Martin Heidegger’s Warning About Technology

Reviewing the book ’The Question Concerning Technology’

I’ve been a fan of Heidegger for a while, but always through secondary sources beyond a few excerpts. But I wanted to read something that he wrote himself. Unfortunately, his Magnus opus Being and Time is one of the most difficult texts there is, and it’s also quite long. It would take me months to go through it.

This book is excellent because it presents a lot of key themes from Heidegger, while also speaking about technology in specific which I’ve been increasingly thinking about for the last year. The book has 3 parts, the first is the most known and what I will focus on: “The Question Concerning Technology”. The other two I only skimmed, I will save them for another time.

By Heidegger's standards, it’s not a particularly difficult text, but it’s still not an easy read by any means. Similar to what I’ve previously read of Heidegger, it is incredibly misleading in the beginning. Everything seems to make sense, but as the progress further and further, at one point you realize that you got lost. And you have no idea how. There was a lot of re-reading, and in many instances, I had no idea whatsoever what he was saying and gave up completely. Looking up commentaries and guides online was incredibly helpful.

Heidegger wants to explore our relationship with technology. First, by technology, he doesn’t mean technology as we may now associate with — computers or cars. It is much broader, and we have had technology for a very long time. Second, he doesn’t want to focus on anything specific. He famously claims “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological”. There is a deeper aspect that is the root cause of technology and how we use it.

He gives a layman's definition of technology as something human and a means to an end. He agrees with this, but at the same time, it is rather superficial. He first explores it as “means to an end”. This means that it is instrumental, in getting something done. He connects this to the problem of causality and brings Aristotle’s notion of the four causes. There are different ways of being the “cause” of something:

• Causa materialis (the material)
• Causa formalis (the form/structure)
• Causa finalis (the reason to be made)
• Causa efficiens (the agent)

For example, the phone you are likely holding required specific materials, such as plastic and metals, but was also put into a specific form, and that specific form was also caused by someone, and that someone had an intention of what the phone is supposed to do and what is it for. These are “responsible” for the phone’s existence. They make it reveal itself, which is a crucial theme for this essay and his thought in general.

He uses different terms (Greek words and their original meaning) to describe this, which are related but not the same. For example “poeisis” means “bring forth”. The phone was brought forth by its causes. It’s also the same term that we got poetry from. The poet is bringing forth something new that was not there before. It allows for “aletheia”, which means “unveiling”, and also the word for “truth”. While Heidegger doesn’t say this explicitly, it is as if the act of creation is “pulling” the hidden reality out of pure potential.

Technology is a kind of poeisis. Just like poeisis can mean both a material object or the art in a poem, the original word for technology — “techne”, again refers to both material creation and also art. But techne is connected to “episteme”, which is where we get epistemology from. It is the knowledge of that creation. He gives the example of a silversmith, who brings together the form and matter together, through his techne, to reveal the object.

This essence of technology affects all technology, but he claims that modern technology has a particularity. It also reveals, but it always reveals something else. Creation is “standing reserve”, in which what we create is always used for something else. The intrinsic value of the revealing has been lost, and now it is purely instrumental. And thus, humanity itself becomes standing-reserve.

Another important part of the essay is about enframing. This is the way we frame reality into categories which makes us biased and limits how much we can “reveal”. In addition to standing reserve, which is another facet that created our modern predicament. Not only can we not avoid enframing, but is also increasingly fixed with our scientific worldview. It is purely mechanical and mathematical. The problem of technology is not any machine in specific, but rather our enframing and our approach of standing reserve.

At some point, the essay almost turns into an environmental warning, and how the standing reserve mode degrades our relationship with nature, and eventually it will become completely destructive. Furthermore, the enframing will only deepen, it will more and more be a reflection of ourselves. Because of it, we will increasingly lose the ability to bring forth, as we’re increasingly trapped in what we can conceive of being possible. The ever-increasing mathematical outlook will only make this worse, as we will increasingly be blind to the world in-itself, and lose the sight of what is beyond measurement.

This does not mean technology is bad. He just wants us to understand what technology is and its nature. If we better understand it, we can better master it which can be incredibly useful and powerful. But if we are blind to it, instead of using it we will be used, and we will sink further and further into it. We will no longer be able to “reveal” the world. We will fail to bring being into being as fully as we could otherwise.

He proposes that we go back to the original conception of technology (techne) so that can we remember its purpose. It is not only material creation but also art. They weren’t separate things in classical Greece and they should never be. Everything was integrated to better cultivate aletheia.

We need to be more like poets, but in doing so we need not reject technology (nor could we), but recognize the essence of art (techne) within technology. Only then we will be able to minimize the consequences of enframing and our own enslavement.

“The actual threat has already afflicted humanity in its essence. The rule of enframing threatens humanity with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth. “

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