Anti-Climacus’s Pre-emptive Critique 
of Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology”

Andrew Komasinski

ABSTRACT: In this article I argue that The Sickness unto Death, authored by Kierkegaard under the pseudonym Johannes Anti-Climacus, has resources for an interesting critique of technology in some ways like that of Heidegger’s critiques in “Question Concerning Technology” and Being and Time. I suggest that Anti-Climacus’s account of “despair” resonates with much of what Heidegger says about inauthenticity and the self’s orientation toward death. But I also contend that in maintaining that the self can only be complete by understanding itself as essentially relating and related to God, Anti-Climacus has a critique of the sort of solution that Heidegger would provide. Finally, I trace the origin of this view to fundamental differences in ontology that must be settled outside of the problems posed by technology.

In this article I argue for the claim that Kierkegaard, using the pseudonym Johannes Anti-Climacus,1 presented a critique of modern technology in Sickness unto Death. He did so in a way that permits a critique of Heidegger’s solution to the problems posed by technology. I defend this claim by first sketching out Heidegger’s critique from “Question Concerning Technology,” including his references to Being and Time, so as to indicate how technology posed a problem for Heidegger’s view of authentic human existence and how he posited reflection on our “ownmost” possibility as the best response for a human individual.2 I then suggest that The Sickness unto Death includes a critique of technology in which the problem that Anti-Climacus identifies in “despair” encompasses and parallels Heidegger’s term “inauthenticity.” I also contend that Anti-Climacus critiques the position that will become Heidegger’s solution. Heidegger’s view of the self’s “ownmost” possibility (i.e., death) can only be complete if the self understands the self as essentially relating and related to God. Finally, I trace the origin of this divergence to fundamental differences in ontology that must be settled outside of the problems posed by technology.

Heidegger and the Problem with Technology
		
Heidegger’s critique of technology focuses on technology’s effect on Dasein (“being here” considered as lived human existence). Heidegger begins with the observation that technology first appears as usefulness.3 In our times devices like iPods, iPads, Kindles, mp3 players, and Androids entertain us and keep us connected even when we are far away from home. By itself this prospect seems pleasant and suggests that human existence and technology can be fruitfully allied,  but in another sense, this idyllic view hides a problem. Technology is like Calypso’s island –- offering constant fun on the surface but with a great price for the humanity of the one who remains there. 
	Upon reflection we might notice that this entertainment is a distraction. In his “Question concerning Technology,” Heidegger argued that the real sense in which technology is distracting is that it re-organizes the self’s Lebenswelt. In other words, my cell phone is like a magician or confidence man distracting me with a simple trick so that it can prepare for a bigger illusion while I am not looking. In Heidegger’s view, the real essence of technology has to do with revealing and determining the essence of things.4 Behind this oblique construction is the claim that technology changes what the things that we encounter mean to us. 
	Heidegger did not see this problem as involving merely a mental trick, for it has very real consequences for us. In its unnatural and novel usages of things technology challenges the very order of “nature” and the forms that we expect to find. There he states: “The river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water-power supplier, derives from the essence of the power station.”5 For Dasein, the meaning of space is transformed when beautiful scenery interrupts the technology that helps me arrive at my destination. Time too changes in meaning for us as we move from concepts of fortnights to living by the minute and trading by the microsecond.
	What does technology gain from such tricks? Heidegger argued that technology re-shaped nature in terms of usefulness. We might naively assume that this usefulness will be its usefulness for us, but to make assertion risks a misunderstanding. Technology asks questions like “how many houses can this power plant and a certain quantity of coal or natural gas power?” or “Will a new version of Microsoft Word increase productivity by 15%?”. In the process, things, natural and unnatural, are made into known quantities of stock.6 The human being is not exempt from this re-organization: “The forester...is made subordinate to orderability of cellulose.”7 In other words, it takes away the self’s awareness of being a self.
	Modern technology only amplifies this re-ordering. While search engines can help us find things more quickly, they do so precisely insofar as we become quantifiable and qualifiable searchers who can be potentially identified by time, gender, location, demographic, bank account, and IP address.8 Formerly human problems become mathematical problems, and people become “human resources.”9 In other words, technology looks at things insofar as they are useful for technology. Human persons are not exempt from the reduction to “usefulness.”

