The New Colossus

Description

Heidegger and the Will-to-Machine

Will is all. It looms as the enduring buzz beneath life’s fluctuations. Generation after generation, man imagines his noon and midnight are the first — but will is the same at every noon and midnight. Will is not the deus ex machina — it is the Machine, and man is the means for its realization.

Liberal and conservative are synonymous in essence and euphemism in practice. Both are drawn to modernity’s twin pillars: money and surveillance. Each of the pillars reinforces the other, and both are evidence of will’s ultimate motive to steer its subordinate manifestations. Man is not meant to last — his existence ensures this.

Heidegger saw through man’s fundamental falsity; for this, his purpose has been either contorted or commandeered. Purpose is impediment to will; this is why man persistently gropes his way through what passes for life. Part of man’s duplicity is convincing himself that misapprehension of purpose is the greatest purpose. Heidegger’s ability to cut through misapprehension to motive was misperceived because it required an extraction from common ways of existing. Mere existing is thoughtlessness; Heidegger saw the necessity of thought. Thought provides genuine purpose, which thwarts the will. And thwarting the will is the surest sign of possessing it.