In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Martin Heidegger relies heavily on an exegesis of a few passages of Aristotle. In this paper, I will not only attempt to provide an exegesis of Heidegger’s important paper—it is arguably the genesis of the philosophy of technology—but also, in so doing, look closely at what Heidegger has to say in reference to Aristotle. Ultimately, Heidegger is trying to “prepare a free relationship to [technology],” a relationship that “opens our human existence to the essence of technology.”[1] A free relationship to technology is therefore open to the essence of technology; therefore, Heidegger devotes considerable attention to the essence of technology.
With the mention of essence, we seem already to be treading Aristotelian ground, since it is the Aristotelian sense of essence that Heidegger is employing here. This sense is captured in the several words that Aristotle used at various times that are commonly translated as “essence,” among them ti esti, to einai, to ti en einai, and ousia. These are not all exactly the same thing, but I will address them as they come to bear on the matter at hand.
Through the word ousia, essence is inseparably linked to substance in Aristotelian thought, since ousia is not only a word often translated essence, but it is also the word for substance. For Aristotle, substances come in two kinds: primary substance and secondary substance. In the Categories, Aristotle explains that a primary substance “is that which is neither said of a subject nor in a subject, e.g. the individual man or the individual horse,” where the secondary substance are “the species in which these things primarily called substances are…as also are the genera of these species.”[2]
Essence can be understood in relation to both primary and secondary substances. Socrates is a primary substance, and there are properties without which Socrates would cease to be the individual, Socrates. Similarly, Socrates is a human being, which is a secondary substance, and there are properties—rationality, for instance—without which Socrates would cease to be human (and would therefore cease to be Socrates, as well). Anything that Socrates might lose but would still allow him to be Socrates is an accidental attribute, such as his hair. Essences and accidents do not exhaustively describe properties, however, since there is a third category, called propria. Propria are properties that are necessary but not essential. Socrates cannot be human without the capacity to understand grammar, since rationality entails this capacity. But rationality is explanatorily prior to grammaticality, and so it is essential, where grammaticality is a proprium. In the Topics, Aristotle explains 102a18-30 that a proprium “is something which does not indicate the essence of a thing, yet belongs to that thing alone, and is predicated convertibly of it.”[3] So an essence, in Aristotelian terms, consists in properties that are both necessary for an entity to be what it is and that are explanatorily basic. So Heidegger’s investigation into the essence of technology can be expected to be aimed not only at seeing through what is accidental to technology and finding what technology is wherever and whenever it appears, but also at finding what is explanatorily basic among the necessary features of technology. For this is what an essence is for Aristotle.
In light of this Aristotelian conception of essence, Heidegger offers two common definitions of technology, which are the instrumental and anthropological definitions. First, “technology is a means to an end,” and second, “technology is a human activity.”[4] Though these are both correct about technology, they do not in any way constitute the essence of technology, which Heidegger explains in terms of a distinction between the correct and the true. The true is in the correct, just as tree-ness is in every tree, but the correct is no more the true than any tree is tree-ness. This distinction is remarkably like the distinction between essence and proprium. Both the instrumental and the anthropological are necessary for technology, but they are posterior to some more explanatorily basic essence. Whatever explains all the propria is the essence. Similarly, whatever is in all the particulars is the universal, and since the universal is in any particular, it can be found in any particular, but so are propria, hence the aforementioned basicality requirement. Hence the principle, “we must seek the true by way of the correct,”[5] whereby Heidegger puts the instrumental definition of technology to use as a correct definition to seek the true concerning technology.
The concept of instrumentality leads Heidegger to causality, since means effect ends. This is not the Enlightenment or mechanical model of “billiard ball” causation (wherein one billiard ball strikes another and the latter reacts), following the example found in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding of David Hume.[6] For Hume, that a particular effect follows from some purported cause is unknowable to the Understanding, that is, unknowable by reasoning a priori; rather, the association of causes with effects is learned a posteriori by the empirical observation of constant conjunctions and probabilistic reasoning. Whether there is a connection between them called “causation,” whatever it might be, is altogether secret. Heidegger appeals instead to the Aristotelian framework of causation, putting the four-causal structure of explanation to use in order to expound upon instrumentality. Traditionally, the four causes have been called the material cause, the formal cause, the final cause, and the efficient cause. For Heidegger, the modern concept of causation is mired in problems, mainly insofar as it limits itself to the efficient cause, “which brings about the effect.”[7] Heidegger asserts that what we now call the efficient cause was unknown to Aristotle, whose “doctrine neither knows the cause that is named by this term nor uses a Greek word that would correspond to it.”[8]
There are three passages in which Aristotle gives an account of his four causes, one in the Posterior Analytics, one in the Metaphysics and the other in the Physics. The Posterior Analytics account, referring to four types of explanation, says, “one, what it is to be a thing; one, that if certain things hold it is necessary that this does; another, what initiated the change; and fourth, the aim.”[9] What is called the efficient cause is of course that which initiates change.
