ALBERT BORGMANN

Heidegger made his first public appearance on December 1, 1949, at the unlikely venue of a gentlemen’s club in Bremen, founded in 1781. Under the overall title of Insight into What Is (GA 79), he presented the fruits of his thinking since 1935 in four lectures:

1 The Thing (Das Ding).
2 The Framework (Das Ge—stell).
3 The Danger (Die Gefahr).
4 The Turning (Die Kehre).

These presentations contained the substance of Heidegger’s mature philosophy, and although Heidegger continued to think, write, and speak for another twenty—seven years, little regarding technology was added. As before, his writings on being, thinking, language, poetry, and some of his great predecessors by far outweighed in quantity what he said and published on technology after the war, and it is this massive material that has chiefly concerned the Heideggerians and postmodernists. But his enduring legacy may well he his insights into the framework of technology and his reminders of the fourfold nature of the thing.

Remarkably, Heidegger seems to have been unsure of the cohesiveness and persuasiveness of the Bremen lectures, for he never had them published as a whole during his lifetime. In 1954, he published the second lecture under the title "The Question Concerning Technology" and the first under he same title, "The Thing," in a collection of essays(GA 7: 9–40, 157–79). However, these two Bremen lectures were grouped in different parts of the anthology and out of sequence, and without any indication of their original connection, "The Question Concerning Technology" was rendered in English in 1977 in an unfortunate translation that has given us the neologisms of “enframing’ (das Gestell, better the framework) and “standing-reserve” (der Bestand, better resources)(Heidegger 1977: 3–35).

The essay falls into roughly eight parts, or perhaps we should say steps, for Heidegger begins by portraying his investigation of technology as the building of a path. Next he turns to the common understanding of technology as a neutral instrument under the control of humans. The neutral sense is both instrumental and anthropological. It is correct, but not true, i.e. not revealing. He proposes to get to the true sense via the correct sense.

The third part, then, analyses the notion of instrumentality to reach the truth or the essence of technology. Instrumentality is traced to causality; causality is explicated in its fourfold Aristotelian mode – the material cause in Heidegger’s example is silver, the formal cause is the shape of a sacrificial bowl, the final form or purpose is worship, and the efficient cause is the silversmith. Heidegger describes the process of making the bowl to have us realize that the silversmith does not so much produce the bowl as he brings it forward into the open. His work is a disclosure or revelation.

Having argued that revelation underlies production, Heidegger, in his fourth step, invites us to think of technology as a kind of revealing as well. He describes the particular mode of disclosure that is technology and, very importantly, the revealing that modern technology constitutes. The description articulates the five key terms of his philosophy of technology. Modern technology challenges (herausfordern) nature to yield its

428