For Work / Against Work
Debates on the centrality of work

References for Theme: On Heidegger

  • Backman, Jussi
  • Bakken, Tore; Holt, Robin; Zundel, Mike
  • Bernasconi, Robert
  • Blok, V
  • Blok, Vincent
    • "An Indication of Being—Reflections on Heidegger's Engagement with Ernst Jünger" (2011)
      (p.197) This change in the appearance of the world together with the way people deal with it, leads Jünger to conceive of a new turn of ‘Being’ – the Gestalt of the worker - which is capable of “guaranteeing a new certainty and new rank order of life” (Arb 99). ‘Being’ is understood here in line with the metaphysical tradition, as a Gestalt, form or measure in which reality appears as ordered (see for further details on Jünger’s concept of Being §2). In the case of Jünger’s Gestalt of the worker, this form or measure must be found in work: that...
    • "An Indication of Being—Reflections on Heidegger's Engagement with Ernst Jünger" (2011)
      (p.198) Nietzsche sees the nihilistic character of Platonism, the denial of life in its conception of the Gestalt. His reversal of Platonism takes its point of departure precisely from within the world of becoming and conceives the Gestalt as the product of the will to power of life. The Gestalt is a Herrschaftsgebilde amidst the world of becoming, which serves the power-preservation and power-enhancement of life. The Gestalt is a necessary condition for the power-preservation of life, which would otherwise evaporate in the face of relentless variability (becoming). Nevertheless, this Gestalt is not stable and everlasting, because all stabilization destroys becoming,...
    • "An Indication of Being—Reflections on Heidegger's Engagement with Ernst Jünger" (2011)
      (p.201) According to Heidegger, Jünger is the only real follower of Nietzsche, because he doesn’t speak about Nietzsche and his doctrine of the will to power. He sees beings as will to power without describing them: “his way of thinking is itself a Gestalt of the will to power; in Jünger’s language: thinking itself has “work-character” [Arbeitscharakter]”. 25 Jünger calls his own way of thinking heroic realism, because he does not only see the reality of the work-character (Arbeitscharakter) of people and things in the world, but also affirms this in such a way that his own way of thinking has...
    • "An Indication of Being—Reflections on Heidegger's Engagement with Ernst Jünger" (2011)
    • "Heidegger's Ontology of Work" (2015)
      (p.63) Despite Heidegger’s criticism of Jünger’s metaphysical position in the period of 1934–1940, a more nuanced picture shows itself if we look at Heidegger’s concept of work in the beginning of the 1930s. In  The German Student as Worker from 1933 for instance, Heidegger argues that work “confronts us with beings in a whole.”  1  “Work displaces and inserts the people in the radius of action of all essential powers of being. The structure of  völkischexistence, which is shaped and constituted  in    its work and  as    work, is the state. The National Socialist state is the work-state.”  Work seems...
    • "Heidegger's Ontology of Work" (2015)
      (p.65) In  a  lecture  about  the    Basic  Concepts  of  Aristotelian  Philosophy  in  the  same  period  (1924),  this  world  of  equipment  and  work  is  explicitly  con-nected with the concept of work. In his productive appropriation  12  of Aristo-tle’s basic concepts, Heidegger explores what primarily encounters us in the world: “A being thus in the world is there and can, as  dunamis, at the same time be something usable.  Dunamis, ‘not yet,’ can mean: is usable for . . ., transformable into. . . . This being that is there thus, as there completed and usable for . . . is characterized...
    • "Heidegger's Ontology of Work" (2015)
      (p.67) When  we  compare  Jünger’s  description  of  the  total  mobilization  in  the  First  World  War  with  Heidegger’s  description  of  the  work-world  in Being and Time, we encounter one similarity and one difference between the two. Jünger’s  description  of  the  total  mobilization,  in  which  man  and  things  appear as function or operative, is comparable with Heidegger’s description of the ready-to-hand world, which is extended to the whole of being. Also for Heidegger, the whole of nature appears as ready-at-hand equipment or work, which derives its meaning from its productivity (serviceability, usabil-ity): “The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry...
    • "Heidegger's Ontology of Work" (2015)
      (p.69) Also in the beginning of the 1930s, Heidegger saw the mission of thought in the destruction of philosophy, i.e., “ the end of metaphysics out of a more originary question regarding the ‘meaning’ (truth) of being.” 34  But when he discusses the concept of work at the beginning of the 1930s, the worker is no longer the one who is absorbed by the ready-to-hand world of work. Contrary to  Being and Time, the worker is precisely the one who is transitory toward a way of human existence that is concerned about the meaning of being. In  The German Stu-dent as...
    • "Heidegger's Ontology of Work" (2015)
      (p.70) Following Jünger, Heidegger rejects economic conceptualizations of work and worker, just as conceptualizations of the worker as a class. Heidegger conceptualizes work in the following way: “The word work  is  ambiguous.  It  means  on  the  one  hand  work  as  enactment  of  specific behavior. On the other hand, it means work as a product, the result or success of this enactment. According to this broad and doubled meaning, all human behavior, provided that it is  about something, is  work and  care.”  
    • "Heidegger's Ontology of Work" (2015)
      (p.71) In the “advancement” and “insistence” of the German student as worker, Heidegger sees an indication that our  Dasein begins to shift toward another way  of  being,   43   i.e.,  to  a  way  of  being  of  the  people  that  exposes  itself  to  the meaning or truth of being. Work therefore no longer  prevents access to the meaning of being, but arises out of, and provides access to the experi-ence of being. The essence of work consists here in the care for being. And as Jünger saw the harbingers of the new worker type in the soldiers of the Great War, Heidegger saw...
    • "Heidegger's Ontology of Work" (2015)
    • "Jünger’s Concept of the Gestalt of the Worker as the Consummation of Modernity" (2015)
      (p.77) Heidegger concentrates on this identification of the subject of  The Worker(worker) and the way this subject is being discussed in Jünger’s book (work). “Is the essence of the worker determined out of the  essence of work ? . . . Or is the essence of work put forward out of the essence of the worker? . . . how does Jünger decide? Does he see this question at all, does he notice its weight?” 5   On  the  one  hand,  the  subject  (worker)  is  the  basis  for  the  work  character  of  the  world  as  its  object.  On  the  other  hand,  the ...
