Document Type

Article

Keywords

Heidegger, technology, Ge-Stell, hermeneutics, phenomenology, GPS

Disciplines

Continental Philosophy | Epistemology | Philosophy | Philosophy of Science

Abstract

I propose an etymological translation of Ge-Stell, Heidegger’s word for the essence of modern technology, from its Greek and Latin roots as “synthetic com-posit[ion]ing,” which presciently portends our twenty-first century experience of the internetted WorldWideWeb with its virtual infinity of websites in cyberspace, Global Positioning Systems, interlocking air traffic control grids, world-embracing weather maps, the 24-7 world news coverage of cable TV-networks like CNN, etc., etc.—all of which are structured by the complex programming based on the computerized and ultimately simple Leibnizian binary-digital logic generating an infinite number of combinations of the posit (1) and non-posit (0). The sharp contrast between the global time-space technologically foreshortened into instantaneity and simultaneity and the radically local time-space of our situated historical existence—in short, the temporal-spatial tension between Ge-Stell and Da-Sein — is examined for ways and means of bringing them together in contemporaneous compatibility.

Article Number

1034

Publication Date

2014

Comments

This chapter was originally published in Babette Babich and Dimitri Ginev, eds., The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology (Frankfurt am Main: Springer, 2014).

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