Myrmidons

 

Byung-Chul Han, "Heidegger's Hand"

Heidegger is strongly dedicated to work and to the hand, as if he sensed that the human being of the future would be handless and inclined to play rather than work. One of his lectures on Aristotle begins thus: 'Aristotle was born, worked, and died.'57 Thinking is work. Later, Heidegger called thinking handwork: 'Perhaps thinking, too, is just something like building a cabinet [Schrein]. At any rate, it is handwork.'58 The hand makes thinking a decidedly analogue process. Heidegger would say: artificial intelligence does not think because it does not have a hand.

Heidegger's hand is determined to defend the terrestrial order against the digital order. Digital is derived from digtus, meaning finger. With our fingers, we count and calculate. They are numerical, that is, digital. Heidegger explicitly distinguishes between the hand and the fingers. The typewriter, requiring only the use of the fingertips, C withdraws from man the essential rank of the hand'.59 The typewriter destroys the 'word' by degrading it; the word becomes 'a means of communication', that is, information.60 The typewritten word 'no longer comes and goes by means of the writing hand, the prop- erly acting hand'.61 Only 'handwriting' approaches the essential realm of the word.62 The typewriter, Heidegger says, is a 'signless cloud [Wolke]',63 that is, a numerical cloud [Wolke], a Cloud that conceals the essence of the word. The hand is a 'sign' because it points towards what 'awards [zusprechen] itself to language'. Only the hand receives the gift of thinking. For Heidegger, the typewriter is the precursor of the computer. It turns the 'word' into 'information'. The typewriter foreshadows the digital. The construction of the computer is made possible by the 'process in which language increasingly becomes merely an instrument of information'.64 The hand does not count or compute. It represents the non-countable, the non-calculable, the 'singular as such, which, as one in its singleness, is uniquely the uniquely unifying One that precedes all number'.65

Heidegger's analysis of equipment in Being and Time shows that the hand is what discloses to us the environment in its original form. A thing appears initially as something available to our hands, as 'ready-to-hand'. When I reach for a pen, it does not appear to me as an object with certain qualities. If I want to imagine the pen as an object, I have to draw my hand back and purposefully stare at the pen. The grasping hand experiences the thing at a more primordial level than the representing intuition:

the less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is — as equipment. The hammering itself uncovers the specific 'manipulability' [Handlichkeit] of the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment possesses — in which it manifests itself in its own right — we call 'readiness-to-hand' [Zuhandenheit].66

The hand anticipates [greift vor] every representation. Heidegger's thinking always attempts to advance to a sphere of experience that precedes but is blocked by representational and objectifying thinking. The hand has special access to the primordial sphere of being that precedes all forms of objectification.

In Being and Time, the thing, as equipment, is experienced as useful. In his second analysis of equipment in The Origin Of the Work of Art', Heidegger tries to advance to an even deeper sphere of the thing's being, one that precedes even usefulness: 'The equipmentality of equipment consists indeed in its usefulness. But this itself rests in the fullness of an essential being of the equipment. We call this reliability.'67 'Reliability' is a primary experience of the thing that precedes its usefulness. Heidegger illustrates 'reliability' through the example of a painting by Vincent Van Gogh of a pair of leather shoes. Why does Heidegger choose these shoes as an example? Shoes protect the foot, which is in many respects akin to the hand. Interestingly, Heidegger explicitly draws attention to the foot, which, given that everyone knows what shoes are for, is not necessary: 'We will take as an example an everyday piece of equipment, a pair of peasant shoes.... Equipment of this kind serves as footwear.'68

The Van Gogh painting actually seems to show the artist's own shoes. They are apparently men's shoes. But Heidegger makes idiosyncratic decisions in his reading:

The peasant woman wears her shoes in the field. Only then do they become what they are. They are all the more genuinely so the less the peasant woman thinks of her shoes while she is working, or even looks at them, or is aware of diem in anyway at all. This is how the shoes actually serve.69

This passage is reminiscent of the analysis of equipment in Being and Time. As soon as I take the hammer-Thing into my hand and hammer, instead of just staring at it, it appears to me for what it is, that is, as equipment. Similarly, the shoes actually serve as shoes when the peas- ant woman walks and stands in them. But the essence of the shoe-Thing is not usefulness. In a pictorial language, Heidegger points to a level of experience that precedes usefulness :

From out of the dark opening of the well-worn insides of the shoes the toil of the worker's tread stares forth. In the crudely solid heaviness of the shoes accumulates the tenacity of the slow trudge through the far-stretching and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lies the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. The shoes vibrate with the silent call of the earth, its silent gift of the ripening grain, its unexplained self-refusal in the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining worry as to the certainty of bread, wordless joy at having once more withstood want, trembling before the impending birth, and shivering at the surrounding menace Of death. This equipment belongs to the earth and finds protection in the world Of the peasant woman.70

The 'reliability' of things consists in the fact that they embed human beings in those relations to the world that make life stable. With its 'reliability', the thing is a world-thing. Its reliability is part Of the terrestrial order. Today, the thing is decoupled from this world-founding wealth of relations and exhausts itself in pure functionality. Thus, it is no longer reliable:

The individual piece of equipment becomes worn out and used up. ... In this way equipmental being withers away, sinks to the level of mere equipment. Such dwindling of equipmental being is the disappearance of its reliability. ... Now nothing but sheer utility remains visible.71

Human Dasein has its footings on the earth. Heidegger's foot stands for being grounded on the soil. It connects human beings with the earth, which gives them stability and abode. Heidegger's country' path 'quietly escorts one's Steps along the winding trail through the expanse of the sparse landscape'.72 The thing and its reliability take care that human beings establish a firm footing on the earth. The foot provides another clue as to why Heidegger holds on to the hand with such determination. Hand and foot point to the site of Heidegger's thinking. They embody the terrestrial order. The handless humans of the future are also footless. They hover above the earth in the digital Cloud.

Heidegger's thing is a world-thing: 'The thing things world.'73 The verb 'thinging', belonging to the thing, means 'gathering'. The thing 'gathers' the meaningful relations in which human Dasein is embedded. The world structure that founds meaning Heidegger calls the 'four- fold'. The world consists of four elements that provide meaning and stability: 'earth' and 'sky', the 'divinities' and the 'mortals'.74 For Heidegger, things include 'brook and hill' [Bach und Berg], 'heron and roe' [Reiher und Reh], 'mirror and clasp' [Spiegel und Spange], 'book and picture' [Buch und Bild] and 'crown and cross' [Krone und Kreuz].75 The consistent alliteration suggests a simple world order that has to be reflected in the things. Heidegger asks us to rely on the metre, on the rhythm, of the terrestrial order to place ourselves in the hands of the weight of the world.

Heidegger insists on the intrinsic measure of the earth. His belief is that there is an 'approval or ordering' beyond the human will, and that humans need to obey this ordering.76 An abode is not produced but approved. The later Heidegger had in mind a care-free Dasein, a 'safebeing' that is, however, beyond human influence:

Safe, securus, sine cura means: without care. Care has here the nature Of deliberate self-assertion along the ways and by the means Of absolute production.... The safebeing is the sheltered repose in the attraction-nexus of the whole attraction.77

Humans, Heidegger says, are the 'be-thinged'.78 The 'thing' shelters the 'attraction-nexus of the whole attraction' that takes care of the stabiliw, the 'safebeing'. Heidegger sets himself against the beginnings of the dig- ital order, in which the world 'remains orderable as a system of information'.79 The digital order strives for the un-thinged [das Un-Bedingte], whereas in the terrestrial order humans are the be-thinged:

Man is about to hurl himself upon the entire earth and its atmosphere, to arrogate to himself the hidden work- ing of nature in the form of energy... This same defiant man is incapable of saying simply what is; of saying what this is, that a thing is.80

Heidegger's hand is tied to the terrestrial order. Thus, it does not grasp the human future. Human beings have long since stopped dwelling between 'earth' and 'sky'. On the way towards the un-thinged [Unbedingtheit], they will also leave the 'mortals' and the 'divinities' behind. The last things (τὰ ἔσχατα) will also have to be elimi- nated. Human beings soar up towards the un-thinged, the unconditioned. We are headed towards a trans- human and post-human age in which human life will be a pure exchange of information. Human beings shed their being be-thinged, their facticity, even though this is precisely what makes them what they are. 'Human' is derived from humus, that is, soil. Digitalization is a resolute step along the way towards the abolition Of the humanum. The future Of humans seems mapped out: humans will abolish themselves in order to posit themselves as the absolute .

Notes

57. According to Hannah Arendt: Hannah Arendt — Martin Heidegger: Letters 1925-1975, Orlando: Harcourt, 2004, p. 154.
58. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 16 (transl. amended).
59. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, p. 85.
60. Ibid., p. 81.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., p. 85.
64. Martin Heidegger, 'Johann Peter Hebel', in Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, 1910—1976, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 16, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000, pp. 530-3; here: p. 532.
65. Martin Heidegger, 'Anaximander's Saying (1946)', in Off the Beaten Track, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 242-81; here: p. 260.
66. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 98.
67. Martin Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', in Off the Beaten Track, pp. 1—56; here: p. 14.
68. Ibid., p. 13.
69. Ibid., p. 13f.
70. Ibid., p. 14.
71. Ibid., p. 15.
72. Martin Heidegger, 'The Pathway', in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan, Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1981, pp. 69—71; here: p. 71 (transl. amended). Note that the text is not included in the book's table of contents.
73. Martin Heidegger, 'The Thing', in Poetry, Language, Thought, New York: Harper & Row, 1971, pp. 164—84; here: p. 178.
74. Ibid, p. 177.
75. Ibid, p. 180.
76. Martin Heidegger, 'Anaximander's Saying (1946)', p. 276 (transl. amended).
77. Martin Heidegger, Why Poets?' , in Off the Beaten Track, pp. 200—41; here: pp. 223f.
78. Martin Heidegger, 'The Thing', p. 179
79. Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York: Garland Publishing, 1977, pp. 3—35; here: p. 23.
80. Martin Heidegger, 'Anaximander's Saying (1946)', pp. 280f.

 Salvador Dali, "Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus" (1935)