Heidegger and Technology

Heidegger: "The Question Concerning Technology"

Contributor: Ben

In the opening lines of Heidegger’s essay, Heidegger informs us that “Questioning builds a way” (3). This essay contains Heidegger’s analyses of language, which provides insight into the relationship between human existence and the essence of technology. Heidegger begins by discussing and rejecting the colloquial and common definition of technology as incomplete; he tells us “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological”(4). He tells us that this approach is rooted in the ancient view which stated that “the essence of a thing is considered to be what the thing is”(4). This view which emphasizes the material and physical aspects/properties leads us to think of technology as means to an end and as a human activity; he calls this the instrumental-anthropological definition of technology. On this understanding, technology is a tool; it is the collection of machines, instruments, and devices we invent, assemble, and utilize. It is something we control.

Heidegger argues that this instrumental-anthropological view is correct in a trivial sense but it is also inherently incomplete and limited. Heidegger claims that the essence of technology is unaccounted for in the everyday understanding. Because of his beliefs about language and truth, Heidegger proposes that in order to encounter or discover the essence of technology we need to describe a technological mode of being. Through analysis of his native German language and ancient Greek, Heidegger arrives at the claim that the essence of technology has everything to do with revealing(12). This “revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology…. is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such”(14). Heidegger’s main point here is that the modern, technologically influenced revealing understands all phenomena—animals, atoms, plants, people, etc—as nothing more than energy resources to be used or stored for use. Heidegger presents the Rhine and the trend of renaming personnel departments as ‘human resources’ as evidence for his claim. Heidegger wants to show that the technological mode of being reduces the natural beauty of the Rhine into a mere resource. This revealing has led us to think of conversations with new people as “networking opportunities” instead of a chance to enjoy the company of other beings. Heidegger’s claim is that our naïve-instrumental understanding of technology is blinding us to the actual case in which technology builds a deeply reductive and destructive view of the world. Heidegger is arguing that this ugly, reductive view defines modernity as a way of being and understanding the world. He claims that this view follows once one realizes that mathematical or exact science “demands that nature be orderable as standing-reserve” and requiring that “nature report itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and that it remain orderable as a system of information”. By showing that modern-technology’s mode of revealing only reveals beings as solely the measurable and the manipulatable, Heidegger argues that our thinking reduces beings into not-beings; existing things into data points and quantitative descriptions. I think Heidegger is trying to point us towards two ideas here. The first is that the kind of technological revealing either ignores or destroys the wonder and marvel in beings like the Rhine; and secondly that we are unmoved by loss. I think Heidegger would say that we respond to the loss of natural wonder by substituting a “technological feeling” like the drive for information and consumption of entertainment and information.

                However, it would be a misunderstanding of Heidegger to only think of technology as a negative and perverting thing. Heidegger himself states that “It [technology] is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth”(12). Heidegger recognizes the urgent danger that technology presents but he also understands that it is a stage in the unfolding of Being. This leads us to the question: is technological revealing and its effects on the natural world something humans are responsible for? Heidegger tells us that humankind is the active agent of technological revealing so we must have some part in the responsibility. Yet on the other hand, he says “Since man drives technology forward, he takes part in the ordering as a way of revealing. But the unconcealment itself, within which ordering unfolds, is never a human handiwork”(18). In effort to shed more light on this point, we must dive into Heidegger’s own terminology; specifically his concept of Enframing. Yet this is where I am uncertain about what Heidegger is actually getting at but here goes.

 Enframing is that challenge which drives man to order the self-revealing as standing-reserve(19). He also describes it as “the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e, challenges him forth, to reveal the real….(20). Enframing is a particular ordaining of Destining.  Where Destining is “what first starts man upon a way of revealing”; it is an apriori transcendental aspect of our Being (of dasein?) and thus, it is beyond our control. Technology then is a manner of the essential “swaying of being”; it is of Being’s own unfolding.

                Unsurprisingly Heidegger has more to say and Heidegger leads us farther down the rabbit hole as he develops his previous claim that technological thinking defines our age. To see this let us return to the previous example of the Rhine. Heidegger sees the old wooden bridge as an example of Poiesis. Poiesis is a process of gathering natural materials in a way where the anthropological purpose brings forth the essence of the materials and the natural environment it is in. But does this not suggest that technological thinking existed before our age? If so how can it be the defining trait of modernity? Heidegger answers this in his discussion of Poiesis. He is suggesting that our age is dominated by technological thinking and Enframing. Heidegger is arguing that Enframing “drives out every other possibility of revealing”, and that it blinds us from the concealing-unconcealing nature of knowledge and forces us into one reductive viewpoint.

Now remember the discussion of our apathetic stance towards loss that Heidegger identifies. This happens because we are Enframed by technological thinking. I think Heidegger is claiming that we have forgotten the fourfold nature of causation. Importantly, one must not hear Heidegger’s words as calling for a radical abandonment of technological thinking. Heidegger warns that we should neither “push on blindly with technology” nor “curse it as the work of the devil” (330). Heidegger is not advocating for an end to technology but rather a reconceptualization of it and a recognition of how our interacting with it changes ourselves.

-What do you think of Heidegger’s heavy reliance on linguistic analysis and appeal to definition? Is it a good way to get at the truth? Does “Questioning” build a way? What about concerns about Greek being a dead language? How can we know we are correct in our understanding of the language?

-How is Heidegger’s understanding of truth as a process of revealing related or different from other author’s understanding of truth and nature? (Ex. Kant, Nietzsche, Callicot, Aristotle, King)

- Is Heidegger’s analysis of modern science still fair today?

-How might Heidegger’s suggestions alter our political policies toward nature and is it possible for modern society to accept and embrace them? If so what kind of measures would need to be taken for this kind of conceptual overhaul?