6672965 nihilism and technology by nolen gertz z lib.org

Nolen jpeg). # NIHILISM AND TECHNOLOGY. NIHILISM AND TECHNOLOGY Nolen Gertz ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD INTERNATIONAL London • New York Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB com Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and London (UK) com Copyright © 2018 by Nolen Gertz All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-702-7 ISBN: PB 978-1-78660-703-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gertz, Nolen, author. Title: Nihilism and technology / Nolen Gertz. Description: Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018022468 (print) | LCCN 2018024763 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786607041 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781786607027 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781786607034: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Technology--Philosophy. | Technology--Social aspects. | Nihilism. Classification: LCC T14 (ebook) | LCC G38 2018 (print) | DDC 601--dc23 LC record available at

gov/2018022468 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America v TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface vii Acknowledgments xi 1 Nietzsche and Chill 1 2 The Will to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 13 3 The Hammer of the Gods 35 4 Ecce Hulu 59 5 Amor Fitbit 89 6 The Uber Mensch 111 7 Thus Spake Zuckerberg 137 8 The Trolling of the Idols 161 9 Google is Dead 195 Bibliography 215 Index 223 About the Author 227.

vii PREFACE This book is the result of my work at the University of Twente, and the result of my nihilism. With regard to the former, this book grew out of the vast variety of perspectives on technology that I have been able to engage with at UT. Teaching in modules in departments as varied as Industrial Design, European Public Administration, Communication Science, and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Society has al- lowed me to discuss and develop my ideas with students and faculty who have a wide range of backgrounds and expertise. It was particularly illuminating to see firsthand how UT students and faculty were able to so thoroughly diagnose the dangers created by technologies in the past and in the present, and yet so optimistically, and so consistently, pre- scribe the development of new technologies and of new technology policies to avoid such dangerous situations in the future.

That we are technological beings living in a technological world was rarely if ever questioned, as instead the primary question students and faculty both sought to answer was how to make our technological world better. It was in response to the optimism required to have such a single-minded focus on technological solutions—a focus that, again, I found to be consistent even though the people holding this view came from such different backgrounds and areas of expertise—that I began questioning my own relationship to technology. For while I taught the techno-pessimism of thinkers like Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, and Lewis Mumford, I nevertheless chose to teach these thinkers by using PowerPoint, using Word, using Google, using Blackboard—by using

PREFACE viii technology. Consequently I was made more and more sympathetic to the view that technologies are fundamental to what it means to be human, that technologies mediate our relationships to ourselves and to the world, and that we should investigate technological mediations in order to shape them rather than merely be shaped by them. However, thanks perhaps to my training at the New School for So- cial Research, I could not avoid my nagging suspicion that there was something wrong with this techno-optimism. While I came increasingly to rely on technologies in my personal and professional life, I yet did not feel optimistic about my relationship to technologies.

I did not enjoy relying on FaceTime to connect with my brother and sister. It is often like a chore to use Twitter to try to keep up with current events. I was never confident in my decision to use PowerPoint slides, slides filled with pop culture references found on Google Images, as a way to en- gage with students. Such technologies were a ubiquitous part of my daily life, but that felt less like a welcome development than simply a fact of life that could not be avoided. I did not love technologies. I did not hate technologies.

I merely acquiesced to a life lived with technolo- gies and through technologies. At the same time I found myself more and more invested in trying to keep my son away from technologies, in trying to get my son outside as much as possible, in trying to get my son to prefer forests over Frozen and playgrounds over PAW Patrol. I knew my son liked technologies and that I could not prevent him from using technologies. I also knew that familiarity with technologies could only help him to advance in our technological world. But he wanted to use technologies a little too much.

He got a little too upset when I took them away. He could be a little too absorbed in the technologies he was using. And it often felt a little too easy for me to turn to technologies as a way to solve parenting problems. In other words, I did not want my son to become as depen- dent on technologies as I had. Thanks to these conflicting experiences I came to realize that my concern over techno-optimism was less about whether we are wrong to seek technological solutions to our problems and more about whether we are wrong to see so much of life as problems.

For to view an experi- ence as a problem is to be led to seek a solution, a solution to that experience, a solution that would help us to avoid again having such an experience. Further, to view a technology as such a solution is to view a PREFACE ix technology as a way to avoid certain experiences, to avoid experiences viewed as problematic. But once we discover that technologies can help us to avoid problematic experiences, it is hard not to make the further discovery that technologies can also help us to avoid undesirable experi- ences.

Consequently, we are led to the final discovery, that technologies can even help us to tailor experiences to our desires. In this way trying to solve a problem, a problem like not wanting to take the bus to get to work, becomes trying to raise money for a start-up devoted to disrupt- ing commuting, devoted to the vision of a world where no one ever has to take a bus again. It may seem at first like there is nothing wrong with such a vision, with such disruption, with such a problem-solving mindset. But the issue is how this mindset can lead us toward techno-utopianism rather than toward self-discovery, rather than toward asking ourselves why we would find an experience like riding a bus to be a problem in the first place.

To seek solutions to problems is to be able to avoid not only the recurrence of the problem but to be able to avoid reflection, as we are not led to ask questions about experiences if we are no longer having the experiences. Using technologies to try to create a problem-free world, a world where we can avoid problematic and undesirable experi- ences, can also be seen therefore as using technologies to try to create a reflection-free world, a world where we can avoid problematic and undesirable questions. In other words, my concerns were not focused on technology but on humanity, on investigating why we are so drawn to the problem-solving mindset, and why the problem-solving mindset is so drawn to technolo- gy.

These concerns were motivated by the realization that the problem- solving mindset can lead us not only toward techno-utopianism but also toward techno-nihilism. Philosophically, as well as etymologically, this should come as no surprise, as utopianism and nihilism—or no-where- ness and no-thing-ness—are two sides of the same coin. To want a perfect world is to both want a world different from the world in which we live, and to see the world in which we live as so imperfect as to need to be replaced. It is for this reason that I wrote this book, this book which is a turn to Nietzsche in order to analyze human-technology relations, as Nietzs- che’s analyses revealed that nihilism could result in either pessimism and dystopianism or in optimism and utopianism.

Thanks to Nietzsche PREFACE x we can see that someone who is morbid and someone who is cheerful could have the same reality-denying attitude but merely express that attitude in opposing ways. Though Nietzsche analyzed the relationship of such nihilistic attitudes to morality and to religion rather than to technology, I believed that Nietzsche’s analyses could nevertheless be applied to technology. A Nietzschean philosophy of technology is pos- sible not only because we pursue moral goals through technologies and because technologies cultivate a religious faith and devotion from users but more generally because Nietzsche diagnosed the life-denying nihi- lism at the heart of the problem-solving mindset, a mindset that existed in the Christian moral world as much as it exists in our technomoral world.

This book is not meant to be a work of Nietzsche exegesis but rather is a work inspired by Nietzsche, a work intended to develop a critical, Nietzschean perspective on our relationships with technologies. I pro- vide an interpretation of Nietzsche’s views on nihilism in order to devel- op my own views on nihilism, not in order to provide a definitive “expla- nation” of Nietzsche. Similarly, it should be noted that I use the word “we” throughout this book, not in order to suggest that I am describing tendencies and experiences universal to we humans, or universal to we Westerners, or we English-speakers, but in order to avoid the confusion that the use of “I” and the use of “they” can create.

I would prefer readers think I am describing tendencies and experiences that I believe they share with me and share with countless others (“we”), rather than think I am describing tendencies and experiences that I believe only apply to me (“I”), or that I believe apply to everyone but me (“they”). There is of course still a danger of confusion with the use of “we,” but I believe that the benefits outweigh the costs (and of course you are welcome to exclude yourself from the “we” should you be so lucky to have lived a nihilism-free life).

To paraphrase Nietzsche, this book was written for everyone and for no one (that is, for no specific academic or cultural group in particular). xi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book would not have been possible without the generous support of my colleagues and students in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Twente. In particular I have greatly benefited from being a member of Peter-Paul Verbeek’s research group, a group that has kindly invited me to present chapters from this book during various colloquia held over the past two years. The critical feedback I have received from Peter-Paul Verbeek, Ciano Aydin, Michael Nagenborg, Melis Bas, Jonne Hoek, Olya Kudina, Bas de Boer, Philip Brey, Mari- anne Boenink, Michael Kühler, Steven Dorrestijn, and many others has been immensely helpful throughout.

My research assistants Ana Fer- nandez Inguanzo and Anna-Carolina Zuiderduin worked with me early in the writing process, identifying possible technologies for me to ana- lyze, and my research assistant Emīls Birkavs aided me with the com- pletion of this project. I must give special thanks to David Douglas, Melis Bas, Babette Babich, Jon Greenaway, and Miranda Nell for hav- ing been so generous as to read each chapter and provide me with such valuable feedback. Portions of this book have been presented at various conferences and colloquia, not only at the University of Twente but also at TEDx- Frankfurt; the Philiminality Society at Cambridge University; the ADAPT Centre at Trinity College Dublin; the Machine Learning Sym- posium at the University of Liverpool; the Forum on Philosophy, Engi- neering, and Technology (fPET); the joint conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) and the European Association for the

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xii Study of Science and Technology (EASST); the Culture, Technology, Communication (CaTaC) conference; and the Thomas More Summer School at Utrecht University. I thank Mark Coeckelbergh, Joseph Savir- imuthu, Wessel Reijers, James Dickinson, Kevin McMillan, Srdjan Vu- cetic, and Stephanie Igunbor for their invitations to present my work at their institutions. I also benefited from presenting my work to two companies (which asked me to sign nondisclosure agreements). Serving as the Coordinator of the Centre for Ethics and Technology’s Task Force on Risk, Safety, and Security further enabled me to present work relevant to this book in various workshops and panel discussions.

It is often thought that teaching and research are two distinct and perhaps even opposed aspects of academia, but for me teaching and research feed off of each other and thus my teaching was vital to my research for this book. Many arguments from this work made their way into my lectures over the past two years, for which reason I am grateful to the many students at UT who engaged in debates with me about these arguments both in class and in their assignments. I am especially grateful to the students who asked me to work with them on their Master’s theses as either their supervisor or as a member of their exam- ination committee.

Working so closely with Ana Fernandez Inguanzo, Christian Pauli, Peter Segers, Gerald Munters, Gijs de Boer, Duuk Baten, Anna Melnyk, Selen Eren, Samantha Hernandez, and Denise op den Kamp has not only been delightful but has been very helpful in developing my own philosophical arguments about technologies while working with them on developing theirs. I also benefited from having three groups of students (Simone Casiraghi and Roos de Jong; Anna Melnyk and Chris Fries; Selen Eren, Alan Houot, and Joonas Linde- man) in the PSTS course PhiloLab write papers based on chapters of this book.

Many people have provided me invaluable guidance and inspiration over the years, such as my former professors Jay Bernstein, James Dodd, Simon Critchley, Nicolas de Warren, Agnes Heller, Yirmiyahu Yovel, James Miller, and James Willson-Quayle. I am also grateful (in no particular order) to Miles MacLeod, Dominique Behnke, Mayli Mertens, Johnny Søraker, Aimee van Wynsberghe, Saskia Nagel, Lantz Fleming Miller, Brandt van der Gaast, Margoth Gonzalez Woge, Stéph- anie Gauttier, Luisa Marin, Stefan Koller, Robert-Jan Geerts, Per-Erik Milam, Petra Bruulsema, Ada Krooshoop, Jan Nelissen, Sabine Roeser, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii Sven Nyholm, Gemma Calderon, Iris Huis in ‘t Veld, Noel Sharkey, Robin James, Patrick Lin, Chelsea Harry, Michael Neu, Bob Brecher, Irna van der Molen, Christina Kousiounelou, Marlene Nowotny, Mat- thew Beard, Jan Mieszkowski, Nastaran Tavakoli-Far, Ephraim Rosen- baum, Sara Murphy, Britta Schnoor Loftus, Christina Nabholz McLe- od, Scott Stephens, Robert Rosenberger, Krista Thomason, Philip Laughlin, Albrecht Fritzsche, Charles Ess, Thom Brooks, Shannon French, Stephanie Carvin, John Adams, and Marina Adams.

I also wish to thank Isobel Cowper-Coles, Natalie Linh Bolderston, Sven Ove Hansson, and everyone else who provided me support and assistance from Rowman & Littlefield. I am grateful to my family, especially to my grandmother Sylvia, who was perhaps the first to motivate me to turn off the TV and go outside. I am thankful that my brother Bennett (and Katie, Dylan, and Ethan) and my sister Lynne (and Mike and Tyler) have always been there for me. My partner Miranda has provided not only invaluable feedback throughout the writing of this book but has been a great motivator, interlocutor, and, well, partner.

My son Zachary has been a constant source of inspiration for me, both because of his terrifying ability to quickly master any technology put in front of him and because of his awe-inspiring ability to make even the darkest moments seem comical. If this book was written for anyone, it was written for him.. 1 1 NIETZSCHE AND CHILL 1.1 LEISURE-AS-LIBERATION A family is playing together in their living room. Mom and daughter are inside a couch cushion fort, a fort that dad is moments away from invading. The daughter is happily watching the family dog, who is too busy with a chew toy to guard the perimeter.

Alongside this happy family in their happy home happily playing on their happy carpet is a large hockey-puck-like machine sitting on the floor. The black machine appears in stark contrast to the bright sunny situation surrounding it. The machine’s function is not made obvious, but its purpose is clear as we can see that this machine is what enables this family to be so happy, and thus we can further conclude that without this machine, the happi- ness would be gone. What I am describing is not only an ad for a Roomba1 but an ad for a trend in the design of technologies, a trend that has become so perva- sive, so dominant, so ubiquitous, that advertisers need only hint at it for us to immediately understand that what is being sold to us is not the technology but a way of life, a way of life that only the advertised technology can make possible.

The Roomba ad needs no text as the image tells us everything we need to know. The large black hockey puck in the corner works so we do not have to, so we can instead play, so we can instead be happy, so we can instead be human. I call this the leisure-as-liberation trend in technological design. The idea behind this trend is very simple: the role of technologies is to CHAPTER 1 2 liberate us from the chores that prevent us from having the leisure time we need to be human. This is the idea we see at work not only in the Roomba but also in online shopping, in voice-activated assistants, in predictive algorithms, and in the development of autonomous cars, autonomous robots, and autonomous drones.

Technologies can clean for us, they can buy and sell for us, they can check the weather for us, they can write texts for us, they can drive for us, they can do manual labor for us, and they can even kill for us. Technologies can do so much for us that we are beginning to wonder which of life’s tasks, if any, will be left for us to do. In other words, while it is clear that technologies are advancing at an incredible rate, that technologies are becoming more and more capable of performing tasks previously assigned to humans, it is not as clear that humans are neces- sarily advancing, that humans are becoming more capable rather than merely more dependent on the capabilities of technologies.

Yet as tech- nologies become more capable, they also become more entrenched in our everyday lives, for which reason it is increasingly difficult to even determine where technologies end and we begin. Hence it is perhaps a mistake to think that technologies could advance independently of hu- mans, or that humans could become dependent on technologies, as it could instead be argued that the human/technology distinction is mere- ly a leftover from our more traditional dualistic ways of thinking. Contemporary thinking about technology—both in design and in philosophy—suggests that rather than distinguish humans and technol- ogies we should instead recognize that technologies have always played a formative role in human life.

Rather than worry that technologies are turning us into the helpless blobs depicted in Wall-E, we should realize that we would not be who we are without technologies, that, as was shown in 2001: A Space Odyssey, we can draw a straight line from our prehuman ancestors’ discovery of tools to our present-day exploration of outer space. As technologies have always been part of human devel- opment, we should not fear what they are doing to us but strive to learn more about them and to take a more active role in their design, as technologies have been and will continue to be part of human develop- ment whether we like it or not.

Such contemporary thinking about technology is not meant to cham- pion technophilia but instead to move us away from what is seen as the counterproductive concerns of technophobia. These contemporary NIETZSCHE AND CHILL 3 thinkers—thinkers such as Peter-Paul Verbeek, Shannon Vallor, Lucia- no Floridi, and Bruno Latour—would likely argue that they are simply technorealists, that either loving or hating technologies is less useful than studying technologies, than engaging with developers and actively participating in the design process. Yet such study, engagement, and participation would necessarily require that we invest a lot of time and energy into thinking about technology.

In other words, it appears that we must develop technologies that can liberate us, in order to have leisure, in order to think about technologies, in order to develop tech- nologies that can liberate us, in order to have leisure,,, etc. However, for the technophobic thinkers of the past—thinkers such as Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, and Lewis Mumford—what was at issue was not the question of whether technolo- gies had a role in human development but rather the question of wheth- er the in-order-to mindset of modern technological thinking was per- verting human development.

Modern technologies appear to function not by helping us achieve our ends but instead by determining ends for us, by providing us with ends that we must help technologies achieve. Thus the Roomba owner must organize their home in accordance with the maneuvering needs of the Roomba, just as the smartphone owner must organize their activities in accordance with the power and data consumption needs of the smartphone. Surely we buy such devices to serve our needs but, once bought, we become so fascinated with the devices that we develop new needs, such as the need to keep the device working so that the device can keep us fascinated.

Technologies go beyond providing us with goals and shaping our activities, they can also influence our values and shape our judgments. The values of efficiency and of objectivity lead us to necessarily judge technologies to be superior to humans, for which reason we not only prefer technological solutions to our problems but we increasingly see humans as inefficient, as biased, as problems—problems to be replaced by more trustworthy and dependable technologies. Likewise our use of social media leads us to constantly redefine the values of privacy and of friendship so that we see Facebook as just another form of communica- tion, with pluses and minuses like any other, rather than seeing it as intrusive and alienating in ways that were unimaginable before its pres- ence.

CHAPTER 1 4 Just as contemporary thinkers would not see themselves as techno- philiacs but as technorealists, so too these thinkers of the past would not have seen themselves as technophobes but as technorealists. Indeed these earlier thinkers would have probably suggested that the label of technophobia is itself symptomatic of the effect modern technologies have on us, as to challenge the perceived positive benefits of technolo- gies is to be seen as either a Luddite, an ingrate, or a paranoid conspira- cy theorist. In other words, contemporary thinkers accuse thinkers of the past of not understanding what it means to be technological where- as thinkers of the past would accuse contemporary thinkers of not understanding what it means to be human.

It is important to realize that the opposition between these two perspectives is not merely an esoteric theoretical argument. If we can indeed take an active role in determining how technologies influence us, then to treat tech companies as our enemy is to risk letting tech companies determine these influences for us rather than with us. Alter- natively, if technologies are warping our goals, our values, and our judg- ments in ways that we do not realize, then the more we try to work with tech companies, the more we will be at risk of becoming entrenched in a technological mindset, consequently making us less and less able to take a critical stance toward technologies.

Working out which of these perspectives is correct is thus vital for ensuring that technologies are providing us leisure as a form of liberation rather than providing us leisure as a form of dehumanization. 1.2 FROM TECHNOLOGY TO GENEALOGY The question of whether our practices are leading us to become liberat- ed or dehumanized, to become freer or more deluded, is a question that has arisen not only due to practices concerning technology. In the nine- teenth century, Karl Marx attempted to answer this question with re- gard to Capitalism, and Friedrich Nietzsche attempted to answer this question with regard to Christianity.

For Marx, Capitalist ideology con- vinces workers that anyone could become wealthy if they only work hard enough when, in reality, workers are exploited by the wealthy and alienated from themselves, from other workers, and from their human- 2 Yet because the wealthy not only seek to keep profits from their NIETZSCHE AND CHILL 5 workers but also from each other, Marx argued that the wealthy would inevitably fight each other, train the workers to fight their battles against their rivals, and consequently destroy themselves by having in- advertently revolutionized the working 3 In other words, the more that brands advertise that their competitors are lying to us, the more we should learn to distrust advertising, to distrust brands, and to distrust Capitalist ideology.

For Nietzsche, it would come as no surprise that Marx’s predicted revolution has not taken place, that we have not become distrusting of Capitalism, nor even of brands, but have instead developed brand loyal- ty, identifying with brands, taking sides in brand wars, choosing to de- stroy ourselves rather than Capitalism. Whereas Marx thought that we are distracted and deluded by ideology, by external influences prevent- ing us from learning the truth of our situation, a truth that, once learned, would immediately lead us to unite and revolt, Nietzsche thought that we are distracted and deluded because we want to be.

According to Nietzsche, we should be concerned less with dangerous external influences than with dangerous internal influences, internal influences such as our tendency to view life as a source of suffering rather than as a source of challenges that force us to adapt and grow. This tendency leads us to turn against life, to embrace both opportu- nities to be distracted from life and ideologies—no matter how delu- sional—that promise us a way to a better life, even if such a life is to be found only through death. From a Nietzschean perspective, what we need to learn to recognize and fight against is not exploitation but nihilism.

For we will never revolt against our exploitation so long as our nihilism—our tendency to turn against life—leads us to prefer being exploited to being free, to being responsible, to being human. In other words, Marx took for granted that we want to be our own boss instead of being bossed around, and he did not appreciate the degree to which we might like having a boss, having a boss whom we could blame for our suffering, a boss who could tell us what to do, a boss who could prevent us from having to face the burden of making decisions for ourselves.

In his philosophical writings, Nietzsche diagnoses various ways that we turn against life, various ways that we distract and delude ourselves, various ways that we seek leisure, not as a way to become more human but as a way to avoid being human. What is important for Nietzsche is CHAPTER 1 6 that we live a life of contradictions since we do not recognize our every- day practices as being contrary to life but have instead developed a moral framework that valorizes our anti-life practices, defining such practices as means to the sole end that life should have: being good.

It is for this reason that Nietzsche focuses on Christianity as he traces the genealogy of our paradoxical value system—a value system that defines someone who is bad at being human as good at being moral—back to the victory of Christianity over paganism. Using his philological exper- tise, Nietzsche reveals that our moral values are not based on universal human experience or on pure concepts discovered by reason but are the product of a struggle between competing value systems, a struggle that took place so long ago, and that ended so decisively, that we no longer realize that alternative value systems are even possible.

If “good” could have multiple competing meanings, then so too could “progress,” for which reason Nietzsche does not ask whether humans have achieved progress since the dawn of Christianity; he asks how we define “progress” and whether this definition accords with what it means to be human. It is for this reason that I believe Nietzsche— though he did not write much specifically about technology—can still help us to address the question of whether technological progress ac- cords with human progress. Nietzsche in particular can help us to avoid the simple reduction of this inquiry to a question of whether technolo- gies are making us more moral as we can see, thanks to Nietzsche, that the relationship between moral progress and human progress must be interrogated rather than taken for granted.

By turning to Nietzsche, we can, for example, investigate not just whether technologies that monitor and report shifts in moods might help save lives4 but also what sort of “life” is being saved by using such surveillance technologies, technolo- gies which could motivate the very mood shifts that they are designed to monitor and report. 1.3 OUTLINE OF THE BOOK The aim of this book is to investigate how our nihilism became techno- logical and how technologies become nihilistic. The goal of this investi- gation is to move us away from the endless debates between techno- optimists and techno-pessimists about whether technological progress

NIETZSCHE AND CHILL 7 is making us better or making us worse, to move us instead toward interrogating how we define concepts like “progress,” “better,” and “worse,” toward interrogating how technologies both shape and are the result of such ideological definitions. In chapter 2 I begin this project by clarifying what nihilism is, what nihilism means, and why we should not underestimate nihilism by thinking of it as merely an affliction of overprivileged teenagers. For existential philosophers like Sartre, nihilism has become so normalized in everyday life that we take for granted that nihilism is only experi- enced by those who claim not to care about life, and thus we do not recognize how even what we think of as “caring about life” can be nihilistic.

By recognizing the pervasiveness of nihilism in everyday life, we can better understand Nietzsche’s arguments about the role of nihi- lism in the history of Europe, and in particular in the history of Chris- tian morality. For Nietzsche, nihilism and morality are intertwined his- torically, for which reason Nietzsche challenges us to question the value of our values so that we can see that our values of self-sacrifice and self- denial are nihilistic and self-destructive. Though we might think that Nietzsche’s arguments no longer apply to the technological world we live in today, by investigating transhumanism we can see how vital an understanding of nihilism is for appreciating the nihilistic underpin- nings of the “posthuman” that this movement is championing.

In chapter 3 I turn from developing a philosophy of nihilism to developing a philosophy of technology. As Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” has become a rite of passage for contempo- rary philosophers of technology—a text that one must criticize in order to establish trust that one is not a technophobic determinist—I begin with this text as well. My aim is not to attack Heidegger in order to assuage fears about my own views but instead to show how Heidegger’s philosophy of technology both points toward and breaks from Nietzs- che’s philosophy of nihilism. Heidegger’s concerns about modern tech- nology ushering in a conformist society can be read as an argument about the relationship between nihilism and technology.

Yet, like Marx and unlike Nietzsche, Heidegger ends up blaming the external influ- ence of technology for humanity not achieving its destiny. For this reason I move from Heidegger to Don Ihde, as Ihde’s philosophy of technology is based on trying to separate Heidegger’s helpful insights into the use of technologies from his philosophically problematic and CHAPTER 1 8 politically dangerous views about human destiny. Ihde’s analyses of what he calls human-technology relations show how we can combine Nietzsche’s philosophy of nihilism and Ihde’s philosophy of technology and investigate what I call nihilism-technology relations. Having developed the theoretical underpinning of this project in chapters 2 and 3, chapter 4 begins the application of this theoretical framework by investigating the nihilism-technology relation that I call techno-hypnosis.

After discussing Nietzsche’s analysis of “self-hypno- sis,” of the practices we engage in to try to put ourselves to sleep, of practices like meditating or drinking, I show how this analysis can be applied to technology. What Nietzsche saw as our attempts to avoid the burdens of consciousness can help us to recognize the hypnotic appeal of such technologies as television, streaming entertainment services, and augmented reality and virtual reality devices. I conclude by discuss- ing the danger of techno-hypnosis as can be seen, for example, in such technologies not only helping us to relax but helping us to become complacent with the status quo, to become complacent with lives lived staring at screens.

Chapter 5 is focused on the nihilism-technology relation that I call data-driven activity. Nietzsche’s analysis of “mechanical activity,” of the practices we engage in to try to avoid the burden of decision-making, practices like obeying orders and routines, can help us to recognize how we use technologies to keep ourselves busy and to keep ourselves orga- nized. By investigating our use of Fitbit, Pokémon GO, and our increas- ing reliance on algorithms, we can see how these technologies not only help us to avoid making decisions but how they make decisions for us. The danger of such data-driven activity can be seen, for example, in the increasing inequality between how much algorithms know about us and how little we know about algorithms, an inequality that requires that we not only put our faith in machine learning but that our faith be blind.

Chapter 6 is an investigation into the nihilism-technology relation that I call pleasure economics. According to Nietzsche, we use “petty pleasures” as a form of compensation for our powerlessness as we enjoy helping others because, in giving to others, we experience power in both reducing others to their neediness and in elevating ourselves through our ability to be givers. This analysis can be applied to the technologies of the sharing economy to help us to understand why so many people make online donations, rent out their homes, and get into NIETZSCHE AND CHILL 9 cars with strangers.

By comparing such technologies as Kickstarter, Airbnb, and Uber to technologies like Tinder, we can see how they all have in common this dynamic of other-reduction and self-elevation. The danger of pleasure economics can be seen, for example, in the swiping activity essential to all of these technologies, as they allow us to not only enjoy the power of generosity but also the power of cruelty, in particular the power of judging others as worthy or not worthy of our generosity. Chapter 7 is concerned with the nihilism-technology relation that I call herd networking. For Nietzsche our “herd instinct” leads us to join with others, partly because there is strength in numbers but also be- cause of the opportunity to lose ourselves in a crowd and thus avoid the burden of having to continue to be who we are.

Applying these insights to social media technologies, from CB radios to emojis to Facebook, can help us to see why social networking has become so popular and so pervasive, as these technologies have expanded from serving as an out- let for our desire to engage with others to fundamentally reshaping what we think engagement means. The danger of herd networking can be seen in how social networking platforms not only lead brands to act like people but lead people to act like brands, crafting identities and producing content in accordance with the platform-induced need to attain and retain followers, followers whom we cannot be sure are inter- ested in us beyond our content as we ourselves are no longer sure who we are beyond our content.

