Heidegger And Wittgenstein.pdf

Inquiry , 46, 324–345

Thinking and Being: Heidegger and

Wittgenstein on Machination and

Lived-Experience

Paul Livingston

University of California at Irvine

Heidegger’s treatment of ‘machination’ in the Beitr¨ ge zur Philosophie begins the

critique of technological thinking that would centrally characterize his later work.

Unlike later discussions of technology, the critique of machination in Beitr¨ ge

connects its arising to the predominance of ‘lived-experience’ ( Erlebnis ) as the

concealed basis for the possibility of a pre-delineated, rule-based metaphysical

understanding of the world. In this essay I explore this connection. The unity of

machination and lived-experience becomes intelligible when both are traced to their

common root in the primordial Greek attitude of techne , originally a basic attitude of

wondering knowledge of nature. But with this common root revealed, the basic

connection between machination and lived-experience also emerges as an important

development of one of the deepest guiding thoughts of the Western philosophical

tradition: the Parmenidean assertion of the sameness of being and thinking. In the

Beitr¨ ge ’s analysis of machination and lived-experience, Heidegger hopes to discover

a way of thinking that avoids the Western tradition’s constant basic assumption of

self-identity, an assumption which culminates in the modern picture of the

autonomous, self-identical subject aggressively set over against a pre-delineated world

of objects in a relationship of mutual confrontation. In the ﬁnal section, I investigate

an important and illuminating parallel to Heidegger’s result: the consideration of the

relationship between experience and technological ways of thinking that forms the

basis of the late Wittgenstein’s famous rule-following considerations.

In the singular, complex, and mysterious Beitr¨ ge zur Philosophie (Vom

Ereignis) , written between 1936 and 1938, Heidegger begins to articulate the

critique of the technological character of the modern world – a critique that

would become a guiding thread of his later thought. As is well known,

beginning in the 1940s Heidegger would consistently identify the character of

modern times as determined by technological ways of thinking and behaving,

ways that, according to Heidegger, manifest the most developed and injurious

forms of an abiding forgetfulness or loss that traces almost to the beginning of

the Western tradition. The discovery and unveiling of the hidden bases of the

technological character of modern thinking and acting thus became an

essential and familiar part of Heidegger’s narrative interpretation of the

history of Western thought from its ﬁrst beginning with the Greeks to its

anticipated, if wholly unforeseeable, future. But in Beitr¨ ge itself, the

Heideggerian critique of technology develops alongside what may be a

surprising result even to those familiar with late Heidegger: that the modern

DOI 10.1080/00201740310002398

2003 Taylor & Francis

Thinking and Being 325

dominance of technology and a technological way of thinking and relating to

things – what Heidegger calls, in the Beitr ¨ ge , ‘machination’ ( Machenschaft )

– is possible only through the conjoint emergence and growth of something

that seems at ﬁrst completely opposed to technology, namely individual,

subjective ‘lived-experience’ or Erlebnis .

In this essay, I investigate this surprising connection, arguing that its

discovery is essential to the development of Heidegger’s views about

technology and indeed that understanding it is an important prerequisite to

any comprehensive philosophical understanding of technological ways of

thinking and operating. I argue that the unity of machination and lived-

experience becomes intelligible when both are traced to their common root in

the primordial Greek attitude of techne , originally a basic attitude of

wondering knowledge of nature. But with this common root revealed, the

basic connection between machination and lived-experience also emerges as

an important development of one of the deepest guiding thoughts of the

Western philosophical tradition: the Parmenidean assertion of the sameness

of being and thinking. In the Beitr¨ ge ’s analysis of machination and lived-

experience, Heidegger hopes to discover a way of thinking that avoids the

Western tradition’s constant basic assumption of self-identity, an assumption

which culminates in the modern picture of the autonomous, self-identical

subject aggressively set over against a pre-delineated world of objects in a

relationship of mutual confrontation. In the ﬁnal section, I investigate an

important and illuminating parallel to Heidegger’s result: the consideration of

the relationship between experience and technological ways of thinking that

forms the basis of the late Wittgenstein’s famous rule-following considera-

tions. By reading Heidegger and Wittgenstein together, we can better

understand how a penetrating analysis of technology and experience can lead

us to question some of the deepest assumptions of the Western tradition and

orient us towards a fundamentally different kind of thought.

Reckoning with the Beitr¨ ge means reckoning with an enigmatic text, a text

whose organization is determined not externally by the usual form of a book,

but internally by the uniqueness and singularity of the thinking that Heidegger

is trying to enact. 1 Nevertheless, we can begin to understand Heidegger’s

remarks on the connection between machination and lived-experience by

understanding their place in the complex organization of Beitr¨ ge as a whole.

