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The Question Concerning Technology
Heidegger's 1954 essay arguing that the essence of technology is nothing technological — and that the essence is a mode of revealing that culminates in enframing.
Delivered as a lecture in Munich in 1953 and published the following year, 'The Question Concerning Technology' is the single most influential philosophical examination of modern technology's ontological character. The essay's central move is to refuse the instrumental and anthropological definitions of technology — that it is a means to an end and a human activity — by showing that while these definitions are correct, they are not true. The correct identifies; the true discloses. The essay develops the vocabulary of enframing, standing-reserve, and the danger, and ends with Hölderlin's line that where the danger is, grows the saving power also — a structural claim about the relationship between the two that has shaped seven decades of philosophy of technology.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The essay opens with a methodological provocation: to question technology, one must not ask what technology does but what technology is. The instrumental definition — technology as means to an end — is correct. The anthropological definition