Continental Philosophy

The Question Concerning Technology

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Martin Heidegger

1954

This collection of essays poses the question of technology not as a practical problem to be managed but as a destining of Being — the defining event of the modern epoch. Heidegger analyses how modern technology is not a neutral instrument but a way of disclosing the world: everything, including nature and human beings, becomes a standing-reserve (Bestand) ordered and available for unlimited exploitation. The ruling structure of this disclosure is Gestell — Enframing — which conceals all other possibilities of revealing. Yet the danger, Heidegger argues, carries within itself a saving power, accessible only through a thinking that has stepped back from the will to dominate.