Summary of The Turning

Note: of all my summaries so far, this is the most lingo-laden of all. At the same time, it is the least adequately phrased; for Heidegger, in this essay most of all, uses the most idiosyncratic and perspicuous language. It has been impossible for me to capture what he is saying in its sheer poeticalness without resorting to near complete quoting.

The Turning describes the event wherein the concealedness of Being of unconcealed. Enframing, as the mode of revealing holding sway throughout the modern age, conceals the truth of Being, inasmuch as its revealing the world as that which is to be ordered around and set up as standing reserve does not safeguard the world, allowing to appear for what it is. Furthermore, it even conceals that it is a way of revealing, and conceals that it conceals it. Hence Enframing is a danger to man, because it throws into obscurity his essence. His essence is as that which Being needs to in order to keep and safeguard it in its coming to presence, which is precisely what man fails to his setting himself up as over/against it, as in Enframing. But this is not merely a danger; it is the arch danger. This because it is the risk of the loss of truthful being, to be replaced by the self-augmenting spiraling out of the forgetting of the forgetting of Being, i.e. the consummation of Enframing. This danger is highest because Being is that which is absolute, is that which gives beingness to all that is in being. The danger of Enframing’s concealing cannot be overcome by man in the sense of man mastering technology, either by controlling or by negating it. This is because technology, and the essence which holds sway in it, is no mere human doing. Indeed it is a favor granted by the Being, a happening which man is but caught up in. In this happening, we are in the precipitous age wherein way may be approaching the lightening-flash of insight, wherein the negative presence of Being - the evidence of its thereness by way of its conspicuous not-thereness – sounds forth. It sounds forth in the form of insight into the essence of technology and therefore simultaneously into the essence of man. Therefore the danger of the situation is also the saving power. This implies the necessity of reflection as the course of action, for grasping of the essence of technology and of the man as Dasein is the imperative.