What can Heidegger tell us about Elon Musk? Unfolding the diagnosis of Indifference in Heidegger’s Beiträge

This contribution departs from a latent social-ontological diagnosis in Heidegger’s "Contributions to Philosophy" concerning machination in modernity: Gleichgültigkeit, that is, the equivalence of beings turning into an indifference of Being. The paper argues that the notions of “the gigantic” (das Riesenhafte) and “lived experience” (Erlebnis), which Heidegger develops in this context, should be understood as unfolding phenomena of this diagnosis. The main claim is that both “the gigantic” and “lived experience” acquire a new significance in today’s regime of one-upmanship under the imperative of “creating a difference” to distinguish oneself from others. A "gigantic success" is defined today not only by achieving what has never been done before, but also by accomplishing what is considered impossible. In its present form, the gigantic is nothing but about the success of producing the most “impressive” lived experiences that are one-upped almost on a daily basis. The paper takes Elon Musk as an emblem of the fusion between the gigantic and lived experience as the culminating figures of Gleichgültigkeit in the twenty-first century: the one-upmanship of “impressive” achievements, the breaking of records of the imaginable, the production of never-before-seen lived experiences and unimaginable wealth accumulation are all contemporary appearances of what Heidegger once called the gigantic that only seals the disappearance of any true greatness.