He moves on to expand upon the first definition of technology as a means to an end and explains just how the final result is achieved, or “caused,” and thus introduces the four modes of causality. The four ways are “responsible” for bringing something into presence, poiesis – the revealing of that which has not been revealed yet, which brings us to achieving “truth.” Truth in this case meaning the revealing or “unconcealment.” “Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens” (13), which brings him to the definition of the root of the word “technology” – techne, a revealing, or bringing-forth. In this he further defines technology as not just the making (as in the manufacturing process), but as having an expertise: “to be entirely at home in something, to understand and be expert in it” (13).

He goes on further to distinguish early technology from modern technology. Although it is still a revealing, rather than being a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis, it is a challenging, “which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such” (14), which introduces the idea of a “standing-reserve” and man using nature as such.

Then he moves on to “Enframing” which he goes on about for quite a number of pages, but I still don’t quite get what exactly he means by it. These are the parts I had to go back to and re-read multiple times but I still don’t have a clear picture.

I am going to go through a play by play of my interpretations of some key statements.

Heidegger claims we have to reevaluate our definition of technology as our current definition doesn’t put us in contact with its essence. He then looks at our responsibility regarding technology (that is, to spur it on) and states we have to involve the full telos of any object we create when considering its creation. He mentions the word Physis (which I had not heard before) and explains it as a blossoming / blooming. Picasso stated he thought the greatest mind was one that could take normal objects and rearrange them to create something else. An example of this is his ‘bulls head’ sculpture, made from a bike seat and handle bars:

Heidegger then says technologies job is a way of revealing; the revealing of truth, which he defines as ‘the correctness of an idea’. The end of p13 to p14 depicts the change in mindset towards the world when we went from pre-agrarian societies to post-agrarian (to nation/state, to empire) and eventually arrived at industrial. Many empires fell because they used up all their resources, they farmed unconscientiously. Even though these societies did this, they didn’t fully look at the earth as a resource to be squandered as they didn’t have a mass way of mining the raw fuel and building products (coal/steal) the earth held. Our worldview used to be based on a windmill mindset – waiting for the forces of nature to occur and then harness these energies; the energies floating around, going un-used; harnessing them in an unobtrusive slip-steam style. We then started mining coal, seeing the earth as a body of energy that can be chipped away at and used. Heidegger uses the term ‘suns warmth’ as a synonym for coal, juxtaposing the two mindsets; stating “It is stockpiled; that is, it is on call, ready to deliver the sun’s warmth that is stored in it.” (My underlinings).

The growth from tribe to city state to empire to nation is directly correlated to the energy the people have available to them (i.e. Zebra’s can’t be tamed due to their flighty nature, cows can be. People that are born into climates that sustain tamable animals and easily harvestable crop, like corn, will quickly advance to higher social orders. Hunter and gatherer tribes exist to this day because they occupy an inhospitable environment). The speed that technologies advance in these societies also relies on the energy available (Jared Diamonds premise of Guns Germs and Steal rides on a question to which that was his answer). Societies started with an extreme ‘harness the powers and energies that float around us’ mindset which is, arguably, a very spirit-invoking view of the world. We then turned to an industrial ‘grab the chunks of energy from the ground and use them at our convenience’ mindset. We moved from a ‘whenever we are given’ to a ‘whenever we feel like taking’ mindset towards the earth (or energy); from spiritual-driven (archaic/magic/mythic) to human-driven (French existentialism – Sartre. I haven’t read much in-depth outside of him though so I’m being naïve but using him as example).

We now live in an interesting time because the windmill mindset is coming back, with many wind-generators adorning our hilltops. That pre-industrial mindset is started to crawl back into society, and the industrial is not withering but perhaps bettering itself in reference to the devastation we have wrought on the earth. Many great societies have fallen because they have over-farmed their soil (causing the slave-farmers to rise up against the elites that are praying for good harvest). Since we are all taught this in history classes these days, and due to the infotainment quality of the news and their sensationalist take on global warming, the dangerous mistakes of our past shall likely not be relived.

Heidegger mentions the damming of rivers and exclaims the way in which we even use this aspect of nature with a standing-reserve mindset. We have however as of late moved to many non-obstructive means of obtaining energy from water (particularly the sea).

On p16 he mentions that “regulating and securing even become the chief characteristics of the challenging revealing.” This is again the turn from god-looking to man-blaming societal mindsets.

