What the river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station. In order that we may even remotely consider the monstrousness that reigns here, let us ponder for a moment the contrast that speaks out of the two titles, “The Rhine” as dammed up into the power works, and “The Rhine” as uttered out of the art work, in Holderlin’s hymn by that name. But, it will be replied, the Rhine is still a river in the landscape, is it not? Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry. [Heidegger 1977: 5]
But it seemed to me that that the cost of this reassurance was high: his suspicion not, I think, of scientism but of science itself. It is suggested here:
It remains true, nonetheless, that man in the technological age is, in a particularly striking way, challenged forth into revealing. That revealing concerns nature, above all, as the chief storehouse of the standing energy reserve. Accordingly, man’s ordering attitude and behavior display themselves first in the rise of modern physics as an exact science. Modern science’s way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces. Modern physics is not experimental physics because it applies apparatus to the questioning of nature. Rather the reverse is true. Because physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance, it therefore orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way. ... The modern physical theory of nature prepares the way first not simply for technology but for the essence of modern technology. [ibid: 21]
(There is also a lovely distinction between history and chronology:
But after all, mathematical physics arose almost two centuries . before technology. How, then, could it have already been set upon by modern technology and placed in its service? The facts testify to the contrary. Surely technology got under way only when it could be supported by exact physical science. Reckoned chronologically, this is correct. Thought historically, it does not hit upon the truth. [ibid: 21-2] )
If I follow the broad picture, the way in which the world reveals itself to us in the modern era, the era of both modern science and industrial production, manifests the essence of technology. That essence is the form that the world takes for us. Further, although Heidegger thinks that there is something wrong with this way, what is wrong is not a matter of falsity. Truths are revealed to us through the technological gaze. One thing wrong seems to be that this way of understanding the world excludes all others. From within it, it seems that this is the only way to latch onto the world. It takes a Heidegger to spot, because of clues still present and hinted at in a line from Holderlin, that this is not so. A poetic revealing of the world, by contrast, permits the idea that still other ways may be available.
The logic of the passage about science seems to be that what is wrong in the way the world is revealed to us through the conceptual spectacles of the essence of technology is already present in the way that natural science takes the world to fit the realm of mathematicised natural law. So if there were a way to step aside from a technological gaze it would involve rejecting the rise of scientific accounts of nature. Heidegger does not seem to reject merely a philosophical addition to science: the scientistic assumption that there is no more to nature than natural science reveals. It seems that with the sentence “Modern science’s way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces” that science itself is already at fault.
This may all be my misunderstanding but if not it seems that the cost of the framework that Heidegger offers to my colleagues is too high. As well as rejecting a scientistic assumption that the world is merely the disenchanted realm science describes, we have also to reject its disenchanted descriptions of the disenchanted bits of the world described despite the truth that seems to inhere in them. So scientific medicine would have to be thrown out wholesale rather than merely put to the service of person centred care.
I also wonder what the marks of someone who had achieved the view Heidegger points towards would be. It was, apparently, there in the poetic response to the world of the ancient Greeks and their wholehearted embrace of art not as a mere cultural industry. For them, a life of silver chalice making perhaps. But what would it be now?
Heidegger, M. (1977) 'The question concerning technology' in Heidegger, M. The question concerning technology, and other essays. New York: Harper & Row
