Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
modern technology, and cannot be detected through anthropological
investigations like Marx's that tend to focus on instrumental analyses
of machines and technical processes such as the division of labor. As a
mode of being that illuminates beings of all sorts, Gestell is nothing
technological itself, but indicates that “to be” in the age of technology
means to be scientifically calculable and technically controllable, creat-
ing the illusion that humanity is now “lord of the earth.” In attempting
to “humanize” nature in its totality, erasing any significant difference
between it and ourselves, we quite unexpectedly and paradoxically
intensify our alienation from it, and create against all our good inten-
tions a world where environmental devastation becomes an acceptable
by-product of progress and the standardization of mass production
applies to consumers as well as to consumables. Nature, in effect, with-
draws and, even more strangely, hides itself in this mode of revealing
(much as God has gone into eclipse, as Martin Buber has argued), con-
cealing from human making and knowing its character as
physis
, by
which Heidegger means nature's capacity to bring itself forth from out
of itself in ways that remain ultimately impenetrable to Western science
and technology.
There is about modern technology, when seen in this way, an air of
hubris, a marked tendency on its part to push both humans and nature
beyond their limits, to make “unreasonable demands” on them. Specifi-
cally, it is with the earth
as earth
that modern science and technology
run up against
their
limits, and so become fateful in a historical sense.
Concealed from them is the “unnoticeable law of the earth,” a “law” of
self-preservation in the face of assaults that would deny and suppress
nature's character as physis. “Technology drives the earth beyond the
developed sphere of its possibility into such things which are no longer
a possibility and are thus impossible,” doing so in order to secure a stable
human order both on and beyond the earth, where, in spite of its
acknowledged successes, it will find that the law of the possible—that is,
the hidden and inexhaustible ways of being that govern beings—cannot
itself be mastered.
30
Simply put, “nature is not to be gotten around,” and
most insistently when it is theoretically objectified and technologically
entrapped.
31
Marx's hope of overcoming humankind's age-old alienation from
being, manifest for him in Cartesian dualism, and finally establishing a
