Technology and modernity

Abstract

In the crisis scenarios of modernity which flourished in the Weimar Republic, technology is typically seen as destiny or fate. Thus Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger both construe the coming struggle for world power in terms of the integration of production and technology in the industrial-military complex. Martin Heidegger’s critique of Jünger’s blueprint for total mobilization in Der Arbeiter (1932) springs from his reading of modernity as nihilism. Just as the crisis of Western history is reaching completion in modernity, so equally metaphysics reaches completion in modern technology. Heidegger’s essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, written after the Second World War, is contrasted with Ernst Cassirer’s essay ‘Form and Technology’ (1930), directed against Spengler’s regression to irrationalism, in terms of two fundamental relationships to the world: Heidegger’s Greek-oriented ontology of world disclosure and Cassirer’s modern ontology of construction (the possibilization of the world) with reference to technology and art.