54 theory
pen, however, only insofar as man decided, by himself and for him-
self, what, for him, should be “knowable” and what knowing and
the making secure of the known, i.e., certainty, should mean. Des-
cartes’s metaphysical task became the following: to create the meta-
physical foundation for the freeing of man to freedom as the self-
determination that is certain of itself.^10This philosophical conception of freedom as the subjective self-
determination that is certain of itself, a conception that will stand at the heart
also of modern science, involves, Heidegger wants to insist, a kind of impe-
rialistic thinking and practice within which the world as a whole becomes the
object of human conquest—“conquered” by the human subject who, in rep-
resenting the world to himself rationally, becomes the “relational center”^11 of
all that is and thereby secures, both conceptually and practically, a hold or
control over all that is. From this perspective, the key to modern man’s con-
quest of the world is the mental activity through which the rational human
subject “represents” the world to himself—and in this context “to represent”
(vorstellen) would mean “of oneself to set something before oneself and to make
secure what has been set in place, as something set in place.”^12 Within the
modern age, Heidegger argues, by means of the subjective representation of
objects, by means of this attempt to put all things in their place, “man contends
for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure
and draws up the guidelines for everything that is,”^13 and through such con-
tention “man brings into play his unlimited power for the calculating, plan-
ning, and molding of all things.”^14
Reemergence of the Mystical in Technoscientific Contexts
If major theorists like Weber and Heidegger in the earlier twentieth century
can see in modern science and its technologies primarily a project of human
mastery over reality, a project that would, as heir to distinctive tendencies of
the Enlightenment, seem to exclude any operation of the mystical from our
world, more recent thinkers are beginning to glimpse a persistence or a re-
emergence, a shadow or resonance of something like the mystical in precisely
those forms of technoscientific practice that are so often taken to exclude the
mystical.
For example, in a 1995 text titled “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources
of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone,” French philosopher Jacques Derrida
suggests that our everyday experience of technoscience takes on an increas-
ingly mystical quality as the technological and scientific systems we inhabit
and navigate reach a scale and complexity that would set those systems beyond
our actual comprehension and control. In making use of those systems, then,