Status Updates From Basic Writings: Essential M...

Enframing is the essence of technology because it is what always endures.
Mankind belongs here, pursuing truth in the world. Here is the greatest danger and greatest hope for humanity.

Fine arts used to be called techne. Reflection upon the essence of technology must happen in the realm of art.

“Placed between these possibilities, man is endangered by destining… the danger that man may misconstrue the unconcealed and misinterpret it.”

The greatest danger is to misrepresent the hidden essence of things.

“Always the destining of revealing holds complete sway ver men. But that destining is never a fate that compels.”
Freedom isn’t free will.

“To the occurrence of revealing, i.e., of truth, freedom stands in the closest and most intimate kinship.”

“Freedom is the realm of the destining that at any given time starts a revealing on its way.”

(Freedom is alignment with essential purpose?)

The essence of technology is prior to physics.

“Enframing means the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, te:, challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.”

(Destiny to take dominion?)

Mankind “challenges” nature “only to the extent that man for his part is already challenged…”

“Yet precisely because man is challenged more originally than are the energies of nature… he never is transformed into mere standing-reserve.”

“Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.”

“Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object.”

Greek “techne” includes both “skills and… fine arts… It is something poetic”

Techne is closer to “revealing” than to “manufacturing.”

But
“The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging… to unlock energy… in order to store it.”

“Challenging” includes 1) exposing 2) prior need/direction

“Every bringing-forth (creating, making) is grounded in revealing.”
“Technology is a way of revealing.”
Now we are in “the realm… of truth.”

“The current conception of technology, [as] a means and a human activity, can therefore be called the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology… [and] even holds for modern technology.”

But it doesn’t show the full truth about the essence of technology. He explains the four causes.

“The technological framework is inherently expansionist and can reveal only by reduction. Its attempt to enclose all beings in a particular claim — utter availability and sheer manipulability … [or] "enframing."

Reading an excerpt for class.

“One of Heidegger's most daring theses is that the essence of technology is prior to, and by no means a consequence of, the Scientific Revolution.”