism, and he meant it in the literal sense of getting beyond the modern age. So the modern age is Descartes to Kant, and that's basically the way humanity understood itself after Descartes. Descartes showed us, he proved to us phenomenologically that um the most certain of all certitudes was that we're thinking.
00:58:31
Speaker
We could doubt everything else, but we can't doubt that doubt is. So there's a kind of like immediately reflexive certitude to thought itself. And that became the axiomatic foundation of modernity.
00:58:43
Speaker
And then you get Kant, who in Heidegger's terms thinks Descartes' unthought. He takes that idea of like a cogito, a point of light, and makes that the basis of ethics.
00:58:55
Speaker
right Ethics is just universalize, only act on that maxim that you can at the same time will to be a universal law. So can i um pick that rose to give to my um mom on her birthday? No. What if every kid picked a rose from the garden to give their mom on her birthday? There'd be no roses for everyone to enjoy. So no, you may that's unethical. That's evil.
00:59:15
Speaker
Evil is treating yourself as an exception. and um in politics that's liberalism right each person gets as we the job of the state is to protect the realm where each person gets as much freedom as is compatible with everyone else having that much freedom and in art it's aesthetics it's art is the experience of a subject of an art object and that our object itself reflects the subject's subjectivity in some way so when i'm in my car and a great song comes on and I'm really grooving to it, I'm having an erlebeness, a lived experience of that where I feel more alive. I feel like I've gotten outside my subjectivity and connected to some work. And if I start thinking about the lyrics, then I start wondering what Cobain was thinking when he was writing those words, you know, and that's aesthetics.
01:00:04
Speaker
Now, Heidegger's view is Nietzsche thinks Kant's unthought, meaning he's the one who thinks, so so Kant, for Nietzsche, kills God. Kant, when Nietzsche doesn't kill God, Nietzsche says, like, this already happened a long time ago. The star went out and I'm just bringing you the news.
01:00:21
Speaker
So Kant kills God when he shows us that we can't know that God exists. So basically, Protestantism kills God. When you have to make a leap of faith to believe, you know, you have to believe you can't know. The Catholics thought you could know. God built into your nature that you were capable of knowing him.
01:00:37
Speaker
It'd be a weird, cruel joke if God made you unable to know God's existence and left you in the dark. But the Protestant revolution is, no, you can't know that. You have to have a leap of faith to believe or not believe, but it's not an object of knowledge.
01:00:49
Speaker
But Kant tries to keep the whole Judeo-Christian value system. So this is in the Pale Criminal in Zarathustra. The Pale Criminal is Kant, I argue. He's the guy who he kills God but steals the Judeo-Christian value system in order to atone for the guilt of the crime.
01:01:05
Speaker
Nietzsche thinks the Judeo-Christian value system just doesn't work anymore. Like it's not working for us. It's making people feel bad about themselves. It's not empowering them. It's not letting us live lives that are cut to the measure of the 20th and 21st century.
01:01:20
Speaker
So what we need is a philosophy of self-empowerment. And that's what Nietzsche is great on. Are you feeling down? Are you feeling weak? Do you feel like your people or yourself has been overlooked.
01:01:31
Speaker
Nietzsche is the key. Nietzsche is the cure. And you get like the Ayn Rand's, you know, and the head of the Fed Reserve in America for 30 years was a Randian. And this is neocons, somehow the just, um,
01:01:45
Speaker
Unchain the laws of supply and demand and the invisible hand will magically fix all our problems. Nietzsche is not like making this stuff up. He's reading Adam Smith, my fellow Scotsman, and he's reading um Darwin and he's reading his contemporary chemistry and he thinks all these fields are starting to understand will to power. They're starting to understand that reality isn't like this solid, unchanging thing.
01:02:08
Speaker
like Plato and Parmenides thought, reality is constant becoming. It's just flux. It's forces forever and becoming, endlessly circulating. And that idea is like the unthought that he develops beyond the death of God to that. And Heidegger thinks his job is to think Nietzsche's unthought, to think where that Nietzscheanism comes from, that's will to power eternally recurring, and then how we get beyond that. Now, a lot of people think, including some very smart people, that um Heidegger was a kind of a quietist who thought there was nothing we could do. We can't have a moon landing, new understanding of being, so we just have to wait for it to magically or miraculously appear.
