ABSTRACT
Heidegger’s critique of the “essence” of our technological epoch, das Gestell, is not just a critique to the way we, modern humans, reduce nature to resources for production and consumption. It is more than that; it is a critique of the tendencies that organize this epoch, as these are typified in natural science. However, Heidegger’s critique is not exclusively directed at natural science; it also aims at the science of phenomenology as it was grasped and expounded by the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. As I show in this chapter, it is in the context of Heidegger’s early critique of Husserlian phenomenology that the basic concepts of his critique of techno-science take shape. I focus on Heidegger’s earlier critique of Husserlian method, specifically the epoché and The Principle of All Principles. Here I show how this early critical encounter with Husserl’s phenomenology paves the way for Heidegger’s conception of Gestell, which reduces the world to the orderable and the uniform, what the early Heidegger refers to as “formalization.” Likewise, Heidegger’s later notion of Gelassenheit, a comportment that releases us to a free relation to nature, is primarily conceived as an alternative to Husserlian epoché.
