Heidegger’s Technology Notebooks in the 1940s–1950s
Andrew J. Mitchell
Heidegger’s technology notebooks in the late 1940s and early 1950s give us new insight into his thinking of technology by highlighting and emphasizing, like nowhere else in his oeuvre, the role of the machine therein. These notebooks were published in 2009 as the third part of volume 76 of his Gesamtausgabe (Collected Edition), entitled Guiding Thoughts on the Emergence of Metaphysics, Modern Science, and Contemporary Technology.1 The volume runs the gamut from readings of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in its first part, to comparisons between Descartes and Newton, with reflections on Heisenberg in its second, to Heidegger’s notes on the steam engine and the automobile in the third. Taken together they present something of a trajectory from the Ancient Greek conception of technê, through the modern natural-scientific experimental method, to the rise of technological replaceability in contemporary life.
What I am calling the “technology notebooks” consist of eleven separate collections of notes. These notebooks include material written in preparation for both Insight Into That Which Is, the 1949 Bremen lectures which inaugurated his post-war thinking of technology and introduced its vocabulary (“positionality,” “standing reserve,” “challenging-forth,” “danger,” etc.), as well as preliminary studies for the famed 1953 lecture, “The Question Concerning Technology.” In the technology notebooks, we encounter a Heidegger who is working through readings in the philosophy of technology while applying himself to thinking through the transformative effects of machines on industry and society.
Unfortunately, since the notebooks do not allow for an accurate dating of their contents, claims about the Entstehungsgeschichte of various terms and ideas are rather difficult. All of the notebooks but the first can be dated after 1949. The first notebook, “Technê and Technology” (GA 76: 285–318) is dated on its cover “1940f.” (see GA 76: 401). As the shift between Heidegger’s thinking of machination and that of positionality (Gestell) occurs sometime in this period, the notebooks should help us better understand this change.
Reviewing these notebooks today, one is struck by the repeat emphasis on machines and Heidegger’s interest in quite specific industrial machines. These notes thus allow Heidegger to respond to two quite distinct groups of critics. First, for many philosophers of technology, Heidegger is dismissed as someone who does not appreciate the variety of technologies operative today, but instead reduces all to manifestations of one overarching hegemonic “essence of technology” itself. These notebooks give the lie to such heavy-handed criticisms of Heidegger and show him aware not just of a variety of devices transforming the world as he knew it, but also of a substantive and burgeoning literature in the philosophy of technology.2
Second, critics like Jacques Derrida argue that Heidegger’s views on technology evince a “fear” of the ontological dimension becoming “contaminated” with the ontic. Heidegger is a thinker of purity on this reading, he wishes to keep a realm of pure being entirely free of particular beings. And Heidegger’s statements around technology are the source of Derrida’s worry, particularly when Heidegger proclaims that “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological” (QT 4).3 For Derrida, this shows the desire to quarantine the realm of essence (technology as such) away from the realm of devices (the technological). From the perspective of the technology notebooks we are considering here, Heidegger’s emphasis on machines and the ontological role he assigns them takes a good deal of the air out of both groups of critics: Heidegger considers particular machines, he acknowledges differences between them, and he draws ontological consequences from them.
I will not pursue these objections any further, choosing instead to focus on what must stand at the center of any response to such criticisms: the machine. Across the notebooks, we find Heidegger struggling to articulate the exact relation between the machine and machination (in the 1930s and early 1940s), or the machine and positionality (late 1940s onward). The machine is ultimately something of a privileged example for helping us better understand this shift in Heidegger’s thinking as a whole across these volatile years.
In what follows, I will trace this thinking of the machine as it emerges from Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche (§1) and leads Heidegger to situate the machine in the context of machination (§2). After the war, the shift in Heidegger’s views of technology lead to a recontextualizing of the machine in terms of positionality (§3). With this, we have arrived at Heidegger’s mature thinking of technology and the role of the machine therein. I conclude with some thoughts on the human’s relation to technology and the machine’s place in enabling this (§4).
The concern with force (Kraft) links the technology notebooks to the Nietzsche lectures and essays of the mid-to-late 1930s and early 1940s. Kraft is what we might call a sub-species of will to power, an application of will to power in the field of the mechanical or physical.4 Will to power appears as “force” there, in the mechanical realm, while appearing differently elsewhere, as law, for example, in the legal realm, or as rank in institutional hierarchies. For his part, Heidegger tends to use the term Kraft for machines and particular beings at the ontic level, and use the term Macht at the ontological level; “power [Macht] as essence of being” as he will say (GA 76: 293). Being shows itself to us today as power, as force.