In the Physics,
In one way, then, that out of which a thing comes to be and which persists, is called a cause, e.g. the bronze of the statue, the silver of the bowl, and the genera of which the bronze and the silver are species. In another way, the form or the archetype, i.e. the definition of the essence, and its genera, are called causes (e.g. of the octave the relation of 2:1, and generally number), and the parts in the definition. Again, the primary source of the change or rest; e.g. the man who deliberated is a cause, the father is the cause of the child, and generally what makes of what is made and what changes of what is changed. Again, in the sense of end or that for the sake of which a thing is done, e.g. health is the cause of walking about.[10]
In the Metaphysics, we read something very similar to that which is found in the Physics:
We call a cause (1) that from which (as immanent material) a thing comes into being, e.g. the bronze of the stature and the silver of the saucer, and the classes which include these. (2) The form or pattern, i.e. the formula of the essence, causes of the octave) and the parts of the formula. (3) That from which the change or the freedom from change first begins, e.g. the man who has deliberated is a cause, and the father a cause of the child, and in general the maker a cause of the thing made and the change-producing or changing. (4) The end, i.e. that for the sake of which a thing is, e.g. health is the cause of walking.[11]
In both the Physics and the Metaphysics, Aristotle goes on to relate the formal cause to one term for essence, both times the Greek to ti en einai. Given our earlier discussion of essence, however, it is important to note that Aristotle goes on to say in the Metaphysics that the essence is “the whole, the synthesis, and the form,”[12] which emphasizes the inseparability of the four causes in explaining something. There is no essence, there is no form, without the matter, nor without telic parts, nor without a source of motion. To inquire into the essence is to enquire into the whole.
As we can see, that Aristotle gave no particular name to that cause that came to be called the causa efficiens is true enough. The question is the extent to which Aristotle’s third cause corresponds to that which is called the causa efficiens: the mechanical cause of the Enlightenment. Clearly, Aristotle’s cause is much richer than the mechanical cause. Not only does it explain the billiard ball causation, but also addresses, in part, what we might call agent causation. The third cause is not only the billiard ball but also the agent that deliberately sets the cue ball into locomotion. Already we are distancing ourselves from the causa efficiens. Further, the causa efficiens as Heidegger is using it can hardly account for the motion that takes place in artistic creation. Aristotle’s third cause easily names the sculptor as the cause of a sculpture, but the causa efficiens is at a loss to do this, since it can hardly describe anything besides locomotion, where Aristotle’s third cause accounts for all kinds of motion. Now, Heidegger phrases the Aristotelian cause as “that from which the [thing’s] bringing forth and resting-in-self take and retain their first departure.”[13] If we understand “bringing forth” as motion and “resting-in-self” as rest, then there is no trouble in counting Heidegger’s definition as equivalent to any of Aristotle’s. Whether this is the case shall become clear below.
The thrust of Heidegger’s use of the Aristotelian four-causal structure of explanation is to establish the sense in which causality is relevant to the question of instrumentality; namely, what is required is causality in the sense of aition, or responsibility.[14] The four causes are four ways of being responsible, none of which alone constitutes a complete account; the four causes, the four ways of being responsible, must be taken together, as we have already seen in our investigation of Aristotle’s text. Heidegger equates his sense of aition to the verb “to occasion.” To occasion is to be responsible in the sense that “the principal characteristic of being responsible is…starting something on the way to its arrival.”[15] This is not mechanical causation, and it certainly sounds like Aristotle’s third cause, but it must not be forgotten that all four causes are modes of occasioning, since all four are ways of being responsible. Accordingly, Heidegger translates a passage of Plato’s Symposium n order to introduce the concept of poiesis: “‘Every occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not presencing is poiesis, is bringing-forth.”[16] So poiesis and bringing-forth are interchangeable. Recall Heidegger’s account of Aristotle’s third cause, which can now be read as “that from which a thing’s poiesis and resting-in-self take and retain their first departure.” The key, then, is the “first departure.” The cause is that which initiates poiesis; in this sense, Heidegger is true to Aristotle.
