Monday, October 2, 2006

Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. 1954. New York: Harper, 1986.

Heidegger questions the nature of technology, seeking a corrective to instrumentalism or treatments of technology that focus merely on the technical or the treat it as neutral or destined. He winds through a sequence of analytical claims set up to distinguish an essence of technology: enframing. Heidegger wants to resist both instrumentalism (means to an end) and anthropological (human activity) perspectives on technology. Questioning, he contends, will open "our human existence to the essence of technology" (311). To explain causality in technology, Heidegger examines a silver chalice. He presents four causal aspects that can be separated or categorized for any produced thing: materialis (matter from which it is made), formalis (shape), finalis (end), and efficiens (the effect). In the four causes we find instrumentality (314). Efficiens or the occasion is the most complex of the four because it connects with responsibility and also combines both poiesis and physis (which lead toward enframing?).

Unless we question technology, "we remain unfree and chained to technology" (311). This is why we should recognize technology as being about "bringing forward" or revealing, or, that is, emphasize agency in shaping technology through production and presenting (poiesis). Enframing, as the essence of technology, introduces both danger (destining or destining of revealing) and opportunity. Also, enframing endures or persists: this is something like a perlocutionary effect of technology (if we could widen speech acts to something like technological acts): made things have a long life inflected (even determined by) production and presentation, provided we encounter them with an understanding of the poetic (and rhetorical). Basically, with a call for questioning technology, Heidegger affirms poetics (the creative power of language). "Questions Concerning" might also be read as an argument for humanized technology or critical perspectives on technology that call into check its ubiquity or fervor about it being destined/predetermined. There is also a subtext of agrarian nostalgia, longing for preindustrial days.

Terms: "telic finality" (314), "standing reserve" (322), enframing (324)

On how to read "Questions Concerning": "We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the way, and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics" (311).

"Accordingly, the correct instrumental definition of technology still does not show us technology's essence" (313).

"The principle characteristic of being responsible is this starting something on its way into arrival" (316): to occasion (as we approach enframing as essence). The occasion ties in with poiesis and physis.

"The modes occasioning, the four causes, are at play, then, within bringing forth" (317).

"Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing" (318).

"The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth" (321).

"Modern technology, as a revealing that orders, is thus no mere human doing" (324)

"For idea names not only the nonsensuous aspect of what is physically visible. Aspect (idea) names and also is that which constitutes the essence in the audible, the tasteable, the tactile, in everything that is in any way accessible" (325).

"The word stellen [to set] in the name Ge-stell [enframing] does not only mean challenging. At the same time it should preserve the suggestion of another Stellen from which it stems, namely that producing and presenting [Her-und Dar-stellen], which in the sense of poiesis, lets what presences come forth into unconcealment" (326).

"The merely instrumental, merely anthropological definition of technology is therefore in principle untenable" (326).

"[Enframing] is nothing technological, nothing on the order of a machine" (328).

"The essence of modern technology lies in enframing. Enframing belongs within the destining of revealing. These sentences express something different from the talk that we hear more frequently, to the effect that technology is the fate of our age, where 'fate' means the inevitableness of an unalterable course" (330).

"But enframing does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is. As a destining, it banishes man into the kind of revealing that is an ordering" (332). Rings of Foucault in TOOT.

"Enframing is a way of revealing that is a destining, namely, the way that challenges forth. The revealing that brings forth (poiesis) is also a way that has the character of destining" (335).

"Thus enframing, as a destining of revealing, is indeed the essence of technology, but never in the sense of genus and essentia" (335).

"Everything, then, depends upon this: that we ponder this rising and that, recollecting, we watch over it" (337).

"The essence of technology is in a lofty sense ambiguous" (338).

"The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought" (341).

Posted by Derek Mueller at October 2, 2006 12:27 PM to Tools-in-use