Books For Designers: “The Question Concerning Technology”, by Martin Heidegger (1954)
Okay, to start off, let’s take a high-level approach to design thinking through philosophy. My hope is to introduce a broader theoretical frame through which we might view design as a method of technologically-abled problem-solving. In other words, we designers utilize various technologies to solve particular problems. However, as we’ll see from this essay by the twentieth-century German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, the technologies and the problems themselves exist within a frame that is so powerful, it becomes difficult to escape its particular way of thinking and designing.
Also an introductory note on Martin Heidegger (1889–1976): Heidegger remains one of the most influential (and controversial) figures in twentieth-century philosophy. While he was the first modern philosopher to identify and explore technology as a distinctively philosophical issue (and not just as a matter of ‘applied science’ or empirical research), he was also a card-carrying and unrepentant member of the German National Socialist party.
If anything, this goes to show that no matter the level of one’s brilliance or the complexity of one’s philosophical position, everything takes place within a given context. If you want to read more on Heidegger’s Nazism, there are many books out there (I recommend starting with this book by Hans Sluga). That being said, whatever you decide about his views, his ideas about technology have served as a touchstone for many debates about technology (even in the digital era).
Jumping In: “The Essence of Technology is By No Means Anything Technological”
Let’s start with the following quote, which is near the opening of Heidegger’s essay:
According to Heidegger, technology’s “essence” is nothing technological. This may seem counterintuitive, but Heidegger goes on to argue that we cannot truly understand the real meaning of technology if our reflection involves some sort of technological approach.
In other words, where we typically want to discuss any problem as having a ‘technological solution’ — be it scientific, administrative, political, or even just the application of more and more amazing gadgetry — Heidegger wants to emphasize that one of the things that cannot have such a ‘solution’ is the ‘essence’ — or the fundamental meaning — of technology itself. We must think technology more fundamentally, which means getting at the source of technology through the ways human beings experience and create the meaning of existence.
As we will see below, we can begin to see our humanity and the world around us only when we clarify this question. For, as Heidegger writes, the blinder we are to the essence of technology, the more we will be enslaved by it:
“Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.” (4)
Enslavement to technology…technology’s supposed neutrality…our immediate acceptance of proposed technological solutions…in the first few pages of Heidegger’s essay, he immediately touches upon many of the conversations we are having today about technology’s influence.
Now, if all of this sounds a little bit woozy and wacky, don’t worry: 8-bit Philosophy has a short-and-sweet version of the essay’s themes. Check it out first before reading what I’ve written below…
Okay! To reiterate, the essence of technology is nothing technological. Instead, it has to do a particular mindset, a way of seeing the world around us. Through a series of arguments, Heidegger says that this way of seeing the world has everything to do with how things are revealed. As the 8-Bit video explains, in the ancient world, the word “techne” had everything to do with the way something was revealed through the creation of artifacts.
Techne as a Revealing
As an example, Heidegger has us consider a silver chalice. In order for a chalice to come into being, various causes must also come into effect. First, there is the material cause, which is the material out of which something is made (in our example, the chalice is made of silver). Next, there is the formal cause, which is the shape into which the thing is formed (the chalice is formed into a cup of a given size). Third, there is the final cause, or what the object is made to do. And finally, there is the efficient cause, which is concerned with the one who forms the chalice.
Cool, cool. But Heidegger writes that each of these is indebted to something else for its cause. For while the chalice is brought into being by the silversmith, it was the silversmith’s way of being in the world that brought forth the silver chalice. It didn’t just arrive out of nowhere; the silversmith and the chalice work together to enact a revealing or a “bringing-forth”. Think here of Michaelangelo’s quip about the art (“techne”) of sculpting: he claimed to “uncover” what was already there in the block of marble. What is essential to understand here is that technology and our ways of being in the world work together to form a certain mindset about the agents in question. This mindset is the essence of technology.
At this point, some might object: “That’s ridiculous! Technology has nothing to do with mindsets and everything to do with tools! Dummy!”
Heidegger responds that it is possible to make factually ‘correct’ statements about something and still truly misunderstand it. For example, we can memorize a list of names and dates for a history exam and still misunderstand ‘the truth’ of the historical period in which those names were involved. The same thing goes with the ‘essence of technology’: we can correctly describe a lot of the features of technology while totally misunderstanding what it truly is.
Why do we do this? Heidegger argues that any factually ‘correct’ understanding of technology is usually attributed to a ‘means/ends’ way of thinking. Here, technologies — tools — are produced and employed for the sake of human activity. Hammers exist to pound nails; there is no mysterious mindset around a hammer. Saying this otherwise, technology is seen here as an instrument employed by human beings to achieve desired ends or aims. This is what is known as “technological instrumentalism”, and in my humble opinion, it is the source of many untruths about technology.
