MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS
Copyright 2000 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711
The tension in this essay comes into sharp focus, at the end, in Heidegger's preposterous suggestion that art may be what we need to carry us out of the dangerous epoch of technology. I say that this is "preposterous" on two grounds. First, our society thinks of technology as its distinctive talent and strength, not as a disaster. Second, our society sees art as frivolous and impotent in the "real world" of capitalistically generated technology. Heidegger himself recognized this irony and devoted the major portion of the essay to a careful analysis of the dangers that befall us in technology. His suggestion regarding art came late and remained poorly explicated.
My intention, in this essay, is to interpret Heidegger's thesis about technology and art in the context of forming an ethical approach to the environment. What we shall discover along this path is that human nature, technology, and art are all intertwined in complex ways. At present, these relationships stand in great confusion and this confusion is part of the danger of our time. But this confusion can be grasped and dispensed with by thinking our way into the essence of our technological epoch. We may also ask, What is the essence of art that it might bear some relation to this epoch? And finally, What is our essence as human beings in relation to technology, art, and our natural environment?
I shall begin by summarizing Heidegger's thinking in "The Question Concerning Technology," concentrating on his vision of the dangers with which technology confronts us. Next, I shall use some of Heidegger's other works to describe the nature of art. And, finally, I shall bring the thesis together by showing how art, technology, and human nature are fundamental parts of a complex puzzle that lies at the heart of most issues in environmental ethics. Wherever possible, I shall try to understand Heidegger's arguments in ordinary language rather than merely absorbing and repeating his terminology. This will not always be possible, however; some of Heidegger's invented terms are simply indispensable, attempting as they do to cut across developed habits of thinking. To Heidegger, it is the thinking that is important and the language of our thinking needs careful study and occasional reformulation.
The Dangers of Technology
The major difficulty with the present discussion of technology is the fact that we focus attention on what we call technology in its everyday sense and we ignore technology in its essence. In this situation, it matters little whether we embrace technology or condemn it, for we are all equally enslaved by our misunderstanding of what technology actually is. According to Heidegger, "technology [in its everyday sense] is not equivalent to the essence of technology." {[7], p. 4} To be free of misunderstandings, to relate to technology intelligently, we must find its central meaning and that can be done only by discovering its essence. (2)
In our present point of view, we see technology as a complex of contrivances and technical skills, put forth by human activity and developed as means to our ends. Technology, in this view, is an object, or a complex of objects and techniques, that seems passive itself; indeed, we conceive of it as activated by us only. According to Heidegger, however, we are fundamentally mistaken in this; "we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral." {[7], p. 4} On the contrary, the essence of technology reveals it as something far from neutral or merely an instrument of human control; it is an autonomous organizing activity within which humans themselves are organized. Viewing technology as a means to an end, "everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner...We will, as we say, 'get' technology 'spiritually in hand.'...But suppose now that technology were no mere means, how would it stand with the will to master it?" {[7], p. 5} How, indeed, can we cope with it if it encompasses us in its organizational activity?
In summary, the problem with our critique of technology lies at two levels. First, while we argue and take sides on the issue of technology, none of us is really free to deal with it constructively because none of us really understands it in its essence, i.e., in its entirety and in its central sense. Second, our limited understanding of technology is so misguided that little of value can be salvaged from it. This is because all discussions are prefaced on the view that technology is an object which we manipulate as a means to our own ends. In fact, the essence of technology reveals it as a vast system of organization which encompasses us rather than standing objectively and passively ready for our direction and control.
If our discussion of technology is so far off its mark, then, how can we anticipate discovering its essence? Heidegger's method is to assume that the instrumental view of technology has a basic correctness even though it is not true. That basic correctness explains why we have dealt successfully with it at a practical level as long as we have. For Heidegger, this basic correctness offers a pathway for investigative thinking by pursuing the concept of "instrument" and the roots of the word 'technology.' These are the only correct clues that we have.
To view something as an instrument is to place it in a context of ends for which it is presumed to be a means and this is the context of "causation." {[7], p. 6} Thus, one promising path to the essence of technology is through an examination of causation. Heidegger was guided in this examination by Aristotle's classic account of the four factors in all causation -- causa materialis, causa formalis, causa finalis, and causa efficiens. While the traditional reading of Aristotle tends to understand each of these factors in isolation and ignores their cooperative relationship, Heidegger asserted that the essence of causation must lie in what unifies the four. "The four causes are the ways, all belonging at once to each other, of being responsible for something else." {[7], p. 7; emphasis added} A singular thing, or event, is caused and the four factors are cooperatively responsible for that in some way. The thing caused is something that "comes into presence;" thus, the factors are cooperatively responsible for bringing it forth. In this way, Heidegger discovered the very essence of causation in the Greek word 'aitia,' or "to occasion;" and as Plato expressed it in Symposium, "Every occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not presencing is poiesis, is bringing-forth." {[7], p. 10}
"The modes of occasioning, the four causes, are at play, then, within bringing-forth. Through bringing-forth, the growing things of nature as well as whatever is completed through the crafts and the arts come at any given time to their appearance." {[7], p. 11}
This bringing-forth is, in its most generally understood sense, what the Greeks called aletheia, which Heidegger expressed in the German word 'Entbergen' and his English translators have expressed in the word 'revealing.' (3)
As mentioned earlier, Heidegger believed that there was a basic correctness both in our view of technology as an instrument, the view we have just interpreted, and in our use of the name "technology" itself. The word 'technology' is derived from the Greek word 'techne' and the analysis of this word leads us to essentially the same place. For the Greeks, 'techne' belonged to the general notion of bringing-forth, 'poiesis.' Techne and episteme are linked together, the latter related to that which comes-forth out of its own nature alone and the former related to that which comes-forth only by our intervention with that nature. As forms of poiesis, both techne and episteme are modes of revealing; but, in contrast to episteme,
"techne ... reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another... Thus what is decisive in techne does not lie at all in making or manipulating nor in the using of means, but rather in the aforementioned revealing. It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth." {[7], p. 13}
Both paths of interpretation lead to the same thing. "Technology [in its essence] is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence [West] in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens." {[7], p. 13} (4) What Heidegger wanted us to recognize by bringing technology to the concept of revealing is that technology's essence is to be found in the most basic realm of experience. That realm is the realm of "truths happening." It could be argued, of course, that all of this analysis takes ancient Greece as its focal point and that modern technology has little or nothing to do with ancient Greece. This is true, of course, in the sense that technology has obviously developed far beyond its origins in Greece; however, it is also misguided if it tries to convince us that technology's essence has been fundamentally changed. Heidegger's point is precisely the assertion that the basic essence of technology has remained unchanged and that this essence is most readily observed in the Greek origins of our thinking about these things. The problem remaining, then, is to understand how modern technology has evolved within this essential nature as a mode of revealing.