Now, “bringing-forth brings hither out of concealment forth into unconcealment,” and this is within “revealing,” which is the Greek aletheria, which is the Latin veritas, which is truth in the sense of correctness, discussed above.[17] Inquiry into instrumentality has yielded revealing, in which all bringing-forth (or poiesis) is “grounded,” and bringing-forth “gathers within itself the four modes of occasioning,”[18] which are the four causes, which bring with them instrumentality. Instrumentality is revealing; therefore, “technology is a way of revealing.”[19]
The Greek poiesis, says Heidegger, includes techne, technical craft. Techne is a way of revealing. He emphasizes the inclusiveness of the Greek concept of techne as being closely bound up with episteme as a way of revealing truth in the sense of bringing-forth, in the sense of unconcealment.[20] In pointing to the distinction between techne and episteme, Heidegger evokes Aristotle once more, attributing the origin of the distinction to the Nicomachean Ethics VI.3-4. In fact, Aristotle distinguishes among five modes of aletheuein, of revealing, in Heidegger’s teminology: techne, episteme, phronesis, sophia, and nous. Of episteme, Aristotle says:
knowledge [episteme]…is a state of capacity to demonstrate, and he has the other limiting characteristics which we specify in the Analytics; for it is when a man believes in a certain way and the principles (arche) are known to him that he has knowledge, since if they are not better-known to him than the conclusion, he will have his knowledge incidentally.[21]
In addition, episteme is concerned with things that cannot be otherwise.[22] Now, in the Analytics, knowledge can be gained by demonstration of what is less obvious from what is more obvious. Such demonstration is done from first principles (arche), which are known without need of demonstration. Aristotle famously discusses the origin of how we come to know archai at the close of the Posterior Analytics (II.19). There he claims that “from perception comes memory” and “memories that are many in number form a single experience [empeiria]. And from experience…there comes a principle of skill (techne) and understanding (episteme)—of skill if it deals with how things come about (genesis), of understanding if it deals with what is the case.”[23] So both techne and episteme come to be known in the same way: empeiria, experience. Aristotle presents this process by analogy with the formation of a battle line. One perception takes a stand in the memory, and others join it and form a strong position until one has gained understanding of the universal. Still, we have seen one difference, but it is not the difference mentioned in the Ethics.
Returning to the Nicomachean Ethics, of techne, Aristotle says that “art [techne] is identical with a state of capacity to make [poiesis], involving a true course of reasoning.”[24] In addition, techne concerns things that can be or not be[25] (which is why they can be brought forth). As we just saw in the Analytics, technai are learned empirically, by repeated perception, just like the truths of episteme; however the Analytics concerns techne with genesis, where the Ethics concerns it with poiesis. Does this suggest any problem? A genesis is a coming into being, where a poiesis is a bringing into being. Thus, it seems that the Analtyics account is simply approaching techne from the angle of epistemology—what is learned as techne is a genesis—but the Ethics is concerned with techne in practice. To have techne is a capacity to engage in poiesis, which to know about the genesis of whatever one is bringing-forth. So the texts are consistent in their usage of techne, and so we can draw the following conclusion. We have seen that episteme is knowledge of what is the case that cannot be otherwise, but techne is knowledge of how things come to be the case (what is responsible for a thing), concerning things that can be otherwise. (No work of art has to be—a point of profound importance when we reach the end.)
Next, Heidegger questions whether this relationship between episteme and techne is the case only with respect to Greek handwork technology, or whether it is applicable to modern technology, also. For Heidegger, the relationship between handwork technology and modern technology involves both continuity and discontinuity. On the one hand, both are modes of revealing, but on the other, only handwork technology is revealing in the sense of poiesis. This is near the heart of the problem with modern technology as a mode of revealing; that which it brings into unconcealment (i.e. that which it reveals), taken by itself, is not true. But this is to jump ahead a bit.
Heidegger looks at the difference between handwork technology and modern technology in terms of technology’s relationship to modern, post-Enlightenment science, which is at once before modern technology and dependent on technological apparatus.[26] For Heidegger, modern technology is chronologically posterior to modern science, but in its essence it is historically prior to modern science.[27] That is, modern science is of the same essence as modern technology. This all makes sense when considered from an Aristotelian perspective. In terms of explanation, or of being responsible—that is, in terms of the four causes—it is not difficult to see how modern science can both be responsible for modern technology and arise later. Since the four causes are inseparable, the appearance of the essence of modern science in modern technology, where modern science is more explanatorily basic, is perfectly consistent with modern science’s later appearance, as itself, in the chronology of history. Heidegger proceeds to pursue the question of what the essence of modern technology is in a framework in which his assessment of modern technology and science makes sense.
