Abstract
This essay examines Heidegger’s reflections on the essence of technology in the context of his remarks on power and planetarism. Heidegger’s approach to the essence of technics is often misunderstood as a “critique” of technology, while, in fact, Heidegger makes it explicit that the essence of technology (Technik) is nothing technological. It is not to be confused or identified with technology, techno-science, production, or technological products but approached instead as the originary modality of revealing characteristic of the modern, increasingly globalized, world after the Enlightenment. That is why Heidegger on technology should be understood in relation to the question of an alternative mode of revealing, which Heidegger terms poietic. Though Heidegger’s writings date from half a century ago, since what he calls the technic revealing only keeps intensifying, the exigency of the poetic becomes all the more apparent.
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Notes
- 1.
All preliminary translations of quotations from Gesamtausgabe, vol. 98, are mine.
- 2.
This point is discussed repeatedly throughout Heidegger’s texts written after World War II, whether published or unpublished during his lifetime. The most widely known instance of such discussion can be found in “The Question Concerning Technology”: “The current conception of technology, according to which it is a means and a human activity, can therefore be called the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology” (Heidegger 1993, 312).
- 3.
This term comes to prominence in Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) and is prevalent throughout the so-called Ereignis manuscripts, composed between 1936 and 1944. The understanding of Machenschaft in relations to Machen (to make), Machbarkeit (makeability), and Macht (power), is discussed in most detail in volume 66 of the Gesamtausgabe, entitled Besinnung.
- 4.
- 5.
In contemporary German, Anwesen occurs as a noun, meaning “estate” or “property,” though the Grimms’ dictionary lists its meaning as presence (“praesentia, gegenwart, aufenthalt.” http://woerterbuchnetz.de/cgi-bin/WBNetz/wbgui_py?sigle=DWB&mode=Vernetzung&lemid=GA05218#XGA05218)
- 6.
This discussion forms the linchpin of the presentation in “The Question Concerning Technology,” see Heidegger 1993, 319–322.
- 7.
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- 8.
In fact (though this is the point I am not going to develop here), Heidegger’s claim is that those ways of thinking, the different humanisms accumulated through the ages, whether Greco-Roman or later Christian in their inspiration, including Marxism and existentialism, cannot counter the force of the technic emergence in modernity. Moreover, most pronounced in the figure of what Heidegger calls Christentum, such thinking crucially contributes and plays into the shaping of the modern technics. Christentum, “Christendom,” does not describe in Heidegger the domain of faith or religion, or the scope of the power of Christian churches or Christian faith. Christentum is a more capacious domain, which holds sway over what the human being is disclosed to be, channeling and shaping what it is allowed to emerge as, namely a rational animal, a created and living being endowed with reason, soul, spirit, and so on. All the attempts to re-form the human being and rescue it from the dominant figure of the human stockpile of resources on standby, amounts to beautifications or additions that not only do not alter what the human is to be but in fact continue, as they have done historically, to play a crucial, if often concealed, contributing role, for instance, in tandem with the development and flow of capital, in bringing the human to reveal itself as a being intrinsically capable of being a resource.
- 9.
In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger suggests that this alternative would no longer be technic in the modern sense but rather be a “poietic” (poietisch) revealing, evocative of the more capacious Greek sense of techne, which extended to bringing forth truth into appearance and to “the poiesis of the fine arts” (Heidegger 1993, 339).
- 10.
“Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being. Man loses nothing in this ‘less’; rather, he gains in that he attains the truth of Being. He gains the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by Being itself into the preservation of Being’s truth.” “Letter on Humanism” (Heidegger 1993, 245).
References
Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. 2019. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Kompetenzzentrum Trier. http://dwb.uni-trier.de/de/. Accessed 27 July 2019.
Heidegger, Martin. 1954/2015. The History of Beyng. Trans. William McNeill and Jeffrey Powell. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
———. 1954. Was heist Denken? Pfullingen: Neske.
———. 1993. Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
———. 1997. Besinnung (1938/39), Gesamtausgabe, vol. 66. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
———. 2012. Die Geschichte des Seyns, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 69. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
———. 2018. Anmerkungen VI–IX, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 98. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
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Ziarek, K. (2020). Heidegger on Technics, Power, and the Planetary. In: Wróbel, S., Skonieczny, K. (eds) Atheism Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34368-2_5
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