essayonheideggerandterrorism
This is an essay I wrote I'm happy about. Here you go. Yes, I'm aware that there are some grammatical errors... it's done, so I'm not gonna touch them.
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Terrorism and Modernity: A Heideggerian Perspective
Terrorism is a phenomenon unique to the modern age. Its explanations have been many, from socio-economic stresses to religious fervour, from civilizational clashes to ideological incompatibilities. These explanations, while quite insightful in explaining specific instances and aspects of terrorism, generally fail to explain the phenomenon as a whole, isolating certain specific instances rather than encompassing the vast myriad of terrorist acts that have plagued the modern period. To understand terrorism in the modern era we must develop a theoretical model that can explain its existence in the post historical period, the existence of terrorism in the increasingly homogenized world that comprises the modern age. If terrorism is truly unique to the modern age, then it follows that it can be understood as being linked to the project of modernity.
It is with this in mind that this essay seeks to accomplish an explanation of terrorism that understands it in the context of Heidegger’s Neuzeit or Hegel’s End of History, that is, the onward march towards total and universal sameness. To do this it will seek to first attain an understanding of the modern project in Heideggerian terms and the role of technology in bringing about widespread homogenization and systemization. Then it shall explore the role of man in this systemization of the world, the creation of the man who is easily recognizable as Nietzsche’s Last Man. From these theoretical understandings it shall seek to expose the phenomenon of terrorism as a diametric opposition to the project of technological modernity, couched in an understanding of anti-modernist movements that share many similar features to terrorism. Then, finally, it shall reconcile the apparent polarities of technology and terrorism and thereby attain a through understanding of terrorism as it exists as a modern phenomenon.
I – The Age of the World Picture and the role of science and technology
The world is shrinking and our view of it is growing. In the Age of the World Picture, Heidegger explores what it is exactly to have a world picture, that is, a conception of the world like none before. The modern age is the world of the World Picture (Weltbild), the age where man understands the world increasingly by his view of it, the examination of the world in relation to man. To break down the term, the word world is self-explanatory, the word picture is the ability to conceptualize something, the grasp of the whole system of the world as shown before us and beheld by man. It is a conception and understanding of the world as a picture, rather than a picture of the world (AWP 129). Heidegger asserts that the no age but the modern age has truly had a world picture, a conceptualization and systemization of the world that encompasses the world and at the same time perpetuates throughout the world. It is the age of man conceptualizing the world in relation to man, the age in which man appropriates nature into man’s domain and systemizes it from the standpoint of man and in relation to man (AWP 133).
This systemization is embodied in the system of modern science, which for Heidegger encompasses all modern studies including that of historical science. Science in the modern sense is couched in research. This is embodied in the likes of Francis Bacon, for whom the science lay in the experimentation and vexations of nature as observed by him and the building of a natural sciences which systemizes the world, explicable conclusively by causational means by the discoveries preceding it. To experiment objectivises the subject at study, systemizes it mathematically and creates a scientific hierarchic structure that all discoveries must adhere to (AWP 119). The modern historical time that takes place at this time of the World Picture, the New Time (Neuzeit) of Heidegger in what Hegel might call post-historical time, is couched in the examination of the past, the calculation of what must be resultant from the ground plan of history (AWP 122-123). What necessarily results from this development of a ground plan of historical research is the objectification of the past, the reduction and explanation of all history as a result of the natural plan of history (AWP 123).
The development of modern scientific methods is opposed to the romantic institutions of scholarship. Science, and historical science, become explanations of the world and its events, eliminating explanations of being that can be attributed to greatness, to the romantic visions of glory, honour, mythologized golden eras in which heroism is anything more than explicable determinations of a systemized historical world view (AWP 127). This, in essence, is where modern society discovers itself at the Age of the World Picture, an age where the world can be conceived, systemized, ordered, set upon by mankind.
