Philosopher Martin Heidegger spent over 65 years handwriting his thoughts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Holy cow I didn’t know he wrote in Kurrent! Kurrent is gorgeous and his handwriting in that scan is quite compact.