The Question
Heidegger’s famous essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” was published in 1954. It condenses and synthesizes a range of Heideggerian concerns over the preceding thirty five years. Much can be learned about this enigmatic essay by expanding brief remarks which often are little more than hints of previous work. This is particularly true of the beginning of the essay, which in the space of a few pages introduces the ancient Greek concept of technê, defines it, and moves on to discuss modern technology. Throughout this essay and others such as “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger maintains and emphasizes the contrast between ancient technê and modern technology. These are the two chief forms of making and correspondingly, the two chief modes of revealing. Yet from these widely known essays, one cannot really gauge the depth of Heidegger’s analysis of technê nor understand fully how it differs from modern technology. This chapter addresses these issues on the basis of a reading of Heidegger’s various lectures and essays on Aristotle.
I would like to begin by considering what Heidegger has to
say about technê in the essay on technology, if only to show its incompleteness.
There Heidegger set up the discussion by suggesting that the instrumental
interpretation of technology is inadequate, that something deeper underlies our
usual assumption that technology is a mere means. As he puts it, “the essence
of technology is by no means anything technological” (QCT, 4). What is it then?
In answering, Heidegger makes the first of several leaps that enable him to
reach his conclusions in a short compass. This first leap takes us quickly from
the idea of the instrumental to the notion of causality, from causality to the
origin of the concept of cause in ancient
Heidegger initially promises that the essence of technology will be disclosed by an investigation of Aristotle’s four causes. As we will see, this promise is not kept but the discussion is important in other ways. The four causes are, of course, the material, formal, final, and efficient causes. These causes actually have nothing to do with causality in the modern sense, a notion roughly equivalent to the efficient cause alone. Heidegger claims that the Greek word translated as cause, aition, really means to be indebted. The four causes signify ways in which a thing is indebted for its existence. Heidegger’s example, a silver chalice, is indebted to the silver from which it is made, the idea of how the chalice should look when finished, the end which limits the possible meanings and uses of the chalice to a single way of being, and finally the craftsman who “considers carefully and gathers together the three aforementioned way of being responsible and indebted” (QCT, 8). The craftsman is not the cause of the chalice in our sense at all, but a co-responsible agent in bringing the chalice into appearance.
The Greeks call the act of bringing something to appearance “poiêsis.” The craftsman takes his place in poiêsis through a specific type of knowledge called technê that allows him to gather the other causes and bring the work to completion. Technê is thus a mode of revealing insofar as it places the finished work before us, making it present. This Greek mode of revealing Heidegger calls a “bringing forth,” a “Her-vor-bringen” (QCT, 10). Heidegger then concludes, rather abruptly, that despite the fact that modern technology is not a form of poesis in the manner of technê, and does not gather the four causes, it too must be understood as a mode of revealing. He proceeds to demonstrate this, in the process contrasting technology implicitly with technê for the rest of the essay. The final pages of the text mention technê again in connection with art which was in fact considered a technê in antiquity. Greek art, he says, was an especially marvelous form of poiêsis lost to us in the modern construction of the aesthetic. No longer does art reveal the world as it did for the Greeks; now it is merely one experience alongside others. Heidegger concludes with some doubtful reflections on the possibility that art will again reveal the truth of being to us moderns.
The essay entitled “The Question Concerning Technology” asks
about the essence of technology. The question seems simple but in reality it is
shrouded in obscurity and the essay does little to dispel the darkness. In
fact, its principal merit is to cast doubt on the obvious answer to the
question. Why does Heidegger deny that
the essence of technology is technological? With this provocative statement, he
distinguishes an instrumental account of technology from an ontological account.
The former concerns the function of technology in fulfilling human desires,
while the latter focuses on the role of the technological spirit in structuring
a world in terms of the exigencies of planning and control. The instrumental
account is not wrong, but it is internal to modernity and cannot explain why
its promise has gone awry. Only an ontological account illuminates the nature
of modernity and its catastrophic outcome. But this conclusion raises further
questions.
Apparently an ontological account will explain technology as a mode of revealing distinct from ancient technê. But what does it mean to say that the Greeks or we ourselves have a world revealed in one or another way? How can making artifacts, a rather limited human activity after all, take on the huge ontological task of defining worlds? Furthermore, if technê as poiesis was such a great thing for the Greeks, why does Heidegger not suggest we make an effort to return to it? Why are we stuck at the end of the essay wondering how we will be “saved” from the tragic problems he associates with modern technology when it seems he has the answer all along? Why, if not, are we bothering with the Greeks at this late date?
These are no doubt naïve questions, but they are reasonable questions from a naïve standpoint. Since it fails to answer them the essay is incomplete, like a few strands of melody that recall a whole piece heard on another occasion but which are scarcely musical to the uninitiated. The only way to get a clearer understanding of Heidegger’s answer to the question of technology is to take these naïve questions seriously and attempt to fill in the gaps in his argument which give rise to them. I have read quite a few accounts of Heidegger’s views on technology but rarely is this attempted. Instead, many commentators emulate Heidegger’s agility in leaping over the weak spots in his argument. The uncritical use of Heidegger’s terminology, often with bizarre neologisms in translation, is the most annoying aspect of these accounts. Going over the same ground, they arrive at the same point, the point at which the questioning must really begin. That point is Heidegger’s early interpretation of Aristotle, specifically, Aristotle’s account of technê, which is briefly sketched at the start of the essay.
“With Aristotle,” Heidegger remarks, “the greatest philosophical knowledge of antiquity is expressed, a knowledge which even today remains unappreciated and misunderstood in philosophy” (AM, 188). From 1921 to 1939, Aristotle is one of Heidegger’s major preoccupations to whom he devotes lecture courses and essays. Indeed Gadamer, who was studying with Heidegger at the time of his 1923 lecture on Aristotle, asserts without qualification that for the early Heidegger “in the care of the human being for itself and for its being, there resides already that which, as the question of the concept of being, had found its comprehensive response in Aristotle’s Metaphysics” (S, 13).
These writings on Aristotle are peculiar for doing two apparently incompatible things. On the one hand, they constitute extremely careful, even brilliant, readings of the finest details of Aristotelian texts. On the other hand, these readings continually demonstrate the many ways in which Aristotle anticipated Heidegger’s own philosophy. One is left wondering if Heidegger’s thought is based on Aristotle’s or if Heidegger merely distorts the Aristotelian texts into a mirror of his own views. Heidegger’s intellectual biographer, Theodore Kisiel, claims the 1923 lecture is the “the “zero-point of the specific project of BT [Being and Time]” (Kisiel, 1993: 250). Indeed, considered as Aristotle exegesis this lecture is far more puzzling than as a first draft of Heidegger’s own position. To a lesser extent this will hold true of Heidegger’s far more rigorous 1931 lecture course on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. A brief sketch of Being and Time is therefore helpful as a preliminary to an exposition of the content of these texts.
Being and Time claims to revive the “question of being,” abandoned under the influence of neo-Kantianism in the preceding decades, by studying human being, the being which alone poses the question of being. Heidegger finds it remarkable that human beings not only exist, like all other things, but that they have a relation to their own being. The being of each human being is “in question” in the sense that one must decide what and how to be the person one is. As a consequence of this self-relation, each person can be said to “have” themselves in a unique kind of self-possession. I not only have qualities, but I must “live” them, assume them and give them a specific and always contingent significance in a life which is mine and mine alone. This questionableness and belonging of human being makes of it a very special kind of being which Heidegger calls “factical life” in his earliest reflections and “Dasein” in Being and Time.
Heidegger argues that the analysis of Dasein’s way of being can unravel the mystery of being itself. Being and Time therefore unfolds as an existential ontology. Heidegger shows that we first encounter the real in the form of a “world,” that is, an orderly system of entities with which we interact in use, rather than as a collection of isolated objects of knowledge which we “invest” with value and take up subsequently in action. Human being can only be understood as always already involved in a world in this sense. As such it is “being-in-the-world.” The things of the world are “revealed” to Dasein as they are encountered in use and so Heidegger calls them “equipment” (Zeug). The process of revealing involves the assignment of purpose and meaning to things in relation to Dasein’s self-understanding. Dasein does not have a stable and definite being but strives to construct itself through its engagements with things and other people. It engages with its world out of concern with its own future. Hence the title of the book, Being and Time.