An Opportunity: Enframing and the Orientation towards Death

Heidegger called this ordering of the world Gestell (”enframing”).10 In Heidegger’s epistemology, there is no access to the thing-in-itself. Instead, our reality is always enframed.11 Framing gives Dasein’s world some semblance of persistence by providing a means to understand the world.12 Thus, the mere fact that technology is a frame is not the problem. The problem is that the frame of technology reduces all essences to inventories.13 Technology frames everything into the possibilities of an arithmetic or probabilistic model.14 Technology works stepwise to turn everything into the mathematical and to eliminate the remainder until the human has no special meaning left.15
	Speaking in this way makes it seem like technology has its own agency. Considered thus far, it does not. Who, then, is the agent in these anthropomorphisms? Heidegger’s answer is it is in fact us. The real acting subject is ultimately human selves who interact with technology in such a way that technology re-frames their world such that everything including the human is merely calculation inappropriately. Thus, the problem is that technology makes everything, including the human, merely for its calculative framing.16 This effects a bondage to technology: “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology.”17 Heidegger believed that accepting a world in which we are mere quantities is inauthentic insofar as it hides human cares and concerns.18
	Fortunately, technology is not a very adept magician or jailer. Technology frames and categorizes in ways so obvious that it creates an opportunity that other inauthentic but less blatantly reductive frames hide more successfully. When being framed by technology, humans have the chance to reconsider their framing and think about their own authentic nature. For Heidegger, this nature arises from three basic facts.19 First, time defines the individual: “The primordial ontological ground of the existentiality of Dasein, however, is temporality.”20 Second, this self exists precisely between his biological conception and death.21 Third, death is the end of the self.22
	For Heidegger, these facts establish an authentic way to live: each self must concern herself with her own death.23 Heidegger suggested that if an individual keeps this orientation, then her life will not be fragmented and that this will be the only way to have the needed unity.24 Heidegger identified the deepest authentic meaning of human existence as caring and worrying about one’s own death and called this one’s “ownmost” continuous orientation.25 Heidegger’s solution makes Angst the defense and response to the continuous buffeting of the self’s authentic frame. To remain in Angst and focus on Dasein’s “dying” requires constant effort to avoid distraction by competing banal frameworks, because every magazine, book, and bar wants to cheer the person out of the Angst in their fundamental orientation towards death and bring them back to a life of mirth.26 Technology continuously tempts the individual away from focusing on her death through its usefulness, but this siren song dashes the authentic self into the rocks of an ever-shifting, ever-demeaning technological frame.27 
	Again, technology is not alone in trying to distract the self. Other people, too, want to pull the self back towards a more happy existence: “This ‘concern’ has the intention of thus ‘comforting’ the ‘dying person.’ It wants to bring him back to Dasein by helping him to veil completely his ownmost non-relational possibility.”28 The common feature of these distractions is that they seek to take the self away from the consideration of his nature as a self that will die. In this way, Heidegger proposed a fundamentally non-relational account of the self and makes the task vigilance in fighting back against every Gestell except that of mortality. Heidegger’s solution is fundamentally gloomy: technology distracts us idly from our authentic reality as temporal world-organizing animals who are going to die.

From In-authenticity to Despair

With this account in mind, I now turn to The Sickness unto Death. I am not the first to suggest that Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms were critical of technology. Herbert Dreyfus and others have extended Kierkegaard’s treatment of the press in Kierkegaard’s The Present Age to a critique of modern technology.29 These critiques tend to make Kierkegaard sound like Heidegger in seeing the de-humanizing nature of anonymizing technology. This is unsurprising, considering for Dreyfus’s extensive work on Heidegger. While I do not think that these readings are wrong to see Kierkegaard as critical of this feature of technology, but in this account I will argue here that this reading overlooks how Anti-Climacus’s account is also critical of what will be Heidegger’s solution.
	Two things make this point even more interesting. First, The Sickness unto Death was published on July 30th, 1849 (a hundred years before “Question concerning Technology”). Second, Heidegger had read and depended on Kierkegaard’s book in writing Being and Time.30 Heidegger’s combination of familiarity and silence about Anti-Climacus’s implicit critique of his own solution is telling. I believe The Sickness unto Death contains a three-part critique of technology built upon the sickness of the soul that Anti-Climacus calls “despair.”31 Anti-Climacus defines “despair” as the “misrelation in the relation of a synthesis that relates itself to itself.”32
	Anti-Climacus uses the motif of sickness to work out the self’s hermeneutic condition much like provide a hermeneutic capacity similar to Heidegger’s Gestell. For Anti-Climacus, the advantage of considering the self in inauthentic states as sick is that the self’s opinion about her own health is considered less important than the physician’s consideration of the person’s health.33 Thus, the self can be aware or unaware of having this sickness but still be in an sub-optimal frame for human existence. To better understand Anti-Climacus’s critique, I first look at unconscious forms of despair and argue that this is roughly equivalent to what Heidegger identifies as the problem with technology. I then identify consciousness of this condition with despair over the world or something in the world. Finally, I argue that the solution that Heidegger recommended turns out to be a form of despair as well -- conscious “masculine” demonic despair.

