Summary/Outline of QT

This is a simplified outline of about the first half of the argument in QT as Heidegger presents it. I will post the second half when I have written it. I also plan on writing an outline of the argument in a reorganized way; the way I want to present it in my paper. While this version will probably remain "un-filled-out", I will will fill out my reorganized version with all the meat of the ideas intact.

Heidegger’s format:

First line of questioning

Definition of essence

Discussion of the essence of technology as thought today

Explanation of the neutral, instrumental definition

Assertion that it employs the cause and effect relationship

Discussion of the four causes

Assertion that today we tend to think of cause as aiton, to be responsible for in the sense that the chalice maker is responsible

Explanation of how to cause something is to bring it into presence

Bringing forth into appearance is Poiesis

Poiesis is to bring out of unconcealment which is to say, to reveal truth

Second line of questioning

Explanation of how technology is a kind of revealing

Bringing forth into presence, or revealing, is the realm in which causality and therefore instrumentality belong; it is their parent category. Instrumentality thought to be the fundamental characteristic of technology. Therefore technology belongs to, is a sub category, of revealing, or the bringing to presence of truth.

What the Greeks thought when they said techne included the idea of poiesis and therefore applied the term equally to the fine arts and the intellectual arts as they did craftsmanship. All technology was poetical (poiesis).

All technology was a mode of aletheia. It was the deliberate bringing out of concealment of truth by way of the 4 causes.

Explanation of what kind of revealing modern technology is

Although modern technology is distinct from primitive handicrafts in that it relies on exact science, it still brings things to presence, and is therefore a kind of revealing. But it is not a poiesis. Rather it is a mode of challenging, which demands that nature be used as a resource of energy as such

Illustration of modern agriculture and peasant farms

Illustration of old wooden bridge and hydroelectric plant

Explicit explanation of the idea of modern technology grasping nature as “standing reserve”

Loss of objectness

Characterization of modern technology as oppressive monotony

Articulation that man both lays the challenging claim to nature and is challenged to do so by the atmosphere of challenging impelling him to do so.

Articulation of the challenging claim as Enframing, and an explanation of the full range of that word

Enframing shows itself to be the mode of revealing as early as the advent of physics

Explanation of Destining and the arising of the Danger

Nature is at all times necessarily revealed to man in a certain way, with certain aspects concealed, others unconcealed. Man is free to destin the revealing one way or another.

Man opens himself up to the possibility of destining the revealing of nature differently that his currently is, when he questions after the essence of technology in order to understand how it comports itself, what it reveals.

He dooms himself if he simply treats technology as an enemy to be resisted.

But man’s ability to destin is being threatened by the possibility of the irreversible consummation of Enframing the world and the consequent loss of man’s experience of his own essence as somehow belonging to revealing

In the midst of the possibility of the coming into being of either one or the other of these possibilities (experiencing his essence or only seeing the world in terms of ordering Enframing), the destining of revealing, in all of its modes, is Danger

Articulation of Enframing as the ‘supreme’ danger

Articulation of 2 reasons

Articulation of 3^rd reason for danger: the concealment of the existence of the process of revealing to begin with

Reiteration that the danger lies in the kind of destining of revealing which is Enframing, which affects man’s essence, not in technology or technological artifacts themselves, which affects merely man’s body

Discussion on the arising of the saving power from out of the danger...

More to come