The+Fourth+Week

__Heidegger - The Question Concerning Technology__

We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the way, and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics.

Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology.
 * Talking here about truth to nature, as if there is an essence to technology: a Truth of technology

Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral

We ask the question concerning technology when we ask what it is. Everyone knows the two statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity.

The current conception of technology, according to which it is a means and a human activity, can therefore be called the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology.

But this much remains correct: modern technology too is a means to an end.

The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.

But suppose now that technology were no mere means, how would it stand with the will to master it?
 * My experience outside of academic STS is that technology is NOT a means to an end, but an end within itself. This is paradoxically because of the perceived neutrality of technology: where by being neutral (objective, godlike?) it is a good.

The end in keeping with which the kind of means to be used is determined is also considered a cause. Wherever ends are pursued and means are employed, wherever instrumentality reigns, there reigns causality.

For centuries we have acted as though the doctrine of the four causes had fallen from heaven as a truth as clear as daylight. But it might be that the time has come to ask, Why are there just four causes?

For a long time we have been accustomed to representing cause as that which brings something about. In this connection, to bring about means to obtain results, effects.

Both the silver into which the aspect is admitted as chalice and the aspect in which the silver appears are in their respective ways co-responsible for the sacrificial vessel.
 * Sounds like this could be determinist? But there are ways in which it might not be.

The three previously mentioned ways of being responsible owe thanks to the pondering of the silver smith for the "that" and the "how" of their coming into appearance and into play for the production of the sacrificial vessel.

The bursting of a blossom into bloom, in itself (en heautoi). In contrast, what is brought forth by the artisan or the artist, e.g., the silver chalice, has the bursting open belonging to bringing forth not in itself, but in another (en alloi), in the craftsman or artist.

Through bringing-forth, the growing things of nature as well as whatever is completed through the crafts and the arts come at any given time to their appearance.
 * Connection between nature and culture. But this seems to be a silly dialectic conception of nature and culture.

This coming rests and moves freely within what we call revealing [das Entbergen].

We say "truth" and usually understand it as the correctness of an idea. If we inquire, step by step, into what technology, represented as means, actually is, then we shall arrive at revealing. The possibility of all productive manufacturing lies in revealing.
 * Technoscience

Technology is a way of revealing.

The word techne is linkied with the word episteme. Both words are names for knowing in the widest sense.

It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth.

Technology is a mode of revealing.

The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such.

That challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed si switched about ever anew.

Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.

The fact that the real has been showing itself in the light of Ideas ever since the time of Plato,

Plato did not bring about. The thinkier only responded to what addressed itself to him.
 * Realist. Positivist. Not very constructionist at all.

Since man drives technology forward, he takes part in ordering as a way of revealing. But the unconcealment itself, within which ordering unfolds, is never a human handiwork, any more than is the realm through which man is already passing every time he as a subject relates to an object.

Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological.

The merely instrumental, merely anthropological definition of technology is therefore in principle untenable. And it cannot be rounded out by being referred back to some metaphysical or religious explanation that undergirds it.

Because physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance, it therefore orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way.

The modern physical theory of nature prepares the way first not simply for technology but for the essence of modern technology.
 * Linear model of technological development.

Because the essence of modern technology lies in Enframing, modern technology must employ exact physical science. Through its so doing, the deceptive illusion arises that modern technology is applied physical science.
 * Ahhh, subtle difference but important. Maybe not so linear after all.

__Weber - Upsetting the Setup__

The problematizing of 'representation'

To read Heideggar seriously is to cease treating representation as though it were simply one 'theme' among others or even an exclusively 'theoretical' issue. Rather, the problem of representational thought imposes itself in an intensely practical way, calling into question conventional styels of academic writing, scholarly or critical.

A cursory reading of the English translations reveals them to be informed by what might be described as the goal of 'conceptual rendition', that is, of rendering the conceptual content of individual terms and turns of phrase in the most rigorous, coherent and consistent manner possible.

What is lost in translation, often without a trace, is a certiain practice of language in which colloquial, idiomatic phrases play a decisive role.

Only when the stability of the most familiar phrases and concepts can no longer be taken for granted, only when they reveal themselves to be possessed by unsuspecting significations that no conceptual univocity can reliably predict or fully account for, only then does the reader sense fully the necessity of calling into question the conceptual matrix of modern representational thought: that of subject and object.

They form part of a long-standing and on-going effort of deconstructive thinking to delimit the authority of representational thought by exploring its consequences in areas that have hitherto been particularly resistant to such questioning, areas designated by the traditional, but increasingly problematic titles: 'history', 'politics' and 'ethics'.

His work emerges as a privileged place from which the question of place itself is put into play. The name that Heidegger assigns to this play, in which the question of determination joins that of institutionalization, is //technics//.

In this sense, //techne// is a form of //poiesis// that in turn is closely related to art.

Science, he argues, depends both in its principle and in its practice upon //Technik// rather than the other way round, as is generally thought.

In a certain sense, technics itself follows something else, for instance, that which is called today 'nature' (and which the Greeks called //physis//). Or also, how technics in its modern form comes after another kind of technics more closely associated with the meaning the term has, or had, in ancient Greek.

To Question: "an opening of oneself to something else in what is described as a 'free relationship' to taht which is considered worthy of being questioned."

The goings-on of technics are on-going, not just in the sense of being long-standing, staying in play, lasting, but in the more dynamic one of moving away from the idea of a pure and simple self-identity of technology. What goes on in and as technics, its //Wesen//, is not itself technical.

To be 'due to' is to appear, to be 'brought into play (//ins Spiel kommen//) thanks to something else.