Philosophy 104: History of Western Philosophy
The Contemporary Period

Course Notes: Martin Heidegger

Heidegger saw himself in a special philosophical relationship with Nietzsche. Nietzsche, in his analysis, had brought Western metaphysical thought to its natural conclusion and end. But Nietzsche himself had not been able to step outside of this derelict thinking. Heidegger believed that he did achieve this; indeed, he preferred to make reference to "thinking" rather than to "philosophy," feeling himself disconnected in this way with the Western tradition. The cumbersomeness of Heidegger's texts, then, is a cumbersomeness to the Western philosophical reader, well trained to interpreting human experience through metaphysical systems. Heidegger stalwartly resists using metaphysical systems; thus, any thinking that he does about human experience is forced into a language that is very unfamiliar to us. Western languages are so thoroughly metaphysical, in fact, that Heidegger often finds himself in the position of being forced to invent a language to express what he wants to say. In this regard, he became an earnest student of languages and often found himself more akin to the way that something was expressed in Greek than in his own time.

Of course Heidegger's books and essays sound like a continual discourse on metaphysical topics --- "Being and Time," "History of the Concept of Time," "What Is a Thing?" But Heidegger's approach to these metaphysical topics was astonishingly innovative. Like so many 20th Century philosophers, Heidegger's approach to these issues was essentially linguistic. How did people (usually the ancients) first make reference to things? What happened to these words? How did developing Western dispositions send the meanings of these words in new directions? What should our understanding of these matters be if we can tear ourselves loose from the epoche of Western metaphysical thought? Heidegger, like Nietzsche, believed that this epoche was destined to a disastrous conclusion and that human survival lay ahead only within a different approach to life and its environment, a matter perhaps of discovering a true concept of home on earth.

"The Question Concerning Technology"

I shall begin by summarizing Heidegger's thinking in "The Question Concerning Technology," concentrating on his vision of the dangers with which technology confronts us. Wherever possible, I shall try to understand Heidegger's arguments in ordinary language rather than merely absorbing and repeating his terminology. This will not always be possible, however; some of Heidegger's invented terms are simply indispensable, attempting as they do to cut across developed habits of thinking. To Heidegger, it is the thinking that is important and the language of our thinking needs careful study and occasional reformulation.

The major difficulty with the present discussion of technology is the fact that we focus attention on what we call technology in its everyday sense and we ignore technology in its essence. In this situation, it matters little whether we embrace technology or condemn it, for we are all equally enslaved by our misunderstanding of what technology actually is. According to Heidegger, "technology [in its everyday sense] is not equivalent to the essence of technology." (P. 4) To be free of misunderstandings, to relate to technology intelligently, we must find its central meaning and that can be done only by discovering its essence.

In our present point of view, we see technology as a complex of contrivances and technical skills, put forth by human activity and developed as means to our ends. Technology, in this view, is an object, or a complex of objects and techniques, that seems passive itself; indeed, we conceive of it as activated by us only. According to Heidegger, however, we are fundamentally mistaken in this; "we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral." (P. 4) On the contrary, the essence of technology reveals it as something far from neutral or merely an instrument of human control; it is an autonomous organizing activity within which humans themselves are organized. Viewing technology as a means to an end, "everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner...We will, as we say, 'get' technology 'spiritually in hand.'...But suppose now that technology were no mere means, how would it stand with the will to master it?" (P. 5) How, indeed, can we cope with it if it encompasses us in its organizational activity?

In summary, the problem with our critique of technology lies at two levels. First, while we argue and take sides on the issue of technology, none of us is really free to deal with it constructively because none of us really understands it in its essence, i.e., in its entirety and in its central sense. Second, our limited understanding of technology is so misguided that little of value can be salvaged from it. This is because all discussions are prefaced on the view that technology is an object which we manipulate as a means to our own ends. In fact, the essence of technology reveals it as a vast system of organization which encompasses us rather than standing objectively and passively ready for our direction and control.

If our discussion of technology is so far off its mark, then, how can we anticipate discovering its essence? Heidegger's method is to assume that the instrumental view of technology has a basic correctness even though it is not true. That basic correctness explains why we have dealt successfully with it at a practical level as long as we have. For Heidegger, this basic correctness offers a pathway for investigative thinking by pursuing the concept of "instrument" and the roots of the word 'technology.' These are the only correct clues that we have.

