What is dangerous is not technology. There is no demonry of technology, but rather there is the mystery of its essence. The essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger (Heidegger, 1977, p.28).
Written in 1954, Martin Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology (Heidegger, 1977) sets out to capture something far deeper than just the surface manifestations of technology: those factories with their endless automations, the methods of mass production in an ever-networked world. His essay is about going deeper and defining the essence of technology as a critical mode of human activity, that may either serve to facilitate a far richer interaction for Dasein in its world or render its dealings unrecognisable and unable to allow connection. The stakes are high and technology acts as something of a final frontier for Heidegger, who uses it to paint a picture of an adolescent phase of Dasein attempting to grasp hold of its maturity. The essay’s closing paragraphs, while perhaps not overly optimistic, set the stage for a battle in which the essence of technology just might facilitate the profound evolution that is needed, or alternatively, will all come to nothing.
While it is true that reading Heidegger’s work can at times feel like a relentless onslaught of verbiage, such a judgement is premature. For when one puts in the effort, it soon becomes more akin to pulling on a sumptuous Platonic golden thread, where everything is so carefully constructed in a way that respects clarity above all. Though notorious for his proclivity in semantics, and his constant grappling with grammar, translation, and the wholesale invention of words as they are needed, the language is consistent and surprisingly self-contained.
Note, however, that the reader will always need to watch out for non-contextual curve balls (the price of doing business with philosophy, I suppose). In this essay, there are two challenges on that score. The first relates to Heidegger’s conception of the self in the world, a construct he denotes as Dasein. Dasein is assumed reading for his technology essay (and to undertake that assumed reading, the voluminous work Being and Time is the way to go), but a brief explanation is provided here so that homework can be put on hold, at least for now.
Dasein is not the same as Self. While philosophy may enjoy an unspoken privilege of arbitrating that perfect arc between extremes of clarity and ambiguity, attaching semantic similarity to these terms is not valid. The Dasein that Heidegger speaks of is something far more than the Self. Dasein is not just everyday consciousness, or an awareness of existence, or a Cartesian abstraction positioning the human as a dual agent inhabiting mind and body. Dasein is rather a deeply immersive and fluid involvement between a human being and its dealings in the world. It is the collaboration par-excellence, one in which the human being has accepted the limits of this collaboration along with the fleeting nature of existence. Dasein embodies the understanding of inevitable physical decay borne by temporality. It is intimately bound up with authenticity, which Dasein can forge by accepting responsibility for a limited lifespan and, in the face of this, choosing to optimise its situation and possibilities. In the paragraphs that follow, the term Dasein is sometimes used to refer to a Self who aspires to becoming Dasein.
The second issue is the slight ambiguity that arises between the different definitions of technology, the essence of technology, and modern technology. This is both an issue in the essay itself and the different ways it has been interpreted. Succinctly, technology refers to a particular instance of technology (e.g., a hammer), the essence of technology is the underlying process that creates instances of technology, and modern technology is what happens when the process goes wrong.
A final note before exploring Heidegger’s essay: it might be tempting to paint him as some kind of Luddite, a countryside recluse lamenting the decline of the modern world, some idealised Wagnerian past. While fitting in parts of his biography, this is an oversimplification. Heidegger provides a complicated moral and historical context, but his essay transcends it, offering an eternal truth about the integration of technology as a core challenge for Dasein in its search for authenticity.
The first salvo in the technology essay is a classic first-principles philosophical opening: be as general as possible. The question of what the essence of technology is becomes the question of what, really, is anything:
According to ancient doctrine, the essence of a thing is considered to be what the thing is. We ask the question concerning technology when we ask what it is (Heidegger, 1977, p.39).
Heidegger provides two responses. First, the essence of technology is a human activity. Second, it is a means to an end. This may feel opaque, suggesting that the essence of technology could be almost any activity, yet it is not something ‘out there.’ Whatever its content may be, it is an indelible part of Dasein’s interior. Further, it is a process, at the disposal of Dasein, undertaken to shape perceptions of the world Dasein inhabits.