01:02:53
Speaker
And Heidegger's view is not that. His view is that this postmodern way of relating to being actually arrived a couple hundred years ago with people like van Gogh and and Friedrich Hüdelin, his and Nietzsche's favorite romantic poet, and that you can come to understand it by engaging deeply with their work.
01:03:10
Speaker
And once you've understood what it means to relate to things in a postmodern way, you can start to bring that with you to everything. It's like you're looking at this van Gogh painting and what you see there, it's like when you look up now, you can you can see it everywhere.
01:03:23
Speaker
So that's the outline of the salvific painting. question you were asked. That's the outline of the, excuse me, answer to the salvific question you're asking. i can get into the details if you want, but I don't want to just rant for 20 minutes straight. so yeah I think i think we we would we would like those details. and And just so that I kind of get that last bit though and make sure that I understand it.
01:03:47
Speaker
um
01:03:50
Speaker
At least when I remember reading Nietzsche, i you know it was all about like this creative genius. Let's let's make a morality... um Christian morality is bad, especially, precisely because it stops creative genius from happening in some individuals, right? So, so by having the unthought of that,
01:04:12
Speaker
what Heidegger was doing was, well, I guess this is what we're going to get into right now, but the opposite of that would be what exactly? I guess. So unthought's not the opposite. It's like the, and it's not the Freudian unconscious. It's more like where all their thoughts are coming from.
01:04:30
Speaker
So it's basically their ontotheology, like how they understand what it means to be anything at all. Heidegger famously says, every great thinker thinks one thought. Only one. If you think lots of thoughts, you might be a really interesting thinker like Kierkegaard, but you won't be a great thinker. You won't transform Western history because to do that, you've got to basically succeed in focusing or transforming your age's understanding of what it means to be.
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Self-Empowerment
01:04:58
Speaker
That's how revolution happens, this onto-historical revolutions. And um in the case of Nietzsche, you're right, it's about these individual creative geniuses. And on Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche,
01:05:13
Speaker
Nietzsche, the Superman especially, he reads the Superman as like a the emergence of a new type, often deliberately bred, but we don't have to get into that, but it's in the but unpublished notebooks.
01:05:25
Speaker
The emergence of a new type of person, higher than all hitherto types, who would be capable of rising to the challenge of the age of technology. So they would understand how things are unfolding And they would be able to shape and guide that unfolding in a way that um if it didn't take control of it, it would at least harness its power for their own power.
01:05:49
Speaker
So I think people like Musk, if Musk was what he thinks he is, he'd be a good example. Sam Altman, people who have actually done a really good job of getting in tune with these forces, even if they don't understand what they're doing, and guiding and shaping them.
01:06:06
Speaker
is the Heideggerian vision of the Nietzschean Superman. Now, Heidegger's not saying we should be that. He's saying, once you understand where Nietzsche's thought is coming from, you can see where it's going. And that's our world, where it's going, because we're we've been caught up in this for 100 years, and it's going to last for a while longer, undoubtedly.
01:06:23
Speaker
So how do we get out of it? what's And what's on the far side of it? And that's the postmodern. So all of this optimization, technological imperatives, that's the late modern. That's what happens when we go from the Cartesian-Contian view of, he calls it subjectivism, where it's about a subject standing over against an object, mastering and controlling those objects.
01:06:43
Speaker
Late modernity or in framing happens when the subject becomes just one more object to be optimized. We start treating ourselves in the terms that the moderns treated objects as just stuff to master and control.
01:06:57
Speaker
And we then start, you know, genetically optimizing, um tech ah educationally optimizing, child rearing optimizing, exercise optimizing, you know sleep optimizing, you name it.
