Michael Gillespie continues to do a masterful job in treating what he calls ‘the ground of history’ in the thought of both Hegel and Heidegger. In this instance (what we will be reading from him below) we will engage with his development of Heidegger’s critique of modernity; particularly as that gets fleshed out in what we might call a technocracy. I want to share Gillespie on Heidegger at length because I think that what Heidegger thought, in regard to history’s reduction to technological determinism vis-à-vis human enablement and projection, is highly pertinent for what we are seeing unfold before our very eyes in the broader culture and global societies now. Let’s read along with Gillespie on Heidegger, and then I will offer some concluding comments following.

The will to power, according to Heidegger, is the penultimate form of modernity. In it the distinction of subject and object dissolves. As Nietzsche puts it: “this world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!” The will to power thus makes possible the universal objectification of everything, for objectification becomes nothing other than the subordination of the will to itself. The end of the will is the subjugation of man and nature, i.e., power. This power, however, has as its end only the security of the will to will. The will to power is thus implicitly the will to will. As such it is merely the means to further means with no end beyond itself and thus fundamentally nihilistic. The will to power, which rests upon the recognition that God is dead, thus passes over into the all-encompassing and all-establishing will (Ge-Stell) of an irresistible world of technology.

The advent of will to power as the will to will opens up the possibility for the unlimited exploitation of everything. This occurs through the universal establishment of everything not merely as objects but as pure instrumentalities (Bestände) and through the subordination of all subjectivity and freedom to the overarching necessities of the will implicit in technology. Man is organized on a global scale by political, social, and economic agencies for production and consumption, and the earth itself becomes nothing but a reserve of energy and raw materials that are brought forth and directed by a technology that aims only at its own continuation and growth. The absolute technical state itself serves only to guide the total mobilization of human and natural resources for the unlimited exploitation and consumption of the earth. Politics along with all other institutions thus becomes an appendage of technology. In this “planetary imperialism” of technical organization subjectivity and modernity reach their end.

With the advent of world technology freedom is extinguished. The general conception of technology as a tool in the hands of a self-determining humanity is in Heidegger’s view a fundamental misunderstanding, for technology has a logic and necessity of its own that passes beyond human control. All men are governed by economic and technical necessities: the competition for the unlimited exploitation of the earth requires the objectification and subordination not just of some men to others but of all men to the world task. Man thus becomes human to the extent that he constitutes himself as raw material that has no determinate characteristics, or as a pure instrumentality that can be used as momentary necessity dictates. Man becomes an interchangeable part.

In the midst of this technological frenzy of production and consumption of subordination and exploitation, man fails to recognize, according to Heidegger, that it is the very subjectivity and freedom he regards as the essence of humanity that uproots him and casts him into uncertainty, insecurity, and alienation. Hence he does not recognize that all his striving only more completely obliterates his place in the world and his true humanity. Indeed, man and the world are thereby so transformed that the very possibility of a place, of an ethos, and hence of an authentic ethics and politics is extinguished. Man who had a home in the world in the context of the polis and traditional life is at home in the modern world everywhere and nowhere: as a pure instrumentality man can adapt himself to anything as homo faber man becomes mass man.

Man’s reaction to this universal homelessness and alienation in Heidegger’s view is not a thoughtful hesitation and reflection upon his own being but an overly hasty decision to fabricate a place for himself, i.e., to objectify himself and his tradition in such a way that every place becomes a necessary place, determined by the inevitability of historical development. The science that achieves this is History (Historie). As the science of the res gestae History is the objectification of what has occurred. Insofar as it is an objectification, however, History is severed from history (Geschichte) itself, from the tradition of which it was a part and in which it had a place, and hence can be made and remade according to the momentary necessities of power and technological development. In this manner History not only fails to establish a secure place for man but indeed itself becomes an, if not the, crucial weapon in the struggle for power and thereby more thoroughly fosters human insecurity and alienation. History thus serves only as an apologetic and polemic for the various conflicting forces concerned with unlimited objectification and exploitation and thereby becomes entangled in this conflict itself.

The resulting disagreement about the Historical interpretation of history in Heidegger’s view leads not the abandonment of History but to a relativism that rests upon the recognition of the subjective element in all History. However, this does not resolve the question about the character of history but only gives rise to a thorough confusion, which further obliterates the truth of tradition and man’s place in the world. This Historical confusion about history in Heidegger’s view is Historicism. Modernity’s response to Historicism, however, is not a return to or a reconsideration of the traditional but rather an ever more vehement attachment to a particular Historical interpretation and an increasingly comprehensive attempt to persuade and indeed to force others to recognize and accept its manifest truth. History thus becomes ideology and replaces philosophy, politics, art, etc., as the determinative explanation of human life.[1]

With the advent of the superclass, the oligarchs and technocrats, as they make their parousia (presence) known to the world, at least for those with eyes to see, what Heidegger (according to Gillespie) ‘prophesied’ in regard to the “masters’ of the universe” seems nigh upon us. When humanity abstracts itself from its ground in the humanity of the triune God pro nobis (for us) in Jesus Christ all that is left is a negated-self. This self must chart out in brave new ways in an attempt to construct a reality of its own making; particularly as that must be done against what seems to be an insurmountable and untamable natural order. As this self gains an ostensible mastery over the created order (per its own perception), it takes its self-assigned ‘freedom,’ which it has acquired by its conscious differentiation from nature simpliciter, and sublates it to this nature as that takes shape in technological machinery and apparatus. In this process the self hands over its self-constructed notion of freedom, and gives it to the technological commodities it becomes enslaved to in order to continue to advance and exist in this sort of monsterized and artificial world. In other words, the ‘man’ becomes the machine (nature simpliciter) out of pure survivalistic necessity; and as Heidegger divinized the distinction between raw-nature and humanity dissolves into a unitive abyss. This is the nihilistic way of the world order currently.

This reality transcends all party and social demographics. In America, for example, it doesn’t matter if you’re for Trump or Biden, on the left or the right, this sort of nihilistic technocracy as understood by Heidegger is the inescapable reduction of a humanity shorn of its groundedness in God’s extra life of triune love. Globalized humanity, which we already are, has been reduced back to a technologized people of Bab-el. We have divested ourselves, at least those who have not repented, of any semblance of what it means to be genuinely human coram Deo. There is only one ground of existence that does not finally dissolve itself into a techno-occultic liturgy of worshipping creation; and that ground, of course, has been gifted to and for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. The ground that God has graciously provided for us is nothing less than the indestructible reality of His life, which is mysterium Trinitatis. There is no other possibility for salvation from the inevitable dystopic technocracy that this world has plunged itself into. God in Christ is it; this is the Way.  

[1] Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 128-29.