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Reflection Paper #2

Heidegger argues that modern technology reveals nature as "standing reserve" - a resource to be used efficiently. This view reduces nature and humans to mere objects. Heidegger believes we must question the essence of technology to understand its influence and avoid being wholly controlled by it. While technology cannot be rejected, we must recognize how it shapes our view of the world and not lose sight of nature and humanity. Questioning technology's effects can help reveal hidden truths and find a path to freedom from its dominance.

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Marc Jalen Relador
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7K views

Reflection Paper #2

Heidegger argues that modern technology reveals nature as "standing reserve" - a resource to be used efficiently. This view reduces nature and humans to mere objects. Heidegger believes we must question the essence of technology to understand its influence and avoid being wholly controlled by it. While technology cannot be rejected, we must recognize how it shapes our view of the world and not lose sight of nature and humanity. Questioning technology's effects can help reveal hidden truths and find a path to freedom from its dominance.

Uploaded by

Marc Jalen Relador
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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REFLECTION PAPER ON: “THE QUESTION CONCERNING TECHNOLOGY”

BY
MARTIN HEIDEGGER
Marc Jalen Relador, BAEL AE11
GE 107 Science, Technology and Society (1:OO P.M.-2:30 P.M.-Monday/Thursday)

As of today, our world has been dependent on the technology. Technology has
been one of the major centrepiece why the world became developed. It was also the one
responsible to the arising of new advancements in materials things. However for
Heidegger, he said that technology must be handled properly in order to avoid mistake
that could threaten us or to slip from human control. Heidegger also said that:
“enframing” is using technology to turn nature into a resource for efficient use. Modern
technology says Heidegger, lets us separate nature and treat it as a “standing reserve” —
that is, a resource to be kept for later use.
Furthermore, Heidegger draws attention to technology’s place in conveying about
our failure by tightening our experience of things as they are. He claims that we now
view nature, and increasingly human beings too, are inclined to technology— that is, we
see nature and persons only as raw material for technical procedures. Heidegger seeks to
put emphasis on this phenomenon and to find a way of thinking by which we might be
protected from technology and controlling us humans. Also he believes, modern people
has been attached to much to modern technology. We must act properly not to be much
inclined to technology but it’s not necessarily , rejecting technology, but by perceiving its
danger.
Heidegger is worried with questioning the essence of technology and in particular,
modern technology, which he recognizes as something not the same to older, pre-
industrialised forms of technology. The dissimilarity, , is that our technological
relationship with nature was once an agent but now is one of both master and slave.
Questioning technology is therefore to break the restraints of technology and be free, not
in the absence of technology but through a better understanding of its essence and
meaning. He suggests that there are two ways to comprehend what technology is. One is
instrumental, to view it as a means to an end, while the other is to see it as human
activity. The instrumental view of technology focuses on a view of causality, which he
breaks down into four Aristotelian causes: causa materialis, causa formalis, causa final,
Causa effciens. These four aspects of causality are in fact four aspects of ‘being
responsible for bringing something into appearance’.
Discussing techné, the root of ‘technology’, he observes that it encompasses both the
activities and skills of the craftsman but also the arts of the mind and fine arts and
concludes that techné “belongs to bringing-forth. Heidegger prevents the accusation that
this view no longer holds true for modern, machine-powered technology. On the other
hand, he argues that modern technology, in its mutual relationship or reliance with
modern physics, is also ‘revealing’.All technology reveals, but modern technology
reveals not in the unfolding graceful sense but as a challenge; it sets upon nature and
accelerates its energy by unravelling it. Once revealed, this energy (raw or in the form of
machine-powered technology) is believed confined as a standing reserve. The airliner
standing on the runway is a stationary object ordered to be ready for take-off. However,
this apparent mastery over nature’s energy is no such thing because we are challenged,
ordered, to act this way. Specifically, modern technology is to approach nature “as an
object of research” to reveal or “order the real as standing reserve”. Heidegger states to
this as enframing. Enframing is the essence of modern technology.
However, technology is not our fate, we are not necessarily compelled along an
unaltered and inevitable course because “enframing belongs within the destining of
revealing” and destining is “an open space” where man can “listen and hear” to that
which is revealed. Freedom is in “Freedom is the realm of the destining that at any given
time starts a revealing upon its way.” Freedom then, is to be found in the essence of
technology but we are continually caused to believe that the brink of possibility is that
which is revealed in the ordering processes of modern technology to create the standing
reserve, deriving all our standards from this basis. This a danger.It is a danger because
when the real is hidden it may be misunderstood. When something is unconcealed it no
longer concerns us as an object but, rather, as standing reserve “and man in the midst of
objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing reserve”. When the object is lost
to the standing reserve, we ourselves become standing reserve and see everything as our
construct, seeing not objects everywhere but the illusion and misunderstanding of
encountering ourselves everywhere.
Therefore, that we can practice the questioning of technology in the hope of revealing
the truth, which modern technology habitually conceals through the order it imposes on
the world.

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