Part II - The Question Concerning “”Vaccine” Technology.

Recalling a university study day at Crosby's "Another Place" on Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology; examined through the lens of today's big questions concerning "technology."

Being

We are at Another Place, the beach installation by Anthony Gormley in Crosby near Liverpool. It is about five years ago.

It is a fast moving windy and cold day. The sand beats into our faces. We taste it. We note that the coat and the hat are themselves technology. They were produced by technology. I got there on the train. I am wearing tough boots. I muse that technology is useful and a good thing when it allows us to engage with “Another Place” in the way we do. I wonder in advance about the thoughts of the group I am to work with for a day. What will be their “take” on the Heidegger essay, The Question Concerning Technology? As I alluded in my previous piece on this, it is a complex essay. Heidegger never takes you where you expect to go. Heidegger, as William Lovitt explains, is primarily a teacher who invites you to accompany him and build a “pathway” through thinking.

First, introductions. We each make a little speech. You know the one. My names is… I’m doing this, I’m studying that … I’m looking to get this, or that out of the day… and so on. I was one of the last to be invited speak. The slight sense of dread we all feel at these moments was enhanced by the sinking feeling that discussing Heidegger’s essay was going to be more difficult than expected. As each person apologises, explaining that “due to time constraints,” they had only been able to “skim the essay the night before,” I feel that peculiarly British sense of embarrassment. I draw breath and say it. I am here for the Heidegger discussion. And suddenly, amid friendly cheers, I am cast in the role of expert, which I most definitely was (and am) not.

Before we venture out of the café where we had our introductions, we are warmed by the drinks we bought at the counter. We sit on seats at the table. All here is technology. The glass windows, the flooring, the counter.  We see the wind turbines. We witness the harnessing of nature’s power. The stock piling of energy as standing reserve. These are Heidegger’s words. But due to “time constraints” they had only skimmed them the night before, so nobody notices.

Outside now and the wind is so strong. We feel literally “thrown” into this world. This is not what Heidegger means by “thrownness” but it nudges me to think of his idea of “thrownness.” He says that we are thrown into the world. None of us chooses anything about our existence, not our sex, our place of birth, our situation, our worlds, our type of body, nothing. And it is the same for every human being. We are under the illusion that we can control our appearance, persona and body. Just as within today’s discourses, the WEF is under the illusion that it can control the entire world via technology. It is a dreadful prospect.

The sea roars and moves in fast. The tide engulfs the iron men. The sculptures contrast with our bodies bent in the wind. They, upright and steady, we pressing against and trying to be heard, hair flying. We laugh at the impossibility of the day. What is it that are we trying to get done? How can we possibly do it? And the appearance of resoluteness in what passes for beings. Those not-human-beings, merely pastiches in iron. Weathered and tethered. Strangely, here is the un-concealing of a wife who cling-filmed the husband-artist, now present by her absence. His illusory presence, signifying his absence. It is not he that is there. He is not Being there. This is not Dasein. Da-sein meaning literally, being there. (Sein the German “to be,” and “da” meaning “there.”) Dasein was Heidegger’s neologism for the human.

Anthony Gormley frequently worked on his installations with his wife. She would assist him in the cling filming of his body and the casting process. In a sense then, she was a sculptor and he became the sculpted, objectified. At the very least it was a joint project. The famous iron men.  We are in relation with them.

They “are,” but not in the way that we “are.”

We can say that what is “true” is what becomes unconcealed, not simply that which corresponds. I think of this as the feeling you get when you suddenly realise something. The realisation comes forward and the former idea or background recedes. Something comes into presence we might say. And when that happens, other aspects recede. All manner of Heideggerian themes rush toward me on the day. Like the idea of “thrownness.” I try to share them with puzzled faces in view.

I speak to one of my colleagues as we return to the café and she scrapes her boot. I say something like, you know how to scrape your boots on the upside-down brush thing that seems to be just there for that purpose. You didn’t think about it, you knew what to do by doing. Brushing. Scraping. Sloughing off the debris. You live in a world where such a thing makes sense. Her face is not unfriendly, but it looks as though it might want to say, “so what?”

