Hans Ruin
Along with his greetings to the tenth annual meeting of the Heidegger Circle in the United States in 1976, Heidegger sent a short piece of writing, one of the very last by his hand. In it he raised again a question that by then had become perhaps the most persistent concern of the last decades of his life, namely the question of technology. By this he meant the need to understand and critically reflect on the sense and significance of the increased technologization of the world in modernity. He writes there that a world stamped by technology is also a world characterized by a forgetfulness of being, and he urges the participants to ponder its significance and effects (in Sallis 1978: 1). The most important concept in this context, and that by means of which he sought to capture the essential character of this momentous transformation, was that of Gestell, normally translated as “enframing”. Its common lexical meaning in German is “frame” or “rack”. But as a philosophical term it is a neologism, and Heidegger often hyphenates it as Ge-stell to indicate that it draws its meaning from a series of related concepts built around the root verb stellen (to place or put), such as herstellen (to produce) and vorstellen (to represent). It is also related to the word Gestalt, meaning figure or configuration. In his 1953 lecture, “The Question Concerning Technology”, one of the most widely read and discussed essays from his post-war period, he writes: “We now name the challenging claim that gathers man with a view to ordering the self-revealing as standingreserve: Ge-stell [enframing]” (BW 324 = VA 23).
In order to understand this enigmatic statement, and in order to grasp the meaning and significance of the notion of Ge-stell in Heidegger’s thinking as a whole, we need to consider it not only in the context of his thinking on technology, but also in the context of his understanding of the meaning of being and its historical transformations. The goal here is to recall this context through a summary of some of the most important texts and passages that lead up to the forging of this new concept. In the course of this analysis it will become clear that the theme designated by Ge-stell is not something entirely new, which emerges only in the post-war writings. On the contrary, it is important to see how and to what extent it is in fact rooted in his very earliest phenomenological attempts to elucidate the meaning of being and human existence, in particular as this is first articulated in his critical elucidations of the philosophy of Aristotle.
A key text in this context, and one to which Heidegger would always return, is the sixth book of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. This is a good starting-point, as it is also the most detailed attempt by a Greek writer to define the sense of technē in contrast to other human capacities. Aristotle here defines technē, the Latin translation of which is ars, as one of the five principal intellectual capacities or virtues. It is an intellectual capacity that has to do with making or creating (poiēsis) something new in accordance with a reflexive rational capacity. As such it also has to do with truth and falsity. Indeed, at the very outset of the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle writes that there are “five ways in which the soul achieves truth, namely through art (technē), scientific knowledge, prudence, wisdom, and intelligence” (1139b). Among the many works and passages in Greek philosophical writings that Heidegger explores in his critical appraisal of Western metaphysics, this line holds a singular importance. It contains the kernel not only of what he will later claim to be the “Greek conception of technology”, but also of the genuine ontological meaning of the phenomenon of technology as such, as well as of the phenomenon of truth. We shall come back to this again towards the end of our discussion, as it surfaces in a key passage in the essay on technology.
Heidegger’s most intense interpretative confrontation with the writings of Aristotle takes place during the formative years of the early 1920s. From this period we have the famous text submitted to Paul Natorp in 1922, the so-called “Natorp Report” or, as its full title reads, “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation” (IHS). This text contains not only the outline of his own basic philosophical orientation, as this is systematized in Being and Time some years later, but also the first decisive formulations for understanding his thinking on technology, and the anticipation of the concept of Ge-stell. For here Heidegger asks how the being of life, of human existence, is grasped in Greek thinking. He stresses the importance of attending to how it is that the vocabulary of early Greek metaphysics is forged, and to the guiding models and motives for its ontology.
