“That which grants.” The “saving power” in modern political thought.

“THAT WHICH GRANTS”

The “saving power” in modern political thought:
an experiment in understanding.

SECTION 1: “THE QUESTION CONCERNING TECHNOLOGY”

In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Martin Heidegger discusses what it is that brings things from “essence” to “appearing;” from the idea to its manifestation in the physical world. He begins with the classical categories and the image of the silversmith. “For centuries philosophy has taught that there are four causes: (1) the causa materialis, the material . . . out of which, for example, a silver chalice is made; (2) the causa formalis, the form . . . into which the material enters; (3) the causa finalis, the end . . . in relation to which the required chalice is determined as to its form and matter; (4) the causa efficiens, which brings about the effect that is the finished, actual chalice, in this instance, the silversmith.”[1] Heidegger goes so far as almost to dismiss the other causes in favor of this efficient cause, that is, the cause that effects the appearing of the thing. “The causa efficiens,” he writes, “. . . sets the standard for all causality. This goes so far that we no longer even count the causa finalis, telic finality, as causality.”[2] In recognizing this dismissal of telos, Heidegger begins to indicate the danger that this understanding of the efficient cause has caused. Yet the dismissal of telos is not inescapably tied to fabrication, as Heidegger makes clear: “The silversmith considers carefully and gathers together the three aforementioned ways of being responsible and indebted.”[3] Material, formal, and telic causes unite in the craftsman’s work of bringing forth the appearing of the thing “out of concealment into unconcealment”.[4] Not one is missing from a properly ordered view of the efficient cause.

But Heidegger has a larger subject in mind. As well as things which are caused to come into being, there area also things that come into being of their own accord. He differentiates the terms poiesis, “bringing into appearance” and physis, “the arising of something from out of itself.” Physis is a kind of poiesis, but unlike poiesis, it indicates something that brings itself into being; it is something that does not depend on another agent to cause it to appear. As he puts it, “what is brought forth by the artisan or the artist . . . has the irruption belonging to bringing-forth, not in itself, but in another,” whereas “what presences by means of physis has the irruption belonging to bringing-forth, e.g., the bursting of a blossom into bloom, in itself.”[5]

Is it possible that the nature of technology passes beyond being brought into being by acts of poiesis, and is in fact a case of ongoing physis, not being brought forth by another agent but revealing itself, continually unfolding under its own natural force, as it were? This is a crucial question when considering the role of technology itself in the work of poiesis.

Heidegger writes: “The Greeks have the word aletheia for revealing. The Romans translate this with veritas. We say “truth” and usually understand it as correctness of representation.”[6] Taking it for granted that what is being revealed is truth, the ground is prepared for the next stage of his argument. Without being too hasty, it appears that the action of technology is at the same time self-revealing and an agent of revealing other things. Taking stock of where the argument stands, he asks, “We are questioning concerning technology, and we have arrived now at aletheia, at revealing. What has the essence of technology to do with revealing?” Not one to leave the reader in suspense, he responds, “The answer: everything.”[7] Revealing is the essence of technology. But then he connects “end and means,” that is, the causa formalis and the causa materialis, to technology, not in a way so as to be brought into being by it, but actually to be ruled over and created by it. In this way, the instrumental cause dominates the other causes and revealing holds sway over truth. “Bringing-forth, indeed, gathers within itself the four modes of occasioning— causality—and rules them throughout. Within its domain belong end and means as well as instrumentality.”[8] Technology is an agent of revealing, but it appears to be more than this. “If we inquire step by step into what technology, represented as means, actually is, then we shall arrive at revealing.”[9] Technology allows for the work of the craftsman, Hannah Arendt’s homo faber, as Heidegger notes: “The possibility of all productive manufacturing lies in revealing.”[10]

Is technology really an instrumental cause in itself? It appears that while technology absorbs the first three causes within itself, it does not exactly become the instrumental cause, since it is still impossible for technology to act on its own accord. We discuss it almost as if it had a soul, but in reality it only exists as carried out by those who use it.[11]

Now if the agent of revealing “gathers within itself the four modes of occasioning— causality—and rules them throughout,”[12] this leads one to question whether, when technology acts, whether it is has not itself become the sole cause, whether it has gathered all causality into itself. This description of technology is quite removed from the definition of the craftsman, the efficient cause mentioned previously, who, as the efficient cause “considers carefully and gathers together” the material, formal, and telic causes. Consider, taking for granted some of Heidegger’s assumptions about technology in this essay, what becomes of the three causes when they are subsumed in the becoming of technology.

