In 1954, Martin Heidegger, late in his career, publishes The Question Concerning Technology, which is to most interpreters a perplexing philosophical essay on how technology informs the way we look at the world. There are many examples in this essay that Heidegger proposes to demonstrate how motion transforms into a project of the will in modern technology. Where once the sails of the old windmill were at the mercy of the wind, today, in the modern technological world, energy from the air is to be unlocked. The modern technological project is meant to unlock the energy of nature so that we can store it for later use. We are now challenged by how the world is framed to us through technology. By looking at motion and energy, as a philosophical investigation, this essay seeks to apprehend an understanding of what modern technology has become. While much has been written about Heidegger and his technology essay, in this article, I want to isolate the concepts of energy and motion, to think through more deeply the problem of technology and the project that it solicits for the human being to follow. Technology, in Heidegger’s essay, organizes motion in a peculiar formation, and, in the famous concept of the standing-reserve, energy is a source on call for the technological will. The technological project becomes the storage of this energy, ever-expanding and widening its grasp. This process deviates from the early accounts of handiwork of the artisan or the natural motion of an acorn turning into a tree. This is Heidegger’s problem: there is something new in global technology, and this protean concept is perplexing to us. It challenges the human being in a fundamental way, which becomes our destiny.
Before looking at Heidegger’s examples to clarify this new challenge of technology, it is important to trace an understanding of motion and energy to see what is new and different about these terms within technology. To understand a definition of motion, it must be contextualized as an old Pre-Socratic lens for confronting reality. This ancient philosophy of motion comprehends the universe as constant flux. Motion, in this old way of viewing it, is the principal impetus behind the movement inherent in life. Heraclitus, a philosopher belonging to the time before Socrates, famously pronounces that someone can never step in the same river twice. The river always moves and rages to be in constant flux; no part of the river is the same through time. We encounter the river differently in each moment that passes. The motivation behind this statement is to uncover that the world humans belong to is within movement, motion, and change. There is nothing for which we could say what the river is as a concept. The river is flux, and therefore it is indeterminate. Some time later, Socrates famously criticizes the Pre-Socratic philosophers. He calls them in the Theaetetus, motion men.1placeholder As against viewing the world through motion and flux, Socratic philosophy goes on to search for rest, for a permanency in the cosmos, for which humans can understand, by way of an aspect of a non-perishable eternity. Socratic philosophy, against nature as flux, believes that you can understand the river, through the aspect of the ideal of a river. This would be the true river.
The original motion Heidegger details in his technology essay belongs to the Pre-Socratic understanding of the world as flux, as Heidegger understands motions according to the Heraclitus definition. Heidegger calls motion a “bringing-forth”, an occasioning, and a happening. This motion brings-something-forth in two ways. First, there is the handiwork of the artisan, which is a construction related to the ancient Greek word poiesis, meaning something like a poetic or beautiful way for a thing to emerge. Poiesis, Heidegger emphasizes, for the Greeks, remains in the realm of nature. Nature, captured in the Greek word physis, is the second way something is brought-forth, as it does this from itself, like a blossom into bloom, like a tree from an acorn, or like rain from the clouds. In the Pre-Socratic realm of motion, both poiesis, that of human handicraft, and physis, that of natural occurrences, belong to the ancient realm of techne, the root word from which our word technology is derived. Both ways of making, a beautiful thing from out of nature, and what nature brings forth itself, generates things into existence.
In the modern period, moving away from both forms of creating, motion becomes a concept derived from modern physics. We say that our material reality is in motion because, through the scientific frame, we understand that atoms, looked at from under a microscope, are bouncing off one another in constant motion. As atoms are in motion so are human beings in motion. We walk to the store, we jot around campus, we hurry to a meeting. This scientific approach to motion, viewing life as “matter-in-motion”, produces Heidegger’s famous concept of Enframing [Ge-stell]. Enframing is a view for which we see through to understand the world, but in a way that challenges us also into action. In other words, thought and action collapse into each other to produce the technological project as a frame that determines reality. We have the ability to see atoms through the microscope, but the effect of this is that we understand the world through the scientific lens. This is why Heidegger says that Enframing itself is nothing technological. No technology can account for Enframing, but the impact upon how we see the world is monumental.
Now that we have looked at a transformation in motion, what are we to make of energy? It is difficult to speak about energy before the time of modern physics. We understand energy now through modern physics, as energy is expressed as E = P t, power multiplied by time. Before this equation, energy is a motivating impetus for movement, and Heidegger claims it is defined philosophically by causes. Near the beginning of the 1954 technology essay, Heidegger takes the example of a silver chalice and analyzes it through Aristotle’s four-fold typology of causation: there is a material cause, a formal cause, a final cause, and an efficient cause. With these four causes, the chalice becomes what it is meant to be. Through the energy input from the silversmith, the item comes into existence, and, similarly, through the aim or purpose of the chalice as a sacrificial vessel, the final cause, these energetic causes are co-responsible for why the chalice is made.