We have arrived at the opening of the essence of modern technology. Technology is a mode of the fundamental way in which things happen in the universe and we, as agents, are involved in this happening within the cooperative elements of causation. But technology has evolved through the intervening three millennia; what was previously called 'techne' and was a form of the general process of bringing-forth has separated into different modes of revealing. What we understand as modern technology can scarcely be recognized as having a common origin with the fine arts or crafts; indeed, modern technology is distinguished in having made its "alliance" with modern physical science rather than with the arts and crafts. (5) Therefore, to understand technology as it is today and in its complete essence, we must understand the course of that separate and unique evolution.
Perhaps it is not difficult to understand the separate paths of the fine arts, craftsmanship, and modern technology. Each seems to have followed different human intentions and to have addressed different human skills. However, while the fine arts and craftsmanship remained relatively consistent with techne in the ancient sense, modern technology withdrew in a radically different direction. As Heidegger saw it, "the revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such." {[7], p. 14} Modern technology sets-upon nature and challenges-forth its energies, in contrast to techne which was always a bringing-forth in harmony with nature. The activity of modern technology lies at a different and more advanced level wherein the natural is not merely decisively re-directed; nature is actually "set-upon." The rhetoric in which the discussion is couched conveys an atmosphere of violence and exploitation. (6)
To uncover the essence of modern technology is to discover why technology stands today as the danger. To accomplish this insight, we must understand why modern technology must be viewed as a "challenging-forth," what affect this has on our relationship with nature, and how this relationship affects us. Is there really a difference? Has technology really left the domain of techne in a significant way? In modern technology, has human agency withdrawn in some way beyond involvement and, instead, acquired an attitude of violence with respect to the other causal factors?
Heidegger clearly saw the development of "energy resources" as symbolic of this evolutionary path; while the transformation into modern technology undoubtedly began early, the first definitive signs of its new character began with the harnessing of energy resources, as we would say. (7) As a representative of the old technology, the windmill took energy from the wind but converted it immediately into other manifestations such as the grinding of grain; the windmill did not unlock energy from the wind in order to store it for later arbitrary distribution. Modern wind-generators, on the other hand, convert the energy of wind into electrical power which can be stored in batteries or otherwise. The significance of storage is that it places the energy at our disposal; and because of this storage the powers of nature can be turned back upon itself. The storing of energy is, in this sense, the symbol of our over-coming of nature as a potent object. "...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." {[7], p. 14} This and other examples that Heidegger used throughout this essay illustrate the difference between a technology that diverts the natural course cooperatively and modern technology that achieves the unnatural by force. Not only is this achieved by force but it is achieved by placing nature in our subjective context, setting aside natural processes entirely, and conceiving of all revealing as being relevant only to human subjective needs.
The essence of technology originally was a revealing of life and nature in which human intervention deflected the natural course while still regarding nature as the teacher and, for that matter, the keeper. The essence of modern technology is a revealing of phenomena, often far removed from anything that resembles "life and nature," in which human intrusion not only diverts nature but fundamentally changes it. As a mode of revealing, technology today is a challenging-forth of nature so that the technologically altered nature of things is always a situation in which nature and objects wait, standing in reserve for our use. We pump crude oil from the ground and we ship it to refineries where it is fractionally distilled into volatile substances and we ship these to gas stations around the world where they reside in huge underground tanks, standing ready to power our automobiles or airplanes. Technology has intruded upon nature in a far more active mode that represents a consistent direction of domination. Everything is viewed as "standing-reserve" and, in that, loses its natural objective identity. The river, for instance, is not seen as a river; it is seen as a source of hydro-electric power, as a water supply, or as an avenue of navigation through which to contact inland markets. In the era of techne humans were relationally involved with other objects in the coming to presence; in the era of modern technology, humans challenge-forth the subjectively valued elements of the universe so that, within this new form of revealing, objects lose their significance to anything but their subjective status of standing-ready for human design. (8)
At this point, we have almost completed the analysis of modern technology in its essence. Only one final aspect of this analysis remains; it is an understanding of the overarching context in which technology came to proceed along this path. Heidegger named this context by the German word 'Ge-stell,' which has been translated to the English word, 'enframing.' In Heidegger's words,
"enframing [Ge-stell] means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve." {[7], p. 20} But, "where Enframing reigns, there is danger in the highest sense." {[7], p. 28}
To understand the essence of modern technology as enframing, Heidegger claims is to understand the problem of technology in its fullest sense; for in enframing we will understand the deeper context in which humans journeyed from involvement with nature into an intrusion upon it. We must move, then, to understand what Heidegger meant by enframing.
We are to understand technology through enframing in two very important ways. First, technology is a process, or coming-to-presence, which is underway in the world and which has truly gigantic proportions. The two concepts that Heidegger used as analogies in arriving at the word 'Ge-stell' were 'Gebirg" and 'Gemuet.' Both of these are processes of cosmic scope. The former is the gradual building, emergence, folding, and eroding of a mountain range. The latter is the welling up and building of emotional feelings that originate in the depths of our beings, as differentiated from the simple emotions that arise quickly and spontaneously in normal contexts. Second, technology viewed as enframing is a process that is shaping human destiny today and that has been shaping human destiny in relation to the universe for almost as long as we conceive of our history. What we call technology and think to be a neutral instrument standing ready for our control is actually a specific manifestation of this whole process. {[7], p. 19} The concept of enframing suggests that human life in the context of the natural world is gathered wholly and cosmically within the essence of technology. Just as the technology that we now see ongoing in the world shows the characteristic of challenging-forth the objects around us, the whole process within which human life is developing challenges-us-forth to this mode of revealing the real or of ordering nature into standing reserve. Our control over technology is an illusion; it and we alike are being shaped, like an evolving mountain range, in the process that Heidegger called enframing. The possession of what we commonly call technology is only a fragmentary, though characteristic, aspect of that whole development; language thought, religion, art, and all other aspects of human life are coordinated into this development as a part of enframing.
To see the essence of technology in this way delivers us into the final phase of Heidegger's analysis, the great danger to humanity that technology represents. Just as enframing organizes our lives progressively into a disposition of challenging and ordering the things around us into standing reserve, its progress as a development of human destiny challenges and orders us into standing reserve for its own ends.
