Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 23 (Martin Heidegger)

"The Question Concerning Technology" (originally published in 1954)

Background notes:

• German philosopher (1889-1976)
• Heidegger joned the National Socialist party in 1933. After the war, he was banned from university teaching on account of his Nazi connections. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1946. He continued to write and lecture on philosophy. 
• "The Question Concerning Technology" emerges out of a series of talks he delivered from 1949 to 1953.
• Heidegger's work has strongly influenced philosophy, theology and the humanities. Within philosophy it played a crucial role in the development of existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, postmodernism, and continental philosophy in general. Well-known philosophers such as Karl Jaspers, Leo Strauss, Ahmad Fardid, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Lévinas, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Jacques Derrida have all analyzed Heidegger's work.
  
• claimed that Western philosophy has, since Plato, misunderstood what it means for something "to be"

Reading Response:
In this work, Heidegger aims to define the essence of modern technology. He believes everything has essence, but that this essence is hidden to humans. To unconceal it, man must "think through still more primally what was primally thought" (259). We can do this through "bringing-forth"--challenging the unconcealment of the essence, rather than merely accepting the concealed (our "stultified compulsion to push on blindly with technology" [260]). According to Heidegger, it is only through unconcealment that we can access the truth.

In defining modern technology, Heidegger says we have moved away from a notion of modern technology as mere manufacturing, and he asserts that modern technology, as with the Greek techne, is a bringing-forth, a revealing. He calls technology's essence "Ge-stell [enframing]" (258), which is the way it exists in the world, the way it is able to be seen and understood by humans. Furthermore, "man stands within the essential realm of enframing. He can never take up a relationship to it subsequently" (259). In other words, he is always already "framed, claimed, and challenged" by destining: "Always the destining of revealing holds complete sway over men" (260).

However, Heidegger believes we are endangered by the destining of revealing: "man may misconstrue the unconcealed and misinterpret it" (260). In addition, when man becomes "nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve" (261),  he becomes even more endangered (on "the brink of a precipitous fall"), namely that "he himself will have to be taken as standing reserve" (261). In other words, at a time when man believes himself to be the supreme being on earth, he will believe everything on earth is his construct. According to Heidegger, this illusion gives rise to a delusion: that man's essence will seem to be everywhere and in everything. However, Heidegger believes the exact opposite: that man "can never encounter only himself" (261). Yet, in spite of (and in the midst of) this danger, Heidegger also sees a saving power; he states: "in technology's essence roots and thrives the saving power" (262) and "the essential unfolding of technology harbors in itself what we least suspect, the possible rise of the saving power" (263).

Although human activity and achievement can never counter or banish this danger, Heidegger sees our witnessing of the crisis and our potential for reflection (pondering/questioning/thinking about technology) as a means for guarding and preserving essence. In other words, the closer we get to the danger, the more we are able to see the saving power of modern technology.