colony - heidegger and the question of technological essentialism.pdf

© 2009. Idealistic Studies, Volume 39, Issues 1–3. ISSN 0046-8541. pp. 23–34

CoNCerNINg TeChNology: heIdegger aNd The QueSTIoN of TeChNologICal eSSeNTIalISm

Tracy Colony

Abstract: martin heidegger’s 1953 lecture “The Question Concerning Technol-ogy” has been one of the most influential texts in english language philosophy of technology. however, within this field heidegger’s understanding of technol-ogy is widely seen to be a conventional essentialist account of technological phenomena. In this essay, I argue that a close reading of what heidegger exactly demarcated as the essence of technology can be seen to limit the degree to which heidegger’s understanding of technology should be interpreted as a traditional form of technological essentialism.

The essence of modern technology shows itself in what we call enframing. But simply to point to this is still in no way to answer the question concerning technology.1

martin heidegger’s 1953 lecture “The Question Concerning Technology”2 remains one of the most influential texts in english language philosophy of technology.3 however, despite its extensive reception, heidegger’s essay is still widely seen as an essentialist interpretation of technology. This charge of essentialism has been recently reasserted by such philosophers of technology as andrew feenberg and Peter-Paul Verbeek.4 even philosophers more sympathetic to heidegger’s views on technology such as Iain Thomson have conceded that the essay offers, at best, a largely reductive account of technology: “heidegger does seem to be a kind of technological one-dimensionalist.”5 unquestionably, heidegger’s essay presents technological phenomena as having an essence which shows itself at the level of what he terms “enframing”: “The essence of modern technology shows itself [zeigt sich] in what we call enframing [Ge-stell]” (BW: 328; fT: 27). for heidegger, enframing names the specific manner of revealing which characterizes beings as a whole within the current epoch of the history of being. however, what has often been overlooked is the fact that heidegger’s description of the essence of technology as enframing is merely an initial and diagnostic stage of this essay and does not encapsulate the entire scope of what heidegger understood as the essence of technology.

While heidegger often states that the essence of technology lies in enframing, this is not the full extent of what is encompassed by heidegger’s understanding of the essence of technology. rather than culminating in heidegger’s descriptions of the particular manner of revealing characteristic of enframing, the essence of technology is further defined at the level of what constitutes the essence of enframing. This essence of enframing is what heidegger refers to in this essay as the essence of truth itself. The essence of truth is not

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described in terms of revealing, but rather, more primordially in terms of what heidegger designates as “the mystery of all revealing” (BW: 338). While many readings of this essay have interpreted heidegger as simply equating the essence of technology with enframing as a granted historical continuity of revealing, I will argue that heidegger in fact ultimately defines the essence of technology in terms of the essence of truth itself. accordingly, it is only within this wider context that the charges of essentialism in heidegger’s understand-ing of technology can be adequately evaluated.

my argumentation is structured in three sections. In the first section, I present the common critique of heidegger’s essay as essentialist. In the second section, I argue that the charge of essentialism is indeed valid for heidegger’s initial description of technol-ogy at the level of enframing, however, it is not valid for his full definition of the essence of technology as the essence of truth itself. In the final section, in light of my reading of the essence of technology as the essence of truth itself, I make a suggestion for better understanding heidegger’s much questioned depiction of technology as containing both the most extreme danger and also what might save.

Imartin heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” was first translated into english in 1977.6 unquestionably, the foremost criticism which has dominated the eng-lish language reception of this work has been the charge that heidegger’s approach to technology is essentialist in that it explains individual technological phenomena as the expression of a single metaphysical essence. The major difficulty which this definition of technology creates is that the essence of technology at the level of metaphysical being, i.e., enframing, characterizes every individual instance of technology in advance and thus leads to a reductive and one-dimensional account of all technological phenomena. The recent work of Peter-Paul Verbeek is representative of this concern: “Specific technologies are secondary, for him, with respect to the ‘essence’ of technology, and only from this ‘essence’ can technology be understood. heidegger does not look at technology ontically but ontologically, regarding the former as derived from the latter. When he speaks about technology, he means not specific technologies but rather the Gestell.”7 however, while heidegger indeed initially grounds individual instances of technology in the Gestell, what has often been overlooked is that this is not the final level at which heidegger thinks the relation of individual beings to the essence of technology.