"The destining of revealing is in itself not just any danger, but danger as such. Yet when destining reigns in the mode of Enframing, it is the supreme danger. This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile, man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself." {[7], pp. 26-7; emphasis added}
Just as humans have progressively limited the being of the natural objects around them, Heidegger observed, they too have acquired a progressively limited character or being. While we have come to think that we encounter only ourselves in the world, "in truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., in his essence." {[7], p. 27} While all epochs of human evolution contain danger, the epoch of modern technology possesses the gravest danger because it is the epoch whose characteristic is to conduct humanity out of its own essence. Modern technology, in Heidegger's view, is the highest stage of misrepresentation of the essence of being human. (9) In order to understand this danger completely and, certainly, in order to come to accept it as a correct analysis, will require a more extensive review of Heidegger's theory of human nature and its essence. But this will be easier and also more appropriate in the final section of this essay, after we have reviewed Heidegger's understanding of art. For art, in its essence and not as we presently conceive of it, from the disposition of enframing, is a wholly separate path of human development.
The Essence of Art
"...und wozu Dichter
in duerftiger Zeit?"
"...and what are poets for
in a destitute time?" {[8], p. 91}
This is the poet Holderlin's question in his elegy "Bread and Wine." It is the questioning of an artist in despair; it is a question asked from the essence of art and addressed to an epoch in which that essence is alien.
"For Holderlin's historical experience, the appearance and sacrifical death of Christ mark the beginning of the end of the day of the gods. Night is falling. Ever since the 'united three' --- Herakles, Dionysos, and Christ --- have left the world, the evening of the world's age has been declining toward its night." {[8], p. 91}
Heidegger identified Holderlin's vision of the decline of the gods with the present culmination of our technological epoch. In this nighttime of the world's history, he asks, Is there a place for poetry and other arts? In "Bread and Wine" Holderlin himself answered this question by suggesting that "they [poets] are like the sacred priests of the winegod." {[9], p. 43} In other words, artists still "serve" a kind of "communion" that calls attention to the holy. The poet's responsibility has something to do with making tribute to the gods; but with the god's withdrawal, one might think that poets are left no object. Far from it, though; for Holderlin, the poets are the only ones remaining who can still hear the echo of the gods, that is, of holy times.
"Bread is the fruit of earth, yet is blessed by
the heavenly light, and from the thundering god
flows the joy of the vine.
These, therefore, put us in mind of the gods, who
once were here and shall return, whenever the
time is right.
Therefore, they mean it in earnest, the poets who
sing of the winegod, and no empty intent sounds
in their praise of the past." {[9], p. 45}
It was surely in the same vein of promise that Heidegger brought forth his own suggestion about art.
"Could it be that the fine arts are called to poetic revealing? Could it be that revealing lays claim to the arts most primally, so that they for their part may expressly foster the growth of the saving power, may awaken and found anew our look into that which grants and our trust in it?" {[7], p. 35}
Art is not what makes the turning away from technology possible or necessary; it is rather proposed as the form of revealing through which we may be conducted out of that epoch. (10)
It is well to begin by observing that what Heidegger referred to as "art" is not the same as what we generally understand as "art" today. Heidegger's identification of art as the probable medium of what he called "the turning" is emphatically not to be read as a recommendation that we should model ourselves after contemporary artists. Art, like every other aspect of human life, has followed a line of development that has been progressively molded by the epoch of technology. For example, it has fallen upon art, in our century, that it has been interpreted by one artist-musician as a work in which a dozen or more radios are tuned now-to-this-channel and now-to-that. An artist-poet has composed poetry by cutting lines of text into fragments and randomly pasting them back together; an artist-painter has filled a canvas with colorful splotches by firing painted pellets out of an old blunderbust. The art that we presently experience is merely, according to Heidegger, the tip of an iceberg; as with the iceberg, the bulk of genuine art has fallen into concealedness. "Modern subjectivism," Heidegger wrote, "immediately misinterprets creation, taking it as the self-sovereign subject's performance of genius." {[6], p. 76} Today's artist conceives of objects and of self in the same mode of revealing that is present in modern technology. Both are products of enframing. Within this disposition, the arts seem to aim for the genius of impracticality while modern technology aims for the genius of practicality. Perhaps the finest example of this evolution and divergence is the work of "living art," the ultimately impractical work of genius that disappears almost as soon as it is realized. (11) None of this is to deny that there is some correctness within contemporary art. The same "living art" may quite insightfully "report" the state of affairs in the contemporary human psyche. The essential nature of art remains even today; though as Heidegger would argue, it has almost been hidden by the overarching tendencies of our epoch.
Let us begin our search for the essence of art with an essay entitled "Remembrance of the Poet" {[5], pp. 233-69}, first published in 1943. It is an analysis of Holderlin's elegy "Homecoming." (12) At the narrative surface, "Homecoming" tells the story of a man who returns from his youthful travels to the town of his birth, his home. He sails across Lake Constance and out of the shade of the Alps to the little town, where he finds familiar places and congenial faces. As Heidegger saw it, "Homecoming" tells a deeper story of a poet who is finding the significance of his homeland and, hence, of home itself. Holderlin considered the poet to be specially tempted to journey into distant lands and, because of that, to be specially prepared for a homecoming. Afterall it is the traveler who can place his "home" in the widest context of where and how people live.
Heidegger found the rudiments of a theory of art in this poem because he conceived of the poet's journey in life as wholly a matter of "homecoming;" the essence of home is the general subject of poetry. Human life itself is wholly involved in the issue of finding "home;" life "really consists solely in the people of the country becoming at home in the still-withheld essence of home." {[5], p. 245} That essence is never obvious to us and, usually indeed, we must leave our homeland and return before we can ever discover it. Nor is the discovery merely in seeing old and familiar places. Home is not the people and the place; merely coming into the homeland is not enough. "Homecoming is the return into the proximity of the source ..[but].. proximity to the source is a mystery." {[5], p. 258-9} We will never quite know what home is; but home is the essence of our being on the earth and that toward which we should work in our lives. In the poet's writing we can share the poet's vision of this human quest.
May we assume that this pursuit of the essence of home is true of all art? That all art is an attempt to strike through to the essence of things, and in particular to the essence of our being on earth? Heidegger's theory of art becomes clearer when we consider his long essay "On the Origin of the Work of Art," begun in a lecture in 1935 and then revised several times up to 1960. {[6]}
The artist, the work of art, and art itself mutually define one another and we must understand them all in order to understand any one. Heidegger began with the work of art. The work is at once a thing and, also, a work of art. What makes it "of art" beyond being a "thing?" His answer is, "In the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work." {[6], p. 36} But he did not mean "truth" in the common sense of our day, as "accurate reproduction;" he was not suggesting that the art work is merely the entity coming before us in its most realistic form of representation. "The work ... is not the reproduction of some particular entity that happens to be present at any given time; it is, on the contrary, the reproduction of the thing's general essence." {[6], p. 37} And that "general essence" Heidegger called "the Being of beings." "The art work opens up in its own way the Being of beings. This opening up, i.e., this deconcealing, i.e., the truth of beings, happens in the work. Art is truth setting itself to work." {[6], p. 39}
The approach to an art work as something in which "truth is happening" should sound familiar; art is yet another mode of revealing, of bringing-forth. However, like other modes of revealing that have fallen under the overarching influence of technology, today, art has fallen into the tendency to see all things as "merely things." Thus, art too always places the art work in a static realm of mere things --- things that can be displayed this-way-or-that, objects subject to a critic's interpretation, pieces of aesthetic value to us. In contrast, Heidegger suggests that the art work is something emergent, a happening. The artist is a medium to this happening. Poetry happens to the poet; art happens to the artist. Art is a way of life.
