Philosophy & Technology

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00417-4
RESEARCH ARTICLE

How to Live a Life of One’s Own: Heidegger, Marcuse

and Jonas on Technology and Alienation

Kieran M. Brayford 1

Received: 15 November 2019 / Accepted: 3 July 2020/

# Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Abstract
In this paper, I explore Martin Heidegger’s and Herbert Marcuse’s critiques of tech-
nology, and their suggestions on how to neutralise the negative effects of technology, in
order to articulate a potential path to an authentic, unalienated life. Martin Heidegger’s
view of technology and its negative effects are first explored before presenting
Marcuse’s critique of Heidegger. The dissimilarities between Heidegger’s ‘Gestell’
and Marcuse’s ‘Technological Rationality’ are then explored, before then examining
the differences between Heidegger’s and Marcuse’s ideas of how one may overcome
the alienating impact of technology. Favouring Marcuse’s suggestions, Hans Jonas’
work on technological ethics is then posited as a necessary guide for Marcuse’s vision
of a post-alienated existence. I conclude that the continued appropriation and integra-
tion of Heideggerian thought into critiques of technology could be valuable for the
field, especially when answering questions concerning individual authenticity in the
context of rapid technological progress and ecological decline.

Keywords Martin Heidegger . Herbert Marcuse . Hans Jonas . Politics of technology .

Authenticity . Alienation

This paper explores Martin Heidegger’s and Herbert Marcuse’s critiques of technology,
and their ideas on how to neutralise technology’s negative effects, in order to articulate
a feasible path to an authentic, post-alienated life. I begin with an exposition of
Heidegger’s understanding of the essence of technology—Gestell or Enframing—and
how technology acts to alienate us from our essence as world-disclosers. I then present
Marcuse’s critique of Heidegger, before exploring the dissimilarities between
Heidegger’s ‘Gestell’ and Marcuse’s ‘Technological Rationality’, and between
Marcuse’s socio-political approach and Heidegger’s suggestions for developing a
new relationship to technology. Siding with Marcuse, I draw on the work of Hans

* Kieran M. Brayford
k.m.brayford@keele.ac.uk

1
Keele University, Newcastle ST5 5BG, UK
 K. M. Brayford

Jonas to supplement Marcuse’s strategy for how to engage with technology so as to

bring around a post-alienated life, and thereby ‘live a life of one’s own’.

1 Later Heidegger: Technology, Levelling and Alienation

The essence of technology, for later Heidegger, is obscured by what he calls the
instrumental and the anthropological conceptions of technology (Heidegger 1954:
312ff)—the instrumental conception of technology envisions technology as a “means
to an end” (ibid) whereas the anthropological sees technology as a set of human
practices. The synthesis of these presents technology as something we do, in order to
achieve something. But for Heidegger, this understanding is only partially true; to grasp
the essence of technology we must also be aware that technology is “a way of
revealing” (ibid: 318)—technology is not just a goal-orientated human activity, but
also a way of transforming our worlds.
According to Heidegger’s understanding of the essence of technology—Gestell, or
Enframing (ibid: 325ff)—the introduction of a new technology into the world causes a
shift in the basic pattern intelligibility in that world. Each iteration of our worlds takes
its form from what was revealed during the previous iteration; technologies always
enframe the next iteration insofar as what shows up for us as useful, and in what way, is
set by the technologies: that already revealed as useful by technology in one iteration
“challenges forth” (ibid: 335) what will be revealed as useful in the next. This process
of continuous technologically driven world development is met with a stark warning
from Heidegger. He claims that the power technology has to reveal new potentialities
for action is “never a human handiwork” (ibid: 324), but rather a power that is
unknowingly abetted by humans engaged with technologies and thus which sits beyond
their remit.1
But where does this leave humans? Humanity, in a world permeated by technolo-
gies, is usurped from its position as the primary agent of world disclosure. Humans
become coerced by technology into interpreting their world in one particular way:
“modern technology starts man upon the way of revealing through which the actual
everywhere, more or less distinctly, becomes standing-reserve” (ibid: 329). This is to
say, technology encourages humans to interpret their worlds as replete with resources,
poised for use by technology: “the earth … reveals itself as a coal mining district, the
soil as a mineral deposit” (ibid: 320). As such, technology effectively interprets the
world for us—where before our worlds were populated by a diverse array of entities
with a range of uses, our worlds now are levelled down to the single category of
resource. This loss of interpretive diversity, influential on contemporary pluralists2, is
not Heidegger’s only warning. Heidegger suggests that this levelling process, whereby
all becomes “standing reserve” (ibid: 326), will reach a point “where [man] himself will
have to be taken as standing-reserve” (ibid: 332). “Every other possibility of revealing”
becomes obscured by technological understanding and thus man will lose “his relation
1
This point is one that is also made by more recent critiques of technology. Perhaps, most explicitly by John
Gray: “There is a deeper reason why ‘humanity’ will never control technology. Technology is not something
humankind can control. It is an event that has befallen the world.” (Gray 2003: 14).
2
Like Heidegger, Richard Rorty is also hostile towards the loss of interpretive diversity. See Rorty 1979., ch.
7 and 8.
How to Live a Life of One’s Own: Heidegger, Marcuse and Jonas on...

