Heidegger: technology and poetry

Abstract

The text presents Heidegger's discussion of the essence of technology, his critique of the contemporary world and the remedy for its ills. It starts from the 1953 lecture at the Technische Hochschule of Munich and takes up earlier writings — On the Essence of Truth (1930), Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) and The Age of the World Picture (1938) — examining technology as a mode of unconcealment: poiesis, techne and episteme refer back to aletheia, so that technology is not merely a means of mastering nature but a mode of truth. It addresses the ambiguity of the essence of technology, which harbours at once the risk that man will confine himself to the world of objects and the possibility of salvation through the return to the essential; the characterisation of the age as a destitute time, of calculative reason and of the forgetting of Being; and the distinction between philosophy and science, with the approximation of thinking and poetising. The text holds that it falls to man to listen to Being through the poetic word, thereby recovering the essential meaning of man and of philosophy.