Why is this ontology rather than a psychological account of how human beings experience an objective world of which they are simply a part? Why is an explanation of Dasein’s being-in-the-world an account of being itself? The answer to these questions has to do with the significance of phenomenology for Heidegger. Phenomenology offers a first person account of how Dasein encounters the world in everyday experience. This account establishes the temporal priority of “worldhood” over objectivity, the fact that we use things before we contemplate them in knowledge. The objective conception of things is the result of a subsequent abstractive process in which knowledge in the usual sense consists. Heidegger argues that the products of that process cannot turn around and explain their origin, for example, reducing the world revealed to Dasein to a combination of sense data and feelings. No objectivistic explanation from the third person standpoint of a scientific observer can get behind what phenomenology uncovers to offer a more fundamental account of being. The explanation of being in terms of being-in-the-world is thus ontologically fundamental, and so technical activity very broadly construed, as the fundamental relation of worldhood, is ontologically significant.
In the next section of this chapter, I will offer a detailed
account of Heidegger’s interpretation of the connection between technê and
being. Already in these early writings, Heidegger rejects the instrumental
account of technical activity and proposes an alternative ontological account.
But in these writings, we are offered much more to go on than in the later
essays or in Being and Time.
The original practical relation to a world is described repeatedly in Being and Time in terms of the use of elementary hand tools. However, in this work, Heidegger does not discuss the relation between the analysis of worldhood and his concurrent research on Aristotle. In his 1931 lecture course on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the connection is made explicit. There Heidegger says, “We have to clarify for ourselves what it signifies that man has a relation to the works that he produces. It is for this reason that a certain book called Sein und Zeit discusses dealings with equipment; and not in order to correct Marx, nor to organize a new national economy, nor out of a primitive understanding of the world” (AM, 117).
The several lecture courses on Aristotle from the early 1920s to the early 1930s thus serve as a background to Heidegger’s ontological concept of action in Being and Time. In these courses, the Greek understanding of being is interpreted on the model of techne. This model is formative for the Greek experience of the world. Aristotle’s detailed explanation of it is the core of his ontology and the highpoint of Greek philosophy. Heidegger continues, “Not only did the Greeks, Plato and Aristotle, carry out the interpretation of this phenomenon of production, but the basic concepts of philosophy have grown out of and with this interpretation” (AM, 117). In Heidegger’s terms, this means that the human activity of making, a specific “comportment” toward the world, is the primordial revealing of being. To put it in the terms of Being and Time, a fact about human being, namely, that it possesses a specific “understanding of the Being of all entities of a character other than its own” is ontologically significant (BT, 34). Dasein is, again in Heidegger’s terminology, “ontic-ontological” insofar as its comportment as a particular being in the world reveals the world, that is, creates an “opening” or “clearing” within which beings come to appearance. And this comportment was initially analyzed by the Greeks as technê. Their intuition about the nature of being therefore conformed in its essential structure with Heidegger’s Dasein analysis—and vice versa.
By the mid 1930s, when Heidegger takes up technology as his principal theme, his views have undergone two important shifts. He comes to believe that the revealing of being is not adequately modeled by notions such as equipment and technê. On the contrary, the modern technological picture of the world is a kind of degeneration product of the initial ontological overburdening of technê by the Greeks. The results of his research into the Greeks are now recast as a historical stage in a process that cannot be fully understood from his own earlier standpoint. Heidegger claims that modes of revealing are historical and that ontology must be pursued as the “history of being.” This second shift motivates the contrast between technê and technology as historically specific modes of revealing. With this in mind, we begin to see why “The Question Concerning Technology” ignores the issues we normally associate with technology to focus instead on ontology.
Ten Key Concepts
In the background of Heidegger’s interpretation there is a phenomenological
methodology that yields surprising results. Heidegger starts out from the
assumption that the world is initially revealed through technê and does not
pre-exist it in the form of a collection of mere present at hand things taken
up by human technical activity in a contingent manner, for example, on this or
that occasion to fulfill this or that passing need. Every aspect of being he
uncovers in the study of technê is thus originally posited by technê. This even
includes the ordinary material objects that become the raw materials of
technical work. These materials are understood from out of their place in production
rather than as pre-existing objects of observation. There is thus something
like a phenomenological reduction at work here. The “natural attitude,” in
which things are merely given as present at hand, is suspended to allow them to
appear as they are originally revealed to technê. Technê itself is considered
ontologically, as a relation of Dasein to world, rather than as a causal
interaction with things. Considered as a phenomenology in this sense,
Aristotle’s technê analysis displays an original unity underlying the dichotomies
of objectivistic metaphysics. This approach has a number of unexpected
consequences, as I will show below in an account of key Aristotelian concepts.
Aristotle’s greatness, for Heidegger, lies in having placed movement, kinesis, at the center of philosophical reflection. Movement in Aristotle’s sense refers not just to change of place, but more generally to any kind of change from one state to another. Aristotle’s accomplishment was to address the nature of movement in this broad sense of the term, and to understand it as the essence of being. To signify movement in this sense Heidegger introduces the rather recondite German word “Bewegtheit,” variously translated into English as “movement,” “movedness,” and “motility.” In Heidegger’s view, following Aristotle, Bewegtheit is not something that happens to being; it is constitutive of being. “It was Aristotle who first attained—and thus, first created—that level of questioning where (movement is not considered as something merely given along with other things, but rather where) being-moved is explicitly questioned and understood as the fundamental mode of being” (AP, 187).
Aristotle, we are told, understands kinesis primarily as the shaping of things as they develop or are made, in other words, as what Heidegger calls their “bringing forth” or “coming to presence.” This is to be sure an unusual sense of the word movement but that should not prevent us from understanding Heidegger’s meaning, which may possibly be the correct interpretation of Aristotle. In any case, Heidegger’s explanation of both physis and technê, nature and art, depends on kinesis in this specifically Greek sense.
In some of his earliest writings, Heidegger relates Aristotle’s conception of movement to human activity in general. Human beings are involved in movement of a special kind which proceeds from their care or concern with the problems of “factical life.” Aristotle’s concept of phronesis is interpreted as an anticipation of Heidegger’s own concept of circumspection. Both concepts differ from the idea of theoretical knowledge in describing the practical intelligence associated with the movement of factical life. In this early anticipation of the analytic of Dasein Aristotle is implausibly attributed a philosophical anthropology based on a phenomenological ontology.
This approach to Aristotle is concretized fruitfully by identifying the inner structure of Aristotelian kinesis with production. Heidegger analyzes this structure in several dimensions, including its relation to the capacities of the producer and to the form and product of the activity of production. Heidegger claims that the Aristotelian concept of movement is derived from the notion of rest as completion, as the standing still in which movement terminates. He interprets Aristotle’s term “entelechy” to signify the moment in which movement gathers itself together and comes to rest in the fully realized product. The term “energeia,” usually translated as “actuality,” has a similar meaning, Heidegger claims, signifying the “ergon,” or finished work that stands before us in its completion.
Although movement is interpreted through its terminus, the completed work must not be isolated from the process of its emergence. The unfolding of that process is implied in its end. Movement is understood through rest, but rest itself is a kind of zero point of movement and as such a form of movement. This dialectic of movement and rest conforms with our common sense understanding of animal behavior. For the animal, immobility is a special kind of movement requiring a specific effort rather than a state of indifference, as it seems to be for a rock or other inanimate thing. But as Heidegger interprets it, Aristotle’s ontology does not make this common sense distinction quite as we do: not just animals, but all that seems merely to stand there stably in itself must be comprehended from out of the movement by which it reached that state and holds itself steady.
With this in mind, Heidegger is able to appreciate some of the most obscure aspects of Aristotle’s Physics, which, he says, “is the hidden, and therefore never adequately studied, foundational book of Western philosophy” (AP, 185). For example, we have seen that movement is animated by a “final cause,” but the goal of movement is not for Aristotle something merely external to the moving being, an idea or representation in the mind. It is the “arche” of movement, an origin that sets in motion that which moves. Hence Aristotle does not share our idea of movement as a contingent interaction between a mutually indifferent cause and its effect. Instead he understands movement through the concept of “eros,” the desire which draws the moved being toward its object and in which it comes to rest. The dialectic of rest and movement also illuminates the discredited notion of “natural place” in Aristotle which, astonishingly, Heidegger claims “is not in the least refuted, in fact not even grasped” (AM, 67). Since the Aristotelian thing is drawn to the endpoint of its own development, if that endpoint implies a specific spatial location it will come to rest there as it is fulfilled.
Physis is usually translated as “nature” but once again Heidegger objects to the standard view. What is lost in the concept of nature is the dynamic character of physis, which refers to the movement in which the thing brings itself forth into appearance. In this Heideggerian usage, “appearance,” is ambiguous, referring at one and same time to what we call “existence” and “appearing.” Physis must therefore be understood outside the framework of such distinctions as that between essence and existence, subject and object.
The emergence of the thing out of itself is most obvious in the case of plants and animals. They are in some sense the archetype of physis insofar as their existence must be grasped as a process. The plant, Heidegger says, has its arche in its rootedness in the earth from out of which it emerges. It stands forth from the earth by going back into the earth, sinking its roots in its source. This double movement—standing forth and going back—characterizes the specific motility of what we call natural things.
It is tempting in a modern context to consider physis as a
kind of self-making. In modern biology, the organism is conceived as a
multiplicity of interacting physico-chemical machines, causes. But Heidegger
argues that this modern conception is completely un-Greek. From the Greek
standpoint, the important point is the form and direction of the process of
emergence, not its cause in our modern sense. This process brings the thing
forth in its “truth,” in the form it was destined to take, for example, as such
and such a plant or animal, and this bringing forth is directed at human
witnessing. There is no concern with causality here at all.
This approach is developed further in Heidegger’s reflections on the meaning of technê. But he has two rather different accounts. Technê, he sometimes claims, does not mean technology or even craft. The term refers rather to know-how in general. Know-how in this sense is what is involved in bringing beings forward as themselves, that is, in recognizing them under this or that category as useful in this or that context or activity (AP, 192-193, 222). Heidegger’s rather obscure point is that things cannot be understood as just there in front of the human being as pure objects before a subject of knowledge. Rather, things enter a world through their interpretation in terms of a meaning and a use. This incorporation of things into humanly organized worlds can be understood through the concept of the eidos, or essence, which Heidegger associates closely with techne. We will return to this enlarged sense of technê later, but for the moment we need to focus on a narrower interpretation which conforms more closely with the usual understanding of the term.
According to the Greeks, things exist either by physis or by technê. The things of physis have their arche in themselves. They are self-originating. The things of technê have their arche in another. They are made or at least helped into being through the mediation of an agent. Know-how in this more conventional understanding of technê is associated with productive activity in contrast with science, episteme.
However, Heidegger gives even this more conventional
understanding of the term an unfamiliar twist. Technê, he claims, is not about
the procedures of making but rather about knowing how the thing must come out
in the process of its production. It consists essentially in bringing the
process of making to completion in the conformity of the produced thing with
its essence. This kind of know-how is directed toward the end or goal of
production rather than the means. It is productive in the sense of bringing the
thing forward, producing it like a witness in court, first as idea, and then in
reality. Technê promotes the specific movement in which a thing emerges. In so
doing it goes beyond physis to bring forth another type of being which,
Heidegger argues, is not the product of arbitrary will, but of a logos.
“Technê, Heidegger writes, “is a mode of proceeding against physis, though not yet in order to overpower it or exploit
it, and above all not in order to turn use and calculation into principles,
but, on the contrary, to retain the holding sway of physis in unconcealedness”
(BQP, 155). It is in this specific sense
that technê is engaged with presence as such and not merely the utilitarian
concerns of everyday life.
For Plato, as we have seen, the distinguishing feature of technê as a form of practice is the predominance of the logos. And now Heidegger places the logos at the center of the Aristotelian concept of technê as well. Thus to understand technê we must first gain an understanding of this important Greek word. It is usually translated as “reason” or “discourse.” Heidegger rejects these translations. “Logos,” he claims, is derived from the word “legein” which means to lay out, harvest, or gather. “Logos” is the gathering together of the relationships that make things intelligible and the making manifest of the results of this gathering. This definition suggests that the logos is related to the essence of things and to the articulation of that essence in speech. But note that Heidegger finds the logos at work not only in theoretical knowledge, but also in circumspection, the most basic familiarity with things that accompanies action. At every level of cognition, the logos indicates the functions of unifying and making explicit involved in the intelligent encounter with the world.
But what is involved in the work of the logos? What does it actually encompass? It is, says Heidegger, a kind of rule or law immanent to the elements it gathers. The gathering act is an interpretation of these elements as belonging together in a model of the thing. This model is not simply the empirical givenness of the thing but its finished and perfected form. In understanding this particular chair or table as what they are, I transcend their limited and imperfect realization in the here and now toward their “idea;” I relate them to what they are in their truth. To grasp X as Y is the essential act of intelligence and this act, for the Greeks, takes the form of an idealization.
If, for the moment, we confine ourselves to understanding the logos in its role in technê, as indicated by Plato, these abstract qualifications can be made accessible and understandable. Recall that for Plato each art is governed by a logos. The art of shipbuilding, for example, gathers materials and plans under the leading idea, the logos, the ideal model, of a ship that will be strong and reliable, and perhaps also suitable for carrying large quantities of goods, fast, or excellent in warfare, depending on its type. The logos selects and assigns each resource its place in the whole and measures the progress of the work against a pregiven result, formulated more or less explicitly in the maker’s discourse either in an internal monologue or in conversation with others.
If the logos refers us to the act of gathering in which a model is identified and articulated, the Greeks call the model itself an “idea” or “eidos.” The eidos is the immediate result of the gathering in which logos consists. The eidos is the “look” that the finished thing must have to be a proper product of its technê. It is sighted in advance and only on the basis of this initial sighting can technê proceed. The eidos is roughly equivalent to the idea of “essence” which we will explore in more depth below.
Heidegger reinterprets the concepts of telos—usually translated as “end”—and peras—usually translated as “limit”—in terms of this understanding of the eidos. In modern terms we conceive the end as a subjective goal and the limit as an external barrier to movement or extension. Accordingly, we think of technical activity as subordinate to a goal in the craftsman’s head and the product as limited by the available resources, the environment, and so on. Heidegger reverses the terms of this modern understanding of the eidos. The end and limit are in fact the finished product itself insofar as it conforms to the eidos and embodies the specific limitation that makes it this particular thing rather than another. The telos is not in the mind of the maker nor is the peras external to the work. In a sense Heidegger is claiming that the eidos is discovered, “disclosed,” rather than invented and thus the end or limit it places on the product and on the craftsman’s activities is a truth rather than a subjective intention. To effect this reversal, Heidegger emphasizes that the craftsman’s conception of the eidos is not original but derivative of some finished or completed work which embodies it. “In other words, eidos is genuinely understood as eidos only when it appears within the horizon of one’s immediate addressing of a being” (AP, 210). In this sense, he claims, Aristotle places the actual before the potential, as more ontologically fundamental. In Heidegger’s retranslation, the finished work as embodying the archetype or eidos is ontologically prior to the various materials, tools, and activities from out of which the work finally takes shape under its guidance and in view of its end.
The concept of eidos is closely related to that of morphê, or form. Form is the eidos realized in an appropriate matter of some sort. In this sense it is not what we understand as form in the usual meaning of the word. The eidos is not so much an idea as the real being of the thing to be made, what it most intrinsically is prior to any and all ideas. As such the eidos must appear, come into presence, through a process of formation of its material, the hyle. Form is a state of being of that material, not something extrinsic that happens to it accidentally. Form is the movement toward completion that overtakes and transforms the material, stripping it of its imperfection as it proceeds. Thus we must not conceive of the material as essentially what it is prior to technê. Rather, the material exists primarily in the process of technê as what has not yet been “forged into its boundaries,” granted the form it awaits in its primitive state (AM, 118).
We can of course reconceptualize all this in common sense terms and think of eidos and form as subjective ideas in the head of the maker, matter as objective things in the world, and their encounter as a contingent happening caused by human will. This is precisely the modern conception of technology which Heidegger claims is alien to the Greeks. We have he says fallen away from the original Greek conception through our inability to cling to the original meaning of technê. In that meaning, the emergence of the thing is thought through the process of formation. Work is not an accident that befalls indifferent raw materials but the entry of the crafted object into a world. With this conception the Greeks seem to have anticipated Heidegger’s own phenomenology. The thing must not be conceived objectivistically outside its relation to the process in which it emerges from the work of the craftsman. Rather, it is “revealed” in that process. Existence and essence are not yet separate as they are for us.
