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Sunday, August 4, 2024

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.

(View this post in WordPress. Any opinions on which format you like better will be welcome.)


12 comments:

  1. I haven't sat with your thoughts to have an intelligent comment on the content of this post, but regarding format: I prefer standard left-justified text to centered text, which I find much more difficult to scan. I actually read the post first in Feedly, which displays all posts in its own, left-justified format. I then clicked through to the Blogspot post from which Feedly read the text, and followed the link there to the Wordpress version.

    I didn't like the Wordpress version as much and it's hard to pinpoint why. At first I thought the WP version was center-justified and Blogspot was left-justified, but that isn't the case. Then I thought the line lengths were greater in the WP version, but on checking, the line breaks are in the same place in both WP and Blogspot. The biggest difference that I can identify is that (on my screen) Blogspot limits the post to a box 1920 pixels wide, regardless of the size of my browser window. Wordpress widens the post area along with the width of the window, so that if I want shorter lines, I have to (or can, depending on one's attitude about it) make the window narrower.

    I should be clear that unlike most readers, I suppose, I read blogs on my 4K computer screen instead of on my phone.

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    1. Thanks for the feedback! User experiences will vary, of course. I was not sure about centering the text (on this Blogspot version) and will keep in mind that not everyone cares for it.

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  2. Hey, enjoy your ability to utilize powerful computers to organize and analyze data while it lasts - world demographics and the inevitable breakup of the world order and the globally-sourced economy will undoubtedly destroy the economies of scale that allow data and processing power to become cheaper and more powerful each year. The fact that investment capital, labor, storage and processing power is cheap is what allows AI and massive data harvesting to exist.

    The end of the baby boomer cheap capital, falling birth rates and the US abandoning it's 60-year commitment to patrolling the world's trade routes is going to mean inflation, wages and interest rates pushing up costs for all high-end computing. The loss of Russian and Ukrainian neon supplies (almost all of it came from those two countries) will also impact high-end computing, because you can't do 3nm/5nm/7nm chip lithography without neon. Soon, the world will be choosing what it wants to put chips into and what just is no longer important enough to computerize given cost escalation and availability loss.

    AI is basically dead man walking, and an Orwellian data-driven "Social Credit" system is already dying in the crib in China for lack of compute (the US made sure of that a year or so ago with severe sanctions targeting the tech sector in China). You'll be getting a more Luddite-friendly world pretty soon whether you want it or not, and Heidegger can rest easy that "presence" will be easier to obtain and maintain. (:

    PS: hope you're not too attached to your iPhone. :D

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    1. Interesting prediction, thanks. I understand that AI is particularly power-hungry. The energy it consumes makes the use of energy and computation in the writing process I describe here seem truly puny.

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  3. Replies
    1. Yes, he was. I've translated relevant evidence and written a lot about it. What point would you like to make?

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  4. Richard, I agree with John Cooper's opinions here and additionally want to express my dislike for centered text; make it flush left ragged right. Also dislike fully justified text in browsers, like in the comments here, because of the uneven word spacing; it's not terrible here but not as nice as flush left. Do like the font in the WordPress version. The variable window width is nice though the blogspot version works for me, too. I too work on a large computer screen. Thanks for asking. == Michael Höhne

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    1. Thanks, Michael. I've switched this post to flush left ragged right!

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  5. Well, the time-being philosophy subject is completely beyond and alien to my engineering-mind; but the paragraph about digital technology does resonate :)

    Regardless of its representation (a mark in a clay tablet), a bit is the fundamental smallest element of information. The engineering-mindset tends towards splitting-hairs and the nano-prefix is stylistic I know, but there's no splitting the bit - no nano-presence :-)

    (Information from technology perspective is (merely?) a third fundamental 'species' like matter and energy.
    Having mastered matter and energy, human technology is now on to information. (Choosing to use paper is akin to choosing a log-fire :-)
    Anyways - whilst there is no nano-bit; the complexity, the amount of bits that humanity can now process and store with relative ease is genuinely mind-boggling! Way beyond Mega, Giga, Tera, ...)

    Apologies for splitting a hair ;-)

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    1. Thanks! With "nano-" I tried to suggest just what you're saying: the smallest possible unit. These days, "information" is one of our fundamental ways of trying to understand what it is to be, but it can be hard to define.

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  6. Looking forward to the Elements text.

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  7. I should give a chance to your texts on Academia, though, as my college career implies some philosophy... Just... Heidegger is not my favorite philosopher... But I should try, anyways...

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