A case study in digital writing

 Philosopher Martin Heidegger spent over 65 years handwriting his thoughts. 

His manuscripts piled up.

His writing is small, and hard to decipher for those who aren't familiar with the obsolete Kurrentschrift cursive.

His brother and his assistants would use typewriters, including this 1932 Urania-Piccola in my collection, to create multiple, easily legible copies of his texts.

Shortly before his death in 1976, the collected edition (Gesamtausgabe) of his writings began publication. In 2024, it is nearing its goal of publishing over 100 volumes. Another 30 volumes of correspondence are projected.

Almost all of these volumes have been illicitly scanned and turned into searchable PDFs. This is what happens these days to every book with a detectable audience. I have downloaded as many PDFs as I can. I don't feel guilty about this, because (a) I'm not reposting them publicly, (b) I have personally bought quite a few expensive volumes from the publisher, and (c) my university library subscribes to the whole series. 

Having all of these texts on my laptop makes it possible to search nearly Heidegger's whole body of work in a split second. Thanks to digital memory, his 65 years of thinking are, in a way, more transparent to me than they could ever be to his own human memory. 

He would be disgusted by this. His instructions for the Gesamtausgabe forbid any indexes, so that no one can be spared the work of thinking through the texts in context, following his trains of thought. He didn't want to become a mere object of analysis. The point of his texts is "not to communicate the opinion of the author, and not to characterize the standpoint of the writer, and not to fit it into the series of other historically determinable philosophical standpoints. Of course, such a thing is always possible, especially in the information age, but for preparing the questioning access to the topic of thinking, it is completely useless."

Nevertheless, this summer I've been writing a text that does dig into his "standpoints" on the issue of presence. In brief, early in his career Heidegger had a brainstorm: to be, at least in the Western philosophical tradition, means to be present. But presence is an aspect of time. So our understanding of being is made possible by time—and the tradition has not grasped this. Hence the title of his main work, Being and Time.

I'm asking: What exactly do "being" and "presence" mean for Heidegger, and did he keep pursuing his critique of the tradition throughout his life? For this project, it's extremely useful to be able to search digitally for words referring to presence. Of course, there is a danger of taking passages out of context, and I'm doing my best to avoid that.

The whole project has proceeded with very little use of paper. I'm composing in Microsoft Word—not my favorite application, but so familiar that it would be a pain to switch. One feature I do like is the Outline view, which makes it easy to create headings and subheadings, collapse and expand them, and shift them around. My whole text can be seen here in outline form.

This system is working well to assemble a complex study that surveys decades of Heidegger's work. It would be much harder without computers. If all goes well, the text will also be published digitally before it's available to be printed on demand. It's one in a series of digital-first academic studies that Cambridge calls "Elements." They're like very long articles or short books. 

My text includes some critical words on digital technology:

In the twenty-first century, our world is constantly scanned, measured, and recorded. We inhabit a global positioning system, a quickly spreading and indefinitely extendable regime of tracking and surveillance. Everything, especially including us, is treated as a resource to be datamined, monetized, and controlled. Nothing seems to resist our digital systems of representation. ... The accuracy of cybernetic representation depends on vast amounts of binary data: nanopresences and nanoabsences, “ones and zeroes,” which are then algorithmically processed to yield new ways of producing and processing what is present. ... Whenever we take a mobile device from our pocket and use it to schedule the delivery of a product that lies ready in a massive warehouse, we are relying on a highly complex and sophisticated system of command and control, presentation and representation, that uses modern science and technology—and thus is founded on modern philosophy, which in turn would not be possible without a history that reaches back into the primal experience of presencing among the Greeks. That, at least, would be Heidegger’s analysis.

The irony has not escaped me. But I don't see myself as a complete hypocrite, since neither Heidegger nor I are saying that all use of digital devices is wrong; we just don't want to accept an unquestioned  technological "Paradigm." 

Still, this all leaves me with a craving for old-fashioned paper, fallible human memory, and quiet reflection. That craving is being fulfilled by my other major writing project—which I'll describe in my next post.

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