Techne and the Essence of Technology

The commonest definition of technology — that it is a means to ends, a set of instruments and methods by which human beings achieve their purposes — is correct but not true, in Heidegger's sense. It is correct in that technology does indeed produce means and achieve ends; it is not true in that it fails to disclose the essence of technology — what makes modern technology the pervasive, self-reinforcing, world-shaping force that it is. The instrumental definition also conceals the question of human freedom in relation to technology: if technology is merely means, then humans are always in control; but the evidence of the modern world suggests that something has gotten beyond their control.

Modern natural science does not discover a method that is then applied to produce modern technology. Rather, modern technology calls for modern science as its theoretical instrument, and modern science is itself already a form of Enframing — it discloses nature as a calculable system of forces available for measurement and manipulation. The precision of modern physics is not a refinement of everyday experience but a deliberate abstraction of nature into what can be expressed in mathematical formalisms and experimentally controlled. Physics does not first encounter nature and then produce equations; it encounters nature already through equations.

"The Question Concerning Technology" opens with the observation that the correct (richtig) and the true (wahr) are not the same. The distinction between correctness and truth — between propositional accuracy and genuine disclosure — runs throughout Heidegger's work from the 1930s onward and is connected to his account of aletheia in the 1930 essay "On the Essence of Truth".