How are we to critically understand what Aristotle means by substance, ousia? In designating the most fundamental nature of being by this term, Aristotle has been guided, Heidegger argues, by an understanding of being as something fabricated, in poiēsis, and thus as something placed at hand, as something that has been produced (Hergestelltsein). The German word is important here, for it marks the first in a long sequence of concepts forged around the root verb stellen. In Greek metaphysics being is thought, in its general essence, as something produced and grasped in language through its eidos, its visible form. And this way of making being appear, stand forth and thus be true, Heidegger continues, is the way of technē. So the technological understanding of being is in fact what we could call the basic Greek model of understanding being, the one according to which Greek metaphysics built its fundamental conceptual structure. Only by becoming critically aware of what we could thus call a certain technical bias in the very construction of metaphysical language can we also engage in an exploration directed towards other, complementary and supposedly also more fundamental senses of being. Metaphysics understands and thus conceptually constructs being according to a model of production. This conclusion is not simply a descriptive hypothesis that concerns the first emergence of a metaphysical conceptuality; it also holds a critical potential. For in questioning the validity of the original conceptual configuration, a space for critical reflection on the inherited understanding and meaning of being is also opened up.
When Heidegger publishes Being and Time five years later, the core of its argument is the critique of a substantialist metaphysics that understands being in terms of presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit). The connection to the earlier analysis of the “technical” roots of metaphysics is not, however, obvious at first glance. For in Being and Time, the explicit theme of technology and technē hardly appears at all. In Being and Time the critique of substance ontology takes as its startingpoint not the Greek “technical” sense of being, but rather the modern, Cartesian construction of the meaning of being as pure extension in space (see BT §§19–21). This understanding of being presupposes a distanced perspective that contemplates nature simply as a calculable material extension, as is shown in the famous example of Descartes’ meditation on a piece of wax as an extended thing removed from its context of use.
In order to deconstruct this understanding of thinghood as presentat-hand objectivity, Heidegger takes a step that is somewhat surprising in view of his earlier analysis of Greek metaphysics. For in searching for a different conceptual avenue for thinking the being of reality he turns instead to the Greek word for things, pragmata, which etymologically signifies “that with which we are concerned” in praxis. These entities are not meaningless spatial extensions, but always contextually meaningful things embedded in a whole surrounding world of concerns. Their mode of being is, as he says, “readiness-to-hand” (Zuhanden-heit). Their meaningfulness presupposes precisely that they are not objectified, but rather lived with in a pre-reflective referential context. From this perspective it is also possible for him to develop his analysis of “world” as something more than simply a constellation of material bodies. The primary phenomenon of world is a meaning-context, into which we are always already thrown. The objectified world of calculable entities as represented in natural science is in fact a secondary phenomenon that grows out of the more original lived world as its theoretically mediated modification. What makes this analysis rather confusing from the perspective of the earlier critique of substance metaphysics is that here it is not the Greek instrumental and technical understanding of being that explains an original forgetfulness but, on the contrary, it is the artefact, the tool or equipment, in the form of the Greek pragmata, that is brought forth as a critical lever against the distanced and objectifying Cartesian understanding of nature in modernity. This is what permits Heidegger to speak of readiness-to-hand as a more original manifestation of being than presence-at-hand.
From one perspective the ontology developed in Being and Time could thus be described as an ontology of the artefact and the tool, since the being of readiness-to-hand is argued to be more fundamental than the secondary and theoretically mediated presence-at-hand. Heidegger even argues in Being and Time that the original manifestation of nature is also a readiness-to-hand, since nature first appears as a meaningful-something in relation to the overall concern of human Dasein. And in Being and Time this destructive retrieval of a more original source of manifestation on the model of equipment or artefact is not criticized, but rather presented as a positive finding. Even though the reason behind this analysis was clearly to reflect critically on the form of objectification of nature that emerges with modern science and its metaphysics, still the implications of it become problematic, not least for Heidegger himself. For if nature is understood on the model of equipment or readiness-to-hand, then the phenomenological analysis would seem to reinstall precisely that subjectivist and anthropocentric determination of the world that it also sought to transcend. If we read Being and Time from this angle, we can understand why Heidegger subsequently distances himself from its analyses.