The material cause, that is, the materials from which a thing is brought into being, is the most affected by the problem of technology as Heidegger sees it. The difficulty is that “the revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis” in the same way that things are brought forth through the art of the craftsman. The nature of it is “a challenging . . . which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such.”[13] Technology feeds on nature in a way that is more than simply shaping or ordering according to a transcendent form. Technology extracts “energy” from nature to be used in the further development of technology. By establishing this energy-management system, this “standing-reserve,” as Heidegger terms it, technology begins to rule over the causa materialis, which is now able to exert fewer limitations upon the act of bringing into being.

The causa formalis is likewise affected by the instrumentality of technology. What is created is what is possible to create, but what is possible to create is what is revealed, and hence, becomes what is known. The form can only be known through the revealing that is mediated by technology. So technology shapes the forms just as the forms shape what is coming into being through technological instruments.[14] Technology is found at end and the beginning of the process.

The causa finalis, the telos which Heidegger dismisses as a cause at the outset, is also obscured or usurped by technology, which has a tendency to become its own end and to subject everything else to serving the end of its own unfolding.

Even the causa efficiens, the craftsman, is not exempt from the threat of being subjected to technological dominance. Technology of course limits his ability to bring things into being, but it also directs his efforts. The potter’s wheel, an excellent example of early technology, allows a skilled craftsman to form a pot from clay much more efficiently, and yet it limits the kind of pottery that can be created with it. The perfectly round jar is a form that was practically inaccessible before the invention of the wheel, but economical and relatively simple afterwards.

Establishing the difference between technology and the craftsman will allow us to understand the unique problem technology poses. Technology is not a simple tool that can be created and used by the craftsman, made to serve a pre-existing purpose such as the bringing-into being of a chalice. It is not a thing or category of things—even a category that could be extended infinitely to include all tools or things that could be used as tools. Technology drives the creation of tools, but it is not a tool. “Technology,” Heidegger writes, “is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth.”[15]

Heidegger argues linguistically that even the ability to have knowledge is affected or limited by technology. “From earliest times until Plato the word techne is linked with the word episteme.”[16] Until the Socratics, who understood truth to be prior to and directing the technical process of ordering (or in Heidegger’s terms, unfolding) the material world, standing apart from it and remaining in a sense superior to it, techne is inseparable from the material world. The essence of technology cannot be separated from its action of unfolding and self-perpetuating in the realm of becoming.

In a startling turn, technology becomes its own starting and ending point; the very truth that it is revealing. Do not overlook the fact that this kind of self-revealing is very similar to the nature of Divine revelation, which is God acting to reveal Himself the supreme creator, and His glory the telic end, of all things.[17] It is not only that God’s nature is revealed—it is also His nature to reveal Himself, and this revelation changes our view not only of who God is, but also who we are, as created beings who also exist to bring glory to God, just as it is His nature to bring glory to Himself. It was for this purpose that all things were created. Technology, then presents a particular difficulty for the Christian. That is, how can we acknowledge the role of technology in bringing things into being while at the same time acknowledging God as Being Himself[18] and the source of all being?[19]

Heidegger senses a danger in technology, but it is not the danger of obscuring the transcendent—he does not have much of a category for the transcendent. He is more concerned about the effect it has on man—that the technological impulse will not, cannot differentiate man from any other part of the world as it seeks energy for its “standing-reserve.” He warns: “As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve.[20] At this point it must be noted that Heidegger is not so naïve as to entirely separate man, as an agent of technology, from a causal relationship with technology, for here he represents the technological action of enframing as standing-reserve in a way that makes it clear it is man’s action, and that man bears the responsibility both for committing it and for saving himself from it. But whether he will recognize his actions for what they are is doubtful. He may be uneasy at the power of technology, but he will be tempted to use technology to attempt to assert his rule over creation: “man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself and postures as lord of the earth.”[21] Doing so, he only hastens the crisis: “In this way the illusion comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct.”[22] Man becomes the measure of all things. Yet no sooner does he seem to find an epistemological standing-point than the quality of the measurement is called into question. “This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.[23] With “the discovery of the Archimedean point,”[24] man can understand anything—but himself. And since he has no understanding of himself, he cannot trust his understanding of anything else. “The smallest thing in the world is a soul wrapped up in itself.”[25] There is more to discuss regarding technology, but it must be clear that though we speak of technology, in the end it is a symptom of the tendency of the human soul to gaze inward rather than outward. In the end, to be saved from the feverish spiraling of his own reason, man must find his ordering cause in a being greater than his own.