Since the art work is to be seen as something actively happening through the artist, we must recognize that the art work belongs to the specific world in which it happens, the "work-world." Imagine, if you will, viewing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The contemporary tourist takes view of this object as "a spectacle," "as an impressive achievement," or, at best, "a classic piece of art history." What Heidegger wanted us to see is that the world in which the design and execution of the ceiling were brought forth, the "work-world," is gone. We can try to re-create that world. We can struggle to understand the religious themes of that world, the politics of the day, the cares and suffering of the people, and the class structure of that society. We can try to walk into the chapel and to see it as a whole within the context of its creation; but even our best attempts just show us more clearly how far off we really are, how utterly lost to us is the work-world in its living sense. That world is gone; those who try to re-create it simply know its absence with more clarity and more frustration. Art works that have been preserved have lost their worlds and, in consequence, have become little more than "object-beings." {[6], pp. 40-l}
Now, there are different ways in which things are brought-forth, in which truth happens. What distinguishes the art-work in its world? According to Heidegger, it is a "setting-forth," a "making." Within the art-work, the artist takes that which is, the earth, and makes it into something, sets it forth. {[6], pp. 45-6} But art is distinguishable from a setting-forth like a craft or like tool making because produce objects-of-use and, in their use, their earthly origin as a setting-forth is concealed. In Heidegger's conception of the art-work it is essential that the limiting nature of the earth remains within the work as a source of tension. The artist's work brings the earth into the Open (13) of the artist's world. In a crucial way, it is the only way that human worlds can happen and it is also the only way that the earth can become unconcealed as earth. The two are entirely different and yet mutually dependent. This tension lies at the very heart of human life and is part of the mystery of finding "home." As a unique kind of setting-forth, the art-work is the medium through which the truth of this mutual dependence and difference happens. {[6], pp. 49-50} It is therefore an essential kind of human awareness that brings us into relation with the nature of our being as human beings who dwell on the earth through that specific recognition and understanding of objects and their relations that they call their world. Clearly, art in general, like poetry, is a uniquely vital journey into the basic human issue of finding the essence of home within life on this earth.
It is important to recognize that art is not a dull, sober "investigation" into human life just because of its seriousness and importance. Just as life should come to its height in joy, art should reach toward joy and should be joyous. Holderlin believed that poets have a special access to the joy of life. The poet's subject is "home" but, in particular, the poet writes of the joyous. "The Joyous is what has been made into poetry. The Joyous is Joy harmonised into poetry. So too it is the rejoiced and therefore the enjoying." {[5], p. 246}
The message is very clear, it seems to me. Poetry is no mere "art form" as contemporary commentators might put it; for Heidegger, poetry is an "engagement." The poet is one who hears and there is something to be heard. Poetry is not to be understood as an ego-centric creation by the poet, a mere act of originality; poetry happens to the poet, overcoming him/her. Furthermore, what happens in poetry, what comes upon the poet, is essentially woven into the idea of the Joyous. Holderlin made reference to the "joyously-shuddering chaos," in this way, describing our plight as humans, landed on earth but able to look into the heavens. There is a shuddering tension in human life, which is the essence of that search for home. Holderlin used the metaphor of a cloud to symbolize the poet because the cloud stands between and sees both. The cloud also captures the connection between the Joyous, which is the subject of poetry, and the Serene, the "spatially-ordered." The Joyous comes out of the latter. "The Joyous only draws near where it is met and welcomed by the composition of poetry therefore the angels, heralds of the Serene, appear only if there are any who are composing." {[5], pp. 247-9}
"The writing of poetry is not primarily a cause of joy to the poet, rather the writing of poetry is joy, is serenification, because it is in writing that the principal return home consists. The elegy 'Homecoming' is not a poem about homecoming; rather the elegy itself, taken as the very poetry of which it is comprised, is the actual homecoming --- a homecoming which is continually being enacted so long as its message sounds out like a bell in the speech of the German people. To write poetry means to exist in that joy, which preserves in words the mystery of proximity to the Most Joyous." {[5], p. 261}
It is clear, further, that this characteristic of poetry was not intended "mysteriously;" homecoming is a human adventure and necessity; the poet's vocation simply carries him or her closer to this task, making the poet one who calls us forth.
"The vocation of the poet is homecoming, by which the homeland is first made ready as the land of proximity to the source. To guard the mystery of the reserving proximity to the Most Joyous, and in the process of guarding it to unfold it --- that is the care of homecoming. Therefore the poem ends with the lines:
'Cares like these, whether he wills or no,
singer
Must bear in his soul and often, but the
others not'
.... the blunt 'not' does indeed exempt 'the others' from the care of poetic speech, but it in no way exempts them from the care of hearing that which 'poets meditate or sing' here in 'Homecoming.' The 'not' is the mysterious call 'to' the others in the fatherland, to become hearers, in order that the first time they should learn to know the essence of the homeland." {[5], pp. 266-7}
The poet struggles with the mystery caringly and, if Holderlin was right, in "The Poet's Vocation," the weight of this mysterious knowledge is so great that the poet must enlist hearers "so that they may understand how to help." {[5], p. 269} Homecoming is the message spoken to those who will listen and that speaks through those who will compose. It is the content of what is to be heard.
It should be clear, at this point, that "writing", especially poetic writing, has a significance for Heidegger that runs far beyond mere description or exposition. In his earlier essay, "Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry," written in 1935, Heidegger made some important claims about the language in which writing occurs. Holderlin referred to language as "most dangerous of possessions" and connected the idea with the concept that through language humans are allowed "to affirm what [they are]." Heidegger interpreted the sense in which this could be, drawing from the notion of humans developed in Being and Time.
