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The Question Concerning Technology

Only when insight brings itself disclosingly to pass, only when the coming to presence of technology lights up as Enframing, do we discern how, in the ordering of the standing-reserve, the truth of Being remains denied as world. Only then do we notice that all mere willing and doing in the mode of ordering steadfastly persists in injurious neglect. In this same way all mere organizing of the world conceived and represented historiographically in terms of universality remains truthless and without foundation. All mere chasing after the future so as to work out a picture of it through calculation in order to extend what is present and half-thought into what, now veiled, is yet to come, itself still moves within the prevailing attitude belonging to technological, calculating representation. All attempts to reckon existing reality morphologically, psychologically, in terms of decline and loss, in terms of fate, catastrophe, and destruction, are merely technological behavior. That behavior operates through the device of the enumerating of symptoms whose standing-reserve can be increased to infinity and always varied anew. Such analyses of the "situation" do not notice that they are working only according 1;0 the meaning and manner of technological dissecting, and that they thus furnish to the technological consciousness the historiographical-technological presentation of happening commensurate with that consciousness. But no historiographical representation of history as happening ever brings us into the proper relation to destining, let alone into the essential origin of destining in the disclosing coming-to-pass of the truth of Being that brings everything into its own.

All that is merely technological never arrives at the essence of technology. It cannot even once recognize its outer precincts.

Therefore, as we seek to give utterance to insight into that which is, we do not describe the situation of our time. It is the constellation of Being that is uttering itself to us.

But we do not yet hear, we whose hearing and seeing are perishing through radio and film under the rule of technology. The


Martin Heidegger (GA 11) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays