Critiques of technological modernity are extremely common in environmental thought (for example Leiss, 1972; Merchant 1980; Plumwood 1993; Smith 2005), but some of its most penetrating critiques occurred prior to the full emergence of this intellectual, cultural and political movement that identifies itself as ―environmental‖. One already mentioned in chapter Three was that of Heidegger, who we find Jeff Malpas interpreting as showing us that the modes of being in technological modernity obscure the presencing of place, and therefore Being. We have already seen that Julian Young interprets Heidegger as relating such an experience to that of the sublime as an oceanic transportation and enchantment into this self- concealing and self-revealing of Being, and Heidegger himself identifies the possibility of this as the essence of human freedom (2002, p.205). In his 1939 essay on the concept of
phusis in Aristotle‘s Physics, Heidegger also argues that in Ancient Greek thought—first and foremost in Heraclitus, phusis which we now translate as nature, actually meant Being in precisely his sense of its self-presencing and self-concealing. He translates the fragment of Heraclitus (DK B 123), phusis kruptesthai philei which we translated as ―nature loves to hide‖ as ―being loves to hide itself‖. He gives the following interpretation:
Self-hiding belongs to the predilection [Vor-liebe] of being; i.e. it belongs to that wherein being has secured its essence. . . . Only what is in its very essence unconceals and must unconceal itself, can love to conceal itself. Only what is unconcealing can be concealing. . . . Being is the self-concealing revealing, υύσις in the original sense. . . . Unhiddenness is called ά-λήθεια. Truth, as we translate this word, is of the origin, i.e., it is essentially not a
characteristic of human knowing and asserting, and still less is it a mere value or an ―idea‖ that human beings (although they really do not know why) are supposed to strive to realize. Rather, truth as self-revealing belongs to being itself. Φύσις is ά-λήθεια, unconcealing, and therefore χρύπτεσθαι υιλεϊ. (ibid, pp.229-230)
For Heidegger, traditional interpretations of phusis in Aristotle have falsely conceptualized it in ways which fail to adequately distinguish it from a mode of being Aristotle does indeed distinguish it from—that of technē, the knowhow of what things are appropriate for as finished, made objects, rather than realizing the disclosure of being within phusis is prior to relations of being ―appropriate-for‖ finished works. Phusis is the ―movedness‖ (kinesis) within the appearance, that is, the self-presencing of original, transformative being in things in their changes and rest, the stability of which is also a form of change, as it appears to us already in the language of things (logos, legein), wherein word and being are one. The problem with contemporary conceptions of nature and contemporary modes of being as such, is that they fail to see that being in its essence does not equate with ―stuff‖ that exists as a substratum of relations of being appropriate for the making of a multiplicity of equally instrumental forms and the predicable possibility of their relations. The truth of being is to be found in its original resting in the elusive changes of its appearing and self-concealing in things for being qua human beings (Dasein, the being of beings for whom being is an issue). This is intelligible through the pre-predicative involvements of its being intelligible for
predication—the immediacy of being‘s self-mediation, prior to subject-object predication. But as we have seen, the thinking of nature qua being is the possibility for the presencing of
place, a sublime ekstasis, a ―transport and enchantment‖ into this, and is the possibility that
interdependently defines the essence of human freedom. According to Heidegger, the modes of being of modern technological rationality annihilate these possibilities. For Heidegger, the problem of nature is that we see it as the object of science and the mere form of the unmade and the made and their possible trajectories and effects, rather than the actual being of things as it occurs for us. It is no archē prior to our practices of the mediation of what is, but the immediacy of this mediation itself, prior to and establishing this sense of ―our‖ and ―what is‖
as the self-presencing and self-concealing of being to itself. It therefore escapes Vogel‘s charge of nature being a reified other, a reified archē outside of language, as it remains other to itself in its archewithin language: phusis kruptesthai philei.