"Man is he who he is, precisely in the affirmation of his own existence. This affirmation does not mean here an additional and supplementary expression of his own existence, but it does in the process make plain the existence of man. But what must man affirm? That he belongs to earth. This relation of belonging to consists in the fact that man is heir and learner in all things." {[3], p. 274}
Our most distinctive human feature is the fact that we, of all beings on this earth, bear witness to them and to ourselves. In bearing witness actively, we affirm our existence as this kind of being-among-beings. And finally, "this bearing witness of belonging to all that is existent, becomes actual as history. In order that history may be possible, language has been given to man. It is one of man's possessions." {[3], pp. 274-5} In fact, Holderlin went so far as to call man "a conversation;" and Heidegger agreed, "we ...mankind... are a conversation. The being of men is founded in language. But this becomes actual in conversation." {[3], p. 277}
The idea of a conversation suggests that there is something to talk about, suggests content. Thus, poetry is not only fundamental to our being because it is a certain use of language; poetry is also fundamental because it speaks to the right content through language. What poetry speaks to is what persists. "After man has placed himself in the presence of something perpetual, then only can he expose himself to the changeable, to that which comes and goes; for only the persistent is changeable." {[3], p. 279, emphasis added} We may call "the perpetual" by the name of the gods or the divine or the Most Joyous, as Holderlin and Heidegger did, and the point will not be damaged. The point is that the conversation must come out of what is most basic, most lasting, and hence most certain. It is the peculiar essence of poetry that it addresses precisely this, that it shoots past the details and into the essence. Poetry is
"...not just any speech, but that particular kind which for the first time brings into the open all that which we then discuss and deal with in everyday language. Hence poetry never takes language as a raw material ready to hand, rather it is poetry which first makes language possible. Poetry is the primitive language of a historical people." {[3], pp. 283-4}
Certainly this is our reaction when we are moved by poetry; we say it has shot through to the essence of something. And what the interpretation and criticism of poetry demonstrates is precisely the way the poem has brought things into the open where they can become the subject of ordinary discussion.
In conclusion, Heidegger held to a consistent and well developed picture of art, especially the art of poetry. In this picture, art is a mode in which life is experienced, in which truth happens for us. It is similar to technology in that regard; indeed, art was originally conceived of within the whole framework of techne out of which technology, too, developed. While technology became the thematic pattern of Western development, being destined by the epoch-grounding process Heidegger called enframing, art remained merely another mode of revealing and, like all else, took on characteristics that were shaped by the prevailing destiny of the West. In its essence, however, art is a mode of revealing, a setting-forth, in which humans and other object-beings come to presence in an organization that is far closer to the essential nature of human life on this earth. As truth happens through art, the artist is drawn into awareness of the fundamental objects of the universe and the primal tensions that abound with them. Art carries us into the essential tension between earth and world and to the essential need of humans to find a joyous home within. To fully understand this concept and, hence, to fully understand art's role as the saving power, we must move more directly to a discussion of Heidegger's conception of the essence of human life. For just as technology in the epoch of enframing has effected the greatest threat to us by carrying us away from our essential nature, art possesses the capacity to become the mastering theme of a new epoch in which we are healed by coming back into our own essence.
Human Life and Its Environment
The threat of nuclear annihilation is, currently, the most dramatic and ironic sign of technology's "success" and of its overwhelming power; mass itself has been grasped as a standing-reserve of enormous energy. On the one hand we consider ourselves, rightfully, the most advanced humans that have peopled the earth but, on the other hand, we can see, when we care to, that our way of life has also become the most profound threat to life that the earth has yet witnessed. (14) Medical science and technology have even begun to suggest that we may learn enough about disease and the processes of aging in the human body that we might extend individual human lives indefinitely. In this respect, we have not only usurped the gods' rights of creation and destruction of species, but we may even usurp the most sacred and terrifying of the gods' rights, the determination of mortality or immortality. The gods, it is true, have been set aside in our time; they are merely antiquated conceptions.
The "withdrawal of the gods" is a sign of our pervasive power and our progressive "ego-centrism." The human ego stands at the center of everything and, indeed, sees no other thing or object with which it must reckon on an equal footing. We have become alone in the universe in the most profound sense. Looking outward, we see only ourselves in so far as we see only objects standing-in-reserve for our dispositions. It is no wonder that we have "ethical problems" with our environment because the whole concept of the environment has been profoundly transformed. A major portion of the environment in which modern Westerners live, today, is the product of human fabrication and this makes it ever more difficult for us to discover a correct relationship with that portion of the environment that is still given to us. It is all there to be taken, to be manipulated, to be used and consumed, it seems. But what in that conception limits us or hinders us from using it in any way that we wish? There is nothing that we can see today that really hinders us from doing anything with the environment, including if we wish destroying it completely and for all time. This, I take it is the challenge of environmental ethics, the challenge of finding a way to convince ourselves that there are limits of acceptable human action where the environment is involved. But where can we look for the concepts that we need to fabricate convincing arguments?
The contemporary critique of technology has taken the form of attacking these and other sensitive issues. Both the creative and destructive powers of technology have begun to frighten us because we can begin to see our real limitations as knowledgeable managers and organizers of the world. And the concept of a human fabricated immortality staggers us because it places us, now, in the position of having to make the fundamental decision of whether we humans are better off as mortals or as immortals. These are matters that nature once dictated and that demanded no human consideration. We have to ask whether human intelligence is really capable of addressing them? Can we trust our judgment in matters of this scope?
What Heidegger pointed out in "The Question Concerning Technology" is, first of all, that this critique is fundamentally misplaced. It is misplaced in time and it is misplaced in scope. It is misplaced in time because we assume that technology has been problematic for us only in the last two centuries; it is misplaced in scope because we assume that technology is merely a neutral instrument in our hands and with which we can do as we will. Both of these erroneous assumptions tend to render us less effective in working out our problems with technology and with ourselves. By limiting the era of technology to the last two centuries, we create the hidden assumption that the historical path of Western development is essentially independent of technology. Thus, we assume that Western civilization is founded firmly on various roots that can be called forth to deal with technology. Seeing technology as a relative newcomer, we assume that we are anchored in something else that can take "spiritual" command of technology and turn it into a more constructive agency of design.
Our mistaken assessment of the lifeti e of technology is really caused by our failure to understand its essence. Technology must be understood in its essence and not merely as industrial machinery, space-age refrigerators, and computer-directed guidance systems. If we understand technology in its essence, Heidegger claimed, we will see that all of the West's historical development has been built out of it; technology is the central theme of our civilization. To move out of the dangers that technology presents, then, requires more than retrenching ourselves in "traditional values;" it requires a transformation of values, a process of placing Western civilization on a whole new course. This is clearly similar to what Nietzsche recognized and called the "transvaluation of all values," though Heidegger asserted that Nietzsche himself was never able to make the transformation or to recognize the whole extent to which it is necessary.
The problem of technology is not merely its obvious physical dangers to us nor is it merely these confusions of time and scope. Technology is more than just a name for Western thinking, Western dispositions, and Western inventiveness. Technology is also a mode of self-consciousness, a mode of seeing ourselves and, hence, of letting ourselves enter into the world. Heidegger's analysis demands a new calling-forth of human consciousness. It demands that humans come to presence in the world in a new way more fitting to their essential nature. It is the object of this final section to interpret this last portion of the argument and its relevance to environmental ethics.
