Introduction

Heidegger’s essay on the essence of technology was first delivered as a lecture in the lecture series The Arts in the Technological Age in 1953 at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. A year later, in 1954, the text was also published for the first time.[1] The historical context of the essay is not unimportant, because the spectre of atomic weapons had begun to stalk post-war Europe, and the atomic age and its threat had entered everyday language and consciousness. Yet in the essay on the essence of technology we find no mention of nuclear weapons. For his analysis of what technology in general and modern technology in particular are, Heidegger borrows ordinary examples of technical progress. He can afford to do so, for he wants to arrive at what all technical achievements have in common at the most general, that is, the ontological level. Heidegger asks what the essence of technology is. If he manages to answer this question, the result should be equally relevant to a hammer, a telescope, a computer or a nuclear weapon.

Above all because the philosophy of technology split off from philosophy as a field of its own roughly in the first half of the 20th century, The Question Concerning Technology belongs among the foundational texts of the philosophical reflection on technology, not only historically but also thematically. Those who follow in the field of philosophising about technology thus have, to a greater or lesser extent, to come to terms with Heidegger’s questioning of the essence of technology. Besides Heidegger, the literature speaks of other founders of philosophising about technology, among whom we count Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul and Hans Jonas. These authors form the group of so-called “classical philosophy of technology”[2], whose work is dominated by a transcendental or sociocultural view of technology, often ignoring questions and problems concerning individual technical artefacts. This approach earned the nickname philosophy of technology with a capital “T”[3], for in the thinking of these authors technology appears as a unified, often negative force acting on the human being. In the more recent approach of the philosophy of technology, by contrast, the prevailing effort is to “open the black box” of that abstract force of Technology and to grasp the specificity and the unique being of individual artefacts, with philosophical reflection enriched by data obtained from case studies and other empirical methods.

The essence of technology and a free relationship to technology

Among the main aims of Heidegger’s questioning of the being of technology is to build (or restore) a free relationship to technology. With the arrival of modern technology, which makes use of the results of an exact natural science built on mathematics, our relationship to technology has changed, in such a way that Dasein has begun to lose that free relationship to technology. By a free relationship is meant the openness of Dasein to all the possible modes of the essence of technology and of seeing the world. According to Heidegger, however, modern technology forces upon us just one mode of the essence of technology, which, out of all the possible potentialities of how Dasein can relate through technology to the world and the beings in it, reduces the multiplicity of ways of seeing the world of beings and their being to just one, which transforms everything in the world, nature included, into a mere supply of energy, a standing-reserve, a static, unchanging being.

Under the influence of modern technology, Dasein has begun to reduce the meaning of its being to standing-reserve and has forgotten that it can interpret and reveal its being in the world otherwise too. Worse still, Dasein has no idea that modern technology is doing this, for it understands technology as something neutral, something it has fully under control: “Having technology under control becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human mastery.”[4] The reductive influence of modern technology further leads Dasein astray into a wrong ontology: a wrong interpretation of what and how in the world is means that modern technology conceals not only Truth as grasped by the classical correspondence theory of the relation between a statement and a state of the world, but also Truth grasped phenomenologically, that is, Truth as the conditions of what allows us to judge anything as true or false at all.

The whole essay is thus a warning. To be able to assess this warning, we need to com-prehend why Heidegger sees modern technology so negatively, and how the phenomenology of technology can help us restore a free relationship to (modern) technology.

Technology as a revealing means

Heidegger builds his analysis of technology on the claim that the essence of technology is nothing technological. Just as the essence of a tree is nothing tree-like and is not to be found in individual trees, we will not find the essence of technology in concrete technical artefacts or processes. If we have to start somewhere, the traditional conception of what technology is offers us two views: the instrumental and the anthropological.

Instrumentally we see technology as a means (Lat. instrumentum) to an end; the anthropological view defines technology as human activity. The two views belong together. We use technology as a means in the course of human activity, and human activity in turn presupposes certain ends and purposes for the use of technology. Heidegger points out that the instrumental view tends to understand technology as a means, as something neutral, subordinate to Dasein. Is that so?

We arrive at the answer by analysing the instrumentality of the instrument. The use of a means causes something, and something is effected by it. That which causes something is the cause of what has been effected. Heidegger therefore goes on to examine causality and applies the classical Aristotelian scheme of the four causes to the example of a silver sacrificial chalice:

  • causa materialis — the matter out of which the thing (the means) is made
  • causa formalis — the shape of the means
  • causa finalis — the purpose for which the means is used
  • causa efficiens — the one who made the means

All four of these causes act together and bring about the chalice so that it stands before us. That it is a sacrificial chalice that stands before us, however, is brought about by the fourth cause, the causa efficiens, for the human being in the role of the silversmith gathers the remaining three causes into one whole, not only by making the chalice but also by thinking its purpose through. To think something through is, according to Heidegger, “in Greek λέγειν, λόγος. Λέγειν rests on ἀποφαίνεσθαι, bringing forward into appearance, revealing”.[5] And so the silversmith is not only the one who made the means, but also the cause that occasions the chalice and brings it forward into appearance in a certain way, namely as a sacrificial chalice.