01:07:10
Speaker
And then how do we, um what's on the far side of that is the postmodern, which we still haven't talked about, but just to answer your question. ah Yeah, yeah. So um Sam, ready for the postmodern? just want to say, I mean, you know, sense of a time here, but I just, you know, it seems like,
01:07:26
Speaker
one way of looking at Heidegger, I don't know if this is correct, but it's like, he's kind of, when, when it comes to the critique of subjectivism, it seems like he's kind of breaking, um and like many people were, were trying to do, I think, but trying to break the spell of individualism, you know, with his ideas of like being with kind of a shared world of intelligibility and, and, um, and yeah, just thinking of like human beings as kind of,
01:07:53
Speaker
in more intersubjective terms or more like nested and in tight relations and stuff. And, and basically I'm just thinking like the whole idea of like self empowerment, you know, might be erroneous in really what we should be looking for as a more like communal vision. Um, I don't know. Is that, is that resonate with Heidegger that this like, um,
01:08:17
Speaker
Yeah, there's two two strands there that I would want to ah address both. But the empowerment one is the really crucial one from my perspective. It's sort of like, when do you need empowerment? You know, when you're feeling powerless.
01:08:30
Speaker
The problem is that, or underpowered or something. The problem is that empowerment doesn't give you meaning. You can't, in Heidegger's terms would be, you can't like power your way out of power.
01:08:43
Speaker
When you're trapped by fields of power, more power doesn't set you free. So the free relation to technology is not about Musk or something. Musk isn't free from technology just because he's shaping it more than you and I are.
01:08:56
Speaker
um On the subjectivity thing, yeah, so being in time, again, is the early Heidegger who's still himself doing metaphysics. and um But what he's doing there is critiquing Cartesian metaphysics.
01:09:08
Speaker
um he's under He's trying to undermine subject-object dualism, and he never gives that up. So the idea is that um when you think that ah the human self most fundamentally is a consciousness standing over against a world of objects,
01:09:24
Speaker
that that mischaracterizes the way we usually and ordinarily are. Usually and ordinarily, we are beings who are integraally integrally entwined with the things, our clothing, our computers, our chairs, our roads, our bikes, our cars.
01:09:40
Speaker
Those aren't objects standing over against our consciousness. Those are part of the selves that we are as these as these life projects organizing the intelligibility of our world. That's division one.
01:09:53
Speaker
Whoops, what did I just do? That's division one of being in time.
01:10:01
Speaker
Sorry, I hid your window by accident there. ah That's division one of being in time. And a lot of people never get past that. And it's a very powerful critique of Cartesianism.
01:10:14
Speaker
But it leads to Division two which is the stuff on death and temporality. And that was supposed to lead to the third division, which never got published, where he was going to um explain the meaning of being.
01:10:29
Speaker
So the goal of being in time was to deliver a fundamental ontology, which he defines as an understanding of the meaning of being in general. And he never did it. And if he could have done it, he would have proved that metaphysics was possible by doing it.
01:10:42
Speaker
So later Heidegger is premised on the impossibility of the very project that early Heidegger is attempting. So there's a profound breakdown transformation in his development.
01:10:53
Speaker
There may be other further modifications in his later thinking, but the big one that people called the turn for a long time, or the difference between early and later, is they Heidegger changes his his mind about what being is.
01:11:06
Speaker
In being in time, he seems to think we'll be able to explain it understand it later he thinks being is what informs but also exceeds every possible meaningful understanding of it and it's understanding it in that way that saves us that wraps it back to the postmodern yeah so so um yeah you know is it ah okay if i ask a final question here Go for it. Yeah.
Cultivating a Free Relation to Technology
01:11:32
Speaker
i You know, you you listen to a podcast on ah on on AI ethics, right? And and you want some some practical take home advice here. So anyone near are listening, just what's like couple of things? What's the first thing they can do at least to cultivate a more free relation to technology?
01:11:53
Speaker
Just to come full circle with to the usefulness thing, right? Like I think Heidegger's resisting the very powerful call on the philosopher to help.
01:12:04
Speaker
ah To help in a direct, immediate way. Like, what can I do now? Aren't there some steps I can take? And he's basically saying, what we need to do is step back and come to understand the problem in a deeper way.
