Excerpted from Thomson, Iain. Heidegger on Ontotheology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 52-57. Print.

What exactly is Heideggers understanding of the essence of technology? Heideggers most famous remark, that the essence of technology is by no means anything technology (QCT 4), may not initially seem to be of much help. To comprehend his point, however, we need to know that essence is an important term of art for Heidegger, a term which he explains in his celebrated 1955 essay The Question Concerning Technology. This explanation initially seems to suggest that Heideggers claim that the essence of technology is nothing technological is best approached in terms of what we could call, after Wittgenstein, the paradox of the measure: Height is not height, treeness is not itself a tree, and the essence of technology is nothing technological. For, that which defines the measure cannot be measured meaningfully by the metric it defines on pain of circularity. As Heidegger puts the point in Being and Time, If an ordering principle is genuine, it has its own content as a thing [Sachgehalt] which is never to be found by means of such ordering, but is already presupposed in it (BT 77). In other words, that which establishes a system (or defines a concept) cannot be grounded by the system it establishes (or the concept it defines), no more

than an axiom can be proved by theorems derived from it. Yet, such analogies, although suggestive, can be a bit misleading, because Heideggers point is not to uncover conceptual difficulties plaguing concept definition; as Dreyfus astutely observes, Heidegger is simply not trying to provide a fixed definition of the essence of technology. His goal, rather, is to help us to see that, if we want to understand what he means by the essence of technology, then we cannot conceive of essence the way we have been doing since Plato (as what permanently endures), for that makes it seem as if, by the [essence of] technology we mean some mythological abstraction (QCT 31). Instead, we should think of essence as a verb, as the way in which things essence [west] or remain in play [im Spiel bleibt] (QCT 30). Indeed, once we conceive of essence as a verb rather than a noun, we can see that the essence of technology denotes the way technological entities tend to come to presence or happen for us. 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 (AWP 116). In other words, the referent of Heideggers phrase the essence of technology is our current constellation of historical intelligibility, enframing (das Gestell), an historical mode of revealing in which things increasingly show up only as resources to be

optimized. Heidegger employs the polysemic term Gestell to name the ontotheological essence of technology because, by etymologically connoting a gathering together (Ge-) of the myriad forms of stellen (to set up, stand, regulate, secure, ready, establish, and so on), it succinctly conveys his understanding of the way in which our present mode of revealing a setting-upon that challenges forth forces the presencing (Anwesen) of entities into its metaphysical stamp or mold [Prgung] (QCT 16-21). This, however, is not simply to substitute etymology for argument, as understandably confused detractors frequently allege. Heidegger uses etymology in order to come up with an appropriate name for our contemporary mode of revealing, but it is crucial to recognize that the argumentative work in his ontological critique of technology is done by the understanding of metaphysics as ontotheology which quietly undergirds and generates this critique. In order to remind ourselves of the details of Heideggers understanding of ontotheology explicated in Chapter 1, let us approach the matter from a slightly different angle. Heidegger, as I understand him, is a great critical heir of the German idealist tradition. His ontological critique of enframing builds on the Kantian idea that we implicitly participate in the making-intelligible of our worlds, but maintains that our sense of reality is mediated by lenses inherited from metaphysics.

In effect, Heidegger historicizes Kants discursivity thesis, which holds that intelligibility is the product of a subconscious process by which we spontaneously organize and so filter a sensibly overwhelming world to which we are fundamentally receptive. For Heidegger, however, this implicit organization is accomplished not by historically fixed cognitive categories but, instead, by a changing historical understanding of what and how entities are, an ontotheology that is supplied, maintained, contested, and transformed historically by the metaphysical tradition. At the core of this history of being, as we have seen, the great metaphysicians articulate, focus, and disseminate an ontotheological understanding of the being of entities. When metaphysics succeeds at this ontotheological task, it temporarily secures the intelligible order by grasping it both ontologically, from the inside out, and theologically, from the outside in. By uncovering and joining together the dual points at which the ontological and theological spades turn, the great metaphysicians effectively provide the anchors that suspend Western humanitys changing sense of reality, holding back the floodwaters of historicity long enough to allow the formation of an epoch, an historical constellation of intelligibility unified around this ontotheological understanding of the being of entities. We can thus interpret Heideggers understanding

