I have written a new version of my reflection; I recommend reading A Reflection on Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology
Prologue: The essay The Question Concerning Technology was originally written for an audience whose philosophical education the author could not count on. Heidegger presented the text in 1946 as a lecture at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste). Although the text was written a year after the end of the Second World War, we find no direct mention of the war in it. From a philosophical, but also a purely pragmatic, point of view this makes sense to me. Technology, as we learn in the text, is something that precedes even the theoretical investigation of nature. That is why it is so important not to let oneself be seduced by trends and by the current use of the word “technology”, or of technology itself. This does not mean that Heidegger entirely overlooked the danger that goes hand in hand with technology. But he does so only at the end of his essay, and he has a rigorously prepared argument for it which would hold before as well as after the war, precisely because it does not draw on the context of the time, however terrible. Universality and the effort “to go to the core of words and their meanings” are, among other things, a central theme of the whole essay.
Heidegger undertakes this archaeological trail through the meanings of words in the conviction that over the centuries the original meaning of words has faded away, which causes us problems when we try to get to the essence of things, in the case of this essay the essence of technology. That is also why the essay is full of etymological analysis reaching back to the roots of Western civilisation, to the meanings of words as they were used in ancient Greece.
Seasoned readers and followers of Heidegger will notice that, compared with the philosopher’s other works, this text is unusually short and perhaps also less dense. That does not mean, however, that the text is simple. The use of foreign words and, towards the end, the author’s poetic language make this essay a work whose difficulty matches the goal the author set himself:
“if we question concerning technology, we would like to establish a free relationship to it. The relationship is free when in it our existence (Dasein) opens itself to the essence of technology”.
To those not put off by the difficulty of the essay, Heidegger offers a unique view of technology. Having read and understood it, they will find in Heidegger inspiration for their understanding not only of technology but also of design theory, and even of epistemology. I will write about my interpretation of Heidegger next time, though. In this blog post I would “merely” like to present my notes. Notes on Martin Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology.
The essay in brief:
The conventional understanding divides technology into a means to an end and a human activity. Heidegger calls these views the instrumental view and the anthropological view. But what is instrumentality? This question leads the author to an analysis of causality, which he analyses against the background of Aristotle’s four causes:
- the material cause (causa materialis) — the material from which the object is made
- the formal cause (causa formalis) — the object’s own form
- the efficient cause (causa efficiens) — the one who made the object
- the final cause (causa finalis) — the purpose for which the object was made
In his investigation of instrumentality Heidegger goes one level deeper and focuses on what causality is. Here he warns us not to understand causality as a cause, as that which brings something about. For what the Romans called causa (to fall, to befall) was for the Greeks aition, that is, that to which something else is indebted. A person, for example a craftsman (or, in Heidegger’s example, a silversmith), who makes an object as the causa efficiens is, as Heidegger stresses here, responsible for the resulting object not by making it but by considering carefully and gathering together the other three ways of being responsible. For considering carefully the Greeks used the word legein, logos, a term rooted in apophainesthai, which means to bring forward into appearance, to make manifest, in English “to reveal”.
We must not understand being responsible in the modern, moral sense, but in the original sense of the Greeks, in which aition means “to be responsible for”. Heidegger then comes up with a crucial interpretation of aition: the four “causes” mentioned (here now really in quotation marks) are responsible for the finished object, they let it come forth into presencing, let it in, let it complete its arrival (p. 12). Heidegger writes:
“But in what, then, does the interplay of these four ways of occasioning take place? These four ways let what is not yet present arrive into presencing”.
This occasioning, which induces something to pass from non-presence into presence, is what Plato in the dialogue Symposium calls poiesis, or rather bringing-forth (her-vor-bringen, in English bringing-forth).
We have two kinds of bringing-forth: poiesis and physis. Poiesis is bringing-forth by someone or something (e.g. by a craftsman), although poiesis does not mean only craft, poetic or artistic activity.
Physis, on the other hand, is bringing-forth by nature, of itself.
How does bringing-forth happen, in nature and in the craftsman? Here Heidegger gives an evasive answer. He mentions thoroughly synonymous words and phrases: bringing-forth as:
- Coming into appearance
- Bringing out of concealment into unconcealment
- It comes to pass when what is concealed passes into what is unconcealed
- This passing flashes in what we call revealing
For revealing the Greeks have the word aletheia, the Romans veritas; Heidegger observes that we say truth, the correctness of representation. (p. 12) In revealing the four ways of occasioning are gathered (the 4 causes, for they take part in the revealing of the object). Technology as an instrument, as a means, is one of the ways of revealing. Technology is a realm of revealing. A realm of truth.