Technology and science are inextricably linked. The typical view of technology is the simple application of the scientific ideas, which it undoubtedly is, to an extent. The application of the sciences belies more than simple usage, however, modern technology is the tool by which humankind orders and systemizes the world in accordance with science and brings humankind’s system to the world (QCT 14). It is in The Question Concerning Technology that Heidegger introduces the idea of standing-reserve (Bestand), the method by which technology systemizes the world in accordance with the system created by scientific research. Modern technology differs from the old by setting upon nature to yield its fruits, to store and to use when necessary (QCT 15). The example of the windmill in the essay is exemplar of this. The windmill of previous eras uses the power of nature to do its work, nature turns the sails, but it does not store the energy from the air currents to use it, it is not available at the beck and call of humankind (QCT 14). Though they did not see use in Heidegger’s day, the development of wind turbines is the modern counterpoint to the old windmill. Rather than immediate usage of the mechanical energy from the wind, the energy is stored as electricity. Thus the energy of the wind is stored from nature, called upon whenever necessary to provide the energy necessary to power light bulbs, computers, whatever humans find necessary.
II – The role of man in the Age of the World Picture
Man, then, sets upon nature and accomplishes these things, and reveals through technology the use of nature as standing-reserve. If man is the engine which creates this system and abides within it, then is not man systemized by his technology and science as with the rest of nature? Heidegger certainly believes this to be true. The very concept of human resources that dominates the business world belies this fact (QCT 18). Each and every person who works within the modern technological system belongs to the systemized world commanded by the idea of profit: whether he be the lumberjack, the assembly line worker, or an element in the vast managerial or bureaucratic networks. The assembly worker at an engine plant (Heidegger uses the example of the forester, but the assembly-line worker in today’s ailing automotive industry is perhaps more instructive) is subordinate to the demand of pistons, which in turn is subordinate to the demand of engines, which in turn is subordinate to the demand for automobiles, tractors, and other such products. The demand for these products is in turn dependent upon other factors within the world picture, and so on and so forth.
Man reveals himself to be an element of the standing-reserve. This process has already been described to an extent, the gathering forth of standing-reserves and the ordering of them in accordance to science, is referred to in The Question Concerning Technology by Heidegger as Enframing (Ge-stell) (QCT 19). Enframing is the project of the modern world, the application of technology and science in the systemization of nature. It is the project of endless presentations of natural things and humans as standing-reserve, the project of modernity. Enframing is the essence of technology; it is the destining of the continued processes of systemization (QCT 26). Even in the modern theological sciences God can be robbed of His holiness and mystery through Enframing, systematized and appropriated as the efficient cause for creation, the cause for the sciences and philosophy, robbed of meaning other than an element of the process (QCT 26). Man, like God, is subject to the Ge-stell of technology, and is similarly robbed of his Being, made into a part of the technological system.
Man stands at the brink, peering over the precipice, nearing the realization that he is himself beholden to technology as an element of the standing-reserve. Indeed he is so, but he shies from the recognition that he is simply a consuming, producing economic animal. Technology was his creation, and thus he must be the master of all that has been ordered by science and technology save himself. He has essentially caused the world to become his creation, his oyster, as it is said in common parlance, and everything he encounters is a reflection of himself, his genius, his essence (QCT 27). He fails to realize that he has become part of a self-referential system of technology, of a technological ordering in its own right, no longer beholden to the whims of man but rather the exact opposite.
It is with this analysis that Heidegger has revealed the precise nature of the process here in the Neuzeit that will take humanity to the End of History, the grand homogenization of the machine which Kojève calls the Universal Homogenous State, Leo Strauss the World State, Carl Schmitt the End State, the completion of the modern project we call globalization (Darby 53). It is with this revelation that we see the creation of Nietzsche’s Last Man and Kojève’s re-animalized man: the human beholden to the system and project of technology.
