Heidegger on Technology

Michael E. Zimmerman
University of Colorado, Boulder

To appear in a volume edited by Mark Wrathall

Working draft: Please do not cite without permission.

“Technology” translates the German word, Technik, which is derived from the
Greek techne. (GA 7: 14 / 12) In “Die Frage nach der Technik” (“The Question
concerning Technology”) Heidegger differentiates between technological gadgets and
systems, on the one hand, and the disclosive activity--techne--that makes them possible,
on the other. He offers a typical “instrumental and anthropological” definition of
technology as follows: “The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and
machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they
serve, all belong to what technology is. The whole complex of these contrivances is
technology.” (GA 7: 7-8 / 4-5) Although this definition is “uncannily correct” so far as it
goes, Heidegger claims that it fails to reveal, that “The essence of technology is by no
means anything technological.” (GA 7: 7 / 4) Instead, techne is a mode of disclosure in
the light of which technical devices--ranging from ancient Greek swords to contemporary
smart phones--can arise.
Maintaining that modern technology fulfills possibilities opened up 2500 years
ago by ancient Greek metaphysics, Heidegger indicates that Aristotle’s Nichomachean
Ethics is crucial for understanding the essence of techne. Aristotle wrote that the logos-
endowed human animal has two kinds of intellectual virtues: those involving knowing
that, and those involving knowing how. The latter includes two modes of praxis:
practical wisdom (phronesis) and techne. In ancient Greek, techne referred to the activity
of the fine artist and poet, as well as the artisan. Techne requires foresight and knowledge
in order to change one thing (for example, wood) into another (a table). Bringing forth an
artifact envisioned by techne is called poiesis. Plato indicated that poiesis occurs in nature
(physis) as well, but Aristotle restricted poiesis to human productive activity. Interpreting
poiesis in its broader sense, Heidegger states that “every bringing-forth [human and
natural] is grounded in revealing.” (GA 7: 13 / 12) Whereas natural entities are produced
(brought forth) through themselves, artifacts are produced through others, that is, artists,
artisans, and poets. Although physis “is indeed poiesis in the highest sense.” (GA 7: 12 /
QCT 10), techne allows physis to manifest itself in new modes. To reveal things through
techne, human Dasein must already have some understanding of the Being of things.
Aristotle posits that all poiesis involves four “causes,” material, efficient, formal,
and final. Today, only efficient cause is still entertained. Heidegger reinterprets the four
causes as “being responsible” for letting something come forth into presence and thus “to
be.” For example, an artisan first considers and discloses what is to be brought forth, and
then cooperates with the necessary materials so that the artifact can emerge as initially
envisioned. Rather than imposing the artisan’s will, techne is an “occasioning” that lets
something come forth. Just as Michelangelo “freed” the form slumbering in the marble,
so too a woodworker lets the envisioned form arise from the wood. “Thus what is
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decisive in techne does not at all lie in making and manipulating nor in the using of
means, but rather in the aforementioned revealing. It is as revealing, and not as
manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth.” (GA 7:14 / 13) Moreover, “every
bringing-forth is grounded in revealing [Entbergen],” that is, aletheia. (GA 7: 13 / 12)
Although usually translated as “truth,” aletheia‘s literal meaning is
unconcealment or disclosedness. Heidegger distinguishes four senses of unconcealment.
First, unconcealment is required in everyday dealings with things, as when a doorknob
shows up as a way of getting into the next room. Second, true assertions require
unconcealment. To state correctly that “The snow is white” presupposes that the snow
has already revealed itself to the one making the assertion. Third, unconcealment is
involved in human activity, as when the artisan first envisions an artifact, and then lets it
come into presence, into unconcealment. Such artisanal or artistic unconcealment,
however, takes place within a more primal unconcealment: aletheia, clearing, openness,
or transcendence.
In Being and Time, which explores the interplay between manifesting (Being) and
absencing (aletheia, unconcealment, Lichtung), Heidegger offers a phenomenological
presentation of everyday human existence as revealed in the a workshop. A exists not as a
subject confronting objects, but rather as immersive Being-in-the-world, always already
utilizing the ready-at-hand equipment needed for this or that task. In everyday life, things
show up instrumentally, as useful for human Dasein, the for-sake-of-which of all
productive activity. Absorbed in its work, Dasein does not notice either Being
(appearing, presencing) or time (temporal clearing), because they conceal themselves so
that entities can show up as entities. If a tool breaks down or goes missing, however,
Dasein’s immersion in work is interrupted, and the referential totality of the world
reveals itself. Stepping back from its “absorbed coping” (Hubert Dreyfus) Dasein now
discloses things as present-at-hand objects with certain measurable features. This mode of
disclosure is the basis for natural science.
Being and Time refers only briefly to a non-instrumental, non-objectifying, poetic
mode of disclosure. In everyday life, even nature shows itself as timber for cutting, or as
wind bringing rain for crops. Instrumentality is depicted as a universal feature of fallen
human Dasein. Later on, however, Heidegger maintained that today’s wholly
instrumentalist, exploitative disclosure of entities does not arise because of human
fallenness, but rather from “the sending (or destiny) of Being,” die Schickung des Seins.
Here, Being does not mean the substantial essence of entities as traditional metaphysics,
