Is that Marx I smell on you, herr Heidegger?

The parallels that exist between Heidegger and critical theory are striking. One need only compare Wesen der Technik and Dialektik der Aufklärung. Heidegger claims that we necessarily misconstrue the essence of technology if we look at it as a means to an end or as something people do. While these viewpoints are correct, they are not true - that is they do not grasp the essence of technology. The essence of technology for him is to be sought by following the etymology of the word to its Greek origin techne. Techne meant a way of knowing and through technology for Heidegger the world is revealed in a certain way. Modern technology relates to the world as a Be-stand (quite impossible to translate, some use "standing reserve"), a reserve of energy that can be harboured - in this way the earth becomes the harbinger of coal or oil, while the traditional understanding of the field for the peasant was as something that needed to be nurtured. The danger Heidegger sees is that if this relationship to the world as Bestand is taken to its extreme, humans - who are also part of nature - will relate to each other as mere Bestände, and never be in touch with their essence.

It is quite easy to find empirical equivalents of Heidegger's somewhat perplexing writing. The operation that transforms the world into Bestand is the transformation of use value into trade value. As capital the world can be accumulated and as capital it is used to turn people into Bestände, making it possible to extract more capital from their work. An even more intimate link can be found between Wesen der Technik and Dialektik der Aufklärung. Adorno and Horkheimer similarly devote their attention to a specific relating to the world - Aufklärung or enlightenment. This stance towards the world is an instrumental one, it aims at dominating nature but the price humanity has had to pay for this control was high: in the process of enlightenment (which is not to be confused with the historical epoch of the same name, the process is broader and only culminates in this epoch) humanity has extended this instrumentalist posture to themselves, domination of other human beings has been inextricably connected to domination of nature. In Heidegger's terms: humans extend the relating as Bestand from nature to themselves.

But let us not be fooled into lumping these quite diverse philosophical traditions together on account of a few common themes. Nietzsche supposedly once wrote that he who sees too many similarities between different philosophical systems should get a better pair of glasses. Let us therefore take a closer look at the differences between these two positions. Adorno and Horkheimer claim that we have come full circle: before the process of enlightenment started, our lives were governed completely by necessity, today they are again. The only change that had happened is that natural necessity has given way to economic one: if caveman was blindly subjected to the arbitrary events in nature he could neither control nor understand, so today we are blindly subjected to the arbitrary events of the economic system we can neither control (and on this point neo-liberals will agree first of all) nor understand. Adorno and Horkheimer turn to a critique of enlightenment only to save it from itself. The ideal remains the same: emancipation, subjecting our lives to our own free will instead of external arbitrary forces. This emancipation is not the telos of history (like Hegel's idea of the self-realization of spirit) nor is it the essence of humanity - whenever it is present it is purely negative, a possibility that was never realized but that can be grasped as such. As Adorno had put it in his answer to Popper: "only to those that can imagine it as different from the one currently existing does society, to use Popper's term, pose a problem; only by what it is not will it unveil itself as what it is, and that should be the object of a sociology that does no limit itself, as the majority of its projects does, to projects of public and private administration." What the dialectics of enlightenment is endangering is not any metaphysical essence of humanity, but the never manifested - yet inalienable - right to lead a free life. For Adorno and Horkheimer that, which is, calls upon humanity, but negatively, by revealing itself as what it might become. For Heidegger on the other hand Dasein calls upon humanity affirmatively. As he had put it in Wesen der Technik: "[Gestell] is the way in which the real unveils itself as Bestand. Now we ask: does this unveiling happen somewhere beyond human activiy? No. But it does not happen merely in the human nor essentially through him." Notice the similarity in phrasing between Heidegger and Adorno: they both talk of unveiling (Adorno uses the word ent-hüllen, Heidegger ent-bergen, they both imply that truth is revealed by lifting a barrier that prevents it to be seen), but the crucial difference is that for Adorno truth is revealed through a critical relationship to the world, for Heidegger it is purely affirmative. This is the crucial difference between Adorno's critical theory and Heidegger's metaphysics. The similarities are explained by Adorno in Minima Moralia, 122 - Monnograme: "Not the last of the tasks facing thinking is to put all reactionary arguments against western culture into the service of advancing enlightenment."