28 Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

throughout. Within its domain belong end and means, belongs 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 (QCT: 12).

By way of copperfastening his analysis, Heidegger looks at the etymology of the term technology itself; the word comes from the Greek term Technikon and that in turn is a word used to describe anything which ‘belongs to techne’. Techne itself ‘is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poietic’ (QCT, 13). Heidegger goes on to unpack the Greeks’ understanding of the term techne on the basis of a discussion of the term in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics which supposedly corroborates Heidegger’s claim that the term denotes a kind of revealing:

Techne is a mode of aletheuein. 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 perspectives of the four modes of occasioning. This revealing gathers together in advance the aspect and the matter of ship or house, with a view to the finished thing envisioned as completed, and from this gathering determines the manner of its construction. Thus what is decisive in techne does not lie at all in making and manipulating nor in the using of means, but rather in the aforementioned revealing. It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth … Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence [West] in the realm where revealing and unconcealment takes place, where aletheia, truth, happens. (QCT: 13)

Heidegger has now satisfied himself that the essence of technology lies in revealing, that it has always involved a way of revealing; he now wishes to examine the difference, as he sees it, between the current way in which technology reveals (which isn’t poietic) and the previous poietic revealing of older forms of technology.

What is so unique or different then about the modern technological filtration system which calibrates our interpretative gaze? Why is this particular revealing so different? Heidegger’s answer is that the revealing we are dealing with here is a ‘challenging revealing’. Everything is ordered to ‘stand-by’; we look on everything as standing-reserve (QCT: 17). Heidegger suggests that everything is captured and made to stand as part of this standing-reserve by this ‘challenging revealing’. The world and nature are revealed for us in precisely this way. More distressing still is the fact that no one seems to be responsible for this development, no person or collective has ordained that things should be as such. And yet, this situation has come about as a result of ‘us’; it is human beings that are ‘responsible’ for the situation we find ourselves in. But to say that we are responsible is to say that we have responded to a situation we find ourselves thrown into. We are reacting and projecting in ways which do not reflect