Chapter 8 delves into the world created by the nihilism-technology relation that I call orgies of clicking. Nietzsche separates the fifth and final of his human-nihilism relations—“orgies of feeling”—from the first four by describing these orgiastic nihilistic practices as “guilty,” for they involve outbursts, releases of pent-up urges, emotional explosions, all of which are attempts to experience the ecstasy of evading the bur- den of accountability, evasions that incur a cost that we must later pay. Yet when technologies provide new ways to indulge our ecstatic urges, such as when technologies allow us to post anonymous comments, form flash mobs, and become cybervigilantes, our explosive tendencies can move beyond the self-destruction of guilt to the other-destruction of shame.

The danger of orgies of clicking can be seen, for example, in the escalation that takes place when trolling and flash mobbing merge to create shame campaigns—as those who rally to a hashtag to pillory the CHAPTER 1 10 latest social media outlaw can themselves be pilloried, as trolling incurs counter-trolling, which leads to doxing and counter-doxing—creating a world so toxic that shame campaigns and political campaigns become more and more indistinguishable. Having seen in the previous chapters how technologies both enable and expand our nihilistic tendencies, allowing us to evade the burdens of consciousness, of decision-making, of powerlessness, of individuality, and of accountability, the final chapter is an attempt to answer the question of how we should respond to the relationship between our nihilism and our technologies.

To develop such a response I begin by turning to Nietzsche’s “madman,” the madman who, in The Gay Sci- ence, declared that “God is ” For after our journey through the nihilistic underbelly of the technological world we have created, it is hard not to experience what the madman experienced, a loss of orienta- tion, of direction, of certainty. Just as God once functioned as the star by which we could always guide ourselves, a guide without which we felt lost and the world felt uncanny, so today Google similarly functions as such a guide, as we look to Google Search for answers, to Google Maps for directions, and to Google DeepMind for the cure to our suffering.

We even look to Google for morality, as “Don’t be evil” is certainly easier to remember than the Ten Commandments. Google, however, is not proof that we have killed and buried God or that we have taken up the responsibility of giving our lives meaning, the responsibility that we had formerly outsourced to God. Google is in- stead proof that we have not yet escaped our nihilistic reliance on exter- nal sources of meaning. Hence even the death of Google would only lead to a search for the next Google to take its place. It is for this reason that we must not blame technologies or try to evade technologies—as if turning off technologies would turn off the influence of technologies on us—but instead endeavor to find ways to stop trying to evade ourselves and what it means to be human.

One way to do this is by turning from passive nihilism to active nihilism, by turning from destruction for the sake of destruction to destruction for the sake of creation. Whereas passive nihilism is leading us to equate human progress with technologi- cal progress and to pursue becoming technological posthumans as the goal of human progress, active nihilism can lead us to take a more critical stance toward such goals, to recognize and criticize the ascetic values underlying this techno-human view of progress. Though passive NIETZSCHE AND CHILL 11 nihilism may not lead to active nihilism, just as the death of Google may only lead to a search for new Googles, by continuing to investigate nihilism-technology relations we can nevertheless seek to motivate the move toward active nihilism, to motivate a search for new values, new goals, and new views of what “progress” should mean.

NOTES 1. Steve Dent, “The Roomba 960 Is iRobot’s Cheaper App-Driven Robot Vacuum,” engadget, August 4, 2016, com/2016/08/04/ irobots-roomba-960-is-its-cheaper-app-driven-robot-vacuum/. 2. Karl Marx, “Alienated Labor,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. Law- rence H. Simon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 61–64. 3. Karl Marx, “The Communist Manifesto,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writ- ings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 166–167. 4. Paul Biegler, “Tech Support: How Our Phones Could Save Our Lives by Detecting Mood Shifts,” Sunday Morning Herald, November 12, 2017, au/technology/innovation/tech-support-how-our-phones- html.. 13 2 THE WILL TO ¯\_(ツ ツ)_/¯ 2.1 WHAT IS NIHILISM? Though “nihilism” is a philosophical concept with a long and compli- cated history,1 in everyday usage it is taken to mean something roughly equivalent to the expression: “Who

” In other words, when we say that someone is a “nihilist” we mean that this person is both someone who does not care and someone who believes that, in general, no one else cares either. Not caring, however, seems impossible. Though we might often say we do not care in response to a question like “What do you want to ” or “What do you want to ” we tend to feel that even in these mundane instances the expression of not caring is insincere. Surely we cannot not care about how we spend our time.

Surely we cannot not care about what we put in our bodies. In such instances it seems that “I don’t care” is less an expression of detachment from the world and more an expression of simply trying to avoid making a decision. Yet these two expressions are importantly interconnected. To avoid making a decision, even a seemingly trivial decision, is to be detached from the world. Preferring to let others make decisions for us—whether because we want to avoid being wrong or being held accountable or because we want to avoid having to think or to expend energy—is how we cut ourselves off from what makes our lives meaningful.

That we justify our lack of interest in making decisions by asserting the meaning- lessness of the decisions signifies precisely how easy it is for this way of CHAPTER 2 14 thinking and acting to mutate from the mundane to the nihilistic. Or, to put it another way, we have grown so comfortable with our nihilism that we do not even recognize that it has become mundane, ordinary, nor- mal. 2.2 SARTRE AND THE NORMALCY OF NIHILISM The nihilism of everyday life was precisely what Jean-Paul Sartre was trying to capture in both his philosophical and his dramatic works.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre uses various mundane examples in order to analyze what he calls “bad faith”2 and in particular the “patterns” that it takes. “Bad faith” for Sartre is the consequence of the fact of having “to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it ”3 For example, Sartre analyzes the situation of a man suddenly taking hold of his date’s hand, leading the woman to distance herself from having to confront the fact of the situation by transcending it, by reducing the situation’s significance by elevating herself above such petty concerns.

As Babette Babich points out, although Sartre gives the man a “free pass,” bad faith is so pervasive that both the man and the woman on the date are “dancing the same mind-above-body ”4 It is hard to see why situations such as hand-holding are deserving of philosophical analysis rather than simply seeing the woman’s reaction as nothing more than the innocent rationalizations of which we are all occasionally guilty. Yet the fact that we see nothing terrible about such rationalizing, that it seems silly to even spend so much time analyzing these situations, is the very problem that Sartre wants us to finally see as a problem, as perhaps the problem.

To distance ourselves from our situation is to lose sight of the very freedom that defines us. In any given situation, at any moment, we have within ourselves the capacity to make decisions and, in making those decisions, to make ourselves. But this freedom is a burden, one that we tend to not want to bear. To recognize the actions of another during a date as possibly laden with meaning, as intending more than they appear to be, is to have to face the choice of either accepting or rejecting such intentions. To recognize that the other may want more than just dinner is to be forced to reckon with the possibility that, in agreeing to dinner, the other may believe

THE WILL TO ¯\_(ツツ)_/ ¯ 15 that the “more” has been implicitly agreed to as well. When we wish to avoid such realizations, we pursue—knowingly or unknowingly—vari- ous strategies, such as not thinking about the present moment by in- stead thinking about the future, as for example when we think of our- selves in the future looking back and laughing at the present moment. The danger of such thinking is that life is lived in the present, not in the future, so to focus on the future in order to avoid the present is to essentially avoid having to live one’s life.

To see in the future the past of the present is to let the future become the past without ever having been present. This is what is meant by the existentialist motto: “Existence precedes ”5 That you are always comes before what you are. But the fact of existence, the bare fact, leaves us with the pressure of defining it, of clothing it in the choices we make. When this pressure becomes too much we are tempted to use “duplicity,”6 as Sartre puts it, to avoid the truth of our situation. This is not to say however that this is deception.

To deceive one must be conscious of the truth so as to best hide it from view. If this were the case then we could simply stop deceiving our- selves or others about who we are and just be. Yet, like Nietzsche’s insight that forgiveness requires not just forgetting the offense but for- getting that one forgot,7 here we find ourselves confronted by a deceiv- er who has been deceived, with the deception being that one sees oneself as actually being sincere. But what would it mean to be sincere? As Sartre points out, “sincer- ity presents itself as a demand and consequently is not a

”8 We can no more be who we are than a waiter can be a waiter. Just as someone impersonates you by acting like you, so too does a waiter act like a waiter, or, as Sartre writes, “he is playing at being a waiter in a ”9 But who am I if not myself? The problem here is that we make some- thing of a category mistake when we try to understand what such a question is asking. We try to answer the question in the same way that we would answer, “What is a

” We provide a description, we offer details, we list facts, and in so doing we make ourselves into a thing that can be so described. We feel that just as a table is a flat surface sup- ported by legs that is used as a place to keep objects, we too have an essence, something that defines me as me and not you. And yet the harder we try to offer up this definition, the more tempted we are to simply point at ourselves, as though that should tell you everything you CHAPTER 2 16 need to know, much as how a child would probably tell you what a table is by simply pointing at one.

This is how we come to fear that we, so to speak, are everyday impersonating ourselves, that I present myself as me while I believe, within my heart of hearts, that this is not who I am. Furthermore, this is how others can tell you that you are “not being yourself” and you both have a shared understanding of this to mean that you are not acting like 10 What Sartre illustrates is how willing we are to focus on the “bigger picture” in order to not have to focus on the “small stuff,” consequently losing sight of the fact that the bigger picture is nothing but the accu- mulated small stuffs.

Life is a series of nows, each now is significant, each now is integral to the unfolding of every other now. One cannot therefore remove the meaning from any one now without removing meaning from all other nows. And yet we do this all the time. This is why Sartre focuses on mundane incidents in mundane events. “What are you doing right ” someone asks you, and you respond, reflex- ively, ” And this response is not seen as alarming, as depress- ing, as indicative of a nihilistic reduction of the meaningfulness of exis- tence, but as perfectly normal.

Or, again, such a nihilistic reduction is normal. It is the normalcy of nihilism that the nihilist points to when uttering “Who ” to express that nobody cares. This is not a question but a challenge, a dare to whoever is listening to find someone who actually cares. Even those who appear to care, who appear to make decisions and want to be held accountable, are, as this challenge suggests, either insincere or abnormal. What is held to be sincere and normal then is not caring, not wanting to make decisions, not wanting accountability. These are burdens, and no one wants to be burdened.

And nihilism, as Sartre has shown, is how we unburden ourselves from the burden of being ourselves. The danger of the nihilism of everyday life is that if it is human to make decisions, to make oneself accountable, to be responsible, then to avoid decision-making is to avoid being human. But to understand this human, this all-too-human, attempt to avoid being human requires that we turn from Sartre to Nietzsche. For now that Sartre has helped to introduce us to nihilism, to what nihilism can look like in everyday life and to how it can even play a role in everyday situations like dating, we are better prepared to look to Nietzsche to help us to understand nihi-

THE WILL TO ¯\_(ツツ)_/ ¯ 17 lism’s relationship not only with our everyday lives but with life itself, to understand where nihilism came from, what nihilism means, and what nihilism does. 2.3 NIETZSCHE AND THE GENEALOGY OF NIHILISM In the first note of the first book of The Will to Power, Nietzsche writes: Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests? Point of departure: it is an error to consider “social distress” or “physiological degeneration” or, worse, corruption, as the cause of nihilism. Ours is the most decent and compassionate age.

Distress, whether of the soul, body, or intellect, cannot of itself give birth to nihilism, the radical repudiation of value, meaning, and desir- ability). Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations. Rather: it is in one particular interpretation, the Christian-moral one, that nihilism is 11 Nihilism confronts us, arriving not from within but from without. Yet, as a “guest,” it is not necessarily uninvited. Such a guest is not a stranger, though it is the strangest, the “uncanniest” of guests, a guest who, upon arrival, can make us feel somehow as though we are no longer at home.

But what is such a guest who could be so strange as to make us feel like strangers in our own home, and where did this guest come from? Nietzsche tells us almost immediately. This guest is “the radical re- pudiation of value, meaning, and desirability,”12 a repudiation that comes, not from some cultural or physical decline, nor from some sort of feeling of “distress,” but rather from the “Christian-moral” interpre- tation of distress. Nihilism is “rooted” in this interpretation says Nietzs- che, indicating both that in Christian morality we will find the seeds of nihilism, and that nihilism grew, and has continued to grow, from out of Christian morality.

In subsequent notes we find more and more references to nihilism, to Nietzsche’s attempts at working out what nihilism is and what it means. However these notes were collected and published not by Nietzsche but by editors after his death. Rather than delve into the decades of arguments by academics trying to determine not only the meaning but even simply the order of these notes, I believe we should CHAPTER 2 18 instead turn to Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, which he wrote and published in 1887, immediately after the time during which many of these notes were written.

The Genealogy, Nietzsche’s most systematic work, can be seen as an investigation into the questions raised by these notes, questions con- cerning the origin and progression of nihilism through European histo- ry, in particular the history during which Christian morality was recog- nized by Europeans not as the best morality, but as the only morality. The Genealogy thus pursues the origin and progression of nihilism by pursuing the origin and progression of morality, asking how competing moral value systems gave rise both to Christianity and to nihilism. It is for this reason that Nietzsche called the work a genealogy, as it is a project tracing out the lineage not of a family of people but of a family of concepts—concepts such as “good,” “evil,” “guilt,” and

” Nietzs- che treats these concepts therefore not as universal truths but as victors in a struggle for survival between competing moral value systems, a struggle that Christianity won so decisively that we no longer realize that any other morality could even be possible, just as, before Darwin, we had no realization that any other human species could have been possible. Nietzsche begins the Genealogy by pointing out the taken-for- granted nature of morality, arguing that we do not know ourselves be- cause we accept rather than question our moral values. As an example, Nietzsche asks us to consider whether we are wrong to assume that someone seen as “good” is necessarily beneficial to society and that someone seen as “evil” is necessarily harmful to

13 So long as we identify the “good” as those who do “good” deeds and the “evil” as those who do “evil” deeds—while never questioning if “good” truly is benefi- cial and if “evil” truly is harmful—we can never be certain whether these value judgments are themselves benefiting or harming society. Yet because of the circular nature of our moral thinking, because we take for granted that the “good” are good and that the “evil” are evil, to begin to question these value judgments is to reveal that it is faith rather than certainty that is underlying the morality we live by.

