(p.25) Heidegger, however, never works out a history of the being of equipment, so we will have to construct it from hints. The most important of these hints are Heidegger's discussion of the Greek notion of techne at the beginning of our history and his remark in "Science and Reflection" that, in the technological understanding of the being, subject and object no longer stand in a relation of representation but are both absorbed into a total systematic ordering. ("Both subject and object are sucked up as standing-reserve.") (QCT.173). It follows that opposing the Cartesian subject/object distinction in terms of an account...

(p.32) The idea that in the technological world equipment more and more comes to fit together in one single totality is already a step from the relatively autonomous and autochthonous workshop of the craftsman towards the uprooted interconnectedness of industrial mass production. Its final achievement would be a world system under the feedback control of cybernetics. Heidegger makes a similar point in The Question Concering Technology, when he criticizes Hegel's definition of the machine as an autonomous tool and contrasts the autonomous tools of the craftsman with the total ordering characteristic of the technological machine

(p.5) 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. Who would ever deny that it is correct? It is in  obvious con­formity with what we are envisioning when we talk about tech­nology. The instrumental definition of  technology is  indeed so uncannily correct that it  even holds for modern technology, of which,  all other respects, we maintain with some justification that it  is,  in contrast to  the older handwork technology, some­thing completely different and  therefore new.

(p.10) But in what, then, does the playing in unison of the four ways of occasioning play? They let what is not yet present arrive into presencing. Accordingly, they are unifiedly ruled over by a bringing that brings what presences into appearance. Plato tells us what this bringing is in a sentence from the Symposium (20sb): he gar toi ek tau me onton eis to on ionti hotoioun aitia pasa esti poiesis. - "Every occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not presencing is poiesis, is bringing-forth [Her-vor-bringen] ."9 - It is of utmost...

(p.14) What is modern technology? It too is a revealing. Only when we allow our attention to rest on this fundamental characteristic does that which is new in modern technology show itself to us. And yet 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 [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do...

(p.17) Yet an airliner that stands on the runway is surely an object. Certainly. We can represent the machine so. But then it conceals itself as to what and how it is. Revealed, it stands on the taxi strip only as standing-reserve, inasmuch as it is ordered to en­sure the possibility of transportation. For this it must be in its whole structure and in everyone of its constituent parts, on call for duty, i.e., ready for takeoff. (Here it would be appropriate to discuss Hegel's definition of the machine as an autonomous tool. When applied to the tools of the craftsman,...

(p.18) Wherever man opens his eyes and ears, unlocks his heart, and gives himself over to meditating and striving, shaping and working, entreating and thanking, he finds himself everywhere already brought into the unconcealed.

(p.441) It is Heidegger's bold claim that the technology of the modern world is the consequence, indeed the inevitable outcome, of the metaphysics of ancient Greece, specifically of a philosophical perspective that starts with Plato. The distinction in Plato between form and matter leads to the timeless and in effect permanently present eidos, a kind of freezing of temporality, a kind of eternal present. In modern terms the eidos can be seen as something like a blue-print for hyle (underlying substance or matter). This leads to an idealisation of total presence, where local differences pale into insignificance. (One might now be...

(p.443) This context of rapid industrialisation may have its bearing on the preoccupation throughout Heidegger's writing with work and with technology. In this he was again influenced by Nietzsche but also, to his cost, by Ernst Junger. Junger fully embraced new technology and idealised the role of the worker in service of the fully technological state. This was carried to its extreme in the combination of heroism, nationalism, and technology that war made possible. He claimed that the worker/soldier epitomised a higher form of life and the realisation of Germany's destiny. In a strange distortion of Nietzsche, Junger recognised such conditions...

(p.444) Heidegger at times - in the notorious Rectoral Address of 1933, for example (Heidegger, 1985) - appears to share something of Junger's sense of the beauty of labour and service. Whatever the importance of these eulogies to the worker/soldier, however, it is clear that the part played by work and technology in his thought is more subtle and more complex. A starting point for the discussion of this is the question of techne, a concept that will lead us into aspects of the phenomenology of Being and Time. Superficially the account of techne in Aristotle seems appropriate to the nature...

(p.445) Certainly the workshop world seems to be in many respects a world apart from industrialised technology and it may be significant that Heidegger's examples tend to be taken from craft activities that are (and were for Heidegger in the 1920s) tinged with anachronism.

(p.449) [...] let us consider the kind of response to technology that is offered especially by Heidegger's later work. One response involves a turning away from the vision that Heidegger derives from Nietzsche and Junger, with its nadir of faith in a political leader, and towards the shamanic figures of the poet and the thinker: Holderlin is now the supreme inspiration. Reverence for the word displaces the earlier emphasis on the workshop world. The German language assumes a unique historical importance, the rightful heir to the language of the Greeks and the rich origin of an alternative understanding of being. Heidegger...

