Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology

 

German philosopher, existentialist, and a notoriously cryptic writer, whose texts are said to be "untranslatable", even in German! 

Heidegger was always interested in technology at its simplest but in 1954 he published an essay to uncover what technology really is. This was almost a decade after World War II which had caused unprecedented havoc and wreckage, primarily due to technology (atomic bomb). This was also a time when innovation was growing at an immense speed, and this concerned Heidegger deeply. He set out his views in the essay, The Question Concerning Technology. The essence of technology is by no means anything technological. It's not just pushing forward innovation for efficiency, it is essentially human activity, an instrument, or a means to an end. 

This instrumentality implies causality. You do this because you want to do that. This happens if you do that, and so on. He uses the Aristotelian theory that all physical objects have four causes, in order to bring out the essence of technology. 

Aristotle held that all physical objects have four causes, these are:

1) material cause (causa materialis)- that out of which something comes to be, the material

2) formal cause (causa formalis)- the design or form

3) efficient cause (causa efficiens)- the designer, maker, the agent

4) final cause (causa finalis)- the end or purpose for which it is made

With respect to social media, the material cause is the hardware and server, the user-generated content, profiles, or raw data. The formal cause is the code or algorithms. The efficient cause would be the owner of the platform (Mark Zuckerberg for example), and the final cause would be the reasons users want to use social media; the desire to connect to each other. While Heidegger did not live to see the shift to social media, it is likely he would have the same concerns as he did for the technology during the post WW2 era. It is interesting to see that, as opposed to the age of the industrial revolution, today in the age of social media, users actively participate in shaping, defining, and directing what they want to see. 

What irritates Heidegger is that philosophy has been preoccupied with the concept of causes. For Heidegger, the causes bring out something mysterious about the being itself. Each cause belongs together, connects, is co-responsible, and draws something out from the other. The causes bring something into appearance. They let it come forth into presencing. It's a shift from concealment to unconcealment (Aletheia) and the truth is revealed (veritas). 

In this way, technology is deeply connected with our psychology. It is connected with our desires, our needs, good, bad, destructive, constructive needs. It connects us to the world, brings forth the mysterious revelation of being. Essentially, modern technology stores the uncovered truth. Modern technology stands reserved. For example, on the internet, the data stands reserved, quantified, organized. When we click on "add friend", it seems like a simple act. But in reality, our personalities, data, events, memories we share online are stored up. They stand reserved as resources and are presented back to us. The essence of technology is not technical, but a way of revealing. It enframes social relations. The enframing gets ahead of us when it's presented back to us. We see it for what it is, and not how it started. It presents itself as a status quo. We forget that there isn't always a need to connect. The concept of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is apt to understand that there is a level of anxiety created when we miss out on something which is socially expected and accepted to be a part of. We forget the origin of technology. Whenever there is enframing, there is danger is the highest possible sense. 

Heidegger though never talked about social media, it is evident that he did predict the problems we were destined to encounter. Is there a need to store this data? Who makes the decision to enframe us? Who decides the value given to "stories" and "posts"? There is a need to stop technology from taking us somewhere where we might not want to go. 

The question concerning technology is asked to be able to prepare a free relationship to it. The fundamental questions Heidegger asks are: 

How do "we" currently relate to technology?

How do we think about it?

What do we imagine it to be?

The problem for Heidegger is not the existence or forms of technology, but our orientation to technology. The problem is our response to the various problems brought about by technology. These cannot be solved by making technology better, nor can they be solved by simply opting out of technology. 

"Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it."

Heidegger says that the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. His method of questioning strives to expose the unexamined assumptions that shape our understanding of the world. He wants us to find a more empowering way of conceiving the world and our own place in it. 

Heidegger asks: 

How do we generally think about technology? He comes up with two answers.

First, technology is means to an end. This is an instrumental and anthropological perspective. 

Second, technology is a human activity. 

However, finding the definition of technology as human activity is not sufficient to establish a free relationship to it. Our everyday understanding of technology prevents us from understanding our relationship with technology. We need to understand technology in relation to humanity. For that, we need to understand what we mean by instrumentality. This will lead Heidegger to the question of causality. 

What Society thinks of Technology 

Heidegger's greatest concern is that society is seeing technology as something neutral and misunderstands its essence. He breaks down the real ways in which technology is brought forth or revealed by a specific process of the human mind and ability. 

He used the example of a silver chalice to illustrate the traditional model of the four causes by Aristotle. The construction of the chalice involves fourfold causality, that includes:

1) material of chalice, silver - material cause

2) form of chaliceness- formal cause

These two are responsible for the chalice being a chalice. This chalice has been produced for a certain activity.

3) the purpose for which the chalice has been made - final cause

4) the agent who affects the production of chalice ie. silversmith. The silversmith is responsible for the chalice and the chalice is indebted to him/her. - efficient cause

Heidegger asks us to imagine a chalice that is "on its way" to existence; the 4 ways of being are responsible to help it "arrive" there. It is a kind of bringing forth.

He distinguishes between two kinds of bringing forth:

1) One kind is directly associated with poiesis (poetry; poetry helps to bring forth something in form of poems). The product in this way is brought forward by something else. For example, the poet makes the poem.

2) The second kind is Physis: the bringing forth occurs in nature. ex. flowers are brought forward themselves.

"Bringing forth brings out concealment into unconcealment." This is the origin of Aletheia or unveiling (the truth).

Heidegger wants to associate technology and poetry. He goes to the etymology of understanding world technology. 

Technology comes from "Technikon" (Greek) and is related to the word techne. 

