Paraphrase of Question Concerning Technology

This is a rough paraphrase of the essay Question Concerning Technology more or less paragraph by paragraph. It has typos and merely tentative interpretations. It is simply meant to be a step on the way to understanding the text.

The discourse is a “way of thinking” (“way” as in path e.g. upon a path of thinking). That is, it is the process of thinking about the question that will lead us to the answer or at least to authentically engaging the question. Don’t pay too much head to specific words or turns of logic. P.3

The essence of a thing, or the way it is (rather than what it is), is how it endures through time, is how in our phenom. experience of the world it presents and comports itself, enduringly. P.3-4 foot

The essence of technology isn’t particular pieces of tech. but the thing that makes all techs techs. P.4

Everyone is “unfree and chained to technology” and are all the more delivered over to it the more they consider it “neutral”, though that is a common way to look at it nowadays. P.4

The conceptions of tech as a means to an end and otherwise as a human activity are actually the same/complimentary definitions. That is, seeking ends and supplying means, and human activity, go together/ are the same. This is the anthropological definition of tech which thinks of it as instrument/contrivance. P.4-5

The instrumental definition seems to apply accurately to modern tech as well as old handicraft even though new tech seems somehow new. Perhaps it slips closer to being “out of control”. P.5

As it slips, our “will to master” it grows accordingly. P.5

The instrumental definition of tech is merely “correct” whereas we seek a “true” definition of tech. However the true must be sought by way of the correct. P.6

Causality reigns over instrumentality because whatever has a means and end has a cause and a consequence. P.6

What instrumentality is reveals itself when we trace it back to “the ancients” (Aristotle) conception of cause: fourfold. The four causes are material (that material from which it is made), formal (the form into which the material is made), final (the end, goal, or use (see p.7-8 for nuanced def.) to which it is made), and efficient (the maker or causer which brings about the reformation). P.6

???? Exegesis needs revising - Common modern conceptions of cause tend to be limited to “that which brings about results” or something like the efficient cause, but to such an extent that the best Greek concept to describe this is none of the causes at all but something more like a “being indebted to”. In other words, we are inclined to think of (in the case of a chalice) the silversmith as the main cause. But the Aristotelian doctrine doesn’t even have a word for this “cause”. The silversmith was not what the efficient cause is meant to denote. P.8

??? Exegesis needs revising - The maker responsible for a thing, the efficient cause, is what gathers together the other 3 causes, utilizes them and thinks about the “that” and “how” of their coming into being, presencing, (essencing). P.8

To be responsible for something is to set it upon its way to appearing, to occasion it, to induce it to go forward. Also, to set loose, to call forth. This comes close to the essence of cause as the Greeks thought it. P.9

According to Plato, all bringing into presence is a bringing forth, or poiesis (unconcealment). Not only the crafts of the artists but nature also is a coming into presence, a revealing, poiesis. The former is brought about by something else, the latter by itself. P.10-11

Bring hither from concealment into unconcealment, or to reveal (entbergen), somehow entails these related concepts: rescue, recover, secure, harbor, and even conceal. (See Building, Dwelling, Thinking) P.12

For the Greeks, the concept of revealing was related to Aletheia, which the Romans call Veritas, which we usually understand as truth in the sense of “correctness”. P.12

What has this path upon thinking accomplished? This: Bringing forth into presencing, revealing, rules over causality and over instrumentality. Instrumentality originates in revealing. Instrumentality is considered to be the fundamental characteristic of technology. Therefore technology originates in revealing, is a way of revealing. Is a way towards truth. P.12

The greek concept of Techne applies just as well to the “arts of the mind” and the “fine arts” as to the work of the craftsman. Techne is something “poetic”. P.12-13

Techne is mode of aletheia, or truth and is distinct according to Plato from Epistime. It is the mode wherein truth is actively brought out of concealment by being given form through the 4 causes. The decisive aspect of Techne is in its revealing in the realm of truth rather than its manufacturing. P.12-13

Modern technology is qualitatively different from handicrafts because it relies on the use of exact science. But it too is a kind of revealing. P.14

Modern technology does not bring forth or reveal in the sense of Poiesis but rather in the mode of “challenging” (summon, demand, provoke) which puts to nature the unreasonable expectation of extracting and storing its energy as such. P.14 (really?)

