Daimon-X's post on Trees and Computers inspired me to think through some related ideas that I have been entertaining for some time now.

 One of Heidegger’s cherished Holderlinian maxims (from the hymn Patmos) is: “Yet, where the danger is, the saving power also grows.” 

According to Heidegger, as Being is technologized, our conception and understanding of our selves and our world is changed.  We tend not to notice the changes because of their pervasiveness, for this seems to render them invisible.  Heidegger calls this paradox “The first law of phenomenology.”  This “Law of proximity” or “Distance of the near” states that the closer we are to something, the harder it is to bring it clearly into view, and thus the more decisively a matter shapes us, the harder it is for us to understand it explicitly.   

For Heidegger, technology is both the danger and the promise.  Thus, the task is for us to understand how technology can work against the technologization of Being?  Heidegger himself does not explain this to us. 

One answer, I believe is: through its negation.  Remember that Heidegger holds that when Being is reduced to Nothing, Nothing becomes the means by which Being reveals itself.  This, for Heidegger, is the truth that saves Being from Nietzschean Nihilism.  But what do I mean when I say that technology can work against the technologization of Being through its negation?  Well, I don’t mean getting rid of, eliminating or eradicating technology.  In an attempt to understand what I mean generally, consider the following particular example:  The average person’s life is filled with the pervasive, almost ubiquitous presence of media imagery.  Now imagine the profound qualitative difference that results in one’s experience to exist in its absence, the absence of media imagery.   This absence, as that which is achieved through the negation of that which is, is in the sense of common, standard, or normative, does itself in turn become a content.  The space or void that is opened up by the negation, by the elimination from one’s life of media imagery, is a nothing that allows Being to be revealed. 

To further arrive at the positive meaning that I am attributing to the negation, think about this:  An individual’s choice to not watch television is not merely the choice to not watch television as opposed to to watch television.  Rather, it is to not watch television as opposed to not to not watch television.   

An individual who relates to technology by means of negation, it seems, is an instance of one using technology in a way that opposes the technologization of Being.  For the individual who chooses to not watch television there is an attunement to Being that is very different from the attunement of those who choose not to not watch television.  In abstaining from technology (by no means does it have to be all technology all the time; I think the profound difference that results from an individual simply abstaining from only TV proves this), technology is used against technologization.  It is clear, however, that technology plays a positive role in this occurrence, for it is only because of technology’s ubiquitous existence that abstention therefrom can have the effect that it does, the effect of presenting a space, an emptiness, a nothing, that is an otherwise unavailable clearing, in which Being may be revealed.  Another example of this, for me, is to think of my experience of the absence of billboards in Vermont experienced against a more default background experience of seeing billboards everywhere.  Clearly, my experience as such is profoundly different from someone experiencing no billboards in Vermont in and of itself, that is, in the sense that one had never seen billboards in the first place.  The unique manifestation of Being that is itself the absence of billboards experienced in opposition to billboards is fundamentally different and impossible without the existence of billboards.  Thus, while technology is the danger, the promise, too, has its roots in that very same technology.  By means of negation, Being may be revealed.