World

Hubert Dreyfus writes: “The difficulty in locating just where Heidegger stands on technology is no accident… Heidegger’s ontological concerns are mistakenly assimilated to ecologically minded worries about the devastation of nature.” I sensed on the study day that my colleagues had misunderstood the Heidegger in precisely that manner. I look back to that day and think about the basic technology of the paperback book, and what was for some, the merely photocopied text from the paperback book. I had a few little glances and saw no underlining or marginalia. The idea that you might be able to skim through such a text the night before turning up to the (funded!) study day, winging it, busking it or whatever the phrase might be, is, well, rather pointless. It occurs to me to reflect. Has reading everything on our phones and experiencing life via screens fooled us into believing that we no longer need to do this work? Is technology now the main repository of human knowledge? Or worse, have we merely contracted out our thinking to machines?

I get the impression that two key assumptions had been made by the group leader. One, that Heidegger was somehow “against” technology and saw it as dangerous in some sense. The second was that “art was the saving power against technology.” This was Heidegger’s reference to the poet Hölderlin, prefacing a complex part of the essay concerning the role of the arts in times past, and how we have in modern times, objectified the arts because of our technological thinking. In another work, Heidegger disparagingly refers to the production of art (and art history) for the “art industry” which provides a little clue to his thought on this. However, I increasingly sense the direction of  travel the leader wanted to take.

Over and again the (Heideggerian) point was missed with many wasted opportunities to explore on the day. What a pity the footprints and pathways walked on the sand did not provide a talking point. In addition to the gift of being surrounding the iron men, and question of what “being” meant in that context, we had for example, the provision of food for the group and a consideration of the technology that went into its production. The leader had purchased ready-made (ready to hand) items at a well-known upmarket store. There was so much to explore there. Where does our food come from? What does it mean to grow your own food, or to be in touch with the natural world by growing food? What is the process by which supermarkets can get fresh food to stores so efficiently? Here, we could have explored Heidegger’s use of the phrase “stock” or “standing reserve.” What does that mean, and why is it technological? There were enough technological processes to think about on that theme alone to have lasted the entire day.

We used a church hall as our meeting place. Because of modern safeguarding rules, we were obliged to navigate routes within the building that prevented any contact with or us even having sight of the children that were there in a supervised playgroup. Always the risk of danger is embodied within the human, but not the machine. In this way, the human is incrementally dismantled. Have we not quite learned that contact with others is dangerous and technological solutions in terms of digital identification, disclosure and barring systems or whatever they are named now, is presented as the answer. How to lose touch with Being without even noticing.

This is top-down thinking.

On the beach and through the café window, we could see the wind turbines and the heavy plant in the distance. It is apparent to me now, that it is the pagan climate religionists who devastate the land and ecology. They “set upon” nature. There is more than a whiff of human sacrifice we all thought long gone, whistling in the wind. A sacrifice to mother earth. They do not see the Rhine or the Mersey that was once present to us. They see wind power, wave power. And their own virtue propped up. It is the climate religionists who see resources where once was sea, land, landscape and wildlife. I cannot help recall those sandwich boards of old proclaiming: The End is Nigh.

The confusion about Heidegger’s discussion with technology was laid bare amongst my colleagues as the implicitly required approval for all of this new harnessing and colonising of the natural world was set against the assumptions of some vague, unstated notion of technological danger. And this is where I felt the leader was hoping to get. Were we to take it that this visible new good technology was saving us from the invisible old bad technology? And furthermore, was the good technology feminine in some way? Was the old bad technological stuff, masculine? Although this was not fully articulated, there was more than a hint of it in the air. And all around we were distanced and distancing from being.

We had, after all, not come to discover. We had come to shore up presuppositions. To do precisely that technological top down thinking we had supposedly been critiquing. Who on that day, ripe with potential for discovery and thought, really intended to be open to Heidegger’s crucial essay? And anyway, wasn’t Heidegger a privileged white man? (Actually, he wasn’t. He came from a poor background and was originally funded the Catholic church). The “privileged white man” syndrome is a further demonstration of calculative thinking. Here, Heidegger is reduced to the tick box identity process whereby all a person is, is decided by unchosen bodily characteristics. Remember, Heidegger tells us that we are thrown into the world. Everyone.