to himself” (ibid.)—what the human is becomes decided by whatever it is that the

technology demands of them.3 As such, the human in the technological society
becomes alienated, insofar as they are estranged from their fundamental essence as
world-disclosers: a way of being unable to be realised in a world where technology
does the world-disclosing for us.

2 Marcuse, Technology and Stratified Society

For Marcuse, Heidegger’s view lacks grounding in the concrete existence of the world:
“they [technologies] are treated as “forces in-themselves”, removed from the context of
power relations in which they are constituted and which determine their use and
function” (Marcuse 1977: 168). This lack of concrete grounding not only engenders
a situation where technology becomes “reified [and] hypostatized as fate4” (ibid) but
also obscures the true object of Heidegger’s critique. For Marcuse, technology is not
the decontextualized force that Heidegger sees, but rather “always a historical-social
project” (Marcuse 1965: 168). That is to say that technology contains within it “what a
society and its ruling interests intend to do with men and things” (ibid.)—technology is
not, therefore, a pure levelling force surreptitiously promoted by an unsuspecting
population, but rather it is both the mechanical embodiment of social values and the
reproductive force of a stratified society.
Indeed, the point of Marcuse’s critique of Heidegger can be sharpened by consid-
eration of the relationship between Heidegger’s notion of Gestell and Marcuse’s notion
of Technological Rationality. Gestell refers to technology’s ability to distance humanity
from its role as world-discloser, by encouraging people to interpret their world primar-
ily through the lens of the demands of technology, and thus levelling all to resource.
The central idea of this—that technologies are capable of determining our interpreta-
tions of the world—is one that is also picked up in Marcuse’s idea of Technological
Rationality. For Marcuse, the proliferation of technologies in a society engenders a kind
of rationality that “establishes standards of judgement and fosters attitudes which make
men ready to accept … the dictates of the apparatus” (Marcuse 1941: 44). The parallels
with Heidegger here are clear.5 In both cases, technology is presented as a disclosing
force, capable of influencing our interpretations of the world to suit its demands, but
there is also an important difference. For Heidegger, this process is a consequence of
3
It is not just in a social sense that this warning applies—consideration of the work of synthetic biologists that
seek to manipulate our genetic make up for various functional ends (see Schyfter 2011) or the role that
technology has in our evolutionary history (see Idhe and Malafouris 2019) reveals that Heidegger’s warning
also applies in a very literal sense.
4
The image of technology as a fatalistic force is again one that reappears in contemporary expositions of
technology. See Kelly 2017 and Zuboff 2019, respectively, for a sympathetic and hostile engagement with
technological inevitability and its effects.
5
So much so that it seems that Heidegger’s Gestell could have directly influenced Marcuse’s idea of
Technological Rationality, but this does not actually appear to be the case. The notion of Gestell was
introduced by Heidegger in his 1949 lecture Positionality and was later developed in his 1954 The Question
Concerning Technology. Marcuse’s notion of Technological Rationality was first introduced in 1941, in his
Some Implications of Modern Technology. One could speculate that Heidegger’s influence on Technological
Rationality originated from Marcuse’s development of related ideas found within Being and Time—such as
Heidegger’s exposition of equipment—but one cannot know this for certain, nor can one rule out the
possibility that Heidegger’s own thinking was influenced by that of his former student.
 K. M. Brayford

