Heidegger On The Bondage Of Technology

Heidegger had a negative view of technology. He thought that technology leads to a decline in our ability to experience the world. His discussion of the problem of technology is an extension of the claim that he has made in his Being and Time that from Plato onward the history of Being has been one of gradual forgetting. We have been forgetting or ignoring what it is meant to be—a phenomena that he describes as the oblivion of Being. In his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” (Chapter 1; The Question Concerning Technology & Other Essays, by Heidegger), he says that the modern man views of nature and other human beings as a resource for achieving his ends. Due to the normalization of the technological view of the world, people have lost track of myriad ways of experiencing the things as they are—as spiritual, as beautiful, as uplifting, as something of personal value; they have become convinced that since everything can be transformed by the power of technology, nothing has inherent character and value in itself. He notes that the capitalist west and the communist east are both in the bondage of technology, and that rejecting technology will not free us from this bondage: only the acknowledgement of the danger of technology will.