This is KZSU Stanford.

Welcome to entitled opinions.

My name is Robert Harrison, and we down with two journalists from the German magazine Der Spiegel

to answer pointed questions about his thought and his involvement with the Nazi regime in the 1930s.

Late in the interview, which came out after his death in 1976, with the title only a God

can save us, Heidegger decried technicity's deracinating effects on humanity, claiming that

modern technology is not a tool, but a fundamental change in the way being reveals itself in the modern era.

The essence of technology is nothing technological, he declared,

its essence must be sought in the era's metaphysical will

to render all things, including human beings, objectifiable, orderable, and fungible, or what today we might call datable.

Human kind has not yet found a way to respond to the essence of technicity, he said, because we are the servants, not the masters of technology's inner impulse to forever optimize and augment its own functional operations.

Dazed and confused, the interviewers asked Heidegger, quote, but someone might object very naively. What must be mastered? 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?

A perfectly reasonable query to which Heidegger responded as follows.

Everything is functioning.

That is precisely what is uncanny, 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.

We do not need atomic bombs to uproot us. The uprooting of man is already here.

Our relationships have become merely technical ones.

It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today.

Heidegger was wrong about many things, yet he was more right

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