The Question Concerning (Digital) Technology
An attempt to understand our digital world - part one
To understand technology we need to understand how it affects us—the human beings that both create technology and are created by it. If we forget this symbiotic relationship between technology and humanity, then our understanding will always be incomplete.
The entire point of such understanding is to ensure that we can have a free relationship to technology. To act freely with technology means that we must understand it.
But this is much harder than it sounds. Today, technology moves so quickly that it feels like it’s changing faster than our ability to analyze it. We’re diving into technologies that have more potential than ever to disrupt this symbiotic relationship, and we’re doing so with very few tools and methodologies that can adapt to an accelerating rate of change.
So we somehow need analysis that can get to the core of the human condition, but in ways that aren’t frozen in specific moments of technological time. We need to account for the broad patterns of technology while remaining invariant to certain degrees of technological progress. Even better, we want this analysis to be predictive about where our human condition might be going.
One thinker that might help us is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger towers over 20th century philosophy. His work Being and Time is in the pantheon of humanity’s greatest philosophical achievements.
But wow, does he come with complications. His work is notoriously dense and difficult to process. Unless you can read German you are depending on a translation to understand that material. Best of all, Heidegger seems to take a sadistic pleasure in inventing new words to define difficult concepts, and then invents more new words to explain those original new words. Oh, and then there’s the whole Nazi business1.
In 1945 Heidegger released a short series of essays translated as The Question Concerning Technology. I recently spent a week studying it as part of a reading group seeking to recover the intellectual origins of technology. So that’s my excuse for reading Heidegger.
But what I found in trying to understand Heidegger was a methodology for analyzing technology that Heidegger used to generate powerful insights into the nature of humanity itself. The question that struck me upon finishing the reading was: would the same approach generate equally powerful insights today?
This series will be an attempt to answer that question.
But before we can address today’s technology, we need to understand Heidegger’s approach. This will be my humble attempt2 to provide a legible summary of The Question Concerning Technology.
It starts with truth
The key to understanding The Question Concerning Technology is that it’s not ultimately about anything technological. To set the stage for where Heidegger is going, we first need to talk about truth.
For Heidegger, truth is not just about how much our beliefs might correspond with reality. It’s much weirder than that. For Heidegger, truth gets to the mystery of what it means to be a human being. Truth is what makes our experience of being in the world intelligible.
In this sense, truth is not just epistemic, it’s revelatory. You could even say it’s spiritual. It reveals to us the nature of our own being by unlocking a new awareness of what is possible.
But this also makes truth mysterious. It is always something revealed in history, in specific times and places. This revealing happens through us, through human activities like art, science, and yes, even technology. In this way, we are co-revealers of truth. We are active participants in the process.
This process of revealing truth also defines us. For Heidegger, the essence of man is to freely participate in this truth process—the revealing of truth and how it defines us. We can freely participate in it by constantly questioning it—by understanding it at its very essence. We are the beings that question our own being.
So when Heidegger wants to understand the essence of technology, he wants to understand how technology affects how truth is revealed, and how it affects our role in that process.
Technology
Keeping truth in mind, we can now approach Heidegger’s question concerning technology.
The goal of Heidegger’s project is simple: he wants to have a free relationship with technology. If we use technology without thinking—for example, if we simply assume that technology is neutral or that it has no potential to affect our nature—then we risk becoming blind to technology. To act freely with technology means that we must understand it.
The first thing that Heidegger makes clear is that he is not interested in any particular technology. He’s interested in the “essence” of technology—what defines all technology. We can only have a free relationship with technology if we understand its very essence.
So what is the essence of technology?
Causality
Heidegger starts with the obvious. Technology is a human activity that employs means towards ends. This is the common answer understood by everyone, and Heidegger agrees that it is correct.
But just because an answer is correct does not mean that it is exhaustive. There may be more to uncover. Heidegger wants to keep digging.
He latches onto this instrumental idea of means and ends. What are we really talking about when we employ means to pursue ends? We’re talking about causality. Heidegger defines causality as a process of becoming—of starting something new that becomes present in the world.
