AI & Soc
DOI 10.1007/s00146-015-0605-8
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Heidegger on technology and Gelassenheit: wabi-sabi and the art
of Verfallenheit
Babette Babich1
Received: 8 February 2015 / Accepted: 27 July 2015
 Springer-Verlag London 2015
Abstract The question of the contemporary relevance of
Heidegger’s reflections on technology to today’s advanced
technology is here explored with reference to the notion of
‘‘entanglement’’ towards a review of Heidegger’s under-
standing of technology and media, including the enter-
tainment industry and modern digital life. Heidegger’s
reflections on Gelassenheit have been connected with the
aesthetics of the tea ceremony, disputing the material
aesthetics of porcelain versus plastic. Here by approaching
the art of wabi-sabi as the art of Verfallenheit, I argue that
Gelassenheit may be understood in these terms.
Keywords Heidegger
Media studies, technology

Gelassenheit
Entanglement
Wabi-sabi
1 On beyond getting beyond Heidegger
It has become common to underline the importance of
going ‘‘beyond’’ Heidegger, especially in the wake of the
Black Notebooks scandal which comes hard on the heels of,
and indeed resonates with, Tom Sheehan’s most recent
assertion of a sea change (Sheehan 2014), complete with a
self-pronounced ‘‘paradigm’’ shift in everyone else’s
paradigms along with a denunciation of the whole range of
Heidegger studies. How could that not but reverberate?
Hence a recent collection rightly looks to a ‘‘new’’ Hei-
degger (Georgakis and Ennis 2014). In a sense, technology
studies might seem to be well ahead of this curve, even if
& Babette Babich
Babich@fordham.edu
1
Fordham University, 113 West 60th St., New York, NY
10023, USA
media studies can claim to echo the spirit of (and to have
adumbrated) the Black Notebooks scandal (Babich 2016).
Interior to media studies as such, one author declares that it
is time to dump Heidegger altogether (Fuchs 2015)—as if,
and apart from Friedrich Kittler, media studies had ever
been overwhelmingly attuned to Heidegger in the first
place (see for this point Kittler 2009) and just to the extent
that most scholars of media tend to follow in the wake of
the new ‘‘thing’’ ontologies which are less Heideggerian
than they are attuned to the same McLuhan and Postman as
ever, now replaced with newer names (could be your name
here).
Out with the old, in with the new. Digital scholarship,
digital humanities is thereby the current metaphor for the
wholesale discarding not merely of books of the ontic
paperly kind but a sloughing of all associated hermeneutic
traditions, a final going beyond of the things and scholar-
ship of a previous century. This is the legacy of Sheehan as
of the (latest) Heidegger scandal, on behalf of those who
cannot but recommend a final push in favour of ‘reason’
and hence contra whatever is supposed to be ‘postmod-
ernism’ (i.e. whatever is not Sheehan, whatever is not Faye
or Wolin, not to say that these scholars are identical with or
even that they tolerate one another, save in opposition
contra Heidegger with the interests of other scholars) per-
haps not nearly as dramatic as book burning, but certainly,
note the unspoken metonymic assonance, like the afore-
mentioned parallel to the library and to the books of
another era: to be discarded or merely warehoused, loaded
and stored off-site, and out of mind.
Hence, when one does not have politically worrisome
reasons like Faye and like Wolin, to argue that one might
bracket Heidegger’s name altogether, it is common to
claim that Heidegger is simply outdated, especially in
technology studies. Indeed, apart from the scores of
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scholars who simply never mention his name (that would
be most authors these days), it might be Don Ihde who
declares most loudly that Heidegger has blinders for any
but the technologies dating from his own era, roughly
supposed as the era of handcraft (Ihde 2012). Born in 1889,
what could the Heidegger who died in 1976 have to tell us
about technology today? Should we not, as Ihde has
argued, limit our attention not to dead white males, but
(just as Ihde for years conducted his technology seminars at
Stony Brook by limiting invitations) to white males, all
alive and well, with one or two specially invited exceptions
(e.g. Donna Haraway)?
Apart from the blinders of thinking that an exclusive
focus on white men makes a difference by concentrating on
the living rather than dead (as if this were a challenge:
almost none of the past remains, the names we know are
the barest remnants of that vast foreign country), the
question concerning today’s technologies seems right
enough. After all, philosophers of technology, like
philosophers of science, ought to know their subject mat-
ter—and, how much technology could there have been in
the years before, during, and after the two wars: i.e. years
that span Heidegger’s Being and Time, his reflections on
‘‘The Age of World Picture’’, and all the way to the post-
war Bremen and Munich lectures that became The Ques-
tion Concerning Technology? Hasn’t Ihde a devastating
point—nearly as good as the revelations of the Black
Notebooks from the purview of Faye and Wolin, at least as
good as Meyer Schapiro’s contention that the painting of
Vincent van Gogh’s shoes represented the shoes of the
artist himself and hence hardly shoes ‘‘belonging’’ to (and
so able to ‘‘reveal’’ the world of) a peasant woman, à la
Heidegger’s Bauerin (see, for an opposed argument,
Babich 2003 as well as Derrida 1987).
Can’t we say that given the technologies of our day,
everything has changed dramatically? Wireless as we think
of it as Wi-Fi (not ‘‘wireless’’ in Heidegger’s antique
sense) didn’t exist, no computers (not as we know them)
but merely clunky (and fascist) radio and film and the
beginnings of television, just teletype and telephone, and to
that we might add transportation limits and such like.