To view something as an instrument is to place it in a context of ends for which it is presumed to be a means and this is the context of "causation." (P. 6) Thus, one promising path to the essence of technology is through an examination of causation. Heidegger was guided in this examination by Aristotle's classic account of the four factors in all causation -- causa materialis, causa formalis, causa finalis, and causa efficiens. While the traditional reading of Aristotle tends to understand each of these factors in isolation and ignores their cooperative relationship, Heidegger asserted that the essence of causation must lie in what unifies the four. "The four causes are the ways, all belonging at once to each other, of being responsible for something else." (P. 7; emphasis added) A singular thing, or event, is caused and the four factors are cooperatively responsible for that in some way. The thing caused is something that "comes into presence;" thus, the factors are cooperatively responsible for bringing it forth. In this way, Heidegger discovered the very essence of causation in the Greek word 'aitia,' or "to occasion;" and as Plato expressed it in Symposium, "Every occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not presencing is poiesis, is bringing-forth." (P. 10)

"The modes of occasioning, the four causes, are at play, then, within bringing-forth. Through bringing-forth, the growing things of nature as well as whatever is completed through the crafts and the arts come at any given time to their appearance." (P. 11)

This bringing-forth is, in its most generally understood sense, what the Greeks called aletheia, which Heidegger expressed in the German word 'Entbergen' and his English translators have expressed in the word 'revealing.'

As mentioned earlier, Heidegger believed that there was a basic correctness both in our view of technology as an instrument, the view we have just interpreted, and in our use of the name "technology" itself. The word 'technology' is derived from the Greek word 'techne' and the analysis of this word leads us to essentially the same place. For the Greeks, 'techne' belonged to the general notion of bringing-forth, 'poiesis.' Techne and episteme are linked together, the latter related to that which comes-forth out of its own nature alone and the former related to that which comes-forth only by our intervention with that nature. As forms of poiesis, both techne and episteme are modes of revealing; but, in contrast to episteme,

"techne ... reveals watever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another... Thus what is decisive in techne does not lie at all in making or manipulating nor in the using of means, but rather in the aforementioned revealing. It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth." (p. 13)

Both paths of interpretation lead to the same thing. "Technology [in its essence] is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence [West] in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens." (P. 13) What Heidegger wanted us to recognize by bringing technology to the concept of revealing is that technology's essence is to be found in the most basic realm of experience. That realm is the realm of "truths happening." It could be argued, of course, that all of this analysis takes ancient Greece as its focal point and that modern technology has little or nothing to do with ancient Greece. This is true, of course, in the sense that technology has obviously developed far beyond its origins in Greece; however, it is also misguided if it tries to convince us that technology's essence has been fundamentally changed. Heidegger's point is precisely the assertion that the basic essence of technology has remained unchanged and that this essence is most readily observed in the Greek origins of our thinking about these things. The problem remaining, then, is to understand how modern technology has evolved within this essential nature as a mode of revealing.

We have arrived at the opening of the essence of modern technology. Technology is a mode of the fundamental way in which things happen in the universe and we, as agents, are involved in this happening within the cooperative elements of causation. But technology has evolved through the intervening three millennia; what was previously called 'techne' and was a form of the general process of bringing-forth has separated into different modes of revealing. What we understand as modern technology can scarcely be recognized as having a common origin with the fine arts or crafts; indeed, modern technology is distinguished in having made its "alliance" with modern physical science rather than with the arts and crafts. Therefore, to understand technology as it is today and in its complete essence, we must understand the course of that separate and unique evolution.

Perhaps it is not difficult to understand the separate paths of the fine arts, craftsmanship, and modern technology. Each seems to have followed different human intentions and to have addressed different human skills. However, while the fine arts and craftsmanship remained relatively consistent with techne in the ancient sense, modern technology withdrew in a radically different direction. As Heidegger saw it, "the revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such." (P. 14) Modern technology sets-upon nature and challenges-forth its energies, in contrast to techne which was always a bringing-forth in harmony with nature. The activity of modern technology lies at a different and more advanced level wherein the natural is not merely decisively re-directed; nature is actually "set-upon." The rhetoric in which the discussion is couched conveys an atmosphere of violence and exploitation.

To uncover the essence of modern technology is to discover why technology stands today as the danger. To accomplish this insight, we must understand why modern technology must be viewed as a "challenging-forth," what affect this has on our relationship with nature, and how this relationship affects us. Is there really a difference? Has technology really left the domain of techne in a significant way? In modern technology, has human agency withdrawn in some way beyond involvement and, instead, acquired an attitude of violence with respect to the other causal factors?

Heidegger clearly saw the development of "energy resources" as symbolic of this evolutionary path; while the transformation into modern technology undoubtedly began early, the first definitive signs of its new character began with the harnessing of energy resources, as we would say. As a representative of the old technology, the windmill took energy from the wind but converted it immediately into other manifestations such as the grinding of grain; the windmill did not unlock energy from the wind in order to store it for later arbitrary distribution. Modern wind-generators, on the other hand, convert the energy of wind into electrical power which can be stored in batteries or otherwise. The significance of storage is that it places the energy at our disposal; and because of this storage the powers of nature can be turned back upon itself. The storing of energy is, in this sense, the symbol of our over-coming of nature as a potent object. "...a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit."(p. 14) This and other examples that Heidegger used throughout this essay illustrate the difference between a technology that diverts the natural course cooperatively and modern technology that achieves the unnatural by force. Not only is this achieved by force but it is achieved by placing nature in our subjective context, setting aside natural processes entirely, and conceiving of all revealing as being relevant only to human subjective needs.

The essence of technology originally was a revealing of life and nature in which human intervention deflected the natural course while still regarding nature as the teacher and, for that matter, the keeper. The essence of modern technology is a revealing of phenomena, often far removed from anything that resembles "life and nature," in which human intrusion not only diverts nature but fundamentally changes it. As a mode of revealing, technology today is a challenging-forth of nature so that the technologically altered nature of things is always a situation in which nature and objects wait, standing in reserve for our use. We pump crude oil from the ground and we ship it to refineries where it is fractionally distilled into volatile substances and we ship these to gas stations around the world where they reside in huge underground tanks, standing ready to power our automobiles or airplanes. Technology has intruded upon nature in a far more active mode that represents a consistent direction of domination. Everything is viewed as "standing-reserve" and, in that, loses its natural objective identity. The river, for instance, is not seen as a river; it is seen as a source of hydro-electric power, as a water supply, or as an avenue of navigation through which to contact inland markets. In the era of techne humans were relationally involved with other objects in the coming to presence; in the era of modern technology, humans challenge-forth the subjectively valued elements of the universe so that, within this new form of revealing, objects lose their significance to anything but their subjective status of standing-ready for human design.

At this point, we have almost completed the analysis of modern technology in its essence. Only one final aspect of this analysis remains; it is an understanding of the overarching context in which technology came to proceed along this path. Heidegger named this context by the German word 'Ge-stell,' which has been translated to the English word, 'enframing.' In Heidegger's words,

"enframing [Ge-stell] means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve." (P. 20) But, "where Enframing reigns, there is danger in the highest sense." (P. 28)

To understand the essence of modern technology as enframing, Heidegger claims is to understand the problem of technology in its fullest sense; for in enframing we will understand the deeper context in which humans journeyed from involvement with nature into an intrusion upon it. We must move, then, to understand what Heidegger meant by enframing.

We are to understand technology through enframing in two very important ways. First, technology is a process, or coming-to-presence, which is underway in the world and which has truly gigantic proportions. The two concepts that Heidegger used as analogies in arriving at the word 'Ge-stell' were 'Gebirg" and 'Gemuet.' Both of these are processes of cosmic scope. The former is the gradual building, emergence, folding, and eroding of a mountain range. The latter is the welling up and building of emotional feelings that originate in the depths of our beings, as differentiated from the simple emotions that arise quickly and spontaneously in normal contexts. Second, technology viewed as enframing is a process that is shaping human destiny today and that has been shaping human destiny in relation to the universe for almost as long as we conceive of our history. What we call technology and think to be a neutral instrument standing ready for our control is actually a specific manifestation of this whole process. {[7], p. 19} The concept of enframing suggests that human life in the context of the natural world is gathered wholly and cosmically within the essence of technology. Just as the technology that we now see ongoing in the world shows the characteristic of challenging-forth the objects around us, the whole process within which human life is developing challenges-us-forth to this mode of revealing the real or of ordering nature into standing reserve. Our control over technology is an illusion; it and we alike are being shaped, like an evolving mountain range, in the process that Heidegger called enframing. The possession of what we commonly call technology is only a fragmentary, though characteristic, aspect of that whole development; language thought, religion, art, and all other aspects of human life are coordinated into this development as a part of enframing.

To see the essence of technology in this way delivers us into the final phase of Heidegger's analysis, the great danger to humanity that technology represents. Just as enframing organizes our lives progressively into a disposition of challenging and ordering the things around us into standing reserve, its progress as a development of human destiny challenges and orders us into standing reserve for its own ends.