Heidegger, on the other hand, apparently seeks salvation in the very nature of technology. He quotes the poet Holderlin:

But where danger is, grows
The saving power also.[26]

He questions what is meant by the idea of salvation. “What does it mean to “save”? Usually we think that it means only to seize hold of a thing threatened by ruin in order to secure it in its former continuance. But the verb “to save” says more. “To save” is to fetch something home into its essence, in order to bring the essence for the first time into its proper appearing.”[27] If all man needed was to be saved from some malevolent force or being, the former would be enough, but his problem runs deeper—it is a lack of something or some insufficency in himself. Man is, because of his own sin, essentially flawed. It is not simply, as Heidegger suggests, an insufficient appearing of the essence, but it is an essence that (in a certain way) has become corrupt through sin. Salvation in the Christian sense is initiated from without, effects a complete renewal of man’s essence, and begins (in what is called sanctification) a movement toward the revealing or bringing-into being of that essence in the world. Man’s redeemed essence is the imago Dei, reminding us once again that man as an image-bearer is a contingent being in the telic sense, not merely in the sense of being contingent upon causality. Telos, certainly, is not precisely the nature of causality, but that is because it is greater than causality.

For Heidegger technology itself holds the key to salvation: “the essential unfolding of technology harbors in itself what we least suspect, the possible rise of the saving power.”[28] This leads to confusion since technology seems to be what ‘causes’ the trouble in the first place.

“Enframing” – In epistemology, enframing is the construction of a way of understanding; in science, it is the categorization of materials according to their use. This is the primary understanding of technology’s function of enframing, but the role of the technological impulse in the building of knowledge systems is not to be ignored – “Enframing is a way of revealing that is a destining, namely, the way that challenges forth. The revealing that brings forth (poiesis) is also a way that has the character of destining. But these ways are not kinds that, arrayed beside one another, fall under the concept of revealing. Revealing is that destining which, ever suddenly and inexplicably to all thinking, apportions itself into the revealing that brings forth and the revealing that challenges, and which allots itself to man. The revealing that challenges has its origin as a destining in bringing-forth. But at the same time enframing, in a way characteristic of a destining, blocks poiesis.”[29] Notice again the distinction Heidegger is attempting to draw between poiesis and physis. Poiesis is a kind of revealing, but not necessarily a kind of revealing that destines, whereas technology has the nature of destining. It affects the essence of the thing it reveals, because for Heidegger things do not have an essence in themselves except as they are brought into being. “If we speak of the “essence of a house” and the “essence of a state” we do not mean a generic type; rather we mean the ways in which house and state hold sway, administer themselves, develop, and decay—the way they ‘essentially unfold’.”[30] It is only in unfolding that things can have a nature, and so the way in which they unfold necessarily affects that nature. With this, there is only one thing left that might be permanent, and this is not a permanent state of being, but a continuous state of acting. Heidegger engages in literary criticism: “Goethe once uses the mysterious word fortgewahren [to grant continuously] in place of fortwahren [to endure continuously]. He hears wahren [to endure] and gewahren [to grant] here in one unarticulated accord. And if we now ponder more carefully than we did before what it is that properly endures and perhaps alone endures, we may venture to say: only what is granted endures. What endures primacy out of the earliest beginning is what grants.”[31] What endures is what grants. But what is it that grants? “As the essencing of technology, enframing is what endures.”[32] In other words, if technology can be said to have an essence, its essence is found in that it enframes. If only that which grants endures, and the only enduring essence even of technology is enframing, enframing becomes “that which grants,” and this creates a problem, since it certainly appears contradictory for the thing which calls all things forth into standing-reserve and reduces all things to be its own instruments for self-perpetuation to have a ‘granting’ nature. “Challenging is any thing but a granting.” Nevertheless, Heidegger believes he can find a way out of this difficulty. “So it seems, so long as we do not notice that the challenging-forth into the ordering of the actual as standing-reserve remains a destining that starts man upon a way of revealing.”[33] The key to salvation is found in that the destining power may reveal something about the true nature of man. This is the “saving power” Heidegger hopes to find: “It is precisely in enframing, which threatens to sweep man away into ordering as the ostensibly sole way of revealing, and so thrusts man into the danger of the surrender of his free essence—it is precisely in this extreme danger that the innermost indestructible belongingness of man within granting may come to light, provided that we, for our part, begin to pay heed to the essence of technology.”[34] The “innermost indestructible belongingness of man” is the truth we have searched so far to find, and Heidegger promises, in a strange use of the Biblical idea, that if we lose ourselves to technology, we stand a chance—our only chance, perhaps, and a slim one at that!—of finding ourselves again.[35]