for heidegger, the way in which enframing constitutes the essence of technology is not to be understood in terms of the unchanging uniformity which characterized the Platonic idea or the traditional concept of essentia. Nor is enframing to be understood as a mere genus underlying all instances of technology. rather, enframing is the essence of technology in the sense of a specific historical continuity of revealing that has been granted by being. however, this granted historical continuity is not to be understood as the full determination of what heidegger understood as the essence of technology. even those more nuanced readings which locate the essence of technology in its character as having been granted, such as those of hubert dreyfus and richard rojcewicz, still remain within the foreground of heidegger’s full determination of the essence of technology.8 In addition to the particular manner in which enframing shows itself as the essence of

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technology, the full sense of the essence of technology is only first arrived at with heide-gger’s further designation of the essence of technology as “mysterious” (BW: 333) and “ambiguous” (BW: 338). however, the importance of these descriptions of the essence of technology have often been overlooked because it would seem that the essence of technology is simply identical with the totalizing grasp of enframing which exactly does not admit of any mystery or ambiguity.

While heidegger clearly describes individual instances of technology in terms of meta-physical being as enframing, what heidegger understands by the essence of technology is not simply identical with enframing. The indeed reductive grounding of technological beings at the level of enframing is merely a diagnostic and initial characterization. however, in the secondary literature it is often maintained that heidegger simply equates the essence of technology with enframing: “In the Gestell, according to heidegger, the essence of technology is to be found.”9 “The central claim in heidegger’s view of technology is that its non-metaphysical essence lies in enframing [Gestell].”10 “heidegger understands the essence of technology in terms of the various interconnected moments of a willful Stellen. gathering these forms of Stellen together, heidegger names the essence of technology with the word: Ge-stell.”11 Iain Thomson has even supported this view by misquoting heidegger: “Thus, as heidegger bluntly states in ‘The age of the World Picture’ (1938), ‘the essence of technology . . . is identical with the essence of contemporary metaphysics.’ In other words, the referent of heidegger’s phrase ‘the essence of technology’ is our cur-rent constellation of historical intelligibility, ‘enframing’ (das Gestell) an historical ‘mode of revealing’ in which things increasingly show up as resources to be optimized.”12 The sentence which Thomson misquotes actually reads: “machine technology still remains the most visible outgrowth of the essence of modern [neuzeitlichen] technology, an essence which is identical with the essence of modern [neuzeitlichen] metaphysics.”13 rather than bluntly equating the essence of technology itself with contemporary metaphysics, what heidegger is equating is modern technology with modern metaphysics. While it is indeed correct that one aspect of the essence of technology shows itself as enframing, it is an unwarranted assumption that this encompasses or is simply synonymous with the whole of what heidegger defines as the essence of technology.

When the breadth of heidegger’s questioning toward the essence of technology is seen as extending only between beings and enframing as the granted destiny of a particular manner of revealing, a grave constriction in the scope of heidegger’s understanding of the essence of technology takes place. The inevitable conclusion which arises from these constrictive framings is that heidegger’s account of technology is ultimately one-dimensional in its reduction of all technological phenomena to expressions of this one metaphysical essence. This conclusion is also drawn by Thomson: “Nevertheless, the question of whether heidegger is a technological one-dimensionalist remains; and the answer, I think, is a qualified yes. Why? Because, as we have seen heidegger holds that the essence of technology is nothing less than the ontological self-understanding of the age.”14 While this assessment is undeniably correct, it is also crucially insufficient in that it does not take into account heidegger’s descriptions of the deeper character of the es-sence of technology as the essence of enframing itself. What has been overlooked in such readings is the fact that heidegger describes the essence of technology as ambiguous,


