The technological view of the world of

Martin Heidegger
Why is technology not neutral?
Heidegger strongly opposes the view that technology is “a means to an end”
or “a human activity.” These two approaches, which Heidegger calls,
respectively, the “instrumental” and “anthropological” definitions, are indeed
“correct”, but do not go deep enough; as he says, they are not yet “true.”
Unquestionably, Heidegger points out, technological objects are means for
ends, and are built and operated by human beings, but the essence of
technology is something else entirely. Just as the essence of a tree is not itself
a tree, Heidegger points out, so the essence of technology is not anything
technological.

What, then, is technology, if it is neither a means to an end nor a human

activity? Technology, according to Heidegger must be understood as “a way
of revealing” (Heidegger 1977, 12). “Revealing” is one of the terms
Heidegger developed himself in order to make it possible to think what,
according to him, is not thought anymore. It is his translation of the Greek
word alètheuein, which means ‘to discover’ – to uncover what was covered
over. Related to this verb is the independent noun alètheia, which is usually
translated as “truth,” though Heidegger insists that a more adequate
translation would be “un-concealment.”

How can technology be ‘a way of revealing’?

What does this have to do with technology? And what does Heidegger mean
when he says that technology is “a way of revealing”? Answering these
questions requires a short but important detour. What we call “reality”,
according to Heidegger, is not given the same way in all times and all
cultures (Seubold 1986, 35-6). “Reality” is not something absolute that
human beings can ever know once and for all; it is relative in the most literal
sense of the word – it exists only in relations. Reality ‘in itself’, therefore, is
inaccessible for human beings. As soon as we perceive or try to understand it,
it is not ‘in itself’ anymore, but ‘reality for us.’

This means that everything we perceive or think of or interact with “emerges

out of concealment into unconcealment,” in Heidegger’s words. By entering
into a particular relation with reality, reality is ‘revealed’ in a specific way.
And this is where technology comes in, since technology is the way of
revealing that characterises our time. Technology embodies a specific way of
revealing the world, a revealing in which humans take power over reality.
While the ancient Greeks experienced the ‘making’ of something as ‘helping
something to come into being’ – as Heidegger explains by analysing classical
texts and words – modern technology is rather a ‘forcing into being’.
Technology reveals the world as raw material, available for production and
manipulation.

Why is technology not a human activity?

According to Heidegger, there is something wrong with the modern,
technological culture we live in today. In our ‘age of technology’ reality can
only be present as a raw material (as a ‘standing reserve’). This state of
affairs has not been brought about by humans; the technological way of
revealing was not chosen by humans. Rather, our understanding of the world
- our understanding of ‘being’, of what it means ‘to be’ - develops through
the ages. In our time ‘being’ has the character of a technological
‘framework’, from which humans approach the world in a controlling and
dominating way.

This technological understanding of ‘being’, according to Heidegger, is to be

seen as the ultimate danger. First of all, there is the danger that humans will
also interpret themselves as raw materials. Note that we are already speaking
about “human resources”! But most importantly, the technological will to
power leaves no escape. If we want to move towards a new interpretation of
being, this would itself be a technological intervention: we would manipulate
our manipulation, exerting power over our way of exerting power. And this
would only reconfirm the technological interpretation of being. Every attempt
to climb out of technology throws us back in. The only way out for
Heidegger is “the will not to will”. We need to open up the possibility of
relying on technologies while not becoming enslaved to them and seeing
them as manifestations of an understanding of being.

Technological Criticism:
Heidegger and Enframing
Published: Thu 20 February 2014
By Eric Scrivner
In On Philosophy.
tags: philosophy

Is technology good or calamitous? Do we control the development of technology or does it control

us? It never fails to amaze me how few technology professionals ever approach these questions.
Perhaps it is our desire to avoid cognitive dissonance related to our work. Perhaps it is simple
intellectual dishonesty or cowardice. It could also simply be that criticism of technology is not
easy to come by for us - nowhere in the traditional canon of blogs, books, and papers is an
engagement with these questions easily found. It is for this reason that I'd like to propose a series
of articles in which I'll share the thoughts of influential critics of technology by outlining their
basic arguments in an accessible fashion with some of my own commentary attached. In the end
the judgment is, of course, yours.