III – Reactionary regimes in the age of technology and the World Picture
With this examination of the modern age, the Neuzeit, how then to explain terrorism? It seems ordained by the march of technology that mankind will forever be beholden to the systemization, the Enframing, the transformation into this final state of homogenized and subsidiary animal. Eerily, perhaps because the philosophical tradition of the Western world stems from Christian theology (and it from Greek philosophy), the answer can be found in scripture. In the book of Matthew, the disciples of Jesus question him on the end times and his return, and he addresses them, saying, “And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye not be troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.” (Matthew 24:6 KJV) It is before the end, the End of History proper, the U.H.S of Kojève and the World State of Strauss that the tumultuous times take place. See that ye not be troubled, He says, as though the wars in the Neuzeit will scarcely affect the outcome.
The notion of wars suggests at least two sides on which the demarcation of factional conflict takes place. If on one rests the laurels of the men beholden to technology, the men of the modern project and of globalization in its form as liberal democracy (as idealized in the American way), who is it that takes position against them? Nietzsche at the end of The Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life places his hope in the Youth in opposition to the Last Man. Heidegger dreams of a hope of salvation through ‘art’ as techné (τέχνη), countering technology by calling forth the beautiful (a thoroughly romantic notion) (QCT 34-35). Though he does so without the same hope for salvation as Nietzsche and Heidegger; Kojève also posits in an addendum to a footnote in his lectures to the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel the existence of the Japanized Man, a man defined by aesthetic tradition and culture as an alternative to the re-animalized man (Kojève 161-162).
In his book, Unmodern Men in the Modern World, Michael J. Mazarr identifies these men opposed to the modern man as reactionary ‘anti-moderns’, and gives extensive accounts of four case studies: German fascism, Russian Bolshevism, Japanese imperialist nationalism, and radical Islamism (Mazarr ix). The fourth of these shall be addressed along with the broad spectre of terrorism in general in the subsequent section, as the other three possess more similarities in form, possessed of states and traditional political structures. Islamic radicalism and other terrorist movements have unique characteristics which, while similar, can be addressed as a whole as a natural inheritor of these three movements.
Returning to the first three cases, these studies performed by Mazarr share many similar situational similarities, all culminating in the unsuccessful adoption of the project of modernity. The socio-economic reasons are many and varied, from defeat in war to economic crises, but the net result has always been a retrenchment away from modernizing influences and a reactionary response couched in the language of tradition. The specific causational reasons in each case are not important for the purpose of this essay1: what is important is an examination of the anti-modernists themselves, their temperament and their philosophical heritage. Only with this may we successfully examine the anti-modernist ethic and contrast them to the modern project of technology.
Mazarr asserts that the anti-modernist ethic stems from the school of existentialism. It has already indicated that Nietzsche places a great hope in Youth as a foil to modernity. It is this image that the anti-modernists, especially the early thinkers of each movement, seem to embody: the heroic exile that fashions an understanding of the world from nothingness, from a rejection of the conventional ideology that has spurned their trust (Mazarr 66). Adherents of modernity are taught to aspire to the paradoxical messages of freedom of personal choice in a world of sameness, a sameness derived from the stripping away of content, culture, and reducing man to the state has been demonstrated. (Mazarr 75) The existentialist mindset is a reaction towards the robbing from man of his Being, a reaction against the ordering of man into the standing-reserve (Mazarr 80).
It is indeed the youth who first adopt the existentialist ‘anti-modern’ reactions here in the Neuzeit, as Nietzsche predicted. The youth, intelligent, disenfranchised, given license to vent their anger and galvanize others to do the same leap heartily into the opportunity. The early fascists of Germany were young men, jobless, disheartened with modernity’s failures to bring them greatness and the loss of their people’s soul. So too were the early Japanese nationalists and the Russian Bolsheviks (Mazarr 185). Of these angry young men the most philosophically inclined amongst them build, from the literature of philosophy and political theory, a working ideology espousing the evils of modernity (Mazarr 199). From this they develop a romanticised view, hearkening for a non-existent golden age and frequently an idealized mythical leader. For the Germans the Barbarossa myth came to prominence amongst the fascists, the Russians the dream of a ‘true Tsar’, and the Japanese nationalists an idealised Emperor (Mazarr 179). These images are often linked to a highly individualized will, the glorification of mythological heroes and images of man outside of the norm, outside of modern man; whether it is the samurai, the perfect Aryan, or the professional revolutionary.
