SDSU Template, Version 11.1Master of Arts
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The technological-scientific rationalization ruling the present age justifies itself every day more surprisingly by its immense results. But this says nothing about what first grants the possibility of the rational and the irrational. The effect proves the correctness of technological-scientific rationalization. But is the manifest character of what is exhausted by what is demonstrable? Does not the insistence on what is demonstrable block the way to what is?
Perhaps there is a thinking that is more sober-minded than the incessant frenzy of rationalization and the intoxicating quality of cybernetics. One might aver that it is precisely this intoxication that is extremely irrational.
--Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy and The Task of Thinking
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San Diego State University, 2018
The following is an attempt to elucidate an often overlooked yet fundamental aspect of Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) philosophy of technology—his thoughts concerning cybernetics. Cybernetics is an interdisciplinary field comprised of the theory of control, communication, and organization in self-regulating systems. Many of the theoretical frameworks upon which general systems theory is built have their origins in cybernetic research, and the two fields are so closely related that one term is often used as a synonym for another. In order to understand the role of cybernetics in Heidegger’s philosophy of technology I will attempt to explain a thesis that he began repeating towards the end of his career—that cybernetics has replaced philosophy in Western civilization. This proposition will have to be understood in the context of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology generally. Once a basis for understanding what Heidegger means by saying that cybernetics has replaced philosophy has been established it will then be possible to turn to the wider Heideggerian corpus in order to assess the extent of Heidegger’s engagement with cybernetics. It will be established that the role of cybernetics in the end of philosophy and the onward march of technology has to be considered of major importance for Heidegger. It will further be demonstrated that Heidegger was engaging with this new science on its own terms by reading his interpretation of cybernetics alongside the texts of the American mathematician and founder of cybernetics Norbert Wiener (1894-1964). It is my hope that in the end I shall have established that Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of technology constitutes a serious and still relevant engagement with the bleeding edge techno-scientific developments of his day (which is not far removed from our own, and indeed, anticipates many of our contemporary problems with technology). The ultimate goal of this project is to establish that an understanding of Heidegger’s confrontation with cybernetics is critical for a thorough engagement with his philosophy of technology, and that his concerns have only become more prescient as time has passed.
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1 SCIENCE, “TECHNOLOGY,” AND TRUTH IN BEING AND TIME ........................6
2 TECHNOLOGY AS METAPHYSICS .......................................................................21
3 CYBERNETICS AND THE END OF PHILOSOPHY...............................................41
4 THE ESSENCE OF GE-STELL, THE END OF PHILOSOPHY, AND THE “SAVING POWER” ....................................................................................................56
5 HEIDEGGER ON CYBERNETICS............................................................................80
REFERENCES ......................................................................................................................118
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to take this opportunity to thank specifically several individuals whose
assistance was absolutely essential for me in the completion of this thesis. Firstly, I would
like to thank all of my current and former friends and mentors who have assisted me along
the way towards my development as a modestly competent thinker and scholar. I would also
like to thank my parents for their material support and toleration of my dismally imprudent
decision to pursue philosophy academically. To Dr. Peter Atterton, without whose guidance
and instruction in the English academic virtues of intellectual temperance, clarity, and rigor
in all things, this project would perhaps have come into being as a hoary mess of loose
connections and gnomic proclamations, thank you. To Dr. Mark Wheeler, whose mentorship
and hyper-active example have encouraged me to believe that it is still possible today to
think and to be as an authentic lover of wisdom, whatever that means—thank you. I regret
not taking more advantage of the limited time we shared at this institution. To my good
friend Brandon K. White, whose thorough instruction in argument, the dialectic, and
ontology have been indispensable in steering me towards a less wrong path in the search for
truth, thank you. As regards this thesis, your etymological expertise and help in translating
certain passages was indispensable.
1
INTRODUCTION
OUR QUESTIONABLE RELATIONSHIP TO TECHNOLOGY It has become absolutely banal in the present age to remark that society has been
profoundly (if not fundamentally) altered by the advance of modern technology. However,
just because an idea has become rote does not at all mean that it has been adequately
understood. Can philosophy in any capacity have anything to say to us that might be
instructive in our present situation? It might seem upon first impression, especially to
modern, empirically minded persons, that the answer is no. Such persons might suppose that
it would be more proper to appeal to scientists and technicians themselves in order to arrive
at a clear understanding of what is happening today with technology. Then again, technical
experts are often remiss to indulge too deeply in conversations about the “bigger picture”
with what is going on with technology—often out of laudable methodological aversions to
overstepping the bounds of what can be said with a high degree of rigor and expertise. All the
same, voices have begun to emerge in recent years from prominent enough positions within
the technical-scientific community to merit some pause for reflection about our current
situation.
The rapid pace at which technology and science have been advancing in recent times
has generated much high-flying speculation concerning what new possibilities technology
will open up for humanity in the near future. Google's Director of Engineering, Ray
Kurzweil, is an exemplary champion of this contemporary attitude. In the preface of his
bestselling book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005),
Kurzweil frames his vision of the future of technology by invoking Arthur C. Clarke's third
law, which states that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
2
magic.”1 Kurzweil then immediately goes on to stretch this reference to the most extreme
possible limit in appealing to the example of “J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter stories”2 as
examples of “not unreasonable visions of our world as it will exist only a few decades from
now.”3 Kurzweil is on record claiming that Google will be capable of uploading human
minds to computer servers sometime around the mid-2040s when he predicts that the
“Singularity”—the point when machine intelligence eclipses human intelligence and
amplifies in a runaway process of exponential growth—will happen. Kurzweil also believes,
if we are to take him at his words in The Singularity is Near that “the ultimate destiny of the
Singularity and of the universe” is that:
In the aftermath of the Singularity, intelligence, derived from its biological origins in human brains and its technological origins in human activity, will begin to saturate the matter and energy in its midst. It will achieve this by reorganizing matter and energy to provide an optimal level of computation...to spread out from its origin on Earth...the “dumb” matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence, which will constitute the sixth epoch in the evolution of patterns of information.4
It is easy to dismiss these remarks about human technology giving birth to a divine
computer that rearranges the cosmos for the purposes of its sublime computations as
exuberant flights of fancy not worthy of serious consideration—and this should be done. Is
Kurzweil really a solitary eccentric though? To be sure, his views exist out on an extreme
fringe. Even without directly concerning oneself with Singularity theory there are many
unique challenges being posed to society by its currently existing technical artifice—to say
nothing of more even-tempered yet still incredible sounding near-future forecasts.
Environmental degradation and man-made earthquakes rate as only some of the problems
currently posed to us by our own technology. To say that nothing significant will happen or
1 Arthur C. Clarke, “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination,” in Profiles of the Future: An Enquiry into the Limits of the Possible, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1973), 12-21.
2 Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005), 23.
3 Ibid.
3
is happening seems almost as absurd as Kurzweil's “Singularitarianism.” How can we arrive
at a basis for evaluating the meaning of modern technology in a sober, even-handed manner?
Perhaps science could be expected to intervene in order to help us understand what is
going on with technology? In the journal Nature (September 2013) a team from the
University of Miami, the CEO of Nanex LLC5, and a co-representative of the “Complex
Systems Center” at the University of Vermont and the MITRE Corporation published a paper
they had co-authored entitled “Abrupt Rise of New Machine Ecology beyond Human
Response Time.” The abstract informs readers that:
Society's techno-social systems are becoming ever faster and more computer- oriented. However, far from simply generating faster versions of existing behaviour, we show that this speed-up can generate a new behavioural regime as humans lose the ability to intervene in real time. Analyzing millisecond-scale data for the world's largest and most powerful techno-social system, the global financial market, we uncover an abrupt transition to a new all machine phase characterized by large numbers of subsecond extreme events. The proliferation of these subsecond events shows an intriguing correlation with the onset of the system-wide financial collapse in 20086
The findings are claimed by the team to be “consistent with an emerging ecology of
competitive machines...and highlight the need for a new scientific theory of subsecond
financial phenomena.”7 Both of these propositions should seem counter-intuitive at first
glance according to what we shall call the “common-sense” understanding of the relationship
between scientific understanding and the technological sphere. By the “common-sense”
understanding of the relationship between science and technology, we mean to express the
“received view that technology owes its birth to science. Modern technology emerged only
5 Nanex is a software engineering firm based in Chicago, Illinois that appears to specialize in providing streaming real-time market data for all financial market transactions. The CEO of Nanex, Eric Scott Hunsander, has become vocal in his opposition to some aspects of the high-frequency trading system. This is of course the system that the study under consideration looked at specifically.
