“The art of living” is already at work in the first few lines of the Question Concerning Technology, quickly summarized in the concise lecture Gelassenheit: how to gain a free relation to technology? In the Gelassenheit address, Heidegger contrasts calculative thought, which he suggests is the dominant modality of thinking, with the much more rarely encountered modality of meditative thinking, this last via a meditation on thoughtlessness, that is, regarding the general and generic “flight from thinking” characteristic of life in Messkirch in 1955 (and certainly no less so in 2015). For Heidegger what is significant above all is the nature of the flight from thinking as we quite conscientiously undertake such a flight, ready as we are immediately ready with objections to meditative thinking: it is, we say, too cut off from practicality, too detached, no cash value and that it is furthermore too high a goal, out of reach for the common run of humanity.

Heidegger’s humanism is there as he begins just where Aristotle begins: “anyone can follow the path of meditative thinking in his own manner and within his own limits. Why? Because man is a thinking, that is a meditating being.” (Heidegger 1966, 47) For Heidegger the issue is a matter as he says of dwelling on “what lies close” and he invites us to

meditate on what is closest; upon that which concerns us, each one of us here and now: here on this patch of home ground; now, at this present hour of history. (Ibid.)

Heidegger turns, with a quote from Hebel, to speak about homelessness which is also to say groundlessness. “Hourly and daily they are chained to radio and television” (Heidegger 1966, 48) he writes, adding to that the distracting escapism of movies and picture magazines in his own era. With today’s Twitter and Facebook and email, it is not unclear that what Heidegger is talking about with respect to “modern techniques of communication” as these “stimulate, assail, and drive man” cannot but entail, as the paragraph turns out, that such elements of modern media technology will have to be closer still and by far even for the rustic farmer than the “fields around his farmstead…the sky over the earth … the change from night to day” (ibid.) and so on.

With a series of references to the dominion of the technological, Heidegger counts off atomic power, the synthesis of life (that drives our concerns to this day), and rocket science: “already man is beginning to advance beyond the earth into outer space.” (Heidegger 1966, 50) Heidegger’s question in the wake of technology also includes a meditation on hydroelectric engineering, airplane technology, the uses of cellulose, the dynamics of broadcast radio, film and television—the last insights usually associated with the Frankfurt school. To all of that, we may add Heidegger’s knowledge of hammers—he was not his father’s son for nothing, as we recall his famous hammer example in Being and Time. In addition there is his knowledge of atomic energy and its technologies, adverting not only to wartime use but its more positive applications, writing that “it was recognized at once that atomic energy can be used for peaceful purposes” (Heidegger 1966, 49), detailing the Ge-Stell of that deployment, a deployment (and here he conspicuously draws on his dialogues with Heisenberg), that cannot but “succeed.” Yet what is arguably key to Gelassenheit, and perhaps the key to an ecological ethos to come, concerns his meditation on the stakes of what he identifies as our “setting upon” not merely the Rhine but the future itself, ‘developing’ the world for “the attacks of calculative thought,” as “an energy source”—and here we may add Heidegger’s word for this as it appears in the recently published Black Notebooks: “Vernutzung” (Heidegger 2014, 54).

And all of this is less crucial than his suggestion, dating from 1950, that there might yet be some saving element even if only on the order of a poetic paradox, a working contradiction, a saying and an unsaying at once: “But where danger is, grows/The saving power also” (Heidegger 1977, 28). The words of Johann Peter Hebel (1770–1826) which Heidegger adds to his Messkirch address 5 years later elaborates this: “We are plants which—whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not—must with our roots rise out of the earth in order to bloom in the ether and to bear fruit.” (Hebel as cited in Heidegger 1966, 47) Heidegger’s following meditation on the ether echoes Hölderlin on growth and plants and Nietzsche likewise can seem to echo the Suabian poetic insight: “Our ideas and values grow out of us with the necessity with which a tree bears fruit” (GM §ii, Nietzsche 1980, Vol. 5, 248).

In Gelassenheit, the text, we are promised just a bit more. For Heidegger contends, and Marc Van den Bossche (2015) picks this up as the theme of his own essay, “we can act otherwise. We can use technical devices, and yet with proper use also keep ourselves so free of them, that we may let go of them at any time” (Heidegger 1966, 54).

