*A response to Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology (1954).
Heidegger’s revealing of technology’s essence is layered and eventually anticlimactic, for in the end he doesn’t reveal it at all. He merely points the way to the range within which he believes it exists. He describes the nature of the essence in relation to what technology is and explores it further in relation to the way humans use it. Finally, he concludes that technology is becoming something we, here now, may never get to see or understand. He appears to have been searching for more meaning in a world that may have none to offer.
The essence of technology is described by Heidegger using an instrumental, as well as anthropological, definition. Technology is seen as a means to an end, or an instrument. It is also seen as a human activity in general. Perhaps the reason for these perspectives relates to the fact that some humans use tools as they were designed, or for the ends they were designed as means to attain, and some humans use tools as means to some end not considered by its designer. Naturally, both are true at different times for different people. This description of the essence of technology is bound to the use humans have for it, and so fails to define the essence of technology by itself.
Heidegger peels the onion of technology’s essence in confirming that the essence of technology is driven by our use for it. Through “destining” and “enframing” mankind uses technology as a “mode of revealing…through which the actual everywhere…becomes standing-reserve.” In describing human use for technology this way, Heidegger appears trapped in the conception of technology’s essence in relation to its purpose or use, and its effect in relation to its cause. Of course, there are many purposes for technology, and many ways to use technology, which means the essence of it may be in flux until defined within a single actor. Still, the description seems accurate, that tech’s essence is related to the way humans use it to turn nature into usable resources.
Heidegger’s conception of technology is all-encompassing, and his definition of technology is multiplied by the diversity of ways in which it is used by humans. There is a stark dichotomy between himself and Plato, who taught that society must be put into “order” by those who live in the “light” of the “truth.” Heidegger, by contrast, explains that humans put each other and nature in “order” to reveal a truth that is not yet known. If Heidegger is correct, then Plato might represent the kind of sociopathy that enables such things as genocide and other mass murders. Perhaps every tyrant in history could be summed up by the way they treat a possibility as absolute, as if to test if they themselves are wrong while never once admitting it to anyone else. Without someone ordering people and things, those might naturally fall into a better arrangement all on their own!
Heidegger peels his onion back deeper, by describing his very revelation as the act of revealing itself. He calls technology “a mode of revealing” which “comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place…where truth happens.” He claims, “man drives technology forward” to take “part in ordering as a way of revealing.” In this description he appears to confirm my suspicion that men order others around as a means to revealing truth, and not as a result of knowing truth. Further, he unveils a complex truth about the way technology’s use can alter the way it continues to be used. He quotes Goethe in saying “only what is granted endures. What endures out of the earliest beginnings is what grants.” This profound statement leads me to think of the way the military is the first to use a technology, only allowing it to become public after it is done using it, or as a further means to some military objective perhaps. People in society are therefore stunted by the many uses for technology the military did not grant them. Heidegger appears to confirm this in stating “enframing blocks the shining forth of truth,” and where he says, “destining to ordering is an extreme danger.”
As we follow Heidegger’s winding downward staircase, into the core of his onion, it becomes clear the man did not reach the center. The center for him lay in the life experience of some future generation of man, which would use technology whereas Heidegger’s generation was more or less wrapped up in making technology work in the first place. He plainly admits it by writing “in our sheer preoccupation with tech, we do not yet experience the essential unfolding of it.” Further, he appeared to see the unfolding of technology as dependent upon the unfolding of the self. He wrote that man is “continually approaching the brink of a possibility” and “seeks to belong to revealing.” The purpose of living in that context seems to be that future generations are able to live a vision which began here and now. I want to experience the unfolding of technology in my lifetime. On the other hand, is the self not always becoming? So then, technology may suffer the same fate, of never truly being while always being brought about.
Joshua Ray Jongema 