Let us return to the essay "The Question Concerning Technology" because it was there that Heidegger set us underway against "the greatest danger" and in possession of the idea that it may be through art that we can come to a saving power. If he was correct in his understanding of technology as enframing, it poses a great danger to human life; this danger is that the epoch of enframing locks human activity into its own form of the destining-of-revealing and, hence, tends to limit human freedom by concealing the possibility of other forms of revealing and, within that, the possibility of human involvement in other forms of revealing.
"The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence. The rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth." {[7], p. 28}
As human beings become progressively more involved as the orderers of a reality conceived as standing-reserve, they too become standing-reserve at a higher level of organization. In other words, as human beings come to see other beings in the world only for their potential applications to human dispositions, humans themselves come to mirror this shallowness of "being" and to see themselves merely in terms of potential resources to the dispositions of others. Enframing challenges us forth in the decisive role as organizer and challenger of all that is in such a way that human life withdraws from its essential nature. Within this role the essence of our humanity falls into concealment; we can no longer grasp the real nature of life. We withdraw into a conception of reality that is subjective and isolated; but Heidegger asserts that the human essence is not a being in isolation.
When we explore beings, things that exist, we discover that most beings are simply in existence with no relationship to one another, no consciousness. Human beings are unique, so far as we can tell, because human beings do observe. Humans are aware of other beings; they witness them. This is why Heidegger referred to the human being with the German word 'Dasein' or
"being-there." The human is the only being we know for which the "there" and the "when" make sense because the human's awareness defines a "there" and a "when" among all other beings. For non-aware beings, beings that are merely "ready-to-hand," there is no sense of taking a place within a historical time. It is in this respect, then, that our central concern regarding the human essence must be to consider who we are as beings among beings and, in particular, as beings who witness other beings. All profound thinking about human life must be founded on the question of who we are as aware beings among other beings. The essence of human life is, indeed, founded in the facticity, or objectivity, of dasein; not only do we humans come into relationship with other beings through our characteristic consciousness but they come into their own beings as objects through us. They are witnessed by us. This is why Heidegger insisted that, from the position of our own essence, "we can never encounter only [ourselves]." {[1}, p. 27} Any conception of our environment that perceives only ourselves and our dispositions is necessarily flawed from the point of view of essential human nature.
The human presence is crucial to other beings coming-to-presence, to truth happening. This concept should sound familiar now now; what it claims is that the human essence is fundamentally involved in all revealing, in all objects coming into unconcealment. Technology, as a mode of revealing, is one path within many possible paths that open up within the essential nature of that human role; each of these paths develops a specific aspect of our relations to beings. That relationship is always reciprocated in the sense that, in so far as being-there is our essential nature, the way that we are there, the way that we relate, is the way that we ourselves come into being during that period. This is the key to Heidegger's insight that the way we treat other things is the determinant of the way we ourselves will be treated. The danger of technology is that it treats other beings in an aggressive, utilitarian way so that, ultimately, we ourselves are carried away within the overarching themes of aggression and utility. In the epoch of technology, we come to see ourselves exclusively within the limited sense of agency within this unfolding structure of being.
What is this revealing in which we participate? The process is understood as something coming out of "concealedness" into "unconcealedness." To understand what Heidegger meant requires us to reflect as deeply as possible upon the nature of human experience as it happens to us (within what we are) and not merely life as the West has traditionally interpreted it. Heidegger conceived of this through the concept of the "Open."
"In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting... That which is can only be, as a being, if it stands within and stands out within what is lighted in this clearing. Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are. Thanks to this clearing, beings are unconcealed in certain changing degrees." {[6], p. 53}
But the "changing degrees" should be taken as a dialectic of conflict, of clearing and concealment. In this regard, Heidegger's concepts of World and Earth are the forms of clearing and concealment in the dialectical process.
"To the Open there belong a world and the earth... the world is the clearing of the paths of the essential guiding directions with which all decision complies... The earth is not simply the Closed but rather that which rises up as self-closing. World and earth are always intrinsically and essentially in conflict, belligerent by nature... Earth juts through the world and world grounds itself on the earth only so far as truth happens as the primal conflict between clearing and concealing." {[6], p. 55}
Life is more complex than simply living among an extensive inventory of things that we perceive and that stimulate our sense organs. What life is, for each of us and for all of us together, is always in flux. Our recognition of beings, of ourselves, and of all the relations between these, is our world. It is built on, or out of, the whole of beings and is a lighting or clearing within them. It is a continual process in which beings come to presence and beings fall back into concealment. Earth itself is a determinant that is never "seen" as such but is always reckoned with nevertheless; world is what is "seen."
We should recall, at this point, that an important aspect of art rests on the way that the art-work reveals the tension between earth and world. "Setting up a world and setting forth the earth, the [art-work] is the fighting of the battle in which the unconcealedness of beings as a whole, or truth, is won." {[6], p. 55} The art-work, in other words, is different from ordinary unconcealedness, or truth, in the sense that, within the art-work, the conflict itself comes into unconcealedness; in this way, the art-work makes clear the essence of being itself. The art-work always stands as something made, or created; its createdness is overt, standing as a message asking for a different kind of experience. If we follow this message, what we experience within the art-work is not the specific and accurate representation of any one being but rather that very process within which all beings come into being, the very process of world being founded upon earth. Nietzsche wrote, "The phenomenon 'artist' is still the most perspicuous ---." Heidegger interpreted this to mean that "with this being, the artist, Being [the essence of being itself] lights up for us most immediately and brightly." {[4], p. 60}
By contrast, science taken as an act is not an original happening of truth, but it is always the cultivation of a domain of truth already opened, specifically by apprehending and confirming that which shows itself to be possibly and necessarily correct within that field. {[2}, p. 62} Science, in other words, cultivates that which is already true to us, that which has already happened, and in doing so it cannot capture the essential nature of truth happening. We can begin to see here that technology, too, misses the nature of what is by always seeing it as what will be; it misses the essential nature of being by cultivating what has already been opened entirely in terms of its potential, again missing the fundamental processes at work in the happening of truth.
While we may now glimpse something of the human essence and the legitimate role of human life and art in all revealing, we are still left with the problem of how we can make contact with art as a saving power from within our epoch of enframing. In "The Question Concerning Technology" Heidegger suggested that the disaster that technology is becoming compels us to look more closely at the genus and essentia of the whole process in which we have become involved. In fact, the very character of the disaster brings out the specific nature of that genus; for the disaster is a human disaster, having the scope of affecting the whole human role and destiny on earth. Technology is a destining that has involved the human role in revealing, that is, in bringing-to-presence truth; and consequently, it raises the issue of why and for what wider cause humans possess their particular station as conscious agents in the whole process of truth happening.