Thus, as Nietzsche says at the outset of the Genealogy, we do not know our- selves. To achieve such knowledge we must question the value of our values,14 a questioning which, according to Nietzsche, has never before been undertaken. THE WILL TO ¯\_(ツツ)_/ ¯ 19 In the first essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche uses his training as a philologist to trace the etymological evolution of moral values back to their pre-Christian roots, back to a time when there were at least two competing value systems: “master”15 morality and “slave”16 morality. The central concern of the essay is trying to figure out how the Judeo- Christian morality of the slaves defeated the warrior morality of the masters, or, in other words, how the meek inherited the Earth.

The answer, according to Nietzsche, is that the slaves, because they were born weak, were forced to become clever, and thus they were able to outwit rather than outfight the masters, because the masters were born strong enough to remain stupid. The slaves defeated the masters by converting them to Judeo-Chris- tian morality. This was achieved by convincing the masters that humans have a true, but invisible inner life (a “soul”17) that can end up in a true, but invisible afterlife (a “Heaven” or “Hell”18), and that in order to avoid eternal damnation one must avoid “evil”19 (where “evil” is what the masters defined as “good”20).

Such avoidance was possible by acting like the slaves, by becoming “good,”21 by becoming “cultured,”22 by learning to abstain from acting on one’s instincts. The theme of abstinence runs throughout the Genealogy, as Nietzs- che identifies it as the value that becomes dominant in both the rise of Christian morality and the rise of nihilism. In the first essay, abstinence is what turns the strong into the weak and the weak into the powerful, as the masters—in the hopes of achieving salvation—chose to abstain from their “evil” ways, to abstain from their “vigorous, free, joyful activ- ity,”23 and thus created a world ruled by the weak.

In the second essay, abstinence is seen as what kept the Christian world from falling apart, as the instincts of the masters—the instinct for cruelty especially— never disappeared but was merely suppressed, creating in each person a buildup of instinctual energy that demanded to be released. Managing this explosive situation was the job of the priests, who successfully redirected the instinct for cruelty by inventing the concept of “guilt,”24 by inventing a cruelty that we could joyfully experience, though only by being cruel to ourselves. By punishing ourselves for our “sinful”25 instincts, we could both become “virtuous” through pursuing “good” habits like “self-denial” and “self-sacrifice,”26 and we could ex- perience the pleasure of cruelly forcing ourselves to deny our instincts and sacrifice our desires.

These denials and sacrifices were of course CHAPTER 2 20 not made in the name of cruelty, nor even in the name of virtue, but were made in the name of “God,”27 in the name of a being who knew of all of our sinful instincts, and who had made the ultimate sacrifice of dying to save us from our sins, providing us with a debt that could never be repaid, with a guilt that no self-cruelty could ever satisfy. In the third essay, abstinence appears in the form of “asceticism,” or the elevation of self-denial and self-sacrifice from a means for individu- als to redirect destructive instincts to the ideal way of life to which we all should aspire.

According to Nietzsche, ascetic ideals have become so valued, in so many different areas of European culture, that modern life has become a nihilistic ”28 Looking at not only relig- ion and morality but at art, philosophy, and even science, Nietzsche argues that life has become “paradoxical,”29 that we live our lives in accordance with life-denying ideals. The reason for this is that the victo- ry of the weak over the strong did not actually result in the weak be- coming strong as the weak, even in victory, were still weak, still frail, still susceptible to disease, still mortal, still like slaves.

While the victory of the slaves made life safer, easier, and less dan- gerous—because there were no more masters to terrify us—it also made life boring, complacent, and less meaningful—because there were no more masters to inspire us. Exchanging freedom for equality resulted in not only a Christian moral world but also in a sick world, a world where we are sick of being mortal, sick of being human, and sick of being ourselves. It is for this reason that Nietzsche sees the preachers of asceticism, the “ascetic priests,”30 as having the vital role of protect- ing the Christian moral world from the nihilism it produces, protecting society from those made sick by it, as the ascetic priest is the one who “alters the direction of

”31 “Ressentiment”32 is Nietzsche’s concept for the essential characteris- tic of the weak, what in the past drove the slaves to destroy the masters and what in the present drives the sick to destroy themselves. The slaves did not merely resent the masters, the slaves did not merely feel bitter about having been born weak and frail while others were born strong and healthy, instead the slaves hated the masters, they blamed the masters for being masters, for being who the slaves thought they could and should be if there were no more masters standing in their way.

This all-consuming reactive feeling of hatred and blame is what Nietzsche named ressentiment, a feeling which did not end with the THE WILL TO ¯\_(ツツ)_/ ¯ 21 death of the masters since their death did not result in the death of the slaves; those who were weak and frail still remained weak and frail. With the masters gone, the victorious slaves became sicker and sick- er as there was no one left to hate for one’s weakness and frailty, no one left to blame for one’s weakness and frailty, leaving only the Christian moral world itself to hate and to blame.

For this reason ascetic priests became increasingly necessary for preventing the destruction of the Christian moral world, giving us ways to manage our ressentiment, and less dangerous targets for our ressentiment. Importantly for Nietzsche the ascetic priest does not make the sick healthy but rather makes the sick “tame”33 for, as was the case with the invention of guilt, the ascetic priests turn our sickness inward rather than allowing it to be vented outward. As Nietzsche argues, the ascetic priest is therefore not a “phy- sician”34 because the ascetic priest only relieves symptoms, never at- tempting to cure the disease itself.

In other words, the aim of the ascetic priest is not to combat nihilism but to make nihilism palatable, to help sufferers to live with their suffer- ing rather than letting them spread their suffering to others. Nietzsche identifies five different tactics that the ascetic priests employ to achieve this aim: self-hypnosis, mechanical activity, petty pleasures, herd in- stinct, and orgies of feeling. The ascetic priest preaches that we should meditate, that we should keep busy, that we should help the needy, that we should join with others, and that we should punish the wicked.

Relaxation, work, charity, community, and justice are in other words all forms of “priestly medication,” the medications prescribed by the ascet- ic priests that Nietzsche raises a “fundamental objection” against be- cause these activities soothe rather than cure our nihilistic suffering. Of course these activities do not seem to us to be medications; we perceive them to be healthy, normal, even necessary parts of life. But it is precisely the necessity, normality, and, in particular, the healthiness of these activities that Nietzsche wants us to question. For in each of these activities Nietzsche finds not the will to life but rather the will willing its own destruction.

Life is for Nietzsche the “will to power”35— not to achieve political success nor to dominate others but, rather, the will to will. To will is to strive, to pursue, which requires both some- thing to strive after, an end to pursue, and the ability to do what is necessary to achieve one’s goal, the ability to recognize and carry out the means to one’s end. Willing is thus more than mere wanting; there CHAPTER 2 22 are many things we want but, lacking the will to get them, such things remain fantasies rather than realities we are willing to create.

The will to power is to strive after striving itself, to pursue pursuing, to have no other end but to be able to continue to will. “Power” here means overcoming, overcoming obstacles, limits, but also oneself, to overcome what one has already achieved and the gravitational pull that one’s achievements can have, dragging the will away from power to instead focus on preservation. But if life is the will to power, the will to overcoming, then the will to preservation, the will to maintaining the status quo, is the will turning against life, the will turning against will- ing, the will turning toward asceticism.

Having defined life as the will to power, Nietzsche sees the activities that have come to be regarded as normal and necessary as unhealthy because they are aimed at turning the will against itself. To meditate, to relax, is to not act, to will not to will. To work is to work for someone else, to bring about what someone else wills, to keep oneself too busy to be aware of one’s own will. To help is to feel powerful, not by willing but by being recognized for what one has already, for what one has to give to those in need.

To form groups is to compromise one’s will in the service of the will of the many. To punish is to vent, to use the pretext of justice as a way to exercise one’s will against someone else, as a way to compensate for otherwise having ceased to exercise one’s will. But we do not see these activities as unhealthy, or even as having been prescribed to us by others, for which reason we pursue these activities as normal, as necessary, without ever making the connection between how we live our lives and how we feel about our lives.

Each of these activities allows us to feel as though we are living, as though we are willing, and thus our Christian moral world is preserved, even though preserving the world is what continues to make us sicker and sicker. For, as Nietzsche warns, humans cannot live without a goal, even if that means that we would “rather will nothingness than not ”36 Nietzsche finds no ideals competing with the ascetic ideals, as the ideals he finds in art, in philosophy, in science, are still ultimately fo- cused on preserving the world rather than overcoming it, and are thus in the service of asceticism, in the service of soothing rather than curing our nihilism.

It is because Nietzsche is able to diagnose asceticism even in the field of science, even in the field that is meant to be most op- posed to the Christian moral world, that I believe Nietzsche can help us THE WILL TO ¯\_(ツツ)_/ ¯ 23 to explore the field of technology, and even help us to locate updated versions of these priestly medications operating within the technologies we use today. By carrying out a Nietzschean investigation of the tech- nologies that surround us, we can see how technologies impact nihilism and how nihilism impacts technologies, how technologies can soothe our nihilism, and how nihilism can prevent us from realizing the poten- tial of technologies to do more than soothe us.

2.4 TRANSHUMANISM AND THE UPGRADE OF NIHILISM Before we continue, two important objections to this project need to be addressed. First, it may be asked why Nietzsche was able to be the first to pursue this line of questioning, if no one, not even Kant, had previ- ously been able to see the need for a “critique of moral ”37 We have already seen what Nietzsche’s answer to this question is: nihilism. Nihilism is for Nietzsche both the reason why we are able to question our values and the reason why we need to question our values.

Nihilism is the “radical repudiation of value, meaning, and desirability,” and thus the more nihilistic the world becomes, the easier it is to see our values as questionable rather than as absolute. Yet the reason we need to question our values is precisely because the world is becoming more and more nihilistic. As Nietzsche indicates—in another note from The Will to Power written at the same time as the Genealogy—nihilism can be seen as “ambiguous,” as either “active” or as “passive,” as either “a sign of in- creased power of the spirit” or as “decline and recession of the power of the

”38 To question our values is to actively repudiate the taken- for-granted nature of our values, but our values have become weak enough to be seen as in need of questioning precisely because we have for so long passively accepted our values without question. Active nihi- lism could therefore be seen as both a result of passive nihilism and as a way to prevent the continued growth of passive nihilism. Passive nihilism could lead us to not only question the value of our traditional values, it could eventually lead us to question the value of having any values whatsoever, to question even the value of question- ing.

Or as Nietzsche puts it: CHAPTER 2 24 the weary nihilism that no longer attacks; its most famous form, Buddhism; a passive nihilism, a sign of weakness. The strength of the spirit may be worn out, exhausted, so that previous goals and values have become incommensurate and no longer are believed; so that the synthesis of values and goals (on which every strong culture rests) dissolves and the individual values war against each other: disintegra- tion—and whatever refreshes, heals, calms, numbs emerges into the foreground in various disguises, religious or moral, or political, or aesthetic,

39 It is here that we can begin to ask whether technology would be seen by Nietzsche as not only nihilistic but as a manifestation of passive nihi- lism. For it would appear that technology could belong to this list of the “various disguises” through which passive nihilism “emerges,” as tech- nology is what “refreshes, heals, calms, numbs” for so many of us today. Of course it may be objected that technology should instead be seen as active nihilism, as a sign of strength rather than of weakness, of energy rather than of weariness, for surely if there is any domain where we are today questioning traditional values and creating new values it is in the domain of technology.

Before we can begin to make such determinations we should first look at current debates surrounding the relationship between technolo- gy and what it means to be human, for a second objection that could be raised is that Nietzsche is simply too outdated to be of any relevance to contemporary issues. Nietzsche could be seen as having taken for granted that to be human is to be embodied, to be vulnerable, to be mortal, and that to be nihilistic is to evade our embodiment, to evade our vulnerability, to evade our mortality. But what if this presupposition is wrong, or at least, obsolete?

What if embodiment, vulnerability, mor- tality are not necessary features of being human but are merely histori- cally contingent features, features that belong to a phase of humanity, a phase that we may soon be able to leave behind? This is the question posed by a movement inspired by recent innova- tions in technology: 40 Transhumanism is the pursuit of technologically modifying the human body in order to improve it (for example, Kevin Warwick turning himself into a “cyborg”41). A more extreme version of transhumanism pursues not the modification of the human body but the replacement of the human body with a technologi- cal body (for example, Ray Kurzweil’s prophesied “Singularity”42).

In THE WILL TO ¯\_(ツツ)_/ ¯ 25 other words, transhumanists want to upgrade through technology, or they want to merge with technology. While these might seem like different goals, the underlying perspec- tive of both forms of transhumanism is very much the same: human existence is imperfect and it can and should be fixed. The imperfection of human existence identified by transhumanists is that of having a limitless consciousness trapped in a limited body. This idea is of course not new as it is the basis of what has come to be known as mind/body dualism.

Numerous philosophers and numerous religions have enter- tained some version of this dualism, some version of the idea that the soul, the mind, the res cogitans, rationality, intelligence, consciousness, all of these various names for the thinking part of human life, is pure, infinite, immortal, and caged within a body that is impure, finite, mor- tal. This dualistic perspective has been attacked not only by Nietzsche but by phenomenologists, existentialists, feminist philosophers, philoso- phers of race, critical theorists, structuralists, and poststructuralists, to name a few. On the one hand, this perspective has been shown to be nihilistic, positing the existence of a world beyond ours, a better world, a world that we can achieve through death, whether that death be literal or living (for example, through the ascetic renunciation of life favored by monks both Buddhist and Christian).

On the other hand, this per- spective has been shown to be ideological, providing metaphysical jus- tification for the political subjugation of those found to be more physi- cal than rational, more emotional than objective, and thus more in need of being controlled than in need of having control (for example, women, persons of color, or more generally anyone who is not a wealthy hetero- sexual white Christian man). Transhumanism however simply sidesteps all of these issues by as- serting that dualism is not a theory, it is a reality. This is where the can part of their perspective comes in.

