Below is a good summary of Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology by Catherine Griffiths. It outlines some of the key points in the text. It’s worthwhile viewing the 17 minute YouTube video, as well as this text, to get an overview of the concerns Heidegger points out in his essay. However, reading the original text is the most important thing to do. At the start and end of the summary of Heidegger’s text, there is an interesting comment, showing how the text supports the field of study known as Critical Computation.

Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology, published in 1953, can provide a context to the field of critical computation.

A Dissection of the Essay
The essay begins by asking the reader to take up a different position in our relationship with technology “so as to prepare a free relationship to it”, (p.3) taking the opportunity to think outside of its traditional ontology, encapsulated by the traditional understanding of technology: in its instrumentality and as a human activity, or the manufacture and use of tools. Heidegger points out that there is a difference between technology and the essence of technology, “the instrumental definition of technology still does not show us technology’s essence”, (p.6) and it is the latter that he is pursuing here. As long as our position to technology is caught up with the drive to push technology forward, we cannot conceive this essence or truth of technology. “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it”, (p.4) hence the need to step away and find a different position. Heidegger states that our blindness is the strongest when we think of technology “as something neutral”. (p.4)

Heidegger conducts several etymological studies tracing meaning from the idea of the causality at the heart of technology: “Wherever ends are pursued and means are employed, wherever instrumentality reigns, there reigns causality”. (p.6) From here he moves through being indebted, to being responsible, to causality, to occasion, to poiesis, bringing forth, to revealing, and to truth. He demonstrates etymologically, that our relationship with technology has the ability to also navigate this path from technology as being instrumental and about getting things done, to technology as poiesis and unveiling truth. “Technology is therefore no mere means. (…) It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth”. (p.12) Technology and poiesis are connected in their ways of confronting the world, however if we think of technology as poiesis, rather than instrumentality, we can use our understanding of technology to approach the truth. Another etymological study of technology begins with the word techne, traced through craftsmanship, to bringing forth, knowing, arriving again at poiesis; technology is less about know-how, than knowing truth.

Moving away from a philosophical and etymological consideration of technology, we can see that in fact modern technology is not poietic. Heidegger sets up modern technology as having a challenging relationship to nature, in the way that it is extractive of natural resources. The example of a hydroelectric dam on the Rhine River in Germany is used to show technology’s orientation as instrumental, extractive, and from this perspective nature becomes a “standing reserve”, (p.17) in service to technology. This is in contrast to the Rhine from a poetic orientation, as written about by Holderlin, and has served as a cultural and philosophical inspiration. The problem with nature as a standing reserve, is that humans also become incorporated in the same system, functioning as another type of stock in that system.

From the standing reserve, another etymological study traces the term gestell, understood as enframing through ordering or categorizing, through to the precision obtained from exact sciences, and ending with control. We find out that “the essence of modern technology lies in enframing”. (p.25) There is a human impulse to enframe human experience and the natural world into disciplines or categories, in an effort to exert control. Heidegger argues that the “essence of technology is not technological”, in that it is not machines which drive technology, rather than the frame of mind that views the world as a combination of raw materials and categorizations. The essence of technology is the enframing view toward controllable knowledge. Heidegger argues that technology precedes science, rather than the traditional understanding that technology is an application of science, which is evidenced by sciences’ reliance on technological instruments to advance itself. Science is really the application of the human impulse to enframe and control.

The history of human development can be see alongside the history of technology’s development, this raises the question of how humanity can move into a freer relationship to technology, which is the central aim of the essay. The human drive for quantifiable and controllable knowledge puts humanity into an orientation of seeing the world as a standing reserve, which culminates in technology as we see it today. Once we can see and accept this enframing essence of technology, we can open up to a different relationship with it. Heidegger argues that our current relationship with technology is destructive, a threat to humanity, and it also negates the possibility of revealing further truths. He claims that the truth of the world is being missed in spite of the theory and apparatus designed to achieve precise knowledge.

Humanity’s spiritual life is at stake, and it has a responsibility to care for being itself. Returning to the original understanding of techne as containing both instrumentality and poiesis, we can choose to develop a new orientation through the arts (poiesis). Art was not originally a separate field, a cultural activity, “It was a single, manifold revealing”. (p.34) This artistic or poetic orientation is the alternative path. We can seek to understand the world without making it a standing reserve. Art grants this type of revealing truth. Art does not seek to measure, classify, or exploit, and it more concerned with taking part in the process of coming-to-being, to create a freer relation with technology.

Critical Computation

Critical computation is a new field, and most of its texts have been published in the C21st. But from what context does this field emerge? Critically questioning technology has various roots in philosophy and critical theory, and Heidegger’s essay provides one such thread, to contextualize a critical view of computational systems as a dominant technology of our time. There are several arguments that Heidegger makes that resonate with a critique of algorithms. When Heidegger argues that we are most blind to technology when we think of it as a neutral machine, we can see the way this problematic way of thinking continues through the writing of algorithms and use of mathematics, which have been found to contain latent ethical biases. As Cathy O’Neil writes in Weapons of Math Destruction, “The [2008] crash made it all too clear that mathematics, once my refuge, was not only deeply entangled in the world’s problems but also fueling many of them.” (p.2) From her various roles in the application of mathematics and algorithms, from academia, to a hedge fund, to an algorithmic auditing start-up, her insight demonstrates how humans have become part of that standing reserve that Heidegger first articulated, by making up the big data sets on which many of today’s most prolific algorithms train and operate. “Ill conceived mathematical models now micromanage the economy, from advertising to prisons. (…) They’re opaque, unquestioned, and unaccountable, and they operate at a scale to sort, target, or ‘optimize’ millions of people. By confusing their findings with on-the-ground reality, most of them create pernicious WMD [Weapons of Math Destruction] feedback loops”. (p.11) If we continue Heidegger’s argument through to today’s use of machine learning algorithms and big data sets, we are still subsumed by technology’s enframing orientation, which drives forward the quantification, classification, and control of our lives. The field of critical computation seeks to develop a freer orientation to the contemporary command of algorithms as the modern technology.

References
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 1977, Harper Perennial Modern Thought

O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction, 2016, Crown Publishing