Given such modest non-modern technologies, what could
Heidegger know of the modern world in which we today
text and tweet, a world of the new future in which we travel
by plane and rail and automobile?
What’s that you say? Martin Heidegger knew each of
those last mentioned means of transportation? Well then,
how about: no power tools, no microwave ovens, and none
of the media networking available today: absolutely no
Internet, no mp3s, no cell phones. Why surely he would
have found the world today unrecognizable, so argues Ihde,
and I can add that Ihde was already claiming this not only
in his recent seminars foregrounding all the vaunted (if
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micro-) advances of technology through to our current
year, 2015, but back when I was a student in his classes at
Stony Brook in the late 1970s.
But contra my teacher (despite my admiration for him), I
argue that the newest and latest technologies would have
been, had Heidegger known of these, all-too-recognizable.
At issue is not the amount or kinds of technology available
then versus what we have now. The basic Ge-stell has long
been in place, even if we bracket rail transport as this was
already in place well before Heidegger was born but
including automobiles close enough to our own in 1882
(using the same fuel we use today), and in addition to the
airplane (with motorized flight confirmed in France as early
as 1874 [du Temple], in Russia [Možajskij] 1882, in Ger-
many [Weißkopf] 1901, in America [Wrights] 1903), note
that moving sidewalks (the kind we take for granted in
airports and some underground transit systems) had been
invented as of 1893, X-rays in 1895, ditto the date for the
first broadcast radio signal. So perhaps it is not the type of
technology or its gadgets as they were (already) rather
surprisingly abundant: the year Heidegger’s Being and
Time was published is the same year that sees the future
vision of the ambitions and the contradictions of high
technological society with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927,
see for discussion Babich 2013).
2 Brave new world: Heidegger, entanglement,
and Ge-Stell
If it is not the newness of the new technology, proud as we
are of our facility with it, our ‘‘connectedness’’ as we
sometimes say, perhaps it is the ‘‘entanglement’’ in those
same connections, to use the social technological rubric
deployed by Marc Van den Bossche in a recent essay (Van
den Bossche 2015). This Edinburgh (or ‘‘strong pro-
gramme’’) flavoured term could be argued as analogue to
the Frankfurt School ‘‘constellation’’, as I elsewhere use
this latter term to speak of Heidegger’s Ge-Stell (Babich
2014), but it is an even more precisely accurate reflection
on the art of living in and on the terms of today’s network
technologies. It will do to note, the current essay is not the
place to pursue this further, that entanglement is a technical
word in physics—a push me/pull me term for quantum
mechanics and its observables. (See Bokulich and Jaeger
2010; d’Espagnat 2009, on the ‘‘observable’’, classically,
quantum mechanically speaking, see Heelan 2015).
In philosophy of technology and technology studies,
entanglement grows out of the sociology of technology and
would be—were there any debate that involved philoso-
phers other than Ihde and perhaps Andrew Feenberg and
their low country cohort, which in turn limits itself to
them—a site of discussion between philosophy and
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sociology of technology and maybe even, though this is
harder to imagine, of social studies of science (but the
proscription of critique and of critical approaches is a
limiting factor: Schyfter 2009; Babor 2010).
3 Entanglement: the haptic self, embodiment,
and insect aesthetics
The term ‘‘entanglement’’ has of course a more mundane
sense corresponding to the intricacy of snarled headphone
wires or the confusion of cords and plugs under a desk,
especially in the search for a single non-functioning com-
ponent. It corresponds to be sure to a certain media aes-
thetic (Babich 2015) which one may ‘‘borrow’’, as I am
doing here, from the rather differently minded architec-
tonic metaphorics of Parikka (2010) on what Parikka
similarly metaphorically calls ‘‘insect’’ media and the viral
contagion anti-aesthetic of digital medias, in the sense
deployed in Hal Foster’s classic collection (1983) though I
use it here in a bad-future-same-as-the-good-future fashion
popular today. I say metaphoric because the allusion to the
insect is largely aesthetic if we have been riding that aes-
thetic metaphor in social ontology for some time, begin-
ning not only with Wilson and Holldobler (1990) but also
even earlier with Karl von Frisch’s insect ethology, and
thereby carrying us via association with the reference to the
bee (and her social ontology) and a hive mindedness which
is only exacerbated to the extent that she (the bee) seems to
lack the bodily proprioception without which mammals
cannot imagine a ‘‘having’’ a world (this is not really true
but we scholars and vivisection-happy anatomists are fond
of cutting off bits to see which of these bits a mutilated
animal or human being ‘‘misses’’, a practice not unrelated
to our attention to phantom limb phenomena). Heidegger’s
paradigmatically ‘‘world-poor’’ animal, the bee, is
increasingly—and increasingly very literally—world-poor
or world-ablated via cell phone transmission towers
(Sharma and Kumar 2010) but also Monsanto pesticides
and GMO nectar and pollen (Kleinman and Surya-
narayanan 2013), etc., all rendered, no metaphor needed,
increasingly without world.
For our own part, our intentionality is utterly mammalian
(see, by contrast Lingis 2003): it requires bodily there-be-
ing, from which ‘‘there’’ we are able to protentionally (or
retentionally) extend ourselves. Elsewhere I have written
about driving an automobile (though the real reference is to
Paul Virilio with regard to ‘‘speed’’), the same holds for
bicycles and skateboards as it also holds for operators
handling the deadly operations of drones at a distance.
