The Question Concerning Technology, by Martin Heidegger

Text for the 24th February session of the Crag reading group
LLC 50 George Square
Room 3.30
6 pm

‘In what follows we shall be questioning concerning technology.

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Questioning builds a way. We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the way, and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics. The way is a way of thinking. All ways of thinking, more or less perceptibly, lead through language in a manner that is extraordinary. We shall be questioning concerning technology, and in so doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology. When we can respond to this essence, we shall be able to experience the technological within its own bounds.

Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology. When we are seeking the essence of “tree,” we have to become aware that That which pervades every tree, as tree, is not itself a tree that can be encountered among all the other trees. Likewise, the essence of technology is by no means anything technological.’

Read the entire text here: question_concerning_technology

Posted in Ideas and Papers.

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