For Nietzsche, the world is will to power, or “force.” Heidegger rhetorically inquires of Nietzsche: “What is the pervasive character of the world? The answer is ‘force’” (N2: 87). Force is inherently limited, finite, but subject to infinite combinations. These combinations are ever only momentary (the finitude of force also means that it does not last forever), never reaching a balance point: “There is no equilibrium of force” (N2: 88). The world is thus composed of forces constantly vying for ascendancy, assembling, disassembling, and reassembling anew. The world of force is ultimately the world as will to power: “What Nietzsche calls ‘force’ becomes clear to him in later years as ‘will to power’ ” (N2: 87). Heidegger assigns an ontological valence to force so understood: “the essence of force is the original essence of the beingness of beings [Seiendheit des Seienden]” (GA 6.2: 402/EP 38, tm). Force is on the level of beings.
To think force in terms of will to power is to think force as striving to overcome itself, exceed itself, expand and express itself. Power (or “force” in the mechanical realm) is always working to expand itself. A being expands itself by appropriating and assimilating what lies outside of it. For Heidegger’s sense of will to power, this is a two-part process: the particular, finite, and delimited being that would expand itself must: (1) overstep that limit to appropriate what lies outside it, and (2) thereby create and maintain a new, expanded limit and border for subsequent oversteppings.
The Nietzschean, ontological underpinnings of this world of force remain operative when Heidegger’s concerns turn to the capture and production of force by means of machines. Such machines inhibit the free play of force in order to shape it and direct it along desired channels to where it can be particularly effective. Heidegger elsewhere refers to this as the “first” technological revolution, consisting in “the transition from manual technology and manufacture to engine technology [Kraftmaschinentechnik].”5
The notebooks help us better understand this connection between force and the machine:
Force and consumption—need—economy
Industry—frugality—“economical”
greatest effect with least expenditure
Machine—the essence of this is stamped by force in a determinate way
(“subjective”—in terms of power), and indeed by means of an outfitting
not of itself alone, but rather of a “mechanism”; what is this?
(GA 76: 288)
The measurable, quantitative character of force ensures that it be evaluated in terms of maximizing its effect while minimizing the effort needed to produce that effect. This is impressed upon the machine such that it is built for the economy of force. In a section entitled “Machine Technology,” Heidegger notes: “For this is not essentially the ‘machine’ in the formal kinematic sense of Releaux’s (for example, a grind stone assembly), but rather that the machine has a motorized character, which is essentially related to force production [Krafterzeugung]” (GA 76: 308). It is not the kinematic quality that makes a machine, but its motor. The motor produces force (Kraft). Heidegger is fascinated by the idea of the Krafterzeugungsmaschine, the power generator, which stands as the representative machine for him. The key to the machine is force production.
And the key to force production is its homogeneity. Force and power are now detached from their natural analogs, horse power, man power. Force is quantified into units severed from the particularities of such contexts (the horse or the man). The result is a homogeneity of force that renders it utterly replaceable, utterly exchangeable for entirely equal units of force:
What belongs to the planning and carrying out of the production of force? Force as such—separated from animal and man power [Tier- und Menschenkraft]; (Forces of nature)—simply to use what is present-at-hand (water wheel, windmill, wind for the sail). “Forces” “artificially” (τέχνη) produced. Making available for any and all goals and for the most comfortable and cheapest application. Machines, that first produce “force” (what kind of production is this?) and unleashed forces once again captured in installations [Einrichtungen], held as utterly replaceable.
(GA 76: 291–292)
The force that has been homogenized is then put through a series of unleashings and recapturings as it moves from one machine to another linked to it. There is never one machine. This system of machines sharing in force is termed by Heidegger a “mechanism” (Mechanismus). Such a mechanism is the interlinking of machines, whereby the force produced by one is used to fuel another machine to produce something else in turn. One example from many: “Locomotive: train tracks, steel mills, iron production, bellows machines. What is the basic referential context in all this?” (GA 76: 302). The basic context is the mechanism interlocking these machines. A mechanism would be a compound or composite machine, “a machine of machines” (GA 76: 306), as Heidegger terms it.
The mechanism of machines predetermines what new machines can arise. The current state of the mechanism determines how that mechanism may be expanded in the future. What seem like fortuitous “inventions” in the field of science and technology are always already sketched in advance by the state of the mechanism. Every machine implies another. As such, the machine:
can never be thought on its own, even if historically such may seem to be the case, for example, that the steam engine [Dampfmaschine] was “invented” for a particular purpose and scope. In truth, the essence of this scope—its machinational character (economic, industrial, “technological,” scientific) in regard to the objectification that it has mastered—is still veiled. That the invented machine can then be “applied” in a wider region, lies less in the essence of the machine concerned than in that region itself, through the truth of which the machine itself is determined like an extension of it.
(GA 76: 308)
Mechanism includes force producing machines, to be sure, but it also produces something else: needs (Bedürfnisse). These notebooks show a Heidegger grappling with the sociological effects of industrialization like nowhere else in his writings: “With force production there goes hand-in-hand need production; new needs not as only a consequence, but instead in the essence of force production” (GA 76: 308). The force that is produced is to be used, but use is determined by need. The mechanism interlinking these machines interlinks desires. The best way to guarantee increased force production is to inculcate new needs for that force. In this way, force keeps getting urged beyond itself and new discoveries and breakthroughs keep being made. We need only think here of the way in which internet capability has migrated from computers to cell phones and on to standard kitchen appliances to see evidence of this proliferation.