"The destining of revealing is in itself not just any danger, but danger as such. Yet when destining reigns in the mode of Enframing, it is the supreme danger. This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile, man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself." (P. 26-7; emphasis added)

Just as humans have progressively limited the being of the natural objects around them, Heidegger observed, they too have acquired a progressively limited character or being. While we have come to think that we encounter only ourselves in the world, "in truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., in his essence." (P. 27) While all epochs of human evolution contain danger, the epoch of modern technology possesses the gravest danger because it is the epoch whose characteristic is to conduct humanity out of its own essence. Modern technology, in Heidegger's view, is the highest stage of misrepresentation of the essence of being human. In order to understand this danger completely and, certainly, in order to come to accept it as a correct analysis, would require a more extensive review of Heidegger's theory of human nature and its essence.

In brief (and in a very rough form) the essence of being human is being witness and, hence, aiding in creation. I do not simply walk through a field; rather, as I walk along a path, I am witness to the coming-to-presence of manifold beings. It is not just that things come into view, as we say, but that I witness them and bring them into activity in a world. For Heidegger, the environment is no mere environment, that is, no mere inanimate, encompassing thing, or backdrop. The essential nature of humans being in the world unites us with other beings. I make this a place by being witness to it and to everything united within it. More and more, though, the present tendency of technology is to remove me from the mode of witnessing beings and to place me in isolation. In this mode of technology, we order the world with things standing-in-reserve for our use. When we demand use of these things, we no longer witness them in the sense of understanding (learning about) their manifold potentials, but merely as that under which we have ordered them to be. In the gravest situation, we begin to order other human beings in the same way! Thus, we have "departments of human resources." We recognize in human beings around us their usefulness to us, not their genius. Thus, we witness them in artificially limited ways rather than enabling their coming-to-presence creatively as animated parts of our worlds.

"The Turning"

In this essay, Heidegger took up in greater detail the possibility of a "saving power," suggested in the previous essay. The essay originated as the fourth in a serious of lectures, given in 1949, in which the dangers of the present epoch of technology were explored in the earlier lectures. He repeats (p. 42) Hölderin's ". . . where danger is, grows the saving power, also" and reminds us that "the danger is the epoch of Being coming to presence as Enframing."

In order to comprehend this turning, we must begin by understanding more deeply the danger that Heidegger has introduced in his thinking about technology. We begin by recalling that the modern era of technology is the epoch of Enframing. In this sense, Enframing is a destining of a mode of revealing that challenges forth all presencing as ordered in standing reserve. In other words, in this epoch of human experience, truth more-and-more emerges as something like "organized potential energy." In so far as we experience ourselves as the creators of this organization, we become inflated with the illusion that we meet ourselves -- that is, our own handiwork -- everywhere in experience. But the twist in this destining is that we also come to organize ourselves as well as standing reserve, or merely potential energy. That is, human presencing -- the truth of being human -- takes on a particular and strange nature. According to Heidegger, this nature of modern human life is far removed from man's genuine essence.

The problem with modern technology is its participation in a general and dangerous problem with Being itself. "The danger is the epoch of Being coming to presence as Enframing." (P. 43) That is, both man and everything else come into presence -- if you will, find their truth -- within the challenging ordering that Enframing is. The turning that Heidegger imagines is a turning away from Enframing "into a safekeeping of Being," that is, a restoration of the essence of Being. He describes this as "world comes to pass . . . as world, that the thing things." (P. 43) What Heidegger understands as the essence of Being, in a sense "the ideal world," is a coming to presence of things in their full sense, as things. In coming to presence as world, man witnesses things. In the epoch of Enframing, one can scarcely say this for man participates in the regimentation of objects, coming to presence, and witnesses only the setting upon these objects to appear and perform in an ordered and limited way, as standing reserve. Man himself, in this respect, appears in the limited essence of Enframing. One views an old-growth cedar tree and witnesses it as "15,000 board feet." In his essence, man is capable of witnessing this fine old tree in its full being as a tree-thing -- allowing the tree to be a tree, receiving the message of its special history and being affected by its old weather-worn form.

In effect, the essence of human life (Being) comes to truth, to expression, in different ways, as time passes. The current epoch, as indicated by the present path of technology, first witnesses humans setting upon the world and ordering it to stand and wait for our convenience in use. But this epoch continues forward into the situation where humans now set upon themselves and order themselves for their convenience in use. The result, of course, is a corruption of the essence of Being, that is, man finds himself farther removed from his true essence than at any other time in history. The grave danger of the present epoch of technology is, in that sense, the extreme alienation of Being from its essence.