6 Neil Johnson, Guannan Zhao, Eric Hunsader, Hong Qi, Nicholas Johnson, Jing Meng, and Brian Tivnan, “Abrupt Rise of New Machine Ecology Beyond Human Response Time,” Scientific Reports 3, no. 2627 (September 2013), doi:10.1038/srep02627.
7 Ibid.
4
when science let itself avail in a specific area.”8 As scientific understanding increases, so too
does the ability to create new technologies. Finally, these technologies in turn allow us to
make more accurate descriptions of the natural world from where we draw our scientific
conclusions and in turn make even further technological advances. Is it not strange, then, that
we are now running into situations where we don't need new science to create new
technology, but instead need scientific research to describe the behavior of currently existing
technology? This fact seems to raise suspicions about the common-sense view of the
relationship between science and technology.
It appears unavoidable to draw the conclusion that something quite strange is going
on with technology, and that our common-sense understanding might prove more of a
hindrance than a helpful guide to what is going on. It is not the purpose of this project to
resolve definitively any particular question about contemporary technology or within the
philosophy of technology or the philosophy of science. What I do propose, however, is to
provide an interpretation of a philosopher whose thoughts on human understanding, science,
and technology, can help us on the way towards grasping closer to the root the problems we
are encountering today—in a world that we are constantly being reassured is absolutely
overflowing with various technological disruptions. It is my intention that in doing so it will
become easier to assess in a sober, deliberate manner what is really going on with modern
technology.
What is to follow will be an attempt to understand in depth the philosophy of
technology of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). For our present purposes, the clarification of
the role of cybernetics in Heidegger's philosophy of technology will be the principal aim. In
particular, we hope to elucidate the meaning of the particular claim that Heidegger began
making towards the end of his career that cybernetics had replaced philosophy in Western
society. Heidegger's philosophy of technology cannot be explained in isolation from his
primary philosophical project, which is the phenomenological investigation of the question of
8 Lin Ma and Jaap Van Brakel, “Heidegger’s Thinking on the ‘Same’ of Science and Technology,” Continental Philosophy Review 47, no. 1 (March 2014): 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-014-9287-z.
5
the meaning of Being. The principal goal of phenomenological inquiry is to arrive at a
standpoint where one can describe phenomena as they appear, in themselves, without any
theoretical distortions such as have bewitched philosophers since time immemorial.
Heidegger's own notion of what phenomenology is will be exposited when we introduce
some essential passages from his early magnum opus Being and Time that will help us
understand the arguments developed in his later philosophy of technology (Chapter One).
Once an adequate understanding of Heideggerian phenomenology has been provided
from our exposition of Being and Time our attention will then be turned to the matter at hand.
It will become apparent that already in the 1940s Heidegger saw that there was something
qualitatively different (even uncanny) about modern technology as opposed to all hitherto
human artifice. Fundamentally, for Heidegger, what was essential to modern technology was
not so much the particular machines or techniques employed, but a process that he foresaw
escalating into an unavoidable, planetary crisis. At the center of this story about humanity's
emerging relationship with its new technology is an often neglected yet fundamental
argument about the role of the science of cybernetics in the unfolding of Heidegger's
planetary technological drama. Heidegger's argument about the essence of technology will be
the focus of Chapters Two and Four, whereas his discussion of the role of cybernetics in the
broader scope of his argument about technology will be directly treated in Chapters Three
and Five.
BEING AND TIME
Our objective is to provide an analysis of the role of cybernetics in Martin
Heidegger's philosophy of technology. Insofar as the piece that is to be our focus in Chapter
Three, “The End of Philosophy and The Task of Thinking,” begins by announcing that it
“belongs to a larger context...the attempt undertaken again and again...to shape the question
of Being and Time in a more primordial fashion”9, it is clear that some exposition of the
overall project and some of the phenomenal findings of Being and Time cannot be avoided.
In order to set this reading of Heidegger's philosophy of technology in its proper context, at
the outset, a survey of several key ideas from his early treatise Being and Time shall be made.
In the following, Heidegger's concern with (and insistence on the priority of) the question of
the meaning of Being, some of his early concerns with the sciences, what he says about
Worldhood, Nature, and equipment, as well as his conceptions of phenomenology and truth,
shall be elucidated as these topics appear in Being and Time. Accomplishing this will provide
us with a basis for understanding Heideggerian philosophy broadly, and particularly as it
relates to the ideas that shall be taken up from his later proclamations concerning cybernetics.
The explicit goal of Being and Time (1927) is to raise the question of the meaning of
Being and set a contemporary inquiry into the question on secure footing. A peculiar
difficulty arises at the outset for Heidegger concerning this question of the meaning of Being.
9 Martin Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2010), 373.
7
Since the entire project of Being and Time is an attempt to arrive at a position of clarity
regarding the meaning of Being, it must therefore be the case that at the outset we cannot put
forward an adequate account of what Being is. The question of the meaning of Being then
seems to be bewitched by a certain intractable circularity. How can what it means 'to be' be
clarified without already presupposing beforehand a notion of what 'to be' means in the first
place? This apparent circularity concerning the definition of the word 'is,' serves, along with
a plurality of other factors both historically concrete and philosophically logistical, to shroud
the question in great obscurity at the outset.
Aside from the inherent difficulty of the question, Heidegger is also concerned with
the factors that have led to the generally sanctioned neglect of and forgetting of the question
of Being. It is said that ontology (the philosophical study of being as such) can be dispensed
with because the question of the meaning of Being is hopelessly abstract, or its answer is
self-evident and inconsequential—since we all already understand what we mean whenever
we use the word Being. In order to raise the question of the meaning of Being in the first
place then, Heidegger suggests that it is necessary to understand the historical conditions that
have led to this neglect and forgetting of the question of Being. The attempt to clarify the
meaning of Being and the attempt to disentangle oneself from the forgetting of Being
eventually become co-dependent lines of thought in an explicit way at the end of the first half
of Being and Time, and this in such a way as they seemingly remain so intertwined
throughout the rest of Heidegger's thought.
When Heidegger discusses Being he is not simply referring to the totality of extant
entities. The question of the meaning of Being should not be thought to be synonymous with
more colloquial questions such as “What does it all mean?” or “What is the meaning of life?”
