At the outset of this seminal essay Heidegger makes a series of claims that, prima facie, sound rather bizarre and catch us entirely unawares, not least, that the essence of technology is itself nothing technological.
Heidegger wishes to examine technology, in particular, the essence of technology, yet in so doing he is going to distance himself from the anti-modernist diatribes and cultural pessimism which were the staple diet of early twentieth century European intellectuals. That is not at all to say that Heidegger does not share certain misgivings with respect to the rapid expansion of technology and the concomitant rapidity with which our worldly network of technical instruments and apparatus are collapsing distance and levelling the once mysterious, massive, and, at times, recalcitrant earth to a quite manageable global village. Heidegger is alarmed and dismayed to witness communities and parishes being replaced by global culture and global Gemeinschaft, where parish pump politics, for example, is now a relic of a bygone age.
Heidegger’s reservations do not, however, prompt an impetuous reaction, an outcry or tirade against the evils of technology, this is not the diatribe of yet another intellectual Luddite. Rather Heidegger resists the temptation to demonize technology and thereby propagate an even more sinister myth, and instead has chosen to meditate on the issue and pursue a line of questioning until he arrives at what he holds to be the source/ur of this notion.
A notion, moreover, which seems so ubiquitous and prevalent in everything we say and do as the notion of Sein itself and thus enjoys the exalted and unmerited status of self-evidence