“…the essential unfolding of the essence of technology propriates in the granting that needs and uses man so that he may share in revealing…”[36] In an odd way, even in a world without absolutes, man must find a place and a purpose which is (in some sense) outside of him, and for Heidegger this is to be used by the granting of enframing. His tone is really quite optimistic considering how risky a proposition this really is. “On the one hand, enframing challenges forth into the frenziedness of ordering that blocks every view into the propriative event of revealing and so radically endangers the relation to the essence of truth.[37] What is to say that man will not lose his footing altogether in this “frenzy of ordering” which is itself without order? “On the other hand,” he brightens, “enframing propriates for its part in the granting that lets man endure—as yet inexperienced, but perhaps more experienced in the future—that he may be the one who is needed and used for the safekeeping of the essence of truth. Thus the rising of the saving power appears.[38] This truly is quite a risk, and quite a surrender to the unknown force of enframing. If it were not assumed that enframing was the only sure thing, then surely some older, surer path, some guiding star, would be sought to guide one through the chaotic “frenzy of ordering.” The danger is surely there. “The essential unfolding of technology threatens revealing, threatens it with the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in ordering and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealment of standing-reserve.”[39] If this consumption of everything into the standing-reserve is already becoming the case in the modern age, would not weighing the epistemological anchor merely subject one even more fully to the consuming sway of enframing and the technological impulse?

During this exploration of the effects of technology, we have been awaiting some sign that the artisan, homo faber, has not been utterly swept away in the process. Now we find that Heidegger believes he may yet have a place in the world. So far in this paper the word craft has been avoided, not because it does not apply to the subject, but because Heidegger has, from the beginning, been using the word poiesis in a sense that is indistinguishable from craft, or techne. But only as he draws to his conclusion does he reveal what purpose he has for this character: he wishes to use techne to refer to artistic manifestations, where normally poiesis is used in that sense, while techne denotes rational constructions, i.e., of the episteme. Heidegger uses these words in almost the opposite sense. “There was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called techne. The poiesis of the fine arts was also called techne . . . And art was called simply techne. It was a single, manifold revealing. It was pious, promos, i.e., yielding to- the holding sway and the safekeeping of truth.”[40] The artisan serves the purposes of enframing. This reminds one of a civil religion, but it is greater than a State cult. It is in fact a cult of man, of which the artist is the poet and propagandist, his purposes wholly unified with its goals; he does not reach for the stars but praises the saving power (dare we say it?) of the way of enframing. “Why did art bear the modest name techne? Because it was a revealing that brought forth and made present, and therefore belonged within poiesis.” This kind of art would actually be a participation in the act of enframing, and become one with it. “It was finally that revealing which holds complete sway in all the fine arts, in poetry, and in everything poetical that obtained poiesis as its proper name.”[41] “There was a time,” he says, when art fulfilled this purpose, but if they are to be used they must be brought back under the sway of the saving power. “Could it be that revealing lays claim to the arts most primally, so that they for their part may expressly foster the growth of the saving power, may awaken and found anew our vision of, and trust in, that which grants?”[42]

The last sentence of Heidegger’s essay states that “questioning is the piety of thought.”[43] It is significant that the only other use of ‘piety’ in the essay is here, referring to the function of the arts in the service of truth—which is only known by bringing-into revealing through enframing—very similar to the understanding of piety in the Greek city cult, which was to honor the gods, the founding, the enframing—dare we say?—of the city. So to be consistent, even “questioning” serves the purpose of “bringing-forth into revealing” in the epistemological sense. At any rate, one cannot seriously “question” the basis of questioning itself.

It is tempting to reduce Heidegger’s argument to a simple case of surrendering to the inevitable. This would trivialize the depth of his thought. Rather, he should be seen as choosing consistency of outlook, and while recognizing the sway of technology, following his own counsel in placing himself within the context of its ordering.

SECTION 2: THE HUMAN CONDITION

The act of subjection that constitutes bringing into being is not lost on Hannah Arendt. Although she does not follow Heidegger in ascribing the action to technology, which as has been hinted may be simply another way of looking at a certain tendency of man to act while refusing to take responsibility for the nature of his action, she does recognize the violence of what in Heidegger’s terms we might call “enframing” and what Arendt names “fabrication.” “Fabrication, the work of homo faber, consists in reification. . . . This element of violation and violence is present in all fabrication, and homo faber, the creator of the human artifice, has always been a destroyer of nature.”[44] Homo faber is literally ‘man who fabricates,’ or ‘man who orders existing matter into an artifice that can only be called human.’ It is this ability to fabricate that Arendt believes speaks to the human condition, and which is possibly her attempt to come to terms with the nature of life outside of Eden. “The animal laborans . . . may be the lord and master of all living creatures, but he still remains the servant of nature and the earth; only homo faber conducts himself as lord and master of the whole earth.”[45] Arendt sees this as a potential conflict between the concept of man as a created being within and man ruling over nature. “Since his productivity was seen in the image of a Creator-God, so that where God creates ex nihilo, man creates out of given substance, human productivity was by definition bound to result in a Promethean revolt because it could erect a man-made world only after destroying part of God-created nature.”[46] It is necessary to observe that Arendt demands complexities it never occurred to the Biblical writers to invent, such as the conflict between man as creature and man as ruler, or between man as imago Dei and the supposed necessity of “Promethean revolt” entailed in acts of creation, which could be understood simply as subordinate acts of creation in adherence to the image of God in us, using materials given for man’s use by a provident Creator.