01:12:17
Speaker
Because to get out of this, we need to a his like a spiritual revolution. We need a transformation. in our very way of understanding what it means to be anything at all. But what that means, I think we can start to understand when we think about the stuff that really matters to us.
01:12:33
Speaker
So when you think about, take some field that you care a lot about, whether it's love or art or children, or and when you think about um how you relate to what you encounter in that domain, typically you encounter it as something like inexhaustibly rich in meaning.
01:12:49
Speaker
is what he later calls a truth event or an event of an owning at Agnes. It's like you encounter something profoundly meaningful that you, that and think of a time when you've done that, something hit you as really important and meaningful, and you ended up spending a lot of time in your life, maybe days, weeks, months, years,
01:13:08
Speaker
unfolding, developing the significance of that event. And if it's love, for example, and you stay in love or you stay in a relationship with the person, the way that first event of meeting them and the significance of that unfolded in the rest of your life comes to like define who you are.
01:13:26
Speaker
right So the idea is that being is what um informs that without being exhausted by that. So being is just this inexhaustibly rich source of meaningfulness.
01:13:38
Speaker
And that's what we got to get back in touch with because the age of technological and framing is pushing us toward this view that nothing means anything at all. Everything is just stuff to be optimized. And that view, insofar as we buy into it, it's like in the water we're drinking.
01:13:54
Speaker
you know, and then it's our society's vision of success. Insofar as we buy into that in its myriad forms, we increasingly feel like our lives have no significance. they have no weight.
01:14:04
Speaker
They have no meaning. So again, focus on the times when you feel the opposite, like with your kids or whatever it is, with your art, with your wine, and when it actually matters to you, you know, it's when you can't fully put it into words, but and it's resisting your attempts to quantify and enumerate, and and yet there's something there.
01:14:26
Speaker
but That's why Heidegger loved poets, is the poets are the ones who dedicate their lives to tuning into that inchoate sense of what's just coming toward us from the far side of our our current world and needs our help to arrive, but we can't fully bring it into the present.
01:14:44
Speaker
Developing that skill, that's the essence of who we are. We're world-disclosive beings. We respond to and creatively disclose the hints of this world that's not entirely within our control.
01:14:57
Speaker
And the more we do that, um the more meaningful our lives become. How it plays out politically, i think, it's actually just one step removed because the people who can't handle the chaos...
01:15:10
Speaker
of being. Being is this inexhaustibly rich thing. it's It's anxiety provoking to encounter that. The first encounter with that is in existential death, when your world breaks down and you don't know what to do. And that's very anxiety provoking.
01:15:23
Speaker
Most people don't like anxiety. You know, it's uncomfortable. It makes you ah restless want to get out of it. And if you can learn to sit with that anxiety and tune into what it's showing you, what it's showing you is multiple possibilities.
01:15:37
Speaker
So resist the claim of like the strong father figures who are like, I'll handle your anxiety. I'll all give you the one correct answer about how to live and just do this, reject those people, those new emerging forms of gender and sexuality, and I'll i'll make them color within the lines and we'll punish them together.
01:15:54
Speaker
And you know you can go back to believing in your simple one correct answer of just making as much money as possible and passing it on or something. And that's not a meaningful life.
01:16:04
Speaker
I think the people living that life are experiencing it as not meaningful. They might have moments of intense, oh, it was a great meal or a great vacation, but their lives are not filled with meaning.
01:16:16
Speaker
So the moments of meaning are the key thing to recognizing that in those we're not understanding being as this um meaningless thing to be optimized. We're understanding it as something not entirely within our control, not completely outside all intelligibility either, but something we've got to tune into and learn to work with and creatively respond creatively respond to and creatively develop in order to feel like we are coming into our own as meaningful beings.
01:16:48
Speaker
Well, we've been in conversation with Ian Thompson. His latest book is Heidegger on technology's danger and promise in the age of AI. Ian Thompson, thanks a ton. it was fun. Thanks, Sam, Roberto. It's been fun.