Heidegger, fenomenologia, hermenêutica, existênciaThe novel powers I have in mind are, of course, those of modern technology. My first point, accordingly, is to ask how this technology affects the nature of our acting, in what ways it makes acting under its dominion different from what it has been through the ages. Since throughout those ages man was never without technology, the question involves the human difference of modern from previous technology. Let us start with an ancient voice on man’s powers and deeds which in an archetypal sense itself strikes, as it were, a technological note — the famous Chorus from Sophocles ’ Antigone.
Many the wonders but nothing more wondrous than man. This thing crosses the sea in the winter’s storm, making his path through the roaring waves. And she, the greatest of gods, the Earth — deathless she is, and unwearied — he wears her away as the ploughs go up and down from year to year and his mules turn up the soil.The tribes of the lighthearted birds he ensnares, and the races
of all the wild beasts and the salty brood of the sea,
with the twisted mesh of his nets, he leads captive, this clever man.
He controls with craft the beasts of the open air,
who roam the hills. The horse with his shaggy mane
he holds and harnesses, yoked about the neck,
and the strong bull of the mountain.Speech and thought like the wind
and the feelings that make the town,
he has taught himself, and shelter against the cold,
refuge from rain. Ever resourceful is he.
He faces no future helpless. Only against death
shall he call for aid in vain. But from baffling maladies
has he contrived escape.Clever beyond all dreams
the inventive craft that he has
which may drive him one time or another to well or ill.
When he honors the laws of the land and the gods’ sworn right
high indeed is his city; but stateless the man
who dares to do what is shameful. (lines 335-370)
This awestruck homage to man’s powers tells of his violent and violating irruption into the cosmic order, the self-assertive invasion of nature’s various domains by his restless cleverness; but also of his building — through the self-taught powers of speech and thought and social sentiment — the home for his very humanity, the artifact of the city. The raping of nature and the civilizing of himself go hand in hand. Both are in defiance of the elements, the one by venturing into them and overpowering their creatures, the other by securing an enclave against them in the shelter of the city and its laws. Man is the maker of his life qua human, bending circumstances to his will and needs, and except against death he is never helpless.
Yet there is a subdued and even anxious quality about this appraisal of the marvel that is man, and nobody can mistake it for immodest bragging. With all his boundless resourcefulness, man is still small by the measure of the elements: precisely this makes his sallies into them so daring and allows those elements to tolerate his forwardness. Making free with the denizens of land and sea and air, he yet leaves the encompassing nature of those elements unchanged, and their generative powers undiminished. Them he cannot harm by carving out his little dominion from theirs. They last, while his schemes have their short-lived way. Much as he harries Earth, the greatest of gods, year after year with his plough — she is ageless and unwearied; her enduring patience he must and can trust, and to her cycle he must conform. And just as ageless is the sea. With all his netting of the salty brood, the spawning ocean is inexhaustible. Nor is it hurt by the plying of ships, nor sullied by what is jettisoned into its deeps. And no matter how many illnesses he contrives to cure, mortality does not bow to his cunning.
All this holds because man’s inroads into nature, as seen by himself, were essentially superficial, and powerless to upset its appointed balance. Nor is there a hint, in the Antigone chorus or anywhere else, that this is only a beginning and that greater things of artifice and power are yet to come — that man is embarked on an endless course of conquest. He had gone thus far in reducing necessity, had learned by his wits to wrest that much from it for the humanity of his life, and there he could stop. The room he had thus made was filled by the city of men — meant to enclose, and not to expand — and thereby a new balance was struck within the larger balance of the whole. All the well or ill to which man’s inventive craft may drive him one time or another is inside the human enclave and does not touch the nature of things.
The immunity of the whole, untroubled in its depth by the importunities of man, that is, the essential immutability of Nature as the cosmic order, was indeed the backdrop to all of mortal man’s enterprises, including his intrusions into that order itself. Man’s life was played out between the abiding and the changing: the abiding was Nature, the changing his own works. The greatest of these works was the city, and on it he could confer some measure of abidingness by the laws he made for it and undertook to honor. But no long-range certainty pertained to this contrived abidingness. As a precarious artifact, it can lapse or go astray. Not even within its artificial space, with all the freedom it gives to man’s determination of self, can the arbitrary ever supersede the basic terms of his being. The very inconstancy of human fortunes assures the constancy of the human condition. Chance and luck and folly, the great equalizers in human affairs, act like an entropy of sorts and make all definite designs in the long run revert to the perennial norm. Cities rise and fall, rules come and go, families prosper and decline; no change is there to stay, and in the end, with all the temporary deflections balancing each other out, the state of man is as it always was. So here too, in his very own artifact, man’s control is small and his abiding nature prevails. Still, in this citadel of his own making, clearly set off from the rest of things and entrusted to him, was the whole and sole domain of man’s responsible action. Nature was not an object of human responsibility — she taking care of herself and, with some coaxing and worrying, also of man: not ethics, only cleverness applied to her. But in the city, where men deal with men, cleverness must be wedded to morality, for this is the soul of its being. In this intra-human frame dwells all traditional ethics and matches the nature of action delimited by this frame.