When it comes to entanglements, in addition to computers
and stereo components, we can think of a folding bicycle but
not everyone uses such things. For a more familiar if still
non-universal example, consider ear-buds (in ear head-
phones for sound transmission), the use of which is limited
to those with phones and mp3 players, but also to those who
travel by plane on occasion. In flight, the ear-buds in our
travelling case do not matter to us apart from their unob-
trusive and easy compressibility until in good Heideggerian
obstruction of desire as focusing we find ourselves watching
a movie of interest (of ‘interest’ because we are on a plane)
and struggle with time and space (as the movie plays
unheard), to untangle the entanglement of wires and find the
ear-buds (will they be left and right? can we tell which is
which?) and the correct end of the plug (and hope it fits the
plane we happen to be on).
We are entangled, caught on the plane, with time we
cannot use, time we are of a mind to kill (in Feyerabend’s
1996 sense of the idiom), a likely candidate for the project
appears in the form of a watchable film (we have lower
standards than ever) and we rush so as not to miss too much
of the film that would take the time we need it to take in
plane-bound time-space.
Heidegger’s reflections on ‘‘being’’ and on ‘‘time’’—
early and late—invite us to phenomenologize our own
experience of the most everyday kind (Beauvoir and Sartre
took up this invitation in the most creative ways) and we
find, as the early Heidegger argued, that we are speaking of
time and our disposition to it, our possibilities and our
sense of limitation.
4 Hõlderlin’s growth and Hebel’s plant: earth, air,
and sky—or untangling technology
This sensibility continues to work in the first few lines of the
Question Concerning Technology and is quickly summa-
rized in the concise lecture Gelassenheit: how may we
aspire to a free—non-entangled—relation to technology? In
Gelassenheit, Heidegger contrasts calculative thought—
which is, he suggests, the dominant modality of thinking
(this is better known to us than ever with the publication of
the Beiträge and the Black Notebooks)—with meditative
thinking, this last via a meditation on thoughtlessness on the
general and generic ‘‘flight from thinking’’ characteristic of
life in Messkirch in 1955 (and certainly no less today, some
60 years later). For Heidegger what is significant is the
nature of this supposed flight from thinking as we undertake
it in our harried lives and the pressures of our day, ready as
we are, already, with objections to meditative thinking: it is
too cut off from practicality, too detached, no cash value and
furthermore setting too lofty a goal and thus out of reach for
the common run of humanity. Heidegger’s humanism is
there just as he begins where Aristotle begins:
anyone can follow the path of meditative thinking in
his own manner and within his own limits. Why?
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Because man is a thinking, that is, a meditating being.
(Heidegger 1966, 47)
For Heidegger the issue is a matter of dwelling on ‘‘what
lies close’’ and he invites us to
meditate on what is closest; upon that which concerns
us, each one of us here and now: here on this patch of
home ground; now, at this present hour of history.
(Heidegger 1966, 47)
Here Heidegger quotes the poet Johann Peter Hebel
(1770–1826), not apart from a reference to the same
Hölderlin he had quoted in his earlier technology lectures.
The reference I myself would add here is to Hölderlin’s
An den Aether, particularly the beginning of the third verse
having to do, as Heidegger’s reference to Hebel has to do,
with the ‘‘life of plants’’ as we know that this same impetus
of life for Hölderlin (as for Goethe from whence to be sure
the word aether with its associations also resounds) draws
us ‘‘upward’’:
Heavenly one! Doesn’t the plant search you out with
its eyes
Striving towards you with shy arms the low bush?
That it find you, the entrapped seed breaks out from
its hull,
…That it, enlivened by you, might bathe in your
waves1
It is, one can argue, in something like the spirit of Ge-
lassenheit, as Heidegger reflects it here, that we read
Hölderlin’s last lines:
But in as I long to ascend into the twilight distance,
Where you embrace foreign shores with your blue-
tinted waves,
You come whispering down from the fruit tree’s
blossoming peak,
Father Aether! and soften even that striving heart of
mine
And I’ll live now gladly, as before, with the flowers
of the earth
Hölderlin, To the Aether2
1
[Himmlischer! sucht nicht dich mit ihren Augen die Pflanze,/
Streckt nach dir die schüchternen Arme der niedrige Strauch nicht?/
Daß er dich finde, zerbricht der gefangene Same die Hülse,/…Daß er
belebt von dir in deiner Welle sich bade] Hölderlin, An den Aether
(1797).
2 that, as the paragraph turns out, all these things turn out to
[Aber indes ich hinauf in die dämmernde Ferne mich sehne,/Wo du
fremde Gestad‘umfängst mit der bläulichen Woge,/Kömmst du
säuselnd herab von des Fruchtbaums blühenden Wipfeln,/Vater
Aether! und sänftigest selbst das strebende Herz mir,/Und ich lebe
nun gern, wie zuvor, mit den Blumen der Erde.] Hölderlin, An den
Aether. See for a discussion Binder 1993. See too for a discussion
encompassing Pindar and Rilke, Janke 2005 and, more generally on
Höderlin, Hornbacher 1995.
