Seeing the value beyond instrumentalization makes sense to me.
However I take issue with your reading of Heidegger. He actually specifically goes out of his way to define technology as something other than instrumentalization--that the essence of technology is a function of the movement of destiny, the revealing of truth, and the ordering of the universe in order for such revealing to take place. Instrumentalization is a naive understanding of what technology is. The evolution of technology is rooted in far deeper existential realities than the instrumentality view permits. It's worth being pedantic about this point, because Heidegger's point calls on us to think beyond a mechanistic perspective, towards the divine, the spiritual, the metaphysical, the fatalistic. One cannot write seriously about technology without a genuine consideration of what the eschatology of technology is. Zizek does a really good job of this in "Hegel in a Wired Brain".
Thanks for the comment! Iād be excited to revisit Heidegger and see what I missed - do you have specific sections to point at, or works if not for the essay The Question Concerning Technology?
"The merely instrumental, merely anthropological definition of technology is therefore in principle untenable."
"So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain transfixed in the will to master it. We press on past the essence of technology." I hope it comes across clearly here that Heidegger is explicitly rejecting the instrumental view, since the whole essay is his inquiry into the "essence" of technology.
"The essence of technology lies in enframing. Its holding sway belongs within destining. Since destining at any given time starts man on a way of revealing, man, thus under way, is continually approaching the brink of the possibility of pursuing and pushing forward nothing but what is revealed in ordering, and of deriving all his standards on this basis. Through this the other possibility is blocked, that man might be admitted more and sooner and ever more primally to the essence of what is unconcealed and to its unconcealment, in order that he might experience as his essence the requisite belonging to revealing."
Here Heidegger invokes, quite consequentially, destiny, the mysterious "unconcealment" of essence, and that essence's "belonging to revealing".
"Where do we find ourselves if now we think one step further regarding what enframing itself actually is? It is nothing technological, nothing on the order of a machine. It is the way in which the actual reveals itself as standing-reserve. Again we ask: Does such revealing happen somewhere beyond all human doing? No. But neither does it happen exclusively in man, or definitively through man. Enframing is the gathering together which belongs to that setting-upon which challenges man and puts him in position to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve."
Heidegger spends most of the essay explaining that technology is not instrumentality, but rather "enframing". His last sentence here is where he explains what he means by "enframing" in clearest terms.
Seeing the value beyond instrumentalization makes sense to me.
However I take issue with your reading of Heidegger. He actually specifically goes out of his way to define technology as something other than instrumentalization--that the essence of technology is a function of the movement of destiny, the revealing of truth, and the ordering of the universe in order for such revealing to take place. Instrumentalization is a naive understanding of what technology is. The evolution of technology is rooted in far deeper existential realities than the instrumentality view permits. It's worth being pedantic about this point, because Heidegger's point calls on us to think beyond a mechanistic perspective, towards the divine, the spiritual, the metaphysical, the fatalistic. One cannot write seriously about technology without a genuine consideration of what the eschatology of technology is. Zizek does a really good job of this in "Hegel in a Wired Brain".
Thanks for the comment! Iād be excited to revisit Heidegger and see what I missed - do you have specific sections to point at, or works if not for the essay The Question Concerning Technology?
Yes! Some good quotes:
"The merely instrumental, merely anthropological definition of technology is therefore in principle untenable."
"So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain transfixed in the will to master it. We press on past the essence of technology." I hope it comes across clearly here that Heidegger is explicitly rejecting the instrumental view, since the whole essay is his inquiry into the "essence" of technology.
"The essence of technology lies in enframing. Its holding sway belongs within destining. Since destining at any given time starts man on a way of revealing, man, thus under way, is continually approaching the brink of the possibility of pursuing and pushing forward nothing but what is revealed in ordering, and of deriving all his standards on this basis. Through this the other possibility is blocked, that man might be admitted more and sooner and ever more primally to the essence of what is unconcealed and to its unconcealment, in order that he might experience as his essence the requisite belonging to revealing."
Here Heidegger invokes, quite consequentially, destiny, the mysterious "unconcealment" of essence, and that essence's "belonging to revealing".
"Where do we find ourselves if now we think one step further regarding what enframing itself actually is? It is nothing technological, nothing on the order of a machine. It is the way in which the actual reveals itself as standing-reserve. Again we ask: Does such revealing happen somewhere beyond all human doing? No. But neither does it happen exclusively in man, or definitively through man. Enframing is the gathering together which belongs to that setting-upon which challenges man and puts him in position to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve."
Heidegger spends most of the essay explaining that technology is not instrumentality, but rather "enframing". His last sentence here is where he explains what he means by "enframing" in clearest terms.
https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil394/The%20Question%20Concerning%20Technology.pdf