We must stare into the depths of all that is and was and can be and recognize, above all, that what humans essentially are is, in some mysterious way, a "grant." So Heidegger says. "Only what is granted endures. That which endures primally out of the earliest beginning is what grants." {[7], p. 31} If technology is seen as an imminent threat to humans, it comes to focus human attention upon that which is granted to human life since what is granted is precisely what is most threatened. As we view the specific history of that grant in the development of technology from antiquity onward, we can begin to understand that which is granted to humans in a deeper sense. This is why Heidegger could suggest that the saving power begins to grow precisely within the greatest danger. "The essence of technology is in a lofty sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, i.e., of truth." {[1}, p. 33}
In this way, technology may share some of the privilege that we have already discussed for art. The artist, we should recall, is specially stationed with respect to "homecoming," because the artist has a propensity to journey forth. Having seen the ordinary objects of the world in many different lands, the artist is specially prepared to recognize that home is not merely those particular objects that make up one's familiar world. The essence of home lies in the special way that humans make their way in the world, that is, the special way in which life comes into being in the homeland. In the case of technology, we mirror the poet's propensity to journey far afield though, in this case, it is journeying away from a more passive and cooperative relationship with other beings. In the epoch of technology, we are well prepared, then, to understand that the human essence is not merely invested in being one-among-beings, any more than home is merely the people and the place. We are, indeed, better prepared for the mystery involved in the human essence and, in particular, the grant that we humans live. Technology's aggressive venturing forth in the world eventually calls us to cast our glance back on what is granted to us in the world. That world is, afterall, our home. Technology too, in its perilous ways, calls us to a homecoming.
What is it to save? Heidegger suggested that "saving" is more than hauling something back to its original form; instead, it should be construed as bringing something back into its essence. Thus, the saving power that arises through art and within the danger of modern technology must be a power to bring humans back into their essence.
"Might there not perhaps be a more primally granted revealing that could bring the saving power into its first shining forth in the midst of the danger, a revealing that in the technological age rather conceals than shows itself?" {[7], p. 34}
Yes, art, the poetic in particular, stands in this position. What we have known as art has been merely a shadow of the poetic that could remain within the truth of enframing, something "derived from the artistic," "enjoyed aesthetically," merely "a sector of cultural activity." {[7], p. 34} But art in its essential nature holds forth a mode of revealing in which humans themselves can come to presence in that characteristic role that is their grant.
In conclusion, Martin Heidegger rested an amazing assertion of hope upon art and, in particular, upon the poetic.
"Could it be that the fine arts are called to poetic revealing? Could it be that revealing lays claim to the arts most primally, so that they for their part may expressly foster the growth of the saving power, may awaken and found anew our look into that which grants
and our trust in it?" {[7], p. 35}
Does this mean that we should abandon our factories and our computing machines? Should we destroy our factories and stop teaching our technical skills? Should we find our way back into a primitive way of living on this earth? That would be absurd. Heidegger's argument is with technology's essence, not with the things and characteristics of our world that we inappropriately associate with it. We must proceed into the future from where we stand but, while we proceed, we should use these things and our talents to come back into our own essential nature. As Holderlin wrote, "...poetically dwells man upon this earth." {[1}, p. 33; emphasis added} Can we turn toward the poetic from where we are?
In this essay, I hope to have shown that Heidegger's identification of art as the "saving power" is understandable in terms of both his conception of art and his conception of healthy human life. But even if it is understandable,
is it believable? And, if believable, do we know what to believe and where to direct ourselves? The answers, I think, require each of us to bring Heidegger's very abstract message home to himself/herself. Of particular importance in this process, is our consciousness of life as something granted. That means, in a way, that life is privileged. But that privilege becomes eclipsed when we recklessly and ego-centrically possess and control everything we find around us. When we set upon the environment, we have lost all sense of it as something granted to us or of our lives as privileged by its being there. So long as this is our mode of relating to the environment, there can be no "environmental ethics" as such because there can be no way to consistently argue for a path of behavior that is caring or self-limiting.
Because art brings the tensions of life into presence explicitly, art brings us to that which is sacred. This is to say that life is sacred and that the ego is actually a sacred medium to the continuation of life as a whole. Do "the gods" return within this use of the word 'sacred?' Yes, but these are the "true gods" of Being's essence and not the "corrupted gods" of institution-alized religion's short-sightedness. The solution, I think, is to bring these "true gods" back into our lives.
Suppose an engineer has been assigned the task of designing a dam for the Kern River. As readers of Heidegger, we suggest to the engineer that the way of the future lies in thinking poetically about this project rather than thinking of it from a merely technical perspective. Might he not have to ponder what the Kern River actually is? Might he not have to "sing" of that essence through his works?
Naturally, any engineer known to me would think the whole conversation mad. After all, is not engineering a matter of solving problems? How shall we block the flow of this river? How shall we hold the water thus backed up? What ground will be a sufficient anchorage? But notice how this attitude defines everything in terms of a specific "destining," the assigned task. To see something as a specific "problem" has already accepted a limited sphere of solutions. Problems, as such, have already delimited their solutions. The Kern River is not free to be seen in its whole essence, as it is; the engineer is not free to see himself or his relation to the river in any other way than in the limited frame of a designer and a design. Both are enslaved by the particular destining that we call technology.
Heidegger did not recommend that we should all become artists, certainly not in our contemporary understanding of what that would mean. The engineer's task is no better when viewed as a self-centered exercise of genius or imagination. That understanding would only repeat the errors of our present understanding of technology itself. The real turning point of the whole issue rests on our consciousness, how we see ourselves in relation to other beings and, hence, how we come into being. The lesson of art that seems possible is that through art, even art as we presently possess it, we may secure an understanding of a different kind of consciousness and way into our own being. Even today's art, dominated as it is by the technological mentality, still stands faithful to the consciousness of humans that listen. Isn't that the problem? The engineer who dams the Kern River does not listen. I do not mean that he fails to listen to environmentalists, and he clearly does listen to those who order the dam to be built. It is that, as a being whose very essence is to be-there, to witness the whole of what is, the engineer fails in that essential task of human fulfillment. The engineer fails to see that the river, as well as himself is sacred and deserves to be heard.
Can we truly listen and still go on building dams? At this point we do not know the answer. After the turning point and within the new epoch of an "artistic civilization," it may be quite possible to build dams. The problem of technology is not just the problem of how we come into being through technology. Do we come home to ourselves through our technology or do we still journey outward away from home? Heidegger's belief was clearly that technology carries us outward from ourselves. The essential nature of art, however, is homecoming, that is, discovering the essence of ourselves on earth and within our environment in the world.
