What is technology? How do we figure out its meaning? When you attempt to answer this question, you may be tempted to list the technologies you use in your life. Cell phones, cars, computers, televisions, etc.
But these are mere examples of technology. They don't tell us what technology is, and more importantly, they don't necessarily tell us what is meaningful about technology and its relation to human existence. Philosophers like Martin Heidegger are interested in the philosophical meaning of technology, its essence, or what it is. Heidegger states that technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology. The essence of technology cannot be summed up through a bunch of examples or devices or mechanisms.
Moreover, Heidegger states that the essence of technology is not itself technological. The essence has to do with our experience of it rather than trying to understand it. tools as neutral objects and the characteristics of them. So to figure out the essence of technology, we have to get philosophical. Heidegger is a 20th century German philosopher who is most famous for his book, Being in Time.
He wrote this essay, The Question Concerning Technology, in 1953, but it's a revision of a speech he gave in 1950 in Bremen, Germany. In Bremen, he's speaking to a crowd of people who have just witnessed the devastation of World War II. A lot of this devastation was technological in nature.
So if you think about World War II, the United States dropped two atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Part of Hitler's rise to power was because of his radio broadcasts. Radios had become popular at that time. And the Nazis used new technologies, including factory-like concentration camps, to carry out the genocide of Jews, the disabled, and others they considered unworthy of life.
In 1950, it seemed like technology could destroy humanity. Heidegger writes the question concerning technology from the perspective of a philosopher who believes that we often lose sight of things in everyday life and have to recover their meaning and significance. He approaches philosophy as a wandering path that opens up questions for us to explore.
For Heidegger, it's not simply we who pose questions. Questions... are posed to us. Questions pull at us and demand that we think them. We follow questions on a path or way.
For Heidegger, the best way to approach questions is to have a free relation that opens up our human existence to the essence of technology. So if we discover the experience of our relation to technology, we know we've found its essence. Heidegger begins with two common concepts of technology.
The first one is the instrumental definition of technology, which states that technology is a means to an end, right? It's a means that we use for some specific purpose. Technology consists of tools and machinery that serve a purpose. We use them. They're instruments for our uses.
The second is the anthropological definition of technology, which sees technology as a human. activity. We use technology for our own purposes. We create the means and the ends.
Heidegger states that these two concepts are closely related, but they don't really get at the essence of technology for him. These definitions do not tell us about how we experience technology, how we relate to them, and so it ends up kind of staying on the surface of things. Heidegger tries to get at the essence of technology by asking what it means for something to be an instrument.
He uses an idea from ancient Greece to attempt to answer this, Aristotle's theory of the four causes, which the ancient Romans and the medieval philosophers also adopted. It's an idea that's very common in philosophy. For Aristotle, everything comes into being through four causes.
The first is matter or the material that something is made from. The second is form. or the shape of that thing.
So matter and form cannot really be thought separately from each other. If you think of an object, it always has to have both matter and form. And so Heidegger states that they are indebted to each other.
The final cause is its purpose or its aim. What is that thing for? In Greek, this is called the telos. And last, the efficient cause, which is the person who made it.
This person needs to have knowledge of the matter, form, and final cause in order to bring something into being. But... Heidegger asks, what do these four causes share?
Well, they allow something to appear. They bring something into being through a process of revealing. Heidegger describes different ways that things come into appearance or are revealed using ancient Greek philosophy.
In particular, these words, phusis, poesis, and technet. Phusis is the arising of something from out of itself, like the bursting of a blossom into bloom. Phusis is the ancient Greek word for nature, and it comes from the verb to grow, to develop, to become. A flower blooming arises from itself in a natural process. Poesis is also a process by which things appear, but not from out of themselves.
Poesis is the bringing forth into presence from someone, a person who makes it come into being. Poesis is the ancient Greek word that describes bringing something into being through a human activity. It comes from the verb to make and is used to describe any type of human creation.
Techné is a more specific type of making. It involves activities, skills, and knowledge of someone who makes physical things in the arts and crafts. Heidegger says that techné means to be entirely at home in something, to understand it, and be an expert in it.
Like poesis and physis, techné brings forth something and reveals it. So all three of these processes describe how a thing comes into being. For Heidegger, this means that all three reveal some truth about the world.
For Heidegger, the word true does not mean correct. The concept correct is very narrow. It has to do with statements or propositions that we make.
Is this statement true or false? That's a very black and white way of thinking about truth. For Heidegger, existence is more nuanced than simply correct or incorrect. He uses the ancient Greek term aletheia to describe truth as a process of revealing or unconcealment.
Letheia was a river in ancient Greek myths that would erase your memory if you drank its water. So it has to do with concealing or something being hidden. A is non or un, so aletheia means unconcealing.
The word has to do with revealing something that was previously concealed. For Heidegger, truth has to do with revealing something. It implies that there is a deeper layer that remains concealed and is yet to be revealed. If we think about the arts, this idea of truth makes sense.