    • "Jünger’s Concept of the Gestalt of the Worker as the Consummation of Modernity" (2015)
      (p.79) For Heidegger, “being” cannot be associated with work and workers. Work and workers designate in the first instance (human) beings in the world, and so concern in this way metaphysically understood  beings, whereas “Being” concerns the way reality appears together with the way people deal with it. In the epoch of the worker, reality appears as produced and represented (will to power) for representing-producing humanity (will to power). According to Heidegger, this means that the essence of the work-world ( totale Mobil-machung)  has  to  be  found  in  the  machination  of  beings  (  totale  Mobil ma-chung).  12   Machination  indicates  the  makeability ...
    • "Jünger’s Concept of the Gestalt of the Worker as the Consummation of Modernity" (2015)
      (p.80) Jünger’s  absorption  by  the  work-world  is  however  not  primarily  his  mistake  or  fault.  According  to  Heidegger,  it  belongs  to  the  inner  logic  of  machination that it conceals itself all the more as it unfolds itself.  19  We can understand  this  self-concealment  of  machination  if  we  remember  Heideg-ger’s analysis of the movement of work in  Being and Time (see Section 6.1); all works are characterized by a double movement of their withdrawal as equipment  in  favor  of  their  presence  as  work.  In  1934–1935,  Heidegger  conceptualizes this double movement in terms of the concealment of machi-nation as the essence of the work-world...
    • "Jünger’s Concept of the Gestalt of the Worker as the Consummation of Modernity" (2015)
      (p.81) We can conclude that Heidegger, at the beginning of the 1930s, seemed to  be  quite  revolutionary  in  heralding  the  other  beginning  of  philosophy.  Inspired by Jünger, he developed a destructed concept of work and will to characterize  his  own  way  of  philosophical  thinking,  and  was    willing  the  overcoming  of  the  metaphysics  of  the  will  to  power.   30   But  from  the  con-frontation  with  Jünger,  Heidegger  learned  that  every  “overcoming  of  the  metaphysics of the will to power” is doomed, as long as it is characterized by work and will.  31  Working and willing is absorbed in the circular course from ...
    • "Jünger’s Concept of the Gestalt of the Worker as the Consummation of Modernity" (2015)
  • Borgmann, Albert
    • Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (1987)
      (p.199) When Heidegger described the focusing power of the jug, he might have been thinking of a  rural setting where wine jugs embody in their material, form, and craft a long and local tradition; where at noon one goes down to the cellar to draw a jug of table wine whose vintage one knows well; where at the noon meal the wine is thoughtfully poured and gratefully received. Under such circumstances, there might be a gathering and disclosure of the fourfold, one that is for the most part understood and in the background and may come to the fore on festive...
    • Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (1987)
      (p.3) The advanced technological way of life is usually seen as rich in styles and opportunities, pregnant with radical innovations, and open to a  promising future. The problems that beset technological societies are thought to be extrinsic to technology; they stem, supposedly, from political indecision, social injustice, or environmental constraints. I consider this a  serious mis-reading of our situation. I propose to show that there is a  characteristic and constraining pattern to the entire fabric of our lives. This pattern is visible first and most of all in the countless inconspicuous objects and procedures of daily life in a technological society....
    • Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (1987)
    • "Technology" (2005)
      (p.420) It can be argued that technology is the most important topic of Heidegger's thought.
    • "Technology" (2005)
  • Coeckelbergh, Mark
    • "Technology as Skill and Activity: Revisiting the problem of Alienation" (2012)
      (p.214) This turn to skill—and indeed to technology as skilled activity—implies that at the ontological, transcendental level there is no problem of alienation—with regard to technology or otherwise. In this sense it is appropriate to say that if we feel alienated, it is always alienation ‘in spite of’: alienation amounts to not recognizing the deeper bonds that are there at the transcendental level. We are already related. What alienates us, are theories, principles or procedures that make us feel as if we are detached from the world. What matters, instead, is finding out good ways of doing and good ways of...
    • "Technology as Skill and Activity: Revisiting the problem of Alienation" (2012)
    • "E-care as craftsmanship: virtuous work, skilled engagement, and information technology in health care" (2013)
      (p.808) However, influenced by Sennet’s notion of craftsmanship, Dewey’s emphasis on know-how, and Dreyfus’s view of ethical expertise, we can make a much closer connection between techne and phronesis—and between poiesis and praxis— than Aristotle. I propose that we define the mastery and ‘‘technical’’ expertise that is needed in craftsmanship not as mere means to an end, but as being directly constitutive of the good praxis aims at. In a specific practice, developing and applying ‘‘technical’’ expertise as a highly skilledcraftsman is not entirely different from making wise judgments and doing good. On the contrary, in craftsmanship understood as professional excellence and as good practice, means and end merge: good craftsmanship requires...
    • "E-care as craftsmanship: virtuous work, skilled engagement, and information technology in health care" (2013)
      (p.809) Good work also means knowing how to deal with things and knowing how to care for them. Dreyfus and Kelly argue that by engaging in skilled activities, we can learn to care for things rather than treating them as ‘a mere resource’ (Dreyfus and Kelly 2011, p. 217)—something Heidegger warned for in his later work (see for example Heidegger 1977). Again the craftsman’s understanding is a tacit, intuitive one, based on practical experience. The authors write about the craftsman who sees how the wood ‘will respond to an axe’ (Dreyfus and Kelly 2011, p. 208). They say that the wheelwright...
    • "E-care as craftsmanship: virtuous work, skilled engagement, and information technology in health care" (2013)
  • Cooper, David E
    • "Heidegger on Nature" (2005)
      (p.340) Heidegger's concern is to expose what he takes to be the prevailing way in which, in modernity, nature is 'revealed' to us. 'Technology' is his name for this 'way of revealing'. His main claims in this context are that this way of revealing is a peculiarly partial and impoverished one, and that, worse still, it represents a 'monstrous' and 'supreme danger', being responsible, in effect, for an increasing 'devastation of the earth' and for our contemporary 'distress'. 