Martin Heidegger and The Question Concerning Technology

Martin Heidegger was the philosopher of Being. His magnum opus, Being and Time, sought to re-
examine what the meaning of the word is is and what human beings must be like such that
questions regarding their own existence are even possible for them. He was incredibly influential
in the 20th century and his thought inspired existentialism, phenomenology, and deconstruction.
His critique of technology, originally written in 1955, was also quite influential and inspired many
ecological thinkers.
The argument begins from the instrumental definition of technology - technology is a means to an
end - and, after a thorough deconstruction of the inadequacies of such a definition, works to
uncover what is new about modern technology that makes it so destructive and potentially
dangerous. Heidegger tells us that there are two ways for things to be brought forth into
existence. The first, physis, is through capacities already contained within the entity itself - the
example he gives is a flower bursting into bloom. The second, contained along with physis in the
Greek word poiesis, is through another entity - for example, a chalice through the craftsman or a
painting through the artist. Technology primarily concerns itself with the latter, and modern
technology does so in a particular fashion that "sets upon nature" and "challenges forth the
energies of nature" [Heidegger] [1]. This challenging and setting upon causes us to order the
entities in our world in such a way that they are always standing ready to be put to use - for
example, the blender is always ready to blend or the airplane on the runway is always prepared to
take off. This challenging relationship with nature also means that it is no longer viewed
ecologically - as something that we have a symbiotic relationship to - but instead as the "chief
storehouse of the standing energy reserve" to be set upon, unlocked, transformed, stored,
distributed, and redistributed [Heidegger] [1].

Heidegger does not think that we are exercising our free will when we attempt to go at nature in
this way, but instead that a particular mode of revealing entities and understanding our
relationship to them has got hold of us here since setting upon, unlocking, transforming, storing,
distributing, and redistributing are all different methods of revelation. He calls this mode of
revelation Enframing (Ge-stell in German) as it emphasizes ordering over all else. Enframing
represents an extreme danger. It opens the possibility for humans to forget their own essence as
beings uniquely capable of revealing the world in different ways - as beings capable of revealing
ever new ways of being. More and more it causes humans to see themselves exclusively as
orderers and everything, including themselves, as orderable.

Despite the bleak outlook on the future of Enframing, Heidegger saw a "saving power" contained
within it as well. That saving power was its potential to clearly reveal to us our own essence as
well as the essence of Enframing, and thereby to avoid our being enslaved to a single mode of
revealing. The essay concludes with his call to the arts to help reveal to humanity in general the
insanity of Enframing and our fundamental essence as human beings.

Commentary
It helps, when evaluating the above argument by Heidegger, to understand what he thinks human
beings are. For Heidegger, we are entities always already immersed in a world. Our world here
consist of our social conditioning, geography, history, art, and so on. We are so immersed in it
that it envelops us and we can only in rare moments actually get a glimpse of aspects of our world
itself. Our world is a byproduct of our way of understanding ourselves. Our way of understanding
ourselves ultimately determines what kinds of societies we have, art we produce, and our
relationships to each other and our environment. This "way of understanding ourselves" is a part of
our world also.

Upon looking back on history Heidegger claimed to have uncovered a hidden history of the west in
which human civilizations inhabited different worlds and understood themselves and their place
within these world differently and thus conducted their lives differently. For example, the
Medieval world was one centered around God that viewed humans and animals as His creations
(hence the name creatures). Enframing is what defines the technological world in which we now
live. Its byproducts - alienation, widespread poverty, environmental destruction, species
extinction - can be understood as results symptomatic of our Enframing mode of revealing. If we
believe these things to be catastrophic then the question is not how to fix them within this world,
but how to enter into a new world that does not have these as byproducts of its mode of
revealing.

Throughout several of his later essays Heidegger leaves hints as to what he thinks such a world
would possibly be like. It is a world that would seek to bring us into harmony with the Earth rather
than desecrate it, but for which we would not have to give up all the knowledge we have gained
over human history. It is, instead, a world based on an understanding of our symbiotic relationship
to the Earth and an understanding of our role as guardians of modes of existing. A world that
would respect what he called the fourfold - Earth, Sky, Mortals, and Divinities. That would
encourage multiple modes of revealing rather than overemphasizing a single one as Enframing
currently does.

Bibliography
[1]: Martin Heidegger. "The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays"

In defining the essence of technology as Gestell, Heidegger indicated that all that has come to
presence in the world has been enframed. Thus what is revealed in the world, what has shown itself
as itself (the truth of itself) required first an Enframing, literally a way to exist in the world, to be able
to be seen and understood. Concerning the essence of technology and how we see things in our
technological age, the world has been framed as the "standing-reserve." Heidegger writes,

Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges
him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way
of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing
technological.[4]

Furthermore, Heidegger uses the word in a way that is uncommon by giving Gestell an active role. In
ordinary usage the word would signify simply a display apparatus of some sort, like a book rack, or
picture frame; but for Heidegger, Gestell is literally a challenging forth, or performative "gathering
together", for the purpose of revealing or presentation.
Heidegger’s 32 page essay was originally a series of lectures he gave in 1949, entitled:
The Thing, Enframing, The Danger, and The Turning. He begins by setting out the
reasons for his questioning:

