In this essay I will explain Martin Heidegger’s perspective on technology, which is to say, on its import for the possibility of a meaningful existence for man. To wit, I will submit that in response to the precipitous danger posed by the advent of the “concealment of the truth of Being” - the essence of technology - “existential reflection” - the essence of man - is the course of human action necessary to commence anew the apprehension of truth, and thereby to secure a meaningful existence.
Heidegger’s peculiar form of communication takes the form it does precisely because of the implications of this very analysis of technology. In a sense, understanding what his writing is an attempt at is identical with understanding the fundamental insight in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (the primary source-material of this exposition). This is because the approach Heidegger takes to creating the intersubjective experience of his insight stems intrinsically from it as a form of the praxis necessary for man to apprehend truth, or reflection. By the conclusion of this essay, I hope to have opened up a space in which the reader may share in Heidegger’s insight, which will mean simultaneously apprehending the significance of his way of writing.
As an in-road to this open space, we will follow a path which includes upon the way three basic lines of inquiry: 1) What is the essence of modern science and technology? 2) What is the essence of man? 3) How is it that reflection constitutes the necessary response to the modern technological world? Along the way, we will inevitably encounter the fundamental concepts and working assumptions that Heidegger is employing in the pursuit of this insight, and will try to make them clear. However, being that The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays is little more than a glimpse of Heidegger’s voluminous body of work, these may come to light only dimly.
Let us begin by following the first line of inquiry – what is the essence of science and technology? In truth, apprehending this essence will lead us to a greater understanding. For we will discover that the essence from out of which science and technology are determined is truly the essence of the modern age more broadly - the way in which the world appears in the phenomenological sense as such in its uniquely modern, though originating from of old, iteration - and therefore also the state of man’s relationship with the world and with truth.
One place to begin the approach to this insight is in discerning in sharp contrast the ancient and the modern understanding of technology. Technology is now understood by western culture at large, and in metaphysics taken into account as, and this means also experienced phenomenologically by modern man as, essentially, instrument. What is meant by this is that it is a means to an end in the context of human action; a contrivance implemented to affect a humanly desired outcome. When modern man conceives of instrumentality he conceives of a sequence of causally linked events. For, in terms of the instrumental definition of technology, technology is the means by which something is brought about i.e. by which an effect is caused. For example, in the crafting of a sacrificial chalice, he is accustomed to conceive of it as having been brought into being by way of the four causes, wherein he himself is responsible for the chalice by nature of the fact that he is the causa efficiens. This understanding of “to be responsible for” as “cause” is correct in the sense that it is merely accurate, but Heidegger suggests that a different, fuller, and more essential understanding predates it.
This understanding would be that of the Greeks, for whom the idea of causality narrowly factors into the understanding of technology. There we find technological action (being responsible for bringing something into being) understood not merely as cause, but more essentially as “revealing”, or poiesis. Heidegger reports:
***Plato quote***
What this means is that everything which comes into being, which stands before as present, is “brought forth”, which is to say “destined” by an agent to appear in such and such a way. This destining is called poiesis, or revealing. Some things are brought forth of themselves, such as nature, which blooms forth of its own accord; others are brought forth by man, and are in this case called techne, or technology. To restate, technology is understood as a form of bringing something hither, out of concealment, forth, into unconcealment, so that it lies before, revealed, permitted to appear present: hypokeisthei in the Greek. According to Heidegger, this process is more aptly rendered to our ears as “truth”. P.12-13
But the growing apart of truth and technology into two different conceptual spaces is no accident in the sense of being random, nor is it without import. For the essence of technology is precisely what accounts for this evolution from revealing into instrument. In order to see more clearly what drives this evolution, that is, to think it still more essentially, let us attempt a fuller characterization of technology in the modern age.