An important text in this regard is the essay “On the Origin of the Work of Art” (BW 143–212) from 1935–6, which marks a further step in the genealogy of the technical in Heidegger’s thought. In conjunction with his attempt to develop a phenomenological analysis of the artwork (see Chapter 9), he also expands his earlier critique of substance ontology. He states that the being of the artwork cannot be grasped on the model of objective entities as present-at-hand. But, and this is the noteworthy step, nor can it be understood according to the model of the tool as something ready-to-hand. Furthermore, nature too cannot in the end be understood according to either of these models. For natural being is characterized rather by an elusive auto-emergence (eigenwuchsig). When we turn to the artwork we find that it is different from all three of these types of being. The artwork is a very special way of bringing together and letting the being of nature appear, which does not consume it as raw material for the purpose of its own projects, but rather allows it to come to presence for its own sake. It is in this sense that the artwork is a “happening of truth”. In clear contrast to the analysis in Being and Time, the mode of equipmentality is what lies here in the way of grasping the genuine phenomenon of nature; the latter can be discerned only through the event of the artwork. The work of art, as a work of truth, is what reveals the deeper meaning of nature that is concealed as long as nature is interpreted only through the traditional – technically inspired – matrix of matter and form. In this way the artwork essay marks a new step in Heidegger’s thinking, a step that raises to a whole new level the role and significance of art and the poetical. However, it thereby also leads to a more complex picture concerning the genuine meaning of Greek technē. For, as Heidegger himself also notes, the Greek word for art (German Kunst) is also technē, and the artist is a technites. So, from the point of view of the artwork essay, there is indeed a positive legacy of the Greek understanding of technē, not as a production of the ready-to-hand instruments of our immediate life concerns, but rather as a poetic bringing forth of something into its presence.
While technē in the sense of art is given an increasingly important role in Heidegger’s continued critical assessment of the Western metaphysical tradition and its substantialist understanding of being, technē in the modern sense of technology becomes a theme of increased critical concern from around the same time. If we take the liberty of generalizing, Heidegger’s development from around the time of the artwork essay (1935–6) could in fact be described precisely in terms of these two divergent meanings of technē. On the one hand, technē in the sense of the fabricated artefact functions from the inception of metaphysics as the matrix for thinking being as a disconnected entity, a metaphysical thinking that comes to the fore definitively in modernity, where the truth or event of being is covered over and domesticated in a representational and objectifying understanding. On the other hand, techneē as art emerges as a unique avenue towards thinking the event of truth in a way that does not objectify being but rather permits it to prevail in its own essence, that is, in its dual nature as at once presence and absence. As we shall see later, the essay on technology contrasts these themes in a most explicit manner.
The more “negative” side of the technical, and Heidegger’s emergence as a critical thinker of modern technology, is not something that belongs only to his post-war period, as was often believed to be the case. The decisive confrontation with technology is of an earlier date, and more or less simultaneous with the composition of the artwork essay. For this was also the time when he read and initiated his critical dialogue with the thought of the contemporary writer Ernst Jünger. In 1932 Jünger published a much read and discussed dystopian essay entitled Der Arbeiter (The Worker). In this text, Jünger ventures to think modernity in the wake of Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism as the loss of a transcendent source of meaning. Jünger, who was a decorated war hero from the First World War with profound personal experience of the new technological warfare, here sees the emergence of a new type or configuration (Gestalt) of human being, “the worker”. Human being as the worker has entered into a symbiotic relation with the machine and with technology in the form of labourer or soldier, and is thus a completed manifestation of a will to power. Jünger’s book is an attempt to articulate a distanced and objective analysis of a transformation in human being’s relation to nature, mediated through technology. He describes what he sees as the essence of modernity, where a technologically mediated will to power has made it its task to shape the world according to its own vision and for its own purpose.