    • "Heidegger on Nature" (2005)
      (p.345) His account of technology in effect elaborates aspects of the claim made in Being and Time that nature is 'primordially' experienced as 'ready-to-hand' or 'equipmental' - the forest,  say, as potential timber. (The aspects, as indicated by that particular example, are those related to the more obviously 'economic' and utilitarian dimensions of 'equipment'.) For 'technology', in his sense, refers not to the use of tools and machinery in productive activity, or to applications of technical knowledge to such activity, but to a 'way of revealing' or 'rendering things manifest' - of experiencing and interpreting - the natural world which is paradigmatically manifested by technology in those familiar senses....
    • "Heidegger on Nature" (2005)
      (p.346) From this hegemony of technology, further developments of a monstrous kind ensue. For one thing, the technological view of nature comes to encompass human beings, so that 'man himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve'. Human beings become 'manpower', 'human resources' and the like. And human nature itself is in danger of being put on tap.
    • "Heidegger on Nature" (2005)
  • Corney, Barbara
  • Dall’Alba, Gloria; Sandberg, Jörgen
  • Dias, W P
    • "Heidegger's Relevance for Engineering: questioning technology" (2003)
      (p.392) Given the pervasive and significant impact of technology on our lives and society, it would do well for engineers too to engage in such questioning as an integral part of their practice, since they are agents of technology. This would also result in more balanced critiques of technology. Currently critics of technology tend to be largely philosophers or environmentalist, both of whom are sometimes unrealistic in their rejection of technology.
    • "Heidegger's Relevance for Engineering: questioning technology" (2003)
      (p.394) Questioning technology in practice is not an easy task. Not only does it involve areas such as socially acceptable levels of risk, but also issues of justice and values. There is also the need for a shared discourse and consensus, which is increasingly difficult to find today. While the treatment of these subjects is very brief here, the intention has been to argue that engineers should be part and parcel of this questioning process. As Heidegger remarked, “Questioning is the piety of thought”.
    • "Heidegger's Relevance for Engineering: questioning technology" (2003)
      (p.396) Heidegger’s early writings stressed the primacy of practice over theory, and hence can be interpreted as supportive of the engineering approach. In his later writings he affirmed traditional technology, but was opposed to science based modern technology, in which everything (including man) is considered to be a mere “resource”. This spirit of questioning is something that engineers (who are purveyors of technology) would do well to emulate. Just as Heidegger considered poetry to be an antidote to the spirit of modern technology, the use of metaphor in design could also liberate engineering from its sometimes narrow rationalism.
    • "Heidegger's Relevance for Engineering: questioning technology" (2003)
  • Dreyfus, Hubert L
    • "Between Technē and Technology: The Ambiguous Place of Equipment in Being and Time" (1984)
      (p.25) Heidegger, however, never works out a history of the being of equipment, so we will have to construct it from hints. The most important of these hints are Heidegger's discussion of the Greek notion of techne at the beginning of our history and his remark in "Science and Reflection" that, in the technological understanding of the being, subject and object no longer stand in a relation of representation but are both absorbed into a total systematic ordering. ("Both subject and object are sucked up as standing-reserve.") (QCT.173). It follows that opposing the Cartesian subject/object distinction in terms of an account...
    • "Between Technē and Technology: The Ambiguous Place of Equipment in Being and Time" (1984)
      (p.32) The idea that in the technological world equipment more and more comes to fit together in one single totality is already a step from the relatively autonomous and autochthonous workshop of the craftsman towards the uprooted interconnectedness of industrial mass production. Its final achievement would be a world system under the feedback control of cybernetics. Heidegger makes a similar point in The Question Concering Technology, when he criticizes Hegel's definition of the machine as an autonomous tool and contrasts the autonomous tools of the craftsman with the total ordering characteristic of the technological machine
    • "Between Technē and Technology: The Ambiguous Place of Equipment in Being and Time" (1984)
  • Dreyfus, Hubert L; Spinosa, Charles
    • "Further Reflections on Heidegger, Technology, and the Everyday" (2003)
      (p.339) In writing about technology, Heidegger formulates his goal as gaining a free relation to technology—away of living with technology that does not allow it to “warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature”. According to Heidegger, our nature is to be world disclosers. That is, by means of our equipment and coordinated practices, we human beings open coherent, distinct contexts or worlds in which we perceive, feel, act, and think. The Heidegger of Being and Time called a world an understanding of being and argued that such an understanding of being is what makes it possible for us to encounter people and things as kinds of beings. He considered his discovery...
    • "Further Reflections on Heidegger, Technology, and the Everyday" (2003)
      (p.348) Heidegger sees technology as disaggregating our identities into a contingently built-up collection of skills, technological things solicit certain skills without requiring that we take ourselves as having one kind of identity or another. This absence may make our mode of being as world disclosers invisible to us. This absence of worlds and disclosing would be what Heidegger calls the greatest danger. But this absence could also allow us to become sensitive to the various identities we have when we are engaged in disclosing the different worlds focused by different kinds of things. Then, as such disclosers, we could even respond to technological things as revealing one kind of local world and become...
    • "Further Reflections on Heidegger, Technology, and the Everyday" (2003)
  • Dreyus, Hubert L; Spinosa, Charles
  • Farías, Víctor
    • Heidegger and Nazism (1989)
      (p.121) The  administrative  changes  adopted  by  Heidegger  were  com­pleted  by  a  series  o f measures  intended  to  make  adjustments  in  the  lives o f the  students,  whose  habits  up  to  19 33  were  to  live  an  easy  life  with  no thought other than  professional  and  material  success,  concerns  now judged decadent  and  individualistic.  The  eagerness  with  which  Heidegger  took on  this  task  in  a  university  where  the  students  were  almost  entirely  from the  middle  and  working  classes  is  certainly  a  sign  o f  his  decision  to  im­pose  the  nationalist  program  in  its  most  radical  populist  variant.  Wolf­gang  Kreutzberger  has  brought  out ...