This ever-expanding force is will to power. It constantly drives itself outward in what Heidegger terms both an “empowering” and “overpowering” of itself. Such an “overpowering” of power Heidegger diagnoses as the essence of being itself:
That human and animal work power [Arbeitskraft] and forms of labor are replaced by a mechanism is only a consequence of the dislocation of the human into “subjectivity” by means of the empowering of power [die Ermächtigung der Macht] as the essence of being. (Self-assertion in the midst of beings let loose into machination.) Because technology as the increasing force of force [Verkraftung der Kraft] installs [einrichtet] the empowering of power [die Ermächtigung der Macht] in beings, and is this installation [Einrichtung], for this reason even the over-powering that is characteristic of all power [die alle Macht auszeichnende Übermächtigung] is appropriate to it— in the form of expansion and destruction.
(GA 76: 293)
As mentioned above, will to power operates in two stages, one of overstepping and the other of maintaining. This is the nature of will to power and thus it is the nature of technology as well. The force of technology is the power of the will to power. It is to be understood as such. Technology will thus suffer as power suffers, through expansion and destruction. Heidegger does not say “expansion and contraction” because contraction is not an option for the will to life of will to power. Heidegger seems to be trying to think together force’s overcoming of itself in will to power with the power producing machine, the generator (Krafterzeugungsmaschine). Nietzsche’s conception of force informs this thinking of the machine.
Heidegger’s thinking of the machine is at first tied to the metaphysics of force found in his reading of Nietzsche. The machine is thus embedded in Heidegger’s thinking of the 1930s. Heidegger’s interest in the machine is tied to a larger concern with “machination” (Machenschaft), an idea central to the Contributions to Philosophy (1936–38). In many regards, it is a forerunner to his thinking of technology as positionality (Gestell) in his post-war writings.6 Machination names a collection of institutions, tendencies, and attitudes that objectify the world. Technology is one of these processes and attitudes for Heidegger in the 1930s, but not the most important one. After the war, this changes. Heidegger explains the term “machination” in the Contributions:
In the context of the question of being, it does not name a kind of human conduct but a mode of the essencing [Wesung] of being. The pejorative connotation should also be avoided, even if machination does promote the non-essence [Unwesen] of being. Yet even this non-essence itself, since it is essential to the essence, is never to be depreciated.
Machination should not be thought as some kind of action on the part of the human (scheming and plotting, for example). Rather, machination is on the part of being, it is a way in which being gives itself to us. It gives itself to us as machination. Much turns here on Heidegger’s notion of “essence” (Wesen). Without going in to too much detail, essence for Heidegger is a way of being whereby the entity in question which appears in the world, nonetheless maintains an aspect of concealment to itself. The essencing being does not give itself completely, it is not utterly available (as is the case with the standing reserve), nor is it objective (as is the case with machination). Being’s essencing thus includes its own obfuscation in beings insofar as being itself is machination. Machination is a way of being’s essencing, a way in which being gives us beings that in turn distort its own essence. For this reason, we are not to depreciate machination, so much as attend to it in greater detail. Heidegger continues in the Contributions:
Instead the name machination [Machenschaft] should immediately refer to making [Machen] (ποίησις, τέχνη), which we assuredly know as a human activity. This latter, however, is itself possible precisely only on the grounds of an interpretation of beings in which their makeability [Machbarkeit] comes to the fore, so much so that constancy and presence [Beständigkeit und Anwesenheit] become the specific determinations of beingness [Seiendheit].
(GA 65: 100)
Machination names a regime of processes whereby beings come to be understood objectively. Two points are important here. (1) Beings are understood as constant and present. Their correlate being is here understood as “beingness,” a distorted notion of being that arises through an abstraction of commonalities found among beings. (2) Beings are thought in terms of their makeability. This entails that what exists does so because we have made it. Existence becomes subordinated to our decisions regarding what is to be made. Makeability implies the arbitrary whim of the maker who may just as easily be the destroyer. The world is plastic, ironic.
In the technology notebooks, Heidegger thinks the machine as the representative or exemplary entity of machination. Heidegger remarks, “Machine technology (industry): Preliminary indication of being as machination” (GA 76: 287). He goes still farther. The power generator (Krafterzeugungsmaschine) brings machination to power:
The power generating machine [Krafterzeugungsmaschine]—what is essentially different here? Not somehow to transfer the old [sense of] machine onto everything, but rather the thought of the machine [Maschinengedanke] is essentially different. Unleashing and capturing of forces, such that they take effect in themselves and that reality [Wirklichkeit] becomes a makeable effectiveness [machsame Wirksamkeit], through which being as machination comes to power, because, by machination, everything is already power.
