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[Jul. 20th, 2008|01:32 pm] |
Modern technology, as a revealing that orders, is thus no mere human doing. Therefore we must take the challenging that sets upon man to order the actual as standing-reserve in accordance with the way it whows itself. That challenging gathers man into ordering. This gathering concentrates man upon ordering the actual as standing-reserve.Martin Heidegger. The Question Concerning Technology.
Outside of the paper's context the quote sounds like total gibberish. Let's try to work through it. Basically, he says that technology pushes organization or framing into all corners of human activity. It forces things, including earth, air, people, processes, and etc, to be packaged for future consumption during a yet another unknown stage of an unknown process. Man creates technology to serve, e.g. markets.
Enframing means the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e. challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, a standing-reserve. Enframing means the way of revealing that holds sway in the essence of modern technology and that is itself nothing technologycal. ibid.
We construct sources ready to produce pre-packaged consumable ( standing-reserve) objects at a moment's notice. Unfortunately, over time we lock ourselves into a set of frames ( mental, spacial, temporal) that cannot be moved or restructured. For example, we "reveal" oil as a ubiquitous energy source and line up industrial and lifestyle processes to take advantage of the revelation. But, as it changes over time, we find ourselves trapped within unchangeable frames set up based on the original revelation.
The Greek thinkers already knew of this when they said: That which is earlier with regard to its rise into dominance becomes manifest to us men only later. That which is primally early shows itself only ultimately to men. Therefore, in the realm of thinking, a painstaking effort to think through still more primally what was primally thought is not the absurd wish to revive what is past, but rather the sober readiness to be astounded before the coming of the dawn. ibid.
Because the essence of modern technology lies in enframing, modern technology must employ exact physical science. Through its so doing the deceptive appearance arises that modern technology is applied physical science.
Physical science is just a way to frame inquiry into nature. Technology uses this approach as a tool in its own process of enframing. It is a lot more than just a product of science.
Yet when destining reigns in the mode of enframing, it is the supreme danger. This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As soon as what is unconcealed no lonber concerns man even as object, but exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve.
Where enframing holds sway, regulating and securing of the standing-reserve mark all revealing. They no longer even let their own fundamental characteristic appear, namely, this revealing as such.
... at the same time enframing, in a way characteristic of a destining, blocks poiesis
We can see this blocking at work when a scientist frames art as a technology that produces touchstones.
http://flying-bear.livejournal.com/580350.html
So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain transfixed in the will to master it. We press on past the essence of technology. When we ask how the instrumental unfolds essentially as a kind of causality, then we experience this essential unfolding as the destining of a revealing.
Don't get the last sentence. He probably means that we ought to look at technology as one of the causes, which would lead us to experience it not as a framer but as a revealer.
The essential unfolding of technology threatens revealing, threatens it with the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in ordering and that everyting will present itself only in the unconcealment of standing-reserve. Human activity can nver directly counter this danger. Human achievement alone can never banish it. But human reflection can ponder the fact that all sving power must be of a higher essence than what is endangered, though at the same time kindred to it.
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