The material from Heidegger’s early and intense preoccupation with the writings of Jünger was made available only recently, which is why the full significance of the latter’s analysis for Heidegger’s own thinking on technology and the Gestell has not been fully recognized. In the relevant volume from his Collected Edition (Gesamtausgabe), Heidegger writes that with the character or figure – the Gestalt – of the worker, the subjectivity of man reaches its completion as a domination or mastery of the earth (GA 90: 40). And in the very notion of Gestalt, which for Jünger served as a kind of optics or eidetics by means of which he sought to capture the essence of the historical present, Heidegger traces an inheritance from the Platonic idea as that which visualizes being in a fixed figure or essence. It is in these both sympathetic and critical reflections on Jünger’s thought of the worker and its Gestalt that the thought of Ge-stell is first conceived, even though the word itself appears only later. In a Festschrift for Jünger, published in 1955, Heidegger contributed a piece entitled “Over ‘the Line’”, which was later republished under the title “On the Question of Being”. In this text he picks up his earlier analysis of The Worker and Jünger’s understanding of the Gestalt, stating explicitly that the essence of the Gestalt should be understood as emanating from what he himself in the meantime had thought as Ge-stell (PM 303 = GA 9: 401).
The most important published text from the pre-war period for the development of Heidegger’s thought of the Ge-stell is, however, “The Age of the World Picture”, a lecture presented in 1938 in the context of a conference on the contemporary image of the world, Weltbild, and later published in the collection Holzwege (OBP 57–85 = GA 5: 75–113; also in QCT 75–113). This lecture starts by stating a position around which he will circle for the rest of his life: namely, that what is today in need of thoughtful meditation (Besinnung) is science and machine technology. He then develops his basic argument that machine technology is not a consequence of science; rather, both science and machine technology are rooted in a more fundamental sense of technology, which he equates with modern metaphysics. In this metaphysical constellation, being is understood as something represented (vorgestellt) and visualized so as to be made available for manipulation and domination by a subjective will (see Chapter 12). Even art and the humanities tend to be drawn into the orbit of the metaphysical constellation of technology. Art becomes a source of aesthetic pleasure and the humanities are organized according to the same pattern of production of results as the natural sciences. The researcher, Heidegger writes, becomes a technician who works by means of experiments to produce results that can be measured in terms of their effects for the academic establishment.
This whole development and transformation in the way being comes to presence is traced back to the inception of modern philosophy, the Cartesian conception of certitude, in which human being emerges as a subject that projects the world before it as an object, represented and explained. Thus the very question posed by the conference, concerning the emergence of the “modern world picture”, becomes in itself a symptom for how the world appears in modernity, namely as precisely a picture or image, a projection of representational vision. In this new constellation, humans lose contact with that which cannot be calculated; it withdraws into the shadows, and the world appears as a scene of loss of meaning and transcendence.
A critical awareness of this condition may easily lead to romantic escapism, an urge to reach back into the past or into tradition. But Heidegger’s remedy to this situation is not to escape it, but rather to confront it as such, to develop an experience of technological modernity as “destiny”, that is, as a “sending” (Schicksal, Schickung) of being within which we stand. This destiny as sending is not to be knelt down before, but rather confronted philosophically through a new mode of questioning, and also of listening, through a “poetic questioning” and a “thoughtful meditation” (Besinnung). The task of such a reflection is also to recall human beings to their own finitude, and to the fini-tude of the way the world presents itself in this totalizing view. If we read Heideggger’s critique of Cartesianism, modernity and technology simply as an attempt to distance himself from this whole constellation, his thinking easily takes on the appearance of a nostalgic attempt to escape the present, a somewhat arcane and pathetic critique that can easily be countered by recalling the many remarkable benefits for humankind that have come from this modernity, in terms of both political liberties and improved material living conditions. But what he is pointing towards is rather a non-evaluative or extra-moral perspective in which we can begin to sense how both the enormous benefits and the huge calamities of modernity emerge as two sides of the same underlying movement, that is to say, as the tragedy of modernity.
At the end of the published version of “The Age of the World Picture”, Heidegger added a series of a notes, one of which explains “representation” (Vorstellung) as “a placing [stellen] something out from oneself, and thereby securing it [sicherstellen]” (OBP 82 = GA 5: 108, trans. mod.). Being is thus no longer that which is present, but instead obtains the meaning of that which is placed before a subject as an object or Gegenstand. With this analysis, the foundation for his later thinking on technology in terms of the Ge-stell is essentially in place, even though the actual concept or philosopheme is still not forged as such. This takes place only in a text that he composes ten years later, in 1949, which bears the title “Das Ge-stell”, a text to which we now turn.
