Going Wrong With Innovation
I was intrigued by these words from Heidegger. You will need to read carefully, and at least twice for his meaning to clarify for your mind. Written in the early years of the 20th century, the words are prescient to our condition a century into the future, the 21st century.
By disavowing itself in and for forgottenness,
the mystery leaves historical man
in the sphere of what is readily available to him,
leaves him to his own resources.Thus left
humanity replenishes its “world”
on the basis of the latest needs and aims,
and fills out that world
by means of proposing and planning.
From these man then takes his standards
forgetting being as a whole.
He persists in them
and continually supplies himself with new standards,
yet without considering either the ground for taking up standards
or the essence of what gives the standard.
In spite of his advance to new standards and goals,
man goes wrong as regards the essential genuineness of his standards.He is all the more mistaken
the more exclusively he takes himself,
as subject,
to be the standard of all beings.
excerpt from On the Essence of Truth p. 132
by Martin Heidegger
