 For Heidegger, “enframing” [Gestell in German] is using technology to turn nature into a

resource for efficient use. Modern technology, says Heidegger, lets us isolate nature and treat it
as a “standing reserve” [Bestand]—that is, a resource to be stored for later utility.

 In his later writings on technology, which mainly concern us in this essay, Heidegger draws
attention to technology’s place in bringing about our decline by constricting our experience of
things as they are. He argues that we now view nature, and increasingly human beings too, only
technologically — that is, we see nature and people only as raw material for technical
operations. Heidegger seeks to illuminate this phenomenon and to find a way of thinking by
which we might be saved from its controlling power, to which, he believes, modern civilization
both in the communist East and the democratic West has been shackled. We might escape this
bondage, Heidegger argues, not by rejecting technology, but by perceiving its danger.

 Heidegger is concerned with questioning the essence of technology and in particular, modern
technology, which he understands as something different to older, pre-industrialised forms of
technology. The difference, to put it crudely, is that our technological relationship with nature
was once as one of steward but now is one of both master and slave. The purpose of
questioning technology is therefore to break the chains of technology and be free, not in the
absence of technology but through a better understanding of its essence and meaning. He
suggests that there are two dominant ways of understanding technology. One is instrumental,
to view it as a means to an end, while the other is to see it as human activity. He thinks they
belong together

 The instrumental view rests on a view of causality, which he breaks down into four Aristotelian
causes: the material, the form, the end, and the effect. These four aspects of causality are in fact
four aspects of ‘being responsible for bringing something into appearance’. They reveal that
which was concealed. They are different but united by their revealing.

 Discussing techné, the root of ‘technology’, he observes that it encompasses both the activities
and skills of the craftsman but also the arts of the mind and fine arts and concludes that techné
“belongs to bringing-forth, to poiésis; it is something poetic.” Techné is also linked with the
word epistémé and Heidegger states that both words “are names for knowing in the widest
sense. They mean to be entirely at home in something, to understand and be expert in it.”

 Heidegger pre-empts the accusation that this view no longer holds true for modern, machine-
powered technology. In defence, he argues that modern technology, in its mutual relationship
of dependency with modern physics, is also ‘revealing’.

 However, the revealing of modern technology differs from that of earlier, non-machine-
powered technology, in a fundamental way. It is not a revealing, an unfolding in the sense of
poiésis, “the revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the
 unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such.” He
then leaps into some illustrative examples:

 All technology reveals, but modern technology reveals not in the unfolding poetic sense but as a
challenge; it sets upon nature and expedites its energy by unlocking it.

 Once unlocked, this energy (raw or in the form of machine-powered technology) is held captive
as a standing reserve. The airliner standing on the runway is a stationary object ordered to be
ready for take-off. However, this apparent mastery over nature’s energy is no such thing
because we are challenged, ordered, to act this way. We, in fact, like the airliner on the runway,
are situated in the ‘standing reserve’ as human resources.

 In this way, we are challenged by modern technology to approach nature “as an object of
research” to reveal or “order the real as standing reserve”. Heidegger refers to this as
enframing. Enframing is the essence of modern technology.

 Heidegger’s use of language (or rather the way it is expressed in English translation) can be
difficult at times. In the remaining few pages he discusses what enframing actually is, building
upon the idea that as the essence of technology, it is therefore that which reveals the real
through ordering as standing reserve. As discussed above, we humans are challenged forth
(compelled) by enframing to reveal the real in a seemingly deterministic way (Heidegger refers
to this as destining) that holds complete sway over us. However, technology is not our fate, we
are not necessarily compelled along an unaltered and inevitable course because “enframing
belongs within the destining of revealing” and destining is “an open space” where man can
“listen and hear” to that which is revealed. Freedom is in “intimate kinship” with the revealed as
“all revealing comes out of the open, goes into the open, and brings into the open… Freedom is
the realm of the destining that at any given time starts a revealing upon its way.” Freedom then,
is to be found in the essence of technology but we are continually caused to believe that the
brink of possibility is that which is revealed in the ordering processes of modern technology to
create the standing reserve, deriving all our standards from this basis. Freedom is continually
blocked by this process of the destining of revealing which obscures the real. This is a danger.

 It is a danger because when the real is concealed it may be misinterpreted. When something is
unconcealed it no longer concerns us as an object but, rather, as standing reserve “and man in
the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing reserve”. When the object
is lost to the standing reserve, we ourselves become standing reserve and see everything as our
construct, seeing not objects everywhere but the illusion and delusion of encountering
ourselves everywhere.

 Heidegger concludes that technology once shared the root techné with a broader practice of
poiésis. Technology (techné) brought forth and revealed that which was true and beautiful
through the poetics of the fine arts. It is in the realm of the arts, therefore, that we can practice
the questioning of technology in the hope of revealing the truth, which modern technology
habitually conceals through the order it imposes on the world.