Like motion, energy, viewed from this ancient perspective, also embodied in the Greek term techne, is one of either deriving from nature or from human handiwork. Nature does not bring about a silver chalice. The silversmith does. The old windmill that sits in the riverbank becomes part of the wind’s energy, in harmony with the energy of nature. Heidegger views the old windmill of ancient techne as an offshoot of physis. The wind causes the windmill to move, and the energy is at one with the wind, for which nature, motion, and energy are in sync.
The philosophical path that Heidegger deploys to capture this motion of the old techne is through unconcealment. The energy transfers motion from what was once hidden into what is now uncovered and brought into the light. The old windmill belonging to the realm of techne does not challenge the river, but becomes the unconcealment of a new truth, a new reality, with a new composition of things within the world. The old windmill, once constructed, becomes part of the world. It lies here before us, but it did not come about by physis but by human craft. The old windmill “reveals whatever does not bring forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another. Whoever builds a house or a ship or forges a sacrificial chalice reveals what is to be brought forth, according to the perspectives of the four modes of occasioning…Thus what is decisive in techne does not lie at all in making and manipulating nor in the using of means, but rather in the aforementioned revealing. It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing forth” (Heidegger, 1977, 13).
Does this mean that each point in history has an Enframing that is determining the motion for which things are created?2placeholder To answer this question, Heidegger states that, on the movement from the motion of concealment to unconcealment, “this coming rests and moves freely within what we call revealing” (Heidegger, 1977, 11). How the world is revealed to us becomes entrenched within what and how we bring things into existence. How we create is interwoven into what we know. Our construction of technical things, from the same motion of causation that propels an artist to create a work of art, informs how we see the world. Indeed, this process is the creating of a world-view. Today, common talk is that we adhere to a such a thing as a Marxist worldview. In this sense, the English language captures Heidegger’s purpose quite exactingly. We view the world through the creation of Marxist ideology, and, in turn, this view colours how we perceive the world to be.
In another essay, Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, Heidegger elaborates on how truth formed, from the time of Plato, and how an essential moment we can point to, Plato’s cave allegory, changes the notion of truth from Heraclitus’ river to understanding truth as what appears before us. The daylight strikes what is most true with an aspect of the sun, to make things appear. The Greek word, aletheia, changes from the flux of existence, to, in Plato, that which is correct, a correct aspect of a thing, needing light (or the logos) to appear to our understanding. So, Heidegger says, technology is “no mere means” but is a way of revealing how things come into the world and how truth is defined for us as a result. Technology comes to presence as revealing to inform us how the world works. Technology is the new light to be shined on how things appear. But would this apply to modern machine-powered technology, artificial intelligence, social media, space travel, and cryptocurrency?
The difference for modern technology is that it challenges both nature and human beings unlike that of the artisan previously. There is a challenging in AI that contests human intelligence, a natural occurrence to be overcome. Motion becomes a challenging of human and non-human nature. One challenges the river with the building of a hydroelectric dam, to store this energy harnessed from the river to be on demand for a later time. Heidegger calls this technological project a standing-reserve [Bestand]. It is a standing-reserve of energy that is harnessed for the purpose of being on call for a later time. Energy is to be stored up and guided to be unleashed for whatever purposes we please.
The change between the handiwork of techne and industrial, information, and AI technology today is that the efficient cause becomes the dominant one, ordering motion and ordering energy. From our silver chalice example, the item is brought into existence from the silversmith, not from nature, but from the input of energy into making the object. Today, with the focus from Machiavelli on the effectual truth, creating the modern path, we search for results and effects. Energy breaks away from cause and is measured as an effect. We judge a technology by how it effects output and utility. The standing-reserve is a project of effects and results, which are on call for other effects and results. We label this process efficiency and use this term in our business practices and productive output. When we say technology is an instrument, only for the uses of humanity to employ however it wishes, Heidegger’s problem with technology is missed. The world-view of technology, the Enframing of the world, owes a debt to the effect, meaning that there is a truth claim within technology, that now guides motion to store up energy.