As is indicated by its second, ‘essential’ or ‘proper’ ( Wesentlich ) title, the

Beitr¨ ge ’s thematic and performative center is the singular event of Ereignis ,

the event of ‘enowning’ through which and as which being appears and comes

into its own. 2 ‘ Ereignis ’ is notoriously difﬁcult to deﬁne, or even to translate. 3

326 Paul Livingston

The English-language translators of Beitr¨ ge render it as ‘enowning’ in order

to reﬂect the sense of openness and movement present in the German preﬁx

Er -, together with the sense of something’s coming into its own ( eigen )or

proper domain; but ‘event’ and ‘appropriation’ are other common translations

that also reﬂect something of the sense of Heidegger’s use of the term. 4 In any

case, what is most essential to understand about Ereignis is that its occurrence

is the fundamental historical occurrence of being itself, its ‘opening up’ or

‘coming into its own’, what Heidegger sometimes calls the ‘essential swaying

of being’ [ der Wesung des Seyns ].

The Beitr¨ ge articulates the preparation for Ereignis through six richly

interlinked sections or ‘joinings’ [ F¨ gung ]. 5 The preparation for the event of

Ereignis , Heidegger tells us early in the Beitr¨ ge , is necessarily the

preparation for a ‘crossing’ toward ‘another beginning’ [ anderen Anfang ]

of history. 6 The ‘other beginning’ can arise only as a fundamentally new stage

of Western thinking that escapes the longstanding prejudices and unques-

tioned foundations of the Western tradition since Plato, now hardened into the

increasingly unthinking determination of thinking by technology and

calculation. But the preparation for the ‘other’ beginning is itself only

possible through a new understanding of the ﬁrst beginning, the beginning of

Western thinking in the thought of the pre-Socratics. The six ‘joinings’ that

comprise the structure of Beitr¨ ge exist, therefore, in suspension between two

decisive historical moments: the moment of the ﬁrst beginning, at which the

question of being was ﬁrst formulated by the Pre-Socratic, and then quickly

forgotten and covered over in Plato’s metaphysical interpretation of the

nature of beings, and the never-assured moment of the other beginning, which

we can prepare for only by ﬁnding a fundamentally new way of asking it.

Heidegger’s discussion of the connection between lived-experience and

machination unfolds near the beginning of the ﬁrst of the six joinings, the

section entitled ‘Echo’ or Anklang . This ‘echo’, Heidegger tells us, is the

resonance of the ‘essential swaying of be-ing’ [ der Wesung des Seyns ]inan

age of complete abandonment and loss. 7 The verb Wesung derives from

Wesen , the usual word for ‘essence’, but as the English translators of Beitr¨ ge

caution, we should avoid thinking of it solely or even primarily in connection

with the abstract notion of an essence or type. 8 The ‘essential swaying’ of be-

ing is, rather, be-ing’s way of concretely happening, abiding, or enduring. The

‘echo’, then, is the resonance of be-ing’s happening, both at the ﬁrst

beginning and out of the possibility of the ‘other beginning’, that we can hear

today, even when being has almost completely withdrawn.

Indeed, the progress of the Western tradition, Heidegger thinks, has been

determined by the ever-increasing withdrawal or forgottenness of being. This

withdrawal manifests itself as the prevailing determination of being [ das

Sein ] from the sole perspective of individual beings [ die Seienden ]. 9 This

abandonment culminates in the dominance of technological and calculational

Thinking and Being 327

ways of thinking and handling objects. Heidegger refers to the total pattern of

these ways of thinking and operating, and the interpretation of beings that

facilitates them, as machination . 10 From the perspective of machination, all

objects become raw material for quantitative measurement, calculation, and

manipulation according to the natural-scientiﬁc understanding of matter.

With its dominance, the making and manipulating of particular objects comes

completely to the fore and obscures even the possibility of any question about

the essence and nature of being itself. Within the regime of machination,

accordingly, we cannot hope to deﬁne being, except in the most general and

unhelpful terms; all that we can hope to do, given the increasing withdrawal

of being, is to recover the possibility of a question concerning being, a

question whose original formulation and subsequent forgetting is, Heidegger

suggests, at the deepest basis of the Western thought.