The can part of this perspective is the result of technological progress in biomedical technologies with regard to upgrade-focused transhumanism, and in artificially intelligent technologies with regard to merge-focused transhumanism. Implants, modifications, and genetic engineering that allow us to extend human life already exist, giving rise to the dream of not only curing diseases and impairments but of curing death itself. Similarly, machine learning that allows technologies to understand us, converse with us, and com- CHAPTER 2 26 pete with us already exists, giving rise to the dream of not only living with artificial intelligence but living through artificial intelligence.

The should part of this theory comes from the shared ideological underpinning of both forms of transhumanism: a rejection of the imper- fect, of the natural, of the (traditional) human. As Nick Bostrom writes, in his essay “In Defense of Posthuman Dignity”: Transhumanists promote the view that human enhancement should be made widely available, and that individuals should have broad discretion over which of these technologies to apply to themselves (morphological freedom), and that parents should normally get to decide which reproductive technologies to use when having children (reproductive 43 Transhumanism here appears to be simply an argument for freedom and equality.

If there are technologies available that can improve hu- man life, then everyone—not just those wealthy enough to afford it— should have access to these technologies. This is not an argument that everyone should be enhanced but rather that everyone should decide for themselves whether or not to make use of enhancement technologies. However, while this argument may apply to “morphological freedom,” it quickly unravels when applied to “reproductive freedom,” as this freedom can only exist for the parents who make the decisions, not for the children who are the result of the decisions. Ableism is the belief that there are “normal” human abilities, and that whoever is lacking in those abilities is not only disabled but abnor- mal, inferior, in need of being fixed, of being made human.

To assert “reproductive freedom” is to reveal the ableism of transhumanism. As Melinda Hall writes: Transhumanists seek to eliminate or mitigate dependence and vul- nerability, while disability rights proponents seek to drain stigmatiz- ing power from those concepts and embrace differences of all kinds. Transhumanists make a universalizing gesture when they categorize all humans as deficient, but this move merely serves to shift, rather than ameliorate, stigma connected to deficiency—thus maintaining and even strengthening 44 THE WILL TO ¯\_(ツツ)_/ ¯ 27 What is assumed by Bostrom, and by transhumanism, is that any child would want to be enhanced, that the unenhanced life is not worth

45 It is the assertion of “reproductive freedom” that reveals the true meaning of the normative dimension of transhumanism. As Bostrom continues: Transhumanists counter [in response to what Bostrom calls “biocon- servativism”] that nature’s gifts are sometimes poisoned and should not always be accepted. Cancer, malaria, dementia, aging, starvation, unnecessary suffering, and cognitive shortcomings are all among the presents that we would wisely refuse. Our own species-specified na- tures are a rich source of much of the thoroughly unrespectable and unacceptable—susceptibility for disease, murder, rape, genocide, cheating, torture, racism. The horrors of nature in general, and of our own nature in particular, are so well documented that it is aston- ishing that somebody as distinguished as Leon Kass should still in this day and age be tempted to rely on the natural as a guide to what is desirable or normatively right.

[...] Rather than deferring to the natural order, transhumanists maintain that we can legitimately re- form ourselves and our natures in accordance with humane values and personal 46 Or to put it even more bluntly: Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and 47 Among Bostrom’s list of the “poisoned” gifts of nature, gifts such as “cancer,” “malaria,” “dementia,” and “starvation,” we find “aging,” “un- necessary suffering,” and “cognitive ” Cancer, malaria, dementia, and starvation were all, at various points in human history, seen as death sentences but are today seen as problems that either have been or will be solved by technology.

The inclusion of aging, unneces- sary suffering, and cognitive shortcomings in this list is clearly meant to imply that these are also merely problems to be solved by technology. The further implication is that it is not the case that these gifts are part of human life because that is what it means to be human, but rather they are part of human life because we have mistaken what is historical- ly contingent for what is existentially necessary. CHAPTER 2 28 But is curing cancer really all that similar to curing aging? Cancer is an abnormality, a genetic mutation, which can be caused by inherited or environmental triggers.

Aging however is not an abnormality but rather the condition of possibility for normality itself. Nature is change, growth, decay. To see aging as “poisoned” and as a “horror” is to see not what nature gives but what nature is as poisoned and as a horror. Simi- larly, to suggest that we can distinguish necessary from unnecessary suffering, cognitive perfection from cognitive shortcomings, is to judge reality against ideality, to condemn bodies and minds for being what they are rather than what—in a techno-utopia—they could be. This condemnation of bodies and minds becomes even more appar- ent when Bostrom locates “disease” and “cheating” alongside the “unre- spectable and unacceptable” aspects of human nature such as “rape,” “genocide,” “torture,” and

” Rape, genocide, torture, and ra- cism are crimes against humanity. If transhumanism sees aging as a poisoned gift, then it should be no surprise that disease is likewise treated as a crime. Cheating, however, is less a crime than a taboo, a break with norms that exist in certain societies at certain times. More- over, because of its relation to norms, cheating only exists in societies where it is treated as taboo. Indeed, it could be argued that cheating is a product of living in specific societies with specific social structures. Bostrom seems to be suggesting instead that cheating, rape, genocide, torture, and racism are, like disease, products of nature, not of society, and are thus capable of being “cured” through technology.

They are seen by Bostrom therefore not as part of what it means to be human, not as a product of the interaction between individual character and social structure, but as naturally occurring crimes against humanity, as proof that “Mother Nature” belongs “in jail for child abuse and mur- ” Transhumanism, as presented by Bostrom, appears to be guilty of precisely the mistaken judgment that he criticizes bioconservatives of making. Bostrom is here using nature as “a guide to what is desirable or normatively right,” though not for the purposes of defending nature but for condemning it.

What is seen as natural is what is seen as undesirable and wrong. The transhumanist finds all that is wrong with the world in nature rather than in oneself, rather than in society. If the transhuman- ist suffers, the suffering is seen not as an opportunity for individual growth nor as motivation for social transformation but as evidence that THE WILL TO ¯\_(ツツ)_/ ¯ 29 the transhumanist was wrongly made to be susceptible to suffering and as motivation for technological transformation. And just as transhumanism would accuse bioconservatism of prefer- ring what is natural to what is technological for no other reason than that it is natural, transhumanism is just as guilty of preferring what is technological for no other reason than that it is not natural.

Transhu- manism goes even further than ableism. For transhumanism, the stan- dard against which all are judged is not the “normal” human but the “technological” human, the human who does not yet exist but who is seen as what humanity can and should strive to become. As Babette Babich writes: We want to be anything but human. We want, as Günther Anders already argued in his 1956 The Obsolescence of Humanity, to over- come our “promethean shame” and to be like our precisely manufac- tured objects in all their precision, all their durability, all their re- placeability.

We wish to be objects with exchangeable parts, infinitely upgradable, as science fiction robot stories have long explored these possibilities. Bad heart? Get a replacement. Bad eyes, replace them with optical sensors, see the way Robocop, in the dark, through walls, complete with grids and autofocus—upgrade to Cy- borg vision. Bad spirit, that is to say, afflicted with the “disease” du jour, namely “depression”? There are a bunch of pills to help with that. But what we want, at least we think this, is to live 48 It is here that we can see the relevance of Nietzsche for helping us to understand what may be motivating and operating beneath the surface of transhumanism.

Rather than saying with Nietzsche, “Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger,”49 Bostrom instead effectively says, “Whatever does not kill me reveals a weakness to be technologically ” It may appear that transhumanism is trying to bring about Nietzs- che’s “overman” (Übermensch)50 for, as Nietzsche writes, “Not ‘man- kind’ but overman is the ”51 Yet I believe that Nietzsche would instead view transhumanism as merely continuing the very nihilism that the overman was meant to overcome. As Ciano Aydin writes: The elaborated view of the Overhuman as an index of transcendence is an attempt to express this paradoxical challenge.

Recognizing a dimension in human existence that in no way can be controlled, CHAPTER 2 30 appropriated, or domesticated, is a necessary condition for radical self-transformation. By virtue of this transcendent dimension the hu- man can never completely coincide with his current state, which is a conception that is also expressed by Nietzsche’s idea that the human being can never be completely determined. Radical self-transforma- tion is only possible if the anticipated ideal in no way can be reduced to the current (and past) self-understanding of the human being. Transhumanists who claim that the human being will be able to completely design his life and fate deny this transcendent dimension and necessarily reduce, in their projections of an ideal human being, the human to a contemporary (humanist) perfect image, to an idol.

The human being has from their view no other goal beyond him- 52 The overman is a stage in human development for Nietzsche, a stage that could only occur—if at all53—after the valuation of the masters and the revaluation of the 54 The overman represents the stage of transvaluation, the stage of the transcendence of value judgments, of the transcendence of wanting to reify values rather than overcome them. The masters earn the love of the gods through their actions, the slaves are born beloved of the one true God, but the overman—even if it makes him look like a “madman”55—is able to reckon with the realiza- tion that “God is dead,”56 to reckon with the realization that there is no transcendent being or realm upon which we can base any absolute and eternal value judgments.

Again, it may appear that transhumanists are likewise saying “God is dead,” but in reality they are saying, “Technology is ” Nietzsche argues that science appears to challenge religion but only perpetuates religion by replacing “faith in God” with “faith in truth,”57 positing truth as a value without “justification,”58 taking for granted that it should guide all our actions. In much the same way, transhumanists have re- placed “God” with ” In this replacement, the names we give to our values may have changed, but what the values represent, and the functions they serve, has not.

We have long dreamt of shedding our mortal coils in death, allowing our souls to return to where they truly belong. Though we may believe that the world is becoming increasingly secular, and that technology in particular is helping to usher in a new atheistic age, this dream still clearly exists. We may have replaced a cloud-filled Heaven with a THE WILL TO ¯\_(ツツ)_/ ¯ 31 cloud-computer Heaven—as was depicted for example in the Black Mirror episode “San Junipero”—but it is still the same nihilistic dream. It is for this reason that Nietzsche’s writings, though over one hundred years old, are still relevant, are still in need of being returned to, so that we can investigate our nihilistic dreams, and try to foresee, if not pre- vent, our becoming trapped in a nihilistic nightmare.

Bringing together what I call Nietzsche’s analyses of human-nihilism relations with Don Ihde’s analyses of human-technology relations (which I will discuss in the next chapter), we can ask whether it is technologies that today best serve to help us live with our nihilism, and also whether it is the designers of these technologies who today serve in the role of ascetic priests, by not combating nihilism but instead only making it more palatable. For if this is indeed the case, if our technolo- gies and the designers who make them are not, as we often assume, disrupting the Christian moral world, then they may instead be helping to ensure its survival by providing us Traditional Moral Values 2.0.

There is a danger then that technologies are not a sign of human progress but of decline, making us more advanced but also sicker, more self-destructive, more nihilistic. The question I will be trying to answer in subsequent chapters is whether our technologies are the product not of innovation but of asceticism, whether technologies are life-denying ideals that we can hold in the palms of our hands. NOTES 1. Even solely within the realm of Nietzsche exegesis, the attempt to de- fine “nihilism” has a long and complicated history. For a discussion of this history, see Babette Babich, “Ex aliquo nihil: Nietzsche on Science, Anarchy, and Democratic Nihilism,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 84, no.

2 (2010): 231–56. See also the entry on “nihilism” in Douglas Burnham, The Nietzsche Dictionary (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 236–39, and see Andreas Urs Sommer, “Nihilism and Skepticism in Nietzsche,” in A Com- panion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 250–29. 2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 96. 3. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 100. CHAPTER 2 32 4. Babette Babich, “On Schrödinger and Nietzsche: Eternal Return and the Moment,” in Antonio T. de Nicolas: Poet of Eternal Return, ed. Christo- pher Key Chapple (Ahmedabad, India: Sriyogi Publications & Nalanda Inter- national, 2014), 171–72.

5. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 725. See also Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Humanism of Existentialism,” in Essays in Existentialism, ed. Wade Baskin (New York: Citadel Press, 1965), 34. 6. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 100. 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 39. 8. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 100. 9. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 102. 10. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 102: “A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer. Society demands that he limit himself to his function as a grocer, just as the soldier at attention makes himself into a soldier-thing with a direct regard which does not see at all, which is no longer meant to see, since it is the rule and not the interest of the moment which determines the point he must fix his eyes on (the sight ‘fixed at ten paces’).

There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly elude his ” 11. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 7. 12. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 7. 13. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 20. 14. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 20. 15. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 29. 16. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 36. 17. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 46. 18. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 47–49. 19. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 34. 20. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 28. 21.

Nietzsche, Genealogy, 34. 22. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 42. 23. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 33. 24. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 65. 25. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 92. 26. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 88. 27. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 92. 28. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 117. 29. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 118. THE WILL TO ¯\_(ツツ)_/ ¯ 33 30. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 120. 31. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 126. 32. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 38. 33. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 126. 34. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 129–30. 35. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 78–79. 36. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 97. 37. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 20. 38. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 17. 39. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 18. 40. In order to avoid a potential confusion here, a distinction should be made between “transhumanism” and

” Transhumanists fre- quently use the concept of a “posthuman” to describe what technology will allow humans to become. However there are philosophers of technology who instead use the concept of a “posthuman” to describe the ways in which tech- nology reveals ideological presuppositions in the humanistic conception of what it means to be human. Consequently we could distinguish the former as posthuman-ists from the latter who are post-humanists. In the posthuman-ist camp would belong Kevin Warwick, Ray Kurzweil, and Nick Bostrom. In the post-humanist camp would belong Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, and Rosi Braidotti.

My criticism of transhumanism and of the concept of the “post- human” should thus be read only as a criticism of the posthuman-ist project. My thanks to the anonymous reviewer who helpfully suggested that I clarify this issue. 41. James Edgar, “‘Captain Cyborg’: The Man Behind the Controversial Turing Test Claims,” Telegraph, June 10, 2014, uk/ news/science/science-news/10888828/Captain-Cyborg-the-man-behind-the- html. 42. Lev Grossman, “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal,” TIME, Feb- ruary 10, 2011, html. 43. Nick Bostrom, “In Defense of Posthuman Dignity,” Bioethics 19, no. 3 (2005): 203. 44. Melinda Hall, The Bioethics of Enhancement: Transhumanism, Disabil- ity, and Biopolitics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 133.

