This essay is a term paper drafted in preparation for the Heidegger portion of the senior thesis itself. It reflects opinions which are in progress, and was for the most part an exercise in micro-exegesis of Question Concerning Technology, more than it was an actual thesis.
Thus questioning, we bear witness to the crisis that in our sheer preoccupation with technology we do not yet experience the coming to presence of technology, that in our sheer aesthetic-mindedness we no longer guard and preserve the coming to presence of art. Yet the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.
The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought.
-Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Tehcnology
Heidegger outnazied the Nazis.
-Edger Julian Caballero, often
The condition
Man is oriented towards the world (the real) in such a way (the essence of technology) that he comprehends (reveals) it as mere facet of what it really is, a quality of which is that it increasingly fails to recognize that it comprehends only a facet.
Furthermore, this way of comprehending the world is a degradation.
Man’s essence is as he who chooses to comprehend the world in such and such a way.
The problem
Since man’s essence is as he who shapes the particular way in which the real is revealed, but man is caught up in a way of revealing the real that increasingly forgets that it is merely a way, and a degradation at that, man increasingly ceases to embody his essence as one who chooses the way of revealing, and is destined to reveal, not the real, but a degradation.
The solution
Seeking the essence of this degratory way of revealing, so that man may awaken to his condition as he who increasingly forgets his essence, and the reason for his condition. Awakened thereby to his essence, he may choose to expose the real in a different way: perhaps art.
This essay is intended to be a merely descriptive exploration of Martin Heidegger’s (MH) thesis in the essay The Question Concerning Technology (QT). Before all, Heidegger implores:
In what follows we shall be questioning concerning technology. Questioning builds a way. We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the way, and not fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics. The way is a way of thinking. All ways of thinking, more or less perceptibly, lead through language in a manner that is extraordinary. We shall be questioning concerning technology, and in so doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology. (QT, p. 3)
Irrespective of this advice to an extent (and probably incongruous with MH’s concluding prescription), I intend to represent MH’s “way through language” in a reorganized hierarchy of points and sub-points. Relying on the tacit understanding of his thesis I that acquired through accompanying him on his questioning, I hope to communicate it here in the form of an argument, making the terms and assumptions, the reasoning, and the conclusions of the argument specific.
This is a very difficult task. In QT, MH is essentially constructing poetry. The persuasiveness of his rhetoric derives from many cycles of retreading certain motifs, each coming-around coloring a new facet of the picture, each reiteration adding new dimensions to the structure of his worldview. And at each turn, using challengingly unusual phraseology, as if in an act of intellectual polemics, as if to induce the reader to actually think differently, rather than merely think a different thing in the same old way. To break it down into a linear argument is to a do a kind of violence to it. But from this breaking down I hope to build up an articulable and useful kind of exegetical souvenir. If this essay has a thesis, it is that the reasoning MH implicitly employs is as follows.
The explanation will be structured thus: first, an explanation of the particular condition in which man finds himself with respect to technology; second, an explanation of why this condition is problematic; third, the proposed solution to the problem. For an outline intermediate between this and the essay below, see page 2.
The Condition Man Finds Himself In With Respect To Technology
To begin the first task, let us examine how MH characterizes the modern age. He says:
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 way possible when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology. (p. 4)
The condition then, is that we do not comprehend the essence of technology. However, we do of coarse have a conception of technology that we take to be essential. MH claims that the culturally predominate understanding of “what” technology is, is an instrument, or a means to a given end, particularly in the realm of human activity. (This is called the Instrumental or Anthropological definition.) This is undoubtedly an accurate description of technology and is in that sense “correct”. But MH seeks more than that; he seeks the essence of technology. Therefore MH requires a “true” definition; one that corresponds to what is essential about technology. (p. 4-6)
This misunderstanding of “what” technology is in fact derives from a misconception of essence itself. The conception of essence that the merely “correct” definition requires would be the sense invoked in academic philosophy or by the Latin concept quidditas.