Instead, what he wants to clarify is what it means for entities to be what they are. In this
sense it would then be helpful to keep in mind that Heidegger views himself as being at the
same time in conversation with the history of Western ontology, while his philosophy is also
an attempt to get at the question of Being from outside the traditional metaphysics of
Western ontology. The nature of the question of the meaning of Being then requires a method
which one can use to raise this question without recourse to the metaphysical errors of the
tradition or falling into the trap of simply writing off the question of Being as trivial or
8
obvious. These concerns lead Heidegger to propose that a philosophical anthropology is
necessary to concretely work on the question of Being:
If the question about Being is to be explicitly formulated and carried through in such a manner as to be completely transparent to itself, then any treatment of it in line with the elucidations we have given requires us to explain how Being is to be looked at, how its meaning is to be understood and conceptually grasped...Looking at something, understanding and conceiving it, choosing, access to it—all these ways of behaving are constitutive for our inquiry...Thus to work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity—the inquirer—transparent in his own Being.10
In order to investigate the question of Being, Heidegger proposes that a position of
clarity must be arrived at concerning the hermeneutic situation in which the question of
Being is raised. In order to accomplish this, a phenomenological analysis of the human being
(or as it is referred to in Being and Time 'Dasein,' which literally translates to 'being there' or
'existence') in terms of the basic structures of its average everyday existence is to be
undertaken. This was originally intended only to be the initial phase of the attempt to clarify
and reawaken the question of Being. Once the existential structure of Dasein was thus
clarified, this existential analysis would provide a basis from which it would be possible to
establish “time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being.”11
Ostensibly, once an understanding of the relationship between temporality and Being had
been established, this would provide the basis for what Heidegger called the
phenomenological 'destruction' of the history of ontology. The theme of the relationship
between temporality and Being as well as attempts to re-interpret and break down various
systems and figures in the history of Western metaphysics would both remain operative
throughout Heidegger's writings after abandoning the project of Being and Time. He would
never return to complete Being and Time, only completing two out of three divisions that
were to comprise the first part of the two-part treatise. Regardless of its incompleteness
10 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London:SCM Press, 1962), 26-7.
11 Ibid., 19.
9
relative to the initial design of the treatise, Being and Time is nonetheless the essential
starting point for understanding Heidegger's thought and methodology. The two extant
divisions provide a crucial if not exhaustive account of Heidegger's philosophical
anthropology and the phenomenological method from which the rest of his thought develops.
It might appear counter intuitive at first glance that one should attempt to conduct an
ontological investigation using phenomenology. One might suppose that ontology is more
concerned with things as they are in themselves whereas the term phenomenology might in a
Kantian fashion be thought of as concerned more with phenomena in the sense of qualia or
the contents of the subjective experience. Yet Heidegger insists, in the introduction to Being
and Time, that “only as phenomenology, is ontology possible.”12 Heidegger clarifies his
conception of phenomenology in the introduction of Being and Time by a means of an
etymological interpretation of the terms phenomenon (from the Greek φαινμενον
[phainomenon]) and λγος (logos). Heidegger's interpretation of logos will be considered
later on as part of our exposition of his conception of truth. This discussion of logos pre-
figures the discussion of truth that takes place in section 44 of Being and Time and cannot be
fully taken account of without presenting Heidegger's argument that truth is unconcealment.
For our present purposes, it will be sufficient simply to explain Heidegger's definition of
'phenomenon.'
Heidegger breaks down the stems of the Greek term phainomenon in order to arrive at
the formulation that a phenomenon is “that which shows itself in itself.”13 This definition of
phenomenon maintains the notion that phenomena are generally available to experience
while emphasizing that the phenomenon is what shows itself as it is. Therefore, phenomena,
for Heidegger, are not simply to be considered sensible intuitions or qualia. Instead he draws
a distinction between phenomena and appearances, as well as semblances. An appearance,
according to Heidegger, does not show itself, but rather the appearance is that which shows
12 Ibid., 60.
13 Ibid., 51.
something other than itself. Put more concretely, “all indications, presentations, symptoms,
and symbols have this basic formal structure of appearing.”14 While the phenomenon is that
which shows itself in itself, an appearance is “the showing-itself.”15 Phenomena are not
appearances, but every appearance is contingent upon phenomena insofar as appearances are
what show, or indicate phenomena. Finally, in addition to phenomena and appearances, there
are also semblances. A semblance is simply something which shows itself as something that,
in itself, it is not.
For Heidegger, the question of Being exerts priority not merely over philosophy.
Rather, the obscurity shrouding this question hangs over all theoretical work, in particular
(but not limited to) the natural sciences. Against what could be considered a modern
conception of theoretical enterprise that considers each discipline to be self-sufficient except
in trivial or minor cases, Heidegger's attitude seems decidedly more scholastic—perhaps
somewhat informed by his Catholic education and upbringing. In the introduction to Being
and Time he suggests that the advancement of a science to a point where it becomes “capable
of a crisis in its basic concepts”16 indicates that the sciences are not ontologically self-
sufficient. Revolutions in the basic concepts of a science (exemplified in Kuhn's theory of
scientific paradigm shifts) suggest that in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason
(that nothing is without reason), no science is sufficient to provide a total justification of its
own ontology. The question of Being fills the vacuum in these cases because it:
aims...at ascertaining the a priori conditions not only for the possibility of the sciences which examine entities as entities of such and such a type...but also for the possibility of those ontologies themselves which are prior to the ontical sciences and which provide their foundations. Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately
14 Ibid., 52.
15 Ibid., 53.
16 Ibid., 29.
11
clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task.17
We should take a moment to briefly explain the term “ontic,” which was introduced
here in the above quotation. Heidegger draws a distinction between the ontological and the
ontic. Ontological considerations are concerned with entities in their being what they are.
Considerations of the essence of an entity or thing are ontological since they are concerned
with the Being of beings. The remainder of considerations and accidental propositions are
simply ontic:
Ontology can contribute only indirectly towards advancing the positive disciplines as we find them today. It has a goal of its own, if indeed, beyond the acquiring of information about entities, the question of Being is the spur for all scientific seeking.18
With respect to the theoretical activity of the sciences “Being and Time grounds and
limits the sciences by showing that the theoretical attitude is a modification of everyday
understanding.”19 So then, in addition to the claim Heidegger makes with respect to the
necessity of arriving at some clarity on the question of Being for the sciences, insofar as they
undergo ontological reflection to develop their taxonomies or reformulate their basic
concepts, the existential analytic of Being and Time seeks to limit scientific conceptual
overreach by demonstrating that scientific objectivity is itself founded on a more everyday
comportment that belongs to what he calls our Being-in-the-world. This criticism of what
Heidegger calls presence-to-hand [Vorhandenheit] hinges in part on an account of equipment
that is central to his analysis of worldhood and environmentality in chapter three of division
one of Being and Time. Examining this account in closer detail will serve the double purpose
of providing some insight into Heidegger's later account of technology (insofar as it builds
17 Ibid., 31.
18 Ibid., 77.
19 Trisha Glazebrook, Heidegger's Philosophy of Science (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 42.
12
upon and breaks from this early account of equipment) and understanding his
phenomenological criticism of Cartesian mathematical-scientific ontologies.
For Heidegger, the world is not what is commonly supposed if this term is defined as
the totality of what exists, either in the actual world or the possible worlds of modal logic.
Rather, the world is a constitutive element of Dasein's Being-in-the-world. Heidegger defines
the term 'world' as “that 'wherein' a factical Dasein as such can be said to live”20 citing as
examples the private 'domestic' world of the individual as well as the public sphere of society
at large. A world is the ontic object of Dasein's existential structure of worldhood. To say
that worldhood is an existential structure of Dasein is simply to say that, whatever the
particular concrete variations of worlds between Daseins, Dasein itself is always in a world a
priori. Heidegger should not be taken here to be denying the reality of nature. Instead,
Heidegger simply wishes to indicate that rather than being exhaustive of worldhood “Nature
is itself an entity which is encountered within the world and which can be discovered in
various ways and at various stages.”21
Heidegger's account of Dasein's world emphasizes the unity of Dasein's experience
of, and relationship to, the world. This unity of experience should not, however, be thought
of along the lines of a Kantian apperception of sensible intuitions, but instead, as the totality
of instrumental relationships between entities in Dasein's environment about which it is first
and foremost concerned. In opposition to the prejudice that access to reality is granted
through impartial rational calculation, Heidegger asserts that “the kind of dealing which is
closest to us is...not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which
manipulates things and puts them to use, and this has its own kind of 'knowledge'.”22 His
claim here is not simply that concernful comportment towards entities that are to be put to
various uses is simply one mode of being alongside others that Dasein can switch between
20 Heidegger, Being and Time, 93.
21 Ibid., 92.
22 Ibid., 95.
13
freely. In an important sense this mode of concernful comportment is “the way in which
everyday Dasein is”23 at a fundamental level. In order to attest to the phenomenal primacy of
instrumentality and concern, Heidegger offers forward as evidence that the Greek term for
things is πργματα (pragmata). Pragmata is the root for our English word 'pragmatic' and
originally also contains the connotations of utility that the English 'thing' and German 'Ding'
lack.
