The following analysis of the technological milieu as understood by Heidegger will be confined to his perspective as it is represented in the collection of essays entitled The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. These expositions, written midway through Heidegger’s occupation as a thinker, suggest that the phenomenon of modern technology is a threat to humanity’s apprehension of truth. In response to this most arresting of possibilities, Heidegger proposes that reflection on the essence of technology is the course of action necessary to restore the appearance of truth and therefore rescue man from his course toward oblivion.
In order to explain this with any clarity, it is necessary to lay bare a number of “metaphysical assumptions” upon which Heidegger builds his inquiry. In order to do Heidegger’s discourse any justice, however, one stipulation must be made: Heidegger is not building a metaphysical system. His goal is not to build another floor onto the tower of continental-analytic philosophy that precedes him - especially in the German tradition - after the same fashion in which those preceding worldviews were built, only more, higher. Instead, he claims to be following a line of questioning directed toward the essential, which for Heidegger means Being. Thus he is trying to enact a way of thinking that is capable of “thinking Being”, whatever that means. Accordingly, to attribute to his work some of kind of strict deduction from firmly held postulates would suggest more “contriving” and less “discovering” than Heidegger would appreciate. The analogy he uses for his own work is that each discourse is a path though the forest, in search of a clearing. In these essays, the essence of technology (which is to say technology as it relates to Being) is the clearing sought after. Nevertheless, whatever positive reasoning or critique he does employ is built upon some foundational premises, and it will be necessary to bring to light what these are. The scope of this essay necessitates the articulation of six basic premises.
Metaphysical Assumptions
1) The first might best be denoted as a “value”, for it is assumed qua a desirable end, teleologically speaking. Heidegger values the state of human existence lost to oblivion with the advent of western metaphysics. The most poignant illustration of this shift from one state to the next is in the Greek mind. Heidegger regards the ancient Greek way of existence, exemplified by, say, Homer, as inhabiting the full space of man’s essence, i.e. fulfilling his end. However, Plato, with the employment of radically new concepts of the real some time later, signals a momentous shift in mindset away from the Homeric and toward the scientific. The existence of the pre-platonic Greek is something for which Heidegger is deeply nostalgic. The difference between these two states of mind will come to light only when his analysis of technology has been explained.
2) The second premise underlies Heidegger’s “valuation” of pre-platonic humanity. This is his belief that the ”full space of man’s essence” is what he calls Dasein, which translates literally as “There-Being” and is sometimes summarized by Heidegger as “openness-for-Being”. He speaks of Dasein in so many words only once, in passing, in Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, but the idea is essential to and implicit in his whole take on the danger of technology. Dasein is man when man inhabits the state of mind in which he is openly receptive to the appearing of Being in its constantly fluctuating stream of changing forms. And this is not merely a passive reception but more accurately a solemn attentiveness which safeguards the appearance of Being safely inward so that it remains intact in the knowing of the man (Dasein). Thus Dasein is true existence in the original sense of to “ek-sist”, i.e. to “be-from-without”, i.e. to receive Being into oneself from out of oneself.
His essence is to be the one who waits, the one who attends upon the coming to presence of Being in that in thinking he guards it. Only when man, as the shepherd of Being, attends upon the truth of Being can he expect an arrival of a destining of Being and not sink to the level of a mere wanting to know. p42
3) The third premise ties in closely with Heidegger’s understanding of Man’s essence of Dasein. This is that “the real” (which might be referred to as “history” in the past tense) is the “destining of Being”. Being is that which on account of participation in, things that are, be. (p.44) In other words, it is the final condition of everything, inasmuchas everything only is a thing when it is in Being. Even God is merely that which is most in Being. Being lays claim to the primal origination of not only all that is real, but the real itself. Destining is the giving of particular form to Being such that it appears in this or that way, i.e. manifests as this or that thing. When a river appears as the life-giving artery of the forest and not as a stockpile of hydroelectric power, it is destined to be one thing and not another. Being is always being concealed and unconcealed in ever changing ways, and every revealing of one aspect of Being obscures another, just as to speak of a thing in one way is to remain silent about it in another. This articulation of Being in one particular way is what is meant by Destining. Man’s experience of the real, i.e. Being, always takes the form of some particular destining. Likewise, the milieu which a given age inhabits is made distinctive by its unique destining of Being, i.e. its revealing of Being as a unique array of beings.
4) The “real” and the “true” are essentially identical. This is because to destine Being is reveal it in some particular way such that some part of it is brought into phenomenological appearance. To be in “phenomenological appearance” - the immediate confrontation of the thinking being with Being itself when it enters into the purview of his senses in some particular form – is to be real. But for the ancient Greek (and therefore also for Heidegger) the immediate phenomenological confrontation of the thinking being with what appears before him, is truth. Therefore the real is the true, and the destining of the one is the happening of the other. So, for the ancients (and also for Heidegger), to make or to do something, i.e. to bring something into appearance in Being, is to reveal truth, aletheia. In an essential way, both the poetical arts (poiesis) and the practical arts (techne) were thought together in one accord, as the revealing of aletheia.
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)
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)
5) Human responsibility and the determination of a higher power coexist. It follows from the primacy of Being that – ultimately – any destining of Being is going to be conditioned by Being itself, i.e. is going to be a performance of Being, by Being. The various forms which it takes are as postures which it assumes. Yet it follows from the existence of Dasein that the articulation of Being, the revealing of it in such a way as to unconceal one aspect and leave another concealed, is a function of man’s volition. These insoluble realities must be understood to act in accord, the way, for example, that Hegel understands the freedom of individual action as the modus operandi of the world-historical process of the self-revelation of the Geist.
Who accomplishes the challenging setting-upon though 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 unconcealment itself, in which at any given time the real has been showing itself in the light of Ideas ever since the time of Plato, Plato did not bring about. The thinker only responded to what addressed itself to him. p.18
6) The final premise of Heidegger’s metaphysics is the “dialectical” quality of the Destining of Being. Dialectics, in the Hegelian sense, is not a concept that Heidegger invokes explicitly, but the essence of the theory makes its appearance implicitly when he invokes the maxim: where the danger grows is the salvation also. As a general principle, what he means by this is that every situation or state of affairs (read: particular destining of Being) contains within itself the seed of its own qualitative reversal. In his language, every “turning about” of Being to reveal one aspect of itself, turns another aspect out of sight, yet also implies the continual turning about of Being such that eventually the present aspect will itself turn out of sight and turn another aspect into appearance. In essence, this indicates a picture of Being which is a) continually in a state of transformative flux (becoming) and b) continually resolving the crises resultant from clashing antipathies into new wholes – a fundamentally Hegelian explanation. Thus, technology, for example, when it exists as the danger to man and truth is, as that selfsame event, the salvation, because the antipathy to its danger is man’s delivery.
For what gives destining its characters as destining is that it takes place so as suitably to adapt itself to the ordaining that is ever one. To take place so as to adapt means to set out in order to adjust fittingly to the directing already made apparent – for which another destining, yet veiled, is waiting. That which has the character of destining moves in itself at any given time toward a special moment that sends into another destining, in which, however, it is not simply submerged and lost. (37)
With these six assumptions in mind, Heidegger’s analysis of the technological milieu can begin to be made sense of. Once the essence of the technological milieu is brought to light, then Heidegger’s assertion that reflection on its essence is the praxis necessary to deliver man from his course towards oblivion can be grasped clearly.
Analysis of Technology
The place to begin an explanation of the analysis is with Heidegger’s assertion that the essence which determines the nature of the modern technological milieu has been active in determining western technology since the very inception of the western mind as we know it – Plato.
Prior to Plato’s epoch-making pronouncements, art and craft were thought together in one accord by the Greek mind. Both Techne (technology, craft) and poiesis (poetry, art) were understood as modes of revealing Being in such and such a way (if not consciously, then tacitly), and as such were considered vessels of the appearance of truth. Because, for the Greek, that which comes into appearance, or has aspect, within the purview of the senses of the thinking being, i.e. is immediately present and perceivable, is true. Truth understood as that which lies immediately before in appearance is hypokeimenon in the Greek. The word for the art of “effecting” or revealing the appearance of hypokeimenon was aletheia. For the ancient Greek, techne and poiesis were booth modes of aletheia, both modes of revealing hypokeimenon.