45. See for example Steve Fuller, “We May Look Crazy to Them, But They Look Like Zombies to Us: Transhumanism as a Political Challenge,” Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, September 8, 2015, org/ php/IEET2/more/fuller20150909. 46. Bostrom, “Posthuman,” 205. 47. Bostrom, “Posthuman,” 211. CHAPTER 2 48. Babette Babich, "Nietzsche's Post-Human Imperative: On the 'All-too-Human' Dream of Transhumanism," in Nietzsche and Transhumanism: Precursor or, ed. Yunus Tuncel (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 122. 49. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5. 50. See for example the contributions by Max More and Stefan Sorgner in Nietzsche and Transhumanism: Precursor or

, ed. Yunus Tuncel (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017). 51. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 519. 52. Ciano Aydin, "The Posthuman as Hollow Idol: A Nietzschean Critique of Human Enhancement," Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 42, iss. 3 (June 1, 2017): 322. 53. Aydin, "Hollow," 312: "The Overhuman, not only has never existed, but will also never exist as something particular. [...] By its very nature, the Overhuman cannot be conceptualized nor realized." 54. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 33–34. 55. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), 181. 56. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 167.

57. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 151. 58. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 152. 35 3 THE HAMMER OF THE GODS 3.1 WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY? When talking about technology, there are typically three different positions one can take. First, one can take a pessimistic position, and describe technology as a dominating force, as a power that is taking over the world, as a power that we must try to stop, if stopping it, or even controlling it, is even possible. Second, one can take an optimistic posi- tion, and describe technology as a liberating force, as a power that is fixing the world, as a power that we must try to expand, bringing tech- nology to as many people, in as many places, for as many problems, as possible.

Third, one can take a neutral position, and describe technolo- gy as not a force but as a particular set of objects, a set of objects that, like any other objects, are neither positive nor negative, as they are merely means to ends, ends chosen, and made positive or negative, by people. Technology can be seen as life-destroying, as life-preserving, or as lifelessly instrumental. Yet to claim any one of these positions as defin- ing what technology is is to be immediately criticized by those holding either of the two other positions for having overlooked something cru- cial about the nature of technology.

For a pessimist to hold up the iPhone as an example of how technology is turning us all into zombies is to have to face, on the one hand, arguments about how the iPhone has been vital to keeping us informed, entertained, and even politically active and, on the other hand, arguments about how the iPhone is just a CHAPTER 3 36 device, and a device can have no power other than what we give it. For an optimist to champion the self-driving car as an example of how technology is empowering is to have to face, on the one hand, argu- ments about how self-driving cars are just another technology that are stealing our jobs and, on the other hand, arguments about how a car being driven by programming is still a car being driven by a human.

For a neutralist to point out how even the internet is not a force for good or evil but merely a complicated combination of devices is to face, on the one hand, arguments about how the internet is turning us into trolls and, on the other hand, arguments about how the internet is turning us into gods. 3.2 HEIDEGGER AND TECHNOLOGY In his 1955 lecture, “The Question Concerning Technology,” Martin Heidegger attempted to find a solution to the seemingly intractable problem of defining technology by providing an analysis of the “es- sence”1 of technology. According to Heidegger it is only through such an analysis that we can free ourselves from our preconceptions about technology and so “experience the technological within its own

” Heidegger continues: the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely represent and pursue the technolog- ical, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of

2 Heidegger here not only makes clear that he is a pessimist when it comes to technology but further suggests that our situation with regard to technology is so dire that it matters little whether we are pessimistic or optimistic. Rather what should concern us according to Heidegger is the neutral position—the position that he assumes most people take— THE HAMMER OF THE GODS 37 for it is neutrality that leaves us the most vulnerable, the most “blind,” to the essence of technology. The blindness of neutrality is, ironically, a result of the neutralist being “correct”3 in defining technology as instrumental, as for Heideg- ger a definition being correct is not the same as it being true.

While a correct definition is relevant, it is not revelatory in the way that truth is, and thus it puts forth a part of an answer in place of the whole, like reducing someone’s identity to their nationality. For this reason Hei- degger moves from asking what the essence of technology is to asking what the essence of instrumentality is, moving, like Socrates, through interrogations of the merely correct in order to reach the ultimate truth. In this way Heidegger discovers that the truth of technology, what is revelatory about technology, is that technology is itself a way of reveal- ing.

As Heidegger writes, “If we inquire, step by step, into what tech- nology, represented as means, actually is, then we shall arrive at reveal- ing. The possibility of all productive manufacturing lies in ”4 To produce, to manufacture, is to make something appear, to make visible how physical materials, technical concepts, and cultural practices can be gathered together in order to create a product. This product can be used, can be judged, and can be made significant, such that it can be identified as the product that it was intended to be. In this way, accord- ing to Heidegger, technology reveals through the mode of “bringing- forth,”5 through not only turning what is potential into what is actual but through showing what nature and humanity are capable of, what each means for the other, what each can do for the other.

Or at least this was true of ancient technology, for as Heidegger argues, while modern technology is still a way of revealing, it reveals instead in the mode of ”6 Ancient windmills and ancient bridges helped people to see the power of wind and the power of water, that wind and water were forces to be reckoned with, to be respected, to be named, honored, and even deified. The windmills and bridges of today still reveal wind and water to us as power, however what is revealed is not power to be respected but power to be “stockpiled,”7 to be packaged, stored, and made avail- able on demand, like a battery, or what Heidegger calls “standing-

”8 The reduction of nature from a godlike force to a controllable energy source is what Heidegger sees as the defining feature of modern technology, as what has led humanity to take ourselves to be a godlike CHAPTER 3 38 force, to be the beings for whom not only technology but the natural world that technology mines, harvests, and stockpiles is seen as mere instrumentality, as mere means to our ends, as existing merely to satisfy our demands. Yet Heidegger points out that this is precisely what is dangerous about the neutralist position, for viewing technology as instrumentality, as instruments for us, is to become blind to how we too have come under the rule of instrumentality, how we too have become instru- ments, instruments for technology.

That modern technology has re- duced nature to an on-demand power source, to a power source that we can control, does not mean that we are ourselves the masters of this process of reduction and subservience, for we have likewise been re- duced and made subservient as standing-reserve, as we must be avail- able on demand in order to control and make use of these on-demand power sources as needed. In other words, modern technology not only challenges nature, revealing nature as a power source to be stockpiled, but first and foremost challenges humanity, revealing humanity as the power source to do the stockpiling.

Of course, to refer to something as on demand, as available as needed, is to be taken to imply that these demands and needs are human, and thus even if humans have been made subservient, they have nevertheless been made subservient to the demands and needs of other humans. In this way we are tempted to argue against Heidegger’s pessimism that, even if we are not personally the ones who are in control of instrumentality, humans must still ultimately be in control, and must still be above the level of instrumentality. Modern technology may have reduced nature, but nature has been so reduced for human- ity.

Or at least that is how our situation appears to us. What Heidegger wants us to see however is that while we may work in the service of industries—of industries owned and operated by humans—these indus- tries are operating under a logic that is not a human logic meant to serve human demands and needs but rather the logic of modern tech- nology, a logic meant to serve the demands and needs of modern tech- nology. Heidegger argues though that what is driving humanity to serve modern technology is not itself anything technological but is, rather, part of the “challenging-forth” that is driving modern technology.

What has challenged both humanity and technology to come under the logic THE HAMMER OF THE GODS 39 of instrumentality is what Heidegger calls “Gestell” or “Enframing,”9 a reappropriation of a German word (Ge-stell) meant to make clear how humanity and technology have both been gathered (Ge-) and forced to reveal themselves (-stellen) in the mode of standing-reserve. Using the example of a lumberjack, Heidegger argues that both a lumberjack and his grandfather could walk through the same forest, but they would not walk through the forest in the same way for the same 10 The lumberjack in the forest today is there because he is paid to be, paid in order to chop wood, in order to produce paper, in order to make news- papers and magazines, in order to sell products and opinions to the public.

The lumberjack may appear to be working for the forestry in- dustry, but the forestry industry is itself working for industries within industries and, therefore, the lumberjack is ultimately working within the logic of the in-order-to, the logic of Enframing. What Heidegger is specifically concerned with here is that while Enframing reveals what we can do with nature—we can use modern technology to turn trees into shapers of public opinion—Enframing at the same time conceals our ability to see nature as anything but what we can do with it, and thus conceals that we can exist as anything other than manipulators of nature.

Technology itself does not worry Heideg- ger—“What is dangerous is not technology”11—but rather it is the “des- tining”12 of technology to become the challenging-forth found in mod- ern technology that Heidegger sees as the true danger. In particular Heidegger focuses on how the history of technology has culminated in our becoming enraptured by Enframing, by instrumentality, by chal- lenging-forth, and thereby losing sight of the noninstrumental possibil- ities of bringing-forth that were revealed in ancient technology. Be- cause this outcome was already present as a possibility in ancient tech- nology, as the fate of bringing-forth to become challenging-forth, Hei- degger is not simply arguing for a return to ancient technology since today, under the rule of Enframing, we are incapable of seeing ancient technology as anything other than a primitive form of modern technolo- gy, as anything other than primitive instrumentality.

Once instrumentality becomes the only mode of revelation and thus becomes simply how everything appears to us, Heidegger argues that we will no longer be aware that revealing is taking place, that a particu- lar way of seeing the world is being revealed to us, resulting in revela- tion and concealment themselves becoming concealed. It is at this point CHAPTER 3 40 that humanity would truly have reached the level of mere standing- reserve, seeing the world, God, ourselves only through instrumentality, only through the logic of the in-order-to, relying on the correct version of reality to be effectively sufficient such that we no longer inquire into the truth, such that inquiry itself would no longer be pursued, except in order to satisfy a demand.

Yet Heidegger believes that so long as in- quiry is possible, so long as we can question the essence of technology, then we can free ourselves from the grip of Enframing. For such ques- tioning to take place however we would need something that could again motivate and inspire our curiosity, and the possible source of such motivation and inspiration Heidegger finds in art. Because art is “akin to the essence of technology” and “fundamentally different from it”13— for which reason, according to Heidegger, the Ancient Greeks called both art and technology technē—art has a power to reveal, a power to reveal that could rival modern technology’s power to conceal.

Much more can be said about Heidegger’s lecture but, for our pur- poses here, this overview should be sufficient to see how Heidegger can help us in trying to make sense of technology. Heidegger is clearly pessimistic about the technological world in which we find ourselves, arguing throughout that we have become enslaved to technology and to the instrumental way of seeing the world that modern technology re- veals. However it is important to note that he is not pessimistic about humanity, as he also argues throughout that we are not the ones who have done the enslaving.

The history of humanity is not to blame for our predicament, according to Heidegger, but rather something more like the history of Being, the history of revealing, the history of the revealing of Being, in which humans play a vital role, but of which humans are not the prime movers. As we have already seen, even when Heidegger criticizes those who take a neutralist stance toward technology, he still describes the neu- tralist as having been “delivered over to” this stance. Similarly, when Heidegger begins to investigate the neutralist stance by questioning what instrumentality means, he moves from instrumentality to causality to Aristotle’s “doctrine of the four

”14 Heidegger makes this move in order to show how we have today collapsed causality to one cause, to “causa efficiens,” to the cause where we typically locate the role humans play in causality, a collapse which is indicative of the rela- tionship between instrumentality and causality, of means/ends thinking THE HAMMER OF THE GODS 41 taking over cause/effect thinking. To challenge this view, Heidegger does not merely argue that we need to return to Aristotle and appre- ciate the role of the other three causes but rather argues that we need to return to Aristotle in order to see that we are wrong to view humans as causa efficiens in the first place.

Heidegger writes, “Finally there is a fourth participant in the responsibility for the finished sacrificial vessel’s lying before us ready for use,, the silversmith—but not at all be- cause he, in working, brings about the finished sacrificial chalice as if it were the effect of a making; the silversmith is not a causa ”15 The silversmith does not create the silver chalice but rather partici- pates in the creation, sharing “responsibility” for creation with the three causes, with the causa materialis (silver), with the causa formalis (chal- ice-ness), with the causa finalis (ritual). The three causes are respon- sible for the chalice in the sense that the chalice is “indebted” to the causes for its existence.

Yet the responsibility of the silversmith seems to be of a different order as, for Heidegger, the silversmith appears to be “responsible” for the chalice in the sense of having the ability to respond, in the sense of having answered the call of the three causes so as to gather them together to bring forth the chalice. Heidegger’s thought here seems to be similar to the description of sculpture by Michelangelo put forth in one of his sonnets, which begins: The best of artists hath no thought to show Which the rough stone in its superfluous shell Doth not include: to break the marble spell Is all the hand that serves the brain can

16 The sculptor does not create sculptures from out of nothing but re- sponds to what is present in the stone, revealing what is already there. Heidegger however expands this thought to seemingly apply to any activity we would typically describe as human creativity, even applying it to Plato, as he writes, “The fact that the real has been showing itself in the light of Ideas ever since the time of Plato, Plato did not bring about. The thinker only responded to what addressed itself to ”17 The idea that humanity’s role is to answer the call of Being, to bear witness to Being, to let the truth of Being reveal itself, can be found throughout Heidegger’s

18 Yet if the purpose of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology is to argue that we need to question Enfram- ing such that we can attain a “free relation” to technology, it is not clear what would be gained by having won our freedom from technology if CHAPTER 3 42 seemingly we would nevertheless not be free to be much more than passive observers in our relation to Being. As Heidegger writes, “Wherever man opens his eyes and ears, unlocks his heart, and gives himself over to meditating and striving, shaping and working, entreating and thanking, he finds himself everywhere already brought into the

”19 Enframing conceals the truth of Being, blocking us from serving our purpose, but if our purpose is merely to serve, to be thankful for having been “brought into the unconcealed,” then it ap- pears the “illusion” of freedom presented to us by Enframing might in the end be preferable to the reality Heidegger hopes we can recover. Indeed even when Heidegger explicitly discusses freedom, he still man- ages to make freedom seem somehow passive and unappealing, as for example when he writes, “Man is only an administrator of freedom,, he can only let-be the freedom which is accorded to him, in such a way that, through man, the whole contingency of freedom becomes vis-

”20 Though Heidegger is often described as an existential phenomenolo- gist, he is clearly opposed to the idea of freedom that has come to be associated with Existentialism. Heidegger himself states this opposition in his “Letter on ‘Humanism’” where he explicitly distances himself from Sartre, and in particular from Sartre’s “basic tenet” that “Existence precedes essence,”21 the tenet that defines humanity as essentially hav- ing no essence, as essentially free, free to define our essence for our- selves. Contrary to this idea, Heidegger writes: The human being is rather “thrown” by being itself into the truth of being, so that ek-sisting in this fashion he might guard the truth of being, in order that beings might appear in the light of being as the beings they are.