Technology in Unconscious Despair and Ignorant Inauthenticity

In unconscious despair, the self fails to achieve a unified concept of self at all. As in Heidegger, the issue is one that begins in what is made for the self but now re-makes the self for its own use. For Anti-Climacus, despair can be seen by the physician as an imbalance of four humors: finitude, infinitude, possibility, and necessity. For Anti-Climacus, these imbalances might not present obvious symptoms of despair. Just as “Question concerning Technology” draws attention to how technology is a problem even when not consciously seen as a problem, these forms show how despair is present even when it is not symptomatic. Here I look at each imbalance, noting the similarities with Heideggerian inauthenticity.
	Much of what Heidegger identified with the self’s existentiell situation falls under the heading of “finitude” as the self’s limited nature and mortality.34 When the self lets himself be wholly defined by his finite nature, Anti-Climacus maintains that this is a form of despair where the self is “tricked out of its self ‘by the others.’”35 In terms of technology, to be wholly defined by finitude is to accept as one’s final nature the definition given to the self by technology. Conversely, when the infinite humor is excessive, the self has an unbridled imagination but no actual identity: “The fantastic is generally that which leads a person out into the infinite in such a way that it only leads him away from himself and thereby prevents him from coming back to himself.”36 This self pursues what Anti-Climacus calls “an abstract sentimentality” in things like online worlds, fictional identities, and video games.37 
	The imbalance between these two is converse but symmetric. Louis Dupré notes the symmetry in the following way: “In a perverse dialectic, the culture of self-consciousness has created the exact opposite of the pure subjectivity from which it started. Exalted to being the sole source of meaning and value, the subject soon loses its own identity in the function of exhaustively constituting objectivity.”38 To Anti-Climacus, both of these selves have the same condition -- despair. They are merely coping in different ways. In the one case, a heightened self with a private world; in the other case, a self surrendered to the objective world. The root problem in this case is that a self should be something specific and particular in the world while at the same time being active and having an imagination such that the self is not wholly defined by the world.
	Possibility and necessity naturally pair up to express the idea of meaningful freedom for Anti-Climacus. A self with excessive possibility experiences this excessive possibility as either an excessive insatiable desire that wants to experience everything or a self who is worried about everything that can happen.39 The problem is that the possibility in which she lives is unreal. Conversely, Anti-Climacus identifies the self that has excessive necessity as a self that cannot do anything and ends up being fatalistic. Anti-Climacus holds that the self unconscious of her despair lacks unity and does “not to will to be oneself.”40 A person in this form of despair would not recognize herself as in despair and would not present any symptoms normally associated with despair.41 She might meet with momentary frustrations when unable to do something like trying to login to Facebook, but she would not see this as a signal that she is in despair.42 This self is inauthentic in Heidegger’s vocabulary -- allowing the frame of society wholly to determine her ends and objectives.
	For both Anti-Climacus and Heidegger, most people remain at the level of this sort of ignorance about how technology has an impact on their lives.43 When they do note the inadequacy of their situation to their humanity, they misunderstand it: “the self” and “despair” enter the “language of immediacy” due to “an innocent abuse of language...like the children’s game of playing soldier.”44 The user of technology might be depressed but would not recognize this as a malady of his nature.45 This unknowing despair is the inadequacy of being for technology without the awareness of the inadequacy of being for technology.