    • Heidegger and Nazism (1989)
      (p.122) It  is  only  by  becoming  a  “ worker”  that  the  stu­dent  can  authentically  become  tied  to  the  state,  “ because  the  National Socialist  state  is  a  workers’  state”
    • Heidegger and Nazism (1989)
      (p.125) Certainly  more  original,  even  though  always  within  the  radical  popu­list  option,  is  the  initiative  Heidegger  took  to  connect  student  work  and the  program  for  social  rehabilitation  begun  by  Mayor  Kerber,  which  cre­ated  a  “ living  bridge”  between  the  university  and  the  workers  that  had no  equal  among  the  initiatives  o f any  o f the  other  rectors  o f the  time.  In fact,  work  service  was  not  new  with  the  Nazis,  but  was  rather  an  old  idea begun  in  many  universities  involving  the  youth  movement (Jugendbewe­gung).  This  service  had  now  been  taken  over  by  the  state  and  offered various  options. ...
    • Heidegger and Nazism (1989)
  • Feenberg, Andrew
    • "Critical theory of technology: An overview" (2008)
      (p.32) According to Heidegger’s history of being, the modern “revealing” is biased by a tendency to take every object as a potential raw material for technical action. Objects enter our experience only in so far as we notice theirusefulness in the technological system. Release from this form of experience may come from a new mode of revealing, but Heidegger has no idea how revealings come and go. 
    • "Critical theory of technology: An overview" (2008)
      (p.33) Much philosophy of technology offers very abstract and unhistorical accounts of the essence of technology. These accounts appear painfully thin compared to the rich complexity revealed in social studies of technology. Yet technology has the distinguishing features sketched above and these have normative implications. As Marcuse argued in One-Dimensional Man, the choice of a technical rather than a political or moral solution to a social problem is politically and morally significant. The dilemma divides technology studies into two opposed branches. Most essentialist philosophy of technology is critical of modernity, even antimodern, while most empirical research on technologies ignores the larger issue of modernity and thus appears uncritical,...
    • "Critical theory of technology: An overview" (2008)
      (p.38) Technological systems impose technical management on human beings. Some manage, while others are managed. […] The world appears quite differently from these two positions. The strategic standpoint privileges considerations of control and efficiency and looks for affordances, precisely what Heidegger criticizes in technology.
    • "Critical theory of technology: An overview" (2008)
      (p.44) Building an integrated and unified picture of our world has become far more difficult as technical advances break down the barriers between spheres of activity to which the division between disciplines corresponds. I believe that critical theory of technology offers a platform for reconciling many apparently conflicting strands of reflection on technology. Only through an approach that is both critical and empirically oriented is it possible to make sense of what is going on around us now. The first generation of Critical Theorists called for just such a synthesis of theoretical and empirical approaches.
    • "Critical theory of technology: An overview" (2008)
    • Questioning Technology (2012)
    • "Heidegger and Marcuse: the catastrophe and redemption of technology" (2014)
  • Fritsche, Johannes
    • "Heidegger on Machination, the Jewish Race, and the Holocaust" (2018)
      (p.312) Heidegger means by Rechnen any objectification of beings for the sake of using, dominating, or exploiting them. After his disappointment with the National Socialism of his day around 1937/8, Heidegger presents a theory of Machenschaft (machination) according to which reckoning has been present in all phases of Western philosophy and history, from the beginning in the preSocratics onwards. Prior to modernity, however, it was always subordinated to, or embedded in, practices and modes of unconcealment or truth different from itself, while in modernity it has become the exclusive truth: a step-by-step emancipation of reckoning as a history of decline.
    • "Heidegger on Machination, the Jewish Race, and the Holocaust" (2018)
      (p.316) In §26 of Being and Time, Heidegger introduces three modes of being-with-other Daseine, a “deficient” one and two “positive” ones,as he says in a variation of Hegel’s terminology.28 At the very beginning of §26, referring back to the sections on handiness, he pictures the pre-modern world: the craftsman in his workshop, the tailor cutting clothes to the figure, the corn fields referring to our friends and acquaintances, the boats in theriver doing the same, and sometimes an “‘alien boat’.” Without this pre-modern world, the three modes in §26 would be unintelligible. The world of the craftsmen, or community, is historically the first mode of being-with-other-Daseine,...
    • "Heidegger on Machination, the Jewish Race, and the Holocaust" (2018)
  • Garrard, Greg
  • Gibbs, Paul
  • Gieser, Thorsten
  • Guidi, Lucilla
  • Habermas, Jürgen; McCumber, John
  • Hamacher, Werner; Hartman, Matthew T
  • Heidegger, Martin
    • On Hegel's Philosophy of Right: The 1934-35 Seminar and Interpretive Essays (2014)
      (p.16) Probably the most important sketch for a political philosophy in the context of the seminar on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is the one that goes under the heading “Th e Metaphysical Basic Power of the Future State” (162). Here, care as a political existential is derived from the “struggle,” i.e. from π ο´ λεμος . Care is then analyzed into four elements. At fi rst, it appears as “mastery.” This “mastery” isseized and wielded by the “ones who care.” Th e end of care is “to ‘guard’ [ wahren ]beings.” Th e second element of care is “work.” Under this determination, we couldfind a...
    • On Hegel's Philosophy of Right: The 1934-35 Seminar and Interpretive Essays (2014)
      (p.7) In the winter of 1934 Heidegger wanted to interlace two intentions, namely a philosophical project of overcoming a certain historical philosophical situation with a political project ofsupporting the deep political transformation in Germany. With reference to theparallelization of the lecture course and the seminar, on Hegel as the consummatorof Western philosophy and Hölderlin as the initiator of a new history,Heidegger responded to what, for him, was a necessary historical coincidence, anecessary historical “responsibility” (GA 38: 121).That is why he also was willing to reconsider certain public discourses. Heread attentively Ernst Jünger’s highly influential essay “Th e Worker,” which was published at the...