Now that we have briefly outlined the Heideggerian conception of worldhood and the
original disposition of Dasein to its world as one of concern it is now possible to outline
Heidegger's account of the totality of equipment. The account of equipment provided in
Being and Time pre-figures in important ways Heidegger's later account of modern
technology. As Richard Cohen puts it, “the source of Heidegger's later “question of
technology” is to be found in the earlier analyses in Being and Time of...the world as a
“totality of equipment.”24 For now we shall merely present the account of the totality of
equipment here. Once the later argument of technology is also exhibited it will become
possible to examine these accounts side by side. Not only will the structural symmetries and
divergences between the account of equipment and Heidegger's later thought concerning
technology be of importance to take note of. More critical still will be to arrive at an
understanding of how, clear symmetries notwithstanding, the account of the totality of
equipment in Being and Time is put forward as a corrective to the present-at-hand Cartesian
notion of the world as res extensa, while the account of technology put forward in
Heidegger's later writings describes technological metaphysics as a danger to our very Being.
Equipment is defined by Heidegger as “those entities which we encounter in
concern.”25 However, it would be wrong to think of each item of equipment as an
23 Ibid., 96.
24 Richard Cohen, “Heidegger's Dasein-Analytic of Instrumentality in Being and Time and the Thinking of the ‘Extreme Danger’ of the Question of Technology, and Frederick Tonnies’ Community and Society,” Philosophy Today 54, no. S52 (January 2010): 92.
25 Heidegger, Being and Time, 97.
14
independent entity. Since equipment is supposed to be understood in terms of pragmatic
instrumental relations or reasoning, an entity only constitutes an equipment in relation to a
wider context of the totality of equipment. For example, a hammer as hammer is only what it
is insofar as it is available to serve the purpose of hammering. This implies that there is
something to be hammered, which further implies some end goal for the sake of which the
hammering is done, for example the construction of a house of which the end is to provide
shelter. The being of the object as a mere res extensa begins and ends with the objects'
particular geometrical dimensions within the coordinates of the world as a plane of space-
time. No such isolation of entities can be correctly affirmed in the instrumental reason of the
totality of equipment, insofar as instrumentality is concerned with means that are necessarily
for the sake of some ends, which are not themselves ends in themselves. This is what is
meant when Heidegger says that “taken strictly, there 'is' no such thing as an equipment. To
the Being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be
this equipment that it is.”26 When we take hold of the hammer as a piece of equipment
belonging to a totality of instrumental assignments and references we are encountering and
understanding the hammer as what it is in what Heidegger calls a ready-to-hand mode
(Zuhandenheit), as distinguished from the present-at-hand mode of representing it as this iron
attached to this wood.
This discussion of the totality of equipment, which circumscribes the world of entities
as encountered in readiness-to-hand, leads to a brief discussion of Nature in the context of the
role of materials within the totality of equipment. In addition to formal teleological
references of equipment towards other facets of the totality of equipment, there is also a
reference to materials used and produced for various ends. Heidegger maintains that these
materials even before they have been fashioned into tools are already ready-to-hand in an
important sense:
26 Ibid.
15
In equipment that is used, 'Nature' is discovered along with it by that use—the 'Nature' we find in natural products. Here, however, “Nature” is not to be understood as that which is just present-at-hand, nor as the power of Nature. The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water- power, the wind is 'in the sails'...If its kind of Being as ready-to-hand is disregarded, this 'Nature' itself can be discovered and defined simply in its pure presence-at-hand. But when this happens, the Nature which 'stirs and strives', which assails us and enthralls us as landscape, remains hidden. The botanist's plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow; the 'source' which the geographer establishes for a river is not the 'springhead in the dale'.27
One might consider at the outset that Heidegger's discussion of the totality of
equipment and the ready-to-hand mode of Being-in-the-world applies only within the
enclosure of anthropogenic artifices and activities. This could be taken to imply that, outside
of the dominion of immediate human practical activity, nature persists in a present-at-hand
way, as “the botanist's plants”28 for instance. However, Heidegger instead situates nature
within the totality of equipment through an appeal to the materials it provides as being
already part of Dasein's environs. In the above Heidegger is using the term environment to
mean simply surroundings rather than the ecosystem that is commonly associated with the
term in ecological discourse, for which the term Nature is employed. Nature is not primarily
something we encounter present-at-hand as an astronomer preoccupied with their
observations and calculations. This naturalistic conception of nature is instead a founded
mode of understanding the world that requires abstraction from the everyday world of
concern in order to take form.
A point that shall be taken up for consideration later with respect to what Heidegger
says about Nature here is the introduction of a third mode of conceiving of it neither as
present-at-hand, nor as ready-to-hand, but instead as “the power of Nature.”29 While the
power of Nature is here mentioned in passing, the process of the unlocking of latent energies
in Nature will play an important role in Heidegger's later argument about technological
27 Ibid., 100.
16
metaphysics. Additionally, in the later account it will be precisely the subjugation of nature
to instrumental ends that becomes an issue for Heidegger. While the technological
domination of nature is clearly predicated on the subjection of nature to calculability and
present-at-hand understanding, the ultimate result is a metaphysics of endless instrumentality.
Nature in the later account is not taken merely as present-at-hand, but rather its essence is
cached out in a network of instrumental relations, not unlike materials within the totality of
equipment of Being and Time. This is seemingly in contradiction with the claim in Being and
Time that we must encounter Nature as ready-to-hand in order to have this more primary
engagement with it as it is in itself. These considerations can only be fully considered after
an exposition of Heidegger's later account of modern technology is given, however.
We shall now turn our attention to Heidegger's doctrine of truth. Without a clear
understanding of how Heidegger conceives of truth as distinct from the traditional
correspondence theory of truth, the entirety of his thought, including his later philosophy of
technology, will remain unclarified. This theory of truth is articulated as part of the central
argument in Being and Time, appearing respectively in the introduction during his discussion
of phenomenology, and receiving a more extended exposition at the end of division one.
Heidegger explicates his understanding of phenomenology as a method of philosophy by
providing an interpretation of the notions of phenomenon and logos, which provide the
etymological roots of the term phenomenology. The topic of truth first appears in Being and
Time during the consideration of logos provided during this clarification of phenomenology.
The Greek word logos is often translated as 'word', 'discourse', and 'reason.'
Heidegger interprets logos generally as an activity or process where through language we let
something be seen. Logos can either be true or false according to this conception of it.
However, Heidegger insists that with respect to truth and falsehood “here everything depends
on our steering clear of any conception of truth which is constructed in the sense of
'agreement'.”30 Heidegger suggests that in the Greek concept of logos truth is not simply
30 Ibid., 56.
constituted by technical agreement between mental representations or the meanings of
linguistic terms and a state of affairs in the world. He contends instead that the concept of
truth operative in logos is more accurately understood through a transliteration of the Greek
word for truth, λθεια (alethia), as unconcealment. Under this conception of truth “the
'Being-true' of the λγος [logos]”31 directly implies that “the entities of which one is talking
must be taken out of their hiddenness...that is, they must be discovered.”32 Conversely,
falsehood is not for Heidegger simply disagreement between propositions and states of
affairs in the actual world. Accordingly, “Being false (ψεδεσθαι [pseudesthai]) amounts to
deceiving in the sense of covering up...: putting something in front of something (in such a
way as to let it be seen) and thereby passing it off as something which it is not.”33 In putting
forward this interpretation of truth as unconcealment, Heidegger is able to situate truth and
falsehood into a dynamic of revealing and hiddenness that presents falseness as a positive
phenomenon and truth becomes presented as a privation of a covering up in the sense of a
freeing from concealment, or a dis-covering.