IV – Terrorists as anti-modern reactionaries
Though in the new millennium we often define modern terrorism by Islamic radicalism, it is easy to forget that it is but the inheritor to a tradition of anti-modernist reactionaries without the structure of a state. Terrorism is best understood ideologically as the product of individuals, some who have banded together, sharing the same anti-modernist existentialist approach to modernity but fighting, in the modern age, an eternal war with no end of individual causes (each of which can be traced back to anti-modernist existentialism) or people to fight it. One could say even that there is a standing-reserve of terrorists ready to fight the next fight, inexhaustible and relentless.
Before Islamic radicalism came into the limelight there were many smaller groups of individuals, fighting for a myriad of causes. Many were Bolsheviks, such as the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Gang), Shining Path; some were nationalist, such as the Provisional Irish Republican Army, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna; others religious, such as Aum Shinrikyo. They should be treated as individuals as that is in essence what they are, individuals of like mind, who, unlike the anti-modernists in the section above, possess no state apparatus by which they work and thus are individuals by and large, each capable of independent acts of violence for their cause. This independent action is in concordance with the existentialist outlook of anti-modern ideologists in general, who believe in the sanctity of the individual and the ability of the will to avert the project of technological progress (Mazarr 77-78).
Evidence of the capacity of one terrorist, with no affiliations to an anti-modernist state agenda and pursuing anti-modernist principles on a personal level as dictated by their own beliefs to achieve widespread destruction is bountiful. Though large-scale terrorist organizations resemble some of the features of an anti-modernist state, the capacity of individuals to accomplish their goals is typified in the concept of ‘asymmetric warfare’ of the modern age. Strikingly, a few individuals with minimal tools and resources were capable of perpetuating the attack on the World Trade Center in the September 11th attacks, accomplishing a task which seems to embody the desire of individual will to overcome the masses. However, more extreme examples are abounding in the anti-modernist existentialist extremists of recent decades. It is perhaps most evident in the center of the modernist project, the United States, who in recent decades have experienced a growing number of lone-wolf terrorists, from Theodore Kaczynski (the Unabomber) to John Allen Muhammad (the Washington Beltway Sniper). It only requires a simple observation to see that terrorism as a whole in America as exhibiting characteristics of an anti-modernist movement (though Muhammad and other Islamic terrorists in the past decade can be considered part of the lesser subset of Islamic terrorism within the ‘Terrorism’ phenomenon as a whole, they are nonetheless lone actors reacting towards Americanization, or rather modernization).
Many characteristics of the anti-modern movement have been listed above. Defeats in war can be discarded in the instance of modern terrorism (as it does not lay claim to state borders), but the existential crisis and the beginnings in the disenfranchised, middle-class intelligencia holds quite true. A perfect case study exists in the Unabomber, as his manifesto lends significant, articulate insight into the reasons for his actions where most terrorist actions provide little more evidence of their motives than a set of ultimatums or short declarations in the news media. Theodore Kaczynski perpetrated his first bombing in his thirties, not long after retiring from a University professorship at Berkeley and the attainment of his Master’s. He was the prototypical early adopter, like the early adherents of Japanese nationalism or the Russian intelligencia, a young, intelligent person steeped in the existential texts and repulsed by the project of technology, lashing out with ‘necessary’ violence to attack the modern consciousness. His motives are made explicitly clear in his manifesto, Industrial Society and its Future, in which he describes the existential ethic, equating the technological appropriation of nature and humankind as has been described with the ‘unfulfillment’ of the will (he reflects on it as a process of ‘leftism’ as the sociological and psychological component and industrial society as its driving factor).2
The willingness of Kaczynski to disseminate his manifesto through the mass media is indicative of another feature of terrorism. Despite their outward puritanical disdain for the project of technology they are not shy from using its fruits to accomplish their ends. The recent attacks in Mumbai in November of 2008 demonstrated the willingness of Islamic fundamentalists to use modern technologies to maintain instant battlefield awareness (in the world of military abbreviations, C4I: Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence), using a commercially available range of Blackberry phones, GPS systems, and internet research to plan and coordinate their attacks. Terrorists, like all anti-modernists (after all, the Nazis are responsible for many of the technological marvels are still utilized today), combine a paradoxical reverence of technology with an exalting of simple agrarian, wilful, and natural lifestyles (Mazarr 155-156).