Heidegger uses an example of a silver chalice to help explain the essence of causality. Causality isn’t just about the means, or how the silversmith forges the silver into the form of the chalice. Causality also includes the ends—how the religious service that incorporates the chalice informs every aspect of the silversmith’s craft.
The chalice is caused by both means and ends—by how it’s made and what it's made for. The silversmith guides this causality by unifying both the means and ends. In doing so, he brings something new to be present in the world.
Revealing
This unified causality helps Heidegger make a distinction between earlier technology and modern technology.
For pre-modern technology, the connection between the means and ends is obvious. The trees are cut down to build the home. The field is farmed to provide the grain you eat. The river turns the windmill that grinds the grain into flour. The trees are seen in the home, the field in the food, the river in the flour.
The means and ends are also intimately interdependent, reciprocally revealing more truths about each other. By understanding the nature of silver more fully, the silversmith can more artfully reveal the chalice. By understanding the purpose of the chalice, the silversmith can reveal more of the silver.
What does this say about the essence of technology? That technology is much more than just means to an end. Technology is also a way of revealing—of unconcealing truth. The silversmith reveals more of the silver by bringing out more of its nature in the chalice.
Heidegger called this form of revealing poiesis, a Greek word meaning “bringing forth”. Poiesis is the process of bringing something new into existence.
Standing-reserve
This mode of revealing makes sense for pre-modern technologies. But what about modern technologies?
For Heidegger, there is a clear difference—the immediacy between means and ends is severed in modern technologies. The trees are converted into cellulose for paper. The field is unearthed for coal. The river is dammed up to create hydro-electricity. Nothing of the inherent complexities of the means are revealed in the ends. Instead, they are reduced, transformed, and standardized.
This is a new type of revealing, based on challenging nature. The soil of the field is challenged to be revealed as mineral deposits and stripped of its capacity to grow. The river is secured as energy, ready to be further ordered as power for the factory. The trees of the forest are transformed into the uniformity of cellulose.
This is no longer a “bringing forth”, but a “challenging forth”. When nature is challenged in this way, a part of its essence can no longer be “brought forth”.
Even more, the coal and electricity and cellulose are never ends in themselves. They are always means for much bigger processes of technological assemblies. They are ordered and standardized into reserves, on call and waiting to be used and consumed by ever larger processes of ordering.
Heidegger calls the result of this form of revealing “standing-reserve”.
Enframing
This mode of revealing—this “challenging forth”—doesn’t just apply to nature. It also applies to us. Whenever we view the world through the eyes of “securing and ordering”, we’re being challenged to see objects as what Heidegger calls “objectlessness”. We see complexity and reduce it into standardized metrics of uniformity.
We analyze the forest by how effectively it can be converted into a maximum yield at minimum expense. HR evaluates human beings by how effectively they can conform to a scripted role of productive behavior. We even rank and rate the river by how effectively it can be ordered into a beautiful tourist getaway or the backdrop of a carefully composed selfie (ready to be further ordered into a constructed digital narrative).
Modern technology only rewards standing-reserve. If it can be ordered and standardized, it can be put into productive use. As we become more entangled in these larger forces of technical production, we become more compelled to reveal the world through this lens.
What happens if this compulsion to order becomes increasingly irresistible? We begin to reveal everything as standing-reserve. For Heidegger, this is the essence of technology: the challenge we feel to view everything through the lens of standing-reserve.
Heidegger calls this irresistible compulsion “enframing”.
The extreme danger
But Heidegger doesn’t stop there. He wants to go further. He wants to again question if there’s something more to the essence of technology.
What type of thing is this enframing anyway? And what does it say about Heidegger’s original concerns around truth, and our role in revealing it?
Heidegger seeks to understand the essence of enframing by contrasting it with poiesis, the “bringing forth” that Heidegger associated with pre-modern technology.
With poiesis, we are proactive participants. We are actively investigating the world to more artfully bring it into being. We seek to co-reveal both the means and the ends more fully. We are the initiators of intentional revealing.
With enframing, we are reactive subjects. We are compelled to view everything as standing-reserve, because that is the currency our modern technological world runs on. Only objects that have been standardized and ordered can be valued. Standing-reserve becomes the terms of engagement, until they become the only terms we know.