our understanding of the technologies that have befallen us: the technologies exist, and
then they act to estrange us from our essence as world-disclosers. For Marcuse, this
process is instead a consequence of the rational deployment of technologies in society,
so that the conditions to fulfil the promises of individualism would be in place—i.e. to
allow one the “adequate social and economic setting” (ibid: 43) needed to “break
through the whole system of values and ideas imposed upon them” (ibid). Yet, once
these technologies were introduced into society, this individualism was subverted and
technological rationality subsumed the previous standards of rationality which had
precipitated the introduction of these technologies in the first place. With this distinc-
tion in place, Marcuse’s criticism of Heidegger gains clarity: Heidegger, by neglecting
the forces from which Technological Rationality arose, presents a decontextualized
image of technology as a phenomenon that has befallen us, and thus is in possession of
a kind of autonomous logic of its own, one which threatens our role as world-
disclosers.
So technology does not have its own autonomous logic, as Heidegger suggests—its
specific form and effects are instead structured by the dominant powers of the society
that produces it and, thus, technology becomes the site of political manipulation:
“political power asserts itself through its power over the machine process and over
the technical organisation of the apparatus” (Marcuse 1964: 5). For Marcuse, this
technology-mediated political manipulation takes two forms. The first is that the kind
of technologies deployed to a society govern the particular system of relations present
in that society—here, Marcuse approvingly cites Marx’s statement that the “hand-mill
gives you society with the feudal lord, the steam-mill society with the industrial
capitalist” (Marx 1847 cited in Marcuse 1964: 157–8). The second is that technology,
in advanced industrial societies, is used to obscure and perpetuate the alienating system
of relations that it precipitates, through an “economic-technical … manipulation of
needs” (ibid: 5)—humanity becomes caught up in constant production and acquisition
of new commodities and thus loses itself to the false needs of mass-consumerism.
Here, we can find some resonance between Heidegger and Marcuse. Like Heideg-
ger, Marcuse observes that this situation is alienating because it both denies an
individual the ability to live life on their own terms—insofar as their time is spent
performing alienating labour and their selfhood is reduced to expression via mass-
produced commodities—and entails the emergence of “a pattern of one-dimensional
thought and behaviour in which ideas, aspirations and objectives that … transcend the
established universe of discourse and action and are either repelled or reduced to terms
of this universe” (ibid: 14). Both Heidegger and Marcuse warn of a similar process of
homogenisation that obstructs authentic realisation, but there is disagreement as to the
cause. Whilst Marcuse believes this situation is symptomatic of a stratified organisation
of society, of which technology is an articulation, for Heidegger the culprit is
technology’s essence, the culmination of a certain historical6 understanding. For
Marcuse, this fails to grasp that technology does not sit above or beyond the society
that produces and incorporates it, so the issues that Heidegger highlights are not strictly
to do with technology, in his view. Rather, they are issues concerning the values of a

6
Heidegger is not invoking history in the sense of “that which is chronicled” (Heidegger 1954: 329)—i.e. in
its historiographical historisch sense—but rather in its ontological geschichtlich sense, as “the process of
human activity … [that becomes] accessible as an object for historiography” (ibid).
How to Live a Life of One’s Own: Heidegger, Marcuse and Jonas on...