What the causes have in common is that they bring something from non-presence into presence; they are “pervaded by bringing-forth”, whereby they grant an appearance to what was not present. Already in Plato’s Symposium we read that “every occasioning that prompts anything to pass over from non-presence into presence is ποίησις” (poiesis). Poiesis is thus something like a process that reveals. This revealing, which Heidegger calls das Entbergen in German, is ἀλήθεια in Greek and veritas in Latin, which means Truth (Wahrheit).

Truth and revealing

Truth and revealing are closely related, and technology, as a means that reveals, is in some way close to truth. How exactly? That lies beyond the scope of the essay The Question Concerning Technology, yet Heidegger’s, or the phenomenological, theory of truth departs from the classical correspondence theory of truth, in which a linguistic statement (a sentence) corresponds in its structure to a state of the world. Aletheia and poiesis imply change. The being of beings is not static and unchanging; the essence of beings, that is, the very way how things are, comes into unconcealment and into concealment on the basis of the mode of revealing. How things are is connected with truth, and truth in turn is connected with how things are revealed to us (that is, to Dasein), because how things are revealed to us changes the shape they take and how they appear to us, in short: how things are. The phenomenological theory of truth implies change, dynamism, contextuality, and thereby, to a certain extent, subjectivity.

τεχνη as a non-neutral means of revealing

Returning to technology and the essence of technology, let us sum up what Heidegger arrives at. What is technology? That is the question of the essence of technology, and so far Heidegger understands it as a means that is responsible for the world being revealed to us in a certain way. Heidegger then goes on to say that technology derives etymologically from techne, and that from early times techne was a specific mode of poiesis; techne and technology are thus something poietic, for, alongside poetry, for example, they are a mode of revealing the beings in the world. The identification of technology with revealing is supported by Heidegger’s analysis of the concepts techne and episteme: up until Plato’s time, both words meant knowledge in the general sense, or understanding something and knowing one’s way around in it.

After this analysis it is clearer why blindness towards technology is dangerous for Dasein. The essence of technology is nothing neutral; on the contrary, it shows itself as something that is responsible for a specific mode of revealing the world and for Dasein’s relationship to it, and to itself. Technology is not neutral; rather, we can speak of it as non-neutral[6]. The essence of technology is a revealing instrumentality which, as the means of the relationship between Dasein and the world, transforms how Dasein approaches the world and how the world is revealed to Dasein.

Gestell

If we accept that the essence of technology is nothing neutral, we must ask how technology affects us and how the influence of modern technology differs from that of the technology of earlier times. Heidegger focuses on this question. In his view, technology based on manual labour and craft does not differ in its essence from modern examples of technical artefacts and processes. Precisely because the essence of technology is nothing technological, Heidegger can say that both craft technology and modern technology reveal the world. Modern technology, however, reveals the world in a drastically different way.

We need to define what Heidegger considers modern technology. Roughly speaking, it is a set of artefacts and processes that make use of, and are shaped by, the findings of modern exact, that is, mathematics-based, natural science. Phenomenologically speaking, however, what makes modern technology modern is not merely its historical youth, new functions or tools that use the current results of scientific research. Tilling the soil or harnessing the power of a river’s current, for example, can also be carried out with modern means in a way that is phenomenologically closer to non-modern craft technology — to technology as techne. And the reverse holds too. What is at stake here is not the “technicality” of technology, but its essence, the mode and character of its revealing.

And it is precisely the character of how modern technology reveals the world that has changed. It is not revealing in the form of poiesis, but revealing (so still aletheia) in the form of challenging (Herausfordern). By challenging is meant a reductive revealing of nature as a supply of energy, as something Heidegger calls “standing-reserve” (Bestand). Heidegger then calls this specific mode in which modern technology reveals the world Gestell (enframing). In ordinary German usage the word means a stand, a rack, a chassis. In Heidegger it takes on the meaning of that specific “setting-upon ordering”, the challenging way in which modern technology reveals the world for Dasein and through Dasein. This challenging does not happen outside human action, but it is not entirely dependent on the human being either.

Gestell is a totalising force. It gathers the natural diversity of revealing the world into one single mode. It reduces the many to the one, multiplicity to unity. Heidegger poetically associates Gestell with grammatically related concepts: Ge–birg (a mountain range) reduces the multitude of mountain elements to one range; Ge–müt (the inner self, the soul) gathers the multitude and disorder of a person’s inner states into one whole. With that grammatical prefix “Ge–”, used in German to form collective nouns, Heidegger expresses this unification of the many into one whole.