The instrumental view of technology suggests something like, “If we desire something, we can use this technology to accomplish or satiate that desire.” But again, Heidegger argues that technology is not just a way of linking a desire with its object; rather, it ‘conditions’ and ‘reveals’ something about both the desire and the object itself.
Think about some slick contemporary device like the new iPhone XXXL, or whatever they’re calling it. We would never desire an iPhone unless the technology already existed. Its mere existence conditions our desires. Obvi. But more than this, what we can do in the world is opened up and expanded by the device itself (and, alternatively, we can also see which possibilities are foreclosed or constricted due to inequitable access to the device). Either way, the iPhone’s existence and the possibilities it proposes alter our desires and our understanding of what we are allowed to do in the world. Recall that the essence of technology is concerned with revealing: rather than being an ‘instrumental cause’ that couples our desire with what we want to accomplish, the iPhone XXXL ‘reveals’ our desires and the various possibilities we could not have imagined without it.
Technologies are not neutral — their emergence, their production, and their existence mold our way of being in the world.
‘Enframing’; or the Essence of Modern Technology
This is essential because, the last time I checked, none of us are walking around in togas while speaking Greek. We live in modern times, which reconfigure (and are reconfigured by) technology’s essence. According to Heidegger, there was a shift between the revealing of ancient technologies (say, a sailboat) and the revealing of modern technologies (a cruise ship). He calls this distinct way of revealing “das Gestell”, translated as “enframing”. Das Gestell is to see the world as “standing-reserve”, or as a scientifically- and mathematically-calculable resource that can be exploited through logistical thinking.
Heidegger mentions the example of the premodern farmer, who tends to the land as something given to him to watch over, to nurture, and to protect. The farmer demonstrates deep care for his land, for he sees himself in a deeply symbiotic relationship with it. Sure, this relationship is certainly technological, but it is also — and perhaps more crucially — one in which the farmer is humanly and personally involved with the land, planting and nurturing the crops, and so on. A farmer, in other words, cultivates; he does not simply utilize.
Heidegger compares this with the modern science of ‘agriculture,’ where a ‘yield’ of a certain quantity of land is technologically calculated and produced with almost no personal involvement on the part of the ‘agricultural engineer’. Agribusiness is a precisely that — a business that deploys a certain modern way of thinking about planting, growing, and distributing food.
Here’s another way to think about enframing: it is a human attitude towards nature as well as all of the corresponding ways in which that attitude is configured or organized. Enframing sees the world for how it can be used or exploited. It sees forests as “board feet” to be lumbered, cattle herds as “beef” to be slaughtered and sold, beautiful mountain scenery as “acreage” to be developed for skiing, stone as rare earth materials to be mined for our smartphones or jewelry. You get the picture. To enframe is to view the world as a material resource that is in desperate need of development and organization. From this perspective, our world is reduced to a storehouse of materials whose sole value lies in its potential for development and exploitation.
The ‘Dangers’ of Modern Technology
Heidegger suggests that two dangers are implicit within this way of seeing the world, and both are concerned with an important feature of the metaphor itself.
Consider that any frame (like a picture frame) is a limiting device. Not only does it turn us into ‘viewers’ or ‘consumers’ of whatever is in the frame, at the same time it also conceals from our awareness everything outside of the frame itself.
Likewise, the first ‘danger’ of modern technology is this: in the same moment that we become the “master and possessor of nature”, nature disappears as anything distinct from and having any integrity apart from us. Nature — including so-called ‘human nature’! — becomes constrained and exists only to serve our purposes. As Heidegger writes,
“[The] impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself” (27).
The second ‘danger’ of modern technology is that enframing organizes our world in very specific and very limited ways, and thus conceals us from any possible alternatives. Heidegger thinks that this hyper-organized way of revealing the world — this frame that dictates what we view and how we view it — is also a sort of forgetting of who we are as human beings and how the world can be meaningful beyond our organizational forms and processes.
Conclusion
Heidegger concludes that to understand the essence of technology is the first step in relating differently to it. Instead of merely going along with the assumptions of enframing, we are freed up to ask more probing questions. When we encounter a given technology or any explicit assumptions made with it, we can ask ourselves:
“What sort of mindset is being revealed through this technology? What sort of practices does it encourage? What sort of ends am I being oriented toward through the use of this technology — socially beneficial practices and processes? Or individualistic and consumptive ones? Is this frame ethically dubious?”
Furthermore, keeping in mind that techne has everything to do with revealing and concealing, we might ask: “What does this object reveal?” And alternatively, “What is it concealing through its way of revealing? What might be outside the scope of this particular frame, this particular revealing?”
Heidegger teaches us that to understand the essence of technology means that we can criticize technology properly. After all, the point isn’t to resist technology entirely but to create new relationships with it that would allow us, in Heidegger’s words, to “remember who we really are” and what world is found outside the frame.
