1/11/24, 4:30 PM The ‘Great Danger’ of Technology According to Martin Heidegger | Road Without End

The ‘Great Danger’ of Technology

According to Martin Heidegger
Technology is not just a means to an end, it’s a dangerous mode of
being in the world

Khaled Serafy · Follow

Published in Road Without End · 9 min read · Jun 27, 2021

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Photo by Jim Sung on Unsplash

Who was it first

Distorted the ties of love
And made them into ropes?
Friedrich Hölderlin — The Rhine

Martin Heidegger, arguably the most important philosopher of the 20th

century, and like most Germans of the time, notoriously tied up with the
Nazi party, wrote about the ‘great danger’ that modern technology poses to
humanity in his 1954 work ‘The Question Concerning Technology’.

For Heidegger, the only way for us to understand the danger of modern
technology, and safeguard ourselves against it, was to go beyond the
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“correct” definition of technology as a means to an end, and come to think of

it instead as what it truly is in essence: a mode of being in the world.

Heidegger uses the Rhine River as an example of the dangers of modern

technological thinking. On the one hand you have the old Rhine, which for
centuries has been a source of wonder and awe for Germans as encapsulated
by Hölderlin’s poem The Rhine. There, the old “technology” of a wooden
bridge seems to blend in with the essential features of the river, as if the
bridge naturally unfolded out of the river.

The old bridge does nothing to break the spell of the river as an ineffable
mystery and a sacred source of life. Contrast this with the modern
hydroelectric power station, which transforms the river so that a passerby
will primarily see it as a material resource, a standing-reserve which exists
only in case it’s needed later to generate energy. Hölderlin’s spell is broken,
and even to those people who still see the beauty of nature in the river, it is
reduced to a resource ripe for exploitation by the tourist industry.

In a nutshell, the great danger is that the technological mode of being, which
has us unconsciously perceiving everything in the world as a potential
resource to exploit for our ends, tends to come at the exclusion of all else. It
drives out the possibility of a more authentic existence where our natures
are able to unfold freely in the world. Heidegger’s solution is to safeguard a
poetic mode of being in the world, which is in a sense the opposite of this
dangerous technological thinking.

The Essence Of Technology

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Before I list out the specifics of Heidegger’s dangers of technology, and his
solutions to them, let’s Search
take a closer look at his “correct” and “true” Write
definitions of technology.
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We can define technology as either a means to an end or a human activity.

Heidegger calls these the instrumental and anthropological definitions of
technology. While these definitions are correct — that is, they apply to any
instance of technology — they are not really expressing the essence of
technology.

In order for us to understand what is essential about technology to

Heidegger, we have to go a bit deeper into what he means by essence.
Normally, the essence of a thing refers to the “what-ness” of it, what it really
is. For Heidegger, things are not fixed objects which can be known, rather
they are ultimately mysterious infinities which unfold into the future
through interacting with us, the subject which perceives them.

This applies to Being itself, which is not like a “being” which we can know by
studying, but a phenomenon which becomes manifest through our
interaction with it. Here’s one way to think about it: in any given space which
I inhabit, there are an infinite number of things which I could look at, and
an infinite amount of detail which I can focus on, and yet the world seems to
me to be made of a finite number of objects. This is because of an innate
ability I have to focus my attention on a finite set of those infinite details.
Only a tiny portion of Being is ‘revealed’ to me by me nervous system, which
is the part that matters to me, the part that is relevant to my survival.

Technological thinking then messes with what Heidegger calls ‘revealing’ so

that everything is revealed to us as a ‘standing-reserve’, a resource available
to us as a means to an end. This revealing as standing-reserve is what
Heidegger calls ‘enframing’, which he says is the essence of technology — to
see everything in this framework of means, ends, causes, and effects.

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The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It sets the Rhine to
supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines turning. This
turning sets those machines in motion whose thrust sets going the electric current
for which the long-distance power station and its network of cables are set up to
dispatch electricity. In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the
orderly disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears as something
at our command.

The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden
bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather the river is
dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water power
supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station.

In order that we may even remotely consider the monstrousness that reigns here,
let us ponder for a moment the contrast that speaks out of the two titles, “The
Rhine” as dammed up into the power works, and “The Rhine” as uttered out of the
art work, in Holderlin’s hymn by that name. But, it will be replied, the Rhine is
still a river in the landscape, is it not? Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as
an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation
industry.”
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology

The Dangers Of Technology

1. When we inhabit this technological mode of being, where we think of
everything as a standing-reserve, we will even come to think of ourselves
as standing-reserve. Heidegger says that we feel so threatened when our
existence is reduced to being a resource available to the world just in case
it’s needed, that we compensate by posturing as “lords of the world”, and
we fall prey to the delusion that everything which presents itself to us
exists only insofar as we construct it.
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2. Richard Drefyus gives an example of what happens when we start

thinking of everything as a means to an end: a friendly chat in a bar is
turned into a networking opportunity.

