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The Question Concerning Technology

two things with respect to the meaning of this word. One is that τέχνη is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Τέχνη belongs to bringing-forth, to ποίησις; it is something poetic.

The other thing that we should observe with regard to τέχνη is even more important. From earliest times until Plato the word τέχνη is linked with the word ἐπιστήμη. Both words are terms for knowing in the widest sense. They mean to be entirely at home in something, to understand and be expert in it. Such knowing provides an opening up. As an opening up it is a revealing. Aristotle, in a discussion of special importance (Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. VI, chaps. 3 and 4), distinguishes between ἐπιστήμη and τέχνη and indeed with respect to what and how they reveal. Τέχνη is a mode of ἀληθεύειν. It reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another. Whoever builds a house or a ship or forges a sacrificial chalice reveals what is to be brought forth, according to the terms of the four modes of occasioning. This revealing gathers together in advance the aspect and the matter of ship or house, with a view to the finished thing envisaged as completed, and from this gathering determines the manner of its construction. Thus 'what is decisive in τέχνη does not at all lie in making and manipulating, nor in the using of means, but rather in the revealing mentioned before. It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that τέχνη is a bringing-forth.

Thus the clue to what the word τέχνη means and to how the Greeks defined it leads us into the same context that opened itself to us when we pursued the question of what instrumentality as such in truth might be.

Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where ἀλήθεια, truth, happens.

In opposition to this definition of the essential domain of technology, one can object that it indeed holds for Greek thought and that at best it might apply to the techniques of the handcraftsman, but that it simply does not fit modern machine-powered technology. And it is precisely the latter and


Martin Heidegger (GA 7) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays