In the 1950s, Martin Heidegger claimed that the essence of technology is itself nothing technological (WHD, 155/WCT, 135; VA, 9/QCT, 4).l Rather, he argued that technicity is a way of being that informs both human being and beings. I wish t o draw attention to two points of Aristotelian influence on this well-known analysis of technology, and two points of Heidegger's resistance t o that influence. First, Aristotle held that to know is to become one with the thing known, and that therefore different kinds of thing lead t o different kinds of knowledge. Heidegger translates Aristotle on this point in 1940 (GA 9, 276/BCP, 250; Physics 2.1.193a31-32). Heidegger's insight that the essence of technology is not a technological thing but rather a way of revealing stands in agreement with the Aristotelian correlation between knowledge and what is known. Heidegger disagrees, however, that things inform knowledge. Heidegger's analysis of technicity shows that knowledge correlates with things because it informs their very being. That is to say, the danger of technicity is that it reduces all the beings it encounters to resources available for technological exploitation.Secondly, the essence of technology is for Heidegger a way of revealing the being of nature. Hence, it is a way of knowing. To say that technology is essentially a way of knowing is not to mistake Heidegger's ontological point for an epistemological one. Rather, it is t o suggest that Heidegger agrees with Aristotle: t o know is essential t o human being's very being. Aristotle opens the Metaphysics with the claim that "all human beings by nature desires to know" (980a22). As Will McNeill has pointed out, Heidegger discusses this claim in at least three places.2 Likewise, Heidegger defines Dasein as the inquirer.
Trish Glazebrook is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Colgate University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1993. Her most recent publication appeared in Philosophy Today, and she has a book forthcoming with Fordham University Press calledHeidegger's Philosophy of Science.
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