View source for User:ThomasW/Notes heideggers critique of modern

https://belate.wordpress.com/2010/07/12/heidegger-modern-technology/ 21.03.16


What compelled him to write on technology lies in his observation that “everywhere [in Europe], [man] remain[s] unfree and chained to technology,” (QT, 287)

the word “technology” stems from the Greek word techné, which designates “skill,” “art,” and “craft,” a mode of doing or making. 

“The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the [social] needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what technology is” (QT, 288).  

In Adorno and Horkheimer’s words: “What human beings seek to learn from nature [physis] is how to use [techné] to dominate wholly both it and human beings.  Nothing else counts.”[5]

Heidegger correctly, the essence of technology, then, is the poetic process of bringing something forth into presence and, as a mode of revealing, “frames” a world that is unfolded or unconcealed in the process.

Enframing is not a tool or an apparatus, but (and this is the crucial point in Heidegger’s argument) the very condition of possibility for the truth of the real to be revealed, poetically, to man.

Modern technology does not share the essence of technology because it is a different kind of truth-revealing:  where the original essence of technology is the poetic revealing of bringing-something-forth, in modern technology the kind of revealing is what Heidegger describes as a “challenging” [Herausforden], a challenging that “puts to nature an unreasonable demand that it supply energy, which can [then] be extracted and stored” for man’s purposes (QT, 296).

As he says, what is dangerous about modern technology is that its ways of enframing reality “conceals a former way of revealing,” it “blocks the shining-forth and holding sway of truth” (QT, 309).  Under these conditions, man, in modern technology, becomes himself merely something technological.