but rather the event of disclosure itself. Human Dasein is appropriated (vereignet), even
violently, as the clearing needed for entities to show up intelligibly as entities, and in that
sense “be.” What Being means, that is, what it means for something to be, changes
historically, from Plato’s eidos to Nietzsche’s Will to Power. Die Lichtung, sometimes
synonymous with the das Ereignis, is said to “send” or “give” different senses of Being.
The discourse of “sending” suggests a “sender,” but Heidegger contends that there is no
“reason” (Grund) for the changes. Retrospectively, according to Heidegger, we can see
that the clearing opened up through human existence has become increasingly
constricted, such that in the techno-industrial era only exploitable aspects of entities can
show up.
Heidegger’s later view of technology was shaped by the writings of Ernst Jünger
in the early 1930s. According to the Jünger, 20th century humankind is “stamped” by the
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Gestalt of the worker-soldier, is the latest historical formation of what Nietzsche called
the Will to Power. As the planet is transformed into a titanic foundry for war matériel,
soldiers and workers play interchangeable roles in a system that seeks ever-greater power
for its own sake. Jünger embraced modern technology, but Heidegger found it much
more difficult to do so. Raised in a village, he had experienced the wrenching social and
cultural dislocations imposed by rapid German industrialization, as well as the gruesome
consequences of mechanized warfare. He joined the Nazi Party in 1932 because it
seemingly promised the “new beginning” needed to resist the cultural uprooting and
nihilism brought about by global “machination.” (GA 65: 124-129 / 99-106; also GA 95:
408.5 ff.)
In his 1936 lecture course, Heidegger read Nietzsche as saying that art could help
establish a new mode of disclosure (world). Doing so, however, involves struggle and
violence. A year earlier, glossing the first choral ode from Antigone, Heidegger had
described Dasein as confronted by dike, the overpowering order of physis. Here, we must
distinguish two such orders: first, physis understood aletheia-logically sense, and second
physis understood onto-logically, or meta-physically. Heidegger does not always make
the distinction. Physis in its aletheia sense delimits how entities can “be” (show up) as
entities in a given historical era. Physis in this sense cannot be mastered, because it
appropriates us as the needed for entities “to be” (show up as entities), in one way or
another. Physis in its onto-logical or metaphysical sense refers to Being as the substantial
presence of nature, to nature’s enduring power embodied in the sea and wind, in animals
and earth. To bring forth a meaningful world, Dasein must bring physis (Being
understood metaphysically) to a stand through techne, which makes possible temples and
poetry to orient human life. Yet, Dasein can undertake such world-formative techne and
poiesis only within the already-granted clearing (aletheia-logical) that allows entities to
show up as entities. Within the world opened up by and through them, the Greeks did
violence against the powers of nature, by ensnaring animals and catching fish, by digging
up the earth, and by engaging in in relentless warfare against one another. (GA 40: 153-
173 / 153-191)
These remarks about the violence involved in world-formation and sustenance
contrast with what Heidegger said two decades later, when comparing a sawmill in the
Black Forest with a hydroelectric dam on the Rhine River, and a windmill with a nuclear
power plant. (GA 7: 8 / 5) Modern technology is today’s prevailing mode of revealing,
which challenges human Dasein to treat entities solely as instruments for producing
power that is to be stored and redistributed, traditional technology cooperates with
nature’s processes. Heidegger sometimes depicts modern technology as “monstrous” for
disclosing entities (that is, letting them “be”) in this limited way, but as his discussion
about ancient Greek Dasein make clear, humankind engage in violence in order to wrest
a historical world from resistant, self-concealing physis, which he sometimes called
“earth”.
Even while valorizing ancient Greek Dasein, Heidegger maintains that Plato and
Aristotle initiated the productionist metaphysics that led to techno-industrial nihilism.
Modeling their concepts of Being on handcraft production (consider Plato’s eternal forms
as blueprints for things, and Aristotle’s account of things as formed matter), these
thinkers concluded that for something “to be” means for it to be permanently present, and
to be present means to have been produced. Subsequently, medieval theologians depicted
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God as the metaphysical ground and producer of all things. At the dawn of modern
philosophy, however, Descartes posited the human subject as the ground of entities: for
something to be means now means for it to be an object (representation) produced by the
self-grounding human subject. By adding striving and will to modern subjectivity,
Leibniz paved the way for German idealism’s contention that will is central to Being, and
thus for Nietzsche’s claim that the Will to Power is the metaphysical ground. In short,
Aristotle’s “rational animal” (zoon logon echon) ends in Nietzsche’s Overman, whom
Heidegger often reads as the clever animal bent on world dominion. Heidegger’s
narrative of decline is strikingly opposed to Enlightenment modernity’s narrative of
historical progress.
In his 1936 lectures, Heidegger read Nietzsche in a positive light, for indicating
that art may provide a way beyond nihilism. Within a few years, however, Heidegger
concluded that Jünger was right: techno-industrial modernity is an expression of
Nietzsche’s idea of the Will to Power. Moreover, Heidegger contended that National
Socialism was just another variant of the nihilism at work in Soviet Marxism and liberal
capitalism. In the published version of his 1935 lecture course, Introduction to
Metaphysics, Heidegger described the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism
as “the encounter between global technology and modern humanity.” (GA 40: 208 / 191)
The meaning of the latter phrase, which was interpolated years later, remains contested.
Today’s totally mobilized mode of Being-in-the-world is correlated with the fact
that entities show up as exploitable raw material. Just as Plato’s philosophy was a
response to how Being (as eidos) addressed itself to him, so too modern technological
activity is a response to how Being now addresses itself to humankind. (GA 7: 18 / 18)
Heidegger warns that humankind risks losing its essential humanity, thus becoming
reduced to what his student, Herbert Marcuse, would later call “one-dimensional man.”
In Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger asserted that humankind is “bewitched” by
“machination” (later, Gestell) which calls for ever more intensive techno-industrial
transformation of the planet (GA 65: 123-124) Fascinated with entities, Dasein risks what
amounts ontological damnation: In exchange for control over entities, we lose our
“highest dignity,” namely, guarding the unconcealment and concealment “of all coming
to presence [Being understood aletheia-logically] on this earth.” (GA 7: 33 / 32)
After World War II, Heidegger defined modern technology as a kind of poiesis
whose mode of unconcealment is “challenging” (Herausfordern), by virtue of which
entities show up as “standing reserve” (Bestand), stockpiled for further enhancing the
techno-industrial system. (GA 7: 15 / 14) When things are disclosed as standing reserve,
they are no longer even objects for a subject. To name the technological ordering that
gathers humankind and nature, Heidegger uses the term Gestell, reminiscent of Jünger’s
Gestalt. Gestell refers not technical devices and to the socio-economic structures that
order them up, but instead to techne, “that mode of revealing which holds sway in the
essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological.” (GA 7: 20-21 /
QCT, 19-20) Gestell, the modern mode of poiesis, forces things to come into
unconcealment through being unlocked, transformed, stored, distributed, and switched
around. (GA 7: 17 / 16)
Heidegger denies that modern technology is merely an application of natural
science. Instead, Gestell governed modern mathematical science from the start, thereby
preparing the way for modern technology two centuries later. In modern physics, “nature
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shows itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and that remains
orderable as a system of information.…” (GA 7: 24 / 23) Moreover, “Steering [die
Steurung] and securing even become the chief characteristic of the challenging
revealing.” (GA 7: 17 / 16) Steering is a central concept for cybernetics, the study of self-
governing phenomena, from organisms to automata. Familiar with translations of Norbert
Wiener’s work on cybernetics, Heidegger envisioned that Gestell would generate a self-
ordering technological system that could last for centuries, as it transforms everything
into interchangeable data.
Although modern technology is our destiny, Heidegger claimed that we could
develop a “free relation” to it. Such a relation could arise only if humans see that they
exist as the clearing, the openness within which entities are freed to manifest themselves.
A glimpse of our essential openness would reveal that the technological disclosure of
things is neither natural nor inevitable, but rather an historical and thus temporary way of
unconcealing entities. Things have manifested themselves otherwise in the past, and they
can do so once again in the future. Insight into the temporary nature of Gestell can give
rise to “releasement” (Gelassenheit), which allows us to twist free from it. (See GA 16:
517-529)
Catching a glimpse of our essence is difficult, because it belongs to the self-
concealing interplay of presencing and absencing. As Heraclitus said: “Physis loves to
hide.” Neither presencing nor absencing are things, but instead are no-thing, das Nichts.
The essence of nihilism is not found in the decline of values and decadence, but rather in
the ever-increasing concealment of the nihil--das Nichts--that constitutes our disclosive
essence. Heidegger uses the term “abandonment of [entities by] Being”
(Seinsverlassenheit) to describe the evacuation of the meaningfulness of entities, which
now show up in such constricted ways.
Toward the end of “Die Frage nach Der Technik,” Heidegger glosses this line
from Hölderlin: “Where the danger is, there the saving power grows.” (GA 7: 29 / 28)
Ereignis gives rise to the “granting” that sends humankind into the dangerous mode of
unconcealment called Gestell, but that same granting may be understood as the saving
power that lets humankind enter into its highest dignity, “keeping watch over
unconcealment.” Thrust into Gestell, we are exposed to the danger of losing our free
essence. Gestell and the saving power move past each other like two heavenly bodies, but
“in such passing lies the hidden side of their nearness….” Just when the situation seems
bleakest, we may discern “the growing light of the saving power. What to do? We must
foster the saving power in the little things, and this includes holding before our eyes the
extreme danger.” We must notice “what comes to presence (das Wesende) in technology,
instead of merely staring at the technological. 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.” (GA 7: 32-33 / 32-33)
If the essence of technology is nothing technological, reflecting on it must occur
in a domain that is both akin to the essence of technology, but also fundamentally
different from it. “Such a realm is art. But certainly only if reflection on art, for its part,
does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth [unconcealment] after which we are
questioning.” Of course, such questioning is never straightforward, because “the more
questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of
art becomes.” (GA 7: 36 / 35)
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In 1966 Heidegger granted to Der Spiegel an interview, published posthumously a

