The bookshelves are right there by my bed. Poetry books are closest, always within easy reach. Philosophy books demand a little more of a stretch. Other fiction and nonfiction: Reaching won’t cut it. I have to make myself get out of bed.
Early Christmas Eve morning, I woke up restless and reached for Martin Heidegger. Heidegger is one of those people I keep around because he is difficult. No, not difficult, incomprehensible. But I pick up my copy of The Question of Technology with a fuzzy hope that maybe this time I’ll get it.
That’s who I am, I guess: a person who is not very smart, but who likes smart things. Keeping these difficult books around is the right thing to do. Sometimes I surprise myself. I’ll pick up a book and a page, a paragraph, maybe just a sentence will shine where there was nothing but shadow before. I used to tell myself that I’m getting smarter as I get older, but I don’t think it works that way. I think that sometimes I come to reading with a better mind-set: an openness to the passage: not reading for data or information: not clamping down on the words, but strolling through them, relaxed but attentive, as they say.
So, early on Christmas Eve morning, I read:
Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology. When we are seeing the essence of “tree,” we have to become aware that That which pervades every tree, as tree, is not itself a tree that can be encountered among all the other trees.”
The last time I read these sentences, all I got was moldy pea-soup smog between my ears. Not this time. For some reason, at 3 AM Christmas Eve morning, I could make sense of the difference between “tree” and “essence of tree.” A tree is just a tree. It’s like that dogfish Walker Percy wrote about. (I discussed Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” in my last two newsletters.) Percy writes about two ways of seeing a dogfish – as a “creature” a curious youngster pokes at it with a stick, or as a “specimen” a high school student is instructed to dissect. Except: Percy favors the “creature,” and Heidegger—and I can’t help but think this has something to do with his susceptibility to fascism—favors the “essence.”
Heidegger wants to get to the heart of what “technology” means. He says that one definition of technology is that it is a “means to an end,” but he’s dropping hints that this definition falls short of the true meaning of the word. This is where I lose him. I don’t mean, this is where I lose him because I have some smart and elegant retort. I lose him, because I’m having a hard time parsing these convoluted sentences:
Whatever has an effect as its consequence is called a cause. But not only that by means of which something else is effected is a cause. The end in keeping with which the kind of means to be used is determined is also considered a cause.
I can parse the second sentence by substituting grammatically appropriate words in the right places. If the pronoun that is replaced with the noun stick and the phrase “something else” is replaced by dogfish I can get a sense of what he’s saying:
But not only the stick by means of which the dogfish is effected is a cause.
I’m getting there, but I’m also getting tired. Before I can make any more sense out of this, I’m deep into a dream.
Heidegger is leading a small seminar on cause and effect. One student sits in a straight-backed wooden chair at a green metal table. Another is on his feet, leaning over his chair with a vaguely ominous look about him. The ominous feeling dissipates when Heidegger speaks. He’s friendly, professorial, patient. He explains the maze of his sentences with a chuckle. A warm blanket feeling pervades the room. All of us—even the ominous looking student leaning over the chair—share in a sense of camaraderie.
But Heidegger was a Nazi. He enthusiastically supported the expulsion of Jews from his university. In my dream, I decide to mute Heidegger’s seminar happy seminar so I can hold a seminar of my own.
The subject of my seminar is agape. Agape is unconditional love, which means it is not instrumental. If you are using love as a lever to change someone, how can that be unconditional? Unconditional love is not manipulative. So agape would not use debating tricks to wrestle fascism down onto the mat. But agape would not lie, either. It wouldn’t pretend that the evil wasn’t there just because it’s more comfortable or safe to do so.
Everywhere I turn, there are moral landmines.
Do I storm out of the seminar?
Too easy. Love is not an avoidance strategy.
Do I compartmentalize the seminar? Set aside the troubling background and let myself enjoy the warm blanket?
Love does not seek safety or comfort outside of love.
How do you cultivate a love that opposes evil without attaching the evil to a person?
Do we even want a love that embraces both perpetrator and victim?
In my dream, I felt like I almost have an answer. But the dream faded away.
This made me think, David. Well done, sir.