Rather, man is the one who is – in company with itself – gathered toward presencing, by that which opens itself. To be beheld by what is, to be included and maintained within its openness and in that way to be borne along by it, to be driven about by its oppositions and marked by its discord – that is the essence of man in the great age of the Greeks. Therefore, in order to fulfill his essence, Greek man must gather (legein) and save (sozein), catch up and preserve, what opens itself in its openness, and he must remain exposed (aletheuein) to all its sundering confusions. (131)
Posterior to Plato, and this includes up to the present day, technology is understood much differently. The modern conception of technology is as “instrument”, which indicates that it is a means for affecting a given end - a tool, a contrivance - but stops there. This definition is neither wholly alien to aletheia (which is a tool in the sense that it effects hypokeimenon) nor contradictory to it. But the merely instrumental definition of technology lacks the relationship to truth to an act of aletheia, and has thus diminished the purview of technique to the merely causal. Modern man has sequestered technique and craft off from any possibility of manifesting truth as surely as he has sequestered aesthetics into the realm of the impractical. This schism represents a narrowing and isolating of the full essence of each aspect and leaves both neglected, according to Heidegger.
Heidegger’s query is directed toward discovering the answer to the question: with modern man’s conception of technology as the destiny of this schism, what is its origin? As stated, its origin lies in the advent of metaphysics. By this Heidegger has in mind Plato’s pronouncement that eidos - which in the Greek means appearance, outward visual aspect, i.e. that which stands before unconcealed in clarity (hypokeimenon) – is precisely that aspect of it which cannot be seen with the physical eye and must be apprehended with the rational intellect. This radical reinterpretation of what it means to appear as hypokeimenon commences two essential shifts in the western mind. The first is a shift away from the apprehension of the real entailing appearance before the senses (Heidegger’s language seems to suggest an emphasis on sight) towards apprehension of the real entailing appearance through a framework of mental categories. The second is the relocation of “realness”, i.e. Being, into the realm of the eternal, unchanging, and static. Whereas, when the real was understood to be what appeared before the senses, it was understood to be in flux, the real, when it is placed into the realm of universal thought-categories, becomes that, and only that, which endures fixedly in the qualitative (universal) and temporal (eternal) sense. Hence the ground is laid for categorical divisions, logical relationships, and ideas in the sense of representations, to become that which is real, or true.
The next most illustrative sign-post along this path towards the modern technological milieu is Descartes, who directly inherits Plato’s thinking but drives even further towards the essence, or end, of which Plato is but a faint glimmer. Descartes articulation, “cogito ergo sum”, indicates an even further narrowing of the field of that which can be in Being (be real and true), to the phenomenological sphere of subjectness. This articulation brings to further fruition the two (related) phenomenological shifts commenced by Plato. First, it is founded on the assumption of the human condition wherein the real is divided into the two unequal spheres of subject (subectium) and object (obectium), into the schizoid antipathy of I and world. This conception of man as isolated from and juxtaposed to the real is completely foreign to Dasein. The second is the assumption of the preeminence of the subject. At its core, the reasoning being “cogito ergo sum” relies on the transformation of hypokeimenon from the otherness of nature and/or the realm of universals into subectium, or the experience of the self. Subectium, being the only certainty, becomes the standard measurement for the certainty (truth) of all that is in Being. The “Enlightenment” of which Descartes is a member truthfully designates the age wherein man is freed from the intellectual bondage of the church, but also that wherein he is only freed into the enclosure of his own subjective cogitations.
However, when man becomes the primary and only real subectium, that means: man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth. Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such. But this is possible only when the comprehension of what is as a whole changes. 128
The last significant stop on Heidegger’s guided tour through the evolution of western metaphysics before he arrives at a characterization of the fully fledged technological milieu composing the modern age, is the atomic physicists, such as Heisenberg and Plank, and the “research science” of which they are the capstone. They represent a further enclosure of the thinking being into his own subjectivity and accordingly of his alienation from the self-revealing coming into appearance of the real from outside of the self, i.e. from “ek-sistence”. This is because, for them, the reassignment of hypokeimenon into subectium reaches its pinnacle.
How? Research science takes up as its purpose the express goal of representing all truth with prefect accuracy. This model of action assumes not only the division of the real into subject and object spheres, but also the phenomenological primacy of the subjective. It seeks to perfect a strict, rigorous adherence to the particular set of methodologies to its field of inquiry (physics, historiography, etc), which naturally narrow as the methodologies are honed. What appears as the object of this research, or what inhabits the object-sphere of a particular field, is determined and given form in advance by an a priori cognitive structure which anticipates phenomena and shapes its coming into appearance in the way appropriate to that science. So for example
This stipulating has to do with nothing less than the plan or projection of that which must henceforth, for the knowing of nature that is sought after, be nature: the self contained system of motion of units of mass related spatiotemporally. … Every force is defined according to – i.e. is only – its consequences in motion, and that means in magnitude of change of place in the unity of time.