Arendt invents three categories of human activity that are public: labor, work, and action. This paper will concentrate on what she calls work, which includes the activity of fabrication. “In the process of making,” she writes, in contrast to the act of laboring which produces and consumes its own means of perpetuation; you produce to consume, and consume to produce: “…the end is beyond doubt: it has come when an entirely new thing with enough durability to remain in the world as an independent entity has been added to the human artifice.”[47] It is the creation of a new thing, not simply the production of a resource. “As far as the thing, the end product of fabrication, is concerned, the process need not be repeated. The impulse toward repetition comes from the craftsman’s need to earn his means of subsistence, in which case his working coincides with his laboring . . .”[48]

Work is unique among human activities in that it is silent. It does not depend on speech, as what she calls “action” does, nor does it produce a rhythm that might lead to music, as labor does. She notes, “. . . there exist only labor songs, but no work songs. The songs of the craftsman are social; they are sung after work. The fact is, of course, that there exists no “natural” rhythm for work.[49] This might suggest that in a way fabrication is less of action even than labor. For action, there must be speech, but there is something about the act of creation that Arendt desires to conceal in silence. She wishes to separate it from God’s act of creation by the Word. The “social songs” of the craftsman bear no relation to his craft and are rather a sign of his participation in the active realm of community. “Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: “Who are you?” . . . Without the accompaniment of speech . . . action would not only lose its subject, as it were; not acting men but performing robots would achieve what, humanly speaking, would remain incomprehensible.”[50] Comparing this view of human interaction through speech to her understanding of the craftsman, it appears that without speech the work of the craftsman becomes something subjectless, an activity in which the personhood of the craftsman becomes submerged while he is creating. In this way, Arendt separates the work of the craftsman from a participation in the Divine Word, which, as it spoke in creation, inseparably established the person of Christ as creator.

Arendt next examines what it means to act as human beings in history. “Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story.” Human beings act in history, yet they do not create it, but only see their own place in it. “In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer. Somebody began it, and is its subject . . . but nobody is its author.[51] So, then, history is a kind of story, which is created and perpetuated by human action, but which is unlike a story in that those who create it are its subjects, its characters, and are not conscious of their act of creation. When humankind became conscious of the nature of history as a story, it immediately assumed that there must be some author or creative force behind history, since humankind, though now aware of its place as an actor in history, understood that it was nevertheless incapable of driving it. “For the great unknown in history, that has baffled the philosophy of history in the modern age, arises not only when one considers history as a whole and finds that its subject, mankind, is an abstraction which never can become an active agent; . . . [but] that in any series of events that together form a story with a unique meaning we can at best isolate the agent who set the whole process into motion; . . . we can never point unequivocally to him as the author of its eventual outcome.[52] Arendt uses the word agent twice here to show that while human beings act within the historical process, they are not active in the sense that they do not act upon history, only within it.

Arendt is putting her view in opposition to modern ideas of history as a story that is told or created by some force or person.[53] To her this is a construct falsely drawn from human experience of stories, not reflecting the true nature of history, and it has consequences, especially, for man’s understanding of his own actions and proper place in the world. “It is for this reason that Plato thought that human affairs . . . the outcome of action (praxis), should not be treated with great seriousness . . .”[54] The Greeks embraced the Homeric ideal of action, in which great deeds and great speeches went together and honor was the driving goal. Their greatest ideal was to live actively in cities, not build them. “In their opinion,” Arendt writes, “the lawmaker was the builder of the city wall, someone who had to do and finish his work before political activity could begin. He therefore was treated like any other craftsman or architect and could be called from abroad and commissioned without having to be a citizen . . . legislator and architect belonged in the same category.”[55] What was created was the place in which action could take place. Yet Socratic thought seemed to despise the place of action in favor of contemplating “the good.” If Arendt is correct, then Socrates and Plato were fundamentally misled, for she understands “good” as being wrapped up in the political world, and they were willing to question this realm for the sake of other ends. “The Socratic school, on the contrary, turned to these activities [lawmaking and city-building], which to the Greeks were prepolitical, because they wished to turn against politics and against action.”[56] Unless Arendt reads their works quite differently, it appears that the works of Plato and Aristotle were not a reaction against action and the political, but an attempt to establish a more stable foundation for all human activities. They do this by orienting their thought around an understanding of the essence of man and allowing the realm of human activity to proceed from his internal nature. They show that defects in the public realm correspond to sicknesses of the soul. Politics proceeds from the nature of man. Hannah Arendt wants to root man’s essence in politics itself.