V – Terrorists as an element of the modern project
In the use of technology by terrorists we have been given a vital clue as to the place they hold within the theoretical framework of modern technology. It has been asserted above that terrorism is a wilful reaction towards the homogenizing processes of the modern technological project. This would appear, then, to suggest that they exist outside of the theoretical framework of the modern project and are not beholden to the homogenizing process. Nothing could be farther from the case. Returning to the assertion that we have yet to reach the absolute End, it can be demonstrated that terrorism is a logical extension of the process that takes us to that end. To understand this we must examine what the advent of terrorism means and how it functions from the Enframing of mankind as standing-reserve.
To understand this we shall draw upon another idea, that of the transformation of war. War has forever been a fundamental element of politics. From a classical standpoint (as espoused by Clausewitz) the ideal form of war pits two oppositional sides with infinite resources, a war without end (Mitchell 184). Its only possible end is that one side is completely overcome and entirely annihilated, a war which renders them unable to rise and fight once again. This, in the course of history, cannot be realized. Thus the pre-modern3 conception of war can be thus summarized: it is the balance between the ideal war and the pressures of reality, to engage in the spirit of absolute war until necessity via the depletion of resources dictates the end of that war (Mitchell 185). In the modern period, however, the technological process has ensured that all men and materials required for the waging of war, and for the practice of politics, essentially infinite. The transformation of men and materials into the standing-reserve, infinitely replaceable resources, has rendered the ideal war possible (Mitchell 188, 191).
War, as we have already stated, requires at least two parties. However in a world in which the distances of time and space are reducing through technology to an almost instantaneous process, war is no longer a factional difference between two states but an ongoing activity against an ever-present entity (that is, terrorism). This ever-present war is also paradoxically a peace, one brought upon by technology. Technology and industry thrive in the ideal war: inexhaustible, providing the infinite standing-reserve of men and weapons to fight the war (Mitchell 188).
The sensation of terror in the Heideggerian context is not the idea of destruction but the realization of the withdrawal of being in the modern project. Terror is borne when the blinds on the eyes of man are opened and he can no longer think of himself as master of the standing-reserve which he has created to serve his own needs, but rather he exists only as an element of the standing-reserve which has taken a life of its own. It is terrorism that brings forth this realization and gives it notice (Mitchell 199).
Terrorism is a reaction to the technological project, as has been already demonstrated. This reaction is violence on a scale of which that has not been experienced before; not violence proper but rather the threat of violence. The use of technology by terrorists has been noted, and where technology reduces the distances in time and space so too does it reduce the distances between terrorism’s violence and beings. As such the fundamental characteristic of terrorism is that it comes from within the homogenized world and can strike anywhere, calls into question all beings (Mitchell 202-203). Therefore because of terrorism all beings; humans, industries, resources, exist already destroyed, in essence if not in fact. Whether an attack actually occurs does not matter, all elements of the standing-reserve are made essentially destroyed (Mitchell 204). It is this very threat to the everyday, the common order of the technological society that calls into question the very withdrawal of Being, makes apparent the withdrawal of Being to Man and creates the sensation of terror.
