A Wittgensteinian Critique of Heidegger's Views on Understanding and Technology

Introduction

Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein represent two of the most influential philosophical voices of the 20th century, each offering profound insights into the nature of understanding, language, and human existence. While they share certain concerns—particularly a critique of traditional metaphysics and a focus on everyday practices—their approaches diverge significantly. This essay examines Heidegger's views on understanding, technology, and the possibility of artificial intelligence through a Wittgensteinian lens, revealing how Wittgenstein's focus on language games and forms of life might challenge Heidegger's more ontologically-oriented perspective.

As we have seen in our previous essay "Wittgenstein's Certainty and Understanding", his later philosophy suggests that understanding is not an internal mental state but a practical ability demonstrated through participation in public language games. This perspective offers a distinct counterpoint to Heidegger's emphasis on primordial being-in-the-world and his critique of technological "enframing." By bringing these two philosophical approaches into dialogue, we can gain deeper insight into questions of human and artificial understanding.

Heidegger's Fundamental Ontology

Heidegger's philosophical project centers on what he calls the "question of Being" (Seinsfrage). He argues that Western philosophy since Plato has forgotten this question, focusing instead on beings (entities) rather than Being itself. For Heidegger, our most basic mode of existence is not as thinking subjects contemplating objects, but as beings engaged in practical, concerned activity within a world:

"The 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence." (Being and Time, §9)

Heidegger introduces this radical approach to human existence early in Being and Time:

"Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it... Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein's Being." (Being and Time, §4)

Heidegger uses the term "Dasein" (literally "being-there") to refer to the distinctive mode of human existence. Dasein's primary way of understanding is not theoretical knowledge but practical engagement. He distinguishes between equipment that is "ready-to-hand" (zuhanden)—encountered in absorbed practical activity where we don't explicitly represent it—and objects that are "present-at-hand" (vorhanden)—theoretically observed as things with properties:

"The kind of Being which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call 'readiness-to-hand' [Zuhandenheit]... No matter how sharply we just look at the 'outward appearance' of Things in whatever form this takes, we cannot discover anything ready-to-hand." (Being and Time, §15)

"The Being of those entities which we encounter as closest to us can be exhibited phenomenologically if we take as our clue our everyday Being-in-the-world, which we also call our 'dealings' in the world and with entities within-the-world." (Being and Time, §15)

Heidegger would likely view artificial intelligence systems as fundamentally lacking the existential structures necessary for genuine understanding. For him, understanding involves care (Sorge), temporality, and the possibility of authenticity—none of which seem available to AI:

"Dasein exists. Furthermore, Dasein is an entity which in each case I myself am. Mineness belongs to any existent Dasein, and belongs to it as the condition which makes authenticity and inauthenticity possible." (Being and Time, §9)

A Wittgensteinian Response: Language Games vs. Fundamental Ontology

From a Wittgensteinian perspective, Heidegger's search for a more fundamental ontology behind everyday practices risks creating precisely the kind of metaphysical pictures that lead to philosophical confusion. Wittgenstein warns against the temptation to look for deeper explanations when what matters is the actual use of concepts in practice:

"Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is." (Philosophical Investigations, §124)

Where Heidegger sees ordinary analytical thinking as obscuring a more primordial understanding of Being, Wittgenstein might suggest that the problems arise from misunderstanding how language works in different contexts:

"When philosophers use a word—'knowledge', 'being', 'object', 'I', 'proposition', 'name'—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?" (Philosophical Investigations, §116)

Heidegger, however, might respond that language itself has a deeper relationship to Being that Wittgenstein overlooks:

"Language is the house of Being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home." (Letter on Humanism)

"Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man." (Poetry, Language, Thought)

From a Wittgensteinian perspective, Heidegger's distinction between "ready-to-hand" and "present-at-hand" might be reinterpreted not as revealing fundamental ontological structures, but as describing different language games or forms of life. The hammer that becomes "visible" when it breaks is not revealing a shift in ontological categories but showing how our practices and language change in different situations.

