RELATED TERMS: Iconic Designs and Iconic Designers; Design (as) Art (as) Philosophy
Design differs from art, as discussed in Iconic Designs and Iconic Designers and
Design (as) Art (as) Philosophy (pending posting), even though the boundaries between them are no longer strict and admit a certain hybridity. Design also differs from technology, although it bears some relation to τέχνη [techne] and ποίησις [poiesis]. One starting point for understanding the conditionality of the design-technology distinction is Heidegger’s essay, Die Frage nach der Technik [The Question of Technik; The Question of Technology; The Question of Technique].
τέχνη [techne] and ποίησις [poiesis]
Thomas Sheehan (2015: 276-277) points out that in Die Frage nach der Technik, Heidegger employs three terms: das Technische, die Technik, and das Wesen der Technik. By das Technische, he seems to mean modern-day manufacturing machinery. This raises the question of how das Technische differs from die Technik. For example, does die Technik refer to ‘technology’?
In his texts, Heidegger seems to join together two major senses of technology: firstly, as a means to an end, as in the machines which are the means for generating products; and, secondly, as a human activity, which includes both the skill to carry out production and the skilled productive activity itself. If that were the case, the word ‘technology’ would cover everything, from the skills, programmes, instruments and processes to the products of production, held together in an ‘economy’ of technology, as Foucault might put it (Sheehan, 2015).
Despite this, Sheehan considers that It is more likely that Heidegger’s Technik is the modern incarnation of Aristotle’s τέχνη [techne], which refers to a knowing-how-to, rather than to the products of such know-how. This remains the case even if those products are machines producing even more machines. For Aristotle, Technik is an ‘intellectual virtue’ in the order of praxis, specifically the ‘habitual’ practical cognition that creates the programmes and manages the machines. Therefore, Sheehan reserves the word ‘technology’ solely for the machines and translates Technik by ‘technik’ broadly construed as practical know-how. In short, τέχνη [techne] is techno-thinking conjoined with ποίησις [poiesis] as techno-doing.
Therefore, Sheehan contends, the subject matter that Heidegger bears down on in his lecture is τέχνη (techne), understood as a way of disclosing things, specifically in its contemporary form. It is not all the technological stuff (das Technische) or the programmes and machines that churn it out (die modern Technologie).
Heidegger traces the current mode of disclosure back to Aristotle’s notion of τέχνη, [techne] understood as the human capacity to bring things into meaningful presence by making, producing or constructing them. For Aristotle, τέχνη, [techne] is contrasted with ϕύσις [phusis], whereby natural things emerge of and by themselves.
Heidegger declares that, whether in Aristotelian τέχνη or in its modern version as technik, what he is talking about is ἀληϑεύειν, the human disclosure of things by bringing them into their ἀλήϑεια [aletheia], their pre-theoretical intelligible availability. This is achieved by working on them, shaping and transforming them into something that they were not before, not by thinking or speaking about them. Thus, for Sheehan, much of what Heidegger says about technik is heavily indebted to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics VI, specifically to its doctrine of the intellectual virtues.
Technology and Technique
Michael Eldred, in examining the same Heidegger essay, Die Frage nach der Technik, argues that it harbours a fatal ambiguity between ‘technology’ and ‘technique’. This ambiguity, Eldred further contends, arises from Heidegger’s inheritance of an ambiguity at the heart of Aristotle’s metaphysical concept of power.
References
Eldred, M. (2013) Technology, technique, interplay: Questioning die Frage nach der Technik, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. IEEE, 32(2), pp. 13–21. doi: 10.1109/MTS.2013.2259322.
Hainge, G., Nooy, J. D. E. and Hanna, B. E. (2011) Tekhnè, Technique, Technologie, Australian Journal of French Studies, 48(2), pp. 121–128. doi: 10.3828/AJFS.48.2.121.
Heidegger, M. (2006) Technique and the turn. The Question Concerning Technique [unpublished manuscript], Translated by R. Berkowitz and P. Nonet. Academia.edu. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/2083179/The_Question_Concerning_Technik_by_Martin_Heidegger (Accessed: 5 June 2024).
Sheehan, T. (2015) Making sense of Heidegger: a paradigm shift. London, UK: Rowman and Littlefield.
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