To spite the fact that it remains veiled in the modern conception of technology, technology is still a mode of revealing truth, of poiesis. Indeed, the evolution it has undergone is a manifestation of its essence as a particular mode of revealing. But what reality does this mode reveal? Heidegger invents the term “Enframing” to denote the mode of revealing which exhibits itself in the coming into being of technology. Let us analyze the following definition from Heidegger:
Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing reserve. p.20
“Standing reserve” denotes the world - nature and everything in it - as it is understood and experienced phenomenologically by modern technology; namely as a resource of pure potential energy, secured as such in advance, to be put to use however man and the technological mindset dictate. So, for example, the Rhine river, while once crossed by an old wooden bridge, and in that crossing was still allowed to simply lie before as unconcealed in its essence, is now dammed up by a hydro-electric power plant for which there is no essence of the Rhine; there is only a massive wall of potential energy, to be endlessly stored up and ordered about. Likewise, the peasant farmer simply “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”, whereas industrialized agriculture sets in order in a way that “sets upon”; air is nitrogen, land is ore, ore is nuclear power. The world is a standing reserve of potential use at the disposal of man’s “ordering about”.
But Enframing is not simply this. For it is not only the mode of revealing holding sway when the real is revealed as standing reserve; beyond this, it sets upon man in such a way that it challenges him forth as standing reserve - a reserve of that ordering of the real as standing reserve. In other words, 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. 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 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)
We have discerned that technology is a manifestation of a way of phenomenologically experiencing the world. This way conceives of nature as a reserve of energy; it orders the world into a usable resource. And in this milieu, man himself is set upon and ordered about, converted the same way the Rhine is into a reserve of potential orderability. Yet we have said that technology is a kind of veiled poiesis. It is so inasmuchas the “truth” which is revealed is world-as-standing-reserve. It is brought hither, out of concealment, forth, into unconcealment, in the mode of Enframing. Thus technology understood as instrument is accurate in the sense that it correctly apprehends that for modern man technology is instrumental. But it fails to apprehend that instrumentality and with it causality are a mode of revealing truth.
“Technology” in the sense of technical apparati may rightly be called the material manifestation of this phenomenon of Enframing. But this, the essence of technology, runs deeper and originates earlier than the mere preponderance of technical apparati in society. It is indeed the “experienced phenomena” just mentioned. But what is the source, the essence of this experience?
An inquiry into its source leads us to the sciences, which are the source of technology in that they constitute its theoretical underpinnings (for technology is the practical application of the sciences). However they do not constitute its essence; they merely serve as a realm in which Enframing holds sway that is closer to man’s cognition, and therefore more revealing of the essence of technology. If we inquire after the essence of science, what do we find?
We again find a sharp contrast between the science of the ancients and that of the modern age. Ancient and medieval science was not essentially “exact science”. The evolution from the physics of Aristotle to that of Heisenberg is not a linear increase of exactitude, accuracy, or information as it is often understood to be, just as modern technology is not merely a quantitative increase in the use or improvement of technical apparati. On the contrary, it was qualitatively, essentially, different in the way it experienced the world.
Modern science is “exact” science. What this means is that it maintains a strict, rigorous adherence to the particular set of methodologies and observables appropriate to its field of inquiry. In other words, each science inhabits a paradigm in which only certain phenomena appear to be in being, for which only certain methods of observation are applicable. It is fundamentally characterized by a necessary increase in the honing of these methods and a narrowing of the field of observation. These fields Heidegger calls “object-spheres”, and in them the outworking of technology can already be seen. The formation of object-spheres in science is an active force on the part of the subject doing the science. For what appears as object, or what inhabits the object-sphere of a particular science, is determined and given form in advance, by an a priori cognitive structure which anticipates phenomena and shapes its coming into presence in the way appropriate to that science. So for example
***quantum physics quote***
It is clear from this that science is inherently normative, inasmuch as it actively determines what phenomena, as such, will come into being. In its devotion to observation of empirical fact it even becomes more so because experimentation is such that in order to produce more exact and more certain results, more and more exact laws must be sketched into the presencing of nature a priori.
This normalization is self-augmenting and connected inextricably with the specialization of the sciences. For each experiment yields results in keeping with the mode of observation in which they were obtained, which results then become material out of which further experiments, observations, and results are formed. In this way each science develops its own conceptual vocabulary in an ongoing way.
