Skip to main content
Log in

Towards the origin of modern technology: reconfiguring Martin Heidegger’s thinking

  • Published:
Continental Philosophy Review Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Martin Heidegger’s radical critique of technology has fundamentally stigmatized modern technology and paved the way for a comprehensive critique of contemporary Western society. However, the following reassessment of Heidegger’s most elaborate and influential interpretation of technology, “The Question Concerning Technology,” sheds a very different light on his critique. In fact, Heidegger’s phenomenological line of thinking concerning technology also implies a radical critique of ancient technology and the fundamental being-in-the-world of humans. This revision of Heidegger’s arguments claims that “The Question Concerning Technology” indicates a previous unseen ambiguity with respect to the origin of the rule of das Gestell. The following inquiry departs from Heidegger’s critique of modern technology and connects it to a reassessment of ancient technology and Aristotle’s justification of slavery. The last part of the paper unfolds Heidegger’s underlying arguments in favor of continuity within the history of technology. According to these interpretations, humans have always strived to develop “modern” technology and to become truly “modern” in the Heideggerian sense. The danger stemming from the rule of das Gestell is thus not only transient and solely directed toward contemporary Western society, but also I will argue that humans can only be humans as the ones challenged by the rule of das Gestell.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Heidegger (1977a, p. 327). See also: “A mindfulness of what transpires today is always too short-sighted. What is essential is mindfulness of the beginning as it anticipates its end and still includes ‘today’ as the extension of the end—and this in such a manner that what is today becomes being-historically manifest only from the beginning” Heidegger (1999, p. 31).

  2. For an overview of the dominant Heidegger research on technology see: Glazebrook (2000), Hubig et al. (2007), Rojcewicz (2006), Ruin (2010), Thomä (2003), Zimmerman (1990) and Scharff and Dusek (2003).

  3. Heidegger (1977a, b p. 318).

  4. Because the English translation of das Gestell, the enframing, does not refer to a specific “stand” pertaining to the German word stellen, I shall continue to use the concept “Gestell” to characterize what Heidegger means by the essence of modern technology. Another translation of das Gestell, which would call attention to this feature, would be “set-up.”

  5. Heidegger (1977a, b p. 327).

  6. Ibid., p. 322.

  7. Heidegger (1977a, p. 321).

  8. Ibid., p. 316.

  9. Idem, emphasis added.

  10. Heidegger (1977a, p. 313ff).

  11. Finley (1980, p. 67f).

  12. Garnsey (1996, p. 108f). See Peter Garnsey analysis of Aristotle’s notion of a “natural slave” and Finley (1980, p. 9f).

  13. Aristotle (1984, 1253b).

  14. Kalcyk (1982, p. 167ff): „Am Anfang des Bergbaus stand der Tagebau, wobei zu Tage ausstreichende Lager aufgeschlossen wurden. Neben den vorkommen gediegenen Erzes war der im Gestein gebundene Bleiglanz, aus welchem Silber und Blei gewonnen wurde, für die Bergleute von Bedeutung. Es war auf Grund seines höheren spezifischen Gewichts für einen erfahrenen Hauer leicht von tauben Gestein zu unterscheiden. Von Bedeutung war ferner, daß die Begleitmineralien des Bleiglanzes, Zinkblende, Pyrit, Eisenkies, Arsenkies und Schwefelantimon bei ihrer Zersetzung eine rotbraune Oxidationsfarbe entwickeln und af diese Weise das Ausstreichen eines Lagers an der Oberfläche anzeigten; dies war den antiken Prospektoren schon bekannt […] Auf diese Weise entstanden die eigentümlichen gewundenen Gänge, die häufig als Beleg für die unmenschlichen Arbeitsbedingungen unter Tage angeführt werden“ (emphasis added).

  15. Here it is also interesting to notice that the Heidegger scholar R. Rojcewicz in his book The Gods and Technology (2006) accepts the commonly held opinion of the distinction between ancient and modern technology, which I have laid out in the first section. As Rojcewicz strives however, to explain the meaning of “challenging” pertaining to modern technology, he does so in a way that is compatible with what I have identified as characteristics of ancient technology, i.e., Rojcewicz definition of “challenging” could also be used to describe the treatment of ancient slaves: “Heidegger begins by characterizing the attitude of modern technology as a ‘challenging’ (Herausfordern), meant in the sense of a challenging duel. Duelling stems from an imperious and adolescent-minded bravado, and to challenge someone to a duel is to say: ‘I demand that you come out here and give me satisfaction.’ What is to be satisfied, of course, is the person’s claim that he has a right to take the life of the other. Now, duelling is done honourably. That is, the challenger exposes himself to the danger of being killed himself. The other man is given a chance to defend himself. For Heidegger, not only is modern technology a challenging, it is a dishonourable one; nature is given no chance to defend itself and is instead forced to give satisfaction” Rojcewicz (2006 p. 71, emphasis added). Thus, in ancient Greece, it can be said that slaves could be challenged in the exact same way as Rojcewicz describes the challenging of nature by modern technology.

