All posts tagged: martin heidegger

Today’s obsession with authenticity isn’t new – being true to yourself has troubled philosophers for centuries

Today’s obsession with authenticity isn’t new – being true to yourself has troubled philosophers for centuries

Published by Sam Flores

(The Conversation) — Today’s youth cherish “authenticity,” but is it a virtue? According to a report from Ernst & Young, more than 9 in 10 Gen Z respondents indicated that being authentic and true to yourself is extremely or very important. In fact, most of them claimed authenticity is more important than any other personal value. This finding is not all that surprising: All of us live in an age where we’re bombarded by social media and artificial intelligence – when striving to be your authentic self becomes an increasingly difficult task. Yet, even if it has somehow become a common goal, it is unclear how many of us can truly define the “authenticity” that we say we are pursuing. I think it’s also worth asking whether sincerity and authenticity are perennial human virtues or just obsessions of this technological age. As a scholar in the history of political thought and American political development, I think two philosophers can help us understand this problem and how to deal with it: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Martin Heidegger. …

‘Totalitarian’ Technologies and the Transformation of the Political World: A Radical Cold War Critique

‘Totalitarian’ Technologies and the Transformation of the Political World: A Radical Cold War Critique

Published by Jenni Sidey

“The world in which we live today and which surrounds us, is a technological one,” wrote Günther Anders in 1979. The Cold War world, just as much as our own, was a world fundamentally shaped by technology. Technology’s promise included the automation of work, the possibility of abundance, the discovery of new cures for diseases, and the extension of life. These more hopeful claims sat alongside technological fears of the apocalyptic madness of the atom bomb, the dehumanizing effects of machine dominance, or the intrusion of mass media into every corner of the individual’s life. Such hopes and fears might also be held simultaneously: technology, it has so often been said, is merely a tool, a neutral instrument whose effects are the result of its operators. A major group of political theorists in the Cold War period rejected the neutrality thesis, instead asserting that the character of modern technology was essentially totalitarian. These thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, Jacques Ellul, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Hans Jonas, Max Horkheimer, Lewis Mumford, Martin Heidegger, and Günther Anders, were …