For example, what pertains to all trees – oaks, beeches, birches, firs – is the same “treeness”. Under this inclusive genus – the “universal” – fall all real and possible trees. (p. 29)
But by understanding merely the category universally inclusive of all technologies by nature of their possession of a unique set of qualities (genus) as essence, we miss technology’s true essence and deliver ourselves over to it in the worst way.
What does MH understand to be the true nature of “essence”? Etymologically, the word “essence” (Wesen) comes from the word for “tarry” or “dwell” (wesen) which MH indentifies with “endure” (wahren) and which survives in German in inflected forms of “to be” (sein) and ”present” (anwesend). He furthermore hears the idea of “to grant” (gewahren) resonating in “endure”. For MH, essence can only be understood when these archaic and more primal meanings associated with it are heard resonating within it. As he explains:
If we speak of the “essence of a house” and the “essence of a state” we do not mean a generic type; rather we mean the ways in which a house and state hold sway, administer themselves, develop and decay – the way in which they “essence” [Wesen] (p. 30)
With respect to his assertion that “enduring” must be heard in “essence”, he says:
But it can never in any way be established that enduring is based solely on what Plato thinks as idea and Aristotle thinks as to ti en einai (that which any particular thing has always been) or what metaphysics thinks in its most varied interpretations as essentia.
All essencing endures .But is enduring only permanent enduring? (p. 30)
This seems to indicate that essence is not some eternal unchanging abstraction, far off or close by, but is the very manner in which a thing comports its presence as a phenomenon, changing through time. He goes on:
“Only what is granted endures. That which endures primally out of the earliest beginning is what grants.” (p. 31)
So we may conclude that essence is something like this: the ways a thing holds sway enduringly through time, granted to it by that which has endured from the earliest beginning. Thus we have concluded that the misunderstanding of the essence of technology derives from a misunderstanding of what essence itself is. Exactly what this definition means can only and will inevitably become more clear as we trace the rest of his argument.
Thinking essence now in its redefined state, we are in a better position to understand what MH believes is the essence of technology. The answer to this question is primary subject of QT. But in order to arrive at this understanding we must follow MH’s advice to “seek the true by way of the correct” (p. 6), and thereby trace the reasoning that suggests that technology, as instrument or means, is essentially a kind of poiesis, in particular that kind called Enframing (Ge-stell).
What is poiesis, and how is it that technology, even defined anthropologically, can be understood to be poietical? Poiesis is the act of “bringing-forth [that] brings hither out of concealment into unconcealment” and “brings what presences into appearance”. MH quotes/translates Plato, saying:
Every occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not presencing is poiesis, is bringing-forth.
This bringing-forth is a way of “revealing”. The world, or “the real” or “that which is”, always appears in a particular way to man. It always shows its face, of which it has many. “Always the unconcealment of that which is goes upon a way of revealing.” (p. 25) Each appearance is a “revelation” in the sense that it is the world revealed, with certain aspects concealed, others unconcealed. MH believes that each of these ways has its own integrity, its own correctness. But each way remains limited in the scope of its truth. Thus he says:
Bring-forth comes to pass only insofar as something concealed comes into unconcealment. This coming rests and moves freely within what we call revealing. The Greeks have the word aletheia for revealing. The Romans translate this word veritas. We say “truth” and usually understand it as the correctness of an idea. (p. 12)
Furthermore this revealing happens not only as an act by the world on its own behalf, of its own volition, but also upon provocation from man through art and craft. It naturally has and can be given aspect:
Not only handicraft manufacture and concrete imagery, is bringing-forth, poiesis. Physis also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poiesis … 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 (en heautoi). In contrast, what is brought forth by the artisan or the artist, e.g., the silver chalice, has the bursting open belonging to bringing-forth not in itself, but in another (en alloi), in the craftsman or artist.