As this process continues, what begins to happen is the “making secure of the precedence of methodology over whatever is (nature and history), which at any given time becomes objective in research”. In the ongoing process of observation, the influence of the cognitive framework through which phenomena is processed comes increasingly to the fore, and the actual appearance of that which is in Being recedes, inasmuch as what becomes the object of study is increasingly the methodology employed in the act of observation; because it must be rigorously adhered to, which means perfected, which means observed. Heidegger thus accuses the sciences of universally developing into anthropologies, inasmuchas they increasingly become studies of man himself.
***Heisenberg quote***
Our inquiry into the essence of science has lead us not back to the more concrete iteration of Enframing - modern technology - but rather, deeper into man’s cognitive framework, which is at the same time his phenomenological experience of the world. Again, man’s experience of the world is the result of his revealing of the world in such and such a way, in the sense of poiesis, the unconcealment of truth. We have established that, for science and ultimately for technology, this way of revealing is that normative circumscription of object-spheres which ultimately become so rigorous as to peer increasingly into their own make-up, a process carried out analogously in technology by man’s incessant surrounding of himself increasingly with the artificial. In understanding science and technology as this kind of revealing, we begin to uncover the nature of “truth” as it is understood by science and technology.
In doing this we begin to move through the realm of “metaphysics”. While it is true, as we have established, that the essence of technology lies close to cognitive framework which pervades man in the modern world (and therefore pervades the revealing of the world as such, which results in the proliferation of technology), we must take one final plunge into the evolution of western metaphysics and what it signifies, at its essence, to get at that which determines science and technology and brings the modern age to crises in which it finds itself.
It was established above that poiesis is the act whereby truth happens. It happens where that which is concealed is born into presence via unconcealment. So that which lies before, ready, in appearance, hyppkeisthei, is truth. Enframing is a kind of poiesis. Therefore, there is something which for Enframing is hypokeisthei. We have navigated down a path which has brought to light that that which lies ready for Enframing, that which for Enframing is true, is world-as-potential-use-for-subject. This, when analyzed, admits of the even more basic essence of science as the “theory of the real”, wherein the theory itself, the subjective framework of interpretation, ultimately takes precedence as the studied over the objective world which was originally the object of study. The necessary task is now to apprehend in what metaphysical foundation this development is grounded. For Heidegger says:
***metaphysics grounds an age quote***
What is this metaphysical groundwork? It was just now noted that science is considered by modern culture to be the “theory of the real”. This is a meta-scientific statement about science and is therefore metaphysical in the sense meant here. Furthermore it indicates the sentiments of the age generally. Therefore, it constitutes the metaphysical groundwork of science in the modern age. Heidegger means by “metaphysics”: understanding of truth. Hence, the question now being addressed is: what understanding of truth does “theory of the real” entail?
It entails what is commonly understood as the correspondence theory of truth. This to say that there is a perceiving, thinking subject who is in partial isolation from the external objective world. The subject perceives the world in a relatively incomplete fashion and also, in one relationship or another with perception, imagines additional information. This results in conceptions of reality which are understood to be relatively accurate representations of the true external object. Truth in this context is understood as certainty i.e. degree of correspondence between the real (presentation) and the representation. It is an implicit assumption in all of this that only that which is represented by the subject to himself as accessible to perception and thinking. Thus the possibility of the evolution of the sciences into solipsistic anthropologies becomes clear.
Heidegger explains the significance of this understanding of truth by tracing the historical evolution of the meaning of the word theory. It originates with the Greek theorein, which Heidegger believes to men “to look attentively on the outward appearance wherein what presences becomes visible and, through such sight – seeing – to linger with it”.
***quote 131***
Thus it appears to be something like the thinking being’s response to that which is hypokeisthei. By the time of the Romans, the word is translated as contemplatio. This meaning which issues from this word, which means also from the way of existence in which it was employed, would have been utterly alien and dismaying to the Greek.
In theoria transformed in contemplatio there comes to the fore the impulse, already prepared in Greek thinking of a looking-at that sunders and compartmentalized. A type of encroaching advance by successive interrelated steps toward that which is to be grasped by the eye makes itself normative in knowing.
