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Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

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.
Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing
(QCT: 12).

By way of copperfastening his analysis, Heidegger looks at the etymology of the term
technology itself; the word comes from the Greek term Technikon and that in turn is a
word used to describe anything which belongs to techne. Techne itself is the name not
only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and
the fine arts. Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poietic (QCT,
13). Heidegger goes on to unpack the Greeks understanding of the term techne on the
basis of a discussion of the term in Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics which supposedly
corroborates Heideggers claim that the term denotes a kind of revealing:
Techne is a mode of aletheuein. It reveals whatever does not bring itself forth
and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one
way and now another. Whoever builds a house or a ship or forges a sacrificial
chalice reveals what is to be brought forth, according to the perspectives of the
four modes of occasioning. This revealing gathers together in advance the aspect
and the matter of ship or house, with a view to the finished thing envisioned as
completed, and from this gathering determines the manner of its construction.
Thus what is decisive in techne does not lie at all in making and manipulating nor
in the using of means, but rather in the aforementioned revealing. It is as revealing,
and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth Technology is a mode
of revealing. Technology comes to presence [West] in the realm where revealing
and unconcealment takes place, where aletheia, truth, happens. (QCT: 13)

Heidegger has now satisfied himself that the essence of technology lies in revealing,
that it has always involved a way of revealing; he now wishes to examine the difference,
as he sees it, between the current way in which technology reveals (which isnt poietic)
and the previous poietic revealing of older forms of technology.
What is so unique or different then about the modern technological filtration
system which calibrates our interpretative gaze? Why is this particular revealing
so different? Heideggers answer is that the revealing we are dealing with here is a
challenging revealing. Everything is ordered to stand-by; we look on everything as
standing-reserve (QCT: 17). Heidegger suggests that everything is captured and made
to stand as part of this standing-reserve by this challenging revealing. The world and
nature are revealed for us in precisely this way. More distressing still is the fact that no
one seems to be responsible for this development, no person or collective has ordained
that things should be as such. And yet, this situation has come about as a result of
us; it is human beings that are responsible for the situation we find ourselves in. But
to say that we are responsible is to say that we have responded to a situation we find
ourselves thrown into. We are reacting and projecting in ways which do not reflect