stratified society that are crystallised in technological apparatus. As such, he thinks

Heidegger’s criticisms of technology are ultimately misplaced.
For example, consider the following passage from Heidegger:

Agriculture is now the mechanised food industry. Air is now set upon to yield
nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example, uranium is set
upon to yield atomic energy, which can be unleashed either for destructive or
peaceful purposes. (Heidegger 1954: 320)

There are two ways that this can be read. Either it can be read—as Heidegger intends—
as an example of how technological forces challenges forth nature to reveal itself as a
resource, or it can be read in a Marcusean light, as a condemnation of how the “vested
interests” (Marcuse 1964: 5) in society put technology to the task of dominating and
commodifying nature. Should we opt for the Heideggerian reading then, as Marcuse
would suggest, we lose sight of the socio-political nature of technology and thus
erroneously present technology as a decontextualized disclosing force.
As we have seen, Marcuse is keen to emphasise the socio-political aspects of
technology and, thus, arguably, he presents a fuller, more worldly conception of
technology than Heidegger does. Heidegger advances a conception that ultimately
places technology beyond our dominion, and thus our only avenue of resistance to it
is to be aware of its essence so we can question its ill effects. Then, we might perhaps
enter into a “more primally granted revealing that could bring the saving-power into its
first shining-forth in the midst of the danger … [of] the technological age” (ibid: 339),
Marcuse, on the other hand, operates with a conception that recognises that its
alienating and homogenising consequences are not down to technology in and of itself,
but rather how specific technologies are deployed in advanced industrial societies—a
deployment that he sees as fundamentally irrational.
Care must be taken here when understanding what Marcuse means by rationality—
after all, the perpetuation of the system that he condemns as irrational seems to be a
rational endeavour for those vested interests that profit from it. For Marcuse, the
irrationality of this system is owed to the fact that it hinders a mass transcendence into
a situation where our higher possibilities can be realised. For Marcuse, our “attained
level of … material and intellectual culture” (op cit: 224) contains within it the
unrealised potential for the “pacification of existence … [and] the free development
of human needs and faculties” (ibid: 223)—it is the fact that this higher possibility of
mass human development is artificially held back so that the vested interests can
continue to benefit from the status quo, at the expense of the majority, that Marcuse
deems to be irrational.
A rational deployment of technology would seek the emancipation of the individual.
This technology-driven emancipation would act to undermine human alienation in a
number of ways. A rational mobilisation of technology would first utilise the produc-
tive capacities of technologies in order to minimise the individual’s need to perform
alienating labour in order to meet their basic needs—with a rational deployment of
technology a “stage would be reached when material production … becomes automat-
ed to the extent where all vital needs can be satisfied whilst necessary labor time is
reduced to marginal time” (ibid: 18), thus allowing the individual the space to pursue
their own authentic goals. Secondly, a emancipatory engagement with technology
 K. M. Brayford

