Revisiting Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology

Truth is being revealed for us; how can we respond?

Note: After having fruitful conversations on Martin Heidegger's “The Question Concerning Technology,” it was agreed upon that myself and

W.D. James

—a fellow Kentuckian who I’ve met on Substack and interacted with due to his interest in Jünger—would each publish essays on the text. These essays are now presented for your enjoyment. Neither of us have read the other's essay; we hoped that an independent approach would result in synergy that could stimulate further discussion. His essay can be found at his publication:

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 pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.¹

It is all too common to hear some variation of “technology isn’t the problem, it’s how we use it.” Again, it is said that modern technology is a tool which is ultimately at our disposal to do with it what we please. Though there is some correctness to these statements (Heidegger says as much), they do not present the whole story, and actually, if taken alone and repeated uncritically, they can become extremely dangerous.

The debate over technology’s place in the world is nothing new. Philosophers and writers have been debating its role and its effects for the entirety of the 20th century up to today. The internet, computers, mobile phones and smart devices are old news. Today, we see the emergence of free, widely accessible, and ever-improving generative AI engines. We also see technology like neuralink bringing the “futuristic” technology of yesterday into reality today. Though these developments may raise new questions about ethics, practicality, and effects on society, it is unlikely that the debates surrounding AI or “futuristic”/transhumanist technology like neuralink will get to the bottom of the question: that is, the essence of modern technology itself.

At this point, we must turn to Martin Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology (1953). In this essay, Heidegger sets out to question and think about the essence of technology. To Heidegger, the very act of questioning technology and reflecting on its essence allows us to, first of all, set ourselves apart from it and make some sort of stand against it. If we take an unquestioning, uncritical stance and only view technology as a neutral tool to be utilized in whatever which way, we draw ever further under its influence and our slavery becomes all the more acute. By questioning, we can come to understand technology’s essence and, according to Heidegger, the “saving power” that emerges from the danger of technology.

When thinking about the essence of modern technology, Heidegger comes to the conclusion that, “the essence of modern technology shows itself in what we call enframing.”

What is this enframing that he speaks of? Another author,

Duncan Reyburn

, writing on this very subject, summarizes it well. He says,

technology places a frame around everything; it artificially limits what sort of world of meaning we can access. It guarantees inaccessibility. The information we have isn’t the information we want; the information we want isn’t the information we need; and the information we need is impossible to get.

Since I previously wrote on this subject, I will simply repeat my own words—with minor modification—on this particular part of Heidegger’s essay:

Modern technology’s revealing [or the unconcealment of that which was concealed, i.e., the finding-out of truth] is a challenging. It challenges nature and man, it sets upon nature and makes demands of it—often unreasonable demands. Because it reveals things in this way, it enframes reality in such a way that, say, a river—once seen as a source of life or having spiritual aspects—is now seen as a mere source of energy, a source of production. Some may object that the river is still part of the landscape and thus seen as “beautiful,” but Heidegger points out that even here, the river is still expected to be “on call for inspection” by tourists and the vacation industry.

AI and Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology

If we want to see how this relates to modern technologies such as AI, let us think about how AI challenges information itself and places all available information on call for the user. Information is seen only as data to be collected, synthesized, and regurgitated. Is it any wonder that AI would take this form, though, when this is exactly what the modern education system has consisted of for many decades now, and what entire industries have been built upon?

Again, from my previous essay:

Ultimately, technology threatens to enframe the whole world, including us. We could say it begins to understand the world for us, and in fact begins to cause us to understand ourselves within the same framework.

In other words, technology reveals or, we could say, manifests the “truth” about man and nature in such a way that it enframes the whole world as a standing reserve, always standing at attention and ready to be challenged and set upon (or, we could say, in technological language, utilized). However, we would be naive to say that it is technology which actually carries out the setting upon and challenging. Rather, Heidegger says, it is man himself. Quoting Heidegger now:

Who accomplishes the challenging and setting-upon through which what we call the actual 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 over unconcealment itself, in which at any given time the actual shows itself or withdraws…

Only to the extent that man for his part is already challenged to exploit the energies of nature can this revealing that orders happen. If man is challenged, ordered, to do this, then does not man himself belong even more originally to nature within the standing-reserve? The current talk about human resources, about the supply of patients for a clinic, gives evidence of this. The forester who measures the felled timber in the woods and who to all appearances walks the forest path in the same way his grandfather did is today ordered by the industry that produces commercial woods, whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability of cullulose, which for its part is challenged forth by the need for paper, which is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated for magazines. The latter, in their turn, set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set configuration of opinion becomes available on demand.