Energy and motion become separated here in modern technology, out of sync with each other, so that, due to the dominance of efficient cause, we can conquer natural processes at extraordinary rates of efficiency. Energy is what we extract from the air or from the river to be stored and on call for productive results. We want a storehouse of a reserve of energy so that we are able to live more technologically fulfilling lives, to consume at higher rates, and to produce capital more efficiently. Without a standing-reserve of energy, modern technology is not possible; everything requires energy to function. Motion then becomes the will “and its intrinsic entanglement with action” that challenges nature.3placeholder And this entire willing project has to do with our modern conception of truth as what is revealed to us: “the earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit” (Heidegger, 1977, 14). The way truth is set for our modern faculties reveals the earth as a unilateral pathway for our motion. We have steered far from Heraclitus’ motion of constant flux of the natural world, and, with the rise of modern technology, we affirm a subjective project; we have a will to assert over anything. And energy is at our disposal to accomplish these tasks. Nature is the storehouse of all energy, to be unlocked by the human subject in its motion, and we must extract this energy to meet the modern demand of the human-being’s motion. Heidegger calls this process an “expediting” that challenges the energies of nature. Instead of becoming at one with these energies, like that of the old windmill, the modern technological project, sees natural processes as discordant with the challenge that is set upon us in our motion. The challenging of nature “unlocks and exposes”, meaning that nature and all its puzzles must be solved by the human, so that we can store these secrets, and increase the development of the methods to do so, for the project of human willing. The sun and its heat are not some sort of divine image that holds human-beings in check, but, instead, the way technology reveals the sun to us is for the sun’s warmth to be “challenged forth for heat, which in turn is ordered to deliver steam whose pressure turns the wheels that keep a factory running” (Heidegger, 1977, 15).
This process becomes a reification and an intensification of the Enframing world-view. So much so that we think that we have the most freedom ever witnessed in the history of humanity, capable of asserting ourselves as bodies in motion with the most latitude to do so. But Heidegger criticizes this believe, that we believe we are free in our choices. This unilateral path of motion restricts choice and freedom. There is only one pathway of motion: towards the standing-reserve. We already have an end defined for us; stock-pile energy for the technological project in the name of efficiency. Efficiency becomes the final cause, the absolute destiny of our existence. To this end, Heidegger says that “modern technology as an ordering revealing is, then, no merely human doing. Therefore we must take that challenging that sets upon man to order the real as standing-reserve in accordance with the way in which it shows itself. That challenging gathers man into ordering. This gathering concentrates man upon ordering the real as standing-reserve” (Heidegger, 1977, 19). This is connected to Heidegger’s view of modernity as the rise of freedom: we are given the illusion of freedom, but there is a law of motion in technology that is not Newtonian. That law is to adhere to the standing-reserve. All other action is deemed contrary to the world-view set upon our consciousness.
Heidegger should not be taken too seriously when commenting about modernity. There are fundament principles in the modern project that provide actual freedom, that Heidegger willfully ignores, such as the tenets of liberalism. Heidegger is much more satisfied with Heraclitus’ philosophy than with Locke’s. It is in the covering over of flux, or the authentic truth, from Plato that Heidegger considers the beginning of the Enframing project. In the preceding lecture series that would eventually become The Question Concerning Technology, consider in this remark the lack of capacity for political judgement: “agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of countries, the same as the production of the hydrogen bombs” (Heidegger, 2012, 26). Although Heidegger is commenting on action, in the transformation of motion into Enframing, Heidegger’s technological project remains one of thinking—it is our thinking that is enchained and not free. For only in thought could such a lack of practical judgement be so determinative of one’s philosophy. Crossing over into the political or practical realm for Heidegger’s late philosophy of Gelassenheit is near impossible. We are all too technologically enchained, for Heidegger, to have meaningful action—of which nothing could be further from the truth. This is not even considering Heidegger’s 1933 political decision, which would need another essay to do so.
Nonetheless, there is something to be gained from looking at motion and energy and how these processes changed from the pre-modern to the modern world of technology today. Heidegger’s 1954 essay is very striking on this transformation. There is much to be said about how technology determines a way of life and determines the way of looking at the world. Heidegger paints a narrative of the entire history of philosophy to do so. Heidegger on technology is best on this point: “The power station in the Rhine river, the dam, the turbines, the generators, the switchboards, the electrical grid—all this and more is there only insofar as it stands in place and at the ready, not in order to presence, but to be positioned, and indeed solely to impose upon others thereafter” (Heidegger, 2012, 27).
Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man”. The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Science, 1962, reprinted fall 2007.
Blitz, Mark. “Understanding Heidegger on Technology”. The New Atlantis 41 (2014): 63- 80. Bradshaw, Leah. “Technology and Political Education”. Techne 9 Vol. 1 (Fall 2005).
Heidegger, Martin. Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking. Translated by Andrew J. Mitchell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012.
Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, Second Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper Row, 2013.
Plato. Theaetetus. Translated by M. J. Levett. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992.
Riis, Soren. Unframing Martin Heidegger’s Understanding of Technology: On the Essential Connection between Technology, Art, and History. Translated by Rebecca Walsh. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018.
Rojcewicz, Richard. The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger. New York: State University of New York Press, 2006.
Plato, Theaetetus, trans. M. J. Levett (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992).
This is the argument of Soren Riis’ Unframing Martin Heidegger’s Understanding of Technology (Maryland: Roman Littlefield, 2018).
See Leah Bradshaw, “Technology and Political Education,” in Techne 9 vol. 1 (2005) 22. Bradshaw’s analysis of how the will is tied to knowing in the modern technological world is laid out with excellent theoretical precision.