would also precipitate a marked improvement on human wellbeing because the indi-
vidual, freed from “repressive productivity” (op cit. 1964: 46), could then embark on a
process of freeing themselves from their false needs, i.e. those needs manufactured by
the structures of mass-consumerism, those “which require continuing the rat race of
catching up with one’s peers and with planned obsolescence” (ibid: 246), and then
enter into a situation where their wants and needs are authentically their own. Here,
technology can not only be put to use towards the “comprehensive gratification of
needs and wants” (Marcuse 1938: 136), but also towards gratifying needs and wants
that could not exist in a pre-technical society: technology has the power to “extract
from things and bodies their mobility, beauty, and softness” (ibid: 137) and thus “what
man can perceive, feel and do” (ibid.) is opened up, not just allowing for basic needs to
be met, but also allowing opportunities for new, authentic wants to be sated. In short, a
rational deployment of technology creates a situation where “the individual would be
free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own” (op cit, 1964: 5); no longer
under the yoke of wage-labour and the system of manufactured needs that sustains the
alienating situation of the individual, the individual would be free to live a life on their
own terms.
Naturally, this brings the question of how a rational deployment of technology is
possible—of how one can resist the alienating and irrational deployment of technology.
For Heidegger, if we are to escape from the alienating effects of technology—if we are
to “deny [technologies] their right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse and lay
waste our nature” (Heidegger 1959: 54)—we must “keep open to the meaning hidden
in technology” (ibid: 55). To be attuned to this hidden meaning, we must first attain a
free relation to technology. For Heidegger, this free relation is cultivated by engaging
with practices that “gather the fourfold” (Heidegger 1951: 355). The fourfold refers to
what Heidegger calls the Earth—the tacitly understood practices that imbue our
situation with meaning—the Sky—the totality of potentialities that are manifest in a
situation—divinities—the effortlessness flow of the situation that lends it a feeling of
spiritual significance—and mortals—our attunement to the fact that we are without
fixed identity (Dreyfus and Spinosa 1997: 166–168). When a practice gathers these
elements, we act effortlessly, aware of the potentialities of being afforded to us and
ready to switch into one of these potentialities once the situation demands such from us.
For Heidegger, such practices act to counter the levelling power of technologies by
revealing and reasserting the interpretive diversity that technology acts to undermine,
and thus offers us a space outside of the logic of technologies that allows us to realise
that our understanding of technology is contingent. This would allow us to resist our
estrangement and reconnect with our role as world-disclosers. Therefore, to escape
from the danger of technology, according to Heidegger, we must isolate and protect
those practices that allow us to interpret the world in other ways than as resource alone.
Marcuse would disagree with Heidegger’s assertion that engaging in practices that
sit beyond the historically-embedded logic of technology is sufficient to rid it of its
negative impact, on the grounds that such a solution neglects the root cause of our
alienation—the social values that are crystallised in technological apparatuses and the
stratified society that they produce. For Marcuse, the problem requires a reconsidera-
tion of our socio-political situation and the technologies that support it. He states that
“the potential liberating blessings of technology … will not even begin to be real and
visible until capitalist industrialization and capitalist technology have been done away
How to Live a Life of One’s Own: Heidegger, Marcuse and Jonas on...

with” (Marcuse 1970: 68)—and as such, the emancipatory potentialities of technology

can only become real once they have been realised by technology designed and
deployed with emancipation in mind. It is not enough to change our relationship to
the currently existing technology; we must instead change the technological basis of
society. We must “develop a new technology” (op cit, 1964: 232), sympathetic to the
creative freedom that sits at the heart of the “art of living” (ibid: 235) in order to create a
situation where one’s life is lived on one’s own terms. Although Marcuse does not offer
any concrete suggestions of what this technology might look like, he does suggest that
it will begin to arise when technologies become democratised, i.e. when they “pass
beyond the stage at which they were … subjected to politics [and thus are] freed from
all particular interests which impede the satisfaction of human needs and the evolution
of human faculties” (ibid: 238).
We need to turn to one of Marcuse’s contemporaries—Hans Jonas—to flesh out
Marcuse’s position, thereby lending it an ethical axiom that could guide the develop-
ment of the new technology. According to Jonas, the advent of “modern technology has
introduced actions of such novel scale, objects, and consequences that the framework
of former ethics can no longer contain them” (Jonas 1979: 6). This is to say that raw
power of technology has rendered impotent traditional forms of ethical guidance on the
grounds that prior ethical judgements could be made only because of our closeness to
their consequences—“the good and evil about which the action had to care lay close to
the act” (ibid: 4)—whereas the impact of our decisions in the world of modern
technology lie outside of this proximity by way of their capacity to cause inter-
generational harm. This capacity to cause inter-generational damage informs Jonas’
assertion that the grounds of ethics has shifted away from an obligation to act ethically
towards the present, to an obligation to act ethically towards the future, thus providing
us with an ethical responsibility to “act so the effects of your action are compatible with
the permeance of genuine human life” (ibid: 11). Any actions that would make the
“existence or essence of man … a stake in the hazards of action” (ibid: 37) would be
ruled unethical. Crucially, for Jonas, this provides a secondary obligation to preserve
nature, because nature itself is a necessity for both the existence of humankind and the
realisation of individual essence; if our actions render our environments unsuitable for
life, or are stripped of their resources beyond repair, then our obligation to secure the
possibility of a worthy life for future generations has not been met.
Marcuse’s new technology, developed under the guidance of Jonas’ axiom, would
possess (at least) two characteristics. Firstly, it would be sustainable, insofar as it would
seek to minimise ecological damage, perhaps through the use of ‘green’ technologies
and techniques, and by ending the for-profit production process of producing “non-
sense … aimed at consumer titillation” (ibid: 145), with the resources currently used for
those ends instead utilised in meeting genuine human needs—i.e. security and auton-
omy.7 Secondly, it would be democratic insofar as it would be concerned primarily
with the satiation of genuine human wants and needs, if not under the auspices of