Thus, research 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 appearance of the real a priori.
The methodology though which individual object spheres are conquered does not simply amass results. Rather, with the help of its results it adapts itself for a new procedure. … In the course of these processes, the methodology of the science becomes circumscribed by means of its results. More and more the methodology adapts itself to the possibilities of procedure opened up through itself. p124
These a priori cognitive structures are nothing other than the self-expression of the subject, and therefore manifest the almost complete in-turning of human perception away from the outward appearance of the real. Heisenberg and Plank signify the virtual consummation of this when they declare: “The real is that which can be measured” (169) Hence the crisis of modern science: 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.
This “crisis” summarizes Heidegger’s understanding of the “technological milieu”. It is precisely in the emergence into fulfillment of the essence of technology which the preceding metaphysical narrative illustrates, that technology becomes milieu. Heidegger’s word for technology qua milieu is Enframing: “that challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the self-revealing as standing-reserve.” (19) What does this mean and how does it come about?
The emergence of the essence of technology illustrated in the narrative of western metaphysics and science has, in the modern age, reached, or is probably about to reach, its fulfillment in the complete normative structuring of every appearance of the real, i.e. the culminating preeminence of the subject qua that which is real. This leaves all else – every destining of Being which is not original to man – neglected, unrevealed. The objective becomes precisely that which can only slip into mysterious phenomenological absence, ala Kant’s noumenon, or worse, nothing.
When, in this way, man gains ontological preeminence, he “makes depend on himself the way in which he must take his stand in relation to whatever is as the objective” and “there begins that way of being human which mans the realm of human capability as a domain given over to measuring and executing, for the purposes of gaining mastery over that which is a whole.” (132) In other words, when man rises to the position of “representative” of the real, he assumes a role which intrinsically culminates in complete mastery over its destining.
The struggle for dominion of the earth is in its historical essence already the result of the fact that whatever is as such is appearing in the mode of the will to power without yet being recognized or without being understood at all as that will. At any rate, the doctrines of action and the conceptual ideologies that are commonly subscribed to never utter that which is, and which therefore is happening. With the beginning of the struggle for dominion over the earth, the age of subjectness is driving toward its consummation. To this completion belongs that fact that whatever is – which is in the manner of the will to power – is, after its fashion and in every respect, becoming certain and therefore also conscious of its own truth about itself. Making conscious is a necessary instrument of the willing that wills from out of the will to power. It happens, in the sphere of the uprising of man into self-willing, through the ceaseless dissecting of the historical situation. Thought metaphysically, the “situation” is constantly the stage for action of a subject. Every analysis of the situation is grounded, whether it knows it or not, in the metaphysics of subjectness. p101
Hence the stage is set for the critique of technology so widely intuited in the 19th and 20th centuries: its rapine dominance over nature. Just as science forcibly sets up the real to exhibit itself in certain ways by refusing to acknowledge it in any other way than how it has predetermined to measure it, and in so doing makes it into a stockpile of object-data to be measured in such and such a way, technology relentlessly sets up nature to exhibit itself as an object of instrumental manipulation. It “challenges forth” nature to appear as that which it determines that it needs in advance. In so doing, all of nature is converted into a “standing-reserve” of potential energy for the ordering about of the subject. This is because the de facto value of instrumentality is efficiency. Techniques qua instruments are absurd and even impossible without the escalatory accumulation of output with respect to input. Thus, when technology is stripped of its capacity as aletheia, it naturally reorients “toward driving on to the maximum yield from the minimum expense.” (p. 15)
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)
The result is a world of ongoing technological rationalization wherein every activity is robbed of its reverence, its novelty, and its poetry. Every appearance of the real comes in the form of sheer potential energy so that nothing of the constantly morphing spontaneity of the real is left. It accumulates in a monotonous, and therefore oppressive, way. The Rhine, once a quite place of solemn majesty, is dammed up by a hydro-electric power plant, behind which throbs a massive wall of potential energy to be endlessly stored up and ordered about by man, who is lulled into distraction by its deluge of mechanical humming. Likewise, the peasant farmer of old 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 the land in order in a way that “sets upon”; air is nitrogen, land is ore, ore is nuclear power, and the spontaneous generation of novelty in the bursting forth of physis is replaced by acres of uniform rows of depleted crops. “Feeding potential” is unlocked from out of the ground.