In order to get a clearer picture of what Heidegger is attempting to undercut with this
definition of truth as unconcealment (alethia), as well as what is at stake in this formulation,
we shall now turn to the exposition of this concept that is presented in section 44 of Being
and Time. Heidegger formulates his concept of truth in opposition to the correspondence
theory of truth that has held sway in Western thought as far back as antiquity. A large part of
the argument in Being and Time is an attack on Cartesian modernism, and in particular the
subject-object distinction underlying it. In addition to presenting a distorted and artificial
model of our experience of the world that does not hold up to phenomenological inspection,
this modernism is likewise bolstered by a conception of truth bewitched by intractable
31 Ibid.
18
theoretical difficulties that do not accurately present how truth functions as a phenomenon in
the world.
The traditional conception of truth says that truth is an agreement between a concept
or proposition, and the thing about which the concept or proposition is referring. Heidegger
draws attention to the inadequacy of this correspondence theory by asking “with regard to
what do intellectus and res agree?”34 In unpacking the formulation of truth as agreement
between a judgment and a real state of affairs, Heidegger identifies the difficulty of
explaining what the precise meaning of agreement is as a problem of the interaction between
the judgment “as an ideal content”35 and the thing about which the judgment is made as
something real—and therefore not ideal. Instead of attempting to provide an account of how
ideal representations can interact with or become related to real entities in order to produce
an agreement that is true, Heidegger proposes to attend directly to the phenomenon of
demonstration in order to clarify this problem of agreement.
In the act of demonstrating or confirming an assertion about an entity, what is known
after the assertion has come to be demonstrated is not the correctness of a subjective mental
representation. This is because “asserting is a way of Being towards the Thing itself that is”
and “to say that an assertion “is true” signifies that it uncovers the entity as it is in itself.”36
That we can say even prior to the explicit demonstration of the truth of an assertion that the
assertion was about the entity itself and not instead about a mental representation of that
entity. Rather than agreement mediating an intellectual representation to a state of affairs in
reality, truth has the structure of an immanent relationship between phenomena that show
themselves and Dasein.
In order to illustrate his point about assertion Heidegger employs the example of a
person who makes an assertion about a picture hanging on a wall they are not currently
34 Ibid., 258.
35 Ibid., 259.
36 Ibid., 260-261.
19
observing, and then verifying that assertion. This person makes the true assertion “that 'the
picture on the wall is hanging askew'”37 with their back turned to the wall. When they turn
around, they demonstrate to themselves that the assertion about the picture on the wall is
actually correct. It is indeed hanging askew. In confirming the assertion about the picture, the
agreement between “our 'knowledge' or 'what is known'”38 can only be said to subsist as far
as the expression “what is known” is understood in a way that “is phenomenally
appropriate.”39 What would be phenomenally inappropriate would be to understand “what is
known” as the mental representations of the picture the person may have in mind when
making the assertion about the picture before looking at the real picture itself. The assertion
is not in any way mediated by a mental representation, for this would be to say that the
agreement between knowledge and what is known means that the assertion was really about
qualia, in which case the assertion would have to be qualified along the lines 'I will see a
subjective representation of a picture hanging askew on a wall' instead of simply 'the picture
is hanging askew'. If one does not understand the truth of the assertion as representing
agreement between the knowledge of the entity and the entity itself, this results in an
unnecessary multiplication of mediating subjective representations in between our assertions
and the real phenomena about which the correspondence theory also asserts propositions are
ultimately about. For Heidegger, truth is instead a process where phenomena show
themselves as they are directly to human beings without mediation by any intermediary
metaphysical entities.
Having provided this summary exposition of several key concepts and arguments
from Being and Time it should now be possible to turn our attention to the later writings.
After providing an exposition of Heidegger's philosophy of technology (Chapter Two), we
shall turn our attention to his proclamation from the posthumously published Der Spiegel
37 Ibid., 260.
20
interview that cybernetics is the queen of the (logistical) sciences. This will be done by
looking at “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” in which Heidegger himself
explicitly unpacks this claim about cybernetics (Chapter Three). After this, the significance
of cybernetics as an event in the history of Western metaphysics will be assessed through
several other places in his writing where he explicitly addresses the role of cybernetics.
21
TECHNOLOGY AS METAPHYSICS
In this chapter we shall attempt to provide a clarification of Heidegger's account of
technology as it is explicated in his 1949 lecture “The Question Concerning Technology.”
This will lay the groundwork for understanding the role technology plays in Heidegger's later
thought, help us understand developments in his thinking about the question of Being that
took place after abandoning the project of completing Being and Time, and finally allow us to
raise the question of the central place the field of cybernetics in his later thought.
At the outset of “The Question Concerning Technology” Heidegger declares that his
aim is “to prepare a free relationship”40 to technology where “The relationship will be free if
it opens our human existence to the essence of technology.”41 At the outset, then, the reader
should be aware that this is not to be a disinterested cataloging of the nature of technology,
but that the argument Heidegger is about to lay out for us is specifically aimed at in some
way making possible a certain relationship to technology, which presumably at present does
not exist. A second clarification is also immediately necessary to take note of. The free
relationship between human beings and technology that is supposedly being prepared can
only be realized if such a relationship “opens our human existence to the essence of
technology.”42 At stake then is not simply our relationship to technology in terms of the way
we use technology—in which case the philosophical preparation of a “free” relationship to
40 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977), 3.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
22
technology might read something like a laundry list of moral dos and don'ts. Instead we are
specifically called by Heidegger to consider the relationship between human beings and the
essence of technology. This is what is meant by Heidegger when he says that “technology is
not equivalent to the essence of technology.”43 A brief discussion of the notion of essence
and the way in which Heidegger employs it is thus called for before developing Heidegger's
account of technology.
In the present age the notion of essence has been subject to much abuse and
misunderstanding. Without getting into common misunderstandings about the traditional
ontological distinction between existentia and essentia, it is important to note that
Heidegger's notion of essence builds on this distinction in important ways that will become
obvious when his argument about the essence of technology is developed. Heidegger lets us
know that he has something like the traditional notion of essence in mind in saying that
“according to ancient doctrine, the essence of a thing is considered to be what the thing is.
We ask the question concerning technology when we ask what it is.”44 In ontology the notion
of essence is traditionally meant to indicate the 'what it is' of a given thing, and this is
generally cached out in terms of a discussion of what kind of thing that particular thing is.
Generally, these sorts of accounts rely on a distinction between accidental and essential
properties of a given thing. At the present moment, I might feel cold and utter the phrase 'I
am cold.' This does not mean that my essence is to be cold, and this is clearly enough
understood when at a later point I am no longer cold, yet the fact that I am no longer cold
does not change the fact that I am what I am as a human being in any way. My coldness was
accidental to my being, rather than being essential. I am what I am regardless of whether or
not I am hot or cold. The semantics of this example might be a little confusing, but this is an
accident of the English language. Had I given this example in French instead, for instance, 'I
am cold' would become 'j'ai froid'' where the verb avoir (to have) serves the function of the
43 Ibid., 4.
23
'to be' in the English phrase. Those properties that can be subtracted from an entity without
thereby causing it to no longer be the kind of being that it is are considered accidental.
