(Continued from last time...) Derrida recognizes, however, that it is precisely because of the unique way in which Heidegger denounces technics that Patočka may end up saying something different, something “Heidegger would never have said” (GD, 38). For Heidegger, dissimulation is conceived with respect to being, and not with respect to the things that get determined by being when being is interpreted as force. In other words, the existence of things that implement this metaphysics of force—technical machines—is not what dissimulates. What dissimulates is being itself. The disturbance or danger in this dissimulation, then, comes from how the technical setting up of everything as force—as we said, as if force wanted to completely replace being—is condemned to fail. Being loses its dominance over the world because force seems to account for or calculate everything that is but being. Yet, because being cannot be eradicated without all these forces ceasing to be, being keeps this dominance still. Indeed, a technical metaphysics of force still needs being in order to be calculating, both in the sense that it need to exist to calculate and it must calculate forces that are—it cannot calculate nothing. And as long as this is the case, force’s dissimulation dissimulates in vain. This constitutes the core of the problem because technics, in reaction, challenges things to exist in conformity with force with more and more violence, with greater and greater risk of annihilating everything so as to carry out force’s replacement of being. Technical reason would rather have itself be calculable as nil rather than allow something to remain uncalculated or indeterminate for it. This is what constitutes the uniqueness of Heidegger’s consideration of technics: when technics dissimulates being, it is dangerous precisely because, except through extreme nihilistic violence, it cannot overcome the fact that beyond any ability of it to dissimulate being, being would have to be already dissimulating itself. In other words, it cannot overcome the fact that, since force needs to be, it is still not essentially a dissimulation, but an expression of being. So technics is not improper or inauthentic because it dissimulates being: it is inauthentic to the extent that it disturbs the possibility of the proper as a process of letting being dissimulate itself by itself.
Patočka subscribes to all that Heidegger says, except he also claims that this act of letting being relate to itself as its proper, dissimulative self is an act of responsibility: “the civilization… produced by techno-scientific objectivity hides mystery,” or the self-dissimulation of being precisely when, in opposition to this, “authentic mystery must remain mysterious, and we should approach it only by letting it be what it is in truth—veiled, withdrawn, dissimulated” by itself (GD, 36-37). That is, responsibility consists of a letting being “bear” itself as itself or letting being become visible in things properly, as what grants existence and the possibility of meaning to things and yet hides itself (HE, 97-98). As such, it is not the mere response to situations through an act of deciding between equal possibilities that bring themselves forward prior to how responsibility is enacted. Before deciding, there is letting being be: responsibility does not include the decision or accounting that would, upon the choice of a possibility, then bring it about (HE, 98). This sort of “decisionism” is, as Patočka says, “from the start a false, objectified, and objectivistic perspective” that only accounts for that deciding which is a derivation from the act of letting being be (HE, 98). Put a different way, responsibility is an overcoming of what, within oneself and within one’s relationship to the other, would obscure or dissimulate the ability of meaning to “break into” those relationships as itself, as a mystery that should continue to be respected (HE, 98). Guarding the possibility of being’s self-dissimulation in our lives: that is responsibility, and its history is the history of the different ways the dissimulation of being is allowed through these acts of guarding or protection to show itself in different determinations of things or entities.
However, Patočka distances himself from this last, most unique point of Heidegger’s—that technical dissimulation can never escape being reappropriated back to a process of dissimulation within being itself—precisely in using it to be more condemnatory of technics. According to Derrida, he does this in saying that the rise of a metaphysics of force is, of itself, beyond being a dissimulation of being, “fictitious and inauthentic” (HE, 116). This is what Derrida claims that “Heidegger would never have said” (and we now understand how he is able to claim it): “Heidegger would never have said that metaphysical determinations of being or the history of the dissimulation of being in figures or modes of entities developed like myths or like fictions” (GD, 38, translation modified; cf. DM, 43). That is because saying this means the determination of being as calculable force in a technical metaphysics is so dissimulative that its expression or relation to being as dissimulation is itself dissimulated. In other words, it suggests that force is not even an expression of being, because it is a form of dissimulation that completely escapes all reappropriation into being’s process of self-dissimulation. This means that while Heidegger holds out the exceptional possibility that being can explicitly be understood again by some effort to reach underneath this technical determination of everything, Patočka thinks that with the rise of force in the history of the ways of relating to being—that is, in the history of responsibility—being, and responsibility with it, is completely lost. Being no longer has any dominance over force because it releases itself into a dissimulation that, beyond being’s own dissimulative expression, operates on this very expression. With Patočka, “the mystery of being is dissimulated” (GD, 39).
Technics, then, does not just threaten the proper and the responsible: a world determined by technics announces the impossibility of responsibility, the impossibility of the possibility of letting being relate to itself. One’s relationship to oneself and to the other is so calculable, so much a matter of completely understandable forces, that meaning cannot be possible in it. The other, instead of showing up as a “profound individuality” (HE, 112), is at most a fact one must momentarily register only in order to dispense with and move on to other facts or forces, other things to be calculated. One’s achievements are to be accounted for only in terms of their output into the flow of rationality, and one’s sins only matter perhaps insofar as they hinder this flow. In short, responsibility would devolve into the most basic assessment of or decision about the situation—that “there is one to be responsible for”—which, as we have seen Patočka already say, is merely a derivative phenomenon of responsibility and is thus not itself responsible. Any real attempt at responsibility going beyond this ends up in either in self-annihilation or in war—the full utilization of all technically determined energies (HE, 113-114). With the rise of technical reason, one cannot even see there is such a dissimulation of being that being cannot be seen...
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