i.e., as both the manner of revealing characteristic of enframing and, more primordially, the deeper, mysterious essence of truth itself which is not merely identical with a specific historical continuity of revealing. While enframing at once obfuscates this more originary dimension of truth, enframing at a deeper level retains an unbroken structural link to this primordial sense of truth as its own-most proper essence.15 heidegger’s demarcation of the essence of technology includes both of these aspects. as I will now argue, it is only when this duplicity within heidegger’s understanding of the essence of technology is properly taken into account that the traditional charge of essentialism can be more ad-equately evaluated.

IIheidegger’s question concerning technology is clearly structured as a question regarding the essence of technology. When the scope of this question is understood as extending only between technological beings and the metaphysical aspect of the essence of technology, heidegger’s position can indeed be seen as essentialist in that, at this level, technological beings are reduced to expressions of a single metaphysical essence. however, this provi-sional framing of technology within the domain of metaphysics is not heidegger’s final determination of the meaning of technology but exactly what heidegger is attempting to bring into question by further inquiring into the essence of enframing itself. The domain in which this further determination of enframing takes place is the dimension of originary concealment and unconcealment from out of which the specific mode of revealing charac-teristic of enframing is made possible. heidegger repeatedly describes enframing as what “blocks” and “endangers” this more original dimension of truth: “[e]nframing challenges forth into the frenziedness of ordering that blocks every view into the propriative event of revealing and so radically endangers the relation to the essence of truth” (BW: 338). however, what has often been overlooked is that what enframing endangers is exactly the truth of its own essence. more original than enframing’s occultation of the essence of truth is the unbroken structural link to this essence as what is own-most to enframing itself. from this perspective, what is most essential about technology is not enframing, but rather the ontological promise and freedom of originary truth which extends beyond the totalizing enclosure of metaphysics.16 This expansion of the question of technology beyond its metaphysical framing is announced by heidegger’s description of the essence of technology as ambiguous.

When heidegger states that “[t]he essence of technology is in a lofty [hohen] sense ambiguous [zweideutig]” (BW: 338; fT: 37), this ambiguity is not to be understood as a mere lack of clarity, but rather in the sense that the essence of technology is a constellation of two diverging aspects held within a more originary relatedness. heidegger would later express this concurrent instance of two aspects by saying: “It [Gestell] offers a double aspect, one might say, a Janus head.”17 This is the reason why heidegger can simultane-ously claim that “[t]he essence of technology lies in [beruht im] enframing” (BW: 331; fT: 29) and that the essence of technology “is mysterious” (BW: 333). for heidegger, the essence of technology is not reducible to its metaphysical visibility but additionally must be thought in its deeper structural relatedness to what he terms “the mystery.” This sense of mystery should be interpreted within the context of heidegger’s terminological


employment of this expression in his earlier descriptions of the essence of truth to designate the most original sense of withdrawal which is prior to, and yet opens the possibility of, any specific configuration of revealing.

heidegger’s account of the essence of technology in terms of freedom and mystery are consistent with his previous meditations on the essence of truth in his earlier essay by that name: “freedom . . . is the essence of truth (in the sense of the correctness of presenting) only because freedom itself originates from the primordial essence of truth, the rule of the mystery.”18 In the essay on technology, a sense of mystery within the essence of truth is also described as “that which frees” (BW: 330). accordingly, it is this ontological sense of freedom within the essence of technology as the essence of truth which the entire essay is directed at establishing a relation to: “[W]hen we once open ourselves expressly to the essence of technology we find ourselves unexpectedly taken into a freeing claim” (BW: 331; heidegger’s italics). however, this double aspect of heidegger’s understanding of the essence of technology has often been overlooked with the effect that every description of the essence of technology is taken as referring to the specific revealing characteristic of enframing. In fact, as with the above example, many of heidegger’s references are referring to the deeper aspect of the essence of technology as the essence of truth itself. unquestionably, one of the reasons why heidegger’s 1953 lecture has been approached as merely equating the revealing characteristic of enframing with the essence of technology itself is that it is widely assumed that the 1953 lecture is merely an expanded version of heidegger’s 1949 Bremen lecture entitled “The enframing.”

heidegger always acknowledged that “The Question Concerning Technology” grew out of his december 1949 Bremen lecture cycle “Insight into What Is.” This lecture cycle consisted of the individual lectures “The Thing,” “The enframing,” “The danger,” and “The Turning.” This close relation is demonstrated by heidegger’s decision in 1962 to publish “The Question Concerning Technology” along with the fourth lecture, “The Turning.” moreover, in the preface to this edition, heidegger described his 1953 lecture as an enlarged version of the second lecture. This remark has lead commentators to view the whole of his 1953 lecture as also merely an articulation of the enframing aspect of the essence of technology. however, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that the 1953 lecture is entirely rewritten and bares almost no resemblance to the second 1949 lecture. moreover, heidegger would later explicitly caution against reading “The Question Concerning Technology” as simply reducible to an expanded version of the second Bremen lecture: “In the lecture on technology which is not merely another version of the lecture just mentioned, “das gestell.”19 rather than looking only to this second, still diagnostic and initial lecture, the way in which heidegger’s description of enframing functions within his questioning toward the essence of technology only becomes clear in light of heidegger’s move in the third lecture “The danger” to then further describe the essence of enframing itself. This important lecture for understanding heidegger’s thought on technology is still, as of yet, unavailable in english translation. The crucial transition is announced in the final sentence of the second lecture: “Technology es-sences as enframing. What, however, holds sway in enframing? from where and how is the essence of enframing itself enowned?”20 While still implicit in the 1953 lecture, heidegger’s understanding of enframing as endangering its own essence as the essence of truth is more explicitly developed in the third 1949 lecture dedicated to this theme.


In both the 1949 lecture “The danger” and four years later in “The Question Concerning Technology,” heidegger describes the essence of enframing as the danger: “The essence of enframing is however the danger.”21 This sense of danger is not to be confused with the endangerment of any specific being, but rather describes the way in which the metaphysical understanding of being endangers the truth of its own essence: “enframing is the danger not as technology, but as being. What holds sway in the danger is being itself in so far as it stalks [nachstellt] the truth of its essence with the forgottenness of this essence.”22 for heidegger, metaphysical being is the endangerment of its own essence. however, deeper than this danger remains the unbroken structural link to that which metaphysical being is endangering, i.e., the truth of its own essence: “In that enframing holds sway, being evades the truth of its own essence, without ever being able, even in this evasion and distancing-itself, to separate itself from the essence of being.”23 for heidegger, metaphysical being as enframing endangers the truth of its own essence. however, the intelligibility of this sense of endangerment relies upon the fact that heidegger understands metaphysical being as irrevocably linked to the truth of its own essence. This sense of endangerment is not the result of any merely contingent historical shortcoming on the part of metaphysics. rather, the history of metaphysics, which has culminated in the epoch of enframing, is exactly the history of the obfuscation of its own essence as the truth of being: “In so far as being as enframing stalks [nachstellt] itself with the forgottenness of its essence, being as being is the danger for its own essence. . . . Being is in itself, from itself, for itself the danger as such.”24 although less explicit in the shorter 1953 lecture, the sense in which enframing is endangering can be seen as the same as what heidegger more fully articulated in the 1949 lecture. In both lectures, enframing is not endangering something which is ultimately other to it, but rather, it is endangering the essence of truth in which enframing itself is rooted and from out of which its essence is ultimately defined.

