Martin Heidegger

The Question Concerning

Technology
With thanks to Professor B. Babich, Fordham University
Questioning
For the sake of
“preparing” a free
relationship

A free relationship is one

that opens our existence,
our Da-Sein to the
essence of technology
 Technology is not the same as, not equivalent to the
essence of technology
 “the essence of technology is by no means anything
technological”
 But, and here Heidegger invokes Rousseau, indirectly
to be sure:
 “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to
technology”
 This constraint is true “whether we passionately affirm
or deny it” ((311))
 “But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible
way when we regard it as something neutral”
 According to traditional philosophy, we can ask the
question of essence by asking “what” something is.
 Technology is
 a means to an end – Instrumental definition
 a human activity -- Anthropological definition
 Both definitions are “correct” but the correct is not
the same as the true… (312)
Controlling Technology
 We seek to master  This is problematic in
technology the event (and
 I.e., as Heidegger says, Heidegger will defend
we seek to “’get’ this point) that
technology ‘spiritually in technology might be
hand.’ … The will to something other than a
mastery becomes all the “mere means”
more urgent the more  We need a free relation
technology threatens to to technology
slip from human  And we can seek the
control.” true by way of the
correct.
The Four Causes (313-4)
 causa materialis --- hyle -- the “material”
 causa formalis --- eidos – the form or shape
 Causa finalis -- telos – that for which it is for
 causa efficiens*
• not quite translatable, this would be the logos, but Heidegger seeks to
explore this in terms of the working circumspection of the worker
 causa efficiens (315-316)
 For us today this is the exclusive meaning of causality
 Aristotle’s exploration of the fourfold nature of causality is thus
alien to us
 Heidegger explores this in terms of language (our English word
is indebted to the latin)
 German: Ursache, Latin, causa, Greek aition
 The Craftsman – Silversmith here
(315)
 The German überlegen (which Heidegger interprets to mean something
like “bring about by reflecting”)--- renders the Greek λογος for
Heidegger and corresponds to in Latin letters now, apo-
phainesthai, “to bring forth into appearance”
 This can best be illustrated with reference to Heidegger’s
discussion of the tool in his first and most important work, Being
and Time
Tools, of a kind
 Hammering
“Holding a hammer properly enables one to use the hammer to accomplish
what one has to do with the hammer. But this is other than bending the hammer
to one's own will. The hammer will do best what one will if one conforms one's
use to the intrinsic design of the hammer, heft, shape, etc. (conformity with
respect to the appropriate grip, the angle and arc of the swinging stroke, even
the kind of nail employed, surely the position of the same). In the case of
hammering, there is always a great bit of freedom -- one can use the side of the
hammer's head or the shaft for hammering; if it is a claw hammer and one is a
performance artist, say, one can use the sharp edge of the claw. But even here
the condition of the range of use is 'decided' or constrained by the tool and the
task even in the last unlikely because (not albeit) unwieldy case. This is what
Heidegger in Being and Time referred to as equipmental totality (SZ 68). With
more sophisticated machines, anything mechanically driven for example,
especially all things electronic, the range of play is increasingly reduced. “
 B. Babich in British Journal of Phenomenology. 30/1 (January 1999): 106
The Four Causes: Didactic Illustration
“Verschuldetsein”
 That to which something else is indebted (316)
 This is Heidegger’s key reflection on techne as
bringing forth in and through an other, en alloi,
and as distinguished from
 physis, understood as bursting into bloom,
unfolding from itself (37) 1
Revealing
 Every bringing forth is grounded in revealing
 Thus Heidegger here makes clear (p. 317) that
technology is “no mere means” but a mode or
revealing, that is, of bringing forth into
unconcealment – aletheia (318-9)
 In this sense, techne is something poietic
 And as Heidegger emphasizes techne is also a
kind of knowing or episteme
The essence of modern technology
 Not a bringing forth (in the sense of poiesis)
 Too impatient/violent/urgent we might note here that this
violence applies as much to the information-age as to the
machine-age
 Instead it is what Heidegger calls a challenging forth into
revealing (320)
Setting Upon
 The setting upon characteristic of modern technology
challenges forth the energy of nature as an expediting in two
ways
 Unlocks and exposes (“Physics sets nature up” (321))
 And the economic: maximum yield, minimum expense
demands stockpiling
 The result Heidegger calls Bestand (332): standing reserve which
is far more than simply reserves that one happens to have on
hand…[Vorrat]
Examples of such “setting upon”

Hydroelectric plant (and environs)