(GA 76: 307)
Machination (Machenschaft) fits the world as power (Macht) and thus the machine that emblematizes it. The unleashing and capturing of force is an instance of the overstepping and self-maintenance of power: “The capturing and unleashing of forces as the way in which an empowering that harbors power empowers machination” (GA 76: 293). Everything is power, being is power. Machination is part of that transformation.
But when everything is power, then this changes how we have to think about force. Force was previously situated in a particular understanding of reality, a mathematical and mechanical one. From outside that realm, one could enter it and deploy force for one’s own purposes. This is no longer the case:
Technology discloses not only nature as force, but rather beings as a whole—even urge (the living) and power (humankind)—are reckoned as force, and this means that force is transformed into something essential; force is no longer force, the machine is not a machine [Kraft-maschine], but the establishment of machination itself in the unconditioned . (Will to will)
(GA 76: 296)
There is no place outside of force from which to direct and control it. We ourselves have been subsumed into the play of forces. The ever expandable and couplable machine epitomizes the nature of beings today under the sway of machination. Machination is established unconditionally, nothing can restrict or prevent its constant expansion and increase, nothing lies outside it.
After the war, Heidegger’s worry over the objectification operative in machination is supplanted by a new concern over replaceability. This is the work of positionality (Ge-Stell), which is the essence of technology as Heidegger now understands it. The technology notebooks show us a shift in the thinking of the machine as it accommodates the new paradigm of positionality. An entry from the notebooks emphasizes the difference between the paradigms: “Technology and objectivity. Standing reserve in positionality. Object in representation” (GA 76: 320). The machine will now be understood in the context of Heidegger’s post-war reflections on technology and positionality. One caveat to the following is in order: since Heidegger uses the term “technology” throughout the notebooks and since the dating of them is rather uncertain, particularly with the first notebook (dated 1940f.), it is difficult to know in all cases whether we are dealing with “technology” as one office of machination among others (the view of the 1930s to 1940s), or with that “technology” whose essence is positionality (the view of 1949 onward).
The notebooks present technology as enacting and installing the forgetting of being. Technology is thought in terms of an “installation” or “implementation” of something. It operates as an Einrichtung, a word that can have the sense of an institutionalizing or establishing of something, the outfitting of something, setting something up. What technology registers or installs in this way, through institutions and establishments, accomplishes nothing less than the forgetting of being itself:
Technology is the installation ‘of’ the unassailable forgetting of being, i.e. ‘of’ the un-guarding [Ver-wahr-losung] of beings as such and as a whole. In terms of beings and their operations [Betreibung], technology is the highest form of representing [Vor-stellung] and outfitting [Bei-stellung] of beings in their objectivity.
(GA 76: 311)
Technology installs an order of representing and outfitting that objectifies beings.
In this objectification, what is forgotten is the essencing of being, that beings need not always be objects before a subject. By objectifying beings, technology ensures that beings remained trapped within their objective shell, isolated from their concomitant subject who stands over against them. So construed, beings are relationless, trapped in themselves. Such beings are said to be “abandoned” by being, which is taken to mean that they proffer themselves as though they were independent and self-standing without any relation to being (though we should note that “abandonment” is itself a minimal relation, however much abandoned beings might present themselves to the contrary). As Heidegger writes in these notebooks, “Technology is like the being without being (Seyn)” (GA 76: 290). Technology constructs a world of beings independent of being. There are only beings and beinghood to be had. The world of relations is foreclosed in such an environment, what is left is a desert (Wüste). Technology, then, is likewise “the installation of desertification [Verwüstung]. This is no value judgment and, beyond this, no fruitless provocation to a childish denial of ‘technology’ ” (GA 76: 304). These changes effected by technology go hand in hand with the world of force described by Nietzsche. Technological installation completes the agenda of metaphysics, which reaches its climax in the thought of will to power in Nietzsche: “Technology is thus the authentic completion of ‘metaphysics’; the accompanying doctrines of ‘metaphysics’ (Nietzsche) are essential to it and no addendum” (GA 76: 294).
But we should not confuse technology itself with such machines and devices. Technology is distinct from these for technology is a way of truth. Heidegger thinks technology in terms of τέχνη as understood by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics VI, where it functions as a way of unconcealing. Because Heidegger understands unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) as the fitting translation of the Greek word for truth, ἀλήθεια, technology is to be understood as a way of disclosing beings, a way of truth. A notebook entry entitled “Modern Technology” considers this as
the jointure of the truth of the non-essence of modern metaphysics; no “means” and no “manner,” no “goal” and no “cultural appearance,” no foundation and no crown, not experienceable as “ratio,” and not perceivable in the machine, rather [at the basis of all this lies] the essencing and determining truth of being (Seyn). Τέχνη as ἀληθεύειν.
(GA 76: 287)
Our fascination with the machine would obstruct our apprehension of technology as such. Technology does not originate in the machine, either: “this technology is originally associated with neither the machine, nor mathematical natural science” (GA 76: 290). Technology is originally associated with truth.
