Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (26 September 1889, Meßkirch – 26 May 1976, Freiburg) was a German philosopher whose work reopened the question of Being and set the course of twentieth-century continental philosophy — phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism — with influence spilling into literary theory, theology, psychology, and the social sciences. His magnum opus Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927) analyzes human existence (Dasein) as the site where Being becomes intelligible.

His legacy is permanently shadowed by his politics: elected rector of the University of Freiburg in April 1933, he joined the Nazi Party on 1 May 1933, resigned the rectorship a year later but kept party membership until 1945. How (or whether) his philosophy can be separated from that commitment is a live scholarly fight, sharpened by the posthumous publication of the Black Notebooks.

Philosophy of technology

In the wiki’s scope, Heidegger matters most for The Question Concerning Technology (1954; lectures from 1949–1953; Lovitt translation 1977), the founding text of modern philosophy of technology. Its claims: technology’s essence is nothing technological; the instrumental definition (“a means, a human activity”) is correct but not true and treats technology as dangerously neutral; technology is a way of revealing (aletheia), which in its modern form becomes a challenging-forth that orders all of nature — and eventually humans — as standing-reserve under the gathering claim he names Enframing (Ge-stell). The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s history of the field gives him the entire twentieth-century chapter; later philosophy of technology (Ellul, the empirical turn of Feenberg/Ihde/Verbeek) positions itself against his totalizing essentialism.¹

The essay ends not in despair but with Hölderlin — “But where danger is, grows / The saving power also” — locating the counter-possibility in art, which in early Greece was itself called techne. “Questioning is the piety of thought.”²

Wiki connections

• enframing-and-standing-reserve — the concept page for the essay’s core machinery.
• butlerian-jihad-thesis — Herbert’s machine-likeness commandment is a fictional enactment of the Heideggerian fear that technology trains its users into machine-like closure.
• discontinuous-self — his account of Dasein’s being-in-the-world is the continental backdrop against which questions of selfhood and its fragmentation get posed differently than in analytic philosophy of mind.

Sources

• Martin Heidegger 1954 — The Question Concerning Technology
• Maarten Franssen, Gert-Jan Lokhorst, and Ibo van de Poel 2009 — Philosophy of Technology

Footnotes

1. Maarten Franssen, Gert-Jan Lokhorst, and Ibo van de Poel 2009 — Philosophy of Technology ↩

2. Martin Heidegger 1954 — The Question Concerning Technology ↩