When our world becomes dominated by enframing, then our role becomes nothing more than to passively order the standing-reserve into a mass of “objectlessness”.. We are no longer using technology to reveal more of the world in terms of its particular complexity. Instead, technology is using us to reveal more of the world on its terms of standard uniformity. This is how man himself becomes standing-reserve.
But there’s a danger even greater than this. Enframing doesn’t just conceal all other ways of revealing truth. Enframing can conceal the act of revealing itself, and the active role we play in it. This is what Heidegger calls the “extreme danger”.
What if enframing becomes so automatic that we forget the role we play in revealing it? What if we lose our capacity to question truth and how it is revealed? If we can no longer question technology down to its very essence, how would it then be possible to have a free relationship to technology? How would it be possible to have a free relationship to anything?
The saving power
But even in this extreme danger, Heidegger also sees a glimmer of hope.
Yes, enframing can appear irresistible in how it conceals both all other modes of revealing and our active role in the process.
But enframing also reveals modern technology’s utter dependence on us. The world of modern technology shows us how completely the world can change when we reveal truths in different ways. The power of enframing is also in some sense the power of man as co-revealer, and the essential role we play in the process.
By understanding this essential role, we can come to understand what Heidegger calls our ultimate dignity: keeping a faithful watch over the unconcealment of truth. In this sense, the dignity of man lies in our role as custodians of truth, and of how truth is revealed to the world, whether through enframing or poiesis or other forms entirely.
This essence contains the possibility of a free relationship to technology. We become truly free to technology when we become, as Heidegger says, “the ones who listen and hear, and not just the ones who are simply compelled to obey”.
The power of the poetic
Is this really possible? Is there anything that can take this “saving power” and make it more real?
Heidegger isn’t sure. He again goes back to the ancient Greeks, to investigate techne, the Greek term for technology.
Techne isn’t simply a noun that defines pre-modern technologies. For the Greeks, techne was more like a verb that defines a revealing, a “bringing forth” into the world of those things that cannot bring themselves forth. In the same way as the chalice can only be revealed through the silversmith, the poem, the basket, and the sculpture can only be revealed through the creative powers of man.
Heidegger wants us to consider techne’s role in “bringing-forth” more fully:
“There was a time when it was not technology alone that bore the name techne. Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called techne. And the poiesis of the fine arts also was called techne.”
By art, Heidegger is not just talking about aesthetics or artistic representations. Again, his definition is much weirder than that. A true work of art doesn't just depict what is, but what can be. It reveals new ways for beings to be present in the world.
In another work, Heidegger uses the example of a Greek temple—it doesn't just artistically represent the spiritual, but articulates an entirely new world of meanings, values, and understandings. The temple reveals a world where gods, rituals, and humans can emerge into “unconcealment”. Entirely new ways of being are made possible. This is art as the poetical, as that which participates in poiesis, in the “bringing-forth”.
If modern technology can no longer “bring forth” in the sense of poiesis, other forms of techne still can. Heidegger sees this possibility in art, in the essence of the poetical. And in this essence he sees the potential for a free relationship to technology:
“Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art.”
Can art remind us of our essential dignity? Can art restore in us our rightful role as custodians of truth? Can art reveal a more primal truth than enframing, in a way that enables us to have a free relationship to technology?
So Heidegger has taken us on a journey of questioning technology—questioning it over and over again—until we arrive at its very essence. And with this essential understanding, we can now have some hope of having a free relationship to it.
The question is: do we have to follow Heidegger all the way to this destination of being and art and revealing? Or is there something valuable in the journey itself? Perhaps something worth recovering that can help us have a free relationship with technology today?
Will pick these questions up in the next part of the series by applying this methodology to our current digital landscape.
Which I find so tiresome I’m not even going to link to an exhaustive treatment.
Some caveats: I only have a broad understanding of Heidegger beyond this reading, and try to minimize reference to the broader Heideggerian canon. I do not read German. I put very little effort into understanding the nuances of the translation. I try to avoid using Heidegger’s invented words, but include a few to make it easier to reference the work. I use some of his other terms for convenience, like “man” for “humanity”.