The contemporary German translation of contemplatio is Betrachtung, which, in an even more consummated way, signifies the normative character of contemplatio. Heidegger believes this word to be rooted in the word for “to strive after”. “To strive after means: to work one’s way toward something, to pursue it, to entrap it in order to secure it.” Thus it becomes clear that science, while it claims to be “disinterested” in its observation of the world, is rooted unwittingly in an understanding of truth which entails the thinking being’s active, normative, pre-structuring of the very world-phenomena it seeks apprehend disinterred. And this not merely in partial or suggestive way, but rather totally and absolutely. In other words, it comes to pass that only that which is represented in such a way is understood as true – understood to be real at all. The world is representation – representation is the world. ***– planc quote***
***quote 132***
In this setting up of the world as a picture, a representation, to be secured in advance and worked over in exactitude, science’s “entraps after its fashion” i.e. interprets in terms already laid down before the presencing of the thing, the world. In this, the teleological inevitability of Enframing’s coming into being can be seen clearly. Indeed, if we peer only a little deeper into what comes to pass in the historical intensification of this entrapping securing of the world by the subject, we catch a glimpse of its essence.
To peer deeper means to apprehend the most primary origin of the metaphysical situation just described. Upon what foundation does man’s normative representation of the world rest? To entrap the world after the fashion of Enframing is to forcefully bring it to a “stand” i.e. to stand it up before the subject as present in the active sense - in the sense of normative representation. This bringing to a stand is objectification. That which stands in such a way is “object”. The coming into being of the world as object inherently entails the coming into being of man as subject, though not in the causal-sequential sense, as they are essentially two facets of one and the same phenomena, i.e. reciprocally conditioning. However, to characterize this phenomenon as the coming into being of existence as subject-object is merely redundant and does not quite get at the essence we are seeking after.
The coming into being of the world as representation, as object, reciprocally conditions man existing as subject. The word subject comes from the Latin subectium, which Heidegger understands as a translation of hypokeimenon. Thus, the essence of technology comes, perhaps unexpectedly, into sharp focus. The advent of subectium identifies the epoch wherein only representation, or world-as-object, is understood to be real. Because the subject of the represented object is that which represents, this is a merely another way of saying that only the “personal-identity-experience-of-I-ness” is real, or certain, in the sense of laying before unconcealed in the apparentness of appearance, i.e. hypokeimenon.
***p.83***
“Theory of the real” is finally exposed intrinsically to be an anthropology, for it presupposes before all else that only the machinations of the subject are that which may appear before him as unconcealed truth. Hence the essence of technology finds culmination in the decisive crisis of the modern age, which is this: that every man increasingly, helplessly, slips further into subjectivism in the sense of epistemological, moral, and aesthetic individualism, even while simultaneously the world is more and more objectified, more put the unrelenting use of, more set up to be at, man’s conquering disposal.
Keeping this insight in view, let us now follow the second line of questioning towards the essence of man - an insight that will be brought into light all the more clearly on account of our already having taken seriously the essence of science and technology, by thinking it of terms of poiesis and subectium.
In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, it is necessary to “read between the lines” and to listen very carefully in order to hear even the most direct of Heidegger’s theses. The largest part of Heidegger’s “metaphysical framework” goes unexplicated, let alone a decisive definition of the essence of man. Yet this is not an oversight or a deficiency. It stems from the very insight which this essay has attempted to communicate so far: that metaphysical frameworks as such are an expression of a way of inhabiting the world which does let it comes to appearance for what it is, through the safeguarding of the truth, through a basically receptive, though attentive, fostering of the truth in its coming presence; rather it forcefully extracts from it that which it decides in advance is worthy of being extracted.
We have said that this change resides close to man’s cognition. We now pronounce that it reflects a change in man’s very essence. To spite the fact that he mentions in this work only but once, in passing, Heidegger understands man as “Dasein”, which roughly translates: openness-for-being. I believe Heidegger means by this something essentially identical to the essence of man as understood by the Greeks. But an understanding of what this means also requires that we embark down an obscured path towards a clearing wherein this essence is alight.