Critiquing Heidegger's Technology Critique

Heidegger's critique of technology centers on what he calls "enframing" (Gestell)—a mode of revealing that reduces everything to "standing reserve" (Bestand), resources waiting to be optimized and exploited:

"The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such." (The Question Concerning Technology)

"Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological." (The Question Concerning Technology)

For Heidegger, the danger of technology is not primarily in specific devices or their effects, but in how technological thinking transforms our relationship to Being itself:

"The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence. The rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth." (The Question Concerning Technology)

"Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of countries, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs." (Bremen and Freiburg Lectures)

A Wittgensteinian might approach this critique with skepticism, suggesting that Heidegger has conflated different language games or constructed a grand narrative that obscures the diverse ways we actually engage with technology. As Wittgenstein notes:

"A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably." (Philosophical Investigations, §115)

Heidegger's account of technology as "enframing" might itself be such a picture—powerful and compelling, but potentially obscuring the variety of ways we relate to technological practices. Rather than seeing technology as expressing a unified essence, Wittgenstein might encourage us to examine the diverse language games in which technologies figure, each with its own internal logic and criteria of meaning.

Embodiment and Understanding

Heidegger emphasizes that human understanding is fundamentally embodied. We understand concepts like "heavy" not primarily through definitions but through bodily engagement with things that resist us:

"Dasein is its world existingly." (Being and Time)

"In everyday terms, we understand ourselves and our existence by way of the activities we pursue and the things we take care of." (Being and Time, §12)

"Spatiality seems to be constitutive for the world... Does Being-in-the-world imply being-in-space? Does Dasein itself have a spatiality that is proper to it?" (Being and Time, §12)

Heidegger's discussion of space and spatiality is not about objective, measurable space but about how we experience space through our embodied engagement with the world:

"When I go toward the door of the lecture hall, I am already there, and I could not go to it at all if I were not such that I am there. I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the room, and only thus can I go through it." (History of the Concept of Time)

While Wittgenstein would likely agree that embodiment plays an important role in human understanding, he would approach this differently. For Wittgenstein, the significance of embodiment emerges through its role in our shared forms of life and language games:

"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." (Philosophical Investigations, p. 223)

This famous remark suggests that understanding depends not just on language but on shared forms of life—and these are indeed connected to our embodied nature. However, Wittgenstein would resist grounding understanding in a fundamental ontology of embodiment. Instead, he would focus on how our bodily nature figures in specific language games and practices.

The question of whether AI could understand would, for Wittgenstein, not be about whether it shares our embodiment, but whether it can participate in our language games:

"To understand a language means to be master of a technique." (Philosophical Investigations, §199)

Private Experience vs. Public Criteria

One of the most significant differences between Heidegger and Wittgenstein concerns the role of private experience in understanding. While Heidegger does not precisely advocate for a private language, his emphasis on Dasein's unique relationship to Being might seem to privilege a kind of experience that precedes public language.

Heidegger speaks of authenticity as a mode of being that involves owning one's possibilities:

"Authentic Being-one's-Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the 'they'; it is rather an existentiell modification of the 'they' as an essential existentiale." (Being and Time, §27)

"Anxiety individualizes Dasein and thus discloses it as 'solus ipse'. This existential 'solipsism', however, is so far from displacing us into the empty egotism of a worldless subject that in an extreme sense it brings Dasein precisely before its world as world, and thus brings it face to face with itself as Being-in-the-world." (Being and Time, §40)

Wittgenstein explicitly argues against the possibility of a private language or understanding based solely on private experience:

"An 'inner process' stands in need of outward criteria." (Philosophical Investigations, §580)

"If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word 'pain' means—must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?" (Philosophical Investigations, §293)

From this perspective, Heidegger's account of understanding as rooted in Dasein's unique relationship to Being might risk a kind of privacy that Wittgenstein would find philosophically problematic. Understanding, for Wittgenstein, is necessarily tied to public criteria and practices.