7
Here, there is resonance between the telos of Marcuse’s and Jonas’ work and the vital interests identified by
J. S. Mill: “The moral rules which forbid mankind to hurt one another (in which we must never forget to
include wrongful interference with each other’s freedom) are more vital to human well-being than any
maxims, however important, which only point out the best mode of managing some department of human
affairs” (Mill 1863: 96).
 K. M. Brayford

resource-efficiency, then for the realisation of a genuinely human life; i.e. a life lived on
one’s own footing.

3 Conclusion

In this paper, I have combined insights from Heidegger, Marcuse and Jonas to try
sharpen the focus of the critique of technology that arises from this tradition, so that we
might better understand how we might begin to respond to it. Both Heidegger and
Marcuse agree that technology has the potential to estrange us from an authentic
existence, but disagree about the underlying cause. For Heidegger, it is a consequence
of our historical understanding of technology and thus, can be undermined by engaging
in practices that reconnect us to our essence as world-disclosers. Marcuse builds upon
this analysis by isolating its shortcomings and making it more practical, in arguing that
the alienation is a consequence of the social values that are crystallised in our
technologies, and thus that a reconsideration of our socio-political situation, and the
subsequent development of a new technological basis of society, is necessary to escape
estrangement. Jonas then fills out the picture by allowing us to think more concretely
about what some of the characteristics of Marcuse’s ‘new’ technologies may be, as
applied to our contemporary situation.
Although Marcuse’s criticisms of Heidegger successfully undermine Heidegger’s
own view of how we may act to mitigate the alienating effects of technology, as I have
suggested, this does not mean Heidegger’s warnings about technology are not without
residual value. Those sympathetic to socio-political critiques of technology—of which
Marcuse provides an influential and paradigm example—should not necessarily treat
Heidegger with hostility or charge him with redundancy, but rather should recognise
him as an important, yet flawed figure in this line of thought, who, maybe because of
the very neglect of the socio-political realm that we discussed above, took a misguided
turn with respect to his own politics. Indeed, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology may
provide a useful philosophical grounding to what could otherwise be seen by some as a
naïve expression of political dissatisfaction; continuing the Marcusean appropriation
and integration of Heideggerian thought into critiques of technological society may—
should a watchful eye be kept on Heidegger’s shortcomings—be enough to expand and
invigorate the field of contemporary critiques of technology. Not only could this lead to
a sharpened focus on the problems that our current societal, political and technological
structures pose when it comes to questions of individual authenticity but it may also
offer us some insight as to how we may effectively resist those structures that stand in
the way of our own emancipation, in a world of both rapidly expanding technological
progress and ecological decline.

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