decade later. He emphasized that the danger posed by Gestell grows, precisely because of
the “uncanny” fact that

[E]verything is functioning and that the functioning drives us to ever

further functioning, and that technology tears men loose from the earth
and uproots them. I don’t know whether you were frightened, but I at
any rate was frightened when I saw pictures coming from the moon to
the earth. We don’t need any atom bomb. The uprooting of man has
already taken place. The only thing we have left is purely technological
relationships.” (GA 16: 669-670 / 105-106)

Faced with this danger, Heidegger concludes, “Only a god can save us. The sole
possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and
poetizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of
foundering [Untergang]; for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder.” (GA 16:
671 / 107) By the new divinity Heidegger presumably means a new, world-organizing
way in which entities can manifest themselves and thus “be.” Granted by Ereignis, such a
new mode of manifesting would allow nature and humankind to reveal themselves in
ways other than as mere means to the ends of modern technology.
Some critics maintain that such hope is misguided, given how few people are
capable of catching a glimpse of the self-concealing interplay of presencing and
absencing, which makes possible unconcealment in the first place. Having been
preoccupied with understanding and maximizing control of entities for centuries,
humankind seems inextricably wedded to expanding the reach of modern technology.
Heidegger acknowledges this possibility, yet still holds out the prospect that the
unexpected can happen. Perhaps humankind will be granted the possibility of dwelling on
the earth not in some imaginary harmony, but at least in a way that allows entities to
reveal themselves more richly and multi-dimensionally than they do today.1

Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking. Translated by John M. Anderson and E.

Hans Freund. New York. Harper & Row, 1966.

Heidegger, Martin. “Only a God Can Save Us.” Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin
Heidegger. Translated Mary P. Alter and John D. Caputo, Philosophy Today XX (4/4):
267-285. 1976.

Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question of

Technology, and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row,
1977.
1
My thanks to Thomas Sheehan, Frank Schalow, and David E. Storey for helpful
comments that improved this essay.