This suggestion is comforting but little is said about how such having and not having might work, how one might “use technical devices” with such reticence, such a holding back, such that we might also hold “ourselves so free of them” that we might indeed also be able to “let go of them any time.”

Do we need this?

Doesn’t Heidegger promise what we think we already have?

Are we not fairly confident that we do use our technologies without being affected, dominated, warped, confused and ruined (I’m echoing Heidegger’s cadence) by the particular technology in question: from guns and videogames to television and Facebook? This is the official view of technological neutrality according to experts and lay people alike. Hence to take one recent example from online gaming, we are told that it is not the gamers and it is not gaming as such that is the problem (I am referring to the feminist critiques of gaming culture known as Gamergate) with wildy sexist depictions of, and attitudes toward, women, but only a few wrong-minded people.

But even if we were to concede Heidegger’s point: does Gelassenheit come with a how-to manual? Heidegger underscores “the unavoidable use of technical devices,” and suggests that we simply use them while at the same time denying “them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature” (Heidegger 1966, 54).

Contra Don Ihde who thinks Heidegger knows of nothing beyond hammers, Bert Dreyfus takes Heidegger’s reflections on technology as precisely relevant to modern hi-tech and computer technology, as do others including David Weinberger. Dreyfus thought, not without justification, that a kind of “mindfulness,” rather as today's corporate lifestyle coaches speak of it, might be what Heidegger had in mind. I argue instead that we must go beyond Dreyfus to a letting be following today’s aesthetic discussion of wabi-sabi: the art not only of the everyday, but of allowing the beauty less in the Duchamp-style, ‘ready-made’ of found art than, and much rather, in the disintegration of the ordered array, the fallen petal, the turning of the season, day into evening. Wabi-sabi is the art of Verfallenheit that allows falling, that frames enframing, as it were, and attends to what is inevitably outside the frame as such and lets that too be part of it.

Some might argue that this needs no reference to the art and aesthetic sensibility of Zen or of Japan as one could affirm this as the art of Beuys or the Herzogian, Greenaway, by the numbers style, art of ugliness. The difference I think is in what Heidegger suggests by the allowing that is also an inviting. Van den Bossche cites Heidegger’s classic definition of “this comportment toward technology which expresses ‘yes’ and at the same time ‘no’, by an old word, releasement toward things” (Heidegger 1966, 54).

A “techno-sabbath” or time-out from technology, as some technology well-being folk counsel, isn’t quite what Heidegger means here. Although, as a technique to deal with technology, it may help. Yet those who deliberately keep technology at arms-length, temporarily or permanently, by means of an imposed prohibition, are, as deniers, as much “chained” to technology, as Heidegger writes, as those who passionately “affirm” or indeed as those who simply “put up” with it. Using the technological thing itself (and here we could add a meditation on keyboards and pads and wifi), to use and then to release, and to be released, is the point. We need not so much to be relaxed in our disposition towards the technology we use (every child does this, even very small children captivated into silent absorption by an iPad) but we do need to find our way clear to a free relationship which would not bind and rebind, or—to vary Marc Van den Bossche’s word “entanglement” (Van den Bossche 2015)—tangle and entangle us, but leave us yet open to what is apart from technology and calculation, that is what does not bind and does not entangle us.

For Heidegger this is thinking.

That we are not inclined to do this is clear, we are good at closing off possibilities as we ‘have’ the truth as we suppose it to be and we modern children of modern technology like nothing better than calculative schemes. For Heidegger, there is no chance that we will not fall into the trap of Ge-Stell but—and it helps to meditate on the dialectical dyad: the both/and, the Hegelian, actually: the simply Suabian sowohl als auch—Heidegger suggests that by relaxing our sense of the control that we have, we may just be able to let go of enough that the technical mastery we seek will not in turn overpower us, making us its slave. Open to mystery we would also be one step away from what it would take to use and yet not to be given over to the things we use. In order to be able to take it or leave it, we may need to release ourselves, to allow ourselves the freedom from time to time to leave it aside, and to do so without anxiety or regret.

But, and this is the beginning of what may be called digital hermeneutic phenomenology, can you do this when you forget your cellphone?