Technology is viewed as the way in which the truth of being shows itself to us today: “Everywhere we constantly receive confirmation that we inhabit a technological world” (GA 76: 364). Early in the notebooks, this is a matter of subjectivity: “Technology—as the unleashed empowering of power (force) by being (as concealed machination)—a truth of being: namely of the objectivity of unconditioned subjectivity of the most extreme (modern) anthropology” (GA 76: 289). If truth is a way of disclosing, and technology functions as a way of disclosing subjects and objects, then technology is a form of truth, a “truth of being.” But the subject-object distinction is not entirely apropos here, because the most advanced technologies obliterate this distinction. The work of Ernst Jünger, for example, imagines a merger of the organic and the mechanic that would transform the “subject” into the “worker,” a figure that merges perfectly with the mechanized world, as what Jünger terms an “organic construction.” This merger of subject-object marks a shift away from the thought of machination as an objectification of experience. Heidegger writes:
Technology, however, not merely as machine technology, but rather more essentially still, as an “org[anic] construction,” being-historically conceived—not as something alongside something else, also not as a “goal” in the widest sense, but instead as the truth of being [Sein], which joins with and arranges beings.7
(GA 76: 287)
Technology as the truth of being, as the forgetting of being endemic to that truth, pushes for the merger of human and world, the dissolution of subject-object dualism in favor of an organo-mechanic monism.
This technological homogenization within positionality, however, marks a break with machination as objectification. Objectification always entails a subject, and the subject, while inseparable from the object, is nonetheless distinct from it. That distinction can be read as a superiority of the subject over the object. The subject is the active party transforming the passive object. With positionality (das Ge-Stell), that distinction is lost in the homogeneity of what Heidegger will come to term “standing reserve” (Bestand). Here there is no “Gegen” for the Gegenstand (object). The space between subject and object evaporates. Everything is orderable and deliverable standing reserve, the human included.
While machination could be thought with the Nietzschean play of forces, positionality enlists and directs these forces into circuits of replaceability. The notebooks give us this later Heidegger recasting Nietzsche’s role in technology. At the time of his Nietzsche lectures in the 1930s, no mention is made of the machine. For Heidegger at this time, Nietzsche’s place and role at the end of metaphysics has nothing to do with the machine. This changes with the turn to positionality. Now the unending circulation and replacement of the standing reserve is the technological instantiation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same. No such connection is even mentioned in the lecture course on eternal recurrence from 1937. Heidegger writes:
In regard to the requisitioning of the pieces of inventory of the standing reserve into the constancy [Beständigkeit] of the replaceably uniform [Gleich-Förmigen], the essence of positionality is intimated in Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same [Gleichen]. Only Nietzsche could not yet comprehend that with this doctrine he thinks the essence of technology and thinks this essence as the essence of being.
(GA 76: 321)
This circulative recurrence of the same standing reserve across all its channels of supply and demand is now thought as the essence of technology and of being.
These notebooks provide us a fascinating glimpse into the development of this thought of recurrence as implemented in technology. Heidegger’s focus on rotation makes the connection.8 We can trace the effect of rotation across a few passages in the notebooks. The first, entitled “The ‘Automobile’ (in the Essential Sense),” presents the intricacies of the automobile as a mechanism and moves toward a question about rotation and recurrence of a sort:
The conveyance of suitable fuel into propulsion [Antrieb] by the generator itself [Kraftereugungsmaschine] (internal combustion engine).
The generator [Krafterzeugungsmaschine] (force as moving force) is combined with the gas producing apparatus, which is itself active due to the machine, whereby the latter forms a part of the cylinder (the propulsion procuring machine, the factory establishing machine [An- und Betriebsbeschaffungsmaschine]).
And this machine, the automobile, as light as possible (the lowest possible weight for the sake of movement) and thereby increasing motion as quickly as possible to the highest degree.
To what extent is ‘continuous rotational movement [Drehbewegung] the soul of technology’?9 Roller, wheel (that which rotates, such that at the same time the middle point moves forward—car tire).
The repeatability of the same processes and indeed in precisely the same manner—the regular, faultless, form of progression of machine work, driven to the highest degree of refinement.
(The removal of world and earth from beings [ Die Entweltlichung und Enterdung des Seienden ]).
(GA 76: 307)
Here, in a passage about the automobile, Heidegger’s interest is in the translation of motion from the rotational to the rectilinear. In an ancient Greek paradigm, this would be a move from perfect, infinite spherical motion to violent, finite motion. The rotating tire allows the center point of the tire, the axle, to move forward in a straight line. Such transitions are seemingly impossible, but the machine qua rotational engine, makes them almost pedestrian.10 The automobile is not just a mechanism of machines, it functions by the repetition of those same rotational, power generating processes. The repetition of rotational motion is at the heart of the automobile.