These are the categories which explain the concept of technê at the deepest level. They encompass the activity of production and its result. As such they are dialectical categories, for each aspect of production is tied to a contrary aspect in many different ways. Just as raw materials correspond to form, so to clumsy action there corresponds a skill, to every potentiality an actuality, and so on. On the one side there is a specific mode of “privation,” steresis, on the other side, its corresponding fulfillment. This dialectical pattern is repeated over and over. Heidegger writes, “Dynamis is in a preeminent sense exposed and bound to steresis” (AM, 95). As we will see, this dialectical character of production is the result of its ontologically original function of revealing.
Dynamis is usually translated as either potentiality or force. In Heidegger’s account of technê it has both these meanings. The material, hyle, has the dynamis, the potential, to become the finished work. In this sense, dynamis means “appropriateness.” Each technical activity calls forth the appropriate material on which it must work to achieve its ends. The finished work itself is “energeia,” the actualized potential of its production process and materials. The energeia instantiates the eidos, brings it to presence.
The second meaning of dynamis refers us to the craftsman, the producer, who possesses the force or capacity to make the work. Dynamis in this sense is subjected to a very complex analysis by Aristotle, which Heidegger explains at length in his commentary on Book theta of the Metaphysics. This analysis also covers aspects of dynamis in the first sense, as the appropriate materials, and relates it to the skill of the producer. The two together constitute the full meaning of dynamis.
In Aristotle’s Metaphysics, these two senses of dynamis are distinguished as poiesis, the creative moment, and pathein, the moment of tolerating, undergoing. They are mutually implicated in a dialectic of action and passion, creation and receptivity. The creative power of the craftsman implies a material that can “bear” the transformations imposed on it. This “bearing” Heidegger attributes to the material as a quality he calls “bearance.” Bearance is not merely the absence of resistance, but signifies the essential availability of the material for form. The clay is not simply there to be formed into a jug; insofar as it is part of the process of production, it demands the achievement of form. “With the transformation of the clay into the bowl, the lump also loses its form, but fundamentally it loses its formlessness; it gives up a lack, and hence the tolerating here is at once a positive contribution to the development of something higher” (AM, 74).
Dynamis as force or capacity of production is characterized as a “how to,” an effective way of doing. The craftsman’s dynamis places him or her in a state of readiness to perform the work. This readiness is not so much an orientation toward a goal, a wish or striving, as a discrimination and selection of precisely those actions which enable the movement of the produced thing from potential to actuality. Dynamis thus has a third dialectical character. The force for producing is always an exclusion of acts that would be unproductive, a leaving undone of those many mistaken moves that would prevent rather than further the realization of the work. What is not done belongs just as much to the essence of force as what is done.
There is yet a further dialectic of force identified by Aristotle. This is the relation of force to “unforce,” that is to the specific absence which threatens every force. As blindness is to sight, so every unforce is to its corresponding force. This relationship is clear in the fact that performances based on a capacity are not merely done but are always done either well or poorly. The criterion of performance is implicit in the very fact of performance and is derived from the good performance rather than the bad. The bad is condemned by its failure to conform to this criterion. A normative dimension thus inheres in the nature of dynamis.
Finally, there is one last dialectical relation in the structure of dynamis which has to do with the role of the logos in technê as Plato explains it. This is the relation of each specific force to the contraries it mediates. The healing art aims at health by addressing sickness as its problem task. In this, the dynamis of healing, a form of human practice, differs from the dynamis of a natural object such as fire which does indeed turn cold to warm but does not “address” the coldness as such. Fire acts to be sure, but not through a logos but, as we moderns would put it, causally. In medicine’s addressing of sickness can be seen the play of the logos, which signifies the various aspects or phases of the movement in which the work consists as closer or further from completion. The physician acts in this gap between the contraries he addresses to favor one against the other. Nothing of the sort is involved in natural movement.
We have seen the dialectical character of Greek productivism. The word that Heidegger introduces to discuss this is “enantia,” contrary. Contraries appear in relation to every aspect of technê, from the relation of morphê to hyle or dynamis to energeia, to the various forms of steresis (privation) associated with dynamis. But these Greek contraries are not modern antinomies. Each contrary implies its other and comes to rest in its other. Hyle and morphê cannot be thought separately, any more than can dynamis and energeia, force and unforce, movement and rest, doing and not doing. Not only are the contraries mutually implicated, they are engaged in a development, a kinesis with a pre-established telos. It is interesting to note that Heidegger identifies the steresis character of the contraries as a central theme in both Aristotle and Hegel (S, 135, 142). Reconciliation of the contraries, ideal and real, is of course central in both albeit in different ways.
The Greeks live in a world in which everything has its place and achieves the ideal in striving for self-completion according to its own inner tendencies. But this is a world that no longer exists. Modernity consists in the diremption of the contraries into opposing principles. Facts now stand opposed to values, and technê becomes technology, the arbitrary imposition of a measure, a plan, and a goal on raw materials that have no telos and no inner tendencies of their own. Heidegger will attempt to overcome this tragic situation and restore the original harmony.
Heidegger argues that poiêsis, production was the model of all being for the Greeks. This is not to say the Greeks thought that physis, nature itself, was a manufactured object. Rather, it is the structure of production as described above that founds ontology for the Greeks. The essence of production is “being-finished-and-ready, i.e., a kind of being in which motion has arrived at its end” (S, 136). To be finished and complete means to instantiate an essence, the “eidos,” the look. The thing places itself into appearance in the eidos that encompasses its completed and finished form and so enters the world. Presence, ousia, is thus “producedness” and can be analyzed as kinesis in terms of such concepts as morphê and hyle, eidos, telos, and peras.
Of course the analysis can only be applied to being in general with certain modifications to take into account the difference between physis and artifacts. These modifications have to do with the difference between what has its arche in itself and in another. This determines the place of the eidos in the process. The eidos can either guide the craftsman in placing an artifact in the world, or, in the case of physis, actually place itself into the world directly and immediately, without the intervention of another. This self-placing of the eidos into existence is, however, structurally similar to production.
Until the mid 1930s, Heidegger has a primarily positive view of this approach and Being and Time is influenced by it. The production model translates between ancient and existential ontology. At first Heidegger describes Aristotle’s position as more or less identical with the coming analytic of Dasein. For example, in his 1923 lecture on Aristotle he writes: “Thus the toward-which this primordial experience of being aimed at [in Aristotle] was not the domain of being consisting of things in the sense of objects understood in a theoretical manner as facts but rather the world encountered in going about dealings that produce, direct themselves to routine tasks, and use. What is amounts to what has been finished and made ready in the movement of going about the dealings of production (poiêsis), i.e., what has come into a being-on-hand and is now available for certain tendencies to use it. Being means being-produced and, as having been produced, being of significance relative to certain tendencies to have dealings with it, i.e., being-available for them” (127-128). This passage anticipates the later theory of worldhood as the readiness-to-hand of “equipment” rather than the presence-at-hand of things.
However, as he develops his critique of technology, Heidegger begins to argue that the production model is the source of modern technological metaphysics and therefore fundamentally misguided. Already in the period when he is actually writing Being and Time, he begins to retreat from the position sketched in the early Aristotle lecture. He still approves the Greeks’ focus on production but he claims they grasped it inauthentically, in the mode of everyday consciousness, as presence-at-hand (BPP, 110-111). In some of his later works the Greek concept of production is redefined by Heidegger as a purely ideal process of manifesting. Production is cut loose from its common sense roots in the making of artifacts and becomes a synonym for revealing (AP, 222). By 1939, Heidegger is denying that technê is at all helpful in understanding physis, precisely the opposite position from that which he took in his earlier works (AP, 223). In the 1950 lecture on “The Thing” Plato and Aristotle are dismissed for having confused the essence of the thing with the eidos mobilized in the technê of its making (T, 168). Salvation will come from a domain beyond production.
