What Did Heidegger Mean by ‘Only a God Can Save Us’?

When Martin Heidegger gave an interview to the German news magazine, Der Spiegel (The Mirror) in 1966, on condition that it would only be published after his death, no one could anticipate the sentence he uttered in the course of this event, which would become the title by which the interview has been known, namely, ‘Only a god can save us.’ 

Save us from what? And why ‘a god’ instead of ‘God?’ The answers to these questions would shock some readers and puzzle others. In the case of the first question, it would be a shock of confirmation for some, because they never fully trusted this ‘thing,’ and their suspicions seemed to be confirmed by Heidegger’s remark in the context of the interview. On the part of others it elicited puzzlement, because they had already virtually deified this ‘thing.’ What was it, then? In a word, technology. 

The second question is more complex, given the emergence of technology as a world-shaping power in the early 20th century – recall the colossal world Exhibition Universelle (of technology and engineering) in Paris in 1889, to commemorate the centenary of the French Revolution, which adumbrated the veritable apotheosis of technology to come, and where all the wondrous new inventions of the time were celebrated.

By the time Heidegger wrote his famous essay, ‘The question concerning technology’ around 1949 (published in 1954; English translation in Heidegger, M. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper Torchbooks, 1977, pp. 3-35), it was more than three decades after the end of World War I, and four years after the more advanced military technology that was used in World War II. 

Apart from that, technologies such as trains, motor cars, aeroplanes, telephones, and hydroelectric power were already familiar to people, and it did not take a genius to grasp that the post-industrial world, with its roots in the 18^th century, had developed into one where new inventions were transforming society apace. In other words, technology was, visibly and audially, a force that was bringing about a metamorphosis on a grand scale. Needless to say, today we are witnessing another technological metamorphosis, arguably even more far-reaching than the one that Heidegger perceived with concern. 

At the same time, religious faith had taken a knock in the previous two centuries; in the course of the 18^th century, historically known as the Enlightenment or ‘Age of Reason,’ the latter faculty had started overshadowing faith, and the 19^th century, which witnessed the further growth of reason, also saw the emergence of Darwin and Wallace’s theory of evolution, which dealt faith a more severe blow than Newtonian mechanics. Hence, with mechanical technology raising its head, it could no longer be taken for granted that the belief in the God of Christendom would remain steadfast. 

Back to the question, then. Heidegger was well aware of this historical backdrop to his own work, and that of his contemporaries, and knew that there could be other world-transforming powers comparable to technology in the future. Therefore, ‘a god’ who could potentially ‘save us’ from technology is probably a reference to such an as-yet unknown phenomenon. One should note, in this regard, that the German for ‘Only a god can save us’ is ‘Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,’ and if he had omitted the indefinite article, ‘ein,’ it would have made all the difference, because then ‘Gott’ (which, as noun, is capitalised in German) would have meant ‘God, instead of ‘a god.’  

To the vast majority of Heidegger’s contemporaries, including his interviewers (as will become apparent below), with the exception of a mere handful, the notion that we need to be rescued from technology must have seemed insane. Today this attitude is probably exacerbated to the nth degree. What, do without our beloved cellphones? (Appropriately named as such, I would think: these cellular devices, the ‘smart’ ones more than their quaint predecessors, are indeed ‘cells’ in which contemporary peoples’ souls are imprisoned.) Not to mention our chatbot chum(s) – whichever one among the growing number it might be; they have become indispensable ‘conversation partners,’ after all. To individuals who think along this avenue, I would recommend Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together (2011) as essential reading in the interest of their sanity. 

But back to Heidegger’s Der Spiegel interview, an internet-accessible version of which I have linked here – the text of the William Richardson translation (which first appeared in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, edited by Thomas Sheehan and published by Transaction in 1981; the page numbers refer to this publication). I have decided to write about it because it remains as relevant today as when it was finally published in 1976, a few days after Heidegger’s death. 

From the beginning of the interview, one notices that the interviewers are primarily interested in the events surrounding Heidegger’s appointment as Rector of Freiburg University in the early 1930s, when the Nazis were going out of their way to infiltrate universities and to make it clear – through notices being posted on university campuses, among other things – that Jews were not welcome there. Heidegger makes it explicit that he was never interested in becoming Rector, but that he was pressurised by colleagues to accept the nomination because, like his predecessor – who refused to have such notices being put up on campus, and was forced to resign – he was also against it. His mentor – the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl – was a Jew, and Heidegger’s famous book, Being and Time (1927), was dedicated to Husserl. 

As the to-and-fro of question and answer continues, the interviewers home in on what they really want to uncover; namely, the truth about Heidegger’s alleged complicity with the Nazis, and they acknowledge the new information they are receiving from him. One of the things that Heidegger tells them in the context of his inaugural rectoral address is that, during the ten months of his rectorship, he only once articulated a positive appraisal of the role of Hitler in relation to Germany, stressing that it was not in a prominent journal or other such forum, but in a student newspaper.