With this Heidegger completes his analysis of the instrumental nature of technology and of causality.
Heidegger goes on to offer an analysis of the word technology itself. It comes from the Greek technikon, which means that which belongs to techné. Techné is not only craft but also art and ideas. Techné belongs to revealing, and so to poiesis; it is poietic (not physis), because it is not revealed of itself but by someone or something (e.g. by a human being).
Since Plato’s time techné has been linked with the word epistémé. Both words are names for knowing in the widest sense, for expert knowledge, for knowing that opens up and reveals things.
It may be objected to this determination of the realm of the essence of technology that, while it perhaps held for Greek thought and fits handicraft technology at best, it does not fit modern machine technology (p. 15)
Heidegger acknowledges that the analysis so far may have worked for craft, but what about modern technology, which is based on the findings of the exact sciences? Is the use of the exact sciences (theoretical and applied physics) what separates modern technology from the technology of the times when crafts were the pinnacle of technology? Heidegger disagrees, because technology made the modern sciences possible; without technology the modern sciences could not function, verify their results, etc. Which means that technology is something that exists before science.
Where modern technology differs is the fact that its revealing is not poiesis but CHALLENGING (p. 14), which demands of nature that it be challenged, that it supply energy. This challenging of nature is a form of extraction, a challenging revealing. The whole of nature becomes standing-reserve (in English standing-reserve), Bestand, it is struck by challenging revealing.
But the human being itself becomes standing-reserve. The worker and the woodcutter are part of industry, they depend on industry, and industry uses them as standing-reserve for profit. That this is dangerous, Heidegger will mention later.
The challenging revealing is, of course, done by the human being (my note: is Heidegger strongly anthropocentric?). On the other hand, something is also demanded of the human being, namely his very need to challenge nature into revealing. And what is it that drives the human being to this? Heidegger names it Gestell (in English En-framing), an enframing that sets upon and orders. (my note: the word Gestell causes many people trouble; not only does Heidegger use Gestell in an entirely new sense, he does not take the trouble to explain this new [his own] sense properly). Heidegger describes Gestell as:
“that challenging claim which gathers man so that he orders what reveals itself as standing-reserve” (p. 21)
In the English version, “what reveals itself” is translated as “self-revealing”, so we can say that through modern technology the human being exploits (challenges) what is revealed as physis.
(The author notes that in German Gestell usually means a pedestal, a chassis, a bookstand. From the English translation, Enframing, we also understand Gestell as framing, a frame, a framework, a structure)
Gestell is part of revealing, and so of the essence of technology, but it is nothing technological (which is why Heidegger, as a philosopher, can seriously investigate the essence of technology without having any technical education; that is, he does not need to be an engineer, for instance).
Gestell urges the human being to reveal/challenge nature as a usable reserve. (my note: But this happens only when this reserve is quantifiable, in other words, when these reserves can be grasped by the apparatus of contemporary theoretical physics. What is not calculable cannot be revealed, and so in effect does not exist [for the human being]. Heidegger will still talk about this, but this physicalism, which we as humanity have imposed on nature, most likely brings with it, hand in hand, the problems and dangers of Gestell — understanding and treating nature as something that is here for us to use).
Gestell, as follows from the text, is not the one and only way of revealing, and so the human being need not reveal what is in nature as a usable reserve. In this the human being has a freedom which, according to Heidegger, governs what is lit up, revealed. Freedom is in this respect close to truth, for both freedom and truth happen on (my interpretation) the imaginary edge of revealing: revealing illuminates and at the same time reveals.
Gestell is a danger because it forces the human being to reveal only what he can (my interpretation) pigeonhole into concepts and mathematical formulas, regardless of whether it is true or not. If we understand technology as an instrument, we cannot avoid causality. If we understand causality (causes) as the ways in which things come from non-existence, from concealment, into existence, into unconcealment, we will understand that the essence of technology is the way in which we reveal the world.
Heidegger urges that we can avoid this danger if we begin to reveal nature the way the Greeks did, to reveal as techné, as the instrumentality of technology and as art, as poiesis. For Heidegger, art in ancient Greece had a unifying element, in that it integrated all aspects of life into a single whole. Art is for Heidegger a way of revealing that can convey truth to us without it being burdened by the demand for measurability and quantifiability, for art is generally less concerned with these demands than technology as Gestell, technology as the challenging of nature.
Not to stop at Gestell, but to examine and critically assess our relationship to the very essence of revealing, to the world. For questioning, as Heidegger writes, is the piety of thought.