Modernity
We are now ready for the last act in this Heideggerian drama. The main lines of Heidegger’s critique of technology are familiar. I will not belabor it here. Being is “enframed” by the calculative thinking of modern man. We measure, plan, and control ceaselessly, reducing everything, including ourselves, to resources and system components. Nature is “challenged” to deliver up its wealth for arbitrary human ends. It is transformed into a source of energy to be extracted and delivered. But even as man takes himself for the master of being, it is being itself which “challenges” him to challenge beings by incorporating them into technology. Modernity is the total mobilization of the world by humans who are themselves mobilized in the process. This “Ge-stell,” this “enframing” within which man and being are ordered, is now the way in which Being reveals itself. It dissolves all traditions, the linguistic heritage, the fixed meanings on the basis of which people have engaged with the world in the past. Being becomes the object of pure will and the meaning of things derives from their place in the technological system rather than from an eidos.
Yet somehow a “saving power” is said to appear out of this nightmare. What is this saving power and what does it promise? These are the final questions we will address to “The Question Concerning Technology.” Unfortunately, this is precisely where the essay makes the most arbitrary and confusing leaps from theme to theme, often proceeding by punning on words rather than logical argument. The passage in which it is introduced is positively dizzying. I will try to summarize it here.
Heidegger begins with a quotation from Hölderlin which authorizes his initial leap from the idea that enframing is “the danger” to the obscurely connected idea that with the danger a “saving power” grows. “Saving,” we are told, means revealing something in its essence and so, if Hölderlin is right, we ought to be approaching an understanding of the essence of technology even as its danger blocks our understanding of revealing as such. But what is essence? In the case of enframing, it is not a genus under which particular devices would fall. Rather, enframing, like the “bringing forth” of the Greeks, is a revealing. We are “destined” to this technological revealing in a way that blocks the earlier Greek revealing.
This blocking shows up in the collapse of the Greek concept of essence as the permanently enduring, the eidos. “It can never in any way be established that enduring is based solely on what Plato thinks as idea and Aristotle thinks as to ti en einai (that which any particular thing has always been), or what metaphysics in its most varied interpretations thinks as essentia” (QCT, 30). For the “permanently enduring” we should substitute Goethe’s related phrase, the “permanently granting.” “That which endures primally out of the earliest beginning is what grants” (QCT, 31). This mysterious formula means that the revealing itself, as the granting of a world to man, is the ultimate essence from out of which we must think the enframing. The enframing is a revealing and so “grants” man something he could not himself invent, namely beings. The very extremity of the threat implied in this granting can lead us to a fuller understanding of the process of revealing if only we “pay heed to the coming to presence of technology” (QCT, 32).
Never has such a succession of non sequiturs played such an important role in the history of philosophy! Is Heidegger dismissing the Greek concept of essence and substituting a different concept and if so what justifies such a radical revision of one of the foundations of Western philosophy? Surely not a vague etymological argument inspired by Goethe! Why is “revealing,” as a “granting,” now supposed to occupy the conceptual place philosophy has always attributed to “essence” as what endures through change? How can technology, the revealing which precisely blocks awareness of revealing, itself be the bridge to that very awareness? And what is the logical connection between all these themes?
To answer these questions—and it is possible to answer them more or less—it is necessary to consider the difference between the Greek and the modern encounter with being. Heidegger notes that the Greeks discovered being but then failed to ask the question of being. They were blinded by their own discovery which led them no further than an investigation into the nature of beings. They turned too quickly from the fact of the revealing to what was revealed. Here is how Heidegger explains it.
Wonder is the “basic disposition, the one that was compelling at the beginning of Western thinking. It let the question of beings as such become a necessity, though in such a way that it precluded a direct inquiry into alêtheia” (BQP, 149). Wonder directed the Greeks toward the astonishing presence of beings, the unusualness of the most usual, and they responded by seeking to “preserve” being through allowing the essences of beings to appear: “…as moved by wonder, man must gain a foothold in the acknowledgment of what has erupted, and he must see it in a productive seeing of its inscrutable disclosure…” (BQP, 146). Heidegger further explains that “it is clear that this perceiving of beings in their unconcealedness is not a mere gaping, that wonder is carried out rather in a procedure against beings, but in such a way that these themselves precisely show themselves. For that is what technê means: to grasp beings as emerging out of themselves in the way they show themselves, in their outward look, eidos, idea, and, in accord with this, to care for beings themselves and to let them grow, i.e., to order oneself within beings as a whole through productions and institutions” (BQP, 155).
With this the Greeks made the fundamental discovery that the very possibility of knowing things depends on knowing them as…., that is to say, knowing them through their essence. The Greeks explained this with the concept of presence as producedness. Our everyday commerce with the world is based on anticipation. We do not first know individual facts or sense data but rather the “look” we bring to things in engaging with them. In sum, we encounter the “what” of the thing before the thing as the condition for encountering it in all our relations to the real, not just in production proper. This is the background to Plato’s theory of ideas. Heidegger appears to accept a variant of the Platonic position. We must be acquainted, he argues, with the “essence” of things to know them. We must know “houseness” to recognize a house, “birdness” to recognize a bird. All acquaintance with particular facts presupposes an ability to perceive them as something. It is through this “as” that they enter a world (FCM, 335). Thus our experience is constantly guided by concepts. The particulars of sense experience are not what is most real and concrete. What is primary are the ideas that enable those particulars to emerge as what they are.
Of course this only pushes back the problem of understanding our encounter with the world because now we must explain how we “see” the eidos which in turn allows us to see the particulars. Heidegger admits that the realm of essence is “uncertain, shifting, controversial, and groundless,” at least for us moderns (BQP, 73). The encounter with the essences of things, he argues, is a unique kind of intuition, a “seeing which draws forth, a seeing which in the very act of seeing compels what is to be seen before itself” (BQP, 76). In this “productive seeing, a conformity to something pregiven is not possible, because the productive seeing itself first brings about the pregivenness” (BQP, 77).
The concept of a seeing which produces its object has emerged more than once in the history of philosophy. It appears in the scholastic notion of divine creation and is later translated into idealistic terms as “intellectual intuition,” the power of thought to posit its objects. Its most important consequence has no doubt been for aesthetics, where it was introduced by Kant to explain the nature of artistic production. The artist produces the concrete work in all its sensuous details in the very process of conceptualizing it. Heidegger seems to be gesturing in this direction, although, faithful to his phenomenological method, he complicates things by asserting that for the Greeks this productive seeing is actually an uncovering of being in the form of pregiven meanings and not an arbitrary act of creation. “This letting hold sway [of being] is accomplished by exhibiting beings in their forms and modes of presence and by preserving beings therein—occurrences in which poetry as well as painting and sculpture, the act that founds a state, and the worshipping of the gods first obtain their essence…” (BQP, 128).
The Greek revealing is both a noble and a restricted encounter with being. Its nobility lies in the recognition that the forms of beings, the eidos, are not arbitrary products of human will, but arise from being itself. The Greeks knew that Being grants itself to man in a revealing which requires man as a witness. Heidegger comments, “The first task was then to apprehend beings as beings, to install the pure recognition of beings as such, and nothing more. This was quite enough if we consider what was simultaneously grounded with it: the primordial determination of man as that being which, in the midst of beings as a whole, lets beings hold sway in their unconcealedness” (BQP, 128). In sum, the Greeks discovered the basic premises of Heidegger’s philosophy, or rather, Heidegger has rediscovered his own premises in the Greek beginning.
But the restriction limiting the Greeks lies in their inability to get beyond the eidos to its source in a process of revealing they could not conceptualize. They knew the belonging together of Being and man but did not “think” it. Why not? For the Greeks, the discovery of the eidos exhausts the content of human witnessing. It is this turn from Being as revealing to the revealed eidos of beings that eventually leads through the many stages of Western thought to the final culmination in technology.
Heidegger, like the Greeks, affirms both the independent reality of being and the ontological significance of human witnessing, but the precise role of witnessing differs for each of them. Heidegger emphasizes the fact that the Greeks passed without pausing to reflect on the nature of their encounter with being from wonder at being to the invention of the sciences. It was the very strength of the Greeks, their harmonious relation to the world, that blocked their progress toward a deeper understanding. The Greeks did not question the essences they attributed to things and so did not ask how things could appear in the light of their essence. That question, the question of being, can only occur where the very concept of essence is called into question. We ask that question in the modern world because we incessantly take apart and reconstruct the beings around us in the works of technology. This assault on beings does not bring them to completion in pre-given forms but proceeds according to subjectively elaborated plans.