Perhaps the most damaging Physis the standing-reserve mindset has caused is not towards the world but society. Society treats people as sources of energy to get a job done – as a cog in the industrial machine. We are still viewing the world in a lab-coat, science type manor (and Heidegger mentions his gripe with physic’s perspective to explaining truths) but technology is alongside science, more directly ‘feeling’ its way around outskirts of reality until truths are fully realized as a mindset.

Heidegger then asks “To what extent is man capable of such a revealing?” … “man does not have control over the un-concealment itself.” He encapsulated the book “Emergence” by Steven Johnston in a few statements, although Johnston puts humanities situation in context using examples from recent scientific discoveries. A single person in the whole of society cannot hope to know what is going to become unconcealed due to the way in which we locally interact to create a larger whole. Steven Johnston writes:

“Once the embryo reaches a certain size, cell “collectives” start to form, and here matters get more complicated. One group of cells may be the beginning of an arm, while the other group may be the first stirrings of the brain’s gray matter. Each cell has somehow to figure out where it is in the larger scheme of things… yet, cells have no way of seeing the whole, and they have no fixed address stamped upon them when they come into the world, no factory serial number.

This is the secret of self-assembly, cell collectives emerge because each cell looks to its neighbors for cues about how to behave…a cell looks around to its neighbors and finds that they’re all working away steadily at creating an eardrum or a heart valve, which in turn causes the cell to start laboring away at the same task.

“The great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp is that it is a totally decentralized process.”

This also stands for our humans. Our advancement through time, using technology, is an entirely decentralized process and for a single person to grasp it is an impossibility; we move and advance as one mass. Once something is revealed a large part of a society realizes it at once. On p24 Heidegger mentions this revealing doesn’t happen somewhere beyond all human doing – and that it doesn’t happen exclusively either in man or through man. Man cannot see himself in the unfolding.

On p25 he goes onto define freedom in this view of the world. Man becomes free only when he listens and hears the tides of anew unfolding. If you float along with the tide you are not expressing free will; you are constrained to obey the newest phase that has been ushered forth, or revealed, by those who listen; by those who express free will. This freedom however only governs the realm that has been revealed.

On p26 – “Even god loses his mysteriousness – i.e. – we realize what we call god is something real, and a new definition of god is conjured that differs greatly from the previous (the most recent definition essentially being: we are all Gods – Sartre’s ‘everyman is fully responsible for all men’s actions when he acts’ for the humanitarian side of the coin, and science is working at the existential.) This is because even “God sinks to the level of a cause” with regard to the question of ultimate causality. Heidegger then mentions “when destining reigns in the mode of enframing it is the supreme danger” – this is due to the forward marching mindset of the current, without regard to the past (or to the initial cause, and to the destinations Physis). The past becomes passé. Not because want to look down on it but because we have to; the current mindset is the only one that makes sense – we discover atoms, we define ourselves by them; we create computers, we define ourselves by them, and so on.

Heidegger then mentions “everything that man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.” The old riddle ‘if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?’ is interesting because the answer is resounding no. The question is pined upon but it shouldn’t be; the answer ‘no’ should be common knowledge. Vibrations in air molecules only occur to animals as sound because that is how brains have chosen to interpret these particular vibrations. Bats may hear in color as we see in color, different hues representing different surface textures. The subjective reality that we all live in is mind boggling, and can easily be forgotten when living in a society filled with such similar minds, viewing everything as an offshoot of human efforts. Because of this when something new comes about, we slot this new idea into our existing categorizations. We categorize ideas and objects based on what we know instead of what we don’t know. Fungus, for example, was under the heading of ‘plant’ for an incredibly long time; science eventually declared it its own entity, separate from the plant/animal kingdoms.

Technology, and science’s use of it, revealed the truth about fungus. Technology is revealing one truth after another, not only empirically but social, and humanity is adapting as rapidly as it needs to. Every mind that is born on this earth has an astounding adaptability to its surroundings. If you show a six-month old baby a slideshow of different limas faces, it can tell each monkey apart. After six months old (due to the lack of constant exposure to limas faces) the brain doesn’t prioritize the differentiation of this type of face, and limas faces all become similar to the point of being undecipherable from one another. This means that if a baby did not see the face of a human from birth to six months, but instead lived with limas, all human faces would look incredibly similar and the nuances of limas faces would be prominent in the child’s mind. The questions that this fact conjures are obvious and startling. The revealing of a new truth to a society is incredibly caught up in the society’s framework. Heidegger hits upon this and poses the idea that our essence is what forwards us, not our current situation, and this essence can be found in creation, invention, and “a realm of art. But certainly only if reflection on art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth after which we are questioning.”