Human beings do not decide whether and how beings appear, whether and how God and the gods or history and nature come forward into the clearing of being, come to presence and depart. The advent of beings lies in the destiny of being. But for humans it is ever a question of finding what is fitting in their essence that corresponds to such destiny; for in accord with this destiny the human being as ek-sisting has to guard the truth of being. The hu- man being is the shepherd of 22 To be human is to find oneself in a particular historical period, a histori- cal period determined not by humans but by Being, by the Being that

THE HAMMER OF THE GODS 43 gives us our destiny, a destiny of guarding and shepherding Being. Yet as guards and shepherds of Being we still play no role in shaping Being, no role in deciding how Being or beings or even history appears or disappears. Again, if technology serves to block us from realizing that this is our destiny and presents us instead with the illusion of freedom, it is perhaps no wonder that we have so embraced technology. Heidegger is not blind to this issue though, as he himself raises in his “Letter” the concern that if we are enslaved by technology, if we are alienated by technology, then surely we need to respond with ethics rather than with ontology, with a focus on humanity rather than with a focus on Being.

Heidegger writes: The desire for an ethics presses ever more ardently for fulfillment as the obvious no less than the hidden perplexity of human beings soars to immeasurable heights. The greatest care must be fostered upon the ethical bond at a time when technological human beings, de- livered over to mass society, can attain reliable constancy only by gathering and ordering all their plans and activities in a way that corresponds to technology. Yet Heidegger continues: Who can disregard our predicament? Should we not safeguard and secure the existing bonds even if they hold human beings together ever so tenuously and merely for the present?

Certainly. But does this need ever release thought from the task of thinking what still remains principally to be thought and, as being, prior to all beings, is their guarantor and their truth? Even further, can thinking refuse to think being after the latter has lain hidden so long in oblivion but at the same time has made itself known in the present moment of world history by the uprooting of all 23 Heidegger here moves from ethics back to ontology, trying to show that even when we are facing an ethical crisis like that presented by technol- ogy we should nevertheless remain focused on ontology.

An ethical crisis does not automatically “release” us from our “task,” the task we cannot “refuse,” the task of ontology, of thinking about Being rather than merely thinking about human beings. Heidegger next moves how- ever to merge ethics and ontology, arguing “that thinking which thinks the truth of being as the primordial element of the human being, as one CHAPTER 3 44 who eksists, is in itself originary ”24 But Heidegger ultimately concludes that this thinking is “neither ethics nor ontology,” as this thinking is “neither theoretical nor practical,” as it has “no result,” has “no effect,” but is simply “recollection of being and nothing

”25 In other words, our task is to be concerned with Being, not for any ethical or even ontological benefit but simply because that is our task, because that is what it means to be human. We can now see that Heidegger is not particularly interested in technology, nor even in humanity, but only in Being. For this reason Heidegger only thinks about the relationship between technology and humanity from the perspective of Being, and from the perspective of what he perceives as humanity’s role in the destiny of Being. Yet, we must ask, does humanity have a destiny?

Is there a destiny to which humanity belongs? For Heidegger, such questioning is the piety of thinking, such questioning sets us on our way to Being. For Nietzsche, such questioning is the thinking of piety, such questioning sets us on our way to nihilism. In The Will to Power—in a note which begins with the declaration, “Against determinism and teleology”26—Nietzsche writes: As soon as we imagine someone who is responsible for our being thus and thus, etc. (God, nature), and therefore attribute to him the intention that we should exist and be happy or wretched, we corrupt for ourselves the innocence of becoming.

We then have someone who wants to achieve something through us and with 27 In other words, to focus as Heidegger does on Being rather than on becoming, on the destiny of humanity rather than on the humanity operating behind the concept of “destiny,” is to commit the mistake of not having “ceased to look for the origin of evil behind the world,”28 a mistake that Nietzsche tells us in the Genealogy that he “learned early” to avoid. Though Nietzsche is arguing against “theological prejudice,” against the thinking that leads us to look above or behind the world for answers to our questions, we could apply this argument to what we could call Heidegger’s “ontological prejudice” by arguing that we should not look below or within the world either, as we must instead be willing to look at ourselves.

The irony here is that Heidegger questions not only the essence of technology but also “the essence of nihilism,”29 two questionings that so THE HAMMER OF THE GODS 45 well parallel each other that one could seemingly replace “Enframing” with “will to power” in order to reveal that the two lectures—lectures that Heidegger gave only six years apart from each other—are two sides of the same argument. Yet it is precisely their similarity that is the problem for, even in his analyses of Nietzsche and nihilism, Heidegger still turns nihilism into a “historical movement,” a “fundamental ongo- ing event that is scarcely recognized in the destining of the Western peoples,” and “the world-historical movement of the peoples of the earth who have been drawn into the power realm of the modern

”30 Heidegger thus turns Nietzsche into a Heideggerian, into a thinker of Being rather than of becoming. If therefore we disagree with Heidegger and side with Nietzsche, then we can disagree with Heidegger that humanity has a destiny that requires the thinking of Being and instead agree with Nietzsche that humanity has not a destiny but a prejudice toward “destiny” thinking, a prejudice that requires that we investigate becoming. We can still retain Heidegger’s insights into what technology means for human experi- ence, insights into the ways that technology reveals and conceals the world, but we can do so without having to retain the deterministic conclusions that Heidegger draws from these insights.

And such a Nietzschean31 reappropriation of Heidegger is precisely what we find in the philosophy of technology of Don Ihde, the philosophy that he has named postphenomenology. 3.3 IHDE AND TECHNOLOGIES Postphenomenology is centered on what Ihde calls “human-technology ”32 These relations are not meant to be taken as merely how humans and technologies relate to each other, as the latest version of subject/object dualism, but rather as how, through these relations, hu- mans and technologies become what they are. Postphenomenological investigations are therefore investigations into co-constitution,33 into how technological beings, in a technological world, come to have mean- ing in, and through, and for each other.

Devices are not inert tools that I can pick up, use, and discard, for in picking up, using, and even in discarding a device I must already have a meaningful relationship with the device such that I can recognize it, CHAPTER 3 46 manipulate it, and become bored with it. The device must already have a place in my world and must already have the ability to shape, or mediate,34 my experience of the world in order for me to even know that it is a device. A fork is not merely a metal stick at the end of which are three smaller metal sticks, it is an ability to eat, a way to transform a plate of food into a meal, into a dish of mouth-sized bits of nourishment to be taken up as needed or desired.

A fork may start out, perhaps when first seen in one’s infancy, as metal to be played with, thrown, stabbed, or drummed, but it quickly becomes so tied to hunger that these once- infantile fork games are only later reverted to as a way of sublimating our frustration for not eating when expected, games we later play with the fork almost as if we see the fork as itself being as frustrated as we are. To say that a fork is “frustrated” may sound like an appeal to ani- mism—suggesting that objects can be alive even if inanimate—or an appeal to projection—suggesting that objects are receptacles of whatev- er desires, feelings, emotions their human users imbue them with.

Yet in either case we are returned to the very subject/object dualism that postphenomenology is meant to transcend. In animism a fork can be seen as a subject modeled after human subjectivity, while in projection a fork can be seen as an object that a human subject can manipulate psychologically just as a subject would manipulate an object physically. Rather, what must be seen is that, for the child relating to the fork as a participant in a game or for the adult relating to the fork as a participant in a meal, there is no fork independent of the specific human-technolo- gy relation in which it is engaged, just as there is no child or adult independent of that same engaged relation.

As Wittgenstein tried to reveal in his Philosophical Investigations, we are easily tricked by language into holding certain philosophical positions, even if we do not realize it. Thus the name “fork” appears to suggest to us an object in the world that is predefined, predetermined, and whose determinate definition is maintained across any and all pos- sible uses we might find for it. In other words, a fork forks, and a fork forks regardless of whatever particular forking we might be trying to engage in at any given moment. From this perspective, to stab someone with a fork is to misuse a fork for which reason we can, and often do,

THE HAMMER OF THE GODS 47 scold others for using forks wrongly, for using a fork in a way that does not correspond to its proper use. However, from the postphenomenological perspective, to stab someone with a fork is to relate to a fork as a participant in a murder plot. To see a fork as a way to murder someone is to not only constitute the fork as a potential weapon but, vitally, is to constitute myself simul- taneously as a potential murderer. The intentional relation of I → Fork → Murder co-constitutes myself as Murderer and the fork as Weapon such that, within the relation, there is no “fork” outside of its weapon- ness and there is no “me” outside of my murderousness.

Unlike the aforementioned deterministic perspective, for the postphenomenolo- gist, here it is not the case that a fork can be seen as a weapon but rather that a weapon can be seen as a “fork,” just as it is not the case that a person can be seen as a murderer but rather that a murderer can be seen as a ” In other words, there is no fork, there is no me, there is only the intentional relation. Through postphenomenology we have arrived at an ontology based not on subjects and objects but on intentional relations, an ontology that is perhaps the truest realization of Husserl’s lifelong attempt to make phenomenology a presuppositionless science of intentionality.

Such an ontology is centered not on Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am,” or even on “I intend, therefore I am,” but rather the more radical claim: “Intentional beings intend, therefore intentional beings ” To return to the aforementioned fork example, we can now say that, in the I → Fork → Murder relation, there is the intentional being “I” and the intentional being “Fork,” but it is only through the relation “→ Murder” that “I” and “Fork” exist, and exist, more specifically, as “Murderer” and “Weapon” respectively. In other words, to say “I am a murderer” is to say “I, as the being who has an intentional relation with a being in- tended to be a weapon and a being intended to be a victim, am a

” Contrary to the fears of Heidegger, postphenomenology does not see our relationship with technology as dystopic or deterministic, pre- cisely because of this co-constitutive nature of the human-technology relationship. Postphenomenologists refer to the “multistability”35 of technologies to point out—as was shown earlier with the fork exam- ple—that because technologies have no inherent being outside of inten- tional relations, there can be nothing inherently fearful or determining CHAPTER 3 48 about technologies. Like the “duck-rabbit” optical illusion, technologies have no stable essence but only various stabilities, or various ways of being related to, none of which can be said to be “true” or “false,” “right” or

” This does not guarantee that human-technology relations must be instrumental or beneficial either but instead simply refutes any argument based on making a priori claims about how users will relate to technologies or, contra Heidegger, any claim about what technology is. And yet this relational view of technologies does not originate with Ihde; it comes from Heidegger, from the Heidegger of Being and Time, from the “positive”36 Heidegger who Ihde appropriates in order to chal- lenge the “negative” views of the Heidegger of “The Question Concern- ing ” Whereas in the later work Heidegger focuses on the distinction between ancient technology and modern technology in or- der to illuminate the difference between bringing-forth and challeng- ing-forth, in the earlier work Heidegger focuses on the distinction be- tween functioning technologies and malfunctioning technologies in or- der to illuminate the difference between “Being-in-the-world”37 and subject/object dualism.

Though in both works Heidegger’s primary fo- cus is on Being, and the need for humanity to take up our proper role in relation to Being, nevertheless in Being and Time Heidegger explores the uses of specific technologies in specific contexts without making pronouncements about how the particular historical period we live in must determine our relationship to any technology in any 38 The most famous example of such an exploration is Heidegger’s discussion of using a 39 When hammering, according to Hei- degger, we have a more “primordial” relationship to the world, as we do not pay attention to the hammer but simply use it.

In hammering, the hammer is not a hammer but is an “in-order-to,” that which we use to do our work, the work that we are paying attention to instead, the work that is the “toward-this” of the hammering. Heidegger’s primary insight here—the insight from which Ihde develops his philosophy of technolo- gy—is that for the hammer to function as an “in-order-to,” in hammer- ing, the hammer must “withdraw”40 from our attention so that we can do our work, so that the “toward-this” of our work can occupy our attention instead. This insight helps to explain why we so frequently hit our thumbs when hammering since, in hammering, neither the hammer nor even

THE HAMMER OF THE GODS 49 our own bodies are the focus of our concern. Yet when we do hit our thumbs, when we do use the hammer and something unexpected oc- curs, our attention is suddenly taken away from our work and put in- stead solely on the hammer, which we then see no longer as an “in- order-to” but only as a hammer. Or, to be more precise, what we see in such a breakdown situation is not the hammer but the in-order-to-ness of the hammer. As Heidegger writes: But when an assignment has been disturbed—when something is unusable for some purpose—then the assignment becomes explicit.

Even now, of course, it has not become explicit as an ontological structure; but it has become explicit ontically for the circumspection which comes up against the damaging of the tool. When an assign- ment to some particular “towards-this” has been thus circumspec- tively aroused, we catch sight of the “towards-this” itself, and along with it everything connected with the work—the whole “work- shop”—as that wherein concern always dwells. The context of equip- ment is lit up, not as something never seen before, but as a totality constantly sighted beforehand in circumspection. With this totality, however, the world announces

41 Not unlike the law of conservation of energy, Heidegger argues that humans have something like a law of conservation of attention, that we can be concerned with work or we can be concerned with the world but not with both simultaneously. The world, as a referential totality, as a totality of every “in-order-to” and “towards-this,” only “announces it- self” when our work has been “disturbed,” when we are taken out of our practical mode of working and are instead led to take up a more theo- retical mode, following the suddenly apparent chain of references in order to figure out what went wrong.