Questioning builds a way. We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the
way, and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics. The way is one of
thinking. All ways of thinking, more or less perceptibly, lead through language in a
manner that is extraordinary. We shall be questioning concerning technology, and in
so doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free
if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology. When we can respond to
this essence, we shall be able to experience the technological within its own bounds.
Heidegger is concerned with questioning the essence of technology and in particular,
modern technology, which he understands as something different to older, pre-
industrialised forms of technology. The difference, to put it crudely, is that our
technological relationship with nature was once as one of steward but now is one of both
master and slave. The purpose of questioning technology is therefore to break the chains
of technology and be free, not in the absence of technology but through a better
understanding of its essence and meaning. He suggests that there are two dominant
ways of understanding technology. One is instrumental, to view it as a means to an end,
while the other is to see it as human activity. He thinks they belong together.

For to posit ends and procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity. The
manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and
used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what
technology is. The whole complex of these contrivances is technology. Technology itself
is a contrivance—in Latin, aninstrumentum.

The current conception of technology, according to which it is a means and a human

activity, can therefore be called the instrumental and anthropological definition of
technology.
The instrumental view rests on a view of causality, which he breaks down into four
Aristotelian causes: the material, the form, the end, and the effect. These four aspects of
causality are in fact four aspects of ‘being responsible for bringing something into
appearance’. They reveal that which was concealed. They are different but united by
their revealing.

What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? The answer: everything. For
every bringing-forth is grounded in revealing. Bringing-forth, indeed, gathers within
itself the four modes of occasioning— causality—and rules them throughout. Within its
domain belong end and means as well as instrumentality. Instrumentality is
considered to be the fundamental characteristic of technology. If we inquire step by
step into what technology, represented as means, actually is, then we shall arrive at
revealing. The possibility of all productive manufacturing lies in revealing.

Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give

heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up
to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth.
Discussing techné, the root of ‘technology’, he observes that it encompasses both the
activities and skills of the craftsman but also the arts of the mind and fine arts and
concludes that techné“belongs to bringing-forth, to poiésis; it is something
poetic.”Techné is also linked with the word epistémé and Heidegger states that both
words “are names for knowing in the widest sense. They mean to be entirely at home in
something, to understand and be expert in it.”

Such knowing provides an opening up. As an opening up it is a revealing. Aristotle, in

a discussion of special importance (Nicomacheun Ethics, Bk. VI, chaps. 3 and 4),
distinguishes between epistémé and techné and indeed with respect to what and how
they reveal. Techné is a mode of alethéuein. It reveals whatever does not bring itself
forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way
and now another. Whoever builds a house or a ship or forges a sacrificial chalice
reveals what is to be brought forth, according to the terms of the four modes of
occasioning. This revealing gathers together in advance the form and the matter of
ship or house, with a view to the finished thing envisaged as completed, and from this
gathering determines the manner of its construction. Thus what is decisive
in techné does not at all lie in making and manipulating, nor in the using of means, but
rather in the revealing mentioned before. It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing,
that techné is a bringing-forth.

Thus the clue to what the word techné means and to how the Greeks defined it leads us
into the same context that opened itself to us when we pursued the question of what
instrumentality as such in truth might be.

Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where

revealing and unconcealment take place, where alétheia, truth, happens.
Heidegger pre-empts the accusation that this view no longer holds true for modern,
machine-powered technology.  In defence, he argues that modern technology, in its
mutual relationship of dependency with modern physics, is also ‘revealing’.

Modern physics, as experimental, is dependent upon technical apparatus and upon

progress in the building of apparatus. The establishing of this mutual relationship
between technology and physics is correct. But it remains a merely historiological
establishing of facts and says nothing about that in which this mutual relationship is
grounded. The decisive question still remains: Of what essence is modem technology
that it thinks of putting exact science to use?

What is modern technology? It too is a revealing. Only when we allow our attention to
rest on this fundamental characteristic does that which is new in modern technology
show itself to us.
However, the revealing of modern technology differs from that of earlier, non-machine-
powered technology, in a fundamental way. It is not a revealing, an unfolding in the
sense of poiésis, “the revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which
puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted
and stored as such.” He then leaps into some illustrative examples:

But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in
the wind; they are left entirely to the wind’s blowing. But the windmill does not unlock
energy from the air currents in order to store it.