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We may hear both the Suabian Hölderlin together with
the Allemanian Hebel, and we may echo their dialectical
distinctions as those of southwestern Germany. Goethe’s
Aether, by contrast, articulates less a regional ‘‘home-
coming’’ (and this is said despite its seemingly patent
connection with the aether of cosmology: see von Helm-
holtz 1892/1979; Lacoste 2000; Mandelartz 2011 or alter-
nately Allen 1982), though see on Nicholas Boyle’s section
‘‘«Hymnen an die Nacht»—A. W. Schlegel and Schelling
in Jena’’ on Goethe and nature (Boyle 2000, esp. 609–610)
than a contrast with the non-poetic, technologically medi-
ated ‘‘aethers’’ of today: and hence these rather more
Goethean ‘‘aethers’’ are perhaps resonant of the home-
lessness (groundlessness) of modern distraction already in
sway in Heidegger’s 1930s and 40s.
5 The question concerning modern media
To return to our point of departure above, we may follow
Ihde as we may also echo Richard Rorty and any number of
others in supposing that Heidegger refers to primitive or
old-hat technologies, like hammers or (at best) like
hydroelectric turbines (not to mention his airplanes at the
ready on the tarmac). But reducing Heidegger to hammers
and dams is to risk missing the ensnaring, ‘‘entangling’’,
and captivating force of the point Heidegger makes here
with specific reference to perfectly modern broadcast
media: ‘‘Hourly and daily they are chained to radio and
television’’ (Heidegger 1966, 48). Heidegger had also
detailed these same points earlier (if we agree with the
dating of his recently published Black Notebooks) referring
not only to the ‘‘crystallization’’ (here I use Edward Ber-
nay’s mid-1920s radio-set language) of ‘‘public opinion’’
(Bernays 1923, cf. Babich 2014 for reference to Adorno
and the Frankfurt School) via radio and its seemingly
compulsory audition but also to the distractions and opin-
ion-setting influence of movies and picture magazines,
information pamphlets, and news programs (Heidegger
1966, 2014). Given the rather more expanded but, I would
argue, not otherwise different distractions and compulsory
dimensionalities of today’s Internet (and I include texting
along with internet modalities such as Twitter and Face-
book and email), what Heidegger is talking about with
respect to ‘‘modern techniques of communication’’ as he
continues to argue, so ‘‘stimulate, assail, and drive man’’
be closer by far than anything so immediate as the all-too
ontic world of the ‘‘fields around his farmstead … the sky
over the earth … the change from night to day’’ (Heidegger
1966, 48) and so on.
Heidegger’s advice on technology as he offers it in the
1955 lecture known in English as the text called Discourse
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on Thinking, to translate Gelassenheit, Heidegger’s
memorial speech in honour of his fellow hometown
celebrity, the composer Conradin Kreutzer, highlights the
same points as his Bremen lectures, including the business
of industrialized agriculture, the last inevitable in a keynote
for and given in Messkirch, itself an emphatically agri-
cultural town. Here, as in his Bremen reflections on ques-
tioning in the wake of technology, Heidegger underscores
the inevitability of technology and its benefits. Hence
Heidegger’s famously eponymous recommendation to us
that we use technology but without letting it ‘‘entangle’’ us.
We are, that is to say, to employ technological devices and
practices while detached from them, able to ‘‘let go of them
any time’’, able in other words (and it is this that seemingly
defies us today) to ‘‘let them alone’’.
The word Gelassenheit is elusive in its standard trans-
lation into English as releasement or indeed in its French
rendering as serenité (or délaissement, as Sartre has an
early version). Heidegger’s formula for releasement is both
straightforward and gnomic:
We can use technical devices, and yet with proper use
also keep ourselves so free of them, that we may let
go of them any time. We can use technical devices as
they ought to be used, and also let them alone as
something which does not affect our inner and real
core. We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical
devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us,
and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature
(Heidegger 1966, 54)
Note here that Heidegger chains his references in his
examples to a specific kind of technological dominion:
atomic power, the kind of cutting edge biology (the
‘‘synthesis of life’’) we are still concerned to advance to
this day, including the technology of space flight: ‘‘already
man is beginning to advance beyond the earth into outer
space’’ (Heidegger 1966, 50). Thus Heidegger’s questions
reflect a range of modern technologies meditating as he
does on the energy exchanges central to the deployment of
modern hydroelectric engineering (by contrast with tradi-
tional kinds of hydropower), airplane technology, empha-
sizing too the industrial production and uses of cellulose as
a dedicated aspect of media and opinion formation together
with broadcast radio in addition to film and television,
whereby the Ge-Stell in question comprehends what is
elsewhere designated as the culture industry typically
associated with the Frankfurt School.
