Heidegger_ Private experience as a step towards Nihilism

Direct Quote from The Essay by Hubert L Drafus – “Heidegger on the connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Politics” published in the book Cambridge Companion to Heidegger.

“When everything that is material and social has become completely flat and drab,  people retreat into their private experiences as the only remaining place to find significance. Heiddeger sees this move to private experience as characteristic of the modern age. Art, Religion, Sex, Education all become varieties of experience when all of our concerns have been reduced to the common denominator of experience we will have reached the age of Nihilism.”

Guignon. C (editor), 1993,  the Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge University Press.

Pg 292

Magic is Technology’s unconscious

The powerful aura that today’s advanced technologies cast does not derive solely from their novelty or their mystifying complexity; it also derives from their literal realisation of the virtual projects willed by the wizards and alchemists of an earlier age. Magic is technology’s unconscious, its’ own arational spell. Our modern technological world is not nature, but augmented nature, super nature, and the more intently we probe it’s mutant edge of mind and matter, the more our disenchanted productions will find themselves wrestling with the rhetoric of the supernatural. Pg 48 TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information Erik Davis Serpent’s Tail; New edition edition (12 Nov 2004)

The Social Construct and Technomysticism

By creating a new interface between the self, the other, and the world beyond, media technologies become part of the self, the other and the world beyond. They form the building blocks, and even in some sense the foundation, of what we now increasingly think of as ‘the social construction of reality’.
Historically the great social constructions belong to the religious imagination: the animistic world of nature magic, the ritualised social narratives of mythology., the ethical inwardness of the ‘religions of the book’, and the increasingly rationalised modern institutions of faith that followed them. These various paradigms marked the their notions and symbols in the world around them, using archetecture, language, icons, costumes, and social ritual, – and often whatever media they could get their hands on .
For reasons that cannot simply be chalked up to the desire for power and conformity, the religious imagination has an irrepressible and almost desperate urge to remake the mental world humans share by communicating itself to others. From hieroglyphs to the printed book, from radio to computer networks, the spirit has found itself inside a variety of new bottles, and each new medium has become, in a variety of contradictory ways, part of the message. When the Norse god Odin swaps an eye for the gift of the runes, or when Paul of Tarsus writes in a letter that the World of God is written in our hearts, or when New Age mediums ‘channel spiritual information‘, the ever shifting boundaries between media and the self are redrawn in technomystical terms.
p g 8

TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information
Erik Davis

Serpent’s Tail; New edition edition (12 Nov 2004)