Martin Heidegger and Past Master

Over the Christmas break, I have been considering teaching Past Master next summer and posting the lecture recordings. I would probably begin with Heideggerian categories and work backward, letting the novel’s Thomistic and other Christian elements come into clearer focus by contrast. I would also likely assign Paul Kingsnorth’s recent Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity as a supplementary text, given how directly it speaks to the questions Past Master raises for a contemporary audience.

This approach makes sense because Past Master takes up questions that closely parallel those of Heidegger’s late philosophy, especially the questions of Being and Gestell. Gestell—usually translated as “enframing”—names the essence of modern technology: a mode of revealing in which beings appear primarily as standing-reserve (Bestand), ordered and made available for calculation and use. In Heidegger’s later work, this becomes significant because Gestell describes a historically dominant way in which Being discloses itself today, one that conceals other possibilities of revealing and therefore marks a crucial site at which the question of Being must be reopened. At minimum, Heidegger’s vocabulary would be a shared set of terms for class discussion, allowing the novel’s problems to be examined without asking students to begin from the theological commitments within which Lafferty himself is thinking.

The Nine are creatures of Gestell, and Astrobe’s cities are sites where enframing holds sway, so that human beings themselves are disclosed primarily as standing-reserve. For Heidegger, this is the danger internal to modern subjectivity from Descartes through Kant: what begins as the subject’s representational mastery of beings consummates itself in a technological revealing that sets upon everything, including the human, and recruits the subject as a functionary of ordering. In his 1930s lectures Heidegger thought that Nietzsche, as the thinker who most decisively works through this late turn in modern metaphysics, shows the subject reinterpreted as will to power and bound to eternal recurrence, no longer standing over beings, but caught within the same circuitry of ordering, so that the subject itself becomes something deployable and calculable, disclosed as standing-reserve.

The end of Past Master leaves open the possibility of another way of revealing and presencing (Anwesen) beyond Gestell, beyond late-modernity, which in Lafferty takes the form of Christian eschatological hope:

The spirit came down once on water and clay. Could it not come down on gell-cells and flux-fix? The sterile wood, whether of human or programmed tree, shall it fruit after all? The Avid Nothingness, the diabolically empty Point-Big-0, is it cast away again? Is there then room for life? Shall there be return to real life?

In "The Question Concerning Technology" (1954), Heidegger writes about this problem outside eschatology but with hope:

But where danger is, / grows the saving power also. Let us think carefully about these words of Hölderlin. What does it mean ‘to save’? . . . ‘To save’ is to fetch something home into its essence, in order to bring the essence for the first time into its genuine appearing

It also makes sense to read the two men together because, for all their insight, both must be understood within the horizon of Gestell that the Second World War brought into brutal clarity. National Socialism intensified Gestell in its project of total ordering and mobilization. I have addressed this elsewhere in discussing both “Groaning Hinges of the World” and disguised totalitarianism on Astrobe. In short, Heidegger’s late thinking on Gestell is inseparable from his disastrous attempt to think from within the prewar moment; Lafferty’s reflections on the work camps belong to the postwar horizon, the war camp itself standing as the twentieth century’s concrete image of human beings disclosed and administered as standing-reserve.

What follows is a resource for tackling Past Master and Heideggerian questions of disclosure, ordering, and concealment, as well as the relation between technology and nature, largely decoupled from the Thomistic tradition in which I prefer to both.