Ultimately, Heidegger calls the essence of modern technology Gestell or “Enframing,” which is “that challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the self-revealing as standing-reserve.”[28] This definition consists in several parts, which Heidegger has spent the preceding few pages developing. First of all, the revealing of modern technology cannot be understood in terms of a bringing-forth or poiesis; rather, this revealing is “a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such.”[29] The difference is in storage. Heidegger points out that though the windmill, known to pre-modern technology, draws energy from nature, it does not store it. It draws on the wind as it would blow anyway; the wind is not revealed as anything but wind. This is contrasted with modern mining operations, for which “the earth reveals itself as a coal mining district [etc.]”[30] The ways of revealing are, in this case, “unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about,”[31] and this comprises unconcealment of beings as “standing-reserve,” or Bestand. Specifically, “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. Whatever is ordered in this way has its own standing.”[32] So, modern technology as a way of revealing unconceals beings as standing-reserve by way of ordering. For instance, an automobile in a garage is standing-reserve until it is ordered for transportation, and this ordering reveals in such a way as to conceal and unconceal. So, in order to be revealed as standing-reserve, a thing must be ordered as such. Modern science, for Heidegger, is an enormous exercise in ordering. It is now possible to make sense of Enframing, the essence of technology. Inasmuch as Enframing challenges beings, it reveals them to be resources, and these resources are ordered as the standing-reserve, which is what is revealed by the aforementioned challenging.
Stated elsewhere, “The essence of modern technology starts man upon the way that revealing through which the real everywhere, more or less distinctly, becomes standing-reserve,” where “to start upon a way” is “to send.” This leads to the idea of destining, which is “that sending-that-gathers which first starts a man upon a way of revealing.”[33] Destining is to be distinguished from “a fate that compels,” which is antithetical to freedom. Thus, Heidegger says, “Enframing belongs within the destining of revealing,” which is not to say that “technology is the fate of our age, where ‘fate’ means the inevitableness of an unalterable course.”[34] A destined course is alterable, in that one can destine a different way of revealing. Heidegger calls Enframing, the essence of technology, “a destining of revealing,”[35] that is, (again) it starts man upon the way (destining) of revealing (as standing reserve); however, “In this way [Enframing as a destining of revealing] 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 be the same thing, to rebel helplessly against it and curse it as the work of the devil,” and that is unexpectedly a “freeing claim,” says Heidegger.[36] So much for Heidegger the romantic reactionary or Heidegger the progressive.[37]
If the essence of technology results in a freeing claim, then what is the problem? It is the destining of revealing itself, which is “in itself not just any danger, but the danger.”[38] Further, the destining Enframing as the mode of revealing is “the supreme danger.” The danger in general, with any destining of a revealing, is captured by the famous gestalt figure of the duckrabbit. One can destine the duckrabbit to be unconcealed (revealed) as a duck, thereby concealing the rabbit, or vice versa. Both duck and rabbit are correct, but neither is the whole truth of the duckrabbit; neither is the formal cause of the duckrabbit; neither is the essence of the duckrabbit. Each is a revealing, but neither reveals the truth as duckrabbit. Applied to the case of technology, “Enframing conceals that revealing which, in the sense of poiesis, lets what presences come forth into appearance,”[39] and also, “Enframing blocks the shining-forth and holding-sway of truth.”[40] This is because Enframing is but one mode of revealing, and if it is taken to be the only mode of revealing, then disaster ensues. Hubert Dreyfus explains, “The threat is not a problem for which there can be a solution but an ontological condition from which we can be saved.”[41] That ontological condition stems from man taking everything as standing-reserve, and “he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve,” but short of falling into that condition, man “exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth,” and so man views everything as his construct, and “it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.”[42] In short, the destining of Enframing as revealing leads man to look at being in a way that distances him from even his own essence.