If beings are made into the standing-reserve by technology, infinitely replaceable, then terrorism is its partner. The idea of security in the technological age consists of the continuation of the ordering of society into the standing-reserve, eliminating the differences across borders and homogenizing its participants, ensuring that terrorism does not disrupt the ordered flow of society. Its apparent opposition to terrorism, which destroys and complicates the order imposed by technological Enframing, supposes a duality of terrorism and security. However, terrorism also homogenizes: every element of the standing-reserve is created destroyed in essence (Mitchell 210-211). To clarify in a single statement: the goal of security is that of ensuring replacability and the ordering of society, where the goal of terrorism is that of ensuring the destruction of the standing-reserve. This is the role of terrorism in modern society; it renders the reserve destroyed so that it must be replaced. With this in mind, as America is the seat of the modern project and the most advanced industrial and technological hegemonic state of our times, it is no surprise that it is there that so many energies of the threat of terrorism is directed.
Conclusion
If technology is an action that acts upon the world, then terrorism is its equal and opposite reaction. It reacts against technology but is yet part of the entire equation that is modernity. Mathematically, one provides infinite and omnipresent replacability, the other provides infinite and omnipresent destructibility, bringing the sum total to naught: that is, the withdrawal of Being and the bringing about of total sameness, a world without content. Returning to the scripture of Matthew: “all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.” This war against terrorism and the existence of terrorism itself is a predestined part of the modern project that brings about the End.
Far from abandoning the idea that modern terrorism is an ideological anti-modernist reaction to the technological project that was posited in the middle sections of the essay, this assertion is simply: terrorism is the antithesis to the technological project that gives it its impetus. The reaction to terrorism is the concept of technological security, that is, increased globalization and production from the military-industrial complex, securing the positive side of the equation against the negative.
The existence of terrorism, then, is a product of the modern technological project as explained by Heidegger. It is an inextricable part of the modern theme that drives us towards complete homogenization. The questions remains, what then? If at the end War and Peace, action and thought, no longer holds any meaning given the absolute reduction of technological efficiency to zero, that is, simultaneous, does terrorism end? If Being is completely extracted from the World, does the need for terrorism as a highlight of that very phenomenon cease? Or does terrorism continue in perpetuity? These questions are not easily answered, since at the current course it seems the course of technology as a ratio of efficiency (Darby 52) approaches a mathematical limit of zero without ever actually reaching it. In such a case perhaps the End will not be yet, or indeed ever, rather the End exists solely as our current post-historical time stretched infinitely. If this is the case, then the project of technology, and that of its antithesis, terrorism, will never end ere the end of humanity as beings, whether they are bereft of Being or no, inevitably closes the book on our existence.
Works Cited
Darby, Tom. “On Spiritual Crisis, Globalization, and Planetary Rule.” In Faith, Reason, and Political Life Today, ed. Peter Augustine Lawler and Dale McConkey, 35-65. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2001.
Kaczynski, Theodore. “Industrial Society and its Future.” 1995. Found at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Future
Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Trans. Nichols, James H. Jr., Ed. Bloom, Allan. Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 1980.
Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture.” In The Questions Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. Lovitt, William, 115-154. New York: Harper Perennial, 1977.
Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture.” In The Questions Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. Lovitt, William, 3-35. New York: Harper Perennial, 1977.
Mazarr, Michael J. Unmodern Men in the Modern World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Mitchell, Andrew J. “Heidegger and Terrorism.” Research in Phenomenology, 35 (2005). Pages 181-215.
Notes on Sources
Abbreviations:
The Age of the World Picture – AWP
The Question Concerning Technology – QCT
Notes (superscripted):
1The specific case studies performed by Mazarr are nonetheless extremely instructional and provide more significant insight into these anti-moderns than can be summarized in this essay.
2I have neglected to provide an example in the main body of the text as the details are largely unnecessary, but I have included here the first stanza of Industrial Society and its Future, which will aid in picturing the anti-modern overtones in terrorism.
“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering—even in "advanced" countries.”
3The word modern is used here as analogous to post-historical or what some consider post-modern, rather than historical modernity.