The modes of occasioning, the four causes, are at play, then, within bringing. Through bringing-forth, the growing things of nature as well as whatever is completed through the crafts and the arts come at any given time to their appearance. (pp. 10-11)
Such is poiesis. But how is it that technology achieves this bringing-forth of a face of the real into being present? As mentioned, through wielding the four causes to the effect of occasioning it. How does this happen? MH argues that the traditional understanding of the nature of the four causes is incorrect and alien to the ancient Greek understanding of them. Traditionally, the causes are understood as the 1) material; 2) formal; 3) final; and 4) efficient, where the efficient cause is understood as “that which brings something about”, or can “obtain results, effects”, a cause seemingly more primary than and inclusive of the other three causes. Therefore to think of it as analogous or ontologically similar to them is inappropriate. This causal role is in fact not “efficient” at all but is more appropriately named, in the Greek, aiton. The maker of a thing, for example the silversmith, is the entity who is traditionally and erroneously named the efficient cause, but this entity is the aiton[1]. (pp. 5-11) As such, he
…considers carefully and gathers together the aforementioned ways of being responsible and indebted … The silversmith is co-responsible as that from whence the sacrificial vessel’s bringing forth and resting-in-itself take and retain their first departure. The three previously mentioned ways of being responsible owe thanks to the pondering of the silversmith for the “that” and the “how” of their coming into appearance and into play for the production of the sacrificial vessel. (p. 8)
Through doing this he commits the acts poiesis because
According to our example, they are responsible for the silver chalice’s lying ready before us as a sacrificial vessel. Lying before and lying ready (hypokeisthai) characterize the presencing of something that presences. The four ways of ways of being responsible bring something into appearance. They let it come forth into presencing. They set it free to that place and so start it on its way, namely, into its complete arrival. (p. 9)
This act of “starting it on its way” is what MH calls the “destining of revealing”. To wield the three causes to the effect of occasioning the coming into being present of a face of the real is to shape the destiny of the unconcealment of truth, or revealing. To make art or craft is to “destin”, or to give a specific character to, the way the real is revealed. The word MH uses (destin or Ge-shick from the German schicken, to send) implies a kind of sending of revealing on way towards a destiny. (pp. 24-25)
What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? The answer: everything. For every bringing-forth is grounded in revealing. Bringing-forth, indeed, gathers within itself the four modes of occasioning – causality – and rules them throughout. Within its domain belongs end and means, belongs instrumentality. Instrumentality is considered to be the fundamental characteristic of technology. (p. 12)
Thus we have set up the necessary foundation on which to build an understanding of the answer to the question being asked in the first section of this essay: what is the condition which man finds himself in with respect to his relationship to modern technology? For technology, insofar as it is instrumental, occupies the realm of causality, which is a mode of revealing the real, or poiesis.[2] Poiesis summons into presence a facet of what is true, inasmuch as it reveals a certain, merely correct appearance of the real. In order to complete our understanding of the condition that man finds himself in, we must now explain exactly what facet of the real it is that modern technology reveals, and what its distinctive characteristics are.
The answer to this question is at the very heart of QT and is the fulcrum on which MH’s critique of technology turns. Understanding it will thrust us rapidly into accomplishing the next two goals of this essay; understanding the problematic nature of this condition and the possible solution MH offers up to this problem.
The true essence of modern technology, the way that it holds sway through time, MH calls “Enframing”. Enframing is indeed a kind of revealing, but it is a kind of revealing that is not poiesis in the purest sense. As we will see, it is instead a revealing that induces a kind of oblivion, rather than a free, open relationship to the essence of existence. This unique and catastrophic quality makes modern technology an exception to our earlier demonstration of instrument as poiesis. As MH says:
Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, happens. (p. 13)
And later
And yet the revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis. 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. (p. 14)
Rather than poiesis, modern technology is a “challenging”. The essence of this challenging is that it “sets upon” nature in an act of extraction, aggressively unlocking its potential as a resource to be used as a means to man’s ends.
The 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. (p. 16)
…
This setting-upon that challenges forth the energies of nature is an expediting, and in two ways. It expedites in that it unlocks and exposes. Yet that expediting is always itself directed from the beginning toward furthering something else, i.e., toward driving on to the maximum yield from the minimum expense. (p. 15)
Furthermore, modern technology is essentially such that is does not comprehend nature as anything other than the potential for this kind of use, experiences it as nothing other than a resource of useable energy. In revealing the real exclusively in this way, nature no longer appears as object. It no longer “poietically” bursts forth in itself but only appears to man as “standing-reserve”.