And the sucking up of everything into a standing reserve at the service of man is in no way limited to the external world; man himself is set upon by the unlocking utilizing. Heidegger notes, “Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps...". The relentless ordering about of Being revealed as instrument as seen in industrial farming is seen as the travesty which it really is when it sets upon man himself, offending his sense of sympathy. Yet in his disgust, he still cannot escape the Enframing. He is so caught up in the challenging ordering of nature into standing-reserve that he himself is 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 freely, spontaneously, reflectively. Instead, he is intractably ordered about by a complex of industries treating him as if he were 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) Technology and technological man resonate with each other in a mutually augmenting feedback loop until technology becomes the very environment man inhabits, the very medium through which he communicates. As such, it truly becomes milieu.
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 development is a portentous threat to that which Heidegger reveres as most dear: that archaic way of existence called Dasein. Enframing, for all its aggressive ordering about of the real, is characterized by Heidegger as the “injurious neglect of the thing”, underscoring, at heart, its carelessness. Technology is based on a phenomenological experience of the real (“the thing”) as instrument. This experience is based on a metaphysical orientation. Metaphysics is inherently based on an unreflective normative structuring of the appearance of the real. Thus Dasein - the safeguarding of the truth, through a basically receptive, yet attentive, harboring of the coming into appearance of the real inward into the mind of the thinker intact – passes more and more out of Being as metaphysics secures its establishment instead. Man’s very essence, not to mention truth itself, slips into obscurity behind the cloak of man’s representing.
The ordering belonging to Enframing sets itself above the thing, leaves it, as thing, unsafeguarded, tuthless. In this way Enframing disguises the nearness of world that nears in the thing. Enframing disguises even this, its disguising, just as the forgetting of something forgets itself and is drawn away in the forgetful wake of oblivion. The coming to-pass of oblivion not only lets fall from remembrance into concealment; but that falling itself falls simultaneously from remembrance into concealment, which itself also falls away into that falling. p46
But what is the original cause of this receding of Being from out of the purview of man’s thinking? That is to ask, what catalyzed the first normative abstraction of the appearing of the real into an ideos, and destined it through history toward consummation in the form of Enframing? To assert that, at is source, this transformation is some doing of man, would be to misconstrue man as the master of Being. Ultimately, even the setting up of man into a position of mastery over the appearing of Being such that he shuts himself off from it, is a manifestation of Being and its sanction. This “shutting off from” Being is no refusal of Being by man, but rather, a self-withholding of Being’s revelation of itself to man. Thus the age of technology may be understood as the epoch of Being, in the etymological sense of the “self-mystification” of Being.
It would lie in Beings own essence, then, that Being remain unthought because it withdraws. Being itself withdraws into its truth. It harbors itself safely within its truth and conceals itself in such harboring.
In looking toward this self-concealing harboring of its own essence, perhaps we glimpse the essence of that mystery in the guise of which the truth of Being is coming to presence.
According to this, metaphysics itself would not be merely a neglect of a question still to be pondered concerning Being. Surely it would not be an error. Metaphysics, as the history of the truth of what is as such, would have come to pass from out of the destining of Being itself. Metaphysics would be, in essence, the mystery of Being itself, a mystery that is unthought because withheld. 110
Given Heidegger’s exaltation of the Being to, basically, the most important thing imaginable, if any circumstance warrants the attention and effort of humanity, this is it. What does Heidegger understand to be the appropriate human response to the concealing of Being manifest In technology? What form does praxis take in the face of Being’s epoch?
Praxis (Reflection)
Any praxis which intends to bring about some change in the state of Enframing through causal means, i.e. instrumental methods, only continues to move within the realm of Enframing. The technological milieu cannot be altered through the application of technology; since they are essentially identical, this can only augment it. Therefore it will never be defeated, in the sense of overcome by the sheer force of “good” technologies. All technology enframes.
And at any rate, the concealing of Being in the form of man’s enclosure into his own subjectivity was its own prerogative from the very beginning. Enframing is man’s destiny. But does man’s destiny terminate in Enframing? Probably – hopefully – not.