of the ontotheological structure of Western metaphysics (the history that we are) as advancing a doctrine of ontological holism. For, by giving shape to our historical understanding of what is, metaphysics determines the most basic presuppositions of what anything is, ourselves included. This, as we saw, is what Heidegger means when he writes that: Western humanity, in all its comportment toward entities, and even toward itself, is in every respect sustained and guided by metaphysics (N1 205/NII 343). By explicitly focusing and disseminating an ontotheological understanding of what and how entities are, our great metaphysicians establish the most basic conceptual parameters and ultimate stands of legitimacy for their successive historical epochs. Heideggers ontological holism thus explains how these ontotheologies can function historically like self-fulfilling prophecies, pervasively reshaping intelligibility. Put simply, because all entities are, as a new ontotheological understanding of what and how entities are takes hold and spreads, it progressively transforms our basic understanding of all entities. Nietzsche is the pivotal figure in Heideggers critique of our technological epoch of enframing because, according to Heideggers reductive yet revealing reading, Nietzsches unthought metaphysics provides the ontotheological lenses that implicitly structure our own current sense of

reality. Let us recall that Nietzsche criticized what he (mistakenly) took to be Darwins doctrine of the survival of the fittest by pointing out that life forms cannot survive by aiming at mere survival. In a changing environment characterized by material scarcity and hence competition, life can survive only by continually overcoming itself, surpassing whatever stage it has reached previously. From the perspective of this inner will of life (what Nietzsche calls will-to-power), any state of being previously attained serves merely as a rung on the endless ladder of sovereign becoming. As Heidegger thus puts it, Nietzsche understands the totality of entities as such ontotheologically as eternally recurring will-to-power (or simply willto-will), that is, as an unending disaggregation and reaggregation of forces without any purpose or goal beyond the self-perpetuating augmentation of these forces through their continual selfovercoming. Now, our Western cultures unthinking reliance on this Nietzschean ontotheology is leading up to transform all entities, ourselves included, into Bestan, mere resources standing by to be optimized, ordered, and enhanced with maximal efficiency. Heidegger is deeply worried that within our current technological constellation of intelligibility, the post-Nietzschean epoch of enframing, it is increasing becoming the case that Only what is calculable in advance counts as being (Traditional Language and Technological

Language 136). For, our technological understanding of being produces a calculative thinking (Discourse on Thinking 46) that quantifies all qualitative relations, reducing entities to bivalent, programmable information (Traditional Language and Technological Language 139), digitized data ready to enter into a state of pure circulation on the Internet. As this historical transformation of beings into intrinsically meaningless resources becomes more pervasive, it comes ever more to elude our critical gaze; indeed, we late moderns come to treat even ourselves in the nihilistic terms that underlie our technological refashioning of the world: no longer as conscious subjects standing over against an objective world (as in the modern worldview Heidegger already criticized in Being and Time), but merely as one more intrinsically meaningless resource to be optimized, ordered, and enhanced with maximal efficiency, whether cosmetically, psychopharmacologically, genetically, or even cybernetically. As this technological understanding of being takes hold and spreads, it dramatically transforms our relations to ourselves and our worlds, yet we tend not to notice these transformations, because their very pervasiveness helps render them invisible, a seemingly paradoxical fact Heidegger explains by appeal to his first law of phenomenology. This law of proximity (or

distance of the near) states that the closer we are to something, the harder it is to bring it clearly into view (the lenses on our glasses, for example, or Poes eponymous purloined letter), and thus that the more decisively a matter shapes us, the more difficult it is for us to understand it explicitly. Eventually, however, Heidegger thinks that either a new understanding of the being of entities will emerge and take hold (perhaps, as Kuhn suggests, out of the investigation of those anomalous entities that resist being understood in terms of the dominant ontotheology), or else our conception of all entities will be brought permanently into line with this spreading ontotheology. This latter alternative has never yet occurred (because no previous ontotheology succeeded in permanently entrenching itself), yet Heidegger calls it the greatest danger. He is worried that our Nietzschean ontotheology could indeed become totalizing, driving out every other possibility of revealing (QCT 27) by overwriting and so effectively obscuring Daseins special nature, our defining capacity for world discourse, with the total thoughtlessness of lives lived entirely in the grip of the Nietzschean conception of all entities, ourselves included, as intrinsically meaningless resources on standby to be optimized for maximally flexible use (Discourse on Thinking 56). If Nietzsches metaphysical enframing succeeds in securing its monopoly on the real, and so

preemptively delegitimates all alternative understandings of being (deriding them as nonnaturalistic, for example, and thus as irrelevant, ridiculous, nonserious, irrational, and so on), Heidegger thinks this enframing could effect and enforce that double forgetting in which we lose sight of our distinctive capacity for world disclosure and forget that anything has thus been forgotten. The danger, as he provocatively puts it, is that we could become so satiated by the endless possibilities for flexible self-optimization opened up by treating our worlds and ourselves as resources to be optimized that we could lose the very sense that anything is lost with such a self-understanding (the very idea that entities have intrinsic meanings, for example, may come to seem like an outdated myth). This helps explain the later Heideggers strange and seemingly paradoxical claim that the great danger is to be found in the authentic need of needlessness, his idea that we live in the age of greatest need precisely insofar as we experience ourselves as not needing anything at all.