Early into the article, we are shown two definitions of technology. The first being “Technology is a means to an end” and “technology is a human activity.” Now where it looks like Heidegger is looking at the these definitions from the point of view of “his” modern day technology, I wonder if the same arguments can be looked at the same viewing using current day technology. I would tend to think that some of the arguments that are being made are looking at a day and age when man still almost worked one on one with technology, say in the ’50’s or ‘60’s automotive assembly line.

Now where I agree with the first definition, it is the second that I question. At one point, technology could have been looked upon more as human activity, though technology today almost lacks the need of any human involvement. Going back to The Printing Press in Modern Europe, it was man that created the printing press and it was man that had to work the press to so that could print documents, but now we have copiers that will make duplicates just by the press of a button, and robotic assembly lines that are programmed to build the copiers without any human interaction.

Heidegger also brings into play the term “Gestell” or “Enframing”, a term that through out the article, along with all of the other points is widdled down for its examination. Defined as “the means that way of revealing which holds away in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological”, Enframing is a term that is mentioned more than once as” the essence of modern technology”, and while it helps to work through the freedom and destining of technology, it is argued that it becomes and endangerment towards man.

Granted that may all be true, I have to ask as I look back upon my first point, does that really carry if there is no need for a relationship between man and technology? Sure man is still needed for some jobs say overseeing the controls of a nuclear power plant as atomic power was used as an example in the article, and sure we aren’t yet at a point where there isn’t a need for human/technology interaction, but how much longer until technology has advanced so far that it works on it’s own? How much longer until technology no longer has a need for dependence on man?

This is my understanding of the progression and salient points of the text:

1. Both the instrumental and anthropological definitions of technology are correct, but they are not the essence of technology. The essence is something else which is obscured by framing the question in these dichotomous terms.
2. Technology is a mode of revealing, a way of finding the truth about something. Early technology, that of the artisan or artist, belonged to the mode of “poiesis,” a bringing forth like the blossom into a bloom. Modern technology differs in that it CHALLENGES FORTH the energies of nature, and stores them as “standing reserve.” Nature is transformed into standing reserve, and the machine is also standing reserve. Man is challenged to exploit the energies of nature. He is part of the inclusive rubric of the standing reserve, and technology is not a human doing. Man is challenged to order nature’s energies, but he does not become part of the standing reserve. The thing that challenges man to order energy as standing reserve is ENFRAMING. Enframing is the essence of technology.
3. Enframing is the way in which the real reveals itself as standing reserve. It is nothing technological, and it is not only the work of man, but done with the help of man. In a sense, enframing is more primal than man, more original. Thus we come to the word DESTINING. Enframing belongs within destining, which is what causes man to reveal in ordering. Through destining, other possibilities of pushing technology forward are blocked, and so destining is danger. Man is threatened by destining because, as long as it holds sway, he is in danger of becoming standing reserve himself. The challenging enframing conceals the previous way of bringing forth, poeisis, and it conceals revealing itself. Thus truth is impossible to find.
4. But where danger is, there is also the saving power. To find the saving power we must question the word “essence”. Essence is thought of as that which endures, but in technology, that which endures also GRANTS. Enframing threatens man because of the lie that ordering is the only way of revealing truth. Through granting, we can see what comes to be through technology, rather than focus on the technological. How can we reach this saving power? Possibly through poetry and the arts, which are a way of revealing through poiesis, a way of bringing forth purely.

Heidegger is possibly saying that technology is a way of revealing ultimate truth, about the world and about man. It menaces when we limit ourselves to one way of seeing the truth, or allow ourselves to be led in a way that obscures our ability to see a larger truth. Technology threatens when one way of revealing overwhelms all other ways of revealing. Modern technology aims for domination, and encloses man within its framework, excluding poiesis. The role of man is to oversee technology; the danger is that, because of enframing, he is caught up within technology and becomes a part of the standing reserve. Through works of art, it is possible to reach a place where he can see technology and comes to presence through it, without losing sight of other ways of revealing.