    • On Hegel's Philosophy of Right: The 1934-35 Seminar and Interpretive Essays (2014)
  • Heidegger, Martin; Wolin, Richard
    • The Heidegger controversy: A critical reader (1992)
      (p.121) In his lectures of the late 1930s, Heidegger would critically distance himself from Nietzsche's metaphysics. In the early 1930s, however, his relation to Nietzsche was far from critical. Instead, at this time, he clearly viewed the historical potentials of the Nazi movement-its "inner truth and greatness," as he would remark in An Introduction to Metaphysics (1935)- in a manner consistent with the doctrines of Nietzsche and junger; that is, as a  resurgence of a  new heroic ethos, a "will to power," that would place Germany in the forefront of a  movement directed toward the "self-overcoming" of bourgeois nihilism. Thus, following...
    • The Heidegger controversy: A critical reader (1992)
  • Heikkurinen, Pasi
  • Helms, Eleanor; Dobson, John
  • Hemming, Laurence Paul
    • "Work as total reason for being: Heidegger and Jünger’s Der Arbeiter" (2008)
      (p.234) Heidegger became intrigued by Jünger’s work after the publication of “Die totale Mobilmachung” and he refers in several places to discussions he organised on Jünger’s Der Arbeiter both shortly after its publication (with Heidegger’s Assistent Werner Brock and a small circle) and again in 1939/1940 (Heidegger 2000a; cf. Heidegger 2000b, p. 375), until, he says, “one was, however, not surprised that an attempt to elucidate ‘Der Arbeiter’ was watched and finally forbidden” (Heidegger 1996, p. 390).6 This remark was itself made in the context of Heidegger’s final confrontation with Jünger, in the 1956 version of his essay “Zur Seinsfrage” (“On...
    • "Work as total reason for being: Heidegger and Jünger’s Der Arbeiter" (2008)
      (p.242) If God is dead, then the consequences of this are that total mobilisation becomes not just possible, but required, both to make visible the death of God and God’s analogue, the monarch (and insofar as an analogue has made itself present, a split has opened up), and to become visible as an individual at all. Moreover, the will to power fulfils the will of God by replacing it. “God” as “being in general” is now understood as, and through, work: the working out and working up of the real. The indeterminate “substance” of the subjectivity of the subject must both...
    • "Work as total reason for being: Heidegger and Jünger’s Der Arbeiter" (2008)
      (p.243) the type of the worker is counterposed to the type of the feudal lord, the king, the bourgeois: the worker is that one best able to take command of the means of total mobilisation and, at the same time, the worker is that one produced by the means of total mobilisation. The worker is the “product” of technology and of technique, and work is the making manifest of the will to power. Jünger says that “means and the powers of life become possible”, which means “become the same” (Jünger 1941, p. 58).26 Put this way, the worker does not work,...
    • "Work as total reason for being: Heidegger and Jünger’s Der Arbeiter" (2008)
      (p.244) In the protocols from a seminar session of 1937 on Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht entitled “The Biological as Economic Basic-Position”, Heidegger notes that “the opposite of what the common herd desire is necessary for the elevating of the typical man” (Heidegger 2004a, §53, p. 66).29 The typical man is in every case the subject as subject, who distinguishes himself in his very self precisely with respect to, and over against, what he perceives to be what the common lot seek out and seek after. We may note in passing that on this account, the typical man is precisely a cultural...
    • "Work as total reason for being: Heidegger and Jünger’s Der Arbeiter" (2008)
      (p.245) Jünger comments that the contemporary situation, the time of the worker, demands the establishment of a new form of power and rule, which, inasmuch as it is a claim to freedom, is the claim of work. Work produces the legitimation of power, of rule, and of freedom: “every claim to freedom within the work-world is therefore only possible insofar as it appears as a claim of work” (Jünger 1941, p. 65).34 Rule is, however, essentially ordering, it is essentially what orders into hierarchy and distinction, and so difference as such. The appearance of the worker as the form of the...
    • "Work as total reason for being: Heidegger and Jünger’s Der Arbeiter" (2008)
      (p.247) Here the fundamental difference between Heidegger and Jünger can also be seen, one that even lets us glimpse Heidegger’s own political understanding, for if Jünger is interested in bringing to description the typus of the worker and relating it to Nietzsche — the essence of the age — Heidegger himself is interested in origination and the “jointure” of beings as such, what lets beings be seen both for themselves and in relation to each other — what the Greeks name as arche, ordering source, the essence of essence (das Wesen des Wesens). The difference is in an ordering to time....
    • "Work as total reason for being: Heidegger and Jünger’s Der Arbeiter" (2008)
      (p.248) If the worker is typified in the forms of fascism (Nazism), communism (Bolshevism), and Americanism, these are for Heidegger only the means by which the underlying metaphysics of valuation eclipses what Jünger refers to as the latest political forms (after the feudal, monarchial, and others). “World democracy” is not, therefore, either for Heidegger or for Nietzsche, a final form, understood as presence, but the manner of an overcoming, an emerging presencing, something on its way and coming from before us. World democracy, as the triumph of something European (of which the American is only a later form) on a planetary...
    • "Work as total reason for being: Heidegger and Jünger’s Der Arbeiter" (2008)
  • Kennedy, Tara
  • King, Bradley
  • Kittler, Wolf
    • "From Gestalt to Ge-Stell: Martin Heidegger Reads Ernst Jünger" (2008)
      (p.79) Reading Der Arbeiter together with Heidegger's essay "Questioning after Technology" after many years, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, I was struck by the number of parallels in  both the arguments and the terminology of these texts, not only with Benjamin's essay "On the Origin of the Work of Art in the Age of  Mechanical Reproduction" but also with his "Theses on the Philosophy of History." It is, of course, easy to locate Benjamin, on the one side, and Jünger and Heidegger, on the other one, to the so-called Left and Right of the political spectrum, but in doing so we should at least be...
    • "From Gestalt to Ge-Stell: Martin Heidegger Reads Ernst Jünger" (2008)
  • Kouppanou, Anna
  • Kroker, Arthur
  • Lotz, Christian
    • "Reification through Commodity Form or Technology? From Honneth back to Heidegger and Marx" (2013)
      (p.193) Heidegger’s view of the concept of labor is closely connected to Junger’s Der Arbeiter, within which Junger outlines the transformation of modern human beings into ‘‘workers.’’ The total mobilization of human beings through labor leads, according to Heidegger, to the domination of the earth transforms everything into energy to be exploited, and is rooted in manipulation. Laboring, according to Heidegger, is basically an exploitative relationship toward beings, especially since it establishes beings as something that in principle can be labored upon. This, in turn, presupposes that beings are accessible to the laboring subject. Heidegger’s argument, consequently, is that labor as a universal (human) concept, as can be found...