At the utmost limit of the process, the distress caused by the withdrawal of

being and of the question of its possibility is so complete that it manifests

itself as a total lack of distress, as the impossibility of even raising the

question of what has withdrawn and what has been abandoned. 11 But

Heidegger nevertheless thinks that it is possible, even in the most advanced

forms of abandonment that culminate in the total domination of machination,

to detect a faint echo or resonance of the original ‘happening’ or ‘swaying’

[ Wesung ] of being at the time of the ﬁrst beginning. Perceiving this echo even

in the completion of the dominant processes of technological thinking and

machination, Heidegger suggests, will simultaneously enable us to gain a ﬁrst

premonition, hint, or intimation of the event of being, as Ereignis , in the

‘other’ beginning, the one for which the thinking of the Beitr ¨ ge aims to

prepare. 12

Suspended in this way between these two decisive moments, one long ago

and one still to come, Heidegger’s discussion of machination necessarily uses

(as does much of the Beitr¨ ge ) two distinct terms to refer to that which has

withdrawn from beings in modern times and which may again come into its

own. Whereas ‘ Sein ’ refers to being as it has been determined within the

tradition of Western thought, the tradition that Heidegger calls ‘metaphysics’,

he uses ‘ Seyn ’ to refer to being thought outside metaphysics, as it must be

thought in the future. ‘ Sein ’ is being determined as the ‘beingness of beings’,

nothing more than an abstract, maximally general category or essence of

things in general, and conceived in terms of the priority of constant endurance

or presence as the highest trait of beings. 13 For metaphysical thought, the

most perfect kind of being is an eternally present and unchanging being, and

any thought about being within metaphysics remains determined by this

priority. By contrast, ‘ Seyn ’ (which we can write as ‘be-ing’) means being in

its ‘other beginning’; it is Seyn which must be thought in order to formulate

the question of the truth of Be-ing [ der Wahrheit des Seyns ] and it is ‘ Seyn ’

which is en-owned and sways in Ereignis ; indeed Ereignis is Seyn itself, in its

328 Paul Livingston

own special happening and ‘holding sway’. 14 The discussion of machination,

as an instance of the echo of the ﬁrst beginning meant to prepare us for the

‘other beginning’, necessarily exploits the difference between Sein and Seyn .

Thus, though Heidegger tells us that ‘machination’ means ‘a manner of the

essential swaying of being’ ( eine Art der Wesung des Seins ), at the same time

this metaphysical determination of being as beingness ‘yields a faint hint of

the truth of be-ing itself’. ( Die Machenschaft als Wesung der Seiendheit gibt

einen ersten Wink in der Wahrheit des Seyns selbst .) 15 The phenomenon of

the dominance of machination, though it is determined by the history of being

as the history of the traditional interpretation of being as ‘beingness’,

nevertheless provides us, through its distant echoing of the ﬁrst beginning,

with a long-suppressed insight into the possibility of the ‘other beginning’,

the beginning of the thinking of being as Seyn and Ereignis .

Although machination arises from the abandonment of beings to an

understanding that makes the very question of being unformulable, it is to this

very abandonment that we must look in order to discern the faint echo of the

ﬁrst beginning. If we can see machination as the abandonment of beings by

being – and hence as a process of being, even if only the negative one of its

withdrawal – we can begin to see how machination distantly manifests the

resonance of the ﬁrst occurrence of the question of being at the ﬁrst beginning

of the Western tradition. Understanding machination, then, means under-

standing the withdrawal of being that it manifests as itself an essential mode

or aspect of the ‘swaying’ or happening of being ( der Wesung des Seins ):

In the context of the being-question, [machination] does not name a human

comportment but a manner of the essential swaying of being. Even the disparaging

tone should be kept at a distance, even though machination fosters what is not ownmost

to being. And even what is not ownmost to being should never be depreciated, because

it is essential to what is ownmost to being. 16

Machination echoes being in an age that has completely forgotten it. Coming

to the fore alongside the abandonment of being, machination fosters what is

not proper to being ( das Unwesen des Seins ), what furthers its withdrawal and

brings it to completion. But because it does nevertheless echo the essential

sway of being, machination can also prepare the way for the event of

Ereignis , in which be-ing ( Seyn ) comes into its own. The character of

machination is thus deeply ambiguous; machination comes to the fore as an

aspect of the absence and withdrawal of being, but nevertheless does so as an

expression or aspect of being itself, and therefore harbors within itself the

possibility of giving us a new understanding of it. This notion of the twofold

or ambiguous nature of technology is a familiar theme of Heidegger’s later

writings about technology. In all of these writings, technology retains a

fundamental rootedness in being, even though it unfolds in alienation from

what is proper to being. Thus, in Die Frage Nach Technik , Heidegger deﬁnes

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