Heidegger appeals to the traditional account in his own discussion of essence at the
beginning of “The Question Concerning Technology” in saying that “when we are seeking
the essence of 'tree,' we have to become aware that That which pervades every tree, as tree, is
not itself a tree that can be encountered among all the other trees.”45 The essence of the tree
is that in virtue of which we understand the tree to be a tree.
It would be an error, however, to presume that Heidegger himself subscribes to the
traditional account of essence. Within “The Question Concerning Technology” itself he
argues that the notion of essence will fail adequately to describe the essence of technology if
it is thought of in the traditional manner in which essential properties of beings organize
those beings within a genus-species relationship. What, then, is Heidegger's notion of
essence? How can it be that in attempting to formulate the essence of technology that the
answer Heidegger arrives at does not present to us an argument establishing a universal of
which all technological artifacts are particulars in which this universal is instantiated? This
question is one that has only arisen because I have not followed Heidegger's argument
establishing the essence of technology step by step. The open questions surrounding
Heidegger's notion of essence can be answered by appealing to another text in which
Heidegger directly addresses this issue.
Trisha Glazebrook provides a helpful summary of Heidegger's account of what he
takes essence to be in her book entitled Heidegger's Philosophy of Science. Since Being and
Time, Heidegger's thought has sought to arrive at a more primordial understanding of Being,
and an important part of this task is to strip away centuries of misunderstandings that
Heidegger diagnoses as stemming from a transformation of philosophy and ontology in the
West into metaphysics, where Being itself becomes represented as if it were itself a being.
45 Ibid.
Glazebrook illustrates how Heidegger's conception of essence is derived from this reading of
the history of Western philosophy in the following passage, which is reproduced here in full:
In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger argues that “essence” becomes ambiguous when Plato interprets being as ιδα [idea]. It is with Plato that “essence” comes to mean that something is and what something is, the ambiguity that makes the distinction between essentia and existentia possible. But, argues Heidegger, the “substantive 'Wesen' did not originally mean 'whatness,' quiddity, but enduring as presence” (IM 72/EM 55). When Plato changes its meaning to “whatness,” φσις [physis] no longer means what is, but rather means a copy, a mere appearance (IM 183-84/EM 140). Heidegger seeks to retrieve the earlier meaning of φσις, and hence an earlier possibility of essence, in the notion of enduring presence.46
The traditional ontological conception of essence is rooted in the Platonic conception
of the Being of beings as ιδα, or form. In the Platonic metaphysics a distinction is drawn
between the form of a thing that determines what it is and the matter, which appears in one
form or another. In order to get behind this metaphysical conception of Being, Heidegger, in
his Introduction to Metaphysics, seeks to analyze the etymology of the word Being starting
all the way back from its Indo-Germanic roots. According to Heidegger the word “Being”
(across Latin, Greek, and German) can be traced back to two Indo-Germanic roots.
According to his argument, “the oldest and authentic stem word is es, Sanskrit asus, life, the
living...the self-standing”47 This stem is also the root of the Greek eimi (to be, live) and einai
(present infinitive of eimi) as well as the Latin esse (to be) and finally the German ist (is) and
sein (being). The other root of the word “Being” is the Indo-Germanic bhu. The Greek φσις
[physis] relies on this stem, which emerges in the Greek as phuo. Heidegger translates the
Greek stem phuo as “to emerge, to hold sway, to come to a stand from out of itself and to
remain standing,”48 as opposed to the traditional interpretation that simply interprets it as
“growing.” Heidegger then turns his attention to the stem of the German word for Being
46 Glazebrook, Heidegger's Philosophy of Science, 212.
47 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press, 2000), 75.
48 Ibid.
25
(sein), wes. In “The Question Concerning Technology” the German Wesen is at first
deployed in its conventional contemporary meaning as essence. In his Introduction to
Metaphysics Heidegger argues that if one looks to the etymology of the term Wesen, then it
becomes clear that this term did not indicate whatness or quidditas (i.e. essence according to
the traditional ontological account) but rather “enduring as present.”49 This original meaning
of essence has been buried over by the metaphysics of Plato that conceives of the Being of
beings as eternal immaterial forms, where the Being of beings becomes itself a being as an
identifiable universal that is accessible to the intellect by way of dialectical examination.
This superficial summary of Heidegger's account of essence as presence undoubtedly
leaves many questions dangling in the air. The precise steps in the argument and the meaning
of its conclusion probably remain obscure at this point, if not downright confusing.
Fortunately, in turning to the argument in “The Question Concerning Technology” we find
that Heidegger presents us with a concrete example illustrating both the explanatory power of
his notion of essence as presence, as well as an account of the intimate relationship between
coming to presence and Being. I will now attempt to explicate Heidegger's argument
establishing the essence of technology in “The Question Concerning Technology.” I will
have to do this by following Heidegger's argument move by move in order to show how each
step builds off of the previous moves in the argument and ultimately serve to allow him to
arrive at his conclusion that the essence of technology is what he calls “Enframing” [Ge-
stell].
For all of the novelty of Heidegger's account of essence and his persistent attempts at
getting outside of the history of philosophy in order to recover some form of pre-
metaphysical understanding of being, the argument establishing the essence of technology in
“The Question Concerning Technology” follows a format reminiscent of many of the
Platonic dialogues. Initially a preliminary common-sense definition of technology is put
forward, then the true essence of technology is teased out of this merely correct first
49 Ibid., 76.
26
formulation. As we shall see, however, the essence of technology is not arrived at through the
submission of proposed definitions of this essence to various dialectical refinements. The
initial, merely correct definition of technology Heidegger puts forward is that it is “a means
to an end”50 and “a human activity.”51 While this instrumental definition of technology is
undeniably correct, Heidegger maintains that it does not in and of itself help us in
understanding the essence of technology. In order to move to a deeper understanding of
technology by starting with this merely correct formulation of technology as “an
instrumentum,”52 it is necessary to examine the notion of instrumentality in further detail.
Instrumentality, being defined by relationships between means to their respective ends,
necessarily rests upon some kind of notion of causality in order to establish some grounds
upon which certain means can be deployed to produce (or rather, cause) certain ends.
Heidegger's analysis of the notion of causality with respect to technology will eventually lead
to a discussion of truth from the standpoint of which it will become possible for him to
formulate the essence of technology.
Heidegger's discussion of causality does not center on the modern conception of
causality purely as physical cause and effect, such as is considered in the work of Hume.
Instead, the discussion of causality is broached by way of a discussion of Aristotle’s doctrine
of causality. According to the Aristotelian doctrine, every entity has four causes. The four
causes are the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the final cause. In the
case of a pencil, the material cause would be the wood, graphite, eraser rubber, and so on, out
of which the pencil was constructed. The formal cause of a pencil would just simply be the
form (in the Platonic sense) that the object takes, in this case the form of a pencil, its “pencil-
ness.” The efficient cause of a pencil is the pencil maker. Generally, the efficient cause of a
50 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 4.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 5. Lovitt provides here an instructive footnote in which he clarifies that “Instrumentum signifies that which functions to heap or build up or to arrange.” This is significant since it foreshadows Heidegger's concept of the standing-reserve [Bestand].
27
thing is whatever agency or power brings that thing into being, be it an artifact of human
handiwork or a naturally occurring being. The final cause of a thing being its telos, i.e., end
or purpose—the final cause of the pencil would be writing.
