my interests in philosophy include, but are no means limited to: history of philosophy, ontology/metaphysics, ethics, ancient ideas of love, and my boy JJ Rousseau.
What is the danger that comes with technology? In this day and age, it seems as if technology might corrupt us all. From those who believe that Tiktok and Instagram suck our souls to those who believe we are damned by global warming, some say that the movement against modern technology is greater than ever. However, this is not a new problem. In the 1950’s, the nuclear bomb was at the peak of society’s anxiety, and the Cold War let the world know that technology could wipe everything good from the face of the earth. However, this isn’t the only, or even the main danger that comes with technology. In “The Question Concerning Technology” (QCT), Martin Heidegger, a controversial German philosopher, argues that the problem of technology doesn’t just lie in how it can destroy us materially, but how it seems to also destroy our very essence through enframing a standing-reserve. In this essay, I will not only demonstrate how Heidegger uses a ladder of language to describe the evolution of the problem, but also how he uses Aristotle to describe his solution.
Heidegger wants to reveal the essence of technology. Before we continue, it should be noted that “Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology” (QCT, 1). In other words, what is universal to all examples of technology is not an example of technology that can be found in the world. Moreover, Heidegger extends this maxim to all things by using an example on how something as arbitrary as “the essence of ‘tree’ [...] is not itself a tree that can be encountered” (ibid). That is to say, the essence of nearly anything is not equivalent to that thing itself. Therefore, when we want to examine the essence of something, we cannot look at examples alone.
In revealing the essence of technology, Heidegger will also reveal what problems technology causes. He wants to dismantle the claims that “technology is a means to an end” and that “technology is a human activity” (ibid). This, he claims in the same paragraph, leads to the common sense idea of technology as an instrument; or in his words, this leads to “the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology.” Some might claim that this is still too vague, since any human activity that is a means to an end could be viewed as a technology. For example, couldn’t language be a form of technology too, since language is a human means to an end? Love is also a human activity and a means to an end, so what about that? However, Heidegger clarifies this provisional definition further by listing examples such as “the power plant”, “the high-frequency apparatus”, “a sawmill”, and so on (ibid). It seems that when describing examples of technology, Heidegger only uses concrete nouns and not abstract concepts such as language or love. This implies that concreteness exists in this definition as well.
This definition and its implications, even according to Heidegger, seem correct, and it even holds for modern technology. However, it doesn’t “show us technology’s essence” (QCT, p. 2). This is because “the merely correct is not yet the true” (ibid). But why aren’t the instrumental and anthropological definitions of technology true definitions? Moreover, how can a definition be correct but not true? A definition can be correct if it describes the attributes of something, (e.g., a correct definition of “tree” would be that it is something that has leaves) but it isn’t true until the definition describes the essence of something. To define truth, Heidegger refers to the Aristotelian dogma of the four causes.
One of the problems with the instrumental and anthropological definitions of technology is that this common sense definition only relies on one of the four Aristotelian causes. According to Aristotle, for the essence of something to be true, it must answer all four of these causes: the material (i.e., what is it made of?), the formal (i.e., what is its shape?), the efficient (i.e., how is it made?), and the final (i.e., what is it made for?). The only cause that this common sense definition answers is the material cause, or how it was made.
Heidegger offers an alternative: bringing-forth, or poiesis, which “is grounded in revealing” (QCT, p. 4). To bring forth a technology is to reveal what it is inside the material it was made out of. For example, a statue is brought forth by revealing its form inside a slab of marble. Or, perhaps to bring forth a technology is to reveal what was once in the mind into reality, and that the statue isn’t revealed out of marble, but instead out of the artist’s mind. Either way, Heidegger wants to claim that the forms of technology have always existed, and we aren’t inventing technology, but instead revealing what already exists. He claims that revealing has “everything” to do with technology (ibid). Revealing, through bringing-forth, satisfies all four of the Aristotelian causes “and rules them throughout” (ibid). It satisfies the material cause by revealing “the matter out of which, for example, a silver chalice is made;” it satisfies the formal cause by revealing the form; and so on (QCT, p. 2).
