Heidegger, fenomenologia, hermenêutica, existênciaIronically, the way to our own is blocked by our own attempt to bring everything under our own steering power. For cybernetics, “the basic feature of all calculable world processes is steering. The steering of one process by another is mediated by the transmission of a message, by information ” (Heidegger 1983a, 141). From this point of view, “the difference between automatic machines and living beings … is neutralized into an undifferentiated information process.” The relation between [186] human being and world becomes nothing but the ultimate feedback loop. The aspect of human beings that can best be understood as calculable information is “the program for development” that is “stored” in human genes (142). Biotechnology thus promises to control our evolution, although for the moment human behavior remains an unpredictable “disruptive factor” (143). Futurology and the cybernetic control of industrial society try to compensate for this unpredictability by creating a world where “humanity bases itself exclusively upon itself and on the domains of its lived world that it has formed into institutions” (144). Experience and activity are now confined by calculating will: “the human being remains closed up in the sphere of possibilities that have been computed by and for him … industrial society exists on the ground of its enclosure in its own contrivances.” Art threatens to become nothing but information processing (145). What is lost is openness to destiny— “what first sends humanity into its own vocation” (146). In an exchange of letters about his Athens lecture, Heidegger agrees with Arendt ’s comment that in the futurological calculation of the future, the genuine future as what comes toward humanity, rather than from it, is abolished (Arendt and Heidegger 2004, 170-171).
This regime cannot be broken by some act of will—that would simply perpetuate the dynamic of control. Our representation of beings in terms of information and steering depends, ultimately, on the Western understanding of being as presence, and on the appropriating event that eludes all information gathering and control. What is required, then, is meditative thought that retrieves the Greek beginning to discover what remained unthought in it: the event of primal unconcealment that first illuminates what is present. The role of art may be to indicate the concealment that accompanies this unconcealment, alerting us to “what cannot be planned or steered, cannot be calculated or made” (Heidegger 1983a, 148).
In other texts, Heidegger clarifies why he sees our entire age as cybernetic. Cybernetics is not just one science among others, but the master science, and as such, it is taking the place of philosophy. Philosophy can no longer creatively open ontological domains. Science has taken over the exploration of beings within the already exposed domains, and cybernetics can coordinate all sciences, since it allows us to organize all knowledge and steer all objects (Heidegger TB , 58/GA 14, 72; FCM, 368/GA 29/30, 534-35; PA, 259n/GA 9, 341; FS, 26, 63/GA 15 , 51, 59; 2009a, 328).
But what is “steering”? Does it necessarily involve coercion? Perhaps cybernetics itself is steered by a noncoercive steering (Heidegger and Fink HS, 12). It may be that the essence of cybernetics is nothing cybernetic: that is, our approach to the world in terms of control may itself be guided, in a non-controlling way, by a destiny that cybernetics itself cannot understand.
