"After the machines for writing, adding, computing, and accounting, the production of a machine for thinking is only a question of 'time'. Indeed, thinking has already become computing. And why should not this 'thinking' have its machine? More and more is taken from the human being, even thinking (and meditation already long ago). The consequence of this process is that the human being knows less and less what to do with himself - and all the more must he surround himself with gadgets." -Martin Heidegger
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I use the word stupid not only in the now classic sense in which Léon Daudet called stupid an entire century, the 19th, a century rich in historical events, social changes and the century in which science made giant steps and in which all the great philosophers of modernity were born, lived or died: from Kant to Schopenhauer, from the idealists and positivists, from Marx to Nietzsche, from Stirner to de Maistre, up to Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Bergson, Croce and Gentile. If only we had more stupid years like that century…
But the use of the expression stupid also alludes to something that is not linked to historical events but to the climate of the time and the silent anthropological mutation we are experiencing: humanity that relies on technology and artificial intelligence without critical antibodies and intelligent counterweights, surrenders more and more every day to the global destiny of stupidity. It becomes stupider year after year and further proof of what is happening is that it does not even realize it, it proceeds towards stupidity with automatism, that is, with the worst of fatalisms, that of machines; and with the worst of fideisms, that in mechanical processes. Without putting up resistance. Without critical conscience. Without historical memory and culture. We stupidly slide into stupidity. Goodnight stupid 2024, with the hope of seeing less and less stupidity in the year to come.
https://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/buonanotte-2024-anno-stupido/
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Heidegger describes this “oblivion of being” as “the spiritual fate of the West” and offers the following striking description of our present predicament:
When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously “experience” an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all Dasein of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for? – where to? – and what then?[1]
These words call to mind René Guénon’s thesis of “the reign of quantity.” The technology Heidegger is referring to, obliquely, is the airplane, telegraph, radio, and motion picture. But it is impossible to read these words today without thinking for a moment that Heidegger is referring to satellite television, supersonic jets, and the internet. His words read like an uncanny prophecy of today’s world. Heidegger is identifying trends which are not recent, but woven into the fabric of modernity itself. What we live with today appear to be the most extreme outcomes of those trends (though it is always dangerous to make such claims: things may get far worse!). Heidegger writes, further:
The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline [which is meant in relation to the fate of “Being”][2] and to appraise it as such. This simple observation has nothing to do with cultural pessimism – nor with any optimism either, of course; for the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the hatred and mistrust of everything creative and free has already reached such proportions throughout the whole earth that such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long become laughable.[3]
Though Heidegger refers here, tantalizingly, to “the flight of the gods,” he is no neo-pagan. But there is something about Heidegger’s ideas that definitely resonates not only with what we know of traditional pagan thought, but also with the theology of the modern (or post-modern) neo-pagan movement. The “flight of the gods” refers to an old idea that the gods have withdrawn themselves from the land, due to people’s non-belief (i.e., their conversion to Christianity). One of the key elements in Heidegger’s understanding of modernity is the idea of the “self-withdrawal of Being.” Something has changed about Dasein, and as a result Being has concealed itself from us – just as the gods have departed on account of men no longer being true to them.[4] (It is interesting that Heidegger draws on the language of paganism, rather than Christianity, as a poetic way to express this idea.) His reference to “the destruction of the earth” suggests the ways in which Heidegger’s critique of modernity intersects with deep ecology. (This is especially apparent in later essays like “The Question Concerning Technology.”)
Although in these passages Heidegger refers to the modern “decline of the earth,” he sees this mainly as a Western phenomenon, and his concern is with the fate of Europe. He sees Europe as caught between the two great juggernauts of American capitalism and Soviet communism, both of which offer mere variants of the exact same modern forms of decadence described earlier:
This Europe, in its unholy blindness always on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in the great pincers between Russia on the one side and America on the other. Russia and America, seen metaphysically, are both the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and of the rootless organization of the average man.[5]
https://counter-currents.com/2012/06/heidegger-an-introduction-for-anti-modernists-part-2/