I have consequently argued elsewhere that Günther
Anders drew on some part of his work with Heidegger in
his own critique of technology and human obsolescence
(Anders 1956, see further Babich 2012/13), and as with
Heidegger’s relationship with Anders’ first wife, Hannah
Arendt, a certain reciprocity, positive (via attention),
negative (via inattention) can be argued to hold between
these thinkers. The reference to Anders and Arendt would
thus circumscribe (without his mentioning their names)
Heidegger’s own later references to the atomic bomb,
noting as he does not only in its wartime deployment but
and above all that ‘‘it was recognized at once that atomic
energy can be used for peaceful purposes’’ (Heidegger
1966, 49). Heidegger thus details the Ge-Stell of that
peaceful deployment of atomic energy as it proceeds (a
deployment that as he tells us cannot but ‘‘succeed’’—and
here we should count a reference to his friend and dialogue
partner at the time, Werner Heisenberg). Yet what is
arguably key to Gelassenheit here, even perhaps the key to
a potential ecological ethos to come, concerns Heidegger’s
meditation on the stakes of our setting-upon not only the
Rhine as such but the future itself. This setting-upon the
future continues: it drives our ongoing interest in what we
call ‘‘sustainable development’’—a contradiction in terms
we today refuse to acknowledge as contradiction—and our
similarly intensifying dedication to ‘‘developing’’ any
range of natural resources, especially as this involves
fracking and drilling and not less the new expansion of
wind turbines despite their deadly effects on wildlife, their
enormous cost, and comparative inefficiency. Driving all
this we might note Heidegger’s word for such aggressive
development in the so-called Black Notebooks: ‘‘Ver-
nutzung’’ (Heidegger 2014, 54).
6 Growth, resource exhaustion, danger,
and redemption
This expression for using up or wearing down and wearing
out, Vernutzung appears in an aphorism Heidegger titles
‘‘The Might of Machination’’ (Heidegger 2014 54). Hei-
degger explicates this title in his aphorism as follows: ‘‘the
destruction, indeed the godlessness, the humanizing of the
humans into animal, the exploitation of the earth, the cal-
culation of world’’ (Ibid.). The sum of this cadence is for
Heidegger ‘‘transitioned to the condition of the ultimate
[Endgültigkeit]: differences between the peoples, countries,
cultures are now only a façade’’ (Ibid., 55).
Later, in 1966, we read as Heidegger reflects on our all-
too-modern view of ‘‘the world’’ (a view which does not
seem as dated as Ihde & Co. would maintain):
open to the attacks of calculative thought, attacks that
nothing is believed to be able to resist. Nature
becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source
for modern technology and industry. (Heidegger
1966, 50)
What is crucial for Heidegger is the suggestion, already
evident in his Munich lecture in 1950, that there might be
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something akin to redemption, even if only a poetic
paradox, a working contradiction, a saying (Heidegger
1977, 28) and unsaying at once, to quote Hölderlin’s
Patmos hymn: ‘‘But where danger is, grows/The saving
power also’’ (ibid).
We have already noted the reference in Heidegger’s
Gelassenheit address to Hebel’s poetic plant metaphorics,
and it is worth recalling that the language of ‘‘growth’’ is a
resonant metaphor for the Heidegger who concludes his
Introduction to Metaphysics by quoting a different (and
cautionary) word from Hölderlin, as opposed to the cal-
culation or Machenschaft of ‘‘an age which regards as real
only that which goes fast and can be clutched with both
hands’’ (Heidegger 1959, 206). By contrast, for Heidegger,
‘‘the essential is not number’’ but much rather: timeliness
and still more: perseverance, ‘‘For: as Hölderlin said, ‘the
mindful God abhors untimely growth’’’ (Ibid).
Here it can be worth again attending to the change from
Hölderlin’s meditation on danger and growth to Hebel as
Heidegger cites this poet in Gelassenheit: ‘‘We are plants
which—whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not—
must with our roots rise out of the earth in order to bloom
in the ether and to bear fruit’’ (Hebel in Heidegger 1966,
47). As Heidegger explains, ‘‘For a truly joyous and salu-
tary human work to flourish, man must be able to mount
from the depth of his home ground up into the ether’’
(Ibid.). This allusion (to Hölderlin’s aether, to Hebel’s
ether, see previous section above) allows us to comprehend
Heidegger’s invocation of Hebel’s image of growth. In the
same vein, we may note Nietzsche’s own reflection of this
same poetic insight to preface his On the Genealogy of
Morals: ‘‘Our ideas and values grow out of us with the
necessity with which a tree bears fruit’’ (GM §ii). For
Nietzsche, but this is another discussion to be sure, this
same necessity and growth is also the basis of the possi-
bility of a change in thinking, a revaluation of values.
6.1 Wabi-sabi: allowing decay
It is not Hölderlin’s aether any more than it is Goethe’s
aether or his own very different plant metaphorics or
indeed Nietzsche’s physio-organic necessity and transmo-
grification of values that inspires Otto Pöggeler’s discus-
sion with reference to Heidegger (Pöggeler’s own reference
is to Hölderlin’s eagle). Nevertheless, Pöggeler too high-
lights technology and politics. Thus if we concur with the
essential value of aether, not only for the eagle’s flight but
especially today in a technological abstraction, we can
repeat, as Pöggeler does, Paul Celan’s ‘‘here’’. For me, it is
also essential to add the name, once again, of Günter
Anders who spent a lifetime foregrounding, echoing,
reminding us to think the ‘‘here’’ that was and is Hir-
oshima, in Anders’ own echo of Celan’s paean to the
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Fig. 1 Fallen cherry blossoms. Heidegger Society Meeting, Loyola
University, Baltimore, May 2015. Author’s photograph
violence of war, a dimension still all-too silently passed
over, in order to begin if we can to think the ‘‘here’’ of the
‘‘here and now’’ of Heidegger’s own reflections as Celan
writes: ‘‘Hier—wo die Kirschblüte schwarzer sein will als
dort’’ (Celan in Pöggeler 1989, 24).