  16. See Peter Garnsey’s book, Ideas of slavery from Aristotle to Augustine, where he writes: “Chattel slavery has been historically a rare mode of unfreedom. But no other labour system offered a proprietor such flexibility and control over his labour force as did chattel slavery…Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC is the best-known of the Greek city-states whose economies were bases on chattel slavery” Garnsey (1996, p. 2ff, emphasis added). And: “A slave was property. The slaveowner’s rights over his slave-property were total, covering the person as well as the labour if the slave. The slave was kinless, stripped of his or her old social identity in the process of capture, sale and deracination, and denied the capacity to forge new bonds of kinship through marriage alliance. These are the three basic components of slavery” Garnsey (1996, p. 1).

  17. Lauffer (1979) and Kalcyk (1982).

  18. Aristotle (1984, 1253b, emphasis added). See also: “And also the usefulness of slaves diverge little from that of animals; bodily service for the necessities of life is forthcoming from both, from slaves and from domestic animals alike” Aristotle 1254b.

  19. Wiedemann (1980, p. 15).

  20. Heidegger (1977a, p. 322).

  21. Xenophon quoted in Wiedemann (1980, p. 166): “Let us consider how masters behave towards slaves of this sort. Is it not the case that they control any inclinations towards lechery by starving them? And stop them from stealing by locking up the places from which they might take things? Prevent them from running away by putting them in chains? Force the laziness out of them with beatings? Or what do you do when you find you have someone like that among your slaves? I inflict every kind of punishment upon him—said Aristippos—until I can force him to serve properly.”

  22. Heidegger (1977a, p. 323).

  23. See also Riis (2008a, p. 292).

  24. Heidegger (1977a, p. 315).

  25. Idem.

  26. Kalcyk (1982). See also one of Heidegger’s phenomenological descriptions of the rule of das Gestell in “The Question Concerning Technology,” in which he maintains that the rule of das Gestell is manifest in viewing the earth as a resource. The challenging revealing defining the rule of das Gestell thus also applies to ancient silver mining. “In contrast, a tract of land is challenged in the hauling out of coal and ore, the earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently than it did when to set it in order still meant to take care of and maintain…. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be unleashed either for destructive or for peaceful purposes” Heidegger (1977a, p. 320).

  27. Heidegger (1977a, p. 317, emphasis added).

  28. Trish Glazebrook also sees this crucial feature and identifies a fundamental similarity between ancient technology and the essence of modern science: “The projective representation definitive of ancient [techne] is present in the essence of modern science. It projects an understanding and determination onto nature in its representational thinking, basic concepts, and experimental method. Only because the essence of science is thus already collapsed into the essence of technology can technology present the illusion that it is applied science.” Glazebrook (2000, p. 246f).

  29. Furthermore Heidegger has a conceptual problem when he talks about “setting free” and “challenging” something, which has not yet been revealed, i.e., when he speaks of a kind of intentionality before there is an “object”. He thus either undermines the primacy of the concept of alêtheia or the effect of the essence of technology.

  30. It is my claim that the history of metaphysics in connection to Heidegger’s understanding of the makeability of being (‘machination’) may be interpreted as supporting an alternative and more primally thought genealogy of das Gestell that connects the origin of modern technology with the “first beginning of Western thinking” in Greek antiquity. As such, I interpret Heidegger’s version of the history of metaphysics in agreement with what I would like to call the second genealogy of modern technology. To understand the development of a modern technology such as the lighter, one needs to see that already in antiquity there was a strive towards controlling fire and to have it under command. Over centuries this gradually became possible, but the antique household had already revealed nature as a resource for making fire and heat for warmth and cooking. Due to this initial revealing and understanding of nature, it also seems certain that ancient Greek people would have rejoiced about the possession of a modern lighter, as it reflects their own line of thinking and attains the goal of making fire controllable.

  31. Heidegger (1999, p. 88ff). Till Platte understands this clear connection between modern and ancient technology in his work on Heidegger Die Konstellation des Übergangs: Technik und Würde bei Heidegger, but he refrains from criticizing ancient technology and instead tries to interpret what is “modern” without contrasting it from what is “ancient.” See Platte (2004, p. 175). In this way he strives to describe a historical concept without a historical framework, which seems to me to be a misguided approach.

  32. Ibid., p. 88. See also Hans Ruin (2010, p. 185, emphasis added): “In Greek metaphysics being is thought, in its general essence, as something produced and grasped in language through its eidos, its visible form. And this way of making being appear, stand forth and thus be true, Heidegger continues, is the way of technê. So the technological understanding of being is in fact what we could call the basic Greek model of understanding being, the one according to which Greek metaphysics built its fundamental conceptual structure.”

  33. Ibid., p. 92.

  34. Heidegger (2002, p. 128).

  35. Heidegger (1998, p. 214ff), Ruin (2010, p. 187) and Hubig et al. (2007, p. 38).

  36. See also Riis (2011).

  37. Heidegger (1977a, p. 324).

  38. Heidegger (1977b, p. 151ff).

  39. Heidegger (1962, p. 78ff).

  40. Idem.

  41. Ibid., p. 100, emphasis added.

  42. Heidegger (1977a, p. 320ff). See also Lucker (2007, p. 199).

  43. Heidegger (1962, p. 105ff).

  44. See also Bruno Latour (1993), who based on the same insights reaches the opposite conclusion, namely that “humans never have been modern.” Based on my interpretation of Heidegger however, Latour is wrong in making this claim.

  45. Ruin (2010, p. 186).

  46. Heidegger (1962 p. 114ff, emphasis added).

  47. Ibid p. 101. See also: “The nature of the ready-to-hand does anticipate the notion of standing reserve” Ihde (1979, p. 124). Compare as well Graham Harman’s description of the transition from ready-to-hand to present-at-hand: “In the first instance [ready-to-hand], every object is obliterated, withdrawing into its tool-being in the contexture of the world. In this way, the individual objects are smothered and enslaved, emerging into the sun only in the moment of their breakdown” Harman (2002, p. 45, emphasis added).

  48. Riis (2008b, p. 123). Compare also with the origin of the principal framework that needs to be in place in order for human thinking to work, which transgresses the modern epoch.

  49. In this connection, a comparison with Heidegger’s famous notion of “das Man” and his critique of humanism in “the letter on humanism” with the life under the rule of das Gestell would be worthwhile, yet it is beyond the scope of the present article.

References

  • Aristotle. 1984. Physics. In the complete works of Aristotle, 315–446. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Finley, M.I. 1980. Ancient slavery and modern ideology. London: Chatto and Windus.

    Google Scholar 

  • Garnsey, Peter. 1996. Ideas of slavery from Aristotle to Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Glazebrook, Trish. 2000. Heidegger’s philosophy of science. New York: Fordham University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harman, Graham. 2002. Tool-being: Heidegger and the metaphysics of objects. Chicago: Open Court.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and time. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heidegger, Martin. 1977a. The question concerning technology. In Basic writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, 311–341. New York: Harper & Row.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heidegger, Martin. 1977b. The origin of the work of art. In Basic writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, 143–212. New York: Harper & Row.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heidegger, Martin. 1998. Pathmarks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heidegger, Martin. 1999. Contributions to philosophy: From enowning. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heidegger, Martin. 2002. Supplements: From the earliest essays to being and time and beyond.

  • Hubig, Christoph, et al. 2007. Handeln und Technik—Mit und ohne Heidegger. Berlin: Lit Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ihde, Don. 1979. Technics and praxis. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kalcyk, Hansjörg. 1982. Untersuchungen zum attischen Silberbergbau: Gebietstruktur, Geschichte und Technik. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang.

    Google Scholar 

  • Latour, Bruno. 1993. We have never been modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lauffer, Siegfried. 1979. Die Bergwerkssklaven von Laureion. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lucker, Andreas. 2007. Dinge–Zeuge–Werke. Technik und Kunst bei Heidegger. In Handeln und Technik—Mit und ohne Heidegger, ed. Chr Hubig, et al., 193–210. Münster: Duncker & Humblot.

    Google Scholar 

  • Platte, Till. 2004. Die Konstellation des Übergangs: Technik und Würde bei Heidegger. Münster: Duncker & Humblot.

    Google Scholar 

  • Riis, Søren. 2008a. The symmetry between Bruno Latour and Martin Heidegger: The technique of turning a police officer into a speed bump. Social Studies of Science 38: 285–301.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Riis, Søren. 2008b. The question concerning thinking. In New waves in philosophy of technology, ed. Jan Kyrre B. Olsen, et al., 123–145. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Riis, Søren. 2011. Zur Neubestimmung der Technik: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Martin Heidegger. Tübingen: Francke Verlag.

  • Rojcewicz, R. 2006. The gods and technology. New York: SUNY Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ruin, Hans. 2010. Ge-stell: Enframing as the essence of technology. In Martin Heidegger key concepts, ed. Bret W. Davis. Davis. Durham: Acumen Publishing Limited.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scharff, Robert C., and Val Dusek. 2003. Introduction to Part IV: Heidegger on technology. In Philosophy of technology: The technological condition: An anthology, ed. Robert C. Scharff, and Val Dusek, 247–251. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thomä, Dieter. 2003. Heidegger Handbuch. Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Metzler.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wiedemann, Thomas. 1980. Greek and roman slavery. Florence, KY: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zimmerman, Michael. 1990. Heidegger’s confrontation with modernity: Technology, politics and art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Prof. Robert C. Scharff for the critical, yet very constructive comments on preliminary drafts of this article. Furthermore, I’m thankful to Therese Hauge and Anna Glasser for helping me with the copy-editing.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Søren Riis.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Riis, S. Towards the origin of modern technology: reconfiguring Martin Heidegger’s thinking. Cont Philos Rev 44, 103–117 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-011-9170-0

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-011-9170-0

Keywords

Navigation