The Question of AI Understanding Reconsidered

These philosophical differences lead to contrasting perspectives on the possibility of AI understanding. Heidegger would likely reject the possibility of genuine AI understanding, seeing AI as lacking the existential structures necessary for authentic engagement with Being. AI would represent for him the ultimate expression of technological "enframing," reducing even understanding itself to a calculable resource:

"The essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it." (The Question Concerning Technology)

"Calculative thinking computes. It computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities. Calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself." (Discourse on Thinking)

From a Wittgensteinian perspective, the question would be approached differently. Rather than asking whether AI possesses certain inner states or existential structures, Wittgenstein would focus on whether AI can successfully participate in our language games:

"For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word 'meaning' it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language." (Philosophical Investigations, §43)

If an AI system can follow the rules of our language games—responding appropriately in context, maintaining coherence across diverse situations, adapting to new linguistic scenarios—it might be said to exhibit a form of understanding. This understanding would differ from human understanding, as AI participates in a different "form of life," but it would not be categorically dismissed.

Certainty and Groundlessness

Heidegger and Wittgenstein also differ in their approaches to certainty and foundations. Heidegger seeks to recover a more authentic relationship to Being that has been obscured by metaphysics and technology. While he rejects traditional foundationalism, his project still aims at a kind of recovered authenticity:

"The question of the meaning of Being must be formulated... This question has today been forgotten." (Being and Time, §1)

"Truth is not originally the correspondence of judgment to the thing. Truth is the unconcealing of beings through which an openness essentially unfolds. All behavior is open in such an openness." (On the Essence of Truth)

"The essence of truth is freedom... Freedom now reveals itself as letting beings be." (On the Essence of Truth)

Wittgenstein, in contrast, embraces a more radical groundlessness:

"If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false." (On Certainty, §205)

"At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded." (On Certainty, §253)

For Wittgenstein, our certainties are not grounded in direct access to Being or reality, but in shared practices and forms of life:

"I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false." (On Certainty, §94)

This perspective challenges Heidegger's search for a more authentic relationship to Being, suggesting instead that our understanding is inherently bound up with contingent, historical forms of life.

Conclusion: Different Paths, Different Insights

A Wittgensteinian critique of Heidegger reveals fundamental differences in how these philosophers approach understanding, technology, and the possibility of artificial intelligence. Where Heidegger seeks to recover a more authentic relationship to Being that has been obscured by metaphysics and technology, Wittgenstein focuses on the diverse language games and forms of life that constitute our practices of understanding.

Heidegger's concern with technology remains powerful and prescient:

"Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology." (The Question Concerning Technology)

Yet from a Wittgensteinian perspective, this grand narrative about technology's essence might itself be questioned as a kind of philosophical picture that distorts our understanding of diverse technological practices.

These differences do not necessarily mean that one approach is correct and the other mistaken. Rather, they offer complementary insights into the nature of understanding and technology. Heidegger's critique of technology as "enframing" captures something important about how modern technological practices can reduce the world to calculable resources. Wittgenstein's focus on language games and rule-following offers valuable tools for analyzing how understanding actually works in practice.

In considering the possibility of AI understanding, a synthesis of these perspectives might be most illuminating. From Heidegger, we gain awareness of how AI's lack of embodied, caring engagement with the world makes its understanding fundamentally different from human understanding. From Wittgenstein, we gain tools for analyzing how AI might still participate in language games and demonstrate forms of understanding through its linguistic practices.

As Wittgenstein reminds us:

"What is your aim in philosophy?—To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle." (Philosophical Investigations, §309)

Both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, in their different ways, help us escape philosophical confusions about understanding and technology. By bringing them into dialogue, we gain a richer perspective on what it means to understand and how this relates to our technological age.