TECHNOLOGY

treasures to humans. Next, technology positions (stellen) and orders (bestellen) the yields of nature so that they are available and disposable to humans. Whatever is so positioned and ordered becomes a resource (der Bestand). Finally, Heidegger gathers this entire way of treating and disclosing nature under the title of the framework (das Gestell) – the essence of technology.

Heidegger’s fifth part discusses the relation of modern science to the essence of technology. He restates the point made in the Conversations that (the essence of) technology is prior to science, and he does so without the earlier scruples about the strictly disclosive character of science. Instead he claims for the sciences the aggressive approach to nature that goes well with technology, but poorly with science.

The sixth step takes Heidegger to the framework of technology as destiny and to the question of how humans are involved in the dispensation of that framework. Destiny is neither an inevitable fate that descends on humanity, Heidegger claims, nor the result of human willing. Disclosure of destiny and human freedom are one and the same.

There is, however, a twofold danger to destiny – the concern of the seventh step. One is the danger that human being reduces itself to a resource and in so appearing to have taken total control encounters nothing any more but itself. The other is the danger that the disclosure of the framework forecloses every other dispensation and conceals that it too is a disclosure.

Still, the framework is a disclosure. It involves human being. And it therefore harbors the possibility of a saving power. This is the eighth and concluding step of the essay. But given the possibility of saving, Heidegger asks more directly: “How can this happen?” (GA 7: 54). In the reply, there is a scarcely recognizable reference to “The Thing”: “Here and now and in what is inconspicuous” (im Geringen) (GA 7: 54). The inconspicuous presence of the thing is the concluding point of the essay on “The Thing.” But this trace of the thing in the technology essay is all but obscured by the discussion of art that Heidegger thinks is our best hope, since art is both akin to the essence of technology and “fundamentally different” from it (GA 7: 39).

In 1962, Heidegger once more published "The Question Concerning Technology," this time under separate cover along with the fourth Bremen lecture, "The Turn." In the prefatory remark he acknowledges their origin in the Bremen lectures. Of "The Question" he says that it is an enlarged version of the second lecture. The fourth lecture, "The Turn," is unchanged, he says further. We can now see that his last remark is accurate. "The Question," however, though enlarged in some tarts (parts one and two, for example), is quite different, from "The Framework" (das Ge—Stell) in the Bremen version.

"The Question" is entirely rewritten. There are only a few verbatim sentences left from "The Framework." Compared with “The Framework.” “The Question” is less immediate. less impassioned, less involved in its terminology and innocent of all the direct references to "The Thing." Heidegger must have been concerned to publish a measured and simplified analysis of technology that was not susceptible to easy dismissal on the grounds that his presentation of technology was hopelessly mixed up with a nostalgic invocation of a thing and a world that were irrevocably past. Nor did he want to be accused of cultural prejudice and partisanship.

To speak in more detail, Heidegger added the notion of the path of thinking and of ancient making as revealing to disarm the reader of what Heidegger took to be unhelpful beliefs in cogent argument and in making as manufacturing. In the analysis

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