I figure that each person is entitled to a moment of philistinism. No, two moments. Well, three. Over a long period - why not? And if your moment of philistinism is supported by qualms you might have about the foulness of someone else's political choices, then even more so why not? What I'm trying, and now indeed about, to tell you is that I've never read Heidegger. There's more than one reason for this, but not to beat about the bush his relationship to Nazism put me off. And I'm getting on now and have other things to do. Anyway, it's good to know that if James Garvey does him no injustice in this brief summary, Heidegger would not have been my man in any event:
He argues that we are all enmeshed in a technological way of life - our problems, activities, agendas and so on happen in a social world where everything is regarded as a standing reserve, a stockpile... We see our problems as technological problems, and our solutions are technological too. It's all we can see because we're stuck in the world we've thought [ourselves] into. He tells us that we can maybe get out again by reflection on the senses in which we are enveloped by technology, instead of further attempts to save ourselves from it with yet more of it. We can look to art, he says, and maybe build an aesthetic outlook into our way of life. We can think of the mountain as beautiful, not simply as a source of coal. There's a sense in which this sort of thing can save us like no space mirror can.
Looking to art is good but it seems not to have saved Heidegger's soul, and thinking of the mountain as beautiful as well as a source of coal is not so deep an insight. Questions of technology, on the other hand, are not just about more and less; they're about of what kind and for what purpose. It isn't aesthetics so much as morality and politics, in both of which areas Heidegger rather stumbled, that come into play in trying to deal with these questions. Technology will always be with us.