One question: Is the implication that technology itself challenges man to ordering revealing? Heidegger writes “man for his part is already challenged to exploit the energies of nature.” Who or what challenges man? Enframing? It seems like the implication is that man himself is revealed through technology, not in the sense of technological determinism, but in the sense that there is something more primal, more essential, that man is a part of but not the master of. Enframing/technology is above/before man, something that induces or causes him to act?

Like a tour guide, Heidegger takes us on a journey through the past to the present and points out the sites along the way. This seems clear, as he begins his excursion by asserting his primary concern in this essay is the discovery of the “essence of Technology and how the phenomenon of technology comes to presence.”

He states that the essence of technology is in no way technological and that we can define technology as both instrumental (a means to an end) and anthropological (a human activity). Mutually dependent of each other.

Heidegger recognizes our attempts to exert control over technology especially when we think it is slipping away.

Heidegger, uses the 4 causes of the chalice as a vehicle to explain his conclusion that technology is born from necessity and that all the elements required to produce a new technology, which he describes as the revealing of something that was concealed, are dependent on each other or responsible or owing to each other.

Heidegger detours to etymology numerous time to make or clarify his point or points before striking an ecological argument with his comparison of older forms of technology such as the windmill which draws energy from the wind but does not extract or store energy versus modern day technology which exploit and exhaust (“challenges”) our planets natural resources, like coal and oil.

It is at this juncture that, Heidegger, introduces us to his idea of “standing reserve.” The conception that for technologies sake everything in the world is an asset waiting to be used and it’s value to humanity is completely tied to its being at humanity’s disposal.

This is where my questions arise. Can we employ Heidegger’s assessment of “technology” to our own interests in modern information technology or more specifically to modern day communications technology?

If we define information as a resource does it become a “standing-reserve” in the same fashion as coal, petroleum, or water?

“In what follows, we shall be questioning concerning technology. Questioning builds a way… the way is a way of thinking.” (3) With his opening sentences, Heidegger explains our method of discovery. He ends the essay with a final thought about this way of thinking. “For questioning is the piety of thought.” (35) We prepare to think of a free relationship to technology. We open up the thought to the essence of technology rather than technology itself. It makes perfect sense. Heidegger was a philosopher, not a technophile. This essay came from out of a lecture that he gave to people who were neither technophiles nor philosophers. How else would he discuss it?

And so it goes, from the two definitions of technology (means to an end and human activity, 4) to classification (instrumental and anthropological) to the effect and causality. Eventually we arrive at the center of the argument, that a type of causality brings forth things into presence, and so we are made aware that this is the essence of technology, a poiesis.

The part of the essay that interests me most is the revealing or coming-into-presence, an unveiling that goes from poiesis to aleitheia, the Greek word for truth. We bring forth the true into the beautiful (of human destinings to radiance, 34), which is where the word techne comes into play. The dichotomy of the word is fascinating, and Heidegger explains how art and technology hold that same name, techne, for revealing of the true into the beautiful. (34) He questions if “revealing lays claim to the arts most primally…”(35) My understanding of this, which is somewhat formative, would be that both technology and art are a wellspring from which truth, which presents itself, is brought forth into the beautiful. Human enframing and attempts at mastery ensnares us. The “pushing” of technology hinders revealing. It seems that technology is pulled rather than pushed and will reveal itself in its own time. In our enframing, we have lost the trace of these things, that art and technology are, in their essence, the same.

I think his basic thesis is that at one time technology was associated with “techne” – “knowing in the widest sense”. Being “so at home”, such an expert in a thing that it reveals “whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie before us, whatever can look and turn out one way and now another”. By this last phrase, I presume he means its hidden potential. Techne is inclusive of crafts, fine-art, poetry in Early Greek Culture. So far so good – one need only see the diligence and attentiveness that goes into a good music education to know that what ensues are not only degrees, music sheets, sounds or a musician. What is revealed to the practitioner is the essence of music itself. The ability to seek and find in their practice things findable only through the world of music and indeed lost in translation in any other form. This kind of bringing forth (revealing) is Poesis.

Then Heidegger takes on modern technology. He is specially responding to the industrial revolution. Modern technology now challenges (demands – hither) nature itself to come forth and stand in reserve as man attempts to order and control the world. This is a different kind of bringing forth – revealing than Poesis. But Heidegger does not denounce technology – he goes into why this kind of relationship with technology is so problematic.

