Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
processes. To clarify this distinction, Heidegger compares the traditional
windmill with an electric power plant.
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Each harnesses an energy source
and puts it to work for human ends, yet the windmill remains related to
nature in a way that allows the wind to remain itself even as it serves
human ends. This is a technology that lets nature reveal itself as an entity
independent of all technical processes and planning, though, to be sure,
it first
appears
to us never directly but always in a technological context.
A coal-fired electric power plant, by contrast, unlocks basic physical
energies and then stores them up in an abstract, nonsensuous form.
Hence, modern technology places “unreasonable” demands on nature
by aggressively setting upon it and refusing to let it be as it is in itself.
Driven by the standard of efficiency—that is, the maximum yield at the
minimum expense—it is guided by short-term economic considerations
that tend to undermine ethical and environmental concerns. The net
result of this aggressive mode of revealing is the transformation of the
world into a vast stockroom where everything gains its ontological status
in terms of its availability and disposability for the endless cycle of pro-
duction and consumption endorsed earlier by Marx. Modern technology
reduces the world to what Heidegger calls
Bestand
—a stock or standing
reserve of energy resources. As early as the mid-1930s, he was already
formulating this critique, especially in relation to Nietzsche's doctrine of
the will to power that Heidegger explicitly links to mechanization and
the mastery of beings that are now everywhere “surveyable.” But the
nature of this mastery cannot merely be equated with mechanization and
mass production. Rather, it is to be found in the kind of beings that are
mass-produced, beings that as the term Bestand suggests, possess no
inherent ontological standing apart from human consumption and pro-
duction, seemingly subject to the will to power of a new human type in
the history of humanity: Nietzsche's superman.
Yet, Heidegger is insistent (and here his divergence from Marx and
modern humanism and anthropocentrism becomes most apparent)
that the mode of revealing in modern technology eludes human com-
prehension and control. Unknown to themselves, producers and
consumers alike respond to a way of being Heidegger names
Gestell
or
“enframing” that, as a “destiny of being,” urges humans to challenge
forth nature as a mere resource, as standing on reserve for human
consumption and production. Gestell, in other words, is the essence of