Celan gives the note of threnody; this will also take us to
the discussion of wabi-sabi, the art of the ‘‘incomplete’’, as
expressed in a handbook specifically directed to artists of
the ‘‘impermanent, imperfect’’ (Koren 1994, 7), artists of,
as all artists are, artists of things unfinished, always
unfinished: in this case, commemorating the bombs drop-
ped on Japan, appropriated to a site, a place, and a time, to
the memory of extraordinary, all too ordinal, calculated,
deliberate violence.
Above I noted the how-to or art of living, ways, that is to
say, of being, and the following section will look more
closely at the how of such a how-to. To this extent, the
public tone, the lecture Gelassenheit, circumscribes the
Michel de Certeau-style ‘‘tactic’’ of letting-be. After Hei-
degger’s analysis of the harrowing and enframing com-
plications of technology, the constellation of one set-up
‘‘enchained’’, as he says, to the next and to the next—all
the entanglements of the technological Ge-Stell—Heideg-
ger contends that we need not be enmeshed in the snarl or
absorbed by urgency: ‘‘we can act otherwise. We can use
technical devices, and yet with proper use also keep our-
selves so free of them, that we may let go of them any
time’’ (Heidegger 1966 54).
7 Calculation and letting be or gaming
and the ideal of technological neutrality
Heidegger’s disentangling, suggesting that we ‘‘use tech-
nical devices, and yet with proper use also keep ourselves
so free of them, that we may let go of them any time’’
(Heidegger 1966, 54) is comforting, especially in the wake
of The Question Concerning Technology which seemed to
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leave the reader with only the option of a thoughtful
‘‘questioning’’, charging us to maintain questioning as ‘‘the
piety of thought’’ (Heidegger 1977, 35).
For the all the comfort of the Hegelian also/and in
Heidegger’s recommendation that one ‘‘use’’ technology
while also avoiding being caught up in or by it, Heidegger
says suspiciously little about how such having and (at the
same time) not being given over to the having of tech-
nology is to work, that is to say: with respect to the way
and the how of such a reticent using of ‘‘technical devi-
ces’’, a holding back so that we might ‘‘also keep ourselves
free of them’’—detached enough, that is to say, such that
we are able to ‘‘let go of them any time’’ (Heidegger 1966,
54).
How—if we may be permitted to get all technical about
this marvellously Stoic adiaphoretic move or modality
(note that Nietzsche asked just questions of technique and
working practice)—would such an ataraxia work? How
can we, who are manifestly and ordinarily not so disposed
to technology, come to be so disposed to it? Is there a how-
to manual? Can all the Aristotelian, all the Comtean Hei-
deggerians help us here? Can the post-Heideggerians help
us? Given, so Heidegger underscores this: ‘‘the unavoid-
able use of technical devices’’, what is wanted, as he says,
is only the capacity to use them, as we sometimes must and
sometimes should, all the while denying ‘‘them the right to
dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our
nature’’ (Heidegger 1966, 54).
Would this not coincide with our desire to ‘‘‘get’ tech-
nology’’, as Heidegger earlier says, ‘‘‘spiritually in hand’’’
(Heidegger 1977 5)? Would this not simply leave us back
where we started: ever more enthralled to technology, just
to keep to Heidegger’s own terms in The Question Con-
cerning Technology?
Heidegger’s 1927 discussion of the tool in Being and
Time suggests that the tool (and its environing, encom-
passing possibilities for use) always haunts our use of it.
This is the thing force of thing ontology and Neil Postman
picks this up where Heidegger also found it in Plato’s
Phaedrus in Postman’s own (thinly rather than ‘‘thickly’’)
Heidegger-flavoured study: Technopoly (1993). The Hei-
deggerian schema works, and here this would seem to
endorse Ihde’s reading, for primitive or less ‘‘connected’’
technology, fountain pens and hammers and train platform
shelters. But this too is entanglement and more advanced,
more modern technology entails more ‘‘entanglement’’ in
technology. As Heidegger writes in what I regard as a silent
allusion to Rousseau at the start of The Question Con-
cerning Technology: ‘‘Everywhere we remain unfree and
chained to technology: whether we passionately affirm or
deny it’’ (Heidegger 1977, 4).
In the Gelassenheit lecture, Heidegger seems to go
beyond his earlier caution in The Question Concerning
Technology regarding the neutrality thesis favoured by
techno-theorists old (and new): ‘‘we are delivered over to it
in the worst possible way when we regard it as something
neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we par-
ticularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the
essence of technology…’’ (Heidegger 1977, 4). In this
essay, Heidegger suggests a remedy that offers not merely
little or almost nothing, he adverts to the ‘‘here and now’’
of ‘‘little things’’, as opposed to the detached capacity we
(who currently continue ‘‘to pay homage’’ to the same
neutral sensibility vis-à-vis technology) are confident we
have.
The conviction that we can use technology without
being affected or dominated or warped or confused much
less ruined by it (to echo Heidegger’s own cadence here)
may be found across the board to refer to whatever tech-
nology happens to be in question from the atomic bomb
that serves as Heidegger’s example 10 years after its first
double detonation in 1945 (contrasting wartime or negative
with peaceful or positive applications) or with reference to
guns and videogames or to television and Facebook.
Neutrality is the official view on technology according to
both experts and lay persons alike.