Where does the cause of this change in modern technology come from? Heidegger blames modern natural science.

The relationship between science and technology; destining

Modern exact natural science introduced into society concepts, theories, images and ways of thinking that grasp nature by reducing it and manipulating it through mathematisation. Gestell is the legacy of modern mathematical natural science not because modern technology is merely an application of scientific theory, but because in both cases nature announces itself and is revealed as something “identifiable”[7] (grasped quantitatively, mathematically, logically) and is ordered as a system of information.

If the essence of modern technology is Gestell as a mode of revealing that is not a neutral process, we can say that science, scientific theory, and its concepts and terminology are something that leads us to reveal the world in a certain way, and are therefore not neutral either with regard to revealing, with regard to how things are and how they appear to us. On the contrary, science is much closer to technology. Heidegger points out that science cannot be thought of without technology: science, and all the more so modern science, requires various technical apparatuses in order to function, and not only for experimental research. Science does not arise ex nihilo. Technology reveals the world of beings, these beings appear to us in some way, and science, as a human activity, is immersed in a specifically revealed world, and the study of the beings in it is subordinated to how we think about the being of the object of our inquiry.

That is why Heidegger can say that while modern technology comes later historically, at the ontological level modern technology as Gestell precedes modern science, and only retrospectively, through modern technology, do we come to see how Gestell is already mirrored at the beginning of modern science.

To the question of what led Gestell to rule over the essence of both modern science and modern technology, Heidegger offers us an answer: he likens a certain mode of revealing the world to walking along a certain path. We are sent onto the particular path of a mode of revealing by destining (Geschick)[8]. Destining is something outside human activity and control. Yet it is destining that sends the human being on the way — that sets off a specific revealing of the world — and in this way beings and their being finally arise as particular beings with a particular being. Destining initiates, to borrow the terminology of physics or psychology, the collapse of the probabilistic potentiality of the being of beings into something actual; or destining is the necessary condition of a “gestalt switch” in the being of beings:

“And only the destining that sends man on the way of objectifying re-presenting makes this historical accessible as an object for historiography, i.e. for science, and only thereby makes possible the identification of the historical with the historiographical.”[9]

The object of science can only be what has been revealed from concealment into unconcealment and is thematised as something that appears in a certain way. What science can thematise changes according to which destining dominates a given period of history. Depending on destining, some forms of the being of beings come to the fore, while other kinds of the being of beings recede into the background. Although the being of beings is changeable, this phenomenological structure of revealing—concealing may well appear to be the only constant of the history of Dasein.

Defence against Gestell

Finally, in The Question Concerning Technology we must deal with the main motivation of Heidegger’s text: how to defend ourselves against Gestell and how to reverse its effect, which turns the human being itself into standing-reserve, into something that can be mathematised and converted into the form of a supply of energy for producing new energy? Heidegger finds the answer in a return to the original revealing — poiesis — which has been preserved to this day in the fine arts, above all in poetry, for we need to open ourselves again to other modes of revealing the world that participate more in the realm of truth and offer an alternative to the totalitarian Gestell, which reduces all being to standing-reserve: ontologically, to one mode of being; ontically speaking, to a commodity, a product, an unsustainable plundering of nature and of ourselves.

References

ACHTERHUIS, Hans, 2001. American philosophy of technology: the empirical turn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-21449-2.

HEIDEGGER, Martin, 2004. Věda, technika a zamyšlení. Praha: OIKOYMENH. Knihovna novověké tradice a současnosti. ISBN 8072980831.

IHDE, Don, 1990. Technology and the lifeworld: from garden to earth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-20560-5.

LEMMENS, Pieter, 2021. Thinking Technology Big Again. Reconsidering the Question of the Transcendental and ‘Technology with a Capital T’ in the Light of the Anthropocene. Foundations of Science [online]. Springer Science and Business Media, 2021-2-4, 27(1), 171-187 [cited 2025-10-05]. ISSN 1233-1821. Available at: doi:10.1007/s10699-020-09732-7

  1. see the editorial note in HEIDEGGER, 2004, p. 61 ↑
  2. ACHTERHUIS, 2001, p. 2 ↑
  3. see e.g. LEMMENS, 2021 ↑
  4. HEIDEGGER, 2004, p. 8 ↑
  5. Ibid., 2004, p. 8 ↑
  6. IHDE, 1990, p. 75. Ihde introduces into the literature of the phenomenology of technology the English term “non–neutrality”, which captures the transformative effects of technology on its users, and thus, naturally, on the human being as Dasein ↑
  7. HEIDEGGER, 2004 ↑
  8. Ibid., 2004, p. 24 ↑
  9. Ibid., 2004, p. 24 ↑