According to Heidegger's argument causality lets “what is not yet present arrive into
presencing.”53 From the earlier discussion of Heidegger's account of essence it should be
clear that what he means here is that causality indicates the plurality of factors whereby
beings eventually come to be presented to us as the kinds of beings that they are. From this
standpoint it becomes clear why Heidegger must make appeal to the Aristotelian notion of
causality rather than the traditional modern conception of physical cause and effect that
represents beings as merely present-at-hand matter. This presentation of causality leads to a
discussion of the nature of how fourfold causality allows us to understand how the four
causes “are unifiedly ruled over by a bringing that brings what presences into appearance.”54
A definition of this “bringing” is to be found in Plato's Symposium according to Heidegger,
who proceeds to formulate it by translating a line from Diomata's speech (205b) as “every
occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not
presencing is poisis, is bringing forth.”55 This is obviously an interpretive translation of
Plato based on Heidegger's own (partially) interpretive etymology of the word “Being.” The
traditional translation of this line reads, “All creation or passage of non-being into being is
poetry or making.”56 In Greek poisis, while formally being the word for poetry (and the
word from which our term “poetry” is derived), is also understood as any other kind of
making generally. The activity of a shoemaker is just as much poisis as the activity of
Homer. Poitic becoming is not simply limited to human creation or craftsmanship however,
but also the coming into being from non-being of natural entities. Heidegger makes note of
53 Ibid., 10.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 Plato, Symposium 205b in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, vol. 1 (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 330.
28
this in remarking that “physis also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-
forth, poisis. Physis is indeed poisis in the highest sense.”57 Here then we can see
Heidegger establishing what he sees to be a more primordial, and, importantly, intimate
connection between production, cause, and nature, through his appeal to the Greek concept of
ποησις (poisis).
The next move in the argument is important because it is here where Heidegger not
only establishes his grounds for claiming that technology is an epoch of metaphysics, but the
next move will also be critical for understanding precisely how the break between pre-
modern technology and the phenomenon of modern technology is to be understood. Recall
that the formulation of poisis Heidegger provides is based on his translation of Plato's
exposition of the concept. Poisis is supposed to be a bringing-forth into presencing from
non-presence (absence). Contained already in this formulation then is a presupposition that
whatever is being brought-forth is already in the very act of coming into being, related to the
human being as the one for whom things can be present. No further premises are needed for
Heidegger to take the next step in his argument, because coming into presence already
necessarily implies coming out of concealment into unconcealment. He is therefore allowed
to make the observation that poisis is not merely a descriptive concept of the process of
production of objects, but more importantly it is a way in which beings in the world can be
made known to us and appear before us. Once it has been established that any coming to
presence necessarily takes place within “...what we call revealing,”58 Heidegger wastes no
time in reminding us of his doctrine from section 44 of Being and Time that truth is
unconcealment. A lengthy translator's note from Lovitt occasions the relationship between
what has been translated as revealing [Entbergen] and what is translated as unconcealment
[Unverborgenheit] in order to draw attention to the fact that the revealing is meant to be
understood as the activity of unconcealing. It is also worth briefly digressing to make the
57 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 10.
58 Ibid., 11.
29
point that there is an ambiguity in the term bergen, where not only does it mean to conceal,
but also to shelter and to save or rescue. Heidegger will go on to use this double meaning in
order to make some suggestive remarks about how we might be able to eventually enter into
a free relationship with the essence of technology.
To briefly summarize the argument so far: it was said that technology was a means to
an end. In order to understand what this instrumental definition of technology could tell us
about the essence of technology it was necessary to examine the fourfold Aristotelian
causality that grounds our understanding of this instrumentality. In examining fourfold
causality it became apparent that causal accounts serve to help us explain how that which is
not-yet is said to come into being. The type of making, or rather, bringing of what is not-yet
into being that is under consideration was known to the Greeks as poisis, of which physis is
a particular type of bringing. Somewhat clearer would be to use the conventional expression
“making” for the activity of poisis, however there is a clear sense in which when one
considers poisis in terms of its function as a mode of the dispensation of truth, bringing-
forth is clearly preferable in order to avoid implying that Being acts as some sort of Platonic
Demiurge. Bringing-forth implies that whatever is brought forth is being brought forth into or
towards something, and that something turns out to be altheia, or rather revealing—the
realm of truth, understood as unconcealment.
One might be forgiven for wondering what the non-trivial significance of this is. In
this first step of the argument Heidegger is demonstrating that instrumentality is dependent
on some notion of how it is that beings come into being out of non-being, insofar as some
notion of causality is necessary to render instrumentality intelligible. The process of
describing how the particular being in question is brought forth into being cannot be
distinguished into an “objective” non-epistemological aspect where the thing becomes what
it is and then by some separate process having to do with the optical production of qualia it
becomes an object of human cognition, and thereby becomes an object of correct or incorrect
propositions postulated by the human subject. Its bringing-forth is already its appearance into
unconcealment. Its coming into being necessarily entails its already coming into being within
the realm of truth, which is not separated from the phenomenal world as in Kant. These
distinctions might seem purely academic until one considers that the way in which a being
comes to be necessarily determines what it is—its what-ness or essence. Now that Heidegger
30
has explicated the co-dependence of cause, production, and truth he is able to from this
standpoint begin formulating his argument that “technology is a way of revealing.”59
Heidegger establishes that technology is a mode of revealing by returning to the
notion of poisis. This is done by considering the Greek root of the word technology, techn.
Techn and epistm are two types of knowledge that designate in turn practical know-how,
or the type of knowledge possessed by a craftsman relative to the craft (techn), and
theoretical knowledge of the type possessed, for example, by geometers (epistm).
Importantly, “techn 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.”60 This means that techn is originally in the
Greek understood as the mode of knowledge primarily concerned with poitic production.
Heidegger characterizes techn as a mode of revealing that “reveals whatever does not bring
itself forth and does not yet lie here before us”61 thereby seemingly erasing any essential
distinction between the production of a particular being and the revealing of that thing. This
move is seemingly pre-figured already in Being and Time where Heidegger asserts the ready-
to-hand as the primordial mode in which beings in their being are disclosed to Dasein as
opposed to the mode of being present-at-hand.
Heidegger established that technology is a mode of revealing in providing his
interpretation of the relationship between techn and poisis. It should be readily apparent
that this account does not describe how we ordinarily think about technology today. Common
sense tells us that technology is a means to an end, and a human activity. Heidegger has put
before us the Greek understanding of technology that under his interpretation constitutes a
mode of the revealing of beings. Is techn then, the essence of technology? No. The essence
of modern technology, while still taking the form of an essential revealing, is something
altogether different from the poitic bringing-forth that has been the subject of our attention
59 Ibid., 12.
60 Ibid., 13.
61 Ibid., 14.
31
up until now. Prima facie, it seems counter-intuitive for us to suggest that the same kind of
revealing is operative in the activity of a pre-modern artisan and a modern factory. Indeed, it
is banal to remark that modern machine technology has brought about a revolution in the
nature of technological implements, or at the very least it has multiplied and optimized these
implements to the point where it has ushered in a fundamentally different historical epoch.
Heidegger indeed argues that an essential distinction between pre-modern and
modern technology exists. Technology remains a mode of revealing. However, this revealing
“does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poisis.”62 Heidegger argues that with
modern technology a process is underway whereby the very process of revealing is being
interfered with at the most fundamental level, thereby distorting the essence of everything
that comes to presence. This appears to be an extraordinary claim, to be sure. In order to
evaluate this claim it is not enough to reject it out of hand as being hyperbolic. The argument
must be considered on its own terms, and in the interest of doing this we must now, as
Heidegger entreats us to do at the beginning of “The Question Concerning Technology”,
“pay heed to the way, and not...fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics.”63
How precisely is it that modern technology reveals entities in a way that must be
distinguished from the poitic revealing of techn, which has just been explicated above?
Heidegger begins by raising the objection that the account of techn as a mode of revealing is
only tenable within the specificy of pre-modern artisanship and that this account cannot “fit
modern machine-powered technology.”64 It is supposed that modern technology must be
differentiated from pre-modern technology “because it is based on modern physics as an
exact science.”65 This conception of the “received view that technology owes its birth to
science [and that] Modern technology emerged only when science let itself avail in a specific
62 Ibid.
32
area”66 is one that Heidegger will throw into question by highlighting the way in which a
“mutual relationship between technology and physics”67 subsists—and this in such a way
that it becomes apparent that modern physics itself is grounded in the essence of technology.