Strip mining
 Two windmill typs

Even the
wind can be
set upon….
Great birds of prey,
1000s and 1000s of them,
who cannot see the
churning vanes
accumulate around the
circumference
of such wind-farms …
(USA Today 25/1/2004)
Süleyman’s Bridge at Mostar, first built in
1566
Mostar Bridge, 1993
Rebuilt as a tourist attraction
Heidegger’s reference point
Gestell - Enframing
 Gathered by the challenging that sets upon the
human being in order to reveal the real as
standing reserve in accord with appearances
 Heidegger coins the term Ge-Stell (324) on the
model (a rather elusive one on the first reading) of
Gebirge (the chaining of mountain ranges) and
Gemut (what disposes one in one’s disposition)
 The Ge-stell is a putting into a framework or
configuration as standing reserve of everything that
is summoned forth (325)
Setting Upon
 The challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the
self-revealing (this would be nature) in the mode or guise of
so much “standing reserve”
 This should not be equated with the array of technological
apparatus in our world (329: “It is the way in which the acutal
reveals itself as standing reserve.”)
 This becomes the way on which we are embarked: “our
destiny” (329)
Ackerbau Zitat – Example from
Agriculture
 Ein Landstrich wird gestellt… An area is en-
framed
 The context for the Ackerbau quote:
 Ein Landstrich wird gestellt, auf Kohle nämlich und
Erze, die in ihm anstehen. Das Anstehen von
Gestein ist vermutlich schon im Gesichtskreis eines
solchen Stellens vorgestellt und auch nur aus ihm
vorstellbar. Das anstehende und als solches schon
auf ein Sichstellen abgeschätzte Gestein wird
herausgefordert und demzufolge herausgefördert.
Das Anstehen von Gestein ist vermutlich
schon im Gesichtskreis eines solchen Stellens
vorgestellt und auch nur aus ihm vorstellbar.
herausgefordert und demzufolge herausgefördert.


 Durch ein solches Bestellen wird das Land zu einem
Kohlenrevier, der Boden zu einer Erlagererstätte –
Note Heidegger’s later marginal comment: Der Boden,
Land – heimatlose des Bestandes!
 Note the comparison between atomic energy
and agricultural industry:
 Bestellen ist schon andere Art als jenes wodurch vormals der Bauer
seinen Acker bestellte. Das bäuerliche Tun fordert den Ackerboden
nicht heraus; es giebt vielmehr die Saat den Wachstumskräften
anheim; es hütet sie in ihr Gedeihen. Inzwischen ist jedoch auch die
Feldbestellung in das gleiche Be-stellen ubergegangen, das die Luft
und auf Stickstoff, den Boden auf Kohle und Erze stellt, das Erz auf
Uran, das Uran auf Atomenergie, diese auf bestellbare Zerstörung
 Cultivating is now a different kind of thing than what the farmer used
to do with his field. The famer’s activity did not challenge his field; he
entrusted his seeds much more to the power of growing. They were
protected in their development for good or worse. In the meantime,
the fields have come to be cultivated in the same manner as is
nitrogen is destructively extracted from air, as coal and ore are from
the earth, as uranium from ore, as atomic energy from uranium.
Im Wesen das selbe wie …
 Ackerbau ist jetzt motorisierte Ernährungsindustrie, im
Wesen das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von Leichen in
Gaskammern und Vernichtungslagern, das Selbe wie die
Blockade und Aushungerung von Ländern, das selbe wie
die Fabrikation von Wasserstoffbomben.
 Agriculture is now a motorized feeding-industry,
essentially the same as the fabrication of corpses in gas
chambers and the death camps, the same as the
blockade and starvation of countries, the same as the
making of hydrogen bombs.
 

Heidegger’s claim is that such a manufacture of corpses is “in essence the same”as strip
mining, factory farming, etc.
But where danger is, grows
The saving power also.
Friedrich Hölderlin (333)
One must raise a further question, beyond
questioning after technology to raise the
question of what Heidegger, who thinks the
danger [Gefahr] together with the notion of
Ge-Stell, might mean by speaking of
Hölderlin’s saving power [das Rettende].
See “The Origin of the Work of
Art”– here he continues:
 Because the essence of technology is nothing technological,
essential reflection upon technology and decisive
confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, one the
one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the
other, fundamentally different from it.
Such a realm is art. But only if reflection upon art, for its part,
does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth,
concerning which we are questioning… For questioning is
the piety of thought. (340-341)
The essence of technology
is nothing technological
Heidegger
Heidegger’s grave, St. Martin’s Church Graveyard, Messkirch