Furthermore, he states that it was done for practical reasons pertaining to his relationship with the students at Freiburg University. It seems clear, from Heidegger’s elaboration on his short-lived involvement with German politics, that despite this concession to student sentiments, he was not a supporter of the Nazi movement. Yet, as William J. Richardson, the original translator of the Der Spiegel interview, notes on the first page: 

Although Heidegger was one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth century, few such men of his time were criticized more severely or resented more bitterly than he. Much of this criticism arose because of an association with the Nazis while Rector of the University of Freiburg, 1933-34, one that publicly he neither repudiated, justified, nor explained. In 1966 the editors of the German news weekly, Der Spiegel, requested of Heidegger an interview to discuss these issues. In granting the interview, which took place on September 23, 1966, Heidegger insisted that it remain unpublished during his lifetime. (It appeared in Der Spiegel on May 31, 1976, five days after his death.) Its substance goes far beyond the personal issues involved and rephrases his entire philosophical experience. He saw this as an opportunity to meditate upon the meaning of Being, particularly under the guise that most profoundly characterizes contemporary culture— labeled by him ‘Technicity’ (die Technik). In these terms the interview takes on the quality of a last will and testament.

Der Spiegel continues pressing Heidegger on his possible Nazi ties in the 1930s, questioning his intentions with his rectoral address titled, ‘The self-assertion of the German university.’ His answers highlight an important tension between the ‘political science’ demanded by the Nazis and its affiliated organisation, the National Socialist Student Organisation, on the one hand, and his own understanding of ‘science’ (including political science) as articulated in his address. For the former, it simply meant political ‘science’ insofar as it had ‘practical utility for the people’ (p. 48), while Heidegger’s rectoral discourse expressed direct opposition to such a misunderstanding of the true meaning of ‘science.’ 

When his interviewers ask him whether this meant that he ‘could bring about the restitution of the University in conjunction with the National Socialists,’ he corrects them by stating: ‘That is the wrong way to put it. Not “in conjunction with the National Socialists,” but the University ought to renew itself through a reflection all its own and thereby gain a firm position against the danger of the politicizing of science’ (p. 49) – something today’s university authorities might learn from, I daresay. The next exchange must be quoted in full, because of its importance regarding the topic of this essay (p. 49):

Spiegel: And for that reason you proclaimed in your rectoral discourse these three supporting columns: ‘service by labor,’ ‘service under arms,’ ‘service through knowledge.’ Accordingly, ‘service through knowledge,’ or so you thought anyway, was to be raised to a position equal [to the others] that the National Socialists had not conceded to it? [sic]

Heidegger: It is not a matter of ‘supporting columns.’ If you read [the text] carefully, service through knowledge stands in third place numerically, to be sure, but in terms of its meaning it is placed first. The task remains to consider how labor and the bearing of arms, like every human activity, are grounded in knowledge and illumined by it.

Questions concerning Heidegger’s position on book burnings organised by the Hitler Youth – which he forbade as Rector – and his relations with Jewish students (which were cordial) also crop up, together with that of his position on books by Jewish authors, including those by Husserl, his mentor. On all of these Heidegger’s responses are adequate to exculpate him, particularly the calumnious claim that as Rector, he forbade Husserl access to the University‘s libraries. After ten months as Rector of the University, Heidegger resigned, when he was summoned by the Minister (of Education, presumably), who demanded that he replace two deans, recently appointed by him, with others who are acceptable to the Party, and he refused. 

In response to questions by Der Spiegel’s interviewers, it becomes apparent that, subsequent to his resignation as Rector, Heidegger was under constant surveillance by the Party, including by one of his doctoral students (who played open cards with him in the end), and that there were several modes of discrimination against him, such as his publications not being reviewed in Germany, and not being included in the German delegation to important conferences. Furthermore, the new rector declared Heidegger to be among the faculty members who were ‘completely expendable,’ and when he commenced teaching a course which was a continuation of the theme of his previous Nietzsche lectures, namely, his ‘confrontation with National Socialism,’ he was promptly conscripted in the Civil Defense Forces, thus becoming the oldest member of the teaching staff at the University to be called up for such service. 