Heidegger takes the words of the poet Holderlin, “‘But where danger is, grows/ The saving power also’” as his guide to the investigation of the soteriological question, which he takes to be “fetch[ing] something home into its essence, in order to bring the essence for the first time into genuine appearing.”[43] The saving power, according to the poet, is to be found growing precisely in Enframing, the essence of technology, where the danger is. At this point, Heidegger shifts his concept of essence away from the classical sense and toward “the ways in which [things] hold sway, administer themselves, develop and decay—the way in which they ‘essence.’”[44] To “essence” in this sense is to endure; in technology, Enframing as a destining of revealing is what endures. Heidegger goes on to claim that “Only what is granted endures. That which endures primally out of the earliest beginning is what grants.”[45] Enframing endures, therefore Enframing is granted, as is its destining as revealing, and “the granting that sends [destines] in one way or another into revealing is as such the saving power.”[46] So, through the investigation of Enframing—that danger, the essence of technology—we find that the saving power does indeed arise, and “the saving power lets man see and enter into the higest dignigy of his essence. This dignity lies in keeping watch over the unconcealment—and with it, from the first, the concealment—of all coming to presence on this earth.”[47] Man is for this reason free, that a destining is not fated, but a destining is granted; therefore, the saving power grows. He is not free in that he has control over technology—such a view obtains the opposite result—and he is not free in abandoning technology—in its essence the saving power must grow that allows for the free relationship to exist. Man is not yet saved, and his destiny is not fixed, so he may either go the way of pure Enframing, revealing being just as standing-reserve, or the saving power, whatever it is—Heidegger strongly suggests it might be art—which “must be of a higher essence than what is endangered, though at the same time kindred to it.”[48] At this point, we have returned to Heidegger’s aim stated at the beginning; we have seen how he thinks the growth of the saving power can allow man to enter into a free relationship with technology. On a final note, recall that techne concerns what can be otherwise, where episteme, so dear to modern science, concerns what cannot be otherwise. Techne, in the sense of poiesis, speaks to freedom—it is a way of knowing that is apt to reveal things as being other than standing-reserve, to say the least. This, it seems, was Heidegger’s suspicion, and it is why he devoted such attention to the Aristotelian sense of techne. Is the poiesis therein the saving power?
Bibliography
Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation. Jonathan Barnes, ed. Princeton, Princeton: 1984.
Dreyfus, Hubert. “Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology.” Readings in the Philosophy of Technology. David Kaplan, ed. Rowman, Lanham: 2004. Pgs. 53-62.
Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” Readings in the Philosophy of Technology. David Kaplan, ed. Rowman, Lanham: 2004. Pgs. 35-51.
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Tom Beauchamp, ed. Oxford, New York: 1999.
[1] Heidgger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” Readings in the Philosophy of Technology. David Kaplan, ed. Rowman, Lanham, Maryland: 2004. pp. 35-52
[2] Categories 2a14-17
[3] Topics 102a18-19
[4] Heidegger 35
[5] Ibid. 36. Even this seems to be an Aristotelian principle: “The mode of existence and essence of the separable it is the business of philosophy to define” (194b14-15).
[6] Hume, David. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Tom Beauchamp, ed. Oxford, New York: 1999. Sec. 4, pt. 1
[7] Heidegger 37
[8] Ibid.
[9] Posterior Analytics 94a21-23
[10] Physics 194b24-35
[11] Metaphysics 1013a24-34
[12] Ibid. 1013b23-24
[13] Heidegger 37
[14] Ibid. 37
[15] Ibid. 38
[16] Ibid. 38
[17] Ibid. 38-39
[18] Ibid. 39
[19] Ibid. 39
[20] Ibid. 39
[21] Nicomachean Ethics 1139b31-35
[22] Ibid. 1139b20
[23] Posterior Analytics 100a4-9
[24] Nicomachean Ethics 1140a9-10
[25] Ibid. 1140a12-13
[26] Heidegger 39-40
[27] Ibid. 43-44
[28] Ibid. 42
[29] Ibid. 40
[30] Ibid. 40
[31] Ibid. 41
[32] Ibid. 41
[33] Ibid. 45
[34] Ibid. 45
[35] Ibid. 45
[36] Ibid. 45.
[37] Hubert Dreyfus dispenses nicely with these misunderstandings in Dreyfus, Hubert. “Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology.” Readings in the Philosophy of Technology. David Kaplan, ed. Rowman, Lanham: 2004. pp. 53-62
[38] Heidegger 46
[39] Ibid. 36
[40] Ibid. 37
[41] Dreyfus 54
[42] Heidegger 46
[43] Ibid. 47
[44] Ibid. 48
[45] Ibid. 49
[46] Ibid. 49
[47] Ibid. 49
[48] Ibid. 50
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