Document Type

Article

Keywords

Heidegger, modern technology, Gestell, Ge-Stell, media, big data, Ernst Jünger

Disciplines

Continental Philosophy | Digital Humanities | Engineering | Philosophy

Abstract

The author proposes an etymological translation of Ge-Stell , Heidegger’s word for the essence of modern technology, from its Greek and Latin roots as “syn-thetic 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

1040

Publication Date

2014

Comments

Theodore Kisiel, "Heidegger and Our Twenty-first Century Experience of Ge-Stell," in: B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology (Frankfurt am Main: Springer, 2014), pp. 137-151.

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