When influential as well as controversial philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote “Die Frage nach der Technik” (1954), he did not have in mind the dark age of technology, but rather the danger of a reduction of human being to a resource (“Bestand”) inherent to the purely technical world-view of our time. Most perfidiously, this “Gefahr” doesn’t show itself: If our relation to being itself is determined solely by the will to power over nature, it cannot even be adressed anymore as one amongst others – deviation becomes (tech-)heresy. Consequently, scientific explanation is transformed into the ahistoric cult of self-reproducing standard template constructs that is the machine-mysticism of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Whereas Heidegger attempted to contrast the self-concealing notion of modern technology with the original meaning of ancient technē as a principle of Art (poiesis), a glimpse into the far future of the 41st millennium allows for another moment of comparison in the dehumanizing power of “archeotech” throughout the dystopian fiction of the Warhammer universe.
Author bio
Ingo Werner Gerhartz studierte Philosophie und Klassische Philologie (Gräzistik) an der Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz und ist seit 2020 Lehrbeauftragter am Fachgebiet Philosophie der RPTU Kaiserslautern mit den Schwerpunkten Narrative Ethik, Natur- und Technikphilosophie. Er spielt Warhammer 40k seit der dritten Edition.