We now have a new definition; technology, then, “is a mode of revealing” (QCT, p. 4). However, unlike the earlier definition, some might claim that this simply doesn’t hold for modern technology. Before we can understand modern technology, we must understand its distinction from handicraft technology. At the beginning of the essay, Heidegger claims that modern technology is “in contrast to the older handicraft technology, something completely different and therefore new”, but he doesn’t explain what this difference is (QCT, p. 1). Modern technology, as Heidegger claims, is different from handicraft technology because it is “based on modern physics as an exact science” (QCT, p. 4). On the other hand, technology in the past was not always based on hyper-specific math and science, but instead was based more on know-how or techne. However, like premodern technology, modern technology is still “a revealing,” according to Heidegger (QCT, p. 5). However, modern technology isn't the same as premodern or handicraft technology, because modern technology doesn’t “unfold into a bringing forth in the sense of poiesis” (ibid). In other words, unlike handicraft technology, modern technology has a mode of revealing which works to extract from nature.
But what is extraction? Heidegger uses the word once in his essay, but “extraction” is essential to understanding the difference between handicraft technology and modern technology, when he claims that there is an “unreasonable demand [by humanity] that [nature] supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such” (ibid). It seems as if the storage of energy is a key part of extraction. Moreover, the word extraction implies that something is taken out of nature and not returned. What is extracted? Not only energy, but also the essence of a thing. When a hydroelectric dam is set on the Rhine river, it extracts the essence of the river as a river and turns it into “a water-power supplier” (ibid). This is to contrast with handicraft technology, which works alongside nature by not extracting. For example, the handicraft windmill “does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it” (ibid). Instead, it lets the wind blow through it unchanged; it doesn’t change the essence of that area, unlike the dam on the Rhine. This extraction, which is the union of the changing of essence and the storing of energy, is what Heidegger claims to be one of the key new focuses found in modern technology that we don’t see often in handicraft technology.
Heidegger calls the revealing that shows us what we can use as technology as unconcealment. The specific kind of unconcealment that humanity uses is what Heidegger calls bestand, or standing-reserve. Standing-reserve is what humanity can and cannot use as technology. It is not decided by humanity, but is instead already decided in advance by nature as “the call of unconcealment” (QCT, p. 6). Here, Heidegger seems to imply that the driving factor that leads humanity to unconceal standing-reserve is not humanity itself, but instead an external natural force that calls upon humanity.
Further, he wants to distinguish this from the word “stock” (QCT, p. 5). He doesn’t claim why, but we can still speculate. He says later that “dry, monotonous” words are “therefore oppressive,” so perhaps Heidegger means to claim that we must use new words in order to express new ideas (QCT, p. 6). This wouldn’t be new for Heidegger, a philosopher who is notorious for using neologisms to articulate his arguments. Being and Time is an egregious example, which has haunted the minds of translators ever since its publication.
Now, we must imagine how humanity understands and reveals standing-reserve. To articulate this, Heidegger uses the word gestell or “enframing” (QCT, p. 7). This can be simply understood as the verb form of standing-reserve. More specifically, it is the human act of revealing what can and cannot be used as standing-reserve. Although humanity doesn’t decide what is and isn’t standing-reserve, it is still their responsibility to reveal what was already decided to be standing-reserve. This later leads to problems such as the illusion of man “as lord of the earth” (QCT, p. 10). This is the “revealing that holds sway in the essence of modern technology” (QCT, p. 7). Since humanity now uses modern technology, which challenges the earth instead of working alongside it, and now that it has the power and capacity to destroy the earth, humanity is now destined to how far it wants to challenge the earth in order for humanity’s own gains.
This creates some problems for humanity. For one, gestell doesn’t seem to be limited. Thus, it could include “human resources”, as Heidegger notes. Humanity itself seems to be in danger of where “he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve” (QCT, p. 10). In other words, human beings can also become instruments of technology. Some might claim that slavery is a long-dead problem, but Heidegger’s claim here suggests that it hasn’t died, but instead has simply changed forms. For example, just because slavery was de jure abolished in the United States doesn’t mean that our modern wage-slavery works to compartmentalize laborers from human beings into tools to be used.
