Summary of "The Question Concerning Technology"

Heidegger constantly reminds us, like Hegel, that we must pay attention to the movement of the thought that happens in any questioning (more than the words that make up the questioning) in order for that questioning to really be heard. Hopefully a short summary of "The Question Concerning Technology" might help bring out this movement for some people with regard to that essay. It might also help bring out how this essay thinks about what I think we now call "information:" if we can see "standing-reserves" as something like "resources," it is not a really great leap to see that Heidegger really means something like information in our internet/cybercultural age (perhaps, I'll suggest, this is why he turns in "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" to cybernetics). Here it is, as I see (that is, not yet hear or listen to) it:

1. Technology has an essence, which is not the same as technology in the sense of machinery. We search for that and come up with the provisional definition of the essence of technology as instrumentality (of being a means to an end). This definition is correct, but, as only correct, does not hit at essentiality. Searching deeper, we find instrumentality has at its core the concept of cause. We find, searching even deeper, that, at the core of cause, there is not something like "effecting," but rather being-responsible-for-something. Being-responsible-for-something is at the center of cause and thus at the center of instrumentality. This being-responsible-for is responsible for bringing something into presence, i.e. it is responsible for poiesis. In other words, technology's instrumentality brings something forth into unconcealment (this is what poiesis does): it is a mode of revealing, a way in which truth happens.

2. However, modern technology is also not totally poiesis in its bringing-forth or revealing. It is more of a challenging(-to-bring-forth). This challenging is not found in older forms of technology as determined historically in its essence. What is brought forth in modern technology is brought forth in response to a challenge and is destined to remain in a particular, determinate reserve--that is, it is not just brought to presence "somewhere or other" but is regulated in its presencing. Thus in its presence what is brought forth appears as completely different than older technology or poiesis: it appears as an "object on call" or as a "standing reserve"--i.e. what we would normally call a resource. In other words, what is brought forth does not appear as an object, as a resource composed of objects.

3. Man accomplishes this bringing forth in this way, but only because this way of bringing forth makes him bring forth in this way: man is challenged or ordered or regulated by challenging to challenge. The challenging of man by challenging (so that man challenges, regulates, orders, renders into a resource) we call Ge-stell, enframing. Enframing is the essence of modern technology. We must ask to what extent we already consider man, then, as a standing-reserve or resource.

4. Enframing is a type of revealing that does not just oppose itself to poiesis, but effaces the possibility of revealing by poiesis. As such, it essentially enjoins man to submit himself to the interpretation of himself not just as the commanded, but as what is commanded: i.e. as a reserve, as a resource. Thus the essence of technology is a danger to man as man and not as resource. The essence, then, is a danger to essence--to what makes something be as the something it is (and not something else, i.e. like a resource). But how can an essence be a danger to essence? Here we find what is saving (for man) in what is dangerous (to man as man): the essence of technology forces us to think this danger of essence to itself as belonging to essence.

5. That is, essence must not be something's being as something in the sense of something enduring as this or that type of thing. The essence of technology enjoins us to interpret essence as what endures in its being able to grant (to allow access) to what, not within man (for this would be essentia in the sense of endurence as this or that type or inner determination) but outside of or beyond man, allows man be man as man. That is, essence must be interpreted as given by something (an enowning movement, an "it gives") outside of man. What is saving (to man in the essence of technology) is thus "of a higher essence" than what is in danger--in the sense that man must think and question essence differently if he questions the essence of technology and the essence of man essentially. The way to accomplish this transformation of a questioning of essence--indeed, the realm in which it must be questioned--is through art as poiesis.

The movement is, for me, in the progression from instrumentality to a reinterpretation of cause to man to the issue of a transformation of essence. Why exactly Die Frage nach der Technik must hit upon these four issues, must progress through them, is the necessity that I think Heidegger asks us to think when he says that we must pay attention to the movement of thinking. In other words, the necessity that brings these four issues together in their necessary connection is the real movement of the essay.