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 further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing reserve. This word expresses here something more, and something more essential, than mere “stock” … It designates nothing less than the way in which everything presences that is wrought upon by challenging revealing. Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object. (p. 17)
MH provides us with two very similar examples of this kind of relating to the world. The first is the cultivation of land by a peasant farmer as compared with modern industrialized agriculture. The peasant “sets the land in order” in such a way that he places “the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase”. But industrialized agriculture sets in order in a way that “sets upon”. Air is nitrogen, land is ore, ore is nuclear power. The second example is an old windmill as compared with the hydro-electric dam, built contemporary with MH, set into the stream of the Rhine River. It is true that the windmill makes the energy of nature usable to man, but the sails of the windmill only turn in the wind, as if to receive the energy bestowed on them by nature. In contrast, the hydroelectric dam stops up the river and utilizes the consequent wall of massive pressure to set a series of machines to the task of parsing and storing up the energy therein forced out of the river. The river no longer appears as the Rhine, in its objectness, but as “water power supplier”. (pp. 14-16)
We now name that challenging claim which gathers man thither to order to the self-revealing as standing reserve: “Ge-stell” [Enframing]. (p. 19)
In addition to the aforementioned characteristics of modern technology (the “challenging” and the comprehension of nature exclusively as “standing-reserve”), a third essential characteristic remains in order for us to understand the condition man finds himself in with respect to technology. This is that man himself becomes caught up in the cycle of the challenging ordering of nature into standing-reserve and is himself ultimately challenged forth as such by the environmental matrix of Enframing (the essence of technology). For example, the forester who walks through the woods to count felled timber no longer does so the way his grandfather might have. Instead, he is intractably ordered about by a complex of profit seeking industries and is himself conceived of as merely a human resource. He is set to counting, which is set to the ordering of cellulose, which is set to making paper, which is set to making newspapers, which is set to making public opinion, etc. (p. 18)
This intractable complex of ordering challenging which even overtakes man has a direct relationship with the previously mentioned destining of revealing. For the sending of the revealing of the real on a way towards a destination entails the fulfillment or consummation of a future state, toward telic realization, which is in this case totalitarian. However, in a very important way this environmental matrix of ordering revealing is not the result only of human handiwork. It appears, in a sense, on its own behalf as a “granting”. But how and why this is so must wait until section three of this essay.
The Problem With This Condition
Now that we know what condition man is in with respect to technology, we can explore what is problematic with this state of things. Such is the undertaking of the second part of this essay. To begin with, the “problem” of this condition must be instead named a “danger”. For the problem is that man faces a danger. The danger is this: that in destining revealing in such a way that everything in the world including him is revealed only as that ordered standing-reserve, he risks losing sight of his own essence and of that of the world.
Yet when destining reigns in the mode of Enframing, it is the supreme danger. This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but des so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve … In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion in turn gives rise to one final delusion; It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself … In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence. (p. 27)
This is because Enframing, in its relentless ordering of everything as standing-reserve, forgets that it is a kind of revealing, or fails to reveal itself as such. This causes man to forget that he is a kind of revealer, or a destiner of revealing. To restate, mans essence is as that being who destins revealing. But the essence of Enframing is such that it conceals the fact that it is a kind of revealing. At the same time it challenges man forth to order and be ordered, and having drawn man up into it, consequently causes man to forget that through Enframing he is destining revealing. Thus his essence risks being forgotten, as well as that of Enframing, revealing, and the world. MH explains:
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 an exhortation or address, and thus can never encounter only himself.
But Enframing does simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and everything that is. As a destining, it banishes man into that kind of revealing which is an ordering. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing. Above all, Enframing conceals that revealing which, in the sense of poiesis, lets what presences come forth into appearance. As compared with that other revealing, the setting upon that challenges forth thrusts man into a relation to that which is, that is at once antithetical and rigorously ordered. Where Enframing holds sway, regulating and securing of the standing-reserve mark all revealing. They no longer even let their own fundamental characteristic appear, namely, this revealing as such.
Thus the challenging Enframing not only conceals a former way of revealing, bringing-forth, but conceals revealing itself and with it That wherein unconcealment, i.e., truth, comes to pass. (p. 27)
The Solution
The solution to this problem is an upshot inherent in the problematic condition itself, which opens up the possibility of man freely choosing a new paradigm. MH begins by assuming the general truth of the poet Holderlin’s famed words,
But where danger is, grows
The saving power also.
From this he concludes that somehow the “saving power” is a possibility made all the more acute by the ever growing acuteness of the risk of Enframing’s oblivion. Man is in danger of nowhere encountering his own essence, of nowhere witnessing the bursting open for itself of physis, and of only everywhere encountering the world as standing-reserve, until it accumulates in a “dry, monotonous, and therefore oppressive way” (p. 17). But out of this dire situation man is alerted to his precariousness, to his closeness to the “precipitous fall” because the “essence of technology must harbor in itself the growth of the saving power”.
To see how this saving power comes to be, we must clarify how it is that Enframing is a “granting”, and what this means. The condition of Enframing is not only something that man has brought upon himself. It is not merely a framework of understanding applied to the perceivable world, and is not even the totality of forces that compels man, challenges him, to perceive the world in this way, e.g. the complex of institutions that render the forester a human resource. It is not simply technology run amok. It is in fact something higher; it is a condition granted to man by a higher power of some sort, if not with the express purpose of didactically inducing man to awaken to his dangerous and sorry condition, and thereby be in a position to select a new destiny, then at least to graciously grant that possibility.
Does Enframing hold sway at all in the sense of granting? No doubt the question seems a horrendous blunder. For according to everything that has been said, Enframing is, rather, a destining that gathers together into the revealing that challenges-forth. Challenging is anything but a granting. So it seems, so long as we do not notice that the challenging-forth into the ordering of the real as stand-reserve still remains a destining that starts man upon a way of revealing. As this destining, the coming to presence of technology gives man entry into That which, of himself, he can neither invent nor in any way make. (p. 31)
…
Who accomplishes the challenging setting up though which what we call the real is revealed as standing-reserve? Obviously, man. To what extent is man capable of such a revealing? Man can indeed conceive, fashion, and carry through this or that in one way or another. But man does not have control over unconcealment itself, in which at any given time the real shows itself or withdraws … 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.
Where and how does this revealing happen if it is no mere handiwork of man? We need not look far. 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. (p.18)
Enframing must be a granting, a gift, and not merely an existential death knell because it contains within it the seed of the saving power. But it is at its best a two edged sword because it is only through its oblivious occludedness to its own essence as a kind of revealing, and the consequent obliviousness of man to his essence as he who destines revealing, that it alerts man to an alternative.
How does it do this? In its very constitution, Enframing provokes its own transcendence because it draws attention to its essence even while concealing it. It is as if, in Enframing’s increasing obliviousness to everything except challenging-forth and standing-reserve, the absence of the poietical becomes ever more glaring. And it shrieks louder for our attention the closer we come to the brink of existential oblivion. This glaring absence leads man to ask the question, what is Enframing, this condition we are in?
The essence of technology is in a lofty sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, i.e., of truth.
On the one hand, Enframing challenges forth into the frenziedness of ordering that bocks every view into the coming to pass of revealing and so radically endangers the relation to the essence of truth.
On the other hand, Enframing comes to pass for its part in the granting that lets man endure - as yet unexperienced, but perhaps more experienced in the future - that he may be the one who is needed and used for the safekeeping of the coming to presence of the truth. Thus does the arising of the saving power appear. (p. 33)
This ambiguous essence of Enframing, which brings into being the danger which also entails the saving power, or the existential decision between oblivion and enduring, confronts man with enlightenment: a lightedness, an openness, or a clearing. In this clearing he is able to, as it were, move about more freely. The freedom spoken of is the awakened state of questioning after technology’s essence. When man is in a position wherein he can question after the essence of technology and thereby understand it for what it truly is, he is then free to reorient himself towards the world; to create in ways differently than challenging-forth, to experience in ways differently than as standing-reserve.