    • "Reification through Commodity Form or Technology? From Honneth back to Heidegger and Marx" (2013)
      (p.194) As Heidegger argues in his technology essay, modern technology should be understood as (1) the loss of the unity between thing and world (‘‘de-worlding’’) and as (2) the reduction of ‘‘technics’’ to a single form of causality, namely, causa materialis. When Heidegger introduces the essence of modern technology in histechnology essay, he claims that modern technology is still a form of revealing, but the revealing is now of a different character, which he calls challenging (Herausfordern). This transition is important, as it allows us to reject the claim that the difference between modern and nonmodern technology seems to be absolutein Heidegger. It is rather the opposite:...
    • "Reification through Commodity Form or Technology? From Honneth back to Heidegger and Marx" (2013)
  • Malpas, Jeff
    • Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World (2008)
      (p.188) The appearance of ‘the worker’ as the name for the ‘human fulfilment of the being of beings’ is indicative of the way in which human being is now almost entirely taken up in terms of the capacity for ‘production’ (and therefore also, one might say, for ‘consumption’) – in terms of what can also be understood as a form of ‘materialism’, although it is a materialism understood as the metaphysical determination ‘according to which every being appears as the material of labor’ and so, says Heidegger, ‘[t]he essence of materialism is concealed in the essence of technology’.684 ‘Labour’ or ‘work’...
    • Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World (2008)
  • Marcuse, Herbert
  • Mei, Todd S
  • Nielsen, Klaus
    • "Aspects of a Practical Understanding: Heidegger at the workplace" (2007)
      (p.461) Heidegger stresses that it is by using equipment and getting to know its referential character that we learn to understand the world. Bringing this kind of thinking into learning in practice means that the ‘‘know-how’’ of the trade is to a large degree embedded in the social practice of the workplace, and more precisely in the use of tools and equipment. The equipment has immanent purposes, and by using it the apprentices begin to understand its purposes. In order for the practitioner to learn, he or she needs to disclose the referential character of assignments and equipment by using the...
    • "Aspects of a Practical Understanding: Heidegger at the workplace" (2007)
  • Pageau-St-Hilaire, Antoine
  • Patel, Kiran Klaus
    • Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933-1945 (2005)
      (p.328) In his infamous rector’s ad-dress, Martin Heidegger inquired into the task, place, and self-understanding that students should have “to withstand the German fate in its time of ut-most need.” In his view, the students had to establish three kinds of con-nections. The first was that to the Volksgemeinschaft, which imposed the obligation of “supportive and active participation in the effort, striving, and accomplishments  of  all  estates  and  segments  of  theVolk.”  According  to Heidegger, that connection was best realized in labor service. Alongside it the Freiburg philosopher placed two other elements: military service and the “service of knowledge” (Wissensdienst), which went...
    • Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933-1945 (2005)
      (p.329) The Labor Service also failed to respond to a much more elaborate and polished intellectual offering. In his 1932 book Der Arbeiter(The Worker), Ernst J ̈unger had interpreted the age in which he was living as the transition from the disintegrating bourgeois society to the rule of the worker. He de-manded labor conscription as the “morning gift [Morgengabe] of the worker to the state.” It was to be the successor to general military conscription and should assume the latter’s role with respect to “education, penetration, anduniform discipline.” Moreover, J ̈unger wanted to do away with the “silly arrogance” of regarding...
    • Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933-1945 (2005)
  • Riis, Søren
  • Roberts, David
    • "Technology and modernity: Spengler, Jünger, Heidegger, Cassirer" (2012)
      (p.22) Junger’s cold and penetrating gaze serves his apocalyptic construction of world history: the destruction of the hated bourgeois world and the dawn of the age of the totalitarian Worker State, in which the figure (Gestalt) of the Worker embodies the destiny of man to master the earth. Junger’s new man is the Nietzschean Superman, who is capable of facing and welcoming the terrifying annihilating reality of the world as Will to Power, revealed in the Great War. His ‘heroic realism’ separates the Worker from the ‘bourgeois’ individual who anxiously clings to life and security as his highest values. The invasion of bourgeois space by the ‘elemental’ powers...
    • "Technology and modernity: Spengler, Jünger, Heidegger, Cassirer" (2012)
      (p.24) Power, in Junger’s Nietzschean reading, is inherently totalitarian. The Worker mobilizes the world through technology, a process that declares war on all historical systems and religious institutions and reaches its conclusion with the destruction of all nation-states. They will all be swept away by the revolution of the Worker, which installs itself as the superior race. The machine, we may say, ends as with Spengler by emancipating itself from its masters because the Worker, the self-enslaving representative of power, ‘transcends’ the distinction between masters and servants, even if Junger (like Hitler and Himmler) accords a privileged role to military orders...
    • "Technology and modernity: Spengler, Jünger, Heidegger, Cassirer" (2012)
  • Ryder, Andrew
    • "Bataille against Heidegger: Language and the Escape from the World" (2011)
      (p.81) While Bataille’s moi is also separate from Being, he would repudiate the essential role of revealing beings through language and Being. Even this duty, from his perspective, remains subordination. His language does not illuminate beings. The “taste of garlic” that Bataille evokes in the apprehension of death is not revealed in his language. It is instead presented as enigmatic, untruthful, and dirty. Bataille’s language is a being that isobscured by death. It is material. Heidegger criticizes Marxism for a metaphysical commitment tomaterialism, which posits all beings as “the material of labor” (1993: 243). The tendency to see all objects as congealed labor-time leads Marxism to complicity with technical...
