In the Event of Words: Art, Technology, and Language in the Later Heidegger
Vaughan, William Park
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/72600
Description
Title
In the Event of Words: Art, Technology, and Language in the Later Heidegger
Author(s)
Vaughan, William Park
Issue Date
1992
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Schacht, Richard L.
Department of Study
Philosophy
Discipline
Philosophy
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Philosophy
Language, General
Abstract
For Heidegger, questioning technology is of the utmost difficulty. The questioning runs into danger if it addresses technology in terms of a problem to be solved, for this orders the questioning solely within the framework of that orientation which was to be set into question. The kind of questioning which responds to problems never really "sets into question," but rather fixes and secures that about which it questions. When questioning technology one is confronted with the danger that one will not in truth ask about technology but only execute its mandate. The "universal imposition" of technology is of such a completion in modernity that for the later Heidegger the question concerning it can scarcely be raised.
The central task of my doctoral dissertation is to fully understand how the "poetic" is at work both in Heidegger's trenchant description of the universal imposition of technology in modern thought, and in Heidegger's remarks on art and language. The "poetic" serves as an approach to thinking about technology which is not in itself technological. For Heidegger, technology is but the "finished face" of a metaphysics of presence at work in thought since antiquity, a technological metaphysics which allows no gap or seam by which to construe it in any way other than its own procedures. Yet it is this very seamless extremity which allows the question of technology to be raised. I argue that, through insights into the artwork and later, poetic language, Heidegger discerns contexts of significance other than those of technology. Art's present distance from the sway of technology at the center serves in a way that is revealing. Heidegger's later remarks on the "poetic," however, seek to show that even the idea of art as in the service of a preservation of possibility is rejected as "too technological." I demonstrate how this equation is at work throughout Heidegger's later remarks on the "poetic," remarks which themselves work furiously to elude "technology's grasp."
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