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__Introduction __ William Lovitt

 “serious pursuit of thinking”

Rather he is centrally concerned with the relation between man and Being, with man as the openness to which and in which Being presences and is known.

Hence absolute, infinite, or the One can appear to him only as abstractions of man's thinking, and not as realities of essential power.

Genuine thinking is, rather, man's most essential manner of being man. Rigorously demanding and but rarely attained, it manifests the relation between man and Being. In true thinking man is used by Being, which needs man as the openness that provides the measure and the bounds for Being's manifesting of itself in whatever is.

As such, thinking is man's fundamental responding to whatever offers itself to him. Informed by recollection, it brings forth into awareness and efficacy whatever is presented to it to know. It is the caretaking hand that receives and holds and shapes everything that truly comes to be and to be known. Through that receiving and shaping of whatever is present, thinking, as belonging to and needed by Being, cooperates in the handing out of limits and the setting of bounds.

__The Question Concerning Technology __ Heidegger

Questioning builds a way The way is a way of thinking Lead through language

But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.

The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what technology is. The whole complex of these contrivances is technology. Technology itself is a contrivance, or, in Latin, an instrumentum.

For centuries philosophy has taught that there are four causes : (1) the //causa materialis//, the material, the matter out of which, for example, a silver chalice is made ; (2) the //causa formalis//, the form, the shape into which the material enters ; (3) the //causa finalis//, the end, for example, the sacrificial rite in relation to which the chalice required is determined as to its form and matter; (4) the //causa efficiens//, which brings about the effect that is the finished, actual chalice, in this instance, the silversmith. What technology is, when represented as a means, discloses itself when we trace instrumentality back to fourfold causality.

Accordingly, they are unifiedly ruled over by a bringing that brings what presences into appearance.

<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Physis also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poiesis.

<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">The modes of occasioning, the four causes, are at play, then, within bringing-forth. 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.

<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? The answer : everything. For every bringing-forth is grounded in revealing. Bringing-forth, indeed, gathers within itself the four modes of occasioning-causality-and rules them throughout. Within its domain belong end and means, belongs instrumentality. Instrumentality is considered to be the fundamental characteristic of technology. 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. <span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing.

<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">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.

<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">This setting-upon that challenges forth the energies of natur is an expediting [Fordern], and in two ways. It expedites in that it unlocks and exposes.

<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">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 thinker only responded to what addressed itself to him. Only to the extent that man for his part is already challenged to exploit the energies of nature can this ordering revealing happen. If man is challenged, ordered, to do this, then does not man himself belong even more originally than nature within the standing-reserve?

<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">The unconcealment of the unconcealed has already come to pass whenever it calls man forth into the modes of revealing allotted to him. When man, in his way, from within unconcealment reveals that which presences, he merely responds to the call of unconcealment even when he contradicts it. Thus when man, investigating, observing, ensnares nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve.

<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.

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 what is early.

Hence physics, in all its retreating from the representation turned only towards objects that has alone been standard till recently, will never be able to renounce this one thing: that nature reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and that it remains orderable as a system of information.

Again we ask : Does this revealing happen somewhere beyond all human doing? No. But neither does it happen exclusively in man, or decisively through man.

Through this the other possibility is blocked, that man might be admitted more and sooner and ever more primally to the essence of that which is unconcealed and to its unconcealment, in order that he might experience as his essence his needed belonging to revealing.

...that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion : It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.

Each of these in its own way indeed belongs as stockpart, available resource, or executer, within Enframing ; but Enframing is never the essence of technology in the sense of a genus. Enframing is a way of revealing having the character of destining, namely, the way that challenges forth.

And if we now ponder more carefully than we did before what it is that actually endures and perhaps alone endures, we may venture to say : Only what is granted endures. That which endures primally out of the earliest beginning is what grants.

Whether art may be granted this highest possibility of its essence in the midst of the extreme danger, no one can tell. Yet we can be astounded. Before what? Before this other possibility : that the frenziedness of technology may entrench itself everywhere to such an extent that someday, throughout everything technological, the essence of technology may come to presence in the coming-to-pass of truth

Thus questioning, we bear witness to the crisis that in our sheer preoccupation with technology we do not yet experience the coming to presence of technology, that in our sheer aesthetic mindedness we no longer guard and preserve the coming to presence of art. Yet the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.

The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought.

__Upsetting the Setup__ Weber

problematic of representation

Rather, what is lost in translation, often without a trace, is a certain practice of language, in which colloquial, idiomatic phrases play a decisive role. The twist and turns taken by the most familiar, most banal, most household terms in Heidegger's writing yield an effect of uncanniness that in turn constitutes a powerful incitement to rethink things often taken for granted such as the privilege generally assigned to technical terminology over everyday language in philosophical discourse.

possessed by unsuspected significations

For to call it into question, one must already be on the way elsewhere

'Frage,' question,... involves a movement very similar to that of techne itself: an opening of oneself to something else in what is described as a 'free relationship' to that which is considered worthy of being questioned.