What seems to be the hidden difficulty in an understanding of human action as proceeding from human nature is the implicit acknowledgment of any kind of transcendent cause. Arendt attacks this in the form of a critique of the Platonic understanding of history. “It is noteworthy that Plato, who had no inkling of the modern concept of history, should have been the first to invent the metaphor of an actor behind the scenes who, behind the backs of acting men, pulls the strings and is responsible for the real story.[57] Why is it significant that Plato should use this metaphor? It is because for him the realm of action was not the locus of determining. Human events are determined by something else. Arendt sees the human story as a story without an author. “The invisible actor behind the scenes is an invention arising from a mental perplexity but corresponding to no real experience . . . The distinction between a real and a fictional story is precisely that the latter was “made up” and the former not made at all. The real story in which we are engaged as long as we live has no visible or invisible maker because it is not made. The only “somebody” it reveals is its hero . . .”[58] If her purpose is to deny the relevance of God in any aspect of human affairs, her approach is much less subtle than that of Heidegger. She does not merely claim that God is not relevant or active; it is that He has no place in history, and absolutely no place in the realm of human action. If he were to exist, he would be irrelevant and utterly unknowable. In summary, it seems to have been the error of Plato to reach out beyond the realm of human action to find the agent of historical change. Yet, human action itself cannot even affect history except in one special case.

In her most beautiful and yet most troubling passage, Arendt explains the twin powers of forgiving and promising, the only human actions able to affect the course of human events. “The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility—of being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have known what he was doing—the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises.”[59] Forgiving and promising entail a choice to act or react in a certain way regardless of what happens. This commitment to a way of acting regardless of the actions of others is the only way that human beings can act upon the mysterious forces of history and divert its course. Through these special actions, Arendt attempts to place in the hands of the human agent the ability to affect the course of history from within.

The irony is that just as it seems that she has found a way to shape history without the intervention of an outside power, she is compelled to rely in her argument on Divine revelation, although she does not acknowledge it as such. She is drawn to the person of Jesus, who she acknowledges as the first to recognize the power of forgiveness in the world. “The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth.” Quickly she hedges that this is not an admission of religion into her understanding, but “The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously.”[60]

Her attempt to secularize Jesus is not very successful or faithful to the context of the stories from which she idealizes him. “. . . Jesus maintains against the “scribes and pharisees” first that it is not true that only God has the power to forgive, and second that this power does not derive from God—as though God, not men, would forgive through the medium of human beings—but on the contrary must be mobilized by men toward each other before they can hope to be forgiven by God also.”[61] It is a mystery why she would quote Jesus in a situation in which He claims something opposite to her main contention—i.e., that He is in fact God entering the human realm as a man for the purpose of forgiveness. The sacred text is obvious on this point that what the “scribes and Pharisees” would not accept was not that a man could forgive sins, but that God had become a man and could thus forgive sins. The power to forgive derives only from God; this is a central premise of the Gospel. She attempts to take Jesus’ moral capital and use it to support her arguments without accepting any of His claims. “Jesus’ formulation is even more radical. Man in the gospel is not supposed to forgive because God forgives and he must do “likewise,” but “if ye from your hearts forgive,” God shall do “likewise.” The reason for the insistence on a duty to forgive is clearly “for they know not what they do” and it does not apply to the extremity of crime and willed evil . . .”[62] But for Jesus, the ultimate crime, and the one for which the scribes and pharisees were peculiarly responsible, is rejecting God in the person of Jesus Christ. Arendt is attempting to turn Jesus’ words against His central message, nullifying sin and ignoring redemption. “Crime and willed evil are rare, even rarer perhaps than good deeds; according to Jesus, they will be taken care of by God in the Last Judgment, which plays no role whatsoever in life on earth, and the Last Judgment is not characterized by forgiveness but by just retribution (apodounai).”[63] It would be just as valid to claim that the “role” of the Last Judgment in life on earth is to remind men of their responsibility to the higher Divine law, and cause them to life rightly on earth. And the exhortation to forgive others so that God will forgive you would carry absolutely no weight if it were not for the reality of God’s proffered forgiveness or the severity of his threatened judgment if man does not forgive his fellow man. God’s forgiveness is not a spiritual concept that can be separated from the realm of human action. The reality of God’s forgiveness may be experienced in the spiritual realm, certainly, yet it might also be applied to Arendt’s characterization of the Platonic author of history as God, in the act of “forgiving” the actions of men, and acting upon them in this way, to make or alter history. This divine act of forgiving would necessitate God entering into a relationship with men, because forgiveness is a political action which must be practiced in the realm of humanity. This is exactly what we find in the Gospel: God becoming man, entering the world of men, in order to enact this forgiveness, and change the course of history. Something is missing in Arendt’s description of forgiveness, since she limits it (arbitrarily) to forgiveness of unintentional wrongs, whereas God forgives both ignorant and flagrant sins.

If we simply set aside Arendt’s arbitrary exclusion of a God behind history, and take the Incarnation as historical fact, we discover from her other arguments something true the nature of God’s relationship to man.

In this respect, forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance, which acts in the form of re-acting against an original trespassing . . . (240) [But only in a world with a moral law can vengeance exist, since in a world with no borders, there can be no trespassing. And only

This is stated emphatically in Luke 5:21-24 (cf. Matt. 9:4-6 or Mark 12:7-10), where Jesus performs a miracle to prove that “the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins,” the emphasis being on “upon earth.” It is his insistence on the “power to forgive,” even more than his performance of miracles, that shocks the people, so that “they that sat at meat with him began to say within themselves, Who is this that forgives sins also?” (Luke 7:49). (Footnote 76 on p. 239) [With this questionable excursus into Biblical exegesis Arendt seems to be providing her reader with a rope to throttle her argument. It is obvious from the passage that Jesus is hinting at—no, boldly asserting his divinity. Power “on earth” to forgive sins was certainly an unusual concept to the Pharisees for the precise reason that only God has the power to forgive sins, and so to claim power to forgive sins; i.e., to remit the Divine vengeance both on the day of judgment and as expressed on earth through the Torah, of which the scribes and Pharisees considered themselves the executors. Jesus’ claim was indeed stepping on their toes, but it was because God’s forgiveness no longer had to be mediated through a priesthood. The Gospel message is that forgiveness from God is now mediated, not by laws and sacrifices, but through Jesus Christ directly.

Arendt’s ultimate contention is that “the power to perform miracles is not considered to be divine.”[64] She calls forgiveness a miracle, claiming at the same time that there is nothing otherworldly involved in it. “Action is, in fact, the one miracle-working faculty of man . . . [Jesus] must have known very well when he likened the power to forgive to the more general power of performing miracles, putting both on the same level and within the reach of man.”[65]

“Forgiveness becomes a means of expression of the self.” Yet while expressing the self in altering the course of action, it also creates the danger of establishing the kind of personal relationships that separate one from the world of action. “Forgiving and the relationship it establishes is always an eminently personal . . . affair in which what was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it. This, too, was clearly recognized by Jesus (“Her sins which are many are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little”), and is the reason for the current conviction that only love has the power to forgive.”[66] By calling this understanding of love the “current conviction,” Arendt of course makes it clear that this is not her conviction. She claims that there is a way to forgive while remaining in the realm of action. The idea of “respect” allows for forgiveness without friendship, in order to make forgiveness a universally applicable principle. “Respect, not unlike the Aristotelian philia politike, is a kind of “friendship” without intimacy and without closeness…”[67] This is the sort of relationship that may exist in the world of action. Any kind of “love” is altogether problematic. “For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives, indeed possesses an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved person may be, with his qualities and shortcomings no less than with his achievements, failings, and transgressions.”[68] This is precisely what she claims forgiveness is—a separation of someone’s person from his actions.

But love also separates from the world. Arendt’s description of love is as something very rare, the claims of the poets notwithstanding, which meets its “end” (not in the sense of telos) in procreation, a kind of love that is utterly “unworldly” and “anti-political.”[69] “Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love’s own product.”[70] Love is not the “saving power.” Love is what threatens the saving power. Yet perhaps it is still the case that “where danger is, grows the saving power also?”[71] Even in love, Arendt hopes, there is the possibility of a return to the world of action through the birth of a new acting human being, placing itself between the lovers and in a way ‘redeeming’ their love:

“The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, “natural” ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope . . . [which] found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us.’”[72]

SECTION 3: REFLECTIONS

What Heidegger and Arendt both perpetrate is a complete and utter denial of revelation or any transcendent object affecting any aspect of human experience. Yet both of them are looking for a kind of redemption or salvation. Heidegger considers that a seed of it can be found in the essence of technology as enframing. Arendt believes that it comes through a worldly sort of forgiveness. Both of them exclude the Divine (Heidegger negligently, Arendt specifically), and therefore cut themselves off from any real solution to their dilemmas. They attempt to find man’s place and man’s nature only within the context of a temporal process—the realm of action for Arendt, and the realm of becoming for Heidegger. The nature of this realm is that it cannot be questioned but only described.