He makes two points about techne:

1) In the sense of technique, techne refers to both manufacturings and to the arts. Techne is a part of poiesis.

2) According to Plato, Heidegger says, techne is a kind of knowing. It is know-how

The essence of technology lies not in the instrumental production of goods but in revealing. 

Modern Technology 

For Heidegger, modern technology is a mode of revealing. He, in a way, makes an ecological argument. He views the difference between older forms of technology (ex. windmill which draws energy from the wind but does not extract and store energy) and modern technology which exploits and exhausts, is a challenge to our planet's resources. 

There is a difference between how poetry reveals, and how technology challenges, and in this sense, technology is different from poetry or poiesis. 

When we build hydroelectric dams on the river, the "meaning" of the river changes. It becomes an energy resource. He contrasts the river, which is viewed as a source of hydroelectric power, to the river as it appears in the works of poetry. In poetry, the river appears as the source of philosophical inspiration and cultural pride. 

Heidegger argues that to a certain extent, technology transforms itself into a standing reserve. Technology's instrumental orientation to the world transforms it into a standing reserve. Even though humanity is in the "driver seat" of technology, humanity never completely becomes mere raw material. Nature and nature's mode of revealing never fall completely under human control. Humanity doesn't directly control the formation of coal deposits, we can only control the way we orient ourselves, our thinking, and actions in relation to the resources. 

Enframing and Free Relationship with Technology

This fundamental relationship between humanity and the world gives rise to a particular human orientation to the world; enframing. What characterizes the essence of modern technology is the human impulse to enclose all our experiences of the world within categories of understanding that we can control. The essence of technology is that it enframes. Heidegger holds that the question about how we relate to technology comes too late since we are caught up in an enframing view of nature as much as we are caught up in the concrete realities of technological development. 

The human drive to obtain quantifiable and controllable knowledge of the world sends humanity on the way to an orientation that views the world as a set of raw materials, leading to its use and exploitation in the construction of modern technology. From the primal relationship in which the physical world reveals itself to humanity on its own terms, humanity moves into an enframing relationship with the world. Since enframing does not utterly change humanity's connection to the world, there is room within enframing for a different orientation to the world. This will happen once we realize that our orientation to the world is the essence of technology, once we open ourselves to establish a free relationship to technology. 

Heidegger claims that we have a choice to make. 

Either humanity can continue on its path of enframing and structure its life according to the rules and values of this orientation, or...

Humanity can come to realize that it too, is 'on its way' to arrival and that only by re-orienting itself to the way in which nature reveals itself, can humanity establish a relationship with the world that is not ultimately self-destructive.

He also highlights the dangers of technology. What he views as a danger is not so much the mechanization, but it is dangerous in the sense of "threat to spirituality." His description of danger has four elements:

1) In continuing on the path of enframing, humanity will reach a point at which the human too, becomes only a "standing reserve" (This can be seen today in the threat to personal data)

2) Humanity's overinflated sense of its power over the natural world will result in humanity's coming to believe that humanity has control over all existence

3) Excessive pride leads to the delusion that humanity encounters only itself everywhere it looks; a kind of narcissism at the species level

4) It will blind humanity to the ways in which the world reveals itself. We will miss the truth of what the world is.

Paradox in Enframing

He points out that within the "supreme danger" of humanity's enframing orientation to the world, lies the potential of rescue from that very danger. Since humanity is "in the driver's seat" of technology, we must realize that our capacity to manipulate nature entails a solemn responsibility to "watch over" nature. Everything that exists must be cared for. Humanity's responsibility is to take care of being-itself. In the question concerning technology, everything is at stake. 

Heidegger asserts that we tend to think of technology as an instrument, a means of getting things done. This definition misses the actual essence of technology and tends to make us think that by making technology better, we will be able to "get things done", we will master technology and solve problems that accompany it. This instrumental way of thinking stems from our assumption about causality. If we understand modes of causality as many ways of being responsible for the arrival of things into existence, we can begin to understand that the essence of tech has to do with the way we are oriented to the coming into existence, or "revealing" of the world. 

Humanity's orientation to the world takes the form of an enframing which views the world as a standing reserve, a source of raw materials. In this enframing, however, lies the potential for another orientation. Enframing is the essence of technology. It is ambiguous in the fact that it contains two possibilities:

a) either as a danger that sets humans on a destructive and self-destructive course

b) or, at the same time, it is a "saving power" and opportunity. Humanity's enframing orientation to the world makes clear the responsibility of humans to the world. 

To save ourselves from the consequences of enframing, Heidegger suggests that we should uphold the alternative of "art". He takes us back, before the onset of enframing, to Ancient Greece where the concept of techne is the source of our word technology. Techne includes both instrumentality and fine arts (poiesis). He imagines a classical Greece in which art was not a separate function within society, but a unifying force that brought together religious, political, and social life. The art of Ancient Greece expressed humanity's sense of connectedness with all Being. 

In our time, the paradox of how enframing can hold within it a saving power can be resolved by viewing the artistic or poetic orientation to the world as an alternative dimension of enframing. The poet looks at the world to understand it but this reflection does not seek to make the world into a standing reserve. The poet takes the world "as it is" which is the "true form" of the world. He unveils; Aletheia.

Truth, for Heidegger, is revealing. It is the process of something giving or showing itself. Art is the realm in which this 'granting of the world' is upheld. Art is less concerned with measuring, classifying, and exploiting the resources of the world, and more concerned with "taking part" in the process of coming to being and revealing that characterizes its existence. 





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  2. love how you explain these complicated philosophies in an easy yet detailed manner! it is very helpful to us students! thank you so much! :)

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