(p.453) Rational accounting and evaluation [within educational institutions], it is claimed, demonstrate value for money and the quality of the service. But these factors bring with them the impoverishments of distantiality, averageness and levelling down (which Heidegger subsumes under the category of publicness - Die Offentlichkeit). Accessibility and efficiency seem to serve the customer yet staff and students become subservient to the system. Within this regime of efficiency, the idealisation of work and the worker takes on a new style. As obsolete workshops are refurnished and carpeted, the noise of heavy machinery is replaced by the soft clatter of keyboards. A...

(p.xvi) From the beginning of his career, Heidegger was centrally concerned with the nature of working and producing—and with its relation to the question of the being of entities. It was no accident that he began Being and Time with an account of the world of the workshop and equipment.

(p.40) Heidegger's affiliation with National( Socialism may be understood, in part, in terms of his belief that only a corporatist, fascist community could protect German working people from the evils of wage slavery and atomistic individualism in capitalism, on the one hand, and from the ills of materialism and massification in communism, on the other.

(p.77) As we have seen, in the first phase of hisconfrontationwithjunger,Heideggerappropriatedjunger'slanguage in order to support a revolutionary movement which heralded an alternative to the technological future forecast by Junger. After the Rohm purge onJune30,1934,Heideggerbeganthe long process of distancing himself from the"politicalreality"ofNationalSocialism,butcon-tinuedtomeditateon its"innertruthandgreatness."Thismeditation,whichinvolvedatumtowardart, was carried out in his lectures on Nietzsche and on Holderlin. Nietzsche's views on the world-shaping powers of art offered a way of understanding the metaphysical basis for junger's doctrine of the Gestalt of the worker, while Holderlin's poetry seemed to offer a saving alternative to junger's technological future. In this chapter, we begin to study Heidegger's artistic "tum"...

(p.81) Trapped within Nietzsche's metaphysics, Junger conceived of the Gestalt of the worker in terms  of a certain kind of humanity. He spoke  as if the Gestalt of the worker forged together in humanity the calculating,  steely powers of the machine and  the  atavistic, passionate energies  of the Will to Power at work in all  life. As we  have seen, however,  Heidegger believed that this  view  of  humanity  as half-animal, half-rational was  the  final stage  of the decline of Aristotle's doctrine of  the "rational animal" in Nietzsche's "blond beast" who would dominate the earth with modern technology.

(p.82) Heidegger maintained, by way of contrast, that humanity has been transformed into the worker because   today "to be" means "to be worked upon  and transformed in accordance with the imperative of production for its own sake."

(p.88) As elitists, Heidegger and junger believed that the technological era could be carried to its completion only by an elite corps of humanity who scorned the cheerful optimism of mass culture. junger's "worker" was by no means equivalent to Marx's "proletariat"! Heidegger and junger looked to Nietzsche for insight into the remarkable men, the "overmen," needed to complete the process of nihilism. junger had spoken of his interpretation of such men in his collection of essays The Adventurous Heart.[AH] These men were willing to use violence in order to pursue the uncharted paths being opened up by modern technology. Regarding...

(p.90) For Heidegger, junger's technological man had not gone far enough.

(p.110) In 1936, Heidegger wondered whether Hegel was right in saying that art is something past, without power for the modern spirit: "is art still an essential and necessary way in which that truth happens which is so decisive for our historical existence, or is art no longer of this character?" [HW: 67/81] Heidegger believed that technology and art were related in that both were truth events: both were ways of letting entities be. Ordinarily, the Greek word techne is translated as a skilled making of the sort which anticipated the amazing production process of industrial technology. Heidegger argued, however, that...

(p.151) Early Heidegger argued that uprooted modern humanity no longer "dwelt" authentically upon the earth. Later, in his lectures on Holderlin, he said that dwelling occurs only when entities are "gathered" (versammelt) into a world in which the integrity of things is preserved. Such a world would be intrinsically "local," bound up with place in a way wholly foreign to the planetary reach of modern technology. According to Dreyfus, Being and Time—despite later Heidegger's dislike of planetary technology—anticipated "total mobilization" by conceiving of the local workshop-world as a region within the all-encompassing region: the referential totality.'

(p.241) The degradation of work in the twentieth century has reduced the time and skill needed for authentic craftwork, except for those who "drop out" of the social mainstream in order to pursue what they consider to be authentic producing. Nevertheless, great craftworkers remain. Perhaps the attraction such craftspeople have for us today lies in our awareness that they are attuned to things in a way in which most of us are not. Consider, however, the admiration many people display for the intricate circuitry of a computer or the engine of a Mercedes-Benz. We often express amazement at the precision and...