    • "Bataille against Heidegger: Language and the Escape from the World" (2011)
  • Sandberg, J; Pinnington, A H
  • Sasa, Michael Sunday
  • Schalow, Frank
  • Standish, Paul
    • "Heidegger and the technology of further education" (1997)
      (p.441) It is Heidegger's bold claim that the technology of the modern world is the consequence, indeed the inevitable outcome, of the metaphysics of ancient Greece, specifically of a philosophical perspective that starts with Plato. The distinction in Plato between form and matter leads to the timeless and in effect permanently present eidos, a kind of freezing of temporality, a kind of eternal present. In modern terms the eidos can be seen as something like a blue-print for hyle (underlying substance or matter). This leads to an idealisation of total presence, where local differences pale into insignificance. (One might now be...
    • "Heidegger and the technology of further education" (1997)
      (p.443) This context of rapid industrialisation may have its bearing on the preoccupation throughout Heidegger's writing with work and with technology. In this he was again influenced by Nietzsche but also, to his cost, by Ernst Junger. Junger fully embraced new technology and idealised the role of the worker in service of the fully technological state. This was carried to its extreme in the combination of heroism, nationalism, and technology that war made possible. He claimed that the worker/soldier epitomised a higher form of life and the realisation of Germany's destiny. In a strange distortion of Nietzsche, Junger recognised such conditions...
    • "Heidegger and the technology of further education" (1997)
      (p.444) Heidegger at times - in the notorious Rectoral Address of 1933, for example (Heidegger, 1985) - appears to share something of Junger's sense of the beauty of labour and service. Whatever the importance of these eulogies to the worker/soldier, however, it is clear that the part played by work and technology in his thought is more subtle and more complex. A starting point for the discussion of this is the question of techne, a concept that will lead us into aspects of the phenomenology of Being and Time.Superficially the account of techne in Aristotle seems appropriate to the nature of...
    • "Heidegger and the technology of further education" (1997)
      (p.445) Certainly the workshop world seems to be in many respects a world apart from industrialised technology and it may be significant that Heidegger's examples tend to be taken from craft activities that are (and were for Heidegger in the 1920s) tinged with anachronism.
    • "Heidegger and the technology of further education" (1997)
      (p.449) [...] let us consider the kind of response to technology that is offered especially by Heidegger's later work. One response involves a turning away from the vision that Heidegger derives from Nietzsche and Junger, with its nadir of faith in a political leader, and towards the shamanic figures of the poet and the thinker: Holderlin is now the supreme inspiration. Reverence for the word displaces the earlier emphasis on the workshop world. The German language assumes a unique historical importance, the rightful heir to the language of the Greeks and the rich origin of an alternative understanding of being. Heidegger...
    • "Heidegger and the technology of further education" (1997)
      (p.453) Rational accounting and evaluation [within educational institutions], it is claimed, demonstrate value for money and the quality of the service. But these factors bring with them the impoverishments of distantiality, averageness and levelling down (which Heidegger subsumes under the category of publicness - Die Offentlichkeit). Accessibility and efficiency seem to serve the customer yet staff and students become subservient to the system. Within this regime of efficiency, the idealisation of work and the worker takes on a new style. As obsolete workshops are refurnished and carpeted, the noise of heavy machinery is replaced by the soft clatter of keyboards. A...
    • "Heidegger and the technology of further education" (1997)
  • Strunz, Sebastian; Bartkowski, Bartosz
    • "Degrowth, the project of modernity, and liberal democracy" (2018)
      (p.1160) Following Heidegger, there are two basic ways of approaching nature, Hervorkommenlassen and Herausfordern. The first implies that man lets nature reveal itself. Literally, the German word means that humanity does not actively approach nature; rather, she lets nature come out of hiding by itself. Thus, it is a contemplative stance that waits for nature to show what it truly is. By implication, man cannot produce this kind of truth or control the process towards it; it is about meditative thinking and preserving an open attitude. Unfortunately (according to Heidegger), mankind has for a long time embarked on the second way, which refers to humanity's “challenging” of nature....
    • "Degrowth, the project of modernity, and liberal democracy" (2018)
      (p.1164) Indeed, Heideggerian-infused notions such as mindfulness and sufficiency could be key concepts for a liberal degrowth vocabulary. They represent a relaxed and, in effect, liberal stance towards life that may yield radical consequences nonetheless e if large numbers of people choose to live and vote by it. Also, note how therecent modernity critique by Rosa (2016) focuses on the impoverished relations of man towards oneself, towards others and towards nature e and thus exhibits similarities to Heidegger. In Rosa's terminology, processes of social acceleration lead to alienation (selfalienation and social alienation, both in spatial and temporal respects). This alienation does not imply an essentialist notion...
    • "Degrowth, the project of modernity, and liberal democracy" (2018)
  • Taylor, James Michael
  • W. P. S. Dias
  • Waddington, David I
  • Wolff, Ernst
  • Wolin, Richard
  • Woodley, Daniel
    • Fascism and Political Theory: Critical Perspectives on Fascist Ideology (2009)
      (p.43) Although Sartre warned that Comte’s ‘cult of humanity’ could itself evolve into a type of fascism (a ‘facile humanism’ turned in on itself), the implication of Comtean positivism is that human futurity is contingent on technological progress. For Comte there is no reason to think beyond this: technology is conceived as a means for the fulfilment of new human needs – for overcoming metaphysics without relinquishing a humanist faith in progress. For Heidegger, on the other hand, there is a refusal to accept the facticity of humanism and the apparent irreversibility of the human condition. His concern lies with the ontological dimension of technology, that is, with...
    • Fascism and Political Theory: Critical Perspectives on Fascist Ideology (2009)
  • Zimmerman, Michael
    • "Marx and Heidegger on the Technological Domination of Nature" (1979)
      (p.107) at a certain level, Marx and Heidegger seem to say similar things about the proper functioning of the human being. For Marx, the individual fulfills himself in making, doing, and creating a world for himself. For Heidegger, the individual becomes authentic by letting things be what they can be. For Marx, creative activity is restricted primarily to commodity (alienated) production in the capitalist society, but in the communist world all production would eventually involve the self-fulfillment of the worker's human need to express himself. For Heidegger, "letting beings be" is no simple-minded staring, but could include the activity of the...