This conquest of rotational movement inaugurated by the machine has greater consequences, as Heidegger details. Indeed, rotation seems the key to industrialization in the first place, as a collection of notes entitled “Positionality and the Steam Engine” seem to indicate: “What does power generator [Krafterzeugungsmaschine] mean? What is a generator [Generator]? Energy—to be received in the form of rotational movement (the textile industry). Industrial mechanization” (GA 76: 368). The power generator is tied to rotational movement and Heidegger now links this parenthetically with the textile industry. The same collection of notes takes up the transformations in the textile industry due to industrialization:
Watt’s steam engine [Dampfmaschine], i.e., power generator [Krafterzeugungsmaschine], exists, thus other possibilities of force deployment, but as with weaving and spinning, there is relatively less force required for the propulsion of the individual machines.
For the machine [Kraftmaschine] to be set into operation effectively, and that means profitably, the weaving seats must be arranged together in great number in a particular place; this requires the transplanting of workers (women and children) from the home into the factory, from the country into the city. Textile factories as models for industrial mechanization.
The steam engine more economical in large firms than in small [firms]. Positionality [Ge-Stell] and economy (wares and standing reserve).
(GA 76: 367)
The consequences of rotational energy transform social life. People are moved from the periphery to the center (the cities). This concentration is important for industrialization and why the textile factory can be taken as its model. The division of labor reigns supreme, the engines incorporated into the process speed production, and the output reaches gigantic proportions. Heidegger notes that the use of steam engines is more profitable in large firms. The machine that is based on efficiency, demands monumental proportions to maximize that efficiency. The machine inherently tends to the gigantic, the inhuman, if only in scope.
But Heidegger is not entirely comfortable with this exaltation of the machine. The notebooks voice some hesitations about the central role the machine plays in Heidegger’s thinking during these years (the notebooks show us this more than any other text of Heidegger’s). We see him question the relation of the machine to technology: “In what follows, technology means modern machine technology, more precisely power machine technology [Kraftmaschinentechnik] (insufficient!)” (GA 76: 358). Technology cannot be equated with machine technology. A subsequent passage reflects on the name of the machine: “ The Question concerning Technology : to what extent and in what ways does ‘the machine’ come into question, and indeed the ‘force-machine’ (unclear name—force-ordering-installation [Kraft-bestellungseinrichtung] (control [Steuerung])) in positionality” (GA 76: 361). Here it would seem that the name of the machine (as Kraftmaschine) disguises what is key to the machine, that it is installed. We have already seen how this notion of “installation” is the essence of technology, not any particular machine or collection of machines. But there is more here, it is not simply that Kraftmaschine masks the installation (Einrichtung) of technology, it also omits the fact that this is for a Bestellung, an ordering. Heidegger hesitates over the name “machine” because it does not draw attention to the machine’s function, as an installation for the ordering and delivery of force. This ordering (bestellen) and delivery (zustellen) are key components of positionality (Ge-Stell) for Heidegger. The person that does the ordering would seem to be outside of the machine and in control of it. But for Heidegger’s thinking of positionality, there is no such outside position to be had. The emphasis on “control” (Steuerung) that Heidegger remarks here, will later become a concern with cybernetics (the German word Steuerung echoing the Greek kybernêtês, the helmsman or captain who steers and controls the ship). With cybernetics, human thinking itself becomes mechanized. Heidegger’s comment on “control” only confirms the loss of privilege for the human, endemic to positionality.
Or so it would seem. The human cannot lose any “privilege” it has in regards to technology, if this means the human would be let entirely alone and left unaffected by technology. If technology is being, or the truth of being, a way in which beings are disclosed to us, then we can never be outside technology. Such an outside position would give us the purchase needed to dominate technology once and for all, or, conversely, to be dominated by it. Without that outside position from whence to effect control, the human and technology remain caught up in each other without a clear victor. In an entry entitled, “Technology and the Human,” Heidegger writes:
To what extent an either/or—that the human either “master” technology or technology “enslave” the human—misses the essential questions? The “human” and “technology” both emerge from metaphysics; each can only apparently master the respective other, for they require [bedürfen] each other. Technology neither uses [nützt] “the” human, nor is “this human” “of” technology able to free himself from it.
(GA 76: 286)
The human and technology stand in a relationship that is not one of mastery and slavery. Rather, through their comingling, the two are said to “require” each other, and this requiring is specifically not a using of the other. Heidegger specifies the relation later: “The usual question: ‘Does the human stand in the service of technology or technology in the service of the human?’ is inadequately posed. In truth, the human stands in service of the essence of technology. Which means? (Need)” (GA 76: 343).
Heidegger emphasizes that the human serves the “essence” of technology. Recall that essence is a way of being that is not fully present (the entity is marked by concealment, withholding, closure, non-availability, modesty). If all masters are fully present entities then the essence of technology can be no such master, nor could it be mastered like a fully present entity could be. Relations of dominance do not apply between the human and the essence of technology. An awareness of the essence of technology is also distinct from mere familiarity with technology and with technological devices, in that the awareness of its essence entails knowing that technology is a way in which being gives itself to us today, that the reign of technology is our being-historical dispensation. But all giving and dispensing is likewise a holding back or withdrawal. Understanding technology in this way, that there is concealment here in what has been held back, means catching sight of its essence. It is impossible to “serve” this essence of technology, so Heidegger asks what it would mean to be in such a relation, his answer is “need” (Brauch).
