Heidegger's Technological Lens on Water
Modern humans have taken charge of natural forces in order to power our modern existence. Martin Heidegger, in his Question Concerning Technology grapples with definitions of technology and explains how it is instrumental in capturing the potential power of natural resources. Along our way to mastering the world through technology, the definition of nature changes. One can use this logic to assert that our conception of rivers, and therefore water, has changed at the hands of technology.
In an increasingly modern technological society, humans rapidly replace the “worldliness” of the world as it existed in nature with the technologically-driven “human-world.” (Cohen) Heidegger asserts that humans have, through using modern technology, “enframed” their world in a certain way, which entails a distinct way of relating to the world. (Cohen)
Technology is defined by Heidegger as, in its purest sense, a contrivance, a means to an end and a human activity. (Marvin) Belonging to the definition of technology for Heidegger are “the manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and the ends that they serve”. (Marvin) Also, technology can be thought of as a human activity in its positing of “ends and procurement and utilization of means.” (Marvin) These comprise Heidegger’s instrumental and anthropological definitions of technology. (Marvin)
Modern technology must be mastered by humans in order to master our environment. For Heidegger, technology is a “mode of revealing; it comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where truth happens.” (Heidegger) Modern technology’s revealing is brought forth in this way: “energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is in turn distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