The Question Concerning Technology

With thanks to Professor B. Babich, Fordham University

Martin Heidegger

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 isa means to an end – Instrumental definitiona human activity -- Anthropological definition

Both definitions are “correct” but the correct is not the same as the true… (312)

Controlling TechnologyWe seek to master

technologyI.e., as Heidegger

says, we seek to “’get’ technology ‘spiritually in hand.’ … The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.”

This is problematic in the event (and Heidegger will defend this point) that technology might be something other than a “mere means”

We need a free relation to technology

And we can seek the true by way of the correct.

The Four Causes (313-4)causa materialis --- hyle -- the “material”causa formalis --- eidos – the form or shapeCausa finalis -- telos – that for which it is

forcausa 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 usHeidegger 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

RevealingEvery bringing forth is grounded in

revealingThus 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 poieticAnd as Heidegger emphasizes techne is

also a kind of knowing or episteme

The essence of modern technologyNot 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 UponThe setting upon characteristic of modern

technology challenges forth the energy of nature as an expediting in two waysUnlocks and exposes (“Physics sets nature

up” (321))And the economic: maximum yield, minimum

expense demands stockpilingThe 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 - EnframingGathered 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 UponThe 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 AgricultureEin 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.

Das anstehende und als solches schon auf ein Sichstellen abgeschätzte Gestein wird 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, growsThe 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