Being taketh away and Being giveth. Remember that for Heidegger every situation inherently contains the seed of its own reversal. The coming into Being of Enframing threatens with the possibility that in man’s revealing of the real, he will bring it forth as nothing more than “standing reserve”, and in so doing risks revealing himself as nothing but an orderer of standing reserve. Man exults himself to the lord of the revealing of Being, even while, truly, his very existence is threatened by the fact that he barely any longer fulfills his essence as that being who is a harbinger of the appearing of Being into himself from without. But from out this very situation the “saving power” comes to pass. As if cast into appearance in negative - as if, in its sheer absence it becomes conspicuous, the fullness of Being so neglected by the destructively narrow focus on the instrumental of Enframing, shines through in the dimmest flashing of an insight. As man ever more rapidly approaches the brink of the great precipice which is the obliteration of his essence, Being urgently whispers out to alert him to the precipitous danger. This alertness - this flash of insight - is the cause for the hope of salvation. The danger of obliteration is reversed into man’s very salvation from it.
Sheerly, out of its own essence of concealedness, Being brings itself to pass into its epoch. Therefore we must pay heed: The turning of the danger comes to pass suddenly. In this turning, the clearing belonging to the essence of Being suddenly clears itself and lights up. This sudden self-lighting is the lightening-flash. It brings itself into its own brightness, which it itself both brings along and brings in. When, in the turning of the danger, the truth of Being flashes, the essence of Being clears and lights itself up. Then the truth of the essence, the coming to presence, of Being turns and enters in. p44
What is this flash of insight? Metaphorically, it is that we realize we are marching toward a cliff. This means that we come to understand the essence of technology – Enframing - and see it for the “injurious neglect” of Being in the fullness of its self-revealing that it is. This insight is a glimmer of the saving power and not merely the last regretful breath before humanity tumbles over into the precipice of his destiny, because when he enters into a relationship to Enframing where he is is free to question its essence and to evaluate it, he opens a space for himself in which he may move independently of it. (p.25)
Therefore it is of the utmost importance that he enters into a relationship with it such that he may question it. Yet no “instrumental” action, - no causing effecting - that man can take against technology can defeat it. Furthermore, man’s destiny can only ever be that which Being destines for him. Thus the saving power is the power of Being to unconceal itself and bring itself into appearance before man.
However at the same time, by everyone’s account man too has the power within himself to attempt what he can. But what is it that he can attempt if no action against Enframing will work? The very awareness of the situation which a discourse such as this can stimulate already constitutes the first steps; man may reflect on the growth of the saving power within the danger of Enframing, and in so doing cultivate an understanding of what Enframing is, and in so doing cultivate the saving power itself. For in open, lighted up relationship to Enframing’s essence comes the freedom to act in a new way with respect to Being – to open his mind to pay attention to it - and thereby to renew and restore man’s role as he who exists, as Dasein.
Reflection, then must be that form of thinking which is able to question after the essence of technology, to stand from outside of it in order to gain perspective. Enframing is the appearing in Being of, albeit an epoch of Being, the essence of technology. Therefore, reflection must be a kind of thinking capable of “thinking Being”, of safeguarding the appearing of Being qua Enframing inward into knowing intact, rather than a normative representing. It must be the kind of thinking appropriate to Dasein, to the ancient Greek. This means that it cannot operate in the mode of technology. Technology, it has been shown, has its roots very deeply in human consciousness, such that even the division of human experience up into the subject qua hypokeimenon and the object is a misstep. Therefore, reflection must think so primordially so that it even precedes metaphysics all together. It must be simply the immediate, loving, conduction of the appearance of Being through man, as light is conducted through a lens, or sound through a bell.
What is given to thinking to think is not some deeply hidden underlying meaning, but rather something lying near, that which lies nearest, which, because it is only this, we have therefore constantly already passed over. Through this passing over we are, without noticing it, constantly accomplishing the killing in relation to the Being of whatever is in being. 111
Yet this is no merely passive contemplation – as men so often envision when they hear the word “reflection” – it is simultaneously action. Heidegger indeed has in mind a kind of meditative thinking, but even the division of human action into the intellectual the practical originates in the essence of technology. As for the Greek, praxis in the mode of Dasein is both active and reflective. Remember, poiesis and techne are both modes of revealing aletheia. They are both a doing, and a thinking. Thus through art and craft can reflection be accomplished.
Reflection is not needed, however, in order that it may remove some chance perplexity or break down some antipathy to thinking. Reflection is needed as a responding that forgets itself in the clarity of ceaseless question away at the inexhaustibleness of That which is worthy of questioning – of That from out of which, in the moment properly its own, responding loses the character of questioning and becomes simply saying. p181
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