Nevertheless, Heidegger suggests that the realization of danger as such means that the saving power is already alive. In effect, realizing this situation as danger means that the path back to Being's essence is still understood, hence, available to us. The farther we proceed into the present mode of technology and, hence, the farther we proceed into our gravest danger, experiencing our humanity in a form so far removed from our essence, we have still not met danger as such. What Heidegger suggests is a kind of awakening, or insight -- a flash -- that, if we were to witness that danger that is in fact over-taking us, that insight would already be at the point of turning back to an original appreciate of our essential being. Without yet appreciating that danger as such we are still not inclined, or motivated. In a way, it is the energy of our gravest disaster that can motivate us toward a more constructive path, or turning.

"Science and Reflection"

At the beginning of this essay, we find a simple statement of the "essence of art" true to Heidegger's understanding of it. "Art is a consecration and a refuge in which the real bestows its long-hidden splendor upon man ever anew, that in such a light he may see more purely and hear more clearly what addresses itself to his essence." (Emphasis mine) It is a telling statement when we recall Heidegger's concept of the human essence as being witness. Art, in other words, delivers the truth of the real in a way that is thoroughly consistent with our essential nature.

What, then, is science? Science, too, is a way "in which all that is presents itself to us." But, like technology, Heidegger asserts, science is no mere "fabrication of man." In modern science Heidegger sees a destining beyond merely man's wanting to know. Ultimately, he suggests that "[modern] science is the theory of the real" and that the present age of science has been thought through since Greek time. Equally, science invites a contrast between Greek and East Asian approaches to the real. While science, today, remains something which begins in Greek thinking, it is clear that Heidegger sees it, today, as something that has moved away from the essential character previously thought.

In order to understand modern science as the theory of the real, we must explore both "the real" and "theory" separately. In an elaborate analysis of related words used in Greek, Latin, and German (pp. 159-163), Heidegger suggests that the concept of the real has evolved in a very specific way. Thought originally by the Greek as energeia, "enduring-in-work," that is, something that endures after having arrived out of unconcealment, the term acquires a new sense of being caused, indeed, in the same light as God comes to be thought of as the "first cause." In modern times, the mode of causation moves toward a view of "consequences," which stand over against the cause. What evolves is the modern concept of object and objectivity. What Heidegger points out in this is that the term 'real,' in "science is the theory of the real," is no merely passive term but that our conception (and expectations) of the real have already organized science in a very specific way -- namely, that what science will study as the real is the world held to the limited notion of the presencing of objects alone.

Having made this point, he turns (p. 163) to examine the part played in this definition by the word 'theory.' Thus, he asks (p. 165), "what is 'the theory' that is named in the statement 'modern science is the theory of the real'?" Theory in the Greek sense is "bios theoretikos," the way of life of the beholder, "the beholding that watches over truth." As before with the concept of the real, Heidegger believes that there is a distinctly modern sense in which we think "theory" in the proclamation that "[modern] science is the theory of the real." And as so frequently in other discussions, Heidegger sees the major transformation of this thought occurring in its Roman translation -- from theorein to contemplari. "In theoria transformed into contemplatio there comes to the fore the impulse, already prepared in Greek thinking, of a looking-at that sunders and compartmentalizes." (P. 166) While we say that science is objective, meaning "disinterested," it is paradoxically "interested" in viewing all reality according to a human formula, as compartmentalized and categorized objects. Thus, "the theory of the real is necessarily departmentalized [specialized] science." (P. 170)

In the end, Heidegger sees this tendency in modern science as destined by the same overarching mode of revealing that destines technology. We see this in the subject-object relationship that is set up in modern science. Man sets up the real to fit it into the mold of object so that he can categorize and measure it. We have moved from the real as "what presences as self-exhibiting" to something that is set upon to stand forth as objectness. The subject-object relationship is one of ordering; hence the subject and object are "sucked up as standing reserves. It is now clear why modern technology is based on the application of modern science; the same destining holds sway in both.

In the final analysis, Heidegger poses a question with respect to nature, that is, whether science can encompass nature and, hence, fully understand it. But Heidegger suggests that the answer, here, is negative. Science can only achieve an understanding of one way in which nature presences. Nature itself is always exhibiting itself in other, unexpected ways. In fact, Heidegger declares, nature, man, history, and language are all the same in the failure of modern science to encompass the manifold ways in which they may exhibit themselves. But this means that science cannot scientifically arrive at its own essence (p. 177); hence, science fails to be self-justifying. In other words, and in a very dangerous respect, science -- which is viewed as the very best in human rationality by we moderns -- cannot support or become the basis for any serious reflection upon being human or about the significance of human history -- perhaps the most acute statement of the so-called Existential crisis of our time. In casting our lot with modern science and technology, we have inadvertently surrendered any genuine way of reflecting about ourselves and our lives and are thus forced to set upon ourselves with the same objectivity and submit ourselves to continual surprises when our human reality fails to be exhibited by this discipline.