In contrast, a tract of land is challenged in the hauling out of coal and ore. The earth
now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that
the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently than it did when
to set in order still meant to take care of and maintain. The work of the peasant does
not challenge the soil of the field. In sowing grain it places seed in the keeping of the
forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of
the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon
nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized
food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield
uranium, for example; uranium is set up to yield atomic energy, which can be
unleashed either for destructive or for peaceful purposes.

This setting-upon that challenges the energies of nature is an expediting, and in two
ways. It expedites in that it unlocks and exposes. Yet that expediting is always itself
directed from the beginning toward furthering something else, i.e., toward driving on
to the maximum yield at the minimum expense. The coal that has been hauled out in
some mining district has not been produced in order that it may simply be at hand
somewhere or other. It is being stored; that is, it is on call, ready to deliver the sun’s
warmth that is stored in it. The sun’s warmth is challenged forth for heat, which in
turn is ordered to deliver steam whose pressure turns the wheels that keep a factory
running.
All technology reveals, but modern technology reveals not in the unfolding poetic sense
but as a challenge; it sets upon nature and expedites its energy by unlocking it.
The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-
upon, in the sense of a challenging–forth. Such challenging happens in that the energy
concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed
is stored up, what is stored up is in turn distributed, and what is distributed is
switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and
switching about are ways of revealing. But the revealing never simply comes to an
end. Neither does it run off into the indeterminate. The revealing reveals to itself its
own manifoldly interlocking paths, through regulating their course. This regulating
itself is, for its part, everywhere secured. Regulating and securing even become the
chief characteristics of the revealing that challenges.
Once unlocked, this energy (raw or in the form of machine-powered technology) is held
captive as a standing reserve. The airliner standing on the runway is a stationary
object ordered to be ready for take-off. However, this apparent mastery over nature’s
energy is no such thing because we are challenged, ordered, to act this way. We, in fact,
like the airliner on the runway, are situated in the ‘standing reserve’ as human
resources.

The forester who measures the felled timber in the woods and who to all appearances
walks the forest path in the same way his grandfather did is today ordered by the
industry that produces commercial woods, whether he knows it or not. He is made
subordinate to the orderability of cellulose, which for its part is challenged forth by the
need for paper, which is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated magazines. The
latter, in their turn, set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set
configuration of opinion becomes available on demand. Yet precisely because man is
challenged more originally than are the energies of nature, i.e., into the process of
ordering, he never is transformed into mere standing-reserve. Since man drives
technology forward, he takes part in ordering as a way of revealing. 2)
In this way, we are challenged by modern technology to approach nature “as an object of
research” to  reveal or “order the real as standing reserve”. Heidegger refers to this
as enframing. Enframing is the essence of modern technology.
Enframing means the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e.,
challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.
Enframing means the way of revealing that holds sway in the essence of modern
technology and that is itself nothing technological. On the other hand, all those things
that are so familiar to us and are standard parts of assembly, such as rods, pistons,
and chassis, belong to the technological. The assembly itself, however, together with
the aforementioned stockparts, fall within the sphere of technological activity. Such
activity always merely responds to the challenge of enframing, but it never comprises
enframing itself or brings it about.
There then follows a couple of pages which reflect on the relationship between physics
and modern technology. As a 17th c. precursor to 18th c. modern technology, physics is a
theory which sets up nature in a way that orders it in a coherent, self-serving manner. It
is not experimental because “it applies apparatus to the questioning of nature.” The
physical theory of nature is the herald of modern technology, which conceals the essence
of modern technology. Technology then, in its essence as enframing, precedes physics.

Modern physics… is challenged forth by the rule of enframing, which demands that
nature be orderable as standing-reserve. Hence physics, in its retreat from the kind of
representation that turns only to objects, which has been the sole standard until
recently, will never be able to renounce this one thing: that nature report itself in some
way or other that is identifiable through calculation and that it remain orderable as a
system of information. This system is then determined by a causality that has changed
once again. Causality now displays neither the character of the occasioning that
brings forth nor the nature of the causa efficiens, let alone that of the causa formalis. It
seems as though causality is shrinking into a reporting—a reporting challenged forth—
of standing-reserves that must be guaranteed either simultaneously or in sequence…
Because the essence of modern technology lies in enframing, modern technology must
employ exact physical science. Through its so doing the deceptive appearance arises
that modern technology is applied physical science. This illusion can maintain itself
precisely insofar as neither the essential provenance of modern science nor indeed the
essence of modern technology is adequately sought in our questioning.
Heidegger’s use of language (or rather the way it is expressed in English translation) can
be difficult at times. In the remaining few pages he discusses what enframing actually is,
building upon the idea that as the essence of technology, it is therefore that which
reveals the real through ordering as standing reserve. As discussed above, we humans
are challenged forth (compelled) by enframing to reveal the real in a seemingly
deterministic way (Heidegger refers to this as destining) that holds complete sway over
us. However, technology is not our fate, we are not necessarily compelled along an
unaltered and inevitable course because “enframing belongs within the destining of
revealing” and destining is “an open space” where man can “listen and hear” to that
which is revealed. Freedom is in “intimate kinship” with the revealed as “all revealing
comes out of the open, goes into the open, and brings into the open… Freedom is the
realm of the destining that at any given time starts a revealing upon its way.” Freedom
then, is to be found in the essence of technology but we are continually caused to believe
that the brink of possibility is that which is revealed in the ordering processes of modern
technology to create the standing reserve, deriving all our standards from this basis.
Freedom is continually blocked by this process of the destining of revealing which
obscures the real. This is a danger.

