It is a question raised on all sides and always with a sense of urgency. On it hinges nothing less than the survival of the species man and the planet earth. Yet the question concerning technology is usually posed within a purely technical framework as one to be debated solely by technicians. Technological problems, we say, require technological solutions which no layman can fashion or fathom. Just as there are "technical philosophical" questions which none but the philosopher can answer, so are there "technical technological" problems that the philosopher had best let alone. Surely technology and philosophy are as far apart as any two fields could possibly be.
Historians and social scientists define "modern technology" as the application of power machinery to production. They locate its beginnings in eighteenth-century England, where large coal deposits provide a source of energy for the production of steam, which in turn propels machinery in textile and other mills. But already at this relatively primitive stage of development the nexus of events becomes so complicated that nobody can neatly separate cause from effect or even establish the customary hierarchy of causes. Everything is jumbled together into inscrutable "factors"—revolutionary discoveries in the natural sciences, detection and extraction of energy resources, invention of mechanical devices and chemical processes, availability of investment capital, improved means of transportation and communication, land enclosures, mechanization of agriculture, concentration of unskilled labor, a happy combination of this-worldly and otherworldly incentives—and the age of modern technology is off and running before anyone can catch their breath and raise a question.
On December 1, 1949, Heidegger delivered four lectures to the Bremen Club under the general title "Insight into What Is." Each lecture had its own title: "The Thing," "The Enframing," "The Danger," "The Turning." Heidegger read the first two to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, "The Thing" on June 6, 1950, and "The Enframing," completely