Sublime and Technology: Nietzsche / Kant / Heidegger

Abstract

Martin Heidegger’s “Da-sein” (Being-there) is the ideal manifestation of the Nietzschean of “overman” in relation to the “will to power.” Overman is the potential human subject thrown in the world, and is concerned with the world. Dasein manages in the world with other fellow human beings in the world. Dasein is ‘ek-sistent’ (being ahead of itself) and sustains himself by looking ahead of the potentiality of the future anterior (will have been). In this trans-temporality of the gathering together of the simultaneity of past-present-future, this Dasein is the deconstruction of the Nietzschean human subject, thus anticipating the ontology of Being in the form of Nietzschean “trans-human” (human who overcomes himself/herself) and further of post-human (machinic human after human).” In this context, the purpose of this paper is first of all to trace how Martin Heidegger articulates Nietzsche’s concepts of “world,” “overman,” and “will to power,” by deconstructing them into his own ontology of being and provokes the question concerning the ontology of technology. Heidegger’s ontological project of being and technology opens up the new poetics of the postmodern technological sublime, in tandem with the Kantian epistemology of “the analytic of the sublime.” My own aesthetics of postmodern sublime constructed in terms of the convergent dialogues among Nietzsche and Heidgger, and Kant will prepare an open and free relationship to the questioning concerning technology and the sublime.