The issue of technology is introduced when his interviewers draw Heidegger’s attention to a sentence in his book, Introduction to Metaphysics (based on a course he gave in 1935), reminding him that (p. 55): 

…you said: ‘What today’— this was, therefore, 1935— ‘is bandied about as the philosophy of National Socialism but has absolutely nothing to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely, with the encounter between technicity on the planetary level and modern man) casts its net in these troubled waters of “values” and “totalities”…’ 

To the question, whether the words in parenthesis were already there in his 1935 manuscript, or were added later, Heidegger replies that it was indeed in his original manuscript and was in accordance with his idea of ‘technicity’ at the time, but that it was not yet his later conception ‘of the essence of technicity as “pos-ure” (Ge-Stell).’ He admits that this ‘form of planetary technicity’ is encountered in communist countries as well as in America. Moreover, he argues (p. 55),

…the planet-wide movement of modern technicity is a power whose magnitude in determining [our] history can hardly be overestimated. For me today it is a decisive question as to how any political system— and which one— can be adapted to an epoch of technicity. I know of no answer to this question. I am not convinced that it is democracy.

This is one of the most important insights on Heidegger’s part in the course of this interview, and determines the direction taken by everything that comes afterwards. Der Spiegel takes issue with his reference to democracy, objecting that it is a ‘collective term’ that may be understood in many diverse ways, and observes that Heidegger has called it, as well as the continuing Christian Weltanschauung and the human rights ‘system’ ‘half-way measures’ as far as technicity is concerned. Heidegger agrees that this is how he would characterise these things, because they show no serious ‘confrontation’ with technicity, because they are all undergirded by ‘the conception that technicity in its essence is something that man holds within his own hands.’

Heidegger is uncompromising. He insists that this commonly held belief is not possible. Instead, he says, ‘Technicity in its essence is something that man does not master by his own power’ (p. 56). From the exchange that follows this remark it is increasingly clear that Der Spiegel’s representatives, however intelligent and informed they might be, do not understand Heidegger’s thinking. For instance, citing the story of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, they agree that humans are never complete masters of their own tools (already a fundamental misunderstanding of Heidegger’s position, which explicitly warns against confusing modern technology – or its essence, at least – with a set of tools), but suggest that it may be too ‘pessimistic’ to claim that humans are ‘…not gaining mastery over this surely much greater tool [that is] modern technicity…’ (p. 56). The German thinker emphasises that positions like pessimism and optimism do not go far enough, and when his interlocutors wonder why humanity should be ‘overwhelmed by technicity,’ he patiently points out that this is not what he is arguing, but merely that modern people ‘have not yet found a way to respond to the essence of technicity.’

From the interviewers’ reaction it is clear that they do not have an inkling of what he meant by this, for which one cannot really blame them, because for decades people have been conditioned to regarding technology – and not only technical devices – as a set of ‘tools.’ Their response to Heidegger actually confirms their own naivety (p. 56):

But someone might object very naively: what must be mastered in this case? Everything is functioning. More and more electric power companies are being built. Production is up. In highly technologized parts of the earth, people are well cared for. We are living in a state of prosperity. What really is lacking to us?

Heidegger’s answer is a perfect summary of his position, which can only be understood by someone who is prepared to ‘bracket’ (to use a phenomenological term) their own, understandable, everyday biases; that is, to set them aside for the moment (p.56):

Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is awesome, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth. I don’t know if you were shocked, but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us] —the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today. Recently I had a long…dialogue in Provence with Réné Char—a [French] poet and resistance fighter, as you know. In Provence now, launch pads are being built and the countryside laid waste in unimaginable fashion. This poet, who certainly is open to no suspicion of sentimentality or of glorifying the idyllic, said to me that the uprooting of man that is now taking place is the end [of everything human], unless thinking and poetizing once again regain [their] nonviolent power.

This paves the way for Heidegger’s ‘Only a god can save us’ remark. But what does it all mean? Consider that, as he points out elsewhere in the context of worldviews, every distinctive epoch is marked by a dominant, fundamental, all-encompassing assumption. This is what these days, following Thomas Kuhn’s use of the term in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), is called a paradigm, and what Foucault termed an epistemé, underpinning identifiable periods in his 1966 book, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. For instance, the Christian Middle Ages were governed by the virtually unquestioned assumption that God created the world, and all important questions or problems were addressed within this frame of reference, such as ‘What is the relationship between humans and the Creator?’ or ‘What should the relationship between Church and State be?’ Or ‘What is more fundamental – faith or reason?’  

Considering Heidegger’s work on technology, by the mid-20th century, such a framework has definitively been replaced by a technocentric one, which means – as his remark, above demonstrates – that all important questions are approached without questioning the primacy of technology, or what he calls ‘technicity.’ Hence the interviewers’ emphasis on things ‘functioning’ well. As long as everything is ‘functioning,’ all is well with the world, apparently. But Heidegger questions this as only a true philosopher can, for the simple reason that there are other ways of ‘framing’ the world, such as art and religion, for example, or by who knows what could emerge in the future as a new epistemé, as Foucault might say. 

His interlocutors observe that they would rather be ‘there,’ in that age (of technicity) – by implication, than in a world represented by Heidegger and Char – and that, in fact, they do not think that humans need to be confined to the earth, but could possibly ‘reach out from this earth toward other planets’ (p. 57). This goes against everything that Heidegger believes, as he proceeds to argue, when he says that according to his ‘orientation,’ everything worthwhile has arisen only from humans having a home and being ‘rooted’ in traditions on the earth. Clearly at loggerheads with Heidegger on this issue, Der Spiegel asks whether, in the face of the ‘absolutely technical state’ that Heidegger perceives as having arisen, an individual or group, or philosophy, insofar as the latter may ‘guide’ people, could still ‘influence’ this state of affairs ‘to a determined action.’

Needless to say, what this question shows is the understandable – and today still widespread – belief that all it takes for people to change a course of events is to intervene through action of some sort (including technical intervention), which is, as far as Heidegger is concerned, a misguided notion, as his uncannily enigmatic answer reveals (p. 57):

If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us [My italics; B.O.]. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline.

This is the crux of the matter which, not surprisingly, gives rise to great puzzlement on the part of his interlocutors, who inquire whether we can bring this ‘god forth by our thinking.’ His answer, instead of clarifying the matter, is even more perplexing – ‘We can not bring him forth by our thinking. At best we can awaken a readiness to wait [for him].’ He continues (p. 57-58):

It is not through man that the world can be what it is and how it is— but also not without man. In my view, this goes together with the fact that what I call ‘Being’ (that long traditional, highly ambiguous, now worn-out word) has need of man in order that its revelation, its appearance as truth, and its [various] forms may come to pass. The essence of technicity I see in what I call ‘pos-ure’ (Ge-Stell) [Usually translated as ‘Enframing’; B.O.], an often ridiculed and perhaps awkward expression. To say that pos-ure holds sway means that man is posed, enjoined and challenged by a power that becomes manifest in the essence of technicity— a power that man himself does not control. Thought asks no more than this: that it help us achieve this insight. Philosophy is at an end.

This is highly perplexing, but not incomprehensible. Behind Heidegger’s remark stands his grasp of the hubris committed by humankind, to believe that through the essence of technology everything can become what he calls a ‘standing-reserve’ (Bestand) which can be commanded by humans through technology, to do virtually anything, from constructive to destructive, and the apogee of which may be discerned in the WEF’s claim, that they have become like ‘gods’ – although certainly not the liberating kind that Heidegger alludes to in the interview. 

After all, even if it seems as if humans ‘control’ this enframing force, this is not at all the case. There is always what the French thinker, Jean Baudrillard (see for example Baudrillard, J. The Intelligence of Evil, or the Lucidity Pact, Oxford: Berg 2005, p. 185-189), calls ‘blowback,’ which takes many forms to restore ‘duality’ – which any totalising strategy (including what Heidegger calls Gestell) attempts to replace with ‘oneness’ or total identity) – such as the radiation that lingers long after the explosion of a nuclear device or catastrophe, like Hiroshima and Chernobyl. Or the techno-industrial production of plastic, initially regarded as a wonder material, given its many uses, but which has today become a nature-destroying pollutant. 

Rather than elaborating further on the rest of the Der Spiegel interview – which covers the terrain already uncovered above, from various other angles – I shall ask the question, whether Heidegger’s ‘diagnosis’ of the state of the world in terms of technicity is still valid today, and if not, what has changed. In brief, I believe that it is still valid, but that, since the last decade of the 20th century, the hold of technicity has tightened on the world, and moreover, that it has transmogrified itself according to the inner ontological logic of technicity, which no longer assumes the form of ‘pos-ure’ (Enframing) or Gestell, but of something by which such essential enframing has been exacerbated – as may be gathered by the allusion to the WEF’s hubristic pronouncement, above).

The essence of technicity today has ‘morphed’ – like the eponymous T-1000 terminator in Cameron’s second Terminator film – into something that surpasses a frame or ‘posure’ of sorts, because it no longer merely frames; it pervades and saturates everything on the planet, somewhat like the digitalisation of everything in the film, Transcendence, which becomes so pervasive that leaves on trees mutate into entities no longer evincing biological life, but resembling lifeless, quasi-metallic appendages. 

I therefore propose to call this the Age of Pervasive Transhuman Agency (PTA), or alternatively, Transhuman Agentic Saturation (TAS), Optimal Digital Transformation (ODT), or Transformative Digital Protocol (TDP). What these amount to will be clarified in a future post; suffice to say that the idea of saturation is fundamental to it, but also that of the transhuman, and importantly, of agency, because technicity, in the guise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), has reached the stage of development where it is no longer confined to the internet without the ability to effect changes in social reality; it can do so, even if is via mediating, non-AI agents – sometimes to their own detriment. This means that Heidegger’s cryptic saying, ‘Only a god can save us,’ has become more relevant than ever. What this ‘god’ could mean, or whether it is at all meaningful to speculate about it, still has to be addressed.