Conscious Despair as Knowing the Problem of Technology

Anti-Climacus, like Heidegger, holds that to treat the sickness related to technology the subject must become aware of the sickness. When the person in despair becomes conscious of being in despair, this changes the mode of despair to one that is conscious.46 In the case of technology, this happens when the self knows that his condition is problematic, like Neo’s recognition in The Matrix that “[t]he Matrix has you.” Anti-Climacus states that this form of despair recognizes that this first type of life is empty and so has “clarity about oneself.”47 Anti-Climacus identified a form of despair where the self recognizes that the despairing begins to last longer than the blow and the various externalities and begins to appear subjectively in the life of a self in “the stance that the self takes toward [itself].”48
	Anti-Climacus diagnosed this form of despair as “not to will to be oneself.”49 At this point, the symptoms are unpleasant and lead to a certain wistfulness. To the untrained eye, this appears to be the folly of youth.50 Anti-Climacus thinks that this is a misunderstanding in which das Man has merely projected his willingness to submit to the standard frame on those who recognize that there is a problem and hope for a better way to live. This form of despair advances to an awareness of the self as conscious and relating. It sees being a self as the task. This self can no longer be satisfied by trivial enjoyment and so despairs of the trivial things or the trivial world in which she lives.51
	This form of despair compares roughly to when Dasein recognizes that it has been enframed by a disappointing frame that chokes out real human possibilities. Like Heidegger, Anti-Climacus sees this advance in the self’s consciousness of her situation as an advance in self-understanding that can move towards the self’s fundamental mode of existing (i.e., what Heidegger would call authenticity).52 In both low-conscious despair and Heidegger’s equivalent, the self has begun to orient herself towards her future.53 For Heidegger, this orientation, when focused on Dasein as a being that will die, captures the fundamental problem. It moves from the inadequacy of iPhones and Androids to the seeming constancy of death and places the individual in bold opposition to the trivial categories of life.54 But, as we will see, Anti-Climacus thinks that this answer is still despair.

Authenticity and Conscious “Masculine” Demonic Despair

We can identify the preceding species of mis-relation that Anti-Climacus calls “despair” with what Heidegger called inauthenticity as the failure to be framed according to Dasein’s nature. At this stage, the technological object has been excisedtaken out of the mix, which may cause the subject to imagine that the despair problem is solved. What remains problematic, however, for Anti-Climacus is time is a problem with time. The self has traded one It is a move from one temporal definition of her identity (e.g., MySpace, Facebook, Google+) ftor a different temporal definition: a being that will eventually die. It changes the precise identity but remains a temporally-conditioned identity. Heidegger’s solution is to try to compose oneself in a world that is trying to distract the self until he decomposes either as a self or as a being altogether.
	Anti-Climacus would have praised Heidegger’s solution for making the subject aware of herself. He writes: “First comes the consciousness of the self, for to despair of the eternal is impossible without having a conception of the self.”55 Positively, Heidegger’s authenticity account understands that the self needs to relate, but the relation at which Heidegger arrives is one that Anti-Climacus would claim to contain excess possibility. It is defined by anxiety about the possibility that is ever before the self: dying. For Heidegger, this is the most authentic relation that the self could have since his death is the only possibility certain to happen. Consequently, I believe Anti-Climacus would see an account like Heidegger’s authenticity as merely treating the symptoms and not curing the sickness. 
	One weakness in authenticity that is mirrored in what Anti-Climacus calls “despair in strength” or defiance is the exertion of constant effort to maintain this self-identity relation.56 For Anti-Climacus, the inability of the self to maintain an orientation towards death shows that this solution is inadequate: “[The acting self] constantly relates itself to itself only by way of imaginary constructions, no matter what it undertakes, however vast, however amazing, however perseveringly pursued.”57 Authenticity remains only as long as the self maintains herself against entropy, and this effort fails at any moment when the individual stops trying her hardest. If Anti-Climacus is right, tThis ultimately places the individual at risk for suicide, not authenticity.58 This view already implies the self that braces herself is the same individual who earlier made herself wanton.59
	Both Anti-Climacus and Heidegger identify the optimal human condition with self-completion.60 For Heidegger, the self is complete when he exhibits care towards its own predicament, i.e., it concerns itself with being and ultimately with his own mortality. This gives Heidegger’s solution a highly temporal character as the self directs his attention towards the facticity of his own existence. Anti-Climacus’s account of the self is at odds with Heidegger’s account in that time and death are not the final definitions of the self. I will explain Anti-Climacus’s solution to the framing of technology after explaining how the two ideas of self differ fundamentally.