Something else that Heidegger seems to want to focus on is his mourning for the loss of wonder. “God”, for example, “can lose all that is exalted and holy, the mysteriousness of his distance” (QCT, p. 9). For reading comprehension’s sake, it’s important to note that this is a greater theme within Heidegger’s work. Throughout the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, he mourns the loss of wonder not only in philosophy, but in the greater world. This mournfulness can be seen as an attempt to return us back to the ancient wonder that was described in Metaphysics book Alpha. This modern (as opposed to the Aristotelian) unconcealment of nature “as a calculable complex” leads to a sort of narcissism, where it seems as if we can only see ourself in nature (QCT, p. 10). In other words, when modern technology can only view nature as things we can and can’t have, it seems as if nature is man. However, this dangerous illusion is far from the case, because “precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence” (ibid). While we pretend to know what the human is, through modern exact biology, and we pretend to know what the soul is, through modern exact psychology, these so-called exact sciences are actually taking us further away from the essence of man. We lose our understanding of what it means to be in the world.
Is this it? Is this the end? After all, it seems as if we cannot return, because “enframing is what endures” (QCT, p. 12). Even though some readers might claim that this isn’t a historical claim, but instead a conceptual claim, these readers must understand that it’s as scary, if not scarier, to have to live with the universal stability of the conceptual compared to the relative instability of the historical. “But,” he asks, “is enduring only permanent enduring?” (ibid) Here, Heidegger questions if humanity is forever trapped with enframing. It seems as if Heidegger is trying to find a way out, and he claims that while we cannot return to what once was, we can still change the essence of technology through “essential reflection” (QCT, p. 14). Heidegger offers a solution as well. He claims that the way out, or what he calls the “saving power”, is “questioning” (ibid). Specifically, it seems, that we must answer the questions of the Aristotelian causes, because as long as we don’t question, “causality, and with it instrumentality, [...] remain obscure and groundless”(QCT, p. 2).
But why Aristotle? Doesn’t it seem a bit dogmatic for such a destructive thinker like Heidegger to claim that the truth really only lies in some other thinker? Maybe, but it seems that Heidegger would also like to refer to this ancient philosopher so we can broaden our perspective by recovering what once was lost. Heidegger claims that we have cornered ourselves not just by our perspective on what it means for technology to be, but also with our perspective on what it means to be in the world. This implies that Heidegger believes that we once had a way to understand being in the world, but we have since lost it, and we can’t recover it by simply progressing philosophy. This can be seen in his outline of Being and Time, where he places Aristotle at the end of his “destructuring of the history of ontology” (Being and Time, p. 35). Thus, to regain what it means to be in the world, and to be able to progress our understanding of the world, we must start our poiesis of questioning at the beginning. Although humanity cannot return materially and physically to what once was, it can return theoretically and metaphysically.
Before examining the thoughts of the philosophers before him in book Alpha, Aristotle takes some time to establish preliminary remarks in the first two chapters of Metaphysics to the rest of his treatise. These preliminary remarks are strange, and seem more about knowledge than the nature of reality like the name Metaphysics may suggest. For example, there are remarks on the chief goal of all human beings, the difference between human beings and animals, and the difference between what makes men good at art and what makes men wise. After this book, however, Aristotle moves on from these subjects to examine a science of being qua being, and he seldom mentions these topics again. Aristotle then connects this to how we perceive wisdom not only by creating a hierarchy of science but also by examining the (sometimes contradictory) opinions of what makes one wise. Aristotle begins the book by claiming that ”all men by nature desire understanding” (980a1). He then devotes the first chapter to supporting that bold claim by analyzing a hierarchy of functions that are supposed to demonstrate our appreciation of knowledge for its own sake. (That, of course, should eventually be spelled out in detail, going through ch. 1.) From there the book turns in ch. 2 to examining common opinions about who is thought wise.
It is not clear how the opening claim about the natural human desire to understand is to wisdom, but the examination of opinions that follows perhaps sheds some light on that.What does a science of metaphysics have to do with wisdom? As it turns out, absolutely everything. This essay will examine the approach in the metaphysics to understanding wisdom, and why it is important for the Metaphysics to understand wisdom to be able to understand our reality.
He begins the book by claiming that “all men by nature desire understanding” (980a.) It also should be noted that Aristotle doesn’t write that “all men by nature desire wisdom”, which means that there might be a strict barrier between understanding (or as Sachs translates it, “knowing”) and wisdom. However, it might also be the case that understanding should instead be seen as a genus under which wisdom exists.