In The Question Concerning Technology ([1954] 2007), Heidegger describes human history in terms of the actions of human bringing-forth (poiēsis) of the essence of things from the self-concealment of their being into presencing. This entails technē, which in the original
Greek sense is to be understood, argues Heidegger, as the knowledge, the skill of bringing forth what was concealed as merely possibility in things, in works by craftsmen and artists and even philosophers, rather than simply the skill of the making of them as such. Modern technology is a mode of revealing, he argues, but it does not bring forth qua poiēsis in this way, but is a challenging (Herausfordern) which ―puts to nature the unreasonable demand
that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such‖(p.320). It is a ―setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth‖ (ibid, p.321) of the energy of nature that has as its chief characteristic a ―Regulating and securing‖ of it that puts it into a state of ―standing-reserve‖ (Bestand) where in this standing by the thing in question ―no longer stands over against us as
an object‖ (ibid, p.322). This challenging is an enframing (Ge-stell) of all things into standing-reserve. Yet we ourselves are challenged to do this, ordered to do this by this ordering power of technology, such that we too belong in the standing-reserve, are enframed. Heidegger gives these examples: ―The current talk about human resources, about the supply of patients for a clinic . . . The forester who measures the felled timber in the woods and who to all appearances walks the forest path in the same way his grandfather did is today ordered by the industry that produces commercial woods, whether he knows it or not‖ (ibid, p.323).
Enframing and poiēsis are both modes of destining, putting things on their way to revealing, and in this is the essence of human freedom, not in the will or causality of human willing, he argues again. Within technology is the possibility for freedom, but also the greatest danger. Technology springs from the instinctual tendency of human beings to reveal and appropriate the nature of things: ―When man, in his way, from within unconcealment reveals that which presences, he merely responds to the call of unconcealment, even when he contradicts it‖ (ibid, p.324), he argues, ―Thus when man, investigating, observing, pursues nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve‖ (ibid). The danger is that although ―man‖ is threatened to become standing-reserve in being ordered into this ordering by the narrowness of its process,
man, precisely as one so threatened, exalts himself and postures as lord of the earth. In this way the illusion comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself. . . . In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence. Man stands so decisively in subservience to on the challenging-forth of enframing that he does not grasp enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ek-sists, in terms of his essence, in a realm where he is addressed, so that he can never encounter only himself. . . . Above all, enframing conceals that revealing which, in the sense of poiēsis, lets what presences come forth into appearance. (ibid, p.332)
The saving power within this danger, however, argues Heidegger, is the possibility that we may heed this tendency of technology as part of our own essence to order us into such a state of ignorance, where true cannot be known. We might actually begin to grasp the unfolding of technology in this process, rather than being beguiled by the technological as an instrument to master, and look to that more primordial form of bringing forth in poiēsis, that is the mystery of the essence of art that was found in the Greek world and
was called simply technē. It was a simple, manifold revealing. It was pious, promos, i.e., yielding to the holding sway and the safekeeping of truth.
The arts were not derived from the artistic. Artworks were not enjoyed aesthetically. Art was not a sector of cultural activity.
What was art—perhaps only for that brief but magnificent age? Why did art bear the modest name technē? Because it was a revealing that brought forth and made present, and therefore belonged within poiēsis. It was finally that revealing which holds complete sway in all the fine arts, in poetry, and in everything poetical that obtained poiēsis as its proper name. (ibid, p.339)
There is a very real sense in which, according to Heidegger, the essence of technology as a compulsion within us to enframe everything in standing-reserve that ends up enframing us within it too and in its very mode of revealing, conceals everything, makes impossible the freedom in bringing things forth on their way of presencing and concealment into the poetic,
the only way, according to Heidegger, we can experience truth or freedom. It conceals the possibilities of all places, all things, all human beings, nature itself. Like Vogel, Heidegger is deeply concerned with our ignorance and lack of responsibility for the acts that shape our world. Only by being mindful of what we are doing with the technological view of the world and what it is doing to us from within, can we creatively bring forth the ―transporting and enchanting‖ possibilities of nature, and our own freedom, he argues. But these practices occur, for the most part, in the physical spaces that have this technological activity as their dominant shaping feature. Is it any wonder, then, that the illusion arises that only in nature outside of these spaces—wild nature, wilderness—does being in its original form of self- presencing and self-concealing, phusis, unappropriated, exist at all? And is it not obscured again entirely from view, except for those who remain aware of the power of technology over them, and express what they have experienced poetically, in the only way they can?