Rather than follow Heidegger—moving from the ontic to the onto- logical, from the everydayness of hammering to the meaning of Being— Ihde remains within the ontic, establishing postphenomenology as a research program into the human-technology relations of everyday life, a research program meant to steer clear of the “negative” conclusions of Heidegger’s ontology. Ihde thus turns Heidegger’s analysis of hammer- ing into an exemplar of how to carry out analyses of human-technology relations, analyses which lead Ihde to expand the field of human-tech- nology relations beyond Heidegger’s examples, resulting in analyses CHAPTER 3 50 into four types of relations: “embodiment relations,”42 “hermeneutic relations,”43 “alterity relations,”44 and “background

”45 Embodiment relations occur when a technology functions for a user like a body part, expanding and extending the physical abilities of users, such that the user experiences empowerment without experiencing the technology that is enabling the empowering. The classic example of an embodiment relation—other than Heidegger’s hammer example—is wearing a pair of glasses, as glasses enhance eyesight while disappearing from view. The better the glasses, the less likely it is that the glasses wearer will take notice of them, for which reason we say, “I see you,” rather than, “My glasses and I see

” We do not mention the glasses in everyday conversation because the “I” has come to include the glasses. To make this relationship more clear, Ihde formalizes such embodiment relations as: (I-Technology) → World46 We perceive the world through embodiment technologies, but this per- ception is achieved, as Heidegger described, by such technologies with- drawing from concern so that we can be concerned instead with the world that these technologies help to reveal. While such technologies can easily be listed—such as binoculars, ear buds, microphones, ham- mers, and shoes—because of the multistable nature of technologies it is important to recognize that we can potentially experience embodiment relations with almost any technology, like when we use a book as a hammer or when we use a smartphone to move something just out of reach.

The specific technology is not therefore what defines an embodi- ment relation but rather the specific technology’s dynamic of revealing and withdrawing in the form of the amplification of our perception and the reduction of our awareness of the technology mediating our percep- 47 Hermeneutic relations occur when a technology functions for a user like a translator, expanding and extending the interpretive abilities of users, such that the user feels informed without thinking about the technology that is enabling the informing. An example of a hermeneutic relation is reading a book, as a book conveys information while the lines that make up the letters and the letters that make up the words and the words that make up the sentences are all absorbed into the experience

THE HAMMER OF THE GODS 51 of reading. Again, the better the book, the less likely it is that the reader will take notice of the lines, words, and sentences, for which reason we say, “I read a story,” rather than, “I read a collection of various lines that combine to form a ” Ihde formalizes hermeneutic relations as: I → (Technology-World)48 The world that we learn about through hermeneutic technologies is a world that we only have access to through hermeneutic technologies, technologies that merge with the world we are attempting to learn about such that the technology and the world become indistinguishable.

Again, thanks to multistability, what is important here is not the particu- lar technology involved in a hermeneutic relation—whether it be an artifact, a map, a website, or an app—but rather the particular technol- ogy’s dynamic of revealing and withdrawing in the form of the presence of the world we are given access to and the absence of our awareness of the technology mediating that 49 Alterity relations occur when a technology functions for a user like an other, like a person or animal, acting independently of the user, expanding and extending the interactive abilities of users, such that the users experience the presence of a seemingly autonomous being with- out thinking about the technology that is enabling the semblance of autonomy.

An example of an alterity relation is playing a game against a computer, as the computer opponent challenges us and entertains us, leading us to feel inferior to the computer when we lose and to feel superior to the computer when we win, as if the computer opponent could likewise feel inferiority or superiority toward us. Once more, the better the game, the less likely it is that the user will take notice of the programming operating behind the computer opponent, for which rea- son we say, “I beat the computer,” rather than, “I beat the program- ming that determined the moves made by the

” Ihde for- malizes alterity relations as: I → Technology-(-World)50 Unlike embodiment and hermeneutic relations, alterity relations focus our attention on technologies rather than on the world. Yet with the disappearance of the world from our concern so too does the nature of the specific technology disappear, leaving us feeling that we are in the CHAPTER 3 52 presence of a living being rather than a technology created by living beings to simulate the behavior of living beings. Multistability plays a role here too, such that the particular technology—whether a toy, a robot, a game, or a Siri—is less important than the particular technolo- gy’s dynamic of revealing and withdrawing in the form of fascination with the liveliness of the technology and obliviousness with regard to the

51 Background relations occur when a technology functions for a user like a part of the environment, operating unnoticed, expanding and extending the attentive abilities of users such that users can pay atten- tion to the world without having to pay attention to the technologies working behind the scenes to enable the user’s attentiveness. An exam- ple of a background relation is a refrigerator, as the refrigerator keeps food edible for us, through a process that we need not understand and that we likely would prefer not to think about. Hence the better the refrigerator, the less likely it is that we will think about the refrigerator, for which reason we say, “This food is good,” rather than, “This food, which was kept fresh in the refrigerator, is

” Ihde does not formal- ize background relations, however we could imagine that if he had, it would look something like the following: I → World-(-Technology) Background relations are thus the reverse of alterity relations, as our attention is focused on the world rather than on technologies even though, as with alterity relations, our attention’s focus is due to the automaticity of the technology, to the ability of the technology to func- tion without our involvement. Yet the technologies that fade out of our awareness are still a vital part of our world, hence the world that we focus on in background relations is an incomplete world, a world where things work but in a taken-for-granted way.

It is for this reason that multistability operates even in background relations, making the partic- ular technology—such as lighting, heating, plumbing, electricity, or Wi- Fi—less important than the particular technology’s dynamic of reveal- ing and withdrawing in the form of the absent presence of the technolo- gy and the present absence of the 52 Following Heidegger, Ihde not only focuses on the dynamics of re- vealing and withdrawing at work in human-technology relations in opti- THE HAMMER OF THE GODS 53 mal situations but also focuses on how such dynamics work in subopti- mal, or “breakdown,”53 situations.

Embodiment technologies have the ability to empower us, but they also have the ability to belittle us, reveal- ing when they break how dependent on technologies we have become. Hermeneutic technologies have the ability to enlighten us, but they also have the ability to betray us, revealing when they misinform us how much faith we put into technologies. Alterity technologies have the ability to entertain us, but they also have the ability to enrage us, reveal- ing when they impede us how much emotional investment we have put into technologies. Background technologies have the ability to enliven us, but they also have the ability to incapacitate us, revealing when they malfunction how reliant on technologies we have become.

For Ihde, these breakdown situations show that whereas Heidegger was right that we do not have a merely instrumental relationship with technologies, Heidegger was wrong that we have a merely deterministic relationship with technologies. Ihde writes: In extending bodily capacities, the technology also transforms them. In that sense, all technologies in use are non-neutral. They change the basic situation, however subtly, however minimally; but this is the other side of the desire. The desire is simultaneously a desire for a change in situation—to inhabit the earth, or even to go beyond the earth—while sometimes inconsistently and secretly wishing that this movement could be without the mediation of the technology.

[...] In the wish there remains the contradiction: the user both wants and does not want the technology. The user wants what the technology gives but does not want the limits, the transformations that a techno- logically extended body implies. There is a fundamental ambivalence toward the very human creation of our own earthly 54 Technologies mediate our experience of the world, and mediate our experience of ourselves. That this mediation occurs in a “non-neutral” way does not mean that technologies determine our experiences but rather that technologies give us exactly what we want, fulfilling our “desire for a change in

” The problem, according to Ihde, is that, while we want the situational changes that technologies provide, we do not necessarily want technologies to have to provide these changes for us. CHAPTER 3 54 3.4 NIETZSCHE AND NIHILISM-TECHNOLOGY RELATIONS Technologies reveal who we are and, most importantly, technologies reveal that we have a “fundamental ambivalence” toward technologies, simultaneously wanting and not wanting technologies in our lives. We know we want what technologies do; we also know we do not want technologies to do what they do, at least insofar as technologies reveal that we want and often need technologies to do what we are incapable of doing on our own.

Rather than the Heideggerian concern that we are enslaved to technologies, Ihde points toward a much greater concern, the concern that we are not blindly delivered over to technologies but are well aware of what technologies do, what technologies do to us, for us, and with us, yet we continue to use technologies nevertheless. And it is this nevertheless that we must investigate. If we focus less on Being and more on Capitalism, we can see how we have come to be aware of technologies in ways that Heidegger did not think possible. Technologies have not only become increasingly prevalent in our everyday lives, they have also become increasingly likely to break, to misinform, to impede, to malfunction during their everyday use.

Whereas in Heidegger’s day it may have been a rare occurrence for a hammer to break, and thus a rare occurrence for someone to experience in such a breakdown situation the role that a hammer plays in our experience, today it is in no way a surprise for a hammer, or for any technology, to break. Thanks to the drive to max- imize profits by minimizing the costs of production, mass production and cheap materials have combined to surround us with technologies that are made not to last but to be replaced, providing us ample oppor- tunities to discover the roles that technologies play in our everyday lives.

It is here that we can begin to see the role that nihilism can play in human-technology relations. We continue to use technologies that have the ever-present possibility to belittle us, to betray us, to enrage us, and to incapacitate us, and yet this continued use is done not blindly but willingly. Or, to be more precise, we willingly make ourselves blind to these possibilities by taking them for granted, by treating them as just the price we must pay in order to be empowered, enlightened, enter- tained, and enlivened. Technologies have not, as Heidegger predicted,

THE HAMMER OF THE GODS 55 led us to feel like we are masters of the universe but rather something closer to middle management. We are forever in negotiations with our technologies, treating them as partners in a bad relationship, trying to make ourselves comfortable with the idea that even though technolo- gies are not always good for us, we just cannot seem to live without them. So we settle for what we have, we enjoy the good and try to ignore the bad, while we wait for a newer, younger model to come along to hopefully provide what we are missing.

In this way, through our ambivalence toward technologies, we con- tinue to come closer and closer to Heidegger’s determinism. We relate to technologies as if they were our destiny, as if we were blind to their effects on us, as if we had no freedom to change our situation. By bringing Nietzsche and Ihde together to investigate this way of relating to technologies, we can discover a new type of human-technology rela- tion, a type of relation I call nihilism relations. Nihilism relations can be formalized as: Technology → World-(-I) Whereas in alterity relations the world fades from our concern, and in background relations the technology fades from our concern, in nihi- lism relations the I fades from our concern.

To put it another way, in nihilism relations, it is our concern that fades from our concern, which is what takes place whenever we use technologies while trying to con- ceal from ourselves the dangers of using technologies, for which reason we say, “I can’t believe I spent all day on my computer,” rather than, “I can’t believe I am not taking responsibility for having spent all day on my ” As with the human-technology relations Ihde identified, here too multistability is operative, making the particular technology involved in a nihilism relation less important than the particular technology’s dy- namic of revealing and withdrawing.

However, this dynamic can take several forms, as Nietzsche already indicated in his investigations into what I have called human-nihilism relations. In order to investigate our ambivalence toward technologies, we must bring together the insights from Nietzsche’s analyses of human-nihilism relations with the insights from Ihde’s analyses of human-technology relations and begin a new research program into what I call nihilism-technology relations. CHAPTER 3 56 In the chapters that follow I will try to show how this research could be carried out, and to make clear why this research should be carried out, by providing case studies of various technologies.

These case stud- ies will explore not only how technologies in our everyday lives are already being used nihilistically but also how using technologies nihilis- tically can be dangerous. Yet in the end these dangers will lead us in the final chapter not toward a Heideggerian pessimism, not toward a deter- ministic view of the destiny of Being, but rather toward a Nietzschean optimism, an optimism focused on moving from the understanding of what it means to be human that arises from reckoning with the death of God to forging a new understanding of what it means to be human from reckoning with the death of Google.

NOTES 1. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 3. 2. Heidegger, “Question,” 4. 3. Heidegger, “Question,” 5. 4. Heidegger, “Question,” 12. 5. Heidegger, “Question,” 13. 6. Heidegger, “Question,” 14. 7. Heidegger, “Question,” 15. 8. Heidegger, “Question,” 17. 9. Heidegger, “Question,” 19. 10. Heidegger, “Question,” 18. 11. Heidegger, “Question,” 28. 12. Heidegger, “Question,” 24. 13. Heidegger, “Question,” 35. 14. Heidegger, “Question,” 7. 15. Heidegger, “Question,” 8. 16. J. A. Symonds, “Twenty-three Sonnets from Michael Angelo,” The Con- temporary Review 20 (1872): 513.

17. Heidegger, “Question,” 18. 18. For more on this thematic continuity in Heidegger see for example Raffoul’s discussion of Heidegger in François Raffoul, The Origins of Respon- sibility (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010). As Raffoul points out, to make this theme more clear in his work, “after Being and THE HAMMER OF THE GODS 57 Time, Dasein will be referred to more and more as ‘the called one’ (der Geru- fene), having to answer for the very openness and givenness of being and be its ‘guardian’” (Raffoul, Origins of Responsibility, 244). 19. Heidegger, “Question,” 18–19.

20. Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Ted Sadler (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), 94. 21. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism’,” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 250. 22. Heidegger, “Letter,” 252. 23. Heidegger, “Letter,” 268. 24. Heidegger, “Letter,” 271. 25. Heidegger, “Letter,” 272. 26. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 297. 27. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 299. See also Nietzsche, Will to Power, 59–60, where Nietzsche criticizes Schopenhauer for having succumbed to the “nine- teenth century” search “for theories that seem to justify its fatalistic submission to matters of fact,” for “determinism,” and for “the denial of will as an ‘efficient

” 28. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 17. 29. Martin Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead,’” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 53–112. 30. Heidegger, “Question,” 62–63. 31. Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld (Bloomington and Indianapo- lis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 224. 32. Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 21. 33. Peter-Paul Verbeek, What Things Do, trans. Robert P. Crease (Univer- sity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 129–30. 34. Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 44–46. 35. Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 144. 36. Don Ihde, Technics and Praxis (Dordrecht: D.

Reidel, 1979), 125. 37. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 78. 38. On this distinction between Heidegger’s earlier and later works see also Verbeek, What Things Do, 80. 39. Heidegger, Being and Time, 98. 40. Heidegger, Being and Time, 99. 41. Heidegger, Being and Time, 105. 42. Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 72. 43. Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 80.