Contemporary life is dominated by technology that makes it difficult to be present with one another, to take time to make decisions, to concentrate fully on others. Philosopher Mathilde Nielsen argues that we can look to Heidegger to make sense of this predicament. His turn to poetry in his later years, and away from politics, allowed him to find a way to resist technology's dominance in his day. We should do the same. The simple act of reading poetry can expand our ethical horizons by requiring us to focus and care for something outside ourselves. Heidegger's idea of "dwelling" in poetry can teach us how to live more ethically.

In his later years, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) turned to poetry as the best way to do philosophy, as he found in poetry what he was struggling to find elsewhere: a place where he could think deeply and meaningfully. He called this place “the clearing,” as in the clearing of a forest, and held that once one was there, one could begin “to think about and apprehend one’s presence” — “the clearing is the place of stillness from which alone the possibility of the belonging together of Being and thinking, that is, presence and apprehending, can arise…”

Written in 1969, I find these words astonishingly apt for some Western contemporary societies—especially considering how those societies have been influenced by technological developments, making the clearing more difficult to find. Technological developments have turned societies into a thick forest of products, images, notifications, dings and dongs. Technological developments have accelerated our everyday lives; turned activities into tasks to be solved, boxes to be ticked; reduced phenomena and creatures to stocks of resources. To see this, think only of how human beings are being reduced to the product they can present to their employer by the end of their day – or how sentient beings have been reduced to red blobs of goo packaged, priced, and tailored to nearly every segmented consumer.

In this article, I’d like to focus on how some contemporary technological developments, or rather, how an underlying technological framework, has made it increasingly difficult to think and act ethically in today’s Western societies. In 1953 Heidegger referred to this framework as Gestell, or “enframing.”

Enframing is his term for the distorted worldview that turns human beings into “human resources”, patients into “supply” for clinics, rivers into “power stations,” reducing phenomena and creatures to stocks of resources. Enframing touches upon what Weber meant when he talked about “the iron cage,” or what Adorno and Horkheimer were referring to with their “instrumental reason”; yet enframing remains distinctly its own in part due to its links to poetry—and poetry’s links to the clearing.

As a site of apprehension, the clearing is obviously valuable for many reasons and purposes. In this article, however, I’ll mention just one: ethics.

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One crude understanding of ethics goes that ethics is the theoretical and practical attempt to allow beings—oneself and others—to thrive. I write “thrive” and not “function” since I believe, with Heidegger, that human beings are not mere cogs in a machine but a specimen of being that is capable of looking beyond its given place, questioning this place, dreaming of different places, and coming to terms with what comes after its time—that is, with its death. Human beings are, in short, for Heidegger, “an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is an issue.”

Okay. But what has this got to do with poetry and ethics?