We could summarize this by saying that man becomes an instrument of technology for its setting upon and challenging forth of nature, and that man is now subservient to technology as it has enframed reality in such a way that our existence is dictated to us by technology. Though we may use and manipulate machines and instruments, we ourselves are being used and manipulated by the essence behind the very technology in our hands, our factories, and now, perhaps, our minds. We could refer to this, as another man did, as “technological slavery.” Yes, we make use of technology, but only for the ends that technology has set forth for us.

What’s worse is that we do not even notice what is happening. While the essence of technology enframes us, reveals us as standing-reserve, and orders us to be called upon at any time, we arrogantly think that we are the ones using and manipulating technology. Heidegger, again, says:

Meanwhile, man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself and postures as lord of the earth. In this way the illusion comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise to one final delusion: it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself…

Man stands so decisively in subservience to on the challenging-forth of enframing that he does not grasp enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to…

We seem to think we are in charge here, that our ordering of the earth and our organization of ourselves into human resources is our own doing, rather than our being enframed. Heidegger concludes:

What is dangerous is not technology. Technology is not demonic; but its essence is mysterious. The essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger…

The thread to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in his essence. The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.

The idea of our very ability to comprehend existence and participate in the revealing of truth as human beings being stripped from us is a harrowing one. Furthermore, our dasein (or being-in-the-world) becomes like a “resource,” always on call, and always thought of in terms of usage and productivity. This should deeply trouble us. If we want to see enframing at work in our own language and conception of our day to day lives, consider to what extent we view each moment or each activity as “productive” or “useful,” and how we organize our day into “tasks.” In our world people are measured by their "productivity” even outside the workplace. We have apps which organize men and women into standing reserves, ready to be called upon at any moment for work, for receation, and, yes, romantic or erotic experiences. You are not a person, let alone a human being; you are social security number, a source of tax revenue, a human resource to be paid and managed, and an internet user who’s information is collected and ordered into data that can be dredged up and put to use at any moment. Of course, there are exceptions, but one would be foolish to deny these currents in society.

At this point it must again be reiterated that while all this is true, it is not any single tool or machine or manifestation of technology which is to blame or which can be pointed to as the root cause of our condition. I use the word “manifestation of technology” quite deliberately: the essence of technology becomes manifest in various instruments and apparatuses, yes, but these are secondary; they merely carry out the enframing, they do not constitute the essence of technology itself. Many today fall into the trap of believing that it is a single piece of technology or a group that is the real problem, and they thus delude themselves into thinking that if they could just resist or remove those machines or tools, or even learn how to wield them, they could overcome technology. Think of how smartphones or the internet or, now, AI are portrayed, essentially as boogeymen to either be resisted or reformed. This is not to say that certain manifestations of the essence of technology do not have certain unique properties or that one cannot be more dangerous and effective than the other. Actually, we can observe a progression over time of the tools and machines becoming ever more efficient and effective in their carrying out of enframing and ordering. Nevertheless, to say that it is the fault of any given apparatus or machine is false, for again, it misses the fact that these are just manifestations of a greater power. Even man now carries out the enframing of technology as he himself has been enframed and ordered into a standing reserve. In the modern world, man is made to carry out the “will” of technology, not the other way around.

In order to combat this, man must actually think about technology and not let it pass by unnoticed or unquestioned. Heidegger believes that:

Everything, then, depends upon this: that we ponder this rising and that, recollecting, we watch over it. How can this happen? Above all through our catching sight of the essential unfolding in technology, instead of merely gaping at the technological. So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain transfixed in the will to master it.

