Outline the key similarities and differences between Heidegger and Marcuse in relation to the impact of modern technology

This essay will look closely at the two philosophers Herbert Marcuse and Martin Heidegger and outline the similarities and differences between them in relation to the impact of technology. Herbert Marcuse’s thoughts towards technology were political and the way he thought about the U.S government was also in his writing. Heidegger’s work looks closely at the question of the meaning of being.

One important difference that should be noted is that Heidegger argued that technology will become outraged and we should get away from it, he believed that. Science and technology has helped to keep up with this twisted view of the world. Heidegger kept returning to the same question of “what is the meaning of being?"

According to Heidegger’s argument technology is a system and it’s a mode to human existence. The Question Concerning Technology (1953) deals with the issue of immorality in modern society, what Heidegger called the "darkening of the world”. In the book he suggests that within the enframing is the essence of technology and in that is an opportunity to experience a feeling of limitation.

Unlike Heidegger Marcuse's writing shows his dissatisfaction towards modern society and the urgent need of revolution against the confining forms of mechanical civilization, this is possible in the contrast between the possibilities for a better life which is given by modern technology and the keeping up with competition. Marcuse (In the quote) expresses that technology is going to become dominant; ‘Something is being announced…. Namely a relationship of being to man and …. This relationship, which is concealed in the essence of technology, may come to light someday in its undisguised form. I do not know whether it is going to happen!”

In 1964 Herbert Marcuse published ‘One Dimensional man’ which offered views on modern capitalism and the soviet model, he talks about the ‘parallel rise of new forms of social repression’, as Marcuse was part of the Frankfurt school his views were similar to Marx who was also a member of the Frankfurt school, as Marx argued that working class are mistreated, and they do not realise this. Marcuse also argued ‘advanced industrial society’ creates false needs and lowers individuals in this system of production and consumption through the wide range of media modes such as advertisement.

Marcuse remained in some deep sense under Heidegger’s influence. This influence was shown in the book(1964)  Marcuse said that modern technology holds the society and they are being destroyed by products which are causing them a type of memory loss and this can only be changed by the people who are outside the system.  His work on ‘repressive tolerance’ in 1965 also talks about the United States as a repressive or authoritarian county, as he explains that differences is not heard and all alterative are not considered, there fore it is easier to ignore anyone who speaks for the establishment  similar to Marxist view on the working class.

Unlike Marcuse, Heidegger’s book “The Question Concerning Technology.” argued that the modern world was shaped entirely by the technological spirit. Human being were becoming a device in the mechanism, whom being was revealed and through whom it took on meaning. His text was the deepest theoretical expressions of the type of culture criticism that came to prominence in the 1960s. In ‘One-Dimensional Man’ Marcuse argued that instrumental reason had achievement over an earlier form of rationality that embraced ends as well as means. It is not knowledge or technical devices that are primary but the technological relation to reality that makes progress in science and technique possible in the first place.

Just as Heidegger had argued that the structure of experience is occluded by the  “revealing” of technology, so Marcuse held that “technological rationality”  distorted and reduced experience to an insolvent remains. But Marcuse did not treat this change as spiritual as Heidegger. But instead Like Adorno and Horkheimer he saw it as a social occurrence of capitalism under the new conditions of advanced technology that outdated “reality principle”

Join now!

Now mass production overcome over traditional forms of consciousness and a society that “delivers the goods” this will join together the working class once and for all.

Marcuse also referenced Husserl; Husserl argued that science was rooted in the “lifeworld” of everyday practice. Husserl had hoped that regrounding science in experience would open the way to restoring Enlightenment values. Marcuse took over the notion of the lifeworld but argued that it is fundamentally political, as are the scientific concepts derived from it.

On the other hand Heidegger talks about Morden technology and relates it to ...

This is a preview of the whole essay