He uses the word “Ge-stell” or Enframing as the essence of modern technology. Like “gemut” or disposition (in the realm of feelings), GeStell is a primordial imperative that manifests as “man’s ordering attitude and behavior”. This (and not the apparatus of experimentation) is responsible for the rise of the modern science of physics – where “nature is already set up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance”.
The danger of this thinking is that enframing seeks to understand everything in terms of provable causality and only that which lends itself to this particular way of ordering and understanding is paid any attention to. “Correctness” is priviledged over “truth”.

“Thus the challenging Enframing not only conceals a former way of revealing, bearing-forth, but it conceals revealing itself and with it THAT wherein unconcealment, i.e. truth, comes to pass”.

Now, what IS this truth? Tentatively, I offer that what Heidegger is saying is that the truth (of technology) is revealed in watchful attendence to the coming to presence of technology – we still don’t know what the truth is, but this gives some idea of when, in what circumstance, it may reveal itself.

Central to his argument might be the concept of freedom and choice that man enjoys (or could) within the destining to pursue unconcealment. This would require that he does not allow himself (does not see himself) as part of a stack or stockpile of human resource. This would also require his questioning of marshalling everything as a standing-in-reserve – other people, other objects … because when these are one of a collective, one loses the the ability to see them as autonomous … harboring an essence waiting to be revealed. Their truth is clouded from us.

It is perhaps through this resistance or at least watchfulness over our challenging, ordering (organizational, profit-oriented rationale for everything), that we allow ourselves to see the actual essence or truth of technology – not as it is defined by the enframing attitude (as pure instrumentality) but as something that can bring the “dialogue of divine and human destinings to radiance”. Heidegger uses this phrase in relation to Art which was simply called Techne. But I suspect that he hope for modern technology too, to continue this dialogue (provided we are not constantly engaged in blocking every opportunity to do so).

He hopes that our relationship with technology (and art for that matter) can be recaliberated to allow for the coming into presence of the beautiful – the truth, the connection with something that cannot be dissected, programmed, held in reserve.

After all this, I still have this question – if truth/beauty like music belong mainly in the domain of experience, it does not lend itself to rational explanation. Heidegger’s words can clear the way or point a path to a possible experience of truth (he proritizes careful attention and questioning – “questioning is the piety of thought”; Eastern philosophers would point the way by pointing to better meditational practices. But what matters ultimately is the glimpse of something that comes into “presence” at evanescent moments and leaves you a little transformed. Could a very small part of this experience be “insights” ? Whatever it is, this mystery touching you, opens possibilities .. it is easier perhaps to talk about its effects rather than “IT” itself.

One of these effects surely would be to reduce blockages through endless “ordering, stockpiling, mastering, controlling ” – the 7/24 workdays etc etc.

I’m sorry .. I had to write this personal extrapolation (in my last paragraph) of what Heidegger perhaps intends to nudge us towards.

Anyway…excuse my excess of summary in the following…

A recollection from Eisenstein: “One cannot treat printing as just one among many elements in a complex causal nexus, for the communications shift transformed the nature of the causal nexus itself” (308). Just as printing proved itself to be far more than a tool—more than an instrument we use to do a job better—Heidegger argues the same for technology. His purpose in crafting this argument, perhaps, is to help humans gain perspective on the more or less dangerous and problematic “enframing” that defines our relationship with technology, and enable us to make more ethical decisions concerning the use of technology.

He writes, “the current conception of technology, according to which it is a means and a human activity, can therefore be called the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology” (5). Technology is both a means to an end and a human activity, but “the two definitions of technology belong together” (4) and they exceed each other so that Heidegger proves technology is much more than both definitions combined—the two together miss the essence of technology. “Technology is no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing … truth” (12). Heidegger is critical of man’s “enframing,” or systematic way of relating to the world. (The enframing drive is the same drive to understand the world through scientific proofs.) Heidegger depicts man’s advancing of technology as violent and careless with respect to the natural world, and thus it is dangerous.