3. By ‘enframing’ everything in this way, we come to believe that our

frameworks and concepts are the ultimate reality, and we lose our sense
of awe and wonder at encountering the mystery of Being in each
moment. A tree becomes an object of decor in our gardens, or a source of
shade on a sunny day, and there is no longer any feeling of awe or any
sense that the tree is sacred.

4. Heidegger warns that we try to substitute this authentic feeling of awe

with something technological, namely, with “lived-experience”, a drive
for entertainment and information.

5. When our calculative frameworks separate us from the ineffable mystery

of Being in each moment, our essential natures are not able to unfold
authentically in the world, neither is the essential nature of the world
able to unfold authentically through us.

The Solution To The Problem Of Technology

Despite all these dangers, Heidegger maintains that technology is not all
bad. We should still be able to use technology to entertain ourselves and
make our lives easier, it’s just that we need to enter into what he calls a free
relationship with it.

We should neither go on with technology blindly, nor should we turn our

backs on it as something demonic and attempt to return to a simpler pre-
modern time. The solution is for us to safeguard a poetic mode of being in
the world, which stands opposed to technological thinking. So how can we
accomplish this?

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1. First, we have to prepare ourselves for this safeguarding by learning to

think of Being as a gift which has been presented to us. This we can do by
constantly paying attention to artworks which can bring us back in
contact with the mystery of Being, and in which Being announces itself.
For example, a painting of a tree which reminds us that a tree is not just a
utility for shade and decor, but also something sacred and infinitely
wonderful.

Painting of a tree from Carl Jung’s Red Book

2. The action of safeguarding itself should be done across the four

dimensions of Being. The ‘fourfold’ is Heidegger’s way of looking at the
world as an integrated combination of nature and culture, with two natural
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dimensions and two cultural dimensions: earth and sky (the natural
dimensions), and mortal and divine (the cultural dimensions).

3. Saving the Earth: Here it is not meant in an ecological sense, but an

ontological one. Here we save the earth in the way we use its materials for
our purposes. We do this in a way that lets these materials be with their
essence and sets them free into their own essence. For example through the
use of artisanal manufacturing techniques as in the case of the traditional
cabinetmaker.

If he is to become a true cabinetmaker, he makes himself answer and respond

above all to the different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within wood
— to wood as it enters into man’s dwelling with all the hidden riches of its essence.
In fact, this relatedness to wood is what maintains the whole craft. Without that
relatedness, the craft will never be anything but empty busywork, any occupation
with it will be determined exclusively by business concerns. Every handicraft, all
human dealings, are constantly in that danger.
Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? 379

4. Receiving the Sky: Here, what is meant by receiving the sky is to

synchronise contemporary human life with the rhythms of nature (day and
night, the seasons, etc.) It can be something as simple as not exposing
ourselves to too much electric light after nightfall, or making sure we spend
enough time outside each day and expose our bodies to the elements.

5. Accepting Mortality: Heidegger also says that we have to change our

attitudes towards death. Technological thinking will have us believe that we
are on this earth so that we can extract as much as possible out of it, and give
as much as possible back to it, as quickly as possible before we tragically die.
This attitude has to change so that we live our lives in such a way that it is

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possible for us to “die a good death”. We have to see death as an inevitable

part of Being and learn to live our lives fully, so that death feels like a natural
and peaceful end, not a tragic cutting-short.

6. Awaiting Divinity as Divinity: Finally, Heidegger maintains that with our

human thinking alone we are not able to really solve the problem of
technology. Ultimately, we have to open ourselves up and make ourselves
ready to be transformed by something greater than ourselves. In this sense
Heidegger believes that “only a God can save us”, even if God here is taken
separately from religion as a secularised notion of the sacred.

Philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present

condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely
human thought and endeavour. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is
left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poetising, for the
appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering; for in
the face of the god who is absent, we founder.
Martin Heidegger, Only a God can Save Us, 107

In the year 2021, we’re all aware to some extent that technology poses a
threat to our wellbeing. We tend to think that we spend too much time on
our phones or laptops, too much time in the virtual world and not enough
time in “the real world”.

The mistake is that wanting to spend more time “in the real world” is not
really solving the problem at its root, because it’s still a sort of technological
thinking where we’re trying to get something out of the real world for our
ends.

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Heidegger teaches us that in order to really solve the problem of technology,

we have to learn how to think, and how to be in the world outside of the
paradigm of technology. It’s not just about spending less time on our phones,
it’s about engaging with the poetic and mystical side of Being in such a way
that the feeling of awe and wonderment at for instance seeing a tree returns
to us. Then, we remember that whatever we think we know about the tree is
not what the tree really is, that the tree is sacred, an infinite and ineffable
mystery, and that Being itself is a mystery and a gift as it unfolds in each
moment.

Philosophy Technology Life Culture Poetry

Written by Khaled Serafy Follow

279 Followers · Editor for Road Without End

Egyptian. Based in London. Data science pro. I write mostly about philosophy & history.

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