The difference can be characterized by the difference between peasant cultivation of land, where the peasant orders the land and watches over its yield (“places the seed In the keeping of the forces of growth”) to supply his self with food, and the modern mechanized agriculture industry, where the land is set upon, or combatively engaged, to yield over its resources (along the lines of efficiency; maximum yield for minimum expense) which are then stockpiled unrelentingly. P.15

Another example: Rather than the old wooden bridge once built over the Rhine, which presumably was a place of contemplation, respect, sanctity, passivity, etc, is replaced by the hydroelectric plant, which sets itself into the river, damns it up, unlocks and extracts it energy potential, transforms it and stores it up, redistributes it and regulates it, forces through a endless series of uses. The river is still there but has been transformed, that is, now begins to presence differently, appears or is reveled or is unconcealed differently to us. Once a quiet and majestic mystery, it is now a battery buzzing away to energize our machines. P.16

Along these lines, objects are unconcealed to us as “standing reserves”, or as orderable and substitutable stockpiles of use-energy even unto losing their objectness. While the airliner on the runway is an object in some sense, it appears to us only as the “possibility of transportation”. P.17

As everything that appears appears in this way, it becomes “dry” and “monotonous” and therefore “oppressive”. P.17

While man accomplishes and orderes the challenging setting-upon through which the real is unconcealed, he does not order unconcealment itself. He is, as it were, caught up in the unconcealing of nature in this way and unwittingly but necessarily participates in the challenging. He is challenged to challenge. While the man walking through the woods counting felled lumber is apparently altogether similar to his grandfather doing the same, he is in reality a human resource, or standing reserve, subordinate to ordering of cellulose, which is set to making paper, which is set to making magazines, which is set to producing public opinion, etc. The challenging setting forth is the environment man passes though whenever he as a subject relates to an object. P.18

“We now name that challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the self-revealing as standing-reserve: Enframing” – The translation “Enframing” for Ge-stell is intended to suggest … something of the active meaning that H here gives the German word. … enframing is fundamentally a calling forth. It is a challenging claim, a demanding summons that “gathers” so as to reveal. This claim enframes in that it assembles and orders. It puts into a framework or configuration everything that it summons forth, through an ordering for use that it is forever restructuring anew. (taken from footnote on p.19)

Enframing actually challenges man forth to himself orderingly reveal the real as standing reserve. As Enframing is nothing technological but is what gives the characteristic way of reveling to technology, technology does not comprise it or bring it about. Technology, and man, merely respond to the challenge of Enframing. P.20

Nature is the chief standing-reserve. Accordingly, the ordering that challenges displays itself first in physics (fundamentally so, the study of what nature is), even in its pure theory, by “setting nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance, it therefore orders experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way.” P.21

The true essence of modern technology is still concealed and unclear but the Greeks were right in saying that those forces which form and hold sway in the world from the earliest become apparent to men only later. P.22

Even though modern technology comes 200 hundred years later than physical science, the essence of modern technology, the Enframing, shows itself present in the earlier. P.22

??? Exegesis needs revising – modern physical science demands the nature report itself in such a way that it is calculable and orderable as a system of information. The system is determined out a further altered concept of causality which excludes all but challenged forth reporting of standing reserve. P.23

??? Exegesis needs revising – Modern technology is not applied physical science, it simply employs physical science. P.23

“Always the unconcealment of that which is goes upon a way of revealing. Always the destining of revealing holds a 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.” P.25