Aristotle then uses the rest of the first chapter of the book Alpha to describe kinds of knowing that are not wisdom. More specifically, he goes on to describe sensation and experience, and he differentiates them from the kind of knowing that truly is wisdom: theory. Aristotle wants to show us that it seems as if theory is in fact wisdom. When he begins to rank the sciences at the end of chapter one, he claims that the man who practices “theoretical sciences [has] wisdom to a higher degree than” the man who practices the productive sciences, the manual laborer, the master artist, the man of experience, or the man who relies solely on his sensations. It should be noted that there’s some proof here that Aristotle implies that the knowledge laid out in the beginning is wisdom, because he ranks the theoretical sciences at the top. Then, he also claims that the Egyptian “priestly class was allowed leisure”, and because of their leisure they willingly decided that they wanted to study mathematics, which seems to be a theoretical science, or a part of the wisest form of science (981b25).
Aristotle wants to point out that despite the fact that the sensations are “liked for their own sake”, they do not reveal to us wisdom (980a3).For example, although “seeing makes us know in the highest degree”, this is only relative to the other senses (980a26). Why doesn’t it reveal wisdom? If wisdom is truly theory, and theory is knowledge liked for its own sake, then wouldn’t sensation, something liked for its own sake, also be theory, and thus be wisdom? This isn’t the case, because although sensations are “the most authoritative in the knowledge of individuals”, they do not reveal to us the causes of anything (980b10). (Moreover, “ability to have sensations is common to all, and therefore easy, but not a mark of wisdom” (982a11-13). In other words, the reason why sensation isn’t wisdom is because every animal is able to have it, and if everybody has wisdom, nobody has wisdom.) This is confirmed in the list of different kinds of wisdom, where Aristotle places the man of sensations at the bottom of his list of different kinds of wisdom.
Before we can understand how experience isn’t wisdom, we have to understand what the difference between experience and sensation is. “In men,” Aristotle writes, “experience comes into being from memory” (981a1). Does this mean that experience is synonymous with memory? No, there must be some extra ingredient, and this ingredient is likely sensation, considering the former context of the discussion on sensation. Experience, put simply, is sensation with repeated memories of some kind.
Aristotle also wants to tell us what experience aims towards. Experience is a necessary condition for eventually developing “science and art” (981a3). Some readers might immediately assume that this means that experience is science and art, but again, this is not the case (although Aristotle admits that the two are “almost similar”) because science and art come into being “through experience” (981a2-3). However, it sometimes can be the case that experience seems the same as art when “something is to be done” (981a13). (Aristotle notes that experience can even be better for practical purposes than science or art, and this is hugely significant for those who support theories of divisions of labor, or for the fact that we regard the man of experience to be wiser than the man of mere sensation.) Although they seem the same, they are not, as the truth is that “experience is knowledge of individuals but art is universal knowledge” (981a17). In other words, experience might seem like the same thing as art in the action of creation, but the truth is that outside of this specific circumstance, they are not the same. Knowledge of cause differentiates art from experience because the knowledge of cause allows the experience to be taught. Moreover, knowledge of cause is directly related to the knowledge of the universal as opposed to a particular instance, because knowledge of cause can only come when the cause has been repeated enough such that the knower can understand the cause as affecting the universal thing.
Aristotle wants to show us that experience, like sensation, is also not wisdom. Although Aristotle writes that “we observe that men of experience succeed more than men who have the theory but no experience”, the reader should take note of the phrase “we observe” (981a14-15). That phrase suggests that Aristotle believes that there is an opinion, but it doesn’t necessarily suggest that Aristotle believes this opinion.We will examine this in further detail later, but it seems that Aristotle is performing the Socratic trick of using dialectic to pursue philosophy, and the dialectic is between his own thought and the thought of common opinion. Further, Aristotle claims that although men of experience know “the fact” of something, they do not know “the why of it” (981a29-30). With the later definition of wisdom being knowledge of certain causes, we can understand the “why” here as the cause of something. For example, although the man of experience might understand that using butter would help make a grilled cheese, the man of wisdom could articulate the “why” the butter works as an oil to spread heat across the bread, more evenly cooking the grilled cheese. Knowledge of the cause might eventually work to make the knower more successful. In this example, knowing that the butter works as an oil might help the cook understand how much oil the bread needs in order to brown correctly, or it might help the cook develop other recipes which involve browning.
