Revisiting Martin Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology” in the Age of A.I.
Let’s play the associations game. I say technology, you say?
AI, robots, smart phones, computers? In another era, it might have been a factory, the steam engine, railroads, coal energy. Even earlier, you might point to hammers, the loom, or the printing press. What do all of these examples have in common that makes all of them technologies?
If we want to get at the essence of technology, that which makes something technological, simply naming examples is not going to get us there. Martin Heidegger, in his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954), gives us a start where he tells us that the essence of technology is not itself technological.
“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.” — Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, p. 4.
The most common answer to the question is that technology is a tool, and as such it is neutral in the same way a hammer is neutral. You can use it to drive a nail, or to knock someone out.
We tend to think, since Aristotle, that the tools we make have four causes: The material cause is what something is made out of. The formal cause is the shape or form that matter is given or takes. The efficient cause is the agent or maker of the thing. The final cause is the end goal or purpose of the thing. Over time, that efficient cause becomes dominant, so we think the makers causes the thing to appear, and further, we think of causes as cause and effect, if A then B.
Heidegger uses the example of a silver chalice that I’ve always found kind of creepy: The silver is the material it’s made from, the chalice shape is the form given to that material, the silversmith is the one who makes it (the efficient cause), and it’s made for ritual use (the final cause). We tend to attribute the making of the challice to the silversmith, which obscures the way the other causes are co-responsible for the production.
Heidegger will intervene here to bring us back to the sense in which “cause” in the original Greek was not just making or affecting, but it was more like that to which something is indebted, or the different ways something is responsible for something else coming into being. We are indebted to these four causes and they are co-responsible for bringing something forth, which he calls an occasioning or revealing.
But here is the difficulty: while we can say that this smart phone is made of certain materials, designed and made by humans, to some higher end, and we may describe a technology as such, that still doesn’t get us any closer to the essence of technology. It is not the thing that is technology, even if it is an example or instance of it, but how it comes about. And in this sense, technology is not itself a thing.
The essence of technology is the occasioning, revealing, or bringing forth itself, and Heidegger will identify this as poiēsis. We get out word “poetry” from poiēsis, and you would not be wrong to think of poiēsis as a kind of ontological poetry. At the root of poiēsis is phúō, and you can hear it if you say it out-loud, the poetic phúō-ing of beings, manifest in the flowering bloom. This phuo-ing is at the root of both physics and of nature. As you may know, the earliest philosophers were known as phusikoi, philosophers of nature or physicists. They were interested in natural phenomena, and how it might be explained in rational rather than mythical of religious terms. Natural reproduction (phýsis) and human production (techne, meaning art, craft, or skill, and a mode of knowing through making) where thought to be correlates.
Human techne, an offspring of nature’s phúō-ing, is a bringing forth seen in the artisan’s work, the craft in it, in cooperation with the other causes. The loom is the tool through which we make tapestries, as are factory machines that also make tapestries, as are the computers that come to embody the logic developed through the loom. But our care in bringing forth, that is the essence of our technology.
In its essence, technology is a human capacity to bring forth into the world, a creativity from which destruction is never too far. Heidegger points us to the old Greek sense of technology that is, first and foremost, the making of things, including the tools with which we make other things. We don’t just cause a thing to be, we occasion it, and unless it is art for art’s sake, the pure enjoyment of the creative process, we make it for a purpose. Our technologies are never neutral, they have ends built into them. It is human ingenuity that allows us to take those tools and reinvent their uses, but the hammer is designed and made of hard metal so that it can drive nails.
Heidegger wants to take us back to the essence of technology because of how we have ended up developing it. Our modern technology is a reduction of this essence, which turns our human creative impulse into a destructive enframing — a structure that holds or arranges things. Enframing orders everything into what Heidegger calls a standing reserve. Think of it as a universal demand placed on everything — nature, people, information to be ready on call, quantifiable, usable, just pure resource. His example is the Rhine river, no longer a natural body of water but now a water power supply, an object and resource for us: A hydroelectric dam doesn’t just use the river. It dams it up, challenges it, and converts it into a water power supplier. The river itself is set up, ordered, made ready for extraction. It’s not just a river anymore., it’s potential kilowatt hours.
Likewise, agriculture becomes a mechanized food industry. The air is set upon to yield nitrogen for fertilizer. The earth is set upon for ore or for uranium, uranium for atomic energy. It’s this constant challenging, demanding, extracting, ordering things to yield something specific, to be ready for further use.
We ourselves turn ourselves into a resource, we talk about time management or personal energy in our work lives. We’re constantly pushed to optimize schedules, our productivity, even our learning. You might come to see yourself or your team less as people with unique talents and more like “human resources,” units of capacity. Skills ready to be slotted into a project.
In academia, we came to learn that administrators talked about faculty as “information delivery systems,” interchangeable parts in an educational machine rather than scholars or mentors with distinct voices. So things and people lose their own dignity, their own meaning and authenticity.
Now think about our data being collected. All this information isn’t just stored, it’s a massive standing reserve, mined by and for algorithms, for ads, for whatever, it’s all about calculation, control, and prediction.
Enframing is a way of revealing the world in which everything, including humans, show up primarily in terms of utility and efficiency. It’s instrumentality with respect to the natural world, but also to ourselves and others. And the problem is that enframing conceals all the other ways of relating, limiting our openness to more poetic or authentic modes of existence.
[An aside: Heidegger’s metaphysics of presence underlies this account. It critiques the Western philosophical tendency to understand being primarily in terms of what is present, stable, and available to the mind — what he calls “presence-at-hand.” He argues this overlooks more original modes of revealing, where beings emerge into unconcealment (aletheia) through time, context, and relation.]
Heidegger does not say it like this, but we can think of it as a “frame of mind,” that sees everything in terms of what it is for us, what it can do for us, how it is a resource for our goals. This is very much a part of our human nature, to order the world according to our plans. It is the wellspring of our creativity, of why we make things, but also of this way of thinking that turns destructive.
Humans aren’t reduced to mere standing reserve in the same way as are rivers or hammers. We’re the ones being challenged to do the ordering, but we are still gripped in the enframing/structure, summoned by this instrumental way of revealing the world. We are summoned, and here it gets a little woo-woo, but the danger Heidegger sees is that we only see ourselves in this encounter, and become deluded that all that is is us. The danger is that we could lose the ability to experience a different kind of revealing.
We are technological beings. We are also the beings for whom their technology is an issue. We can no more refuse technology than we can refuse to be creative. We make things, and we make things with which to make things. We also create ourselves in and through what we make. This is as true of individuals as it is of us as a species.
Is there a way to do technology, to be technological, in a different frame of mind?
Addendum
Modern technology is an “enframing” or an instrumental frame of mind that orders all of the resources into a standing reserve for capital. Those resources include us as well, human resources and now data streams. But the essence of technology is much bigger than just this enframing, as it goes to our human need to make, to create. That creativity is never too far from destruction, but the closer we get to the destruction, Heidegger seems to write with some hope, the nearer we are also to touching our deepest creative desires. The antidote to our current entrapment is creativity, we can feel it in our bones yes?