The first step onto this path is “Being”. This of course plays an integral role in the preceding line of questioning, and my hope is that it will throw some light backwards onto it as well. Being plays an uncommonly primary role in the thinking of Heidegger, for reasons mostly concealed in “Question…”. Being is that which on account of participation in, things that are, be.
***definition of being quote***
But as we have established, in the mode of Enframing, i.e. the essential current out of which science and technology flows, only that which is set up as objective representation can be real.
In Enframing’s iteration as modern science, this characteristic can be seen acutely in the anthropo-logo-fication (making into a discourse on man) of systematic research. It can be seen to be articulated explicitly by Descartes’ pronunciation that the ego cogito is the only certainty and therefore the ground of all truth, and later unsuccessfully overcome by Nietzsche’s revaluation of the will to power as the ground of value. But the earliest manifestation of this essence in western metaphysics (which is to say, the earliest manifestation of western metaphysics) is with Plato’s declaration that the eidos - which in the Greek means appearance, outward visual aspect, i.e. that which stands before unconcealed in clarity, i.e. hypokeimenon, subectium – is precisely that aspect of it which cannot be seen with the physical eye and must be apprehended with the rational intellect. This is the earliest dawning of representation as truth, and concomitantly, the understanding that (only) that which is in being, i.e. certain in the sense of being hypokeimenon, is that which is endures in the sense of being permanent, unchanging, static, whether it be located far off (Plato) or close at hand (Aristotle). Hence categorical divisions, logical relationships, ideas in the sense of representations, become that which is certain, and the map to a way through Descartes, Nietzsche, and into modern physics is initially sketched up.
To identify the essence of something is to identify that aspect of it which is in Being, i.e. is hypokeisthei. From out of this conception of “to be in Being” as conditioned by permanent fixedness, therefore, an understanding of essence arises which conceives of the enduring aspect of a thing as its essence. Thus the Latin conception of essence - quidditas - is born and conceives of essence as the universal sameness which pervades all particular iterations of a thing. This universal quality is that which is real about the thing. Hence, technology comes to be understood as instrument. But we established that the instrumental definition does not quite apprehend what is essential in technology.
It fails to apprehend the essence of the real, because what presences in the outward aspect of the real - eidos which is hypokeisthei - does not endure in the sense of universality and permanence. Rather, it is in constant flux. The real in its presencing is marked by the passage of time and that means marked by constant change. This is precisely because those fixed representations which have taken precedence in western metaphysics are not real in the sense that they do not presence forth independent of mans normative structuring. Because reality is not “fact” in the mode of science, but is instead
“***quote I can’t find***,
Therefore, essence, as the aspect of that which is which is in Being most primally means, not that fixed permanence of quidditas, but something equally marked by flux. It might be rendered in English more adequately as the way something is, rather than what it is.
***P.30 quote***
From this we may surmise that man’s essence also undergoes change. And indeed our foray into the essence of technology has shown precisely that. In ancient Greece, before the appearance of the real in the mode of metaphysics, we find man in sate of receptivity to the self-exhibiting of nature. His task is to apprehend it, but in the sense of a reverent and vigilant inward harboring of its appearance. In, and as, the coming into being of metaphysics, we see this harboring develop into a normalizing representing. This evolution is fundamentally a change in relation to Being. For, on the one hand, we find a careful openness to that which is Being, that which essences; on the other hand, we find towards it an aggressive posture, resulting in a blindness to that which essences and pushes forth ever more blindly. However, in both cases, we find man in a position of revealing, or poiesis. Man remains that being which, in essence, reveals the real in such and such a way. Yet we have said that in that in the mode of revealing of metaphysics, man aggressively brings the real into appearance not as the real at all, but as representation!
The portentous and astonishing phenomenon which has just come to light is this: that man’s essence as the being allotted with the responsibility of letting the real come to appearance as that which it really is, is being transformed in such a way that it is disappearing. It no longer essences in the primal way of old. Indeed, it begins not even to essence at all, for that with is merely representation has the character of a self-withholding, a mystery, rather than a self-exhibiting.