We are getting ahead of ourselves here though. It has not yet even been established what the
essence of technology even is.
Heidegger proceeds to paint a picture of the differences between the poitic mode of
revealing that the first part of his argument was dedicated to outlining and the kind of
revealing as he sees being connected to the fundamental transformation that takes place in
modern technology. We are told at the outset that:
the revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poisis. The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Heraustfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such.68
To illustrate this difference Heidegger examines the case of a pre-industrial windmill.
The windmill does not challenge because “its sails...are left entirely to the wind's
blowing...the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it.”69 It
is this element of the unlocking of energy that is critical to understanding how modern
technology is also a mode of revealing, and one that is indeed not poitic. The key to
understanding the difference between bringing-forth and challenging lies in the notion of
how in challenging energy is unlocked from nature and stored. Heidegger goes on explicitly
to state that in this process of unlocking what was previously dormant in nature becomes
unconcealed in saying:
That 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.
66 Ma and Van Brakel, “Heidegger’s Thinking on the ‘Same,’” 24.
67 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 14.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid.
Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing.70
In the activity of unlocking energy that was previously concealed the process of
unconcealment operative in challenging revealing does not merely bring an entity into being
from non-being. Instead challenging revealing is operative precisely in the sense that it
produces an excess of unconcealment, whereby energy concealed in nature is unlocked,
stockpiled, and then deployed in turn to increase the stockpile. Under this technological
revealing, all beings that have not yet been stockpiled are merely awaiting to be extracted and
stockpiled, as if the Earth were simply one warehouse and the process of mining was a
process whereby the ore is transferred from one stockpile to another. Heidegger describes
this determination of beings as a “standing-reserve” (Bestand). This process of constant
challenging revealing, stockpiling, and then mobilization of the standing reserve in order to
effect yet more challenging revealing constitutes something like a positive unconcealment
feedback loop, where the more energy is unconcealed or unlocked out of nature the resulting
increase in productive forces leads to yet more energy being extracted, transformed,
stockpiled, and deployed. It is precisely because challenging sets the demand for more and
more energy on nature that Heidegger is able to make the claim that with the advent of the
hydro-electric dam the coming to presence of the Rhine is transformed into “a water power
supplier,” which “derives from out of the essence of the power station.”71 The being of
beings becomes understood as standing-reserve, and even nature itself becomes conceived as
merely untapped natural resources.
It is this circuit of surplus unconcealment and constant stockpiling and transformation
that is distinctive of the mode of revealing that constitutes the essence of technology.
Heidegger names this challenging mode of revealing Ge-stell, which is translated
conventionally in English as either “Enframing” or “positionality.” The term Ge-stell itself
shall be returned to in short order but first we should like to draw our attention to the passage
70 Ibid., 16.
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in which Heidegger initially formulates this term in order to arrive at some clarity about
precisely what is supposed to be designated here:
Modern technology as an ordering revealing is, then, no merely human doing...That challenging gathers man into ordering. This gathering concentrates man upon ordering the real as standing-reserve...That which primordially unfolds the mountains into mountain ranges and courses through them in their folded togetherness is the gathering that we call “Gebrig” [mountain chain]. That original gathering from which unfold the ways in which we have feelings of one kind or another we name “Gemüt” [disposition]. We now name that challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the self-revealing as standing-reserve: “Ge- stell” [Enframing].72
There are two distinctive attributes of Enframing that distinguish it from the kind of
revealing distinctive of techn, which we are now presented with an opportunity to briefly
exhibit together side by side. The first element has already been broached, that of the
continuous amplifying circuit in which energy is unlocked from nature, whereby an
unconcealment comes to pass characterized not by bringing any particular being into the
stock of human artifacts, but instead by the unlocking of pure energy from out of nature
itself—which then sets in motion an ever-increasing circuit of accumulation of natural
resources in a network of perpetual stockpiling, transformation, and deployment. In this
technological circuit of production straightforward fourfold causality becomes increasingly
difficult to appeal to for the process of production being observed. Efficient causality is easy
enough to understand in the case of the activity of an individual artisan. With modern
technology efficient causality disappears from direct control by a single individual and
seemingly must be attributed to anonymous forces of production. The transformation is also
apparent in the case of final causality. Consider the case of a stockpile of coal, which is after
all the product of a coal mining operation. What is the final cause of the coal? This is to be
determined at a later date. The coal is extracted with no final cause in mind, simply to be
stockpiled as standing-reserve and given a proper function at a later date.
72 Ibid., 19.
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The process whereby fourfold causality slips from the grasp of the human being and
the human being increasingly becomes a conduit facilitating the continuation of the circuit of
challenging ever more resources for stockpiling into the standing-reserve is called by
Heidegger “gathering.” The human being is not challenged directly as a unit of standing-
reserve—yet. Rather than being directly challenged by Enframing ourselves, we are gathered
into this circuit with no apparent end goal other than increasing stockpiling and aimless
transformation of the standing-reserve. So then, taken together, the positive unconcealment
feedback loop and the “gathering” of the human being in this circuit designates the essence
of technology as that of a revealing Heidegger calls Ge-stell. Since the essence of technology
is a mode of revealing, Heidegger's claim is that the essence of technology is an epoch of
metaphysics—one in which we currently find ourselves seemingly ensnared.
In returning to the subject of the relationship between modern physics and modern
technology, Heidegger informs us that “modern physics is the herald of Enframing”73 in the
sense that the operation it performs in quantifying nature lays the groundwork for modern
machine-technology to arise. However, a certain priority is maintained by the essence of
technology over modern physics since “modern science has become a variety of technology
insofar as it embodies a notion of being as what is measurable and thus posits nature into a
calculable objectivity, and insofar as the priority is given to method and pre-determined
standards.”74 In The New Heidegger Miguel de Beistegui sees in Heidegger's account of the
primacy of the essence of technology as determining modern science an echo of what
Nietzsche called in The Will to Power “the victory of the scientific method over science.”75
Already, then, the essence of technology as Enframing is present in modern physics since the
modern conception of the physical world as res extensa “demands that nature be orderable as
73 Ibid., 22.
74 Ma and Van Brakel, “Heidegger’s Thinking on the ‘Same,’” 38.
75 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Random House, 1973), § 446. For the discussion from Beistegui see Miguel de Beistegui, The New Heidegger (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 102-103.
36
standing-reserve...that nature reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through
calculation and that it remains orderable as a system of information.”76
Miguel de Beistegui makes an interesting point about the term “Ge-stell,” which is
translated in English here as Enframing. He argues that “Ge-stell is, quite literally, a
translation of the Greek systema.”77 He presents a rather compelling argument for this
reading in breaking down the stems of both terms. The German Ge indicates a gathering or
taking together of disparate parts, to lean on Heidegger's example how the individual
mountains are said to constitute a chain. The Ge corresponds to the Greek prefix “syn-,”
which means together. The German stellen means to stand or place much in the same way
that the Greek istemi means to stand or set up. According to Beistegui's reading, then,
Enframing not only sets up a planetary circuit of assemblages for the mobilization and
stockpiling of the standing-reserve, but also the representational system of technoscience
where nature is “orderable as a system of information.”78 Even modern physics is under the
sway of the essence of technology:
The System designates the way in which things stand together at the end of metaphysics, in the technological, and especially technoscientific age. We speak today of physical, chemical and biological systems, of ecosystems and information systems. We speak of neural networks, research, media, commercial, political and terrorist networks. What do these have in common? The fact that they are considered from the point of view of their formal structure, held together by the flow of information and