Heidegger has already told us that this need should not be understood as a use. One party does not stand independent of the other which it would then utilize to achieve its purpose. Heidegger’s sense of need is distinct from this. Need for him names a co-belonging, that each party would belong to the other in a particular way. Namely, each party would need the other in order to be itself in the first place. This is not a utilization of the other, since the other does not pre-exist this need. Need names the intermingling of the two, here, the human and the essence of technology. But since the essence of technology lies in its disclosive nature, whereby what is appears as standing reserve, the essence of technology is being itself. Need lies between the human and being.
From Being and Time we are familiar with the thought that without Dasein there is no meaningful being and without being there can be no Dasein. This interrelation is heightened when thought in terms of need. Being needs the human, but not in order to utilize it for anything. Rather, the situation is similar to Schelling’s description of parenthood. A woman has a daughter and she is the cause of the daughter. But before the daughter’s arrival, the woman was not a mother. The daughter is who causes the woman to be a mother. Mother and daughter are reciprocally related to each other. So too the human and being.
To serve the essence of technology is to serve that which is not fully present. Such a service cannot be a subordination because neither party is fully present and empowered to utterly dominate the other. The party that would be subordinated is not fully present for its subordination. The party that would dominate is not fully present as dominant. Service avoids subordination in this because there is no outside position of mastery. The two, the human and being, are so implicated in each other that extraction for mastery is impossible. To serve the essence can thus only mean to let there be an essence in the first place. And this means not to challenge beings to show themselves completely and as available. It means to let beings essence and remain connected to being. It means to understand beings, and being, relationally. And it means to understand ourselves relationally as well. In so doing, we let ourselves be approached by the world. We have shed the shell of both subject and object to enter a field of relations, a field wherein we may be approached by what is, as Heidegger observes: “What concernfully approaches us? [Was geht uns an?] Technology! Question: accordingly, whether and how we are concernfully approached!” (GA 76: 358). It gives itself to us in such moments.
Because technology is a way of being’s own disclosure, because this essencing of technology is nothing eradicable, no matter how far technological devices may proliferate, two things follow: (1) the human can never be so assaulted by technology as to lose this relation to essence, (2) technology can always spread wider and farther, render replaceable more and more of what we consider private, sentimental, or singular; it knows no end point.
The technology notebooks show Heidegger moving beyond his Nietzsche interpretations of the decade prior and forging a connection between Nietzsche’s thinking of force (and recurrence) and the development of the machine. Additionally, the notebooks trace the change in Heidegger’s thinking of the machine as the paradigm of his middle period (machination) gives way to that of his post-war, later period (positionality). Throughout the notebooks, Heidegger is adamant that technology not be confused with the machine. Indeed, this is one of the signal ways to misunderstand technology, as Heidegger states in an entry entitled “ ‘Position’ on ‘Technology’ (‘rejection’? ‘against’?),” which reads: “My thinking is not against ‘technology’ (against the essential (dispensational) thoughtlessness), but rather against the superficiality and cluelessness in the ways that technology is regarded: (1) in terms of machines, apparatuses, and organization, (2) as a means, (3) as something neutrally present-at-hand” (GA 76: 347). Thinking technology in terms of machines is the first superficial view to be listed.
Nevertheless, that technology (as disclosive power of truth) be distinct from machines (as ontic devices) does not mean that it be separable from them. Technology needs machines, in the strong sense of the word need we developed above. If the essence of technology is being, if technology is the work of being as it turns against itself and seeks to push itself into a forgetting of being, then machines are required by it. Technology without machines is like being without beings, impossible. Heidegger ruminates on this in the notebooks: “Technology not through machines, rather machines from the essence of technology. But belonging to that essence how? . . . Positionality—to think this first, at the same time to apply knowledge of the machine” (GA 76: 352). The essence of technology requires that technology be instantiated in the world. It is so instantiated as the machine. Heidegger questions how the machine would belong to the essence of technology, because what is necessary for belonging is that there no longer be encapsulated entities, fully present parties, like subjects and objects, masters, and slaves. The paradox is that the machine, which would seem the entity most removed from being, the entity most responsible for the loss of our relational world, is nonetheless the guardian of the possibility of that relationality.
Technology was not a matter of machines because it was the installing of the machines in the name of the forgetting of being. Now we see that this forgetting could not take place without machines. The machine helps being forget itself, and in so doing helps being be itself. This is the hard thought to think, one that begins from positionality (technology as dispensation of being) without omitting consideration of the machine (its ontic implementation). What Heidegger’s concern with the machine gives us to think is the ontic instantiation of technology such that its essencing is never lost to us, whether this entails a deeper entrenchment of technological dominance or not. Otherwise put, if the machine is installed as the forgetting of being, it is that same machine, or mechanism of machines, that grants us the possibility of being’s remembrance. Heidegger’s technology notebooks bring us into contact with Heidegger as he is first formulating these ideas, ideas that will guide his thinking for decades to come.