(p. 25)
Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light, in whose clearing there shimmers that veil that covers what comes to presence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils. Freedom is the realm of the destining that at any given time starts a revealing upon its way.
(p. 25)
…
But when we consider the essence of technology, then we experience Enframing as a destining of revealing. 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. Quite the contrary, when we once open ourselves expressly to the essence of technology, we find ourselves unexpectedly taken into a freeing claim. (pp. 25-26)
Is there an action man can take that might help him cultivate the saving power in the midst of Enframing’s oppression? MH answers maybe: an implicit though provisional yes. In ancient Greece, claims, MH art and craft were understood fundamentally differently than we understand them now. For that culture, no division between art and craft existed; the aesthetic was not a sequestered segment of life. All craft, techne, was also art, poiesis As such, it was a “single, manifold” way of destining revealing that holistically incorporated the true, beautiful, radiant, and pious, rather than for example, just the efficient, as seems true enough of Enframing. To wit, all practical productions aspired to the role which we might assign only to the fine arts, and vice versa. (p. 34) At the very least, this picture serves a kind of mythology with which to represent MH’s ideals.
What, then, was art- perhaps only for that brief but magnificent period of time? Why did art bear the modest name techne? Because it was revealing that brought forth and hither, and therefore belongs within poiesis. It was finally that revealing which holds complete sway in all fine arts, in poetry, and in everything poetical that obtained poiesis as its proper name.
The same poet from whom we heard the words
But where danger is, grows
The saving power also
Says to us:
…poetically dwells man upon this earth.
The poetical brings into the splendor of what Plato in the Pheadrus calls to ekphanestaton, that which shines forth most purely. The poetical thoroughly pervades every art, every revealing of coming to presence into the beautiful. (p. 34)
But would this be enough? Can art reveal the real in an edifying and more primal way to the extent that it can aid in our awakening to our essence, and cast light on the on the dual possibilities of our destiny? No one can know this for sure. (p. 35)
But regardless, the double-edged enlightening obliviousness of Enframing does have the potential in it to awaken man to his essence as he who destins revealing, and provoke in him the question of an alternative to his condition, providing him with the alertness to step back from the precipus.
Yet we can be astounded … that the frenziedness of technology may entrench itself everywhere to such an extent that someday, throughout everything technological, the essence of technology may come to presence in the coming-to-pass of truth. (p. 35)
If there is a solution to the condition man is in with respect to technology, questioning after its essence - which to us the freedom was granted to do by the inherently suggestive nature of the world qua Enframing - through art and through questioning is where it lies.
[1] The author of this essay has not been able to determine what MH is assuming the traditionally presupposed nature of the efficient cause is, and how it would be distinct from his characterization of aiton. MH attributes the maker of for example the chalice to the efficient cause both in his and in the traditional model of the causes, and seems to ascribe essentially the same role. The only difference appears to be aiton demonstrates control over the four causes sans efficient, rather than acting alongside them.
[2] Here it is necessary to point out that for the author of this essay the relationship between revealing, destining, Enframing, and poiesis remains unclear. I have chosen to approach the ambiguity such that Enframing is made out to be a kind of broken or perverted poiesis that does not really accomplish was poiesis should and is therefore not most appropriately referred to as poiesis. The ambiguity is this: are all acts of comprehending the world, in any way, acts of revealing, in which case revealing may be split into two more categories, namely untruth and poiesis? Or is it the case that revealing may be split into destining and poiesis, where destining is all the ways of revealing that comprehend nature with a characteristic challenging, or some other trait? Or is it the case that Enframing and poiesis are both sub categories of destining (which is a subcategory of revealing), where destining is just the shaping of revealing by man? A hierarchal model of the categorical relationships between these four concepts is currently lacking.
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