As the recent Gamergate scandal made it plain (gaming
theorists came down on the side of techno-neutrality just
where they had started), it is not (and must not be) the role-
playing gamers or the conventions and driving enthusiasms
of gaming exploitative of women (even as games continue
to feature abusive tropes, and a continuing abundance of
sexist female depictions), but only wrong-minded people
are to blame. Honi soit qui mal y pense. Even outside of
popular media scandals, we take ourselves to be able to use
without being affected by, much less ‘‘dominated’’ by
technology. (But to set the Gamergate debate in a larger
context and for a contrasting discussion of specifically
internet pornography from a sociological and psychologi-
cal perspective, do see Bhatia 2009; Wolf 2013.)
7.1 Wabi-sabi: a new aesthetics, a new praxis
The question is compounded when we contrast low-tech
technology (hammers and water turbines) with high-tech
visions of technology (with or without the sexual politics of
Gamergate). Thus and contra Ihde, one of the most well-
known exponents of Heidegger on both Gelassenheit and
technology, the analytic Heideggerian, Bert Dreyfus has
taken Heidegger’s reflections on technology to be relevant
to modern high-tech and computer technology, likewise
Albert Borgmann, Raphael Capurro, David Weinberger,
etc. For Dreyfus, a kind of mindfulness, as we speak of it
today, might be what Heidegger had in mind with respect
to technology. But there are also contributions beyond
analytic readers of Heidegger and on the continental side of
123

reflection on Heidegger and technology, Reiner Schür-
mann’s reflection on releasement is of note (Schürmann
1973).
I concur with, if I must also go beyond, Dreyfus (1995)
to argue for a letting be in attunement with a particular
praxis in connection with today’s philosophy of art (I am
here in agreement with Tripathi 2010). Thus we need to
retrieve the connection of techne and/as poiesis, i.e. art. But
to do this is not simply a matter of pronouncing technology
art and as such, rather as Andy Warhol could name a fast
food restaurant: ‘‘the most beautiful thing in Tokyo’’.
Hence in earlier essays I highlight Heidegger’s reference to
the Greek artist as a veritable technician of poiesis.
In this context, and specifically with respect to Ge-
lassenheit as I seek to emphasize its cadence as a letting or
allowing of Verfallenheit, it will do to invoke the aesthetic
attunement relevant for artists, as practitioners, of wabi-sabi
(Juniper 2013; Koren, 1994). Although Koren underlines
the refusal to define the term on the part of the Japanese
themselves, which he states, betraying what are arguably
more conventionally or ‘analytically’ minded conventions
of communicability, explaining that ‘‘Throughout history a
rational understanding of wabi-sabi has been intentionally
thwarted’’ (Koren 1994 15). Koren’s own book as well as
the breadth of his attention (for practitioners, and thus for
artists as well as for philosophers) also attests to the
growing influence of the notion in discussions of aesthetics,
western and eastern (this was already the case in 1994,
following the publication of Kakuzō Okakura’s Book of Tea
in 1906 by Koren (1994, 10, Okakura 2010 and see too Sen
1979 as well as, particularly for the language of imperfec-
tion, Saito 1997) and more so to be sure, now some two
decades later in the present day (see Juniper 2003, and see
also the well-titled novel by Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of
Shadows (2001). This influence is wildly popular, quite
against the guarded efforts Koren details as a kind of
Japanese mafia (in his words) of theoretical refusal in the
now-failed attempt at a conceptual restriction or restraint: a
popular influence evident in its growing role in interior
architectural design and ‘‘the art of living’’ (everyday-tech
as we may think of it) as it may also be (as it has been
extended) to how-to books on regulating one’s love life as
well as the more geekish (as computer folk like to speak of
themselves) conventions of Web design (one makes of
inelegance or ‘‘imperfection’’ in coding a very deliberate
rationale or ‘‘art’’). It is also particularly (and the image I
include here, Fig. 1, can show why) a valuable aesthetic for
understanding and presenting the art of photographs.
As in the case of the tea ceremony, the art of wabi-sabi
attends, with care, to the ‘‘small things’’ as Heidegger notes
these as the art, above all, of embracing the limitations of
(or the nothingness circumscribing) the everyday and the
disposition of the everyday.
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AI & Soc
Some part of this art beyond the art of arranging—
flowers but also rocks but also acts including tea (Okakura
2010), one’s life, one’s wardrobe, and the range of above-
noted popular practical applications—is what I above
referred to as a letting fall. Much of this is pop-kitsch,
deliberately or indeliberately, but the kitsch often turns out
to be not the idea or the practice but the practitioner: what
is it that one hopes to attain by miming zen without zen as
that is also aspiration towards emptiness but not less
compassion, the understanding of the undergirding of
nothingness from which, this is not utterly distant from
Anaximander, everything comes and to which everything
returns?
We may see such an attentive and almost mystical
practice in de Certeau’s attention to the art of the passing,
specifically as it passes qua non-retainable, apart from
habit, apart that is from the practice that leaves no trace
beyond memory. This is the everyday, the quotidian in its
disintegration, as it passes, in its falling out, as it withdraws
from presence, from notice. Thus de Certeau’s fellow
Jesuit priest, William J. Richardson draws our attention to
the same falling in his own foregrounding of what he calls
‘‘errancy’’ which he reads on an ethico-theological level. In
my own reading elsewhere I follow the traces of this same
falling detail, even in its failing, as Ivan Illich, no Jesuit,
but still a priest for the fallen: the poor of and in this world,
especially in the world of the modern loss of the art of
reading, writing of the technology of recording voice, the
invention of the writing of the sounded word itself, and the
cadence (and, very gently, too of the decadence) of the arts
of learning and scholarship in the Vineyard of the Text
(Illich 1993).