The modern technological revealing
sweeps away all concepts of essence and leaves only a collection of fungible
stuff available for human ordering in arbitrary patterns. We recognize, as the
Greeks did not, the ungrounded nature of the eidos. While they
knew its source to be outside themselves in Being, they had no way of
justifying this insight to the ages to come. “For in the essence of technê, as
required by physis itself, as the occurrence and establishment of the
unconcealedness of beings, there lies the possibility of arbitrariness, of an unbridled positing of goals and thereby the
possibility of escape out of the necessity of the primordial need” (BQP, 155).
Modernity is the unleashing of this arbitrariness in the technological
expression of human will.
Modernity is generally the object of Heidegger’s critique, but he at least implicitly admits that it enables us to go beyond the Greeks in this respect. We have discovered the active involvement of human beings in the meaning of beings even if we express this insight in a distorted form as subjectivism and nihilism. With this we are free to move in two different directions.
We can dismiss essence as merely arbitrary and subjective
with a consequent overlooking of the whole question of being. This is the
modern technological outlook. Modernity aims at a condition “where the
absolutely meaningless is valued as the one and only ‘meaning’ and where
preserving this value appears as the human ‘domination’ of the globe” (AP,
197). The danger of this outlook is not
so much its threat to human survival as the incorporation of human beings
themselves into this “enframing” as mere raw materials alongside things. Lost
in this leveling is not just human dignity, but also awareness of the unique
role of the human being as the site of experience, the locus of world-shaping
encounters with Being.
But
there is a second path opened up by the deconstruction of essences.
The concept of essence, Heidegger argues, refers to what is permanent and
enduring. But just insofar as essences are dissolved in the acid of modernity, the
role of the human being in revealing comes to the fore. It is not nature alone
which reveals Being; human being too is actively involved. The belongingness of
human being and Being in the making of worlds is the only constant that
remains, and recognition of this fact is finally possible in modern times.
Indeed, while shrouding Being in the technological enframing, modernity also
contains the “other possibility…that [man] might experience as his essence his
needed belonging to revealing” (QCT, 26; See
also, 28-29,
40-41). Heidegger’s own philosophy is this recognition. Thus despite Heidegger’s apparent nostalgia for
this premodern past, he never suggests a return to ancient technê. Instead, he
looks forward to a new era in which new gods will enable human beings to
reclaim their place in a world no longer shrouded in a technological order. This
new era will “bring about a change in human nature, accompanied by a
transformation of metaphysics” (WBGM, 209). The new era will use technology but it will not be
technological. It will have a “free relation” to the realm of production rather
than understanding being on the model of productive activity.
With these considerations on the concept of revealing we reach the heart of one of the major difficulties of Heidegger’s thought. The language in which he expresses himself seems strangely twisted. This is not arbitrary but results from his fundamental method. He is attempting to think the Western metaphysical tradition as a whole without being limited to the terms of its latest stage, the stage in which, of course, he is himself situated. How is this possible? By a strict abstention from the forms of thought and language of the tradition. Thus Heidegger must write under constraint. In the background of his thought there is always the unexpressed jousting with the tradition from which he is struggling to free himself. The difficulty for us, his readers, arises where the constraint under which he is writing forbids explaining the outcome of that struggle.
Consider terms such as “revealing” and “concealing.” What do they mean? Clearly, they are substitutes for traditional concepts such as consciousness, which Heidegger’s method forbids him to use in a fundamental ontological sense. Heidegger responds to this difficulty by rejecting the concept of consciousness as it has come to shape the philosophical tradition. The concepts of that tradition, such as subject and object, value and fact, are no longer the explananda but have become the explanandum. But to explain these concepts other concepts are required that do not prejudge all the ontological issues in terms of “modern subjectivism.” The new conceptual apparatus cannot be an arbitrary personal invention. Instead, Heidegger finds the new concepts in the beginning of the tradition as its lost origin. The outcome is the vocabulary of revealing and concealing based on the Greek concepts of alêtheia and physis. This new vocabulary is now supposed to provide a transhistorical framework from out of the very history it explains.
Heidegger could have helped us by saying, “I would like to talk about this or that as you ordinarily understand it, but I can’t use your vocabulary without inheriting the very metaphysical assumptions I must escape. Therefore, I have rephrased the familiar problem in this new way.” We would have been grateful to this imaginary Heidegger, so solicitous of our need for understanding. Unfortunately, this is not the real Heidegger, an inconvenient and unsympathetic fellow who rather self-indulgently plunges us into the cold water of his thought without any support. There, it’s sink or swim!
Many commentators respect his self-limitation. However, an account operating under the constraints Heidegger imposed is unlikely to shed much new light on his meaning. We need to permit ourselves what he did not permit himself, a free movement back and forth across the line dividing his language from that of the tradition. This may enable us to understand some things that remain obscure. Of course there is the risk that Heidegger’s thought will be reduced to the very thing he attempted to escape, metaphysics. But the other risk is that his thought will end up as a scholastic play with language of interest mainly to a narrow circle of dedicated players.
With this in mind, consider again the breakdown of the traditional concept of essence that leads to the saving power. It would be more natural to express Heidegger’s point by saying that today we know that meanings are culturally relative and that this knowledge poses for us the problem of what is ultimately real beyond the bounds of any particular culture. We are infected by history and hence distanced from our own culture sufficiently not to take the concept of essence for granted as did the Greeks. What separates modern from Greek ontology is the self-evident contingency of the eidos on a culture.
But let us look more closely at this formulation. It appears that we moderns both know and do not know the source of the “eidos,” the essences of things. We know it lies in culture because we know it differs from one time and place to another. Culture, as we moderns understand it, is a human creation. Hence the essences that open up worlds and give meaning to things must also be human creations. Meaning and empirical reality, value and fact are split apart forever by this reasoning. But this is precisely where the argument breaks down. It is we moderns who, within the confines of our specific culture, assert the cultural relativity of the essences. In so doing we beg the question. We must be right—the facts are obvious—yet we cannot be right—we cannot judge reality as such on the terms of our particular cultural framework.
There is a problem here. If being is revealed only in culturally specific forms, then culture is more than culture and cannot be explained as a merely subjective human creation overlaying nature or a Kantian thing in itself. If there is nothing but culture, then there simply is no such fixed and independent reality in the background of the various cultural dispensations. Furthermore, what “grants” culture is incommensurate with any concept of human creation in the usual sense. But how then can we think this “culture” which has taken on the role of transcendental source of all meaning, including the meaning of the very concept we use to signify it? Heidegger calls this ultimate source “being.” By this he wants to say that we do not create meaning and impose it on pre-existing and meaningless things in themselves. On the contrary, we are granted meaning by something that lies beyond all human power. Being reveals itself in our encounter with our world and thus we are indeed implicated in the granting but not as the creating and imposing subject that commands a passive reality. Being is also implicated in each cultural dispensation and this alone makes culture possible.
Here we reach the point where we can recognize the “saving power,” the way in which our very nihilism can liberate us. With this realization we can free ourselves from the specifically modern culture that overtakes us in the technological outlook. Instead of seeing our world as mere raw materials and system components, we can see it as a particular way in which being appears. But this way, like all others, is partial, incomplete. Being conceals its other possibilities in revealing one of them. Our common sense cultural relativism is the expression of this truth of being in the language of technology. Only in the very different language of Heidegger’s “history of being” can we grasp the nature of revealing itself and so free ourselves from the limitations of our own time.
Heidegger’s Dilemma
In the struggle to avoid modern subjectivism Heidegger’s vocabulary introduces a puzzling ambiguity. Such physis-derived terms as presence, revealing, bringing into the manifest, bringing forth, signify at one and the same time existence and appearance, the one hinting at materialism, the other idealism. Yet it is well known that Heidegger rejected both materialism and idealism. In this he followed his teacher, Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, but he also believed himself to be following the Greeks, who did not rely on the modern distinction of subject and object from which these ontologies derive. The concept of revealing is supposed to transcend these antinomies. What looks like a confusion to us is in fact a deep insight: our conviction that existence and world are totally independent of appearing is the mistake.