Differentiating Heidegger from Anti-Climacus on the Self

Dreyfus claims that Anti-Climacus’s solution to being framed is to make a defining commitment and stick to it: “if and only if you let yourself be drawn into a defining commitment, can you achieve that which, while you were in despair, looked impossible, viz., that the two sets of factors reinforce each other, so that the more you manifest one the more you manifest the other.”61 In both, tThis is a self who is conscious of herself as a self and thereby engaged. As Dreyfus presents it, Anti-Climacus is really talking about authenticity and offers basically the same account as Heidegger.
	Heidegger’s notion of authenticity bears certain similarities to Kierkegaard’s ethical stage (for which Anti-Climacus’s conscious despair seems roughly synonymous), but the symmetry is incomplete insofar as Kierkegaard thought that this stage was necessarily ethical, whereas Heidegger thought that it was not.62 Heidegger avoids moral connotations by defining the human self in terms of possibility and ultimately death as the ownmost possibility of the self. When Dreyfus declares that Anti-Climacus’s self is really about “defining commitment,” he later explains that this formulation supplants any notion of a transcendent God in whom the self might rest transparently.63 This hints at a real source of disagreement between Heidegger and Kierkegaard about what a human self is.
	Anti-Climacus believesarticulates the position that the self is eternal and thus that death is not its end.64 Thus, Anti-Climacus would have rejected Heidegger’s claim that death is the self’s ownmost possibility. Moreover, Anti-Climacus hinges his entire account on the claim the self is essentially relating and relational: “[A] human being is spirit.... Spirit is the self.... The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.”65 This self is essentially relational in his constitution such that at any point where we can legitimately call an entity a self he already has certain constituting relationships. Anti-Climacus provides a definition of despair precisely in terms of a mis-actualization of this relationality.66 
	Seen from the lens of Anti-Climacus’s physician  of the soulanthropology, Heidegger’s self is abstracted merely down to her possibility for dying and has lostoverlooks her relational possibilities.67 Heidegger’s authenticity has an oppositional character since relationships undermine the self’s awareness and attentiveness to what she is.68 Heidegger’s self is defined wholly in ontic terms.69 Since, for Anti-Climacus, the self is always relating, the self requires a relational definition. Consequently, for Anti-Climacus, views like Heidegger’s are merely more advanced species of despair under the description “in despair to will to be oneself.”70 Anti-Climacus’s parody of a king without a country is about authenticity that flits away the moment the thought disappears. He attempts to give himself meaning by trying really hard to keep something bigger than himself in mind. If Anti-Climacus is correct, Heidegger’s medicine will only make you sicker: “Thus to be sick unto death is to be unable to die, yet not as if there were hope of life; no, the hopelessness is that there is not even the ultimate hope, death.”71 On this basis, I think that Hannay is right to conclude that Dreyfus’s reduction of God to commitment and possibility in The Sickness unto Death is “clearly wrong.”72

Faith: Finding Eternity in the Heart as the Release from Despair73

For Anti-Climacus, the self is an essentially relational being who is already related, and the different species of despair are advances in self-understanding and self-relating. Technology leads to despair because the self fails to relate rightly before the mess and maze of the technological. In anxiety, the self despairs of being a self that can only keep himself together by being fiercely opposed to technology. In both cases, the problem with technology is ultimately a problem with the self in which the self improperly relates. When the self relates to technology without an intermediate term to technology, the question is “What am I in front of my computer?” (that is, “what does sitting in front of my computer make me?”) or “What am I to Google?”. Heidegger’s solution is to change the question to “What am I to myself?” and to give the answer, “I am a being that is going to die.”
	In rejecting the idea that the self should be fixated on her death, Anti-Climacus glibly suggested that the self should complete the relation by choosing “simply to die, die to the world.”74 In other words, one should give up the temporal struggle to be something and depend on the self’s eternal nature.75 As a relating eternal being, the self’s task is to relate herself to the eternal in God. In doing so, God supplies the principle that makes the self a self.76 With this anthropology in mind, Anti-Climacus declares that all other attempts to complete the relationship are sin: “Sin is: before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to will to be oneself, or in despair to will to be oneself.”77 In fact, he considers that sin is precisely being unwilling to abandon one’s anxiety -- not to return to the throws of technology but for God.78 Anti-Climacus calls despair (or might we say Angst and anxiety?) the first element of faith.79
	Anti-Climacus’s solution is to see the self as a relation and God as the ultimate criterion of any self. Anti-Climacus’s anthropology views God, not as “some externality” for the self but the condition of the possibility of the self.80 Anti-Climacus adds the God-relation to the question: “What am I directly before God?” as a matter of Christian anthropology.81 Anti-Climacus’s anthropology creates the possibility of a sure definition of the self in a relationship to an eternal God. If this is the case, then the earlier questions change: “What am I as a Google searcher to God?” and “What is my life before God?”. When this “before God” is applied to Heidegger’s authentic Dasein, its form of consistency takes on a new meaning as a self in demonic despair.82
	Anti-Climacus writes that faith determines the answer to “What am I before God?” as either a rejoicing saint or a despairing sinner. Behind these two identities are two responses to what he takes to be the existentiell fact of being before God: to humbly respond in faith and ti to find acceptance in God or to defiantly refuse God and to discover that one is a sinner.83 An identity in technology is the mis-relation of not willing to be a self; living in anxiety about one’s death is the mis-relation of willing to be a self that one ultimately is not. 
	Both technology and anxiety supply temporal frameworks which turn out to be frameworks for self-definition. Since they are fleeting and temporal, however, definitions of the self relative to these frames do not give any certainty to their definitions. Instead, these definitions are always subject to revision by externalities and require either constant distraction (in the case of technology) or constant effort to maintain one’s definition of oneself in the case of anxiety towards death. 