    • "Marx and Heidegger on the Technological Domination of Nature" (1979)
      (p.99) Both Heidegger and Marx claim that technology is not intrinsically destructive, but at present it is used in exploitative and harmful ways. By "technology,'' I mean all facets of the complex system of production and distribution which emerges with the practical application of calculating, objectifying rationality. 
    • "Marx and Heidegger on the Technological Domination of Nature" (1979)
  • Zimmerman, Michael E
    • Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (1990)
      (p.110) In 1936, Heidegger wondered whether Hegel was right in saying that art is something past, without power for the modern spirit: "is art still an essential and necessary way in which that truth happens which is so decisive for our historical existence, or is art no longer of this character?" [HW: 67/81] Heideggerbelieved that technology and art were related in that both were truth events:both were ways of letting entities be. Ordinarily, the Greek word techne is translated as a skilled making of the  sort which anticipated the amazing production process of industrial technology. Heidegger argued, however,that techne had a twofold meaning. On the one...
    • Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (1990)
      (p.151) Early Heidegger argued that uprooted modern humanity no longer "dwelt" authentically upon the earth. Later, in his lectures on Holderlin, he said that dwelling occurs only when entities are "gathered" (versammelt) intoa world in which the integrity of things is preserved. Such a world would be intrinsically "local," bound up with place in a way wholly foreign to the planetary reach of modern technology. According to Dreyfus, Being andTime—despite later Heidegger's dislike of planetary technology—anticipated "total mobilization" by conceiving of the local workshop-world as a region within the all-encompassing region: the referential totality.'
    • Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (1990)
      (p.241) The degradation of work in the twentieth century has reduced the time and skill needed for authenticcraftwork, except for those who "drop out" of the social mainstream in orderto pursue what they consider to be authentic producing. Nevertheless, greatcraftworkers remain. Perhaps the attraction such craftspeople have for us todaylies in our awareness that they are attuned to things in a way in whichmost of us are not. Consider, however, the admiration many people displayfor the intricate circuitry of a computer or the engine of a Mercedes-Benz. Weoften express amazement at the precision and beauty of such products. For themost part, they...
    • Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (1990)
      (p.40) Heidegger's affiliation with National( Socialism may be understood, in part, in terms of his belief that only a corporatist, fascist community could protect German working people from the evils of wage slavery andatomistic individualism in capitalism, on the one hand, and from the ills of materialism and massification in communism, on the other.
    • Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (1990)
      (p.77) As we have seen, in  the  first phase of hisconfrontationwithjunger,Heideggerappropriatedjunger'slanguage  in order to support a revolutionary movement which heralded an alternative to the technological future  forecast  by Junger. After the  Rohm  purge  onJune30,1934,Heideggerbeganthe  long process of distancing himself from  the"politicalreality"ofNationalSocialism,butcon-tinuedtomeditateon its"innertruthandgreatness."Thismeditation,whichinvolvedatumtowardart,  was carried out in his lectures on Nietzsche and on Holderlin. Nietzsche's views on  the world-shaping powers of art  offered a way of understanding the metaphysical basis  for junger's doctrine of the Gestalt of the worker, while Holderlin's poetry seemed to  offer  a  saving alternative to junger's technological future.  In  this chapter, we begin to study Heidegger's artistic "tum"...
    • Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (1990)
      (p.81) Trapped within Nietzsche's metaphysics, Junger conceived of the Gestalt of the worker in terms  of a certain kind of humanity. He spoke  as if the Gestalt of the worker forged together in humanity the calculating,  steely powers of the machine and  the  atavistic, passionate energies  of the Will to Power at work in all  life. As we  have seen, however,  Heidegger believed that this  view  of  humanity  as half-animal, half-rational was  the  final stage  of the decline of Aristotle's doctrine of  the "rational animal" in Nietzsche's "blond beast" who would dominate the earth with modern technology.
    • Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (1990)
      (p.82) Heidegger maintained, by way of contrast, that humanity has been transformed into the worker because   today "to be" means "to be worked upon  and transformed in accordance with the imperative of production for its own sake."
    • Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (1990)
      (p.88) As elitists, Heidegger and junger believed that the technological era could  be carried to its completion only  by  an  elite corps of humanity who scorned the cheerful optimism of mass culture. junger's "worker" was by  no means equivalent to Marx's "proletariat"! Heidegger and junger looked to Nietzsche for insight into   the remarkable men, the "overmen," needed to complete the process of nihilism. junger had spoken of his interpretation of such men in his collection of essays The Adventurous Heart.[AH] These men were  willing  to  use violence in order to pursue the uncharted paths being opened up  by modern technology. Regarding ...
    • Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (1990)
      (p.90) For Heidegger, junger's technological man had not gone far enough.
    • Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (1990)
      (p.xvi) From the beginning of his career, Heidegger was centrally concerned with the nature of working and producing—and with its relation to the question of the being of entities. It was no accident that he began Being and Time with an account of the world of the workshop and equipment.
    • Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (1990)
  • de Sá, Alexandre Franco
    • "Politics and Ontological Difference in Heidegger" (2014)
      (p.57) During the 1930s, Jünger talked about a new relationship between humanbeings and the world, and, in this context, about a new meaning of work. ForJünger, the consequences of the First World War had shown that a new and posthumanistworld was emerging. Liberal and Marxist thought understoodhuman being as the fundamental value and the center of all human activities.According to them, work implies a transformation of the world in order to placeit at the behest of humans, rendering it more and more comfortable and livable.However, for Jünger, the tragedy of the World War had shown that the essence ofthe world’s transformation...
    • "Politics and Ontological Difference in Heidegger" (2014)
      (p.59) In Nietzsche’s concept of the “will to power” Jünger finds the key to thinkingabout the elemental force as the basis of the world increasingly mobilized by the“total character of the work.” For Jünger, the metaphysical place of absoluteBeing is occupied not by the human being, individually or collectively conceived,but by the elemental dynamic of the will to power. Th is is why, in line withNietzsche, Jünger represents for Heidegger the completeness and the inversionof Western metaphysics. “In the form of the worker,” Heidegger argues, “humansubjectivity completes itself as unconditional and reaches its planetaryexpansion.” 14The dialogue with Jünger’s metaphysics of the...
    • "Politics and Ontological Difference in Heidegger" (2014)
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