Epilogue
Typical of all the Native Americans who inhabited the land along the eastern side of what we now call the Sierras, the Washoe Indians survived by harvesting the annual crop of pine nuts from the Pinyon Pine. Their dependence on these nuts was great and the hills that bore the Pinyon Pines year after year were looked upon as sacred land granted to the people. When the Washoes gathered at these hills at the beginning of the annual harvest, they celebrated the time and the gift with many rituals, a celebration that often lasted for four or five days.
The key question that we must ask ourselves is whether we take anything, today, as a gift and, hence, whether anything whatsoever can be sacred to us. Our sophisticated society tends to laugh at the Washoes. Their rituals and their care of the sacred are interpreted as signs of their "primitive nature." The whole history of European interaction with the Native Americans assures us that the Indians' relationship to the land, as a primitive subsistence, was "unworthy" and that Western civilization is the true "owner" of the land in so far as it has been prepared to put it to "productive use." But taking something to be sacred does not require that we believe it to be god's property, does not even require belief in gods. Even without the gods as such, something can still be accepted as a gift and, hence, can still demand care and be sacred to us.
Do we recognize anything as a gift today? Very little, I think. And yet our society consumes more than any other society on the face of the earth. The irony is that we have become so possessed by what we do to transform raw materials for our use that we belittle and ignore the role that raw materials themselves have by their own nature. These "raw materials" are still that which is given to us; and whatever we do to transform them, is still done to what is given and could not be done if they were not given. By what right, then, are we not grateful; by what absence of mind do we fail to see the sacredness of the earth; and by what foolishness do we not care for what we are given?
The way that Americans eat is a profound symbol of this whole dilemma. It is rare today, that we ever see the animal-origin of meat products. Slaughterhouses are far removed from where we live. Supermarkets prepare and package cut meats in advance. Consumers of meat products select what they want in plastic packages that include absorbent papers to eliminate the sight of blood. In all of this, we lose focus on the fact that meat comes from animals who are raised on the land; and while we have designed scientific breeding, feeding, and slaughtering systems for handling animals, animals are still conceived by and born by natural husbandry. Animals are still a gift of the natural earth on which we find our home. And our own ability to digest and utilize animal protein is also a gift to us. We do not have to believe that animals are sacred, but that is a way of setting it before ourselves that they are something given to us and that our lives with them is a grant. Is it not the artistic sensitivity that carries us forward in this project? Perhaps, then, art does bring us the power that can save us from the people that we have become.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
[1] Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams. Intro., Adams, James Truslow. New York: Random House, 1946.
[2] Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.
[3] Heidegger, Martin, "Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry," in Existence and Being. Intro., Brock, Werner. South Bend, Ind.: Regnery/Gateway, 1979. pp. 233-69.
[4] Heidegger, Martin, Nietzsche, vol. 1, The Will to Power as Art. Trans. Krell, David Farrell. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979.
[5] Heidegger, Martin, "Remembrance of the Poet," in Existence and Being. Intro., Brock, Werner. South Bend, Ind.: Regnery/Gateway, 1979. pp. 233-69.
[6] Heidegger, Martin, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans., Hofstadter, Albert. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. pp. 15-88.
[7] Heidegger, Martin, "The Question Concerning Technology," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Ed., intro., and trans., Lovitt, William. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. pp. 3-35.
[8] Heidegger, Martin, "What Are Poets For?" in Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans., Hofstadter, Albert. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. pp. 15-88.
[9] Holderlin, Friedrich and Morike, Eduard, Selected Poems. Trans. and intro. Middleton, Christopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.
[10] Lovitt, William, "A Gesprach with Heidegger on Technology." Man and World, 6, 44-59 (1973).
ENDNOTES
1. This essay originated in 1949 within a series of four lectures given to the Club of Bremen. Heidegger reworked the materials through the '50s and the early '60s. This essay and its companion, "The Turning," were published in 1961 under the title Die Technik und die Kehre.
2. One should note that by "essence" Heidegger does not mean some metaphysical reality, or substance, that stands behind technology. Rather the essence of something is the center of meaning out of which we must think its relationships with all else.
3. It is of interest, here, to note that the Romans translated aletheia as veritas and that we translate this word as "truth." By the word 'truth' we usually mean "the correctness of an idea" {[7], p. 12} and, in doing that, we have lost its objective significance as an expression of the actual coming into presence of something.
4. For an excellent discussion of the preceding analyses see William Lovitt's essay, [10].
5. In this connection, we may begin to see the thrust of Heidegger's claim that art could become the path through which the dangers of modern technology can be undone. Art might be able in some way to draw us back into a more original form of bringing-things-forth.
6. Here we can begin to see the relevance of Heidegger's critique to the issues of environmental ethics.
7. This is the same symbolic connection with energy as made dramatically in Henry Adam's chapter, "The Dynamo and the Virgin," in his Education of Henry Adams [1].
8. Here we can begin to see the danger of modern technology since it seems to transform the significance, to us, of all other beings in the universe.
9. It is interesting to observe the growing tendency in science-fiction fantasies to explore all kinds of non-human life forms. Does this represent our own uncertainty about who we are as human beings? Doesn't it also demonstrate the degree to which we see ourselves, in our present makeup, as merely standing-reserve, one in a vast variety of life forms, not necessarily completely suited to all of the possible destinings of revealing?
10. Heidegger himself favored poetry among the arts. His identification of poetry as the highest form of art emerged clearly in the early '30s in his reading of Friedrich Holderlin. From there his interest broadened to Rilke and others, and his theory of the central role of language developed alongside of his understanding of poetry.
11. I have used this play on 'practicality'/'impracticality' because a major dimension of our epoch is involved in the theory/praxis issue. Art remains true to its nature in its revolt against practicality but, nevertheless, by staging its revolt within the vision of the impractical it demonstrates that it still lies embedded in the whole epoch's involvement with the practical.
12. Approaching this essay requires some caution. Like all of Heidegger's analyses, the poem provided a jumping-off place for his thinking into basic issues. Our interest here is not in the accuracy of Heidegger's analysis of Holderlin, nor is it an interest in determining the true meaning of Holderlin's poem. Rather our interest is in following the directions of thinking that the poetry inspired in Heidegger.
13. Heidegger's concept of the Open will be clarified somewhat in the final section. At this point, it might be fair to read it as "experience."
14. It is interesting to notice the degree to which recent science fiction creations have tended toward the rendering of fantastic prototypes of non-human life forms. Can we interpret these creations as the unconscious human imagination working out the perceived mortality of the human species, trying to assure itself that life of some kind will continue in an advanced technological context?