1. A translation of the volume is currently being prepared by Andrew J. Mitchell and Christopher Merwin.
2. Heidegger considers the following works across the pages of the notebooks (listed in order of publication): Franz Reuleaux, Theoretische Kinematik: Grundzüge einer Theorie des Maschinenwesens (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1875), Werner Sombart, Technik und Wirtschaft (Dresden: Zahn und Jaensch, 1901), Manfred Schröter, Philosophie der Technik (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1934), Eugen Diesel, Das Phänomen der Technik: Zeugnisse, Deutung und Wirklichkeit (Leipzig: Reclam, 1939), Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Munich: Piper, 1949), Max Bense, Technische Existenz (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1949), Robert Jungk, Die Zukunft hat schon begonnen: Amerikas Allmacht und Ohnmacht (Stuttgart: Scherz und Goverts, 1952).
3. A claim that first appears in these notebooks: “Technology is nothing technological” (GA 76: 345).
4. The term Kraft is translated largely as “force,” but some compounds call for Kraft to be translated by “power” instead. But “power” is the term typically reserved for Macht in discussions of Nietzsche. Whenever I translate Kraft as something other than “force,” I give the German in brackets.
5. The second revolution, as per this 1962 speech, is that of cybernetics. Martin Heidegger, “Traditional Language and Technological Language,” trans. Wanda Torres Gregory, Journal of Philosophical Research, Vol. 23 (1998), p. 132.
6. For a discussion of the differences between machination and positionality, see my The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015), ch. 1, “The Technological Challenge to Things.”
7. Heidegger’s text gives the abbreviation “org. Konstruktion” which the volume editor, Claudius Strube, expands to “organisierte Konstruktion” (organized construction). I am instead expanding this abbreviation to “organische Konstruktion” (organic construction), which is a key term for Ernst Jünger’s considerations of technology in Der Arbeiter (The Worker). Jünger is concerned with the creation of a new “type” (Typus) that would seamlessly fit the technologically transformed world he diagnoses. He writes, “We see it [the new type] emerge within seemingly quite distinct formations, which provisionally and in all generality are to be characterized as organic constructions.” Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt, in Sämtliche Werke , Vol. 8, Essays II (Stuttgart, Klett- Cotta, 1981), 123. Heidegger repeatedly stresses the role of “organic construction” in his own reading of Jünger; for one such instance see “ Die organische Konstruktion ” in GA 90: 201–203.
8. For a better understanding of rotation’s role in the industrial revolution, see Helmut Müller-Sievers, The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), part 1, “The Prehistory and Metaphysics of the Cylinder,” 3–55.
9. A citation from the inventor of the diesel engine, Eugen Diesel, Das Phänomen der Technik: Zeugnisse, Deutung und Wirklichkeit (Leipzig: Reclam, 1939), 65.
10. In a certain sense, technology works in the opposite direction, from the finite to the infinite, from the fallen to the perfect. The constant circulation of the replaceable standing reserve attempts to achieve a full and perfect presence in all places at once. Circulation would be an idealization seeking to recapture a fullness of presence that never was.
Bense, Max. 1949. Technische Existenz. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt.
Diesel, Eugen. 1939. Das Phänomen der Technik: Zeugnisse, Deutung und Wirklichkeit , 65. Leipzig: Reclam.
Heidegger, Martin. 1998. Traditional Language and Technological Language. Wanda Torres Gregory, Journal of Philosophical Research 23: 132.
———. 2012. Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event). Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
———. Forthcoming. Guiding Thoughts on the Emergence of Metaphysics, Modern Science, and Contemporary Technology . Trans. Andrew J. Mitchell and Christopher D. Merwin. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Jaspers, Karl. 1949. Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte. Munich: Piper.
Jünger, Ernst. 1981. Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt. In Sämtliche Werke, Essays II 8: 123. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
Jungk, Robert. 1952. Die Zukunft hat Schon Begonnen: Amerikas Allmacht und Ohnmacht . Stuttgart: Scherz und Goverts.
Mitchell, Andrew J. 2015. The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Müller-Sievers, Helmut. 2012. “The Prehistory and Metaphysics of the Cylinder”. In The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century, 3–55. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Reuleaux, Franz. 1875. Theoretische Kinematik: Grundzüge Einer Theorie des Maschinenwesens . Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn.
Schröter, Manfred. 1934. Philosophie der Technik. Munich: Oldenbourg.
Sombart, Werner. 1901. Technik und Wirtschaft. Dresden: Zahn und Jaensch.
Andrew J. Mitchell - "The Question Concerning the Machine" from Heidegger on Technology