Heidegger’s concern that calculative thinking becomes the only accepted and practiced way of thinking is, for him “the greatest danger.” Calculative thinking is the adding up and reckoning (in German you ask for the Rechnung, i.e., the bill or check). It is the world under the microscope, the counting of atoms, the sense that we know something objectively from the outside looking in, by measuring. It is no coincidence that one of the prevailing images circulating for the past two to three years is the concocted image of “the virus,” that spherical ball with the spikes, often complete with a cartoon face. This was the “enemy” we were “fighting,” the image redolent in our minds of what we had assumed “scientists” had seen under the microscope. And here we have in Mary Midgely’s words, the myth of the omnicompetent science.

And now, years after that study day, I think about the unelected beasts of the WEF, and how they see us humans as resources to be used or dispensed with. Stock. Chipped. Controlled. Jabbed and stabbed. Trans-human. Subjected to an electronic surveillance and slavery. With every new technology sprung onto us, there is a de-skilling of the human, a losing of our human instinct to make and to create. Losing touch with being. Why are WEF technocrats deciding anything at all for us? I try to get this next question into conversations. If their ambitions were so wholesome and good and desirable, why do they feel the need to hide so much of their agenda? If things were all fine and dandy, they would not be actively seeking to clamp down on alternative messages, their rebranded idea of “misinformation.” That they do reveals (or unconceals) so much.

As Heidegger also said:

Silence speaks.

The modern age arguably began once God and the spiritual were eschewed. God, now disparaged as the focus of our lives meant that man now placed himself as the source and centre of knowledge. It is such calculative thinking that Mattias Desmet talks about in his book on the Psychology of Totalitarianism. As Desmet explains, in the scientific, man-focused world, all we have to do is observe phenomena with our eyes, and “think logically.”

Many have come to realise something important about Desmet’s observations and thesis. He has helped us find a language for what we have witnessed in those who have succumbed to the now renowned phrase “mass formation.” The book has resonated strongly with many, including Robert Malone and Robert Kennedy Jr.

It is interesting to note that The Psychology of Totalitarianism  took not an inconsiderable inspiration from Hannah Arendt’s The Origin of Totalitarianism. Arendt, being the German-Jewish philosopher who had both witnessed and exposed Adolf Eichmann’s banality, coining the phrase, so commonly used, the banality of evil.  And it was the same Arendt who had been both Heidegger’s student and secret lover at the time he was writing his seminal work, Being and Time in the 1920s. Much has been written about that. However, I will point out something interesting. It was she who sought him out to be her teacher. She once referred to him as the “secret king of thought.” It is notable that with the exception of the war years, they remained lifelong friends and died within a year of each other. It was also Arendt who arranged to get his work translated into English which will have influenced the thought of many a philosopher in the Anglosphere.

I think about the current situation that so many of us are trying to work through and find a language for. I find it oddly satisfying to think about the strange web of connections that runs deep and reaches and connects us over time and space like the waves lapping on the shore at Crosby.

It is the globalists who so frequently think in terms of calculating. We must guard against our own slippages into this way of distancing and contracting out experience. Be open to discovering and surprise rather than confirming assumptions. Learn to pay attention to being. Both technology and science are important. It is the abuse of both we should guard against, in addition to the potential for dehumanisation via contracting out our experiences to machines.  

Heidegger himself (in a lecture series called “What is Called Thinking?”) remarks that Science Doesn’t Think. Before your hackles rise too much, this phrase points to the propensity for “science” to calculate, distance itself and objectify. These are not the actions of thinking.  Heidegger is not against technology and he’s not against science. It is the way we assume that truth is only encapsulated within a scientific (and thus, technological) mindset to the exclusion of other pathways that is the problem.

Scientific developments have enabled unimaginable progress over the years. However, I cannot help musing, when reading those words,  “science does not think…” Was there ever a truer phrase uttered?

Thank you for reading this essay. I hope you found this stimulating. Please do share if you know anyone who would find it interesting. All pictures by The Sideways Thinker.

If not already, you might like to read the first article on this theme. Although both essays stand alone, the first piece provides some additional context. (See also below)

If you enjoyed reading this, you might find the following pieces interesting:

The Question Concerning "Vaccine" Technology. (substack.com)

Truth is a Beautiful Thing. - The Sideways Thinker (substack.com)

This Train is Destined to Terminate. (substack.com)

Rosemary’s Baby: This is Really Happening. (substack.com)

And from other writers:

Keeping Our Community Safe - by Thorsteinn Siglaugsson (substack.com) An excellent analogy for our time – highly recommended.

Informed consent is impossible for these genetic injections (substack.com)

From Tess Lawrie, also highly recommended.