I see two terms in opposition to each other: “making” (it is defined as “poiesis,” a natural bringing-forth) vs. “challenging” (it extracts, exploits, or exhausts). These are two different ways man can use resources to develop technology—two different ways of relating to (or enframing) the world. Along these lines, Heidegger writes that “The revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does NOT unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis. The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging… ” (14). To illustrate this concept, Heidegger contrasts two examples of technology from everyday life: the windmill and the mining of coal and ore. The windmill is a natural bringing-forth, since nothing challenges it or exploits it but the wind, whereas the cultivation of the earth for resources like coal is a challenging. Challenging-forth vs. bringing-forth. He provides another example: “even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it” (14). The challenging side of technology, he notes, can be used for destructive or peaceful use.

Heidegger clearly addresses the violence and carelessness of man’s use of (natural?) resources (standing-reserve) in the development of technology. In man’s perspective, “Everything waits ‘standing-reserve’ for technology to put it to use…” (17) as though that were its only purpose. But just as Heidegger questions the notion of technology as a means to an end, he also questions the notion of man as primary actor, in control of the real as well as his own actions. If the pursuit of technology is the pursuit of ways to reveal truth, “to what extent is man capable of such a revealing? … Only to the extent that man for his part is already challenged to exploit the energies of nature can this ordering revealing happen.” Man can invent methods, processes, tools, but ultimately he does not have control over how this technology will reveal (or unconceal) truth—man causes the invention of technology, “the process of which at any given time the real shows itself or withdraws” (18). In trying to bring-forth technology for his own disposal, man acts as an instrument of technology himself. When man “ensnares nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing…” (19).

What then prevents man from becoming himself a standing-reserve? What makes him separate from/better than/safeguarded against his own technology? Heidegger implies these questions, but I also ask them.

Final thoughts: Just as enframing is violent and really dangerous, it can also become a “saving power” (32) and reveal the essence of truth to man. Enframing is the essence of technology (30), and it is two-fold: enframing blocks the revealing of truth with its “frenzied-ness of ordering” (33), but it also lets man have a purpose extending into the future, since he must be the one to keep safe “the coming to presence of truth.” Man depends on his own technology just as the technology depends on man to conceive of it—to challenge-it-forth. This is a complicated web (should I say network?) of causes and effects, but I understand it a little better when I think of a similar paradox that Derrida notes about the archive—the archiving archive.

I am still troubled by Heidegger’s term “destining.’’ My best attempt: a sending-forth of man, and this is also his desire to reveal the real, everything everywhere, as standing-reserve.

On to Heidegger….
While there are tons of questions to ask, I’ll try to focus on one theme I thought I noticed throughout the work.

It seems that Heidegger is telling us to get past the components of technology, to stop trying to figure it out and control it and to move on to trying to understand it. He warns us in the opening not to get too hung up on any sentence or term, but to focus on the meaning.

He goes on to explain, “The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control” (5). This theme comes back several times in the work and each time brings us closer to the realization that we are so hung up on mastering technology that we forget to ask what constitutes its essence. Heidegger appears to consider original technology a revealing, but modern technology concealing (16) because modern technology drives man to ordering and enframing rather than understanding a truth.

“As a destining, it banishes man into that kind of revealing which is an ordering. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing. …Enframing not only conceals a former way of revealing, bringing-forth, but in conceals revealing itself and with it That wherein unconcealment, i.e., truth, comes to pass” (27).

So long as man is busy “ordering” all that is revealed, he stops short of revealing the “true” or revealing himself. He cannot get to the essence of anything so long as he is superficially categorizing everything

“In Greece, at the outset of the destining of the West the arts soared to the supreme height of the revealing granted them. They brought the presence … of the gods, brought the dialogue of divine and human destinings, to radiance. And art was simply called techne. … The arts were derived from the artistic. Art works were not enjoyed aesthetically. Art was not a sector of cultural activity” (34).

This collection of clips particularly, but the work as a whole, reminds me of Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn where the urn has the saying and the poet responds:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” -that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know

The saying was on an urn and responded to in a poem about an urn which was likely spoken to the urn. That is what I understand to be Heidegger’s explanation of techne. An unconcealing leading to a revealing and poesis.

The image on the urn was a pastoral with lovers and nature, gods and sacrifice, etc. but the inscription, when held up to Heidegger’s thread in this work, works as a reminder of a time when people did not try to control technology, simply to appreciate what they had, and by doing so held a deeper understanding of essence and truth.

Whether or not Heidegger read Keats is less important than the observation both writers seem to have made: It is when man tries to control and order things that he loses the truth of them. Only upon moving past the level of ordering (correct) to we ascend to understanding (true).