After the war, during the years when Heidegger was not permitted to teach at the university, he was invited to give lectures in various places. In a cultural club in Bremen he gave four such talks in 1949 under the general title “Insight Into That Which Is”, the second of which was called “Das Ge-stell” (in GA 79). This is the first version of the text that was later to become “The Question Concerning Technology”. Here he builds on the analysis in “The Age of the World Picture”, developing the semantics of stellen in a depiction of nature and humans as placed before an exploiting demand. Here we can see how he finally gathers the various modes of Stellen (placing, setting), of which he has spoken in previous texts – Vorstellen (representing), Herstellen (producing), Bestellen (ordering), Ausstellen (exposing), and Verstellen (displacing, distorting) – now forging them in the new concept of Ge-stell. The prefix has a peculiar resonance here. The German “Ge-” can imply a “gathering together”, such as in a Gebirge, a mountain range. In Ge-stell the various modes of stellen are gathered to depict the way the world manifests itself in an age of technological willing. Ge-stell designates the essence of technology (Technik), an essence that comes to the fore with the rise of the modern natural sciences at the end of the sixteenth century. But it is important for his analysis that, unlike the standard view, technology is seen not as the outcome of experimental science, but the other way round: experimentally based natural science becomes possible only with the emergence of this essence of technology as Ge-stell.
In Ge-stell nature comes forth primarily as a source of materials and energy to be integrated into a larger system of utility. In a famous passage Heidegger describes a modern hydroelectric power plant on the river Rhine as having the effect of building the river into the power plant. In this situation the role of humans also obtains a new meaning; they are the ones who have to enact this ordering or commanding, this Bestellen, but at the same time are the ones exposed to it, as themselves something commanded and ordered about. It is not incidental that it is in this text that Heidegger makes the only explicit philosophical remark that he ever made concerning the Nazi death camps, whose industrialized disposal of human lives and bodies is likened to the way in which nature is also exploited in modern technological society (GA 79: 27). In the later, published version of the technology essay he took out this remark, for what reason we do not know, but its initial presence in this context indicates that it was through this understanding of technology and of the Ge-stell that Heidegger, in his own thinking, tried to come to terms philosophically with these unspeakable atrocities executed by a well-organized modern industrial society.
With the forging of the concept of Ge-stell as a way to summarize and bring to awareness a whole constellation of phenomena circled around how beings present themselves to humans, Heidegger has thus reached a means with which he can claim to have thought the essence of modernity. It is a concept and a thought that can permit us to see how nature comes forth as a resource to exploit, but also how human beings are conceived as entities that can themselves be reduced to resources. In this instrumentalist paradigm everything is potentially a resource to be used for the benefit of a calculative will. As such, the concept of Ge-stell is not only a way to describe a tendency in how things present themselves, but – and perhaps more importantly – a way to describe how human beings for their part are called on to present things to themselves in such a manner. For the Ge-stell is not something external to human beings and their free will, but a way in which this will orients itself. It is, as the definition from “The Question Concerning Technology” that was quoted at the outset of this chapter reads, a “challenging claim”, a claim that challenges human being to order that which presents itself as standing-reserve (Bestand).
The insistence on understanding and experiencing the Ge-stell as a claim or demand is crucial. For it is in and through this way of phrasing the analysis that Heidegger also distances himself from, for example, the analyses of Jünger, which are still primarily oriented towards grasping, in a totalizing vision, the essence of modernity: in other words towards bringing it under the mastery of a theoretical gaze. What Heidegger has been working towards, at least from the mid 1930s, and in particular in Contributions to Philosophy (CP = GA 65), but in some ways from the beginning of his path, is a mode of thinking that can somehow incorporate the how of thinking into its what: to bring thinking to a thoughtful awareness of what it accomplishes in its very way of conceptualizing being. To think the Ge-stell in the way indicated by Heidegger is therefore also to bring to awareness the technological in thinking itself, the inner urge towards mastery, so as ultimately to release us from this urge, and in this way also perhaps to be more free. This strategy is very much present in the opening lines of “The Question Concerning Technology”, which begins by saying that the task for thinking in regard to technology is “to build a way toward technology”, a way through language that will lead to a new relation to that which is thought, a relation that Heidegger explicitly characterizes as “free”. To think technology through the optics of the Ge-stell is thus to make us more free for and thus in the end also from technology.