Thus, in catching sight of man’s essence, we have inadvertently been alerted to the gravest emergency: that man is losing himself and accordingly losing any apprehension of the real, or Being. But what of Dasein? Have we understood it? We have established from the outset that it is not merely identical with the Greek way, with the essence of the ancient revealing. A fuller comprehension of Dasein must wait until our present line of inquiry crosses paths with “reflection” in that intersection where the paths through technology, man, and reflection coalesce into a clearing. In this open space, we hope to find light cast upon that most important of questions:
***praxis quote***
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Thus we embark upon a path towards “reflection”. Technology manifests from out of the essence of Enframing, which is a kind of revealing of the real which has the quality of foregoing a successful letting of the real come pass for what it is and instead sets it up in a way according to its own governing logic. This is progressively and ultimately everywhere accomplished i.e. the final conversion of the ground of every appearance of the real from its coming to pass of its own accord into its correspondence with modalities extensive of and anticipated by the subject is accomplished to such an extent that even its own essence as a mode of revealing is thrown into obscurity, and even throws its own obliviousness to its essence as a revealing into obscurity. Thus man as that being gazed into by the appearance if the real is closed off from it in a way that even the realization of the closing off which is befalling him is closed off.
What comes to pass in this closing off is the danger of the possibility of a meaningful existence for man becoming impossible. If man increasingly falls deeper and deeper into a state of obliviousness to the real as it appears of its own accord and to his role as the safe-keeper of truth in its appearance, then man is at risk of failing to fulfill the role the subsistence of which is the very condition of meaning. For meaning only exists in the dynamic between man and Being when man fulfills his role as that being whom is openly receptive to the coming into presence of Being. Without man’s apprehending of Being in the sense of harboring it to safety intact, no “meaning” occurs because it is this very occurrence the conduction of Being through man which the word meaning denotes. If Enframing throws man’s role into obscurity, then it threatens that which is of the utmost importance. For even import is grounded in meaning.
***the one whom being needs/ex-istence quote*** ***safe-keeping of truth quote***
But from out of this precipitous danger, is the appropriate human response merely a frightened reversion back to the ancient way of revealing? Definitely not. The advent of the coming into Being of Enframing cannot be understood simply as a dire misstep or as the work of the devil, and merely be put out of mind or, even more futily, destroyed. We cannot simply go back to the way things were, for, the world which the ancients inhabited is no longer the world which comes into appearance, and the appearance of the word is no merely human doing, albeit inextricably tied up in his thinking. Remember, the timber counter is set to work as rigorously as any other object.
History, for Heidegger, is the “destining of Being”, wherein “destining” signifies that revealing of Being in such and such a way, e.g. Enframing. It is not suitable to think of it as merely a consecutive sequence of events through time, as is the common conception. There lies within the very constitution of history a dynamism, an essential tendency to change driven by the dialectical tension inherent in the internal logic of any given age. Heidegger cannot escape the feeling that today, in the modern condition, we at the end of a phase, in the middle of the explosive transition from one state to another.
We stand at the edge of a precipice. This situation presents the possibility of catastrophe but intrinsically, this possibility is the very - the only - thing that can save us. Enframing intrinsically entails the “turning about” of the coming to presence of itself into obscurity. But because of this, its turning about into obscurity falls into obscurity as well. And because of this, any possibility of a further turning, a coming to light of the essence of Enframing, is obscured. Thus Enframing is the age of the epoch of Being, wherein “epoch” signifies concealment, or mystery. Precisely this is the danger which threatens to demolish the possibility of a meaningful existence for man.
Yet this is the way of the world: that each age gives rise from out of itself to a new and different one. From out of this concealment of Being, the coming to pass of its coming to light lies latent. So says Holderlin:
***where the danger is...***
There lies concealed another turning about wherein the essence of technology, that situation which thrusts man into the highest danger, comes to light.