“That which grants” is not the nature of enframing, but the nature of love, more specifically of God’s love and any human love that derives from it. This concept has no place in the Greek or post-Christian worlds explored by Heidegger, or in the similar human realm described by Arendt. Love does not “enframe”—it creates anew, ordering without violence or destruction. Creation is an initial act of pure Divine love, and forgiveness is an equally pure continuation of that love. Human actions of this type cannot be carried out in the earth outside of the inspiration of divine love. The “saving power” can be known and embraced, but in recognizing the transcendent nature of this power, the human realm becomes once more subordinate to a Divine order.

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[1] Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” par. 9. Online publication at <http://www.wright.edu/cola/Dept/PHL/Class/P.Internet/PITexts/QCT.html> accessed Friday, May 09, 2008.

[2] Ibid, par. 12.

[3] Ibid, par. 15.

[4] Ibid, par. 23.

[5] Ibid, par. 21.

[6] Ibid, par. 23.

[7] Ibid, par. 24.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] There is a good deal of speculative literature on this subject, exploring the possibility of “what if” technology in the form of computers or robots took on a self-determining, active role in the world. But the very nature of technology is that it is impossible for it to act by itself—and yet it is also impossible to comprehend the many ways in which it rules over us, not only in our industrial processes, but also in our daily lives, even affecting our understanding of the world and ourselves.

[12] Heidegger, par. 24.

[13] Ibid, par. 32.

[14] Technology is instrumental, but it is not an instrument.

[15] Heidegger, par. 25.

[16] Ibid, par. 27.

[17] Lord Jesus, guide me into Your truth.

[18] God’s self-revelation to the prophet Moses was in these very terms: “I AM THAT I AM.”

[19] One reason we know that technology is not God is that is not transcendent—it is strictly limited in its scope to the realm of becoming.

[20] Heidegger, par. 71.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Hannah Arendt uses this term although others discovered it first. She quotes Kafka, for instance.

[25] I do not remember who said this or where I read it. It sounds like something C.S. Lewis might say.

[26] Heidegger, par. 77.

[27] Ibid, par. 78.

[28] Ibid, par. 88.

[29] Ibid, par. 81.

[30] Ibid, par. 83.

[31] Ibid, par. 85.

[32] Ibid, par. 86.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid, par. 87.

[35] Have we ever known what it is to be human? My suspicion is that Heidegger considers the entry of the Socratic school of philosophy, with its absolute Being separated from physical becoming, to be a departure from what he considers to be the true knowing of self within the context of a world that is in the process of becoming; and in the pursuit of otherworldly speculations we lost our proper place in the world.

[36] Heidegger, par. 91.

[37] Ibid, par. 93.

[38] Ibid, par. 94.

[39] Ibid, par. 100.

[40] Ibid, par. 102-103.

[41] Ibid, par. 106.

[42] Ibid, par. 110.

[43] Ibid, par. 114.

[44] Arendt, 139.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Ibid, 143.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Ibid, 145, footnote.

[50] Ibid, 178.

[51] Ibid, 184.

[52] Ibid, 184-85.

[53] A primum mobile, as it were.

[54] Arendt, 185.

[55] Ibid, 194-95.

[56] Ibid.

[57] Arendt, 185. She continues: “The Platonic god is but a symbol for the fact that real stories, in distinction from those we invent, have no author; as such, he is the true forerunner of Providence, the ‘invisible hand,’ Nature, the ‘world spirit,’ class interest, and the like, with which Christian and modern philosophers of history tried to solve the perplexing problem that although history owes its existence to men, it is still obviously not ‘made’ by them.”

[58] Ibid, 185-86.

[59] Ibid, 237.

[60] Ibid, 238.

[61] Ibid, 239.

[62] Ibid, 189.

[63] Ibid.

[64] Ibid, 247 (footnote).

[65] Ibid. The most dreadful thing about this argument is the violence it does to Jesus’ person and teaching in the guise of reverence. Here she almost suggests that Jesus knew that he was spiritualizing a human activity. Yet it is Arendt who craftily takes on Christ Himself. If she succeeds, then she, not he, takes His place as the revealer of the human condition. Yet observe her clumsy handling of the text to which, it seems, fate draws her against her will . . . Her argument would be so much stronger if she had refrained from mentioning Christ or from attempting to dismiss His divine claims once He had found His way into her argument.

[66] Ibid, 241.

[67] Ibid, 243.

[68] Ibid, 242.

[69] Ibid.

[70] Ibid.

[71] Heidegger might not approve of this use of his quotation.

[72] Arendt, 247. Again, she brazenly subverts the Biblical quotation from its original context and significance.