The way to this realization proceeds by means of addressing the question of the essence of technology in a new way. Rejecting the common approach to this question, Heidegger holds that the essence of something is not simply the answer to what it is. In the case of technology the standard answer would be that technology is a means to an end, an instrument for action. But against this standard response Heidegger suggests that we look instead to how technology brings about truth. We then ask not simply for the truth about technology, but for the truth of and by technology. And it is at this stage in the analysis that he recalls again the passage from the Nicomachean Ethics mentioned at the outset, using it to convey the point that technē has to do with bringing about the true, in the sense of disclosing something, letting it come into its appearance. And the way that technology discloses nature is as “exploitation” or “commanding” (Herausfordern). It discloses nature as that which can and should be commanded. But not only that; it also discloses the human being to himself as one who is “commanded to command nature”, herausgefordert die Natur herauszufordern (BW 324 = VA 21). This is a concentrated formulation of the thought discussed earlier, that Ge-stell, as the essence of technology, manifests itself as a demand inherent in the human being himself, as an aspect and a consequence of his freedom. It is not a destiny in the sense of being something ordained by some superior power, by nature or by being itself, but a way in which humans encounter nature, and themselves.
As such a destiny it is not definitive, but something towards which we can establish a freer relation, by listening to its claim (Anspruch), permitting it to resonate precisely as such, as a claim, indeed as a “freeing claim” (BW 331 = VA 29). Precisely for this reason the Ge-stell marks in the end a very ambiguous situation. From a superficial perspective the concept and diagnosis may appear as only a dystopian resentment vis-à-vis modernity. But Heidegger’s point is that it also contains new possibilities. In the obvious danger inherent in contemporary technologically defined modernity, there also lies a saving potential. In his later writings Heidegger would often quote the lines from Hölderlin’s “Patmos”, “But where danger is, grows the saving power also”. In the essay on technology this holds a very special place, for it also summarizes the way in which he wants Ge-stell to be understood, namely as an “ambiguous” situation of (manifest) danger and (potential) saving at once. The latter possibility rests, however, on the condition that human being can attain to a thinking, reflective relation to that which is, as it is disclosed in the Ge-stell. And at the very end of the essay he explicitly takes up this ambiguity precisely in terms of the aforementioned double inheritance of the Greek technē. Once, he says, technē also meant the “bringing forth of the true into the beautiful” (BW 339 =VA 38). To what is hopeful in technology belongs this possibility of bringing it back to a sense of poietic disclosure, first carried forward in the arts, which were also known by the Greeks as technē.
Jünger, E. [1932] 1981. Der Arbeiter. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett.
Sallis, J. (ed.) 1978.Radical Phenomenology: Essays in Honor of Martin Heidegger. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
See Heidegger’s Country Path Conversations; Gesamtausgabe, vol. 79: Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge; “The Origin of the Work of Art”, in Basic Writings, 143–212; and The Question Concerning Technology.
See Davis (2007); Fandozi (1982); Rojcewicz (2006); and Zimmerman (1990). See also N. A. Corona & B. Irrgang, Technik als Geschick? Geschichtsphilosophie der Technik bei Martin Heidegger: Eine Handlungstheoretische Entgegung (Dettelbach: Röll, 1999); D. Idhe, Technics and Praxis (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978); and H. Ruin, “Contributions to Philosophy”, in A Companion to Heidegger, B. Dreyfus & M. Wrathall (eds), 358–74 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); and S.-O. Wallenstein, Essays, Lectures (Stockholm: Axl Books, 2006).