At the beginning of book Alpha chapter two, Aristotle notes six opinions (not that he has, but that are instead prevalent in society) about what it means to be wise. First, he claims that a wise man is thought to be who knows all things “in a manner in which this is possible”, but he knows them not individually. Secondly, we believe that a wise man knows what is easy and hard to learn. Third and fourth, people think that a good teacher, insofar he is “accurate” for the third opinion and “more able to teach” for the fourth, in every science is a wise man. Fifth, the man that studies the science “pursued for its own sake” is considered a wise man. Finally, the wise man is assumed to possess the superior science, which turns out to be knowledge of the end or the good for each thing and the supreme good in all nature. (We can see how he ranks sciences in the previous chapter.) It is because of this last trait that the wise man should be obeyed, not ruled by others.
Some questions arise here. First off, how does examining opinions about the wise person lead us to understand what the wise person is? Secondly, do these opinions contradict each other? If so, how does Aristotle justify these contradictions?
It seems that Aristotle is taking a Socratic approach to understand the wise person. That is to say, he starts to examine the truth of something by examining the opinion of something. It seems that this is the greater theme of book alpha, which examines the opinion of many philosophers before Aristotle. Moreover, perhaps it advances our understanding by discovering contradictions among those opinions. Either those who hold these opinions don’t know what wisdom is, or wisdom itself has inconsistent requirements.
It also seems that some of these opinions contradict each other. For example, the fourth opinion contradicts the first opinion, because while the first opinion suggests that a wise man needs to know all things, the fourth suggests that the wise man only needs to know one sort of science: the theoretical science. In fact, this could be extrapolated to bifurcate the opinions into two groups. The first group includes opinions that suggest that the wise man needs to have knowledge of all sciences, whereas the second group suggests that the wise man needs only to possess a single science. The first group includes the first four opinions, and the second group includes the latter two opinions.
According to Aristotle, the first group deals with things that are “the hardest for men to know, for they are most removed from sensations” (982a24-25). One should note that Aristotle doesn’t say impossible here, but he instead claims that they are merely difficult. Some readers might ask how it's possible to know universal things at all. Knowledge of universals, to these readers, might mean knowledge of some species contrasted with some knowledge of an individual (e.g., knowledge of a species of lion compared with the knowledge of an individual lion. However, the universal knowledge that wisdom aims at seems to be much more comprehensive, because it is a knowledge of being qua being. People would think that this is a sign of wisdom, according to Aristotle, because knowledge of being qua being would be able to derive knowledge of the cause for nearly anything.
Why does Aristotle bring up this contradiction? Some might claim that he brings up this big contradiction in order to show the reader that the common conceptions of wisdom are contradictory, but that still leaves some room for questions. For one, why specifically this contradiction?
Perhaps this contradiction points out the same thing that Aristotle pointed out in chapter one, the difference between the universal and the particular. Aristotle continues to explore the concept of wisdom because that’s what “first philosophy” should aim towards.
The last two opinions on wisdom reflect the knowledge desirable solely for its own sake and the authoritative knowledge that should rule all the rest. Can these cohere?
This question, the question of the universal versus the particular, then reveals itself as the fundamental question of Metaphysics.The first aporia listed in book Beta reflects this: “whether it belongs to one or to many sciences to investigate the causes” (996b6-7). Although it is widely assumed that many sciences are required to investigate the causes, because each science is concerned with a particular kind of being, a class in which all members have certain features in common, Aristotle’s definition of wisdom as the theory of the universal drives the Metaphysics not towards a science of being, but rather towards a science of how humans can strive to know being.
Finally, Aristotle introduces the concept of wonder to transition from wisdom to philosophy. But before we can understand wonder, we must introduce the concept of philosophy that is taught on the first day of nearly every philosophy class. Philosophy isn’t a wisdom itself, but it is rather a striving towards wisdom; maybe even the same striving that was introduced at the very beginning of this treatise. Aristotle claims that this is because they were stuck in a knot of wonder at first, and they “wondered at the difficulties [ie aporia]” that confronted them, such as the nature of “generation of the universe” (982b15). This account of the genesis of philosophy mirrors the same sort of things that philosophers wonder about today. Some might claim that this means that philosophy is useless compared to the practical sciences, because it isn’t able to be used for anything. And Aristotle, in his own way, would agree: “if indeed they philosophized in order to avoid ignorance, it is evident that they pursued science in order to understand and not in order to use it for something else” (982b19-21). In this way, Aristotle argues that philosophy and contemplating perhaps unsolvable wonders isn’t for some other greater good, but it is in fact the good, and it is our very nature.