| Let us ask Karl Marx. Let us ask him to give us a prophecy: “Our epoch,
the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature:
it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more
splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes
directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”, writes Marx
with Engels in 1848. The “proletariat, [is] the modern working class”.
There is no doubt about it, even in the German original the word
“moderne”, modern is used. Remarkable. Here we are 168 years later in
the age of post-everything, and the main prophecy is still the concern
about modernity. According to our prophet Marx, we constantly overlook
the very thing we thought we left behind, now that we can recall any
piece of human thought and re-tweet it. That is modern. That is the
question of defining the modern working class. That is the concern for
the being of modern. Now it seems the answer has already been given in
1953, at the height of mid-century modernism: “Es bleibt richtig: auch
die moderne Technik ist ein Mittel zu Zwecken”. If you don’t know what
this means, well, you’re out of luck, because Heidegger can not be
translated and still be considered genuine. Just like the Noble Quran:
if you can’t read Arabic, you are not able to grasp the meaning of the
truth, because language and truth are tied to each other, just like our
Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. But I’ll give it a go here, just so we can
move on from blaming each other, who the modern one is, the one in
possession of the truth. “It maintains to be correct: even modern
technology is a means to an end.” Modernity is still just a means to an
end. It is not “an und für sich” in and for itself as Hegel wants us to
think, but in and for other things outside itself, something we use in
order to get to the end. That pretty much defines being goal oriented,
even though Heidegger uses the word “Zweck”, which is purpose. As a
magic word, “Zweck” sounds very final, so I recommend saying this out
loud. Modernity has this magic word at its core, Modernity will use any
means to get there: the end, “zum Zweck”. But what is this goal of
modernity? There is a whole tradition dedicated to the Last Things, the
very end of everything: Eschatology. As the final goal of modernity is a
concern for the end times, the eschatology of our antagonisms, the whole
purpose is the end. Who better than John of Patmos, the attributed
author of Revelation, to give us a good picture of the end: “I am the
Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who
is to come, the Almighty.”
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