Quotes from "The Question Concerning Technology"

"Questioning builds a way. We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the way, and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics" (3).

• Free relationship to technology = questioning that helps us describe our relationship to the essence of technology which is generally concealed by the from we have constructed around technology. (Prior reader)
  
• So he wants us to become aware of and question our relationship to technology? What does he mean by "technology"? (Me)

"Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral" (4).

• Consuming technology, using it is not enough; we have to question it and teach others to question it.

"We ask the question concerning technology when we ask what it is. Everyone knows the two statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together. For to posit ends and procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity" (4).

• Technology is a non-neutral contrivance and instrument used to serve an end(s) = a means and a human activity.
  

"That is why the instrumental conception of technology conditions every attempt to bring man into the right relation to technology. Everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner as a means. We will, as we say, "get" technology "spiritually in hand." We will master it. The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control" (5).

"What technology is, when represented as a means, discloses itself when we trace instrumentality back to fourfold causality" (6).

"For what presences by means of physis has the bursting open belonging to bringing-forth, e.g., the bursting of a blossom into bloom, in itself. In contrast, what is brought forth by the artisan or the artist has the bursting open belonging to bringing-forth not in itself, but in another, in the craftsman or artist" (10-11).

• Reveals himself through his creation.

"Bringing-forth brings hither out of concealment forth into unconcealment. Bringing-forth comes to pass only insofar as something concealed comes into unconcealment" (11).

"We say "truth" and usually understand it as the correctness of an idea" (12).

"Instrumentality is considered to be the fundamental characteristic of technology" (12).

"Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth" (12).

• What does it reveal?

"Thus what is decisive in techne does not lie at all 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" (13).

"The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such" (14).

"yet that expediting is always itself directed from the beginning toward furthering something else, i.e., toward driving on to the maximum yield at the minimum expense" (15).

"The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth. That challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing. But the revealing never simply comes to an end." (16)

• Commodification? Consumption? What does this reveal? Man's nature?

"Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering" (17). "Standing-reserve"

"Hegel's definition of the machine as an autonomous tool. . . . Seen in terms of the standing-reserve, the machine is completely unautonomous, for it has its standing only from the ordering of the orderable" (17).

• The machine has no power to manipulate? But manipulates through man's manipulation of it?

"If man is challenged, ordered, to do this, then does not man himself belong even more originally than nature within the standing-reserve" (18)?

"Yet precisely because man is challenged more originally than are the energies of nature, into the process of ordering, he never is transformed into mere standing-reserve. Since man drives technology forward, he takes part in ordering as a way of revealing. But the unconcealment itself, within which ordering unfolds, is never a human handiwork, any more than is the realm through which man is already passing every time he as a subject relates to an object" (18).

"We need only apprehend in an unbiased way That which has already claimed man and has done so, so decisively that he can only be man at any given time as the one so claimed" (18).

"He merely responds to the call of unconcealment when he contradicts it. Thus when man, investigating, observing, ensnares nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve" (19).

• Man is powerless then?

"Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological" (20).

"Modern physics is the herald of Enframing, a herald whose origin is still unknown. The essence of modern technology has for a long time been concealing itself, even where power machinery has been invented, where electrical technology is in full swing, and where atomic energy is well under way" (22).

• Is technology a child of science or is science a child of technology?

"We are questioning concerning technology in order to bring to light our relationship to its essence. The essence of modern technology shows itself in what we call Enframing" (23).

"[Enframing] is the way in which the real reveals itself as standing-reserve" (23).

"We shall call that sending-that-gathers which first starts man upon a way of revealing, destining" (24).

"And it is only the destining into objectifying representation that makes the historical accessible as an object for historiography, i.e., for a science, and on this basis makes possible the current equating of the historical with that which is chronicled" (24).

• Destining = starting on its way, setting in motion.

"Always the destining of revealing holds complete sway over man. But that destining is never a fate that compels. For man becomes truly free only insofar as he belongs to the realm of destining and so becomes one who listens and hears, and not one who is simply constrained to obey" (25).

"The essence of modern technology lies in Enframing. Enframing belongs within the destining of revealing" (25).

"In this way we are already sojourning within the open space of destining, a destining that in no way confines us to a stultified compulsion to push on blindly with technology or, what comes to the same thing, to rebel helplessly against it and curse it as the work of the devil" (25-6).

• Both relationships are bad. Blind acceptance or refusal. Like that he makes this point.

"Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct" (27).

"Man stands so decisively in attendance on the challenging-forth of Enframing that he does not apprehend Enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ek-sists, from out of his essence, in the realm of the exhortation or address, and thus can never encounter only himself" (27).

"The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence. The rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth" (28).

• That he would be passive rather than active?

"What does it mean 'to save'? Usually we think that it means only to seize hold of a thing threatened by ruin, in order to secure it in its former continuance. But the verb 'to save' says more. 'To save' is to fetch something home into its essence, in order to bring essence for the first time into its genuine appearing" (28).

• Is he saying everything thing--and by extension, each person--has an intrinsically "true" character? This seems to parallel the expressive movement. I wonder what post-modernists would say about this, if this is in fact what Heidegger is claiming.

"Enframing is a way of revealing having the character of destining, namely, the way that challenges forth" (29).

• I thought I had a handle on what Enframing is...but now I'm not so sure. The more he talks about it the more confused I get.
  

"It is technology itself that makes the demand on us to think in another way what is usually understood by 'essence'" (30).

"Everything, then, depends upon this: that we ponder this arising and that, recollecting, we watch over it" (32).

"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. When, however, we ask how the instrumental comes to presence as a kind of causality, then we experience this coming to presence as the destining of revealing" (32).

• This is confusing, I thought he said earlier that this conception made sense. But what he's saying here, if I'm correct, is that in fact technology is much more than simply a means to an end, it reveals something about ourselves and about our relationship with the world around us? And if we view technology as simply a tool, a neutral tool, then we miss opportunities for reflection that can make us more active users/designers/manipulators of technology as well as the world surrounding us?

"The question concerning technology is the question concerning the constellation in which revealing and concealing, in which the coming to presence of truth, comes to pass" (33).