Revealing and Concealment in Technology

For the Greeks, techne meant both craft and art — the skilled bringing-forth of something that does not appear on its own. The silversmith who forms the cup does not impose his will on the silver; he lets the form appropriate to the material come forth through his skill. This is poiesis: a bringing-into-presence that collaborates with the material, allowing it to stand in its own finished presence. Techne in this sense is a kind of letting-be — a disclosure that respects the nature of what is being brought forth. It is continuous with, not opposed to, physis.

Modern Enframing conceals the possibility of all other revealing: the thing as thing, the river as river, the human being as human being rather than human resource. More fundamentally, it conceals the fact that it is itself a mode of revealing — presenting itself instead as simply the way things are, the natural and inevitable consequence of scientific progress and rational organisation. The danger Heidegger diagnoses is not that technology will destroy the world but that it will eliminate from the human horizon any relationship to beings other than the challenging-ordering that technology demands.

Hölderlin's line "where the danger is, there grows also the saving power" governs Heidegger's most hopeful analysis of technology. The saving power does not come from outside the danger but from within it: Gestell, as a destining of being, carries within itself the possibility of its own transformation. The highest possibility within the technological age is that Enframing might be encountered as such — recognised as a mode of revealing rather than as the totality of reality — and that this recognition might open a space for other modes of dwelling and thinking. Art, and above all poetry, is where Heidegger locates this possibility.

The essay "The Turning" (Die Kehre), published alongside "The Question Concerning Technology" in 1954, develops the analysis of the saving power within Enframing. Heidegger's debt to Hölderlin — particularly the hymns "Patmos" and "The Rhine" — runs through all his later work on technology and art.