The concept of freedom was originally associated with the concepts of openness and clarity, spaciousness. Inasmuch as this is true, freedom stands in close relation to revealing, unconcealment of truth. Because while revealing is a concealing and a harboring and a veiling, it is the kind of concealing that in its concealing of certain facets of the real, opens other facets up to unconcealment and openness, accessibility. P.25

“The essence of modern technology lies in Enframing. Enframing belongs within the destining of revealing. These sentences express something different from the talk that we hear more frequently, to the effect that technology is the fate of our age, where fate means the inevitableness of an unalterable course.” P25

We open up the possibility of “destining” for ourselves, that is, we enter into an open and unconstrained position where we can freely consider and judge what tech is and how it comports itself, what it reveals, when we consider the essence of technology. This is better than simply regarding tech as the work of the devil and rebelling against it helplessly, because that leaves us in the same constrained position and progressingly bad position. P.26

Because man’s ability to “destine” belongs to, is linked up with the kind of reveling that is holding sway, Enframing, his ability to destine is pushing towards, is on the verge of, being able to destine, to think, the world in any other way than ordered and Enframed, because the Enframing verges on a kind of irreversible consummation. Because of this the possibility of man “experiencing his own essence as his needed belong to revealing”. P.26

In the midst of the possibility of the coming into being of either one or the other of these possabilties (experiencing his essence or only seeing the world in terms of ordering Enframing), the destining of revealing, in all of its modes, is DANGER. P.26

In whatever the world is reveled, there is the danger that man may collapse, give in to, and misinterpret the unconcealed. An, or perhaps the ultimate, example of this is that even God becomes thought of Enframed, as the ultimate efficient cause, and his holy mysteriousness. P.26

Similarly, in a world that presents itself as a “calculable complex of the effects of forces [that] can indeed permit correct determinations […] precisely through these successes the danger can remain that in the midst of all that is correct the true will withdraw.” P.26

Destining is not just a danger, but danger itself, because it what sets up the option between existential obliteration and salvation. P.26

However, when destining reigns in the mode of Enframing, it is the ‘supreme’ danger, and this can be seen in two ways: First, in coming to see the world no longer as an object but exclusively as standing reserve, man becomes himself nothing but an orderer of standing reserve comes to the brink of the disaster of seeing himself as nothing but a standing reserve (of the resource needed to order the ordered). Meanwhile, man ironically exults his self, threatened with obliteration, as the lord of the earth. The second danger leads out of this: man begins to encounter only himself (his imposed constructs?) everywhere in nature. Meanwhile ironically, man actually nowhere encounters his true essence. In failing to understand himself as one spoken to by the objectness of nature, he fails to understand his true nature as one who “ek-sists”, and cannot therefore encounter himself. P.27

But the danger of Enframing is not limited to mans relationship to himself and everything that exists. Because it is so single minded and occlusive and forceful, Enframing fails to be able to hear the fact that other ways of revealing are possible and that its own way is flawed, and banishes or entails the risk of banishing men to Enframing forever. “This challenging Enframing not only conceals a former way of revealing, bringing-forth, but it conceals revealing itself and with it That wherein unconcealment, i.e. truth, comes to pass. P.27

Enframing blocks the shining forth and holding sway of truth, or in other words, the kind of destining of revealing which orders is dangerous, not technology itself. So let us talk about the danger inherent in destining revealing. P.27

The danger is not in the potentially lethal threat of machines to man’s health. The danger has already affected him in his essence, by denying him (and threatening more so) to deny him access into entering into a more original revealing hence access to hearing the call of a more primal truth. P.27

Thus, where Enframing is, there also is danger. But let assume (or at least hope for) “where the danger is, grows the saving power also”. If this is true, then there must be some possibility of Enframing not altogether blocking out access to understanding its own essence and stepping back from the precipice of existential obliteration. And if there is this possibility, is not the peering into the nature of the essence of Enframing that we have done, it? P.28