On the level of art and practical tactical know-how, this
art, wabi-sabi is the art of finding beauty not in the ‘‘ready-
made’’ styles of found art, designated via the name of the
artist in the fashion of analytic philosophy of art (what is
art? when is art? art is what we—artists, museum curators,
we, the experts, we, the aestheticians—say it is Danto
2014, 1997; Dickie 1974), but and just the disintegration of
the gesture, the action of revelation (or occlusion) that is
error. The city denizen, as de Certeau observes, follows a
hallowed path among favoured spots: the art of wandering,
so too the artist setting a work into place, an array, so too
the eye that sees a fallen petal not in its Keatsian falling
moment, forever wilt thou love, but already fallen, the
turning of the season, day into evening: the soon to be
forgotten, soon to be excluded in its every trace both
physical and psychic memory, traces of a life.
Wabi-sabi to this extent then is the ‘‘released’’ art of
Verfallenheit—the art that allows what is to be as it is, to
fall as it does fall and as it continues to fall, the art that also
sees it in its fall: frames enframing, as it were, attends to
what is outside of, inevitably, or apart from the frame and
AI & Soc
lets that—lets that too—be a part of it. Some might argue
that to speak of this art one speaks of art as artfulness and
as such, needing then no reference to the art and aesthetic
sensibility of Zen or of Japan.
I have already referred to photography. And some might
say that this art is also, with and by another name, the art of
a Beuys or else, in film, a Herzog, or even and still in film,
a Greenaway, in the case of the last, I refer to the
paradigmatic kitsch artfilm of Verfallenheit, a Zed & Two
Noughts (1985), a kind of by-the-numbers ugliness. But I
would counter that the same sensibility is also to be seen in
Eisenstein as in Bergman, especially and just as much of a
cliché, The Seventh Seal (1957) or else, Babette’s Feast
(Axel 1987), Citizen Kane (Welles 1941), or Tous les
matins du monde (Corneau 1991).
The difference here is in the allowing that is also an
inviting. In this sense Heidegger speaks of the openness to
mystery, letting possibilities we take to be impossible be,
including contradiction, as such and for us. That we are not
inclined to do this is also clear: we techno-scientifically
minded or attuned moderns who think, as good Frenchmen,
as Lacan echoes de Sade, that all that is needed to get
technology in hand is another effort, contending that we are
‘‘not yet modern’’ (Latour 1993)—but hey, we could be, or
if not that we can call ourselves posthuman and have done
with it. To this extent, we close off possibilities—having
the truth—and as enlightened, scientifically minded
scholars, we admire nothing better than number: we love
calculative schemes and we are still waiting, in this mode
for technology, only technology to save us.
The Heidegger who tells us that we will fall and cannot
not fall into the trap of Ge-Stell also offers as remedy the
danger/rescue, this is the sowohl als auch of Gelassenheit.
Hence he suggests that by relaxing our sense of the control
that we have we may yet be able to let go enough that the
technical mastery we seek will not overpower us and will
not make us its slave.
If we use the cell phone in this way (it may mean that we
disattend enough not to learn all of its features—but don’t
we do this already and anyway?), might we come not to
depend on it (and all its features, which, ‘‘subversively’’,
‘‘submissively’’, we nevertheless also learn automatically
and anyway)? Might we come to have a released enough or
relaxed enough attitude that when we forget our phones we
do not find ourselves backtracking when we do remember,
heart-beat increasing, pulse-racing? Can we simply leave
it, do without it? Is that enough? I wonder—and I admit: I
doubt it.
Openness to mystery remains elusive (that is the char-
acter of mystery) but leaving such things as claim us, cell
phones, email, social media and, however, many other et
ceteras, all without minding, is less a test of will (or effi-
cacy) but only of allowing what we use among the
accoutrements of the day. This hint is then not a recom-
mendation. It is an indication, a maybe, of releasement.
And with this we are back to questioning towards what we
would take to be a free relationship to technology. What
would it take to use (without being given over to) the things
we use? To take or leave the mediating of our technical
being one with one another, GPS style, in the world is the
challenge.
Just as Celan’s poem cited above and not accidentally
referring to Japan (and I suspect that we may not do
without this reference, despite my regard for the tactics of
de Certeau, the reflections of a Richardson, the meditations
of an Illich or a Schürmann), wabi-sabi includes sensibility
to loss as a given as to pain and to the transforms of decay.
To this extent, wabi-sabi is as much an art of arranging as it
is also and perhaps primarily the art of aesthetic disposition
in the viewer, that is: in the setting of, the finding of art as
art.
In wabi-sabi, artist and audience are, as Heidegger says
towards the conclusion of his own Origin of the Work of
Art, co-responsible: ‘‘To each mode of founding there
corresponds a mode of preserving’’ (Heidegger 1971, 75,
cf., also, Babich 2003, 163). This preserving, however,
cannot keep what is preserved: it is not a conservation, it
does not keep the work founded.
Co-responsibility is what eludes us. Wabi-sabi is that art
of corresponding loss.
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