Identity and technology: Note on Heidegger and some consequences

The Heideggerian critique of technology is not an arguments against the use of tools and methods or techniques to do anything, but against thinking of our manner of being in the world in terms of techniques and the mastery of things. His central claim is that our metaphysics, or ways of thinking about Being, has always been based on technology, and thus on things like mastery and governance.

Clearly there are at least these two ways of criticizing things like technology, metaphysics, and governance:

1) We will none of the things they involve.

2) We will allow ourselves to use such things, but we will not take this use for the paradigm of what it is for persons and things to be, or anything like this.

Either abolishing technology, government, business, etc. or not using such things as metaphors that tell us what is, what matters, what is to be done, or who we are. Maybe this can be made intelligible, maybe not; that it could was, surely, Heidegger's gambit. Maybe it means that practices like art and thinking are sui generis ones that cannot be modeled on things like labor, management, and technique. In Aristotelian terms, they are, like 'the good' ends in themselves; maybe that is enough, maybe it's more than that.

The Heideggerian position on tools and techniques, and business and government, can be compared to St. Paul's, in the reading of him by Agamben:

The social relationships people have will be maintained, but will be considered as having no importance.

For instance, to take the most radical and ineradicable difference among persons we know of: men and women are different in some ways, but nothing important will be staked upon this.

That some of the differences cannot be denied, like that only women give birth, need not be the object of a crisis, as instead things can be "allowed to take their natural course," and need not be something on which something else is staked). In particular identities would not be.

Identities have always announced essences that must be implemented and thus also enforced. Properties of things will remain adjectival, not transformed first into conceptual, and then proper, names. (Maimonidean negative theology asserted that the divine has this character. None of God's properties is an essence. This is a quality of persons whose only essential or unsubtractable terms for being indicated or being invoked are a proper name and deictics like "I," "you," "he/she," or "that person." Your properties are all contingent as far as 'who' you are is concerned; they are all true of you, if they apply, or as Maimonides says of God's they are not false, but none defines you. The properties of persons are available for describing them, but their use is not necessary.

(In theological terms, this means that God is, not an absolutely impersonal force - also, the number of such forces could be one or man, as with things, forms, and other categories by which things can be thought, but the absolutely personal person. That does not make his existence as such any less imaginary, the crucial fact that theologies always deny.)

To the extent that this is true, persons as persons are unmanageable. A task or project can be managed, but persons are not by necessity assigned to any project or task proper to them. In this respect, we are also radically free. Meaning not self-determining but indeterminable.