However we still must look carefully and preparedly into the questions concerning technology to explore as the last inquiry the nature of the danger of which we speak, in order to behold the saving power taking root in Enframing. First question: in what sense of the word is Enframing the ‘essence’ of technology? P.29

Enframing is the essence of technology not in the sense of being Genus or essentia arching over all technology. That is, technologies are not all kinds of Enframe-ments. Instead, Enframing and Poiesis are both kinds of destining, but are not kinds of revealing. Instead, revealing manifests itself (“suddenly and inexplicably to all thinking”) as Poiesis and/or as Enframing, and which “allots itself to man.” Enframing originates in Poiesis, but at the same time, blocks Poiesis. P.29-30

Technology itself demands that we think of essence, and of the essence of technology, in this other way (not Genus). (Is this its saving power?) p.30

Plato and Aristotle did think of the essence of a thing as how its presences, except they understood its only its presencing to be that part of it that presenced permanently and unchangingly, i.e. the eternal form, or idea. P.30

All presencing, essencing, endures. But it is too narrow to think of essencing only as permanently enduring essencing.

To endure is to grant (vouchsafe, guarantee) so only that which grants or is granted can be enduring. Enframing is a challenging-forth, which it not a granting. BUT (?) this cannot be because as a destining, the presencing of technology sets man upon a path towards entry into, encountering, That which is other, Object. For there is no such thing as a man who exists, solely of himself, as a man. (ek-sists?) (needs revising) (p.31)

Enframing can rightfully be called a granting if in it the saving power begins to grow. The saving power can bring man into his essence, his dignity, which is to be the watchful keeper of the coming to presence of truth, of concealment and unconcealment. Ironically this saving power grows out of exactly that thing which threatens to occlude from the fact that concealment and unconcealment are even happening. To take advantage of our essence and dignity, we must pursue the essence of technology. (p.32)

To reiterate, ”everything depends on this’ that we attempt to understand these essence of technology by catching sight of what exactly is coming to presence in it, instead of “just staring at the technological”. Seeing technology as merely an instrument, we cannot do this. (p.32)

Furthermore, the granting of the coming to presence of the essence of technology, requires and uses man, and he shares in the revealing. (p.32)

So we see that “in a lofty sense the essence of technology is ambiguous”. On the one hand Enframing challenges forth all of nature to be ordered and therefore blocks mans view to seeing the revealing, how it reveals, what it conceals and unconceals, and so endangers mans relation to the truth. On the other hand, the granted sort of coming to pass of Enframing seems to have let man endure in such a way as to give him a glimpse of the essence of technology, a glimpse out of which his salvation may arise. (p.33)

“But what help is it to us to look into the constellation of truth? We look into the danger and see the growth of the saving power.”

“Through this we are not yet saved. Be we are thereupon summoned to hope in the growing light of the saving power. How can this happen? Here and there and in little things, that we may foster the saving power in its increase. This includes holding always before our eyes the extreme danger. “ p.33

The coming to presence of technology threatens to consume all of nature in the comprehension of it as standing reserve. While mere human activity cannot counter this attack, human reflection can ponder that the saving power is of a higher essence. P.33-34

Is there a kind of revealing that could bring about the shining forth of the saving power in the midst of the danger?

In Greeks times, the word techne referred also the fine arts, to Poiesis, to that which brought truth forth into the splendor of its radiant revealing, to that which brought about the dialog of divine and human destinings. It was a “single, manifold” revealing, piously yielding to the holding sway and safekeeping of truth.

Properly understood, techne is Poieses. The poetical pervades every true art. Could it be that the fine arts alone foster the growth of the saving power?

Furthermore, the saving power may manifest itself this way: someday the earth may be so consumed by technology that the essence will be all pervading, further increasing the saving power.

Since the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection on it must happen in something akin to it but also different. Such thing is art. Such an art form though must be absolutely sure not to close man off from the kind of questing being done here. Questioning concerning the essence.