Heidegger argues that human witnessing is implicated in principle in any concept of a world. It is meaningless to talk about a world “in itself” and humans certainly cannot exist without a world. Neither man nor world can be considered the ground or origin of the other. Neither can be dissolved in the other. Rather their co-existence is absolutely fundamental. But this position leads to a paradox. How can being require presence without its dependence on a “besouled” being diminishing its “self-reliance?” Heidegger insists that the presence of a witness “precisely makes it possible for such being to secure this self-reliance in the truth….The independence of things at hand from humans is not altered through the fact that this very independence as such is possible only if humans exist” (AM, 173).
In its original Greek form, the eidos has the independence Heidegger demands but in a misleading objective form. He calls Greek ontology “naïve” for this reason. The harmony of the contraries is only obtained by artificially assigning them to each other. We see immediately “behind” the illusion and notice just how easily they can be split apart. For example, Plato’s idea of the logos of technê assumes an intrinsic connection between an end and a means where we see the two as externally related. This is why Callicles seems right to us despite Socrates’ best arguments. But, Heidegger argues, there is something more complicated going on here that we tend to overlook. Plato and Aristotle’s idea of technê binds the contraries together in a way that can be validated in a phenomenology of our practical engagement with the world, but they lack the means to express their insight properly. As a result they attempt to present it in the everyday language of thinghood. The essential connections they have identified appear accidental in that language, at least they do so to us who are remote from the source of their insight in the revelation given to the Greeks at the origin of Western philosophy.
This limitation is overcome in Being and Time. There the meaning of beings is rooted in Dasein’s care and not in objective forms as for the Greeks. The production model continues to operate but in a phenomenological context. Heidegger presents everyday Dasein as primarily handling tools, i.e. involved in technê. But the equipmental realm, now defined as the “world,” is no longer approached through the structure of the product as it is by Aristotle. Instead, Heidegger develops a phenomenology of Dasein’s use of tools. This approach grounds the eidos in Dasein’s temporality. Dasein projects meaning on the basis of its need to be, that is, to be this or that person engaged with this or that thing or activity in the future. Meaning must be understood in relation to Dasein rather than taken for granted as merely given. But it has the same function as did the eidos for the Greeks in terms of letting beings emerge as something definite.
Sartre would later interpret this approach as a reduction of meaning to human intentions. This was not Heidegger’s idea at all. Rather, care “discloses” the world and with it the meanings of the things in the world. It is not subjective but relates Dasein to a tradition and a language. However, Sartre was not entirely wrong in one important respect. The grounding of meaning in care renders it contingent and indeterminate. Dasein’s relation to the model of production is ambiguous. The human being is not governed by a fixed eidos. Its poiesis is or should be subordinate to a praxis of self-making. Phronesis rather than techne is appropriate here, but a phronesis that works with some unusual materials. Heidegger demands that Dasein think itself as a totality, a finished work so to speak. This it can only do in relation to death. Strangely, the order of steresis and completion in technê is reversed, the privation following rather than leading the process. Authenticity is a practice informed by this sense of completeness. Dasein faces the extreme possibility of its being in resoluteness, by which Heidegger does not mean arbitrary decisions but rather “precisely the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically possible at the time,” that is, the response called for by the situation (BT, 345).
In resoluteness, Dasein intervenes actively in shaping its world, as opposed to inauthentic conformism. But authenticity undermines any fixed definition of things as well. The lack of a fixed essence of man spills over onto the world as Heidegger demonstrates the dependence of meaning on Dasein’s indeterminate future. But do meanings then retain the necessary independence to avoid being reducible to the subject? In other words, does Heidegger’s theory actually fulfill his intention to remain faithful to the initial Greek discovery of revealing?
In Heidegger’s later work, he rejects what he sees as the implicit subjectivism that haunts this early approach. He remains convinced that meaning is not present at hand but now he interprets it through an original concept of history as the advent of truth. The meaning of beings is granted in various contingent forms in the course of history. Each of these forms is an encounter with a partial truth about beings, an encounter which is lived as the structure of the world.
The history of being is a long decline from the original Greek discovery of revealing. To explain this decline, Heidegger begins with a promising argument concerning time. He claims that the Greeks reduced presence, ousia, to what appears in the present moment. This leads to the objectification of the eidos which appears as present at hand in the world even as it reveals the world. A tension develops in the concepts between the dynamic principle of revealing and a static understanding of what is revealed. Latin translations of Greek terms eventually cut them loose from their source in the idea of revealing. The present at hand eidos becomes the “whatness” of the thing, entirely separate from its existence and still later in modern times it finally becomes a merely subjective idea in the mind. With technology subjectivity expresses itself in calculations and plans. This is the ultimate dissolution of the eidos. The human “conquest” of nature now prevails where revealing once was recognized as the dynamic principle of being.
In the context of this analysis, Heidegger
takes up again the theme of revealing in an attempt to overcome the limitations
of both the original Greek formulations and his own efforts in Being and Time. In “The Origin of the
Work of Art” he presents revealing not in relation to Dasein’s care but rather
as a dispensation emerging in the work of art. The emphasis shifts back from
the using of tools to their product. The artist’s technê now participates in disclosing
a world through the work. These reflections on art succeed in de-subjectivizing
the notion of revealing. Meaning emerges from a creative process, a technê that
is rooted in being and includes human activity in an essential capacity. The fact
that this activity is no longer purely individual, but relates to, indeed
founds, a community makes possible a concept of essence with the
required independence. Although now the essences of things are time bound,
historical, unlike for the Greeks, they have a certain definiteness and regain
the dynamic character of a logos as that which rules over and gathers the
things themselves.
With these reflections on art Heidegger provides a promising new model for understanding the revealing of beings. But it turns out to be an empty promise. The solution developed in Being and Time was not historical but applied to Dasein as such. It thus explained modern as well as ancient revealing. The creative process of art occupies the theoretical place of Dasein’s care as the fundamental disclosive activity of man, but it cannot do the work it is assigned. Unfortunately, the new model applies only to premodern times when art had the power of revealing and not to the age of technology in which we live. Heidegger claims that the creative process of art is annihilated by technology. Art is reduced to a marginal “experience” and confined to the aesthetic realm instead of shaping the practice of life. The technological enframing which takes over the formative role does not so much create meanings as destroy them, deworlding things and reducing them to a “objectless” heap. To the extent that it reveals a meaning, what appears is an endless repetition of the same “standing reserve,” Bestand, not the rich variety the Greeks found in their world. This explains the extraordinary vagueness of Heidegger’s discussion of the saving power. All he has to offer is the remote eschatological hope that art can recover the power of revealing. But he does not predict as much. He leaves the question open, and as we will see, this invites other initiatives.
Difficult Reconciliations
If we are saved by the saving power, the underlying ontological harmony between man and being will emerge as the new revealing. This harmony was always already there; Heidegger evokes it first with the notion of being-in-the-world and in his last period with the idea of the “fourfold.” These concepts refer to a more fundamental unity that holds together man and being, subject and object, value and fact prior to their separation in everyday experience. But this unity is always obscured by inauthenticity and technology and cannot be lived fully. What philosophy knows might break through occasionally in the form of authentic resolution, and perhaps philosophy itself, or at least the philosophical life dedicated to “thought” can give an existential weight to insight into the ontological depths. But this is not a revealing considered as the form of life of the age. Salvation would consist in the realization of what philosophy recognizes at that fundamental level. The implicit harmony would become explicit, active in everyday life.
What is the meaning of this appeal to a renewed harmony of
man and being from out of the hell of technological strife? It is a return to
the Greeks, a “new beginning.” Hence Heidegger’s intense interest in the
problem of technê with which the Greeks thought the revealing with utmost
clarity. But there is something peculiar about this intense preoccupation with
the Greeks. Heidegger famously claimed that only modern German is a
“philosophical language” on a par with ancient Greek. The Greeks, he assures
us, are the founding fathers of Western thought. We must return to them for
inspiration to grasp the basic insight which has unfolded even as it
degenerated throughout the last 2500 years of Western history. And so on. Such
idealizations of ancient
Schiller and Hegel proposed a remarkable theory of Greek culture based on the difference between ancient and modern art. They contended that Greek art, and in particular the epic poetry of Homer, revealed a world in which meaning was not in question as it is for us moderns. Instead of appearing as arbitrary inventions of human will, the forms of things, social roles, and the meaning of life were given to the Greeks as true, as there to be discovered. We have won the creativity of the subject but lost the truth of the object. The Greeks possessed a wholeness of life that embraced subject and object, “is” and “ought” in a fruitful and resolvable tension but we are condemned to live them as antinomies, as an unhealed wound in the heart of being. The Greeks were at home in the world and we are homeless. Hegel’s dialectic, which claims to reveal the secret of “being at home with itself in its other,” is an ambitious squaring of this particular philosophical circle (Hegel, 1968: 175).