…
This opening up of the essence of technology, and therefore also of man’s essence and also that of truth, is for Heidegger not really decisively determined by human action. For everything that happens in the world, everything that comes into appearance, and this most certainly includes the coming into appearance of Enframing i.e. a way of bringing Being into appearance which for man does not come into appearance as a revealing of Being, is destined to happen in such and such a way by Being. Being is the highest power and the most primary element of all that is. It is through Being that all that is may manifest. Every thing is conditioned by Being. Even to speak of a thing, is to speak of it being. Accordingly, even God for Heidegger is merely that which is most in Being; this is no small thing and Heidegger feels the utmost reverence for God. But Being is the element, the atom, of everything, such as that the Pre-Socratic sought. Accordingly, Being’s concealedness in the epoch called Enframing is no mere doing of man and no accident. It is Being. “What is befalling Being?” Heidegger asks, “Precisely nothing is befalling Being”. This is because the mystery of Being is self-apportioned. The fog sweeping over Being is no sweeping of fog at all but rather the receding of the rays of light once resplendently emitted.
But where the danger lies, there is the saving power also. Being has not altogether dimmed and gone out of man’s thinking. There is still the faint glimmer of it wavering beyond the prisms of man’s representing. And indeed its ponderous and saddening recession into the shadows, which has left our culture bereft of life, bequeathed of a grinding, clanking, self-imposed prison alerts us to the danger more acutely the closer we step to the precipice of the loss of Being. The essence of technology, which is to say, the parameters of our dangerous situation, are closed up and sequestered away from man’s questioning; or rather, the essence remains, but man is closed up and sequestered away. In order to surmount technology we must awake from our hypnotic march towards the precipice and give a glance out from ourselves towards the impending catastrophe.
What is this glance? It is insight into the essence of technology; it is the coming to light of the danger posed as such, and this includes its inherent containment of salvation. In clearing these paths through technology and man, though our starting places were the commonly excepted cultural conceptions of such and such a cultural fixture, which in essence represent precisely ignorance of their essence, have we not cleared a space wherein the true essence of these phenomena are lighted up and come into appearance before us?
In following these linear progressions of thought from the most superficial appearance of the phenomena which seem to determine our age into the deeper space of their essence, we have emulated Heidegger’s attempt to practice the response which this analyses of technology requires. Technology cannot be understood from out of the technological mindset. Science can only represent to itself the objects of scientific inquiry. Insight into what constitutes them requires an external referent, a way of thinking freed from the pre-determined sought-afters of the representing which entraps the real after its own fashion. Technology can only find what it seeks, create what it imagines.
But technology can never know the real in its fullness of being, and indeed cannot even know that it cannot know. There is more to the real; it is not after one fashion and it is not permanently fixed. Heidegger’s implication is that the fluctuating appearance of all that is in Being is a profound source of that which makes life worth living. To fix it into a rigorously enforced filter is ruinous. It is from out of this conviction that he pronounces that Being is precisely that which is worthy of questioning. It is through this questioning that meaning comes to pass.
To surmount the concealedness of Being which is Enframing is to restore Being to its place, into it essence, in relation to man as that which is worthy of being questioned after, and to restore Being to its place as that worthy of questioning is identical with restoring man back into the full breadth his essence. Therefore, to restore the relationship between man and Being is the task.
The state back to which man must be restored is the mode of revealing inhabited by the ancient Greek. In this, man waits attentively for every coming to pass of Being and safeguards it into pure appearance with which to be earnestly lingered. But this cannot be done in the sheer act of emulation. For we no longer inhabit the Greek milieu and therefore are required to respond in an original way. Dasein may be understood as the man-for-today, meaning that even while he posits the relation-to-Being original to Greek, he does so over and against the modern technological milieu, as a dialectical antithesis, which is the historically unique synthesis-task of modern man. Thus we see that man’s essence – he who pays attention to Being – can be inhabited even in the modern epoch of Being called Enframing. Dasein is man’s essence as it is when it is in this context.
But as was said, this world no longer presences as it did in the days of old; our task is not to be Greek, for whom there was no mystery, no world as picture, no exact science. Our task is to attentively await the turning of the epoch of Being, which is distinctly our modern problem, about into the shining forth anew of its essence, to be open receptacles for the presencing of Being. We must “exsist” in the sense of to ek-sist, i.e. to be from without of ourselves; we must become as elements though which the current of Being is conducted; we must correspond
Reflection is the praxis which expresses man’s correspondence to Being such that he exists as Dasein.
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