Conclusion: Two Competing Solutions to the Problem of Technology

Both Heidegger and Anti-Climacus saw technology as a problem and our awareness of it as an opportunity and the first step to a solution.84 Continuing advances in technology only serve to amplify this problem, e.g., the noun friend being supplanted by the verb “friend” as description of a Facebook activity. Consequently, the problem of technology is even more timely now, and technology continues to frame and reshape human existence. Anti-Climacus wrote the following: “That men once lived who thought the earth stands still -- and they did not know any better -- has nothing particularly comic about it. Our age will probably look the same to an age having more knowledge about the physical world.”85
	The crucial difference in Anti-Climacus’s and Heidegger’s respective solutions is the concept of what the human is. In Heidegger, both the problem and the solution are temporal because Dasein itself is temporal. Just as technology distracts us from our ownmost possibility, the solution is to focus on our ownmost (i.e., death). This leads the subject to anxieties that leave one wondering whether the cure is not worse than the disease. Conversely, Anti-Climacus presents a timeless solution to a timely problem because he sees humans as syntheses of the temporal and the eternal. For Anti-Climacus, there is something wrong with being defined merely by technology, and the problem is not the particulars of the technology. For him, the problem of technology is identical to the young man’s question “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”.86 In light of the self’s eternal nature and from the perspective of the self-God relation, this problem takes on a new name -- “sin.” Anti-Climacus defines sin as defying the fundamental identity one has through one’s relationship to God.87
	With this anthropology, Anti-Climacus must present a solution that offers eternal security in an eternity set apart from temporality. Anti-Climacus writes that it is to return to the Gospel and have the individual ask: “Who am I before God?”88 The answer that comes back depends on whether one responds to God in faith or by continuing in sin (the two ways the self can relate to God).89 In this, Anti-Climacus shares the anthropology of Augustine who famously wrote: “our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.”90 Anti-Climacus’s solution can enable us to re-engage our temporality (and log back into Facebook). Travis O’Brian captures the same distinction in terms of the possibilities present for Dasein and for Kierkegaard’s self (and I would say, by extension, for Anti-Climacus’s self).91 For Dasein, possibility is a fundamental limit that shows the self’s finitude. For Kierkegaard’s self, the self’s eternal nature finds her possibility in love and in God: “the awareness that this impossibility is indirectly possible, mediated by and ‘with the help of’ another -- and that love (and neither ‘projection’ nor ‘understanding’) is the ‘medium’ that makes this mediation possible.”92
	Anti-Climacus’s account has the interesting effect of redeeming technology for the self in a way that an authentic orientation towards death cannot. Heidegger’s authenticity and inauthenticity are two competing wholly temporal modes of defining the self. Thus, the self who uses technology is competing with his own existentiell Gestell. Heidegger’s self is either a being-concerned-with-one’s-own-death or a being-occupied-with-technology. In contrast, Anti-Climacus’s self, as defined by the self-God relation, has an eternal definition that enables a continuous identity, regardless of temporal relation.93

NOTES