From: Mark Walker (tap@cgocable.net)
Date: Fri Jun 15 2001 - 11:12:20 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: scerir <scerir@libero.it>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2001 11:26 AM
Subject: Re: The problem with transhumanism
> > "But you know, nanotechnology, AI, genetics etc.
> > have nothing to do with transhumanism!"
>
> "When we look into the ambiguous essence of technology,
> we behold the constellation, the stellar course of the mystery.
> The question concerning technology is the question concerning
> the constellation in which revealing and concealing, in which the
> essential unfolding of truth propriates. But what help is it to us
> to look into the constellation of truth? We look into the danger
> and see the growth of the *saving* power."
>
> "Because the *essence* of technology is nothing technological,
> essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with
> it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the
> essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different
> from it."
>
> [Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology]
>
> Bentornato!
> - S.
>
Heidegger's reflections on technology are intimately intertwined with his
history of the West. As he sees it, ours is a tale of woe: the all-important
"question of Being" is successively submerged first by the Greeks and
metaphysics, then Enlightenment science, and finally by the "technological
worldview" of our own age. His pessimism is most evident in an interview
published shortly after his death where he announced that we are so
ensconced in the technological worldview that only "Only a god can save us
now". Of course, as someone noted in a doctoral dissertation, we may enjoy
the poet's irony in the fact that technology may allow us to make a good
approximation of the "god that might save us". (That is, Heidegger's big
mistake: Dasein has not just a history but a biology as well--and we are
about to change the latter). Mark.
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