DH as τέχνη

Before starting, I have to admit that I am quite moved by Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology," and for a series of different reasons. First, I can't stop noticing and admiring how the text is formally capable to embody the arguments it makes (and un-makes.) "The Question Concerning Technology" is in fact an incredibly complex, mysterious "constellation" of ideas, to borrow one of my favorite images in the text (and an image that is also central in W. Benjamin's writings,) rather than a self-contained piece of linear knowledge. The text exposes the contradictions and shortcomings of a consequential linearity of thinking that is employed as a method and at the same time is discarded, or, at least, is shown to be “never quite enough.”

Another thing that strikes me and moves me, is to realize how crucial and up-to-date Heidegger's reflections are for the current state of DH theory, and not simply because Heidegger's perspective can be easily put into efficient use to dismiss that "instrumental conception of technology" which constitutes the center of many reductive interpretations of DH work. Another thing that Heidegger’s piece does, for DH, is to show that there is a larger and far more complex question to be asked, when thinking about the way in which we deal with technology, a question that can also be illuminating for understanding the origins of that same "instrumental conception" which shapes the thinking of many of us, and not only regarding technology. 

To put it simply, Heidegger is bothered, he is bothered by the "illusion that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct" (332), he is bothered by the fact that, since Descartes on, the separation of subject and object, of Being and being(s), of (humanistic) thinking-thinking and (scientific) calculating-thinking has become an accepted and predominant way of reasoning. And this same separation has also brought to the separation of arts from crafts and sciences and to arts’ isolation (and possibly, neutralization) in the realm of the "aesthetic." So Heidegger goes back to when τέχνη was still (also) art and was still, just as art, a "bringing forth," "a revealing" activity in which subject and object, intellect and thing, still corresponded to one another. And Heidegger calls for a re-union of art and technology, or better, for the coming into existence of a poetical technology, i.e. for a revealing technology, a technology that makes, and does not merely serve, a technology that brings into presence new understandings and new conceptions, new contacts with primal truths, a technology that questions thinking, and therefore language, for "all ways of thinking lead through language in a manner that is extraordinary" (311). 

Of course, and thank god, I am not sure of what Heidegger means, with this final provocation about technology and art. That's why I am sure I could re-read it a thousand times and still enjoy it. But for the purpose of this post, written today, for this class, I would say that DH can benefit from Heidegger’s provocation by working, theoretically and practically, on configuring and imagining itself as a new τέχνη, as a form of scholarship of which thinking and making, philosophizing and calculating are indissoluble components, and in fact, indistinguishable from each other. "The Question Concerning Technology" suggests the potentials of liberating both art and technology from their respective places of relegation and unite them to better think about their essence, and the potentials of liberating our own thinking about technology from its conceptual relegations, so that it could look at larger pictures, beyond the frames that technological thinking tends to create. And perhaps Heidegger is explicitly assigning to art the role of teaching us how to do this, which I believe is a significant fact to consider when we talk about the contribution of 'traditional' humanists to DH. Heidegger suggests that the fear of technology by which these humanists often feel overwhelmed comes from a poor understanding, or perhaps from a forgetting of, technology’s poetical essence.