The sculptor reveals something in the marble and the potter reveals something in the clay. But there is more there than just the marble or clay in its new form. This is the model of truth that Heidegger describes when he says that technology is a mode of revealing truth.
So, is modern technology a techne? Is it a mode of revealing? At first, you might think, no, modern technology involves large mechanical systems, factories, and machines.
Someone pulling a lever on a machine at a factory is not the same as a carpenter who makes a chair. The carpenter has an intimate knowledge of how to make something, and they are there for every aspect of its process. They're not just on an assembly line. So the carpenter understands little aspects of the wood, whether it is too dry to carve, how much pressure it can bear, how to work with its unique grain.
Carpentry is clearly a technique that reveals something about the wood. How could a giant factory reveal something? is not a techne in the sense of craft, but it is a mode of revealing that he calls challenging.
He defines challenging as the unreasonable demand that natures supply energy which can be extracted and stored. While a techne draws nature out and reveals different aspects of it, modern technology sees everything in nature the same way, as energy to be extracted and stored. It makes everything the same.
He uses the example of a windmill that is only useful on windy days. The windmill is not a modern technology because it works with nature rather than making a demand on it like an industrial energy factory. Heidegger also uses the example of traditional modes of farming versus factory farming.
Traditional farming involves an intimate engagement with the soil, working with growing seasons and the different issues that may arise, an infestation, too much rain, a drought. It's a mode of revealing that responds to nature and what nature offers. By contrast, factory farming makes demands of the soil.
It grows plants from other climates that it modifies to grow there. Everything is done mechanically and with as much efficiency as possible. Heidegger calls it a new setting in order.
that sets upon nature by expediting, unlocking, and exposing nature. Its goal is maximum yield at the minimum cost. Heidegger says that modern technology's challenging makes nature seem like it is at our command.
We control it and take things from it. We can change the course of a river, dam it up, and extract energy from it. For Heidegger, it is important that modern technology transforms everything into energy, this homogenous consumable unit. A kilowatt of energy extracted from a river dam is the same as a kilowatt of energy produced from a coal factory, for example. The river and the coal become the same when they are transformed into energy and we store it.
For Heidegger, modern technology treats everything as something that can be stored up for later use. He calls this standing reserve. In German, it's bestand. Things simply wait for us to use them with modern technology. Heidegger gives the example of an airplane.
It is not meaningful as an object. It is meaningful because it is part of an order. The airport, air travel, the whole system of air travel.
No one plane matters. It is simply on the runway waiting for us to use. If you miss one, you grab another.
Its standing only matters in terms of this order that determines its use. For this reason, Heidegger calls modern technology enframing. Enframing is a way of setting up or framing everything as standing reserve. It reveals things, but it does so by transforming nature into a very specific order of use.
We can think of many examples of enframing in the contemporary world. Think about the difference between very old towns, things. built out in nature and the typical suburb and how it arranges homes and yards in ways that are presentable for the real estate market. Think about the organization of a grocery store. Everything is packaged, ready for you to grab.
You don't think about where that chicken came from. Modern technology makes everything simply stand there for us, waiting for us to use it. We don't see anything beyond that. This means that the essence of modern technology is a particular way that humans relate to the world. Heidegger explains that this way of relating is actually dangerous for human existence and it threatens our connection to the world.
It gives us this illusion that everything that exists is constructed by us. The attitude of modern technology asserts that we control nature and extract what we want from it. We impress our minds and our ideas onto the world and the world is nothing but our construction. We never get to encounter anything outside of ourselves if this is the case.
Modern technology is a mode of revealing truth, but it reveals a very limited truth, the truth that we make things. Modern technology actually conceals a number of things in a way that is dangerous for human existence. It conceals the fact that there is something outside of human use and activity. Nature must offer us something in order for us to use it.
It ignores part of this process of becoming or unconcealment. For these reasons, Heidegger wants to address the danger that modern technology poses by reflecting on previous human activities of revealing, techne and poiesis. Unlike modern technology, techne and poiesis are responsive to nature and see themselves as revealing what was previously concealed. They are ways of relating to nature that are not objectifying and do not convert the world into some system of standing reserve. They acknowledge that human making is impossible without the vast mysterious richness of nature and all that the earth offers.
Heidegger himself liked to live close to nature. He had a little hut in the Black Forest Mountains where he went to write, and he preferred to teach while hiking in the woods with his students trailing behind him. He was also deeply suspicious of the technologies that appeared during his time, airplane travel, radio, television, which he argued changes our experience of space and time.
He talks about this in a speech called The Thing, which he gave at the same time as the question concerning technology. He argues that we can travel and communicate across great distances in very little time and experience things that are very far away that we could never experience otherwise. But But he wrote that this frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness for no for nearness does not consist in shortness of distance. So even though distances seem to have shrunk. We are farther away from understanding the world than we have ever been.
What do you think about this way of describing the essence of modern technology? Is Heidegger a troglodyte who's just afraid of adjusting to a new world? Or does he have some points?
I look forward to hearing your ideas. Thank you.