On 'The Question Concerning Technology' - Heidegger

Heidegger opens with a philosophical tiding on p5 regarding our control over technology; “Everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner” … “The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.” This point is echoed (at the end) on p32 “So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain held fast in the will to master it. We press on past the essence of technology.” Heidegger flesh’s out this idea fully in between these statements. Stanley Kubrick’s HAL in Space Odyssey 2001 represents the same idea. I bring up a film, a heavily technological driven art form, as parallel due Heidegger’s direct correlation between the two; he explains the origin of the word technology, from techne, which was used in Greece in reference to all art. This fear of technology passing by us without our full recognition of its hold on our lives has been a meme in many products of the sci-fi genre. With Heidegger’s statements in mind about the artistry of technology, Jules Verne’s visionary writings begin to make sense. Technology can be defined as ‘the art of invention’, as can poetry.

I am going to go through a play by play of my interpretations of some key statements.

Heidegger claims we have to reevaluate our definition of technology as our current definition doesn’t put us in contact with its essence. He then looks at our responsibility regarding technology (that is, to spur it on) and states we have to involve the full telos of any object we create when considering its creation. He mentions the word Physis (which I had not heard before) and explains it as a blossoming / blooming. Picasso stated he thought the greatest mind was one that could take normal objects and rearrange them to create something else. An example of this is his ‘bulls head’ sculpture, made from a bike seat and handle bars:


Heidegger then says technologies job is a way of revealing; the revealing of truth, which he defines as ‘the correctness of an idea’. The end of p13 to p14 depicts the change in mindset towards the world when we went from pre-agrarian societies to post-agrarian (to nation/state, to empire) and eventually arrived at industrial. Many empires fell because they used up all their resources, they farmed unconscientiously. Even though these societies did this, they didn’t fully look at the earth as a resource to be squandered as they didn’t have a mass way of mining the raw fuel and building products the earth held (coal/steal). Our worldview used to be based on a windmill mindset – waiting for the forces of nature to occur and then harness these energies; the energies floating around, going un-used; harnessing them in an unobtrusive slip-steam style. We then started mining coal, seeing the earth as a body of energy that can be chipped away at and used. Heidegger uses the term ‘suns warmth’ as a synonym for coal, juxtaposing the two mindsets; stating “It is stockpiled; that is, it is on call, ready to deliver the sun’s warmth that is stored in it.” (My underlinings).

The growth from tribe to city state to empire to nation is directly correlated to the energy the people have available to them (i.e. Zebra’s can’t be tamed due to their flighty nature, cows can be. People that are born into climates that sustain tamable animals and easily harvestable crop, like corn, will quickly advance to higher social orders. Hunter and gatherer tribes exist to this day because they occupy an inhospitable environment). The speed technologies advance in these societies also relies on the energy available (Jared Diamonds premise of Guns Germs and Steal rides on a question to which that was his answer). Societies started with an extreme ‘harness the powers and energies that float around us’ mindset which is, arguably, a very spirit-invoking view of the world. We then turned to an industrial ‘grab the chunks of energy from the ground and use them at our convenience’ mindset. We moved from a ‘whenever we are given’ to a ‘whenever we feel like taking’ mindset towards the earth (or energy); from spiritual-driven (archaic/magic/mythic) to human-driven (French existentialism – Sartre. I haven’t read much in-depth outside of him though so I’m being naïve but using him as example).

We now live in an interesting time because the windmill mindset is coming back, with many wind-generators adorning our hilltops. That pre-industrial mindset is started to crawl back into society, and the industrial is not withering but perhaps bettering itself in reference to the devastation we have wrought on the earth. Many great societies have fallen because they have over-farmed their soil (causing the slave-farmers to rise up against the elites that are praying for good harvest). Since we are all taught this in history classes these days, and due to the infotainment quality of the news and their sensationalist take on global warming, the dangerous mistakes of our past shall likely not be relived.

Heidegger mentions the damming of rivers and exclaims the way in which we even use this aspect of nature with a standing-reserve mindset. We have however as of late moved to many non-obstructive means of obtaining energy from water (particularly the sea).

On p16 he mentions that “regulating and securing even become the chief characteristics of the challenging revealing.” This is again the turn from god-looking to man-blaming societal mindsets.

---
re-write this bit:

Perhaps the most damaging Physis the standing-reserve mindset has caused is not towards the world but society. Society treats people as sources of energy to get a job done – as a cog in the industrial machine. We are still viewing the world in a lab-coat, science type manor (and Heidegger mentions his gripe with physic’s perspective to explaining truths) but technology is alongside science, more directly ‘feeling’ its way around outskirts of reality until truths are fully realized as a mindset.