At this point some questions arise. Is questioning enough? Can we get out of the frame? How do we go about resisting the revealing of technology? Is it too late?

Heidegger, after explaining the true danger of technology, quotes Hölderlin:

But where danger is, grows
The saving power also

Heidegger goes on to explain that there is another realm that involves enframing and revealing: that of the arts, techne.

There was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called techne. The poiesis [act of making] of the fine arts was also called techne.

Again,

At the outset of the destining of the West, in Greece, the arts soared to the supreme height of the revealing granted them. They illuminated the presence of the gods and the dialogue of divine and human destinings. And art was called simply techne. It was a single, mainfold revealing. It was pious, promos, i.e., yielding to the holding sway and the safekeeping of truth.

Finally, he concludes:

What was art—perhaps only for that brief but magnificent age? Why did art bear the modest name techne? Because it was a revealing that brought forth and made present, and therefore belonged within poesis.

Where is Heidegger going here? He is saying that art or techne essentially manifested the truth to us in some form or another and thus revealed and made present to us the True. The essence of art, then, was a revealing. Let us recall, then, what Heidegger said earlier: technology, through enframing, threatens to “sweep man away into ordering as the ostensibly sole way of revealing, and so thrusts man into the danger of the surrender of his free essence…”

Now we can begin to understand why Heidegger brings up art and specifically refers to it as techne: art, as a way of revealing, challenges technology’s attempts of making ordering the sole way of revealing. We could say that there is a polarity here: technology’s enframing of the world into that which challenges and reveals as an ordering into a standing reserve, and art or techne as another way of revealing, a revealing which reaches to the depths of truth yet unrepresented or known, which dialogues with the divine, and thus manifests Truth and Revelation in the physical world as the beautiful. Whereas technology strips man of his freedom and does the revealing for him, techne—art—fundamentally involves man, as it is man who seeks the truth and man who speaks with the gods. This is why it is man who becomes a technician or an artist.

We find ourselves in an extremely precarious situation, then, for this understanding of art is almost completely absent in society today. The fine arts are no longer understood as man engaging with eternal truths, or, more deeply, with the divine. Art has been “deconstructed” and has been pushed almost entirely into the realm of the subjective. There is not even the understanding today that art ought to be beautiful, let alone any agreement on what “beauty” actually means.

To make matters worse, generative AI engines now produce images which highly resemble art and are passed as such by many. This technology is improving every day, as once it was incredibly obvious that an image was AI generated whereas now it is more subtle. Even the fingers are becoming more realistic. People can’t help but use it, either, and as I’ve discussed previously, AI generated images are now flooding the internet in all sectors, from religious images to interior design, seemingly no area can escape the looming threat of AI. Thus, art has been totally jeopardized in the modern world.

AI Does Not Need to be Sensational to be Dangerous

If art, the realm which Heidegger saw as imminently important to understand, is crumbling before our very eyes (and was already in a very poor state), what hope is there?

It is at this point I wish to posit a third alternative. Thus far, Heidegger has been concerned with man’s involvement in revealing, his freedom, and how technology threatens all this. But what if Truth revealed Itself? What if there was another revealing, one that man is called, and able, to participate in?

This Revelation is, I believe, that of Jesus Christ, and it continues in His Mystical Body, the Church.

While art certainly allows us to represent truth, it will always be imperfect to some extent, as Truth properly understood cannot be actually revealed by human hands, though it can be more or less perfectly represented. Heidegger speaks of how the Greeks represented their contact with the gods through art: this is all well and good, but it does not go all the way; there is still a chasm between the two.

However, when we turn to Christ—who said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life”² who is the Word, the eternal Logos—we now have a case where the Divine has chosen to reveal itself to all mankind in full. The Old Testament was the Revelation of God to the people of Israel, an account of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and in it we find God speaking to his people in varied ways. But it was always through a medium, either through a prophet or through great signs and wonders. In the New Testament, though, the Word, who is God and the second Person of the Trinity, became Incarnate as man—fully man—and he walked and talked with man and called some his friends. He even claimed that “he that seeth me, seeth him that sent me.”³ In Jesus, then, we see the fullness of Truth itself. We come to know this Truth by faith and by entering into relationship with it.

This Truth, though recorded by the Apostles in the New Testament, did not just cease to exist when he Ascended. The Incarnation in a way continues in the Mystical Body of Christ: the Church, and it does so most especially in the preaching of the word and the celebrating of the sacraments. Pope Benedict XVI, then Joseph Ratzinger, said in Introduction to Christianity that, “one encounters the risen Christ in the word and in the sacrament; worship is the way in which he becomes touchable to us and recognizable as the living Christ” (p. 309). When we Catholics celebrate the eucharist, we believe that we are really entering into the presence of God and his hosts of angels, and, even further, that we are remembering and re-presenting Christ’s passion and death on the cross, and that we consume his flesh, blood, soul, and divinity.

Worship in the Eucharist, then, goes beyond anything we could ever imagine or carry out in art. The Truth is revealed, it is made present, and we enter into communion with it and with one another. The whole of faith—the Church, the sacraments, the virtues, the living out of the faith—is thus a revealing, and all of reality is transformed and ordered around Christ.

Today it may be asked whether these words hold any weight anymore. After all, we live in the age of the so-called death of God. Nihilism and secularism reign in our world; how exactly is a modern supposed to experience God, experience Revelation, and come to understand the Truth that was revealed not by any effort of our own or any working out of an earthly force, but by God himself, the One, Being itself?

I believe Pascal has perhaps the most forceful answer to this question. He, all those hundreds of years ago, already saw the direction man was going. Let us see what he has to say:

Endeavour then to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness.—”But this is what I am afraid of.”—And why? What have you to lose?⁴

If, however, you have already come to faith and do earnestly believe, then you too are called to act like it. What does this practically mean? It means living liturgically, living out the virtues, loving God and neighbor, and living as a faithful member of the Body of Christ, the Church. It means viewing others not as useful objects, but as persons made in the image of God and to be loved as Christ loved us. Of course, I mean this in the traditional sense and not in the modern wishy-washy sense, but ultimately that is how we are to view others. We are called to live socially, to live in community with one another in varied ways, to build relationship, to enter into communion, and to realize that we were made for love, to love, by Love.

Heidegger is right to say a saving power exists. In fact, he would go on to say, in a 1966 interview⁵, that:

Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline.

The good news is that a god, the God, has already saved us: he did so on the Cross. I will again quote from Ratzinger a beautiful passage that sums up my postion:

A salvation of the world does exist—that is the confidence that supports the Christian and that still makes it rewarding even today to be a Christian.

If we stand any chance of resisting technology, reclaiming our freedom—our freedom to take part in revealing and to engage with the truth—we must turn to Christ and live accordingly.

I think Ernst Jünger’s Forest Passage is about as great a synthesis between Heidegger and myself that one can get, for he says there that:

Considered in this manner, it becomes clear what role the forest passage plays, not merely in the thoughts but also in the reality of these years. Everyone finds themselves trapped in a predicament today, and the attempts we see to hold this coercion at bay resemble bold experiments upon which a far more significant destiny depends than that of those who have resolved to risk the experiment. A gamble of this kind can only hope to succeed if the three great powers of art, philosophy, and theology come to its aid and break fresh ground in the dead-end situation.

Of these, Jünger stated in The Peace that theology is the greatest science and that Christian truth will be the salvation of man:

There lies mankind’s path — imitation of man’s great prototype'; but the path will be useless unless a way is found to the divine image.

Questioning technology and ever keeping its essence before us, we must go forth and center our lives around the eternally revealed Truth, and thus initiate a revival of the church, of theology, of poetry, of art, and of a life lived outside the standing reserve.

1. Martin Heidegger Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008. The Question Concerning Technology, pages 311-341. All quotations of Heidegger come from here.

2. John 14:6 Douay-Rheims Bible

3. John 12:45, Douay-Rheims Bible.

4. Pensées, Section III, “Of the Necessity of the Wager,” no. 233.

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_a_God_Can_Save_Us