The essence of technology is ambiguous in that it at once has a metaphysical aspect as enframing and a deeper aspect which is occulted by this first aspect. The second as-pect is the more original root of technology which reaches beyond the totalizing closure of enframing and into its own essence as the essence of truth as such. This is the reason why the final step within heidegger’s path of thinking toward the essence of technology is described as looking exactly into the danger: “In order to consider this it is necessary, as a last step upon our way, to look with yet clearer eyes into the danger” (BW: 334). moreover, this is the reason why heidegger claims the question concerning technology is not answered at the metaphysical level of enframing but only first properly posed as a question about the constellation of revealing and concealing within the more origi-nary mystery of the truth of being itself: “When we look into the ambiguous essence of technology, we behold the constellation, the stellar course of the mystery. The question concerning technology is the question concerning the constellation in which revealing and concealing, in which the essential unfolding of truth propriates” (BW: 338). heidegger describes the relation between the two aspects of the essence of technology as two aspects which “[d]raw past each other like the paths of two stars in the course of the heavens. But precisely this, their passing by, is the hidden side of their nearness” (BW: 338). each is, at once, an apparently wholly isolated element, yet exactly in their passing attesting to a deeper unthematized continuity with the other. What heidegger is illustrating is that


at the basis of a supervening divergence between enframing and the essence of truth is a deeper rootedness of enframing exactly within the essence of truth as enframing’s own-most essential character. It is only when this final level of heidegger’s demarcation of the essence of technology is taken into consideration that the charges of technological essentialism can be adequately appraised.

rather than equating the essence of technology as such with the revealing character-istic of enframing and stressing the seeming absolute divergence between this mode of revealing and the essence of truth, the question of essentialism must be posed with respect to heidegger’s understanding of the deeper relatedness of these two aspects. When the essence of technology is interpreted as simply identical with the revealing characteristic of enframing, heidegger’s explanation of technological phenomena with respect to this single metaphysical essence is indeed one-dimensional and reductive. however, when this moment within heidegger’s questioning toward the essence of technology is properly contextualized as merely diagnostic and not itself exhausting the meaning of the essence of technology, a more adequate perspective for assessing the charges of essentialism in heidegger’s understanding of technology is opened. If what characterizes technology most originally is not its metaphysical construal as enframing but the more original, al-though concealed, essence of truth itself, the initial reduction of individual beings to the metaphysical aspect of technology’s essence should not be seen as final, but rather, as a supervening aspect upon a more original characterization of technological beings. This more original depiction can be seen to be the understanding of individual beings from the perspective of their concealed, however undiminished, relatedness to the ontological sense of freedom within the essence of truth at the root of enframing.

In relation to the more original dimension of the essence of technology, individual beings are not reduced to or exhausted in their metaphysical construal, but are rather characterized in relation to an essence that is exactly not unitary, ordering or even finally determined. rather, when individual technological phenomena are thought from beyond the limit of their metaphysical construal and in light of their more original and proper inherence within the clearing of being itself, the sense of essence which ultimately char-acterizes technology is not one of metaphysical domination, but instead one of ontological freedom and possibility. While heidegger’s question concerning technology is clearly structured in terms of the essence of technology, what he ultimately understands as this essence can be seen to escape the traditional charge of essentialism in that the ultimate characterization of technology passes beyond the metaphysical level of enframing and is thought from out of its deeper relatedness to originary truth.

In light of this full characterization of the essence of technology as most properly the essence of truth, what is most essential within technology is an ontological sense of freedom and possibility. however, one of the weaknesses in heidegger’s treatment of technology is that it does not elaborate further upon this possibility which is glimpsed within the essence of technology. however, it should be seen that his understanding of technology is not ultimately a form of technological essentialism but precisely an attempt to think technology in relation to a sense of essence which is not one-dimensional. rather than an unchanging metaphysical sense of essence, the actual meaning of what heidegger understood as the essence of technology can be seen to be a mobile constellation which


is exactly not unitary, determined or even metaphysical. as I will now argue, this fuller characterization of what heidegger understood as the essence of technology can help to shed light upon his often questioned descriptions of the essence of technology as harbor-ing both the most extreme danger, and equally that which might save.

IIIone of the most questioned aspects of heidegger’s essay on technology has been its de-scription of the essence of technology as containing within itself both the extreme danger and equally that which might save: “The essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger” (BW: 333). “[P]recisely the essence of technology must harbor in itself the growth of the saving power” (BW: 334). heidegger illustrates this apparently impossible coinciding by quoting from friedrich hölderlin’s “Patmos”: “But where danger is, grows the saving power also” (BW: 333). This has often created the impression that heidegger is momentarily relying upon the poetic authority of hölderlin to establish one of the most important links in the structure of this essay’s argumentation. and indeed, it is not imme-diately clear how that which endangers could lead toward awareness of what might save or how such divergent elements could both simultaneously inhere within the essence of technology. andrew feenberg has recently expressed his concern regarding this apparent lack of argumentation in heidegger’s essay stating: “Never has such a succession of non sequiturs played such an important role in the history of philosophy! . . . how can technol-ogy, the revealing which precisely blocks awareness of revealing, itself be the bridge to that very awareness?”25 moreover, heidegger’s decision to structure his inquiry into the essence of technology in a terminology borrowed from one of hölderlin’s most religious works has given rise to the view that the saving power was of a piece with heidegger’s contemporaneous understanding of the divinities and the holy. rather than relying upon the poetry of hölderlin or a specifically religious meaning, heidegger’s description of the relation between the danger and what might save should be seen as based upon his purely philosophical articulation of the two-fold aspect of the essence of technology.

While many readings of this apparently impossible co-incidence of danger and saving have focused on the quote from hölderlin, what has often been overlooked is the fact that heidegger’s description of the relation between the danger and what might save is couched in terms of his description of the two aspects of the essence of technology. heidegger clearly states: “The essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger” (BW: 333; my emphasis). When the essence of technology as such is incorrectly understood as the revealing characteristic of enframing, it would then seem that the essence of technology is simply also the danger as such. however, this sentence should be read in light of the ambiguous essence of technology. What heidegger is claiming here is not that the essence of technology itself constitutes the danger, but rather it is dangerous only in its aspect as enframing. moreover, this sense of danger is not simply equated with enframing’s specific mode of revealing but characterizes revealing as such. heidegger clearly states that all modes of revealing within the history of metaphysics represent this danger with respect to the truth of their essence: “The destining of revealing is as such, in every one of its modes, and therefore necessarily, danger” (BW: 331). “The destining of revealing is in itself not just any danger, but the danger” (BW: 331). This also applies to earlier modes of revealing


as poiēsis. It is not the case that heidegger is simply contrasting later modes of revealing with what has gone before and calling for a nostalgic return to the greek experience of revealing as poiēsis. rather, the proper sense of danger which characterizes metaphysical being itself in all of its different epochs and specific modes of revealing is fundamentally the same across the tradition. The sense in which heidegger understands enframing to constitute “the supreme danger” (die höchste Gefahr) (BW: 332; fT: 30) is that it further obscures and forgets this original danger of metaphysical being for its essence as the truth of being. While heidegger indeed designates enframing as the supreme danger, this sense of danger applies only to the metaphysical aspect of the essence of technology and does not exhaustively characterize the essence of technology in its fuller sense.

rather than equating enframing with the essence of technology and interpreting the es-sence of technology as synonymous with the danger itself, heidegger should be understood as locating the danger only at the level of the metaphysical aspect of the essence of technol-ogy. That which might save is also located within the essence of technology, however, at the deeper level of the essence of truth which more originally constitutes any specific mode of revealing. When heidegger states that “all saving power must be of a higher essence than what is endangered” (BW: 339), the sense in which that which might save is of a higher essence can be seen to be the sense in which the essence of truth is the deeper essence of all specific modes of revealing as such. Both of these levels of danger and saving are contained within heidegger’s full characterization of the essence of technology: “‘To save’ is to fetch something home into its essence in order to bring the essence for the first time into its proper appearing. If the essence of technology, enframing, is the extreme danger . . . then the rule of enframing cannot exhaust itself solely in blocking all lighting-up of every revealing, all appearing of truth” (BW: 333). The sense of saving in this description is understood in terms of the deeper truth of revealing as the essence of truth itself. What enframing covers over and endangers is exactly the inextricable rootedness of its own figuration of revealing in the deeper and more original aperity of the essence of truth itself. from this perspec-tive, heidegger’s apparently contradictory or merely mystic description of the essence of technology can be seen as both argumentatively consistent and sound.

at the very opening of his essay on technology, heidegger describes his thinking toward the essence of technology as a questioning which is attempting to build a way. Stressing that what is important is the way itself he explicitly cautions against fixing attention on isolated sentences and topics. unfortunately, the reception of this essay has not always heeded this caveat. many readings have fixed their attention on individual elements and stages within this text and have often lost sight of their later re-contextualizations within the wider movement of heidegger’s questioning. as I have argued, the initial character-ization of technology as enframing is one such aspect which should not be isolated from this essay’s wider movement of questioning for it is only within the wider question of the essence of truth that heidegger first defined what he understood as the essence of technology. While indeed ambiguous and mysterious, what heidegger understood as the essence of technology was also much less essentialistic than what traditional framings of this topic have often revealed.

European College of Liberal Arts, Berlin


Notes

1. m. heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin Heidegger Basic Writ-ings, ed. david Krell (london: routledge, 2007), p. 328.

2. references to the different versions of this work will be given parenthetically in the text along with page numbers. The designation (BW) will refer to the most currently available version of William lovitt’s translation as corrected and edited by david Krell in Basic Writings, revised and expanded edition (london: routledge, 1993). reference to the german will be signaled by (fT) and refer to: “die frage nach der Technik,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2004).

3. “heidegger’s essay presents what is probably the single most influential—though by no means most popular—position in the field.” “editor’s Introduction,” in Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition, ed. r. Scharff and V. dusek (oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. x. more-over, as albert Borgmann correctly points out: “[heidegger’s] influence on american philosophy of technology, among the most vigorous schools in the world, has been significant. In a collection of essays on American Philosophy of Technology, heidegger is easily the most frequently mentioned figure.” a. Borgmann, “Technology,” in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. h. dreyfus and m. Wrathall (oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 431.

4. for examples, see a. feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (london: routledge, 2005); and his “from essentialism to Constructivism: Philosophy of Technology at the Crossroads,” in Technology and the Good Life, ed. e. higgs, d. Strong, and a. light (Chicago: university of Chicago Press, 2000); and P.-P. Verbeek, What Things Do: Philo-sophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design, trans. r. Crease (university Park: Penn State university Press, 2005).

5. I. Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (Cam-bridge: Cambridge university Press, 2005), p. 69.

6. Still in widespread usage, this text is in many ways an unfortunate translation in that it is inconsistent and introduces many unnecessary neologisms. While it is beyond the scope of this es-say to comment on the translation itself, readers should be aware that, in his preface, lovitt twice misquotes heidegger and gives the date of the lecture as 1955 instead of the actual 1953. lovitt also misquotes the date of the related text “Wissenschaft und Besinnung” as 1954 when it was actually 1953. Sadly, these incorrect dates continue to be quoted in english language heidegger scholarship: “[I]n his celebrated 1955 essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’” (Thomson, Heidegger On Ontotheology, p. 52); “heidegger’s thinking until 1955, when he wrote “The Ques-tion Concerning Technology” (h. dreyfus and C. Spinosa, “heidegger and Borgmann on how to affirm Technology,” in Scharff and dusek, Philosophy of Technology, p. 324); “‘The Question Concerning Technology,’ the 1949 essay (revised in 1955)” (J. young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 2002], p. 37). Trish glazebrook describes the lecture as being “read in 1955” (Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science [New york: fordham university Press, 2000], p. 241. one of the effects of this careless strand in scholarship has been to distort the actual proximity of heidegger’s 1953 lecture to the december 1949 lecture cycle. Instead of six years separating them, it was actually less than four.

7. Verbeek, What Things Do, p. 65.

8. Cf. h. dreyfus, “heidegger on gaining a free relation to Technology,” in Heidegger Reex-amined, vol. 3, Art, Poetry, and Technology, ed. h. dreyfus and m. Wrathall (london: routledge, 2002); and r. rojcewicz, The Gods and Technology (albany: State university of New york Press, 2006).


9. Verbeek, What Things Do, p. 55.

10. T. rockmore, “heidegger on Technology and democracy,” in Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, ed. a. feenberg and a. hannay (Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 1995), p. 137.

11. B. davis, Heidegger and the Will (evanston, Ill.: Northwestern university Press, 2007), p. 176.

12. Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology. p. 53.

13. m. heidegger, “The age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track trans. and ed. J. young and K. haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 2002), p. 57.

14. Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology. p. 69. In this work, Thomson rightly calls for a reconsideration of andrew feenberg’s critique of heidegger’s “technological essentialism.” While instructive, the value of this exchange with feenberg is however quite limited in that feenberg and Thomson both accept the same premise that heidegger ultimately equates the essence of technol-ogy with metaphysical being. Thomson’s attempt to rescue heidegger by asking the question, “does heideg ger’s one-dimensionalism force him to reject technology in toto?” and then pointing to the sole example of heidegger’s 1951 discussion of the highway bridge, stating, “Nevertheless, is not this single, carefully thought-out exception sufficient to prove that heidegger does not reject technology wholecloth?” (Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology, p. 70) should be seen as merely a calculating attempt to save heidegger from the dangers created by Thomson’s own misreading.

15. one of the few commentators to stress this fact is miguel de Beistegui. although he does not develop the implications it has for heidegger’s technology essay, de Beistegui expresses this well when he states: “Technology—or, as heidegger began by designating it in the late 1930’s, ‘machination’—is said to designate the Unwesen des Seyns, the non-essence of being. . . . Un-wesen is also un-wesen. yes, machination is the non-essence or the counter-essence of being. But it is also its non-essence or its counter-essence.” The New Heidegger (london: Continuum, 2005), pp. 118–119.

16. This relation has been obscured in all versions of the english translation in that the incor-rect impression is given that the unchecked intensification of the technological will bring about the essential truth of technology: “yet we can be astounded. Before what? Before this other pos-sibility: that the frenziedness of technology may entrench itself everywhere to such an extent that someday, throughout everything technological, the essence of technology may unfold essentially in the propriative event of truth” (BW: 340). Comparison with the german shows that the transla-tor has simply inserted the expression “to such an extent that,” when the german has merely “bis eines Tages” (fT: 39), which simply means “until one day,” and contains no sense of causality or correlation.

17. m. heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New york: harper & row, 1972), p. 53.

18. m. heidegger, “on the essence of Truth,” in Krell, Martin Heidegger Basic Writings, p. 134.

19. heidegger, On Time and Being. p. 36.

20. m. heidegger, “einblick in das was ist,” in Gesamtausgabe Bd. 79, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge (frankfurt: Klostermann, 1994), p. 45. all translations from this text are my own.

21. Ibid., p. 62.

22. Ibid. “die gefahr ist das ge-Stell nicht als Technik, sondern als das Seyn. das Wesende


der gefahr ist das Seyn selbst insofern es der Wahrheit seines Wesens mit der Vergessenheit dieses Wesens nachstellt.”

23. Ibid., p. 52. “Indem das ge-Stell west, entsetzt sich das Sein selber der Wahrheit seines Wesens, ohne doch jemals in diesem ent-setzen und Sichabsetzen vom Wesen des Seyns sich tren-nen zu können.”

24. Ibid., p. 53. “Insofern das Sein als das ge-Stell sich selbst mit der Vergessenheit seines Wesens nachstellt, ist das Seyn als Seyn die gefahr seines eigen Wesens. . . . das Seyn ist in sich aus sich für sich die gefahr schlechthin.”

25. a. feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (New york: routledge, 2005), p. 22.

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