1.5.1. Heidegger and Digital Media
In his book Critical Theory and the Digital, David M. Berry (2014) provides thoughts on how to use critical theory. I find this project feasible and can relate to it to the extent that Berry uses Frankfurt School concepts such as instrumental reason and the dialectic of the enlightenment in order to criticise what he terms computational ideology, authoritarian-computational epistemology, and computationality. New communication technologies have often come along with enthusiastic optimistic ideologies or cultural pessimistic ideologies, in which these tools are presented either as solving humanities’ problems and bringing about a much better society or as causing the decline of culture and society. Ideology critique of digital technologies is therefore a much-needed important endeavour. My own approach, however, diverges from Berry in respect to the fact the he is ‘drawing on the work of the later Heidegger, to create new concepts for thinking the digital, indeed, contributing to a critical theory for the digital’ (Berry 2014, 19).
I do not have the space here to detail the full argument of why I think Heidegger and a critical theory of technology and communication are incompatible, and therefore have to refer the reader to two essays that I have written on this topic (Fuchs 2015b, 2015c). I can here only point out some aspects of this complex topic in a necessarily brief manner. I recommend to those who are further interested in Heidegger, anti-Semitism and the philosophy of technology, to read my two articles in full and to also engage with related works that I reference there.
1.5.2. Heidegger’s Black Notebooks
In the Black Notebooks, Heidegger (2014a, 2014b, 2014c, 2015) argues that Jews have a calculating, instrumental form of reason. Two examples:
Jewry’s temporary increase in power is, however, grounded in the fact that Western metaphysics, especially in its modern development, furnishes the starting point for the difusion of a generally empty rationality and calculative ability, which in this way provides a refuge in “spirit”, without being able grasp the hidden decision regions on their own9 (Heidegger 2014c, 46 [XII, 67–68]).
The Jews “live” by their marked talent for calculation second only to the principle of race, which is why they are resisting its consistent application with utmost violence10 (Heidegger 2014c, 56 [XII, 82–83]).
Heidegger sees Jews as a powerful group, which plays with the myth of a Jewish world conspiracy. Furthermore, he argues that this group has a specific quality, namely a calculative rationality that is grounded in Western metaphysics. He does not argue that this is a biological characteristic, but a socio-natural one, i.e. he constructs ‘the Jews’ as a homogenous collective, attributes to them and blames them for qualities of capitalism. The identification of Jews with instrumental rationality has a double feature: instrumental rationality, on the one hand, is an expression of the drive to accumulate capital and power, and on the other hand, the operating principle of modern technology. Heidegger blames Jews for both the logic of capitalism and industrialism.
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Critical Theory of Communication