What does Heidegger mean when he claims that the essence of
technology is nothing technological?
As humans we can only understand what we
know and the way we interpret the world is through our understanding. We begin
with an object and we process it’s being and ask certain questions; what it is?
What does it do? What is its purpose? And what does this mean for us? We
process the information and categorize this object into a simpler way of
understanding it. Martin Heidegger
uses a tree as an example. What the object is we do not know but we process it
and give it the name ‘tree’ so we can understand it. He uses the Tree as an
example in trying to explore and explain technology and the essence of
technology.
Through
Martin Heidegger’s ‘The Question concerning Technology’ he explains that the
ESSENCE of something is not present in the thing itself. So as far as the
example of the tree it is merely a tree because we say it is but the essence of
the tree it not present in any tree we have or ever will encounter. Heidegger
dedicated his life’s work to explaining the meaning of the word ‘being’ but as
two separate words, ‘being’ and Being’. ‘being’ meaning the physical state of
being and ‘Being’ meaning the essence of something. But to understand the
essence of technology we must first understand what technology actually is.
A
computer to us is technology but in fact it is only one part of technology and
is in a way just a result of technology. Because without previous technology a
computer would never have been invented. According to Heidegger, throughout
history there have been many answers to what technology is, some saying it is a
human activity or a means to an end but although Heidegger agrees that both
statements are correct he also says that they are not true. This is the way we
perceive technology and what we believe and want it to be but it is not what
technology itself is.
Kant
expressed that there are two aspects of reality, the things itself and our
experience of the thing. According to Kant all we know and all we can ever know
is mediated through our experience so we can never know what the thing actually
is. We can never breakthrough the boundaries of our senses; the ‘actually real’
is totally inaccessible to us.
Edmund
Husserl a German mathematician and thinker came up with a way of understanding
thinking called phenomenology (philosophy/psychology) which focuses on
perception and how we perceive the world and how we make sense of the data we
receive or the part of the process things go through for us to understand the
world around us. There are two categories one is Noema which is ‘ meaning
given’, we recognize the objects and circumstances and the process happens to
fast that we do not realize that it has happened and we immediately understand
what the object or circumstance is, in a way it gives itself meaning. The other
is Noesis, which is ‘meaning giving’; this is the process of making the
connection between the meaning that is given, the world of common sense and recognition.
A table cannot be a table with out us making the connection but our processes
of thought when faced with something no in our known world sill tries to
understand. For instance how do we
know what unicorns look liked if they are not real? They do not exist yet we
have pictures of them and they are in stories and we can imagine them. We have
created an image of a unicorn in order to understand it. Husserl argues that there are two
levels of reality; there is a perceivable reality of things that do exist and a
perceivable level of reality where things do not exist. Through his argument
Husserl is trying to unite the external world of objects.
According
to Alex Scott this is what Husserl was explaining through his phenomenology and
his two ways of thinking. “The noetic meaning of transcendent objects is
discoverable by reason, while the noematic meaning of immanent objects is
discoverable by pure intuition. Noetic meaning is transcendent, while noematic
meaning is immanent. Thus, noesis and noema correspond respectively to
experience and essence.” Husserl believed that the representational function of
naming thing could only get us so far; words have lost their meaning because we
give them new meanings as our language changes.
This
explains how the process of our understanding works but to Heidegger we still
need to stop understanding everything and realize that we cannot know and fix
everything. In ‘the question concerning technology Heidegger asks the
unanswerable questions because if the essence of something is not present how
can we possibly know what it is? Heidegger is not interested in finding out the
answer because then as we have always done before we will find the answer
process it and fixes it to a name and category. Heidegger is interested in
trying to change our way of thinking from an optic to an ontological, from a
closed to open way of thinking. He is interested in opening our thoughts and
encouraging us to ask the unanswerable questions and realize that the world is
always in a state of flux and forever changing, that we cannot hold it back and
fix it into place we must flow with it and accept that nothing is permanent.
Heidegger believes that technology is enframing us and we have to get out of it
and to do so we must move to his new way of thinking.
Returning
to what Heidegger said about what technology is or what Heidegger calls
‘instrumentality’, technology is a means to an end and says that that means to
an end is human activity because it is human beings who recognize. Heidegger
argues that this is correct once we get further into the truth. The truth is to
uncover the essence of something because the correct is static, ontic and
one-dimensional. But Ontic knowledge is fact and therefore not to know the
truth. Knowledge what we take as fat does not give a full story because the
truth is always changing, it is not ontic knowledge at all. Because of this
Heidegger states that it is not what we know that is important it is what you
are prepared to find out that gives us the real truth.
For
Heidegger this way of thinking is an approach to life and is about the
aesthetic of our existence. It becomes for Heidegger a way of living and this
way of living means that we must be immersed in our existence, move on and
accept change to not just accept the knowledge that is placed in front of us
but to question it and always search for the truth.
Francis
Bacon suggests that there is two ways of searching into and discovering the
truth, axioms said by Bacon are statements of acceptable truths. The first way
of discovering the truth is flies from the senses meaning to the information
from your senses and then try to justify that our senses are right. The second
way of discovering the truth is derives axioms from senses, meaning that when
we see that leaves are green; Green is different types and shades so it asks
the question of is are leaves green? We make a statement and then our senses
use this information. According to Bacon the first way is absolute we believe
what we see and as Heidegger would say it is fixed. The second way means that
we never stop questioning we are open to change.
Heidegger
argues that asking questions about cause and effect is the next step on from
instrumentality and the means to an end. According to Heidegger there are 4
causes and uses a silver chalice as an example to explain the causes. The first
is the casual materiarlis, which is the matter out of which something is made,
the silver out of which a chalice can be made. The second is causa formalis,
which is the form, or shape that the matter can enter, for example the shape
that the silver will enter is the shape of a chalice. The third is Causa
Finalis, the end that is given to the matter; the silver has become the
chalice. The fourth and final cause is causa efficiens, the person that
actually does the thing and brings it into being, for this instance it would be
the silver smith. However
Heidegger does state that the concept must first exist for the end to be
created.
Graham
Harman argues that we have forgotten the question of being and just accept
things equally just as we have forgotten how these 4 causes work. Something in
the way we are as a population has made us forget that all these things
interact and that they are not isolated. As a population and human beings we
bestow responsibility to humans. We have taken the fourth cause the causa
efficiens to be the most important and over time have completely forgotten
about the third cause. We now always say that a person is the cause of
something we do not look further into the process we just accept the knowledge
that somebody has crafted something and that makes them the cause.
In
this digital age people use radios and Television to the point where it
actually can change the relationships they have with technology and people.
Most people do not know how a Television works or how our mobile phones works,
we do not know how they are made what materials are used in order to make them
but we constantly use them and according to Harman we are subject to technology
even though we do not know how it works.
Heidegger
argues against Harman stating that one thing cannot be responsible. All these
things and answers have to work together one is no more important than the
other. Heidegger believes that the causa efficiens or the silver smith does
contradict itself because he did not create the chalice the idea of the chalice
already existed, he would not have made the chalice if somebody did not ask for
the chalice. We need to think why we have things and what we use them for
rather than just to know we have an item and that’s it. The 4 causes are always
interlinked with the two aspects of bring forth Poiesis and Physis. Poiesis, a
way of doing and creating and Physis meaning the nature, the Being ,
combination where things sync and works together. Heidegger believes these two
words, Poiesis and Physis, have become separate because technical production is
no longer seen as creative. but we now live in an era where these two words and
functions are possibly being reconnected.
Foucault
suggests that knowledge is not power, as human we think if we have knowledge we
have power but because of our way of thinking the word knowledge has become
separated from its root meaning. Our ‘knowledge’ of the world around us is not
about unity with our environment or the concept of being. Every human being is
seen as how much potential they have to an employer or to someone else.
Heidegger also believe that the world is enframing us leading on from our
flawed relationships. The world is enframed within discourse and there are
parameters in which we exist. Heidegger believes that the world is not ours to
freely explore. But the process of enframing is the essence of technology.
According
to Paul Gorner a lecturer in philosophy at the university of Aberdeen the
essence of technology is just a way of opening and revealing. “What lets things
show themselves is what normally does not show itself ”The essence of something
is that which does not show itself. Through Heidegger’s philosophical approach
to the essence of technology it is apparent that Heidegger does not want to
find the essence of anything but to rather search for the essence without an
answer. The essence of technology is the Being of technology, what some people
may call the spirit of technology. The essence of technology is information
about technology that we as humans have been processing in our heads and have
come up with nothing for our senses to understand.
In
our digital age we are surrounded by technology but we do not know how it works
or how it is brought about. We attribute the credit to humans such as the
company apple and the founders Steve jobs and Steve Wozniak. They invented the
ipod, the iphone and the ipad but we do not know how they were made or what
they are made of and just like the four causes we have made the 4th
cause the most important we have not questioned the products we have just
accepted that that’s the way things are.
Heidegger
means that the essence of technology is what we must strive toward and question
everything that we see and do not take it as true. The fact that Heidegger
suggests that the essence of technology is nothing technological sets about a
new way of thinking in order for us as humans to be free from technology. It is
possible that it is not technology that it enframing us but it is in fact doing
the opposite we do not need to get ourselves out by a new way of thinking
because technology could actually be doing that for us.
The
essence of technology is in nothing technological because anything that it
technological can be a physical piece, something that we as human have taken,
named, fixed in place, and understood. We are able to use computers because we
understand them. The essence is something that cannot only be linked to
technology but to most parts of our daily life. Religion can be used as an
example because in all religions people believe in something. Anything
religious can be a physical object like a book (the bible, the Koran) but what
the people believe in is something, which cannot be seen or heard or felt.
For
Heidegger he believes in the essence of technology is not just what we call
technology such as a computer or anything that can be ‘categorised’ as
technology even in its earliest forms. It is more like an idea that people can
feed from and have other ideas from but something that no one can really think
of. It is a chance for us as human to think a new way and join with technology
not just to understand it but to question it and see it as ever changing and
expanding, understanding that we can never stand still with technology, that we
have to move with it.
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