It is a danger because when the real is concealed it may be misinterpreted. When

something is unconcealed it no longer concerns us as an object but, rather, as standing
reserve “and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the
standing reserve”. When the object is lost to the standing reserve, we ourselves become
standing reserve and see everything as our construct, seeing not objects everywhere but
the illusion and delusion of encountering ourselves everywhere.

In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e.,
his essence. Man stands so decisively in subservience to on the challenging-forth of
enframing that he does not grasp enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as
the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ek-sists,
in terms of his essence, in a realm where he is addressed, so that he can neverencounter
only himself.

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. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of
revealing. Above all, enframing conceals that revealing which, in the sense of poiésis,
lets what presences come forth into appearance.
Enframing blocks the truth and destining compels us to create order out of nature which
we believe is the truth. This is the danger, not of technology, which itself cannot be
dangerous, but rather of the destining of revealing itself. Enframing, the essence of
technology then, is the danger.

The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal
machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in
his essence. The rule of enframing threatens man 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.
Drawing on Holderlin, Heidegger believes that technology’s essence contains both the
danger (enframing) and its saving power. How is this so? Enframing is not the essence
of technology in the sense of a genus, “enframing is a way of revealing having the
character of destining, namely, the way that challenges forth.” Recall that the revealing
that “brings forth” (poiésis) is also a way with the character of destining. By contrast,
enframing blocks poiésis.

Thus enframing, as a destining of revealing, is indeed the essence of technology, but

never in the sense of genus and essentia. If we pay heed to this, something astounding
strikes us: it is technology itself that makes the demand on us to think in another way
what is usually understood by “essence.”
As we have seen, the essence of modern technology for Heidegger is enframing and as
its essence, enframing is that which endures. Enframing is “a destining that gathers
together into the revealing that challenges forth.” But Heidegger also states that “only
what is granted endures” and “challenging is anything but a granting.” So how can the
challenging of modern technology be resolved into that which is granted and endures?
What is the saving power “that let’s man see and enter into the highest dignity of his
essence”? The answer is to recall that enframing need not only challenge forthbut can
also bring forth the revealing of nature.” The essential unfolding of technology harbors
in itself what we least suspect, the possible rise of the saving power.”

Heidegger argues that “everything depends” on our ability and willingness to cast a
critical eye over “the essential unfolding” of technology. That instead of “gaping” at
technology, we try to catch sight of what unfolds in technology. Instead of falling for the
“irresistibility of ordering”, we opt for the “restraint of the saving power”, always aware
of the danger of technology which threatens us with the possibility that its revealing,
saving power might be “consumed in ordering  and that everything will present itself
only in the unconcealedness of standing reserve.”

So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain transfixed in the will

to master it. We press on past the essence of technology… The essence of technology is
ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, i.e., of truth.
Now at the end of his essay, we can see there are two possible direction one might take
with technology:

On the one hand, enframing challenges forth into the frenziedness of ordering that
blocks every view into the propriative event of revealing and so radically endangers
the relation to the essence of truth.

On the other hand, enframing propriates for its part in the granting that lets man
endure—as yet inexperienced, but perhaps more experienced in the future—that he
may be. the one who is needed and used for the safekeeping of the essence of truth.
Thus the rising of the saving power appears.
Heidegger concludes that technology once shared the root technéwith a broader practice
of poiésis. Technology (techné) brought forth and revealed that which was true and
beautiful through the poetics of the fine arts. It is in the realm of the arts, therefore, that
we can practice the questioning of technology in the hope of revealing the truth, which
modern technology habitually conceals through the order it imposes on the world.

Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon

technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the
one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different
from it.

Such a realm is art. But certainly only if reflection upon art, for its part, does not shut
its eyes to the constellation of truth, concerning which we are questioning.