Heidegger drills deeper into the nature of this process. The essence of technology allows Dasein to have things at its disposal—contrivances that it can employ to uncover the hidden nature of an obscure world. Technology is presented almost as a bag of tricks, being instruments or contrivances that Dasein creates to clarify its world:
“The whole complex of these contrivances is technology. Technology itself is a contrivance” (Heidegger, 1977, p.40).
From here, things take an Aristotelian turn. Means leading to ends become causes leading to effects. The instruments and contrivances Dasein arms itself with are recast from ends to effects, leading to Aristotle’s fourfold definition of cause and effect:
Heidegger rejects this discrete categorisation, seeing cause and effect as more interconnected, reflecting Dasein’s collaboration with the world. An illustrative example is the silver chalice, which emerges as a product of interplay, not discrete causes. The instrument is an emergent phenomenon revealing a previously unseen aspect of the world, providing purpose (telos) to what was material:
“Circumscribing gives bounds to the thing” (Heidegger, 1977, p.43).
Thus, the essence of technology is a mechanism for Dasein to create contrivances that reveal the nature of its world, providing an opportunity to optimise its being. It is a process of bringing forth, or revealing. Heidegger invokes the Greek term Aletheia (“revealing”), related to Plato’s Techne and Poiesis, framing Dasein as an artisan:
“Techne belongs to the bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poetic” (Heidegger, 1977, p.47).
Technology, then, is no mere means; it is a way of revealing, a facilitation of Dasein’s artfulness, and a means to Dasein’s creativity.
Heidegger then addresses modern technology. While historical contrivances enabled Aletheia, modern industrial technology, dominated by mass production and automation, is different:
“It is said that modern technology is something incomparably different from all earlier technologies because it is based on modern physics as an exact science... modern physics, as experimental, is dependent upon technical apparatus” (Heidegger, 1977, p.49).
Modern contrivances exceed Dasein’s perceptual and cognitive capacity, leading to a type of revealing that lacks content. Aletheia is replaced with “Standing Reserve,” where Dasein organizes, sorts, and stores information rather than engaging authentically. Enframing describes this inauthentic activity:
“Unlocking, transforming, storing, and switching” (Heidegger, 1977, p.49).
The accumulation of historical contrivances—e.g., the invention of the wheel—leads to an informationally overloaded world. Dasein becomes a bureaucrat of information, reminiscent of Kafka’s characters, managing meaningless structures rather than engaging with authentic revealing. Modern technology then is both the product and enabler of information bloat.
Heidegger identifies Destining as a hopeful counterpoint to Enframing:
“We shall call the sending that gathers that first starts man upon a way of revealing, destining. It is from this destining that the essence of all history is determined” (Heidegger, 1977, p.59).
Destining marks the initial position of Dasein in the world, a moment of choice: Aletheia or Enframing. It is precisely the constraint imposed by modern technology that allows Dasein to strive toward authenticity:
“But where danger is, grows / The saving power also” (Heidegger, 1977, p.63).
Dasein must navigate the narrowing space left for Aletheia, transforming existential risk into opportunity. Technology itself, as Enframing, demands reflection and authentic engagement:
“Thus Enframing, as a destining of revealing, is indeed the essence of technology... it is technology itself that makes the demand on us to think in another way what is usually understood by ‘essence’” (Heidegger, 1977, p.65).
Milan Kundera’s Slowness provides a literary coda:
“The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he is in a state of ecstasy” (Kundera, 2020, p.3).
Modern Dasein faces a choice: to hide in the ecstatic abstraction of information or to embrace Aletheia in its complexity. Heidegger warns of information death but offers the possibility of authentic engagement. Technology is not inherently dangerous; rather, its essence is a challenge and opportunity for Dasein to navigate, create, and reveal. Reading philosophy, particularly Heidegger, is to be assaulted by complexity, yet it is in engaging with these challenges that Dasein may realize authenticity amidst modernity’s overwhelming structures.
Heidegger, M. (1977). The Question Concerning Technology. In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (W. Lovitt, Trans.). New York: Harper.
Kundera, M. (2020). Slowness. Faber & Faber.