Such ideas were certainly familiar to any German reader of the classics in Heidegger’s day. But it is a curious fact that they resurfaced in 1916 as contemporary philosophy in a book that excited much comment at the time and was likely known to Heidegger. This book is Lukács’s Theory of the Novel. The central category of Lukács’s analysis of epic literature is “totality,” by which he means not all and everything but rather the unity of the antinomial opposites of modern life. The Greeks lived the totality which we can only represent aesthetically or philosophically. In the Homeric epic there is no fundamental opposition between duty and interest, art and reality, individual and community, between, ultimately, the soul and the world in which it finds itself. Every act and every object in this world are, just as they are, artistic and ethical in their natural form. The gods are companions, not judges of men. The tools and speech of everyday life are beautiful and find literary expression just as they are, without lyrical or illusionary aesthetic transformation. It is this proximity of the ideal and the real that characterizes the Greeks for Lukács.
Lukács’s notion of totality may or may not have influenced Heidegger directly, but the following passage from The Theory of the Novel sounds remarkably like his interpretation of technê.
“Totality as the
formative prime reality of every individual phenomenon implies that something
closed within itself can be completed; completed because everything occurs
within it, nothing is excluded from it and nothing points at a higher reality
outside it, completed because everything within it ripens to its own perfection
and, by attaining itself, submits to limitation. Totality of being is possible
only where everything is already homogeneous before it has been contained by
forms; where forms are not a constraint but only the becoming conscious, the
coming to the surface of everything that had been lying dormant as a vague
longing in the innermost depths of that which had to be given form; where
knowledge is virtue and virtue is happiness, where beauty is the meaning of the
world made visible” (TN, 34).
In classical German philosophy, the idealization of ancient
Quite obviously this is not Heidegger’s solution. His references in the mid 1930s to a “revolution” and a “new beginning” are all euphemisms for Nazism. When he discovers that Hitler’s plans are different from his own he retreats from history into more and more obscure formulations of his goals. Heidegger neither describes the salvation he awaits nor prescribes a path to reach it. This abstention has impressed some readers with his profundity, while others have dismissed Heidegger’s blurry vision as a dangerous mystification. I would like to try a different approach, a kind of immanent critique and synthesis of Heidegger’s reflections on technique. He would no doubt have rejected my interpretation, but it bridges the gap between his thought and that of his student, Marcuse, who also entertained an apocalyptic vision of a post-technological era but went beyond his teacher in sketching a hopeful future. The point of this exercise is to show that implicit in Heidegger’s own theory are the elements of a more concrete critique of technology and projection of its promise than he himself developed.
Let me begin this (no doubt blasphemous) reconstruction of Heidegger’s position by noting the moment of reconciliation in his thought. Heidegger argued that the Greek world still slumbered in the hidden recesses of everyday life, but that it could only be recovered by a radically modern gesture. Thus his analytic of Dasein and worldhood posits a quasi-Greek totality at the basis of human existence in the intimate familiarity and practical engagement with the things of immediate experience. At this basic level, the contraries are complementary, as they are for the Greeks. There are no antinomies of subject and object, value and fact, for Dasein in its everyday commerce with its world as Heidegger presents it in Being and Time.
This “Greek” note in Heidegger’s thought comes
up against a dissonant modern note from the very start. The dissonance takes
various forms throughout his career but always returns to disturb the idyllic
unity of man and world. Contraries continually degenerate into contradictions
both existentially and historically. This is the significance of “fallenness,” inauthenticity,
nihilism. But Heidegger holds out a hope of recovery, a “Verwindung,” at first at the personal level through the resolute
grasping of the time of life, and later through a possible “new beginning” of
the history of the West through which the antinomies of modernity would be left
behind. These different versions of recovery cannot bring about a return to the
happy age of the Greeks but remain within the general framework of modernity.
But they do promise a reconnection with meaning and limit, a recognition of
finitude, and a homecoming of sorts in the midst of modern homelessness.
This notion of reconciliation suggests that beneath the
explicit historical narrative of decline in which Heidegger
situates technique there lies an implicit narrative of a very different sort. His
story could also be told to say that the ancients understood the importance of
Being as the source of meaning, and the moderns the role of human being in its
essential activity. But each age misunderstood its own deepest principle. The
ancients confounded Being with the essences of particular beings. The moderns
confused the essential role of humanity in the process of revealing
with technical command of
nature. Stripped of these misunderstandings and adequately comprehended, this
previous history opens us to what Heidegger claims is “a more original
revealing, and hence...the call of a more primal truth” (QCT, 28). This “turn”
amounts to the revealing of the revealing itself. Obscured throughout history
by the exclusive focus on the things revealed, revealing itself will finally
become visible. The transcendental account Heidegger
proposes will enter existence as a disposition toward being. In sum, we await a
new dispensation in which revealing as such is encountered in its essence. On
this unorthodox reading, “The Question Concerning Technology” would culminate
in a kind of posthistorical synthesis of ancient and modern through
self-consciousness.
But this is a familiar figure of thought that goes
back to Hegel: the “end of history” as history aware of itself. The young Marx repeats this figure in
the notion of communism as a “dream” from which the world need only awaken to
possess its reality. The implicit structuring of Heidegger’s essay on
technology around the figure of self-consciousness suggests a way of reading him
against the grain of his own self-understanding. This quasi-Hegelian reading is
certainly untrue to other themes in Heidegger’s thought, the very themes that
led him into complicity with Nazism and later to a completely apolitical
conception of a new beginning. Nevertheless, the Hegelian reading is not
arbitrary. A student following Heidegger’s courses in the late 1920s and early
1930s might easily have understood him in this way.
Indeed, Hegel’s dialectic suggests a solution to the central problem of Heidegger’s later work, the construction of a specifically modern relation of man to being that can replace both Greek bringing forth and the modern Gestell. This is the central task Heidegger must address as he becomes dissatisfied with the solution offered in Being and Time. But despite his long struggle with the problem, his later philosophy disappoints precisely on this point.
Although Heidegger hopes for a new
dispensation, his reflections on how meaning would arise in that context are
theoretically opaque, evocative and poetic, but resistant to philosophical
elucidation. We go from “thinking” to “thanking” but never discover a mediation
between man and being, some new way, after the defeat of art, in which they can
join creatively in the making of a modern world rich in meaning again. The late
descriptions of the fourfold appear to offer an ontological utopia which cancels
the very notion of revealing that was Heidegger’s unique contribution. Yet
without some notion of mutual mediation of man and being thought falls behind
the modern insight into the active role of the subject. Simply waiting around
for art to regain its power in a new dispensation seems a sad default on the
promise of the Western philosophical tradition. A never quite acknowledged
religious impulse hovers in the background.
The Hegelian alternative focuses
on life as a conflictual process of self-making leading to a harmonious
outcome. In its Marxist variant, this solution promises a new era through
historical action. Where would Heidegger have ended up had he based his one
intervention in history not on the existential notion of resoluteness but on
the technê of historical self-production, the internal tensions and conflicts
driving history toward the realization of its potential? Certainly, his
trajectory would have been quite different. But had he moved in this direction
it would be difficult to distinguish his position from Lukács’s Hegelian version
of reconciliation through struggle. There is enough similarity that it could
occur to Herbert Marcuse to write a doctoral dissertation in which Hegel’s
thought is reconstructed in a Heideggerian framework as the implicit “solution”
to the problem of modernity. Marcuse reconstitutes the concept of essence
through the dialectic without recourse to an improbable revival of the
revealing power of art. This astonishing attempt to combine Hegel and Heidegger
is the subject of the next chapter.
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