---

Heidegger then asks “To what extent is man capable of such a revealing?” … “man does not have control over the un-concealment itself.” He encapsulated the book “Emergence” by Steven Johnston in a few statements, although Johnston puts humanities situation in context using examples from recent scientific discoveries. A single person in the whole of society cannot hope to know what is going to become unconcealed due to the way in which we locally interact to create a larger whole. Steven Johnston writes:

“Once the embryo reaches a certain size, cell "collectives" start to form, and here matters get more complicated. One group of cells may be the beginning of an arm, while the other group may be the first stirrings of the brain's gray matter. Each cell has somehow to figure out where it is in the larger scheme of things... yet, cells have no way of seeing the whole, and they have no fixed address stamped upon them when they come into the world, no factory serial number.

This is the secret of self-assembly, cell collectives emerge because each cell looks to its neighbors for cues about how to behave...a cell looks around to its neighbors and finds that they're all working away steadily at creating an eardrum or a heart valve, which in turn causes the cell to start laboring away at the same task.

"The great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp is that it is a totally decentralized process."

This also stands for each human in society. Our advancement through time, using technology, is an entirely decentralized process and for a single person to grasp it is an impossibility; we move and advance as one mass. Once something is revealed a large part of a society realizes it at once. On p24 Heidegger mentions this revealing doesn’t happen somewhere beyond all human doing – and that it doesn’t happen exclusively either in man or through man. Man cannot see himself in the unfolding.

On p25 he goes onto define freedom in this view of the world. Man becomes free only when he listens and hears the tides of anew unfolding. If you float along with the tide you are not expressing free will; you are constrained to obey the newest phase that has been ushered forth, or revealed, by those who listen; by those who express free will. This freedom however only governs the realm that has been revealed.

On p26 – “Even god loses his mysteriousness – i.e. – we realize what we call god is something real, and a new definition of god is conjured that differs greatly from the previous (the most recent definition essentially being: we are all Gods – Sartre’s ‘everyman is fully responsible for all men’s actions when he acts’ for the humanitarian side of the coin, and science is working at the existential.) This is because even “God sinks to the level of a cause” with regard to the question of ultimate causality. Heidegger then mentions “when destining reigns in the mode of enframing it is the supreme danger” – this is due to the forward marching mindset of the current, without regard to the past (or to the initial cause, and to the destinations Physis). The past becomes passé. Not because want to look down on it but because we have to; the current mindset is the only one that makes sense – we discover atoms, we define ourselves by them; we create computers, we define ourselves by them, and so on.

Heidegger then mentions “everything that man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.” The old riddle ‘if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?’ is interesting because the answer is resounding no. The question is pined upon but it shouldn’t be; the answer ‘no’ should be common knowledge. Vibrations in air molecules only occur to animals as sound because that is how brains have chosen to interpret these particular vibrations. Bats may hear in color as we see in color, different hues representing different surface textures. The subjective reality that we all live in is mind boggling, and can easily be forgotten when living in a society filled with such similar minds, viewing everything as an offshoot of human efforts. Because of this when something new comes about, we slot this new idea into our existing categorizations. We categorize ideas and objects based on what we know instead of what we don’t know. Fungus, for example, was under the heading of ‘plant’ for an incredibly long time; science eventually declared it its own entity, separate from the plant/animal kingdoms.

Technology, and science’s use of it, revealed the truth about fungus. Technology is revealing one truth after another, not only empirically but social, and humanity is adapting as rapidly as it needs to. Every mind that is born on this earth has an astounding adaptability to its surroundings. If you show a six-month old baby a slideshow of different limas faces, it can tell each monkey apart. After six months old (due to the lack of constant exposure to limas faces) the brain doesn’t prioritize the differentiation of this type of face, and limas faces all become similar to the point of being undecipherable from one another. This means that if a baby did not see the face of a human from birth to six months, but instead lived with limas, all human faces would look incredibly similar and the nuances of limas faces would be prominent in the child’s mind. The questions that this fact conjures are obvious and startling. The revealing of a new truth to a society is incredibly caught up in the society’s framework. Heidegger hits upon this and poses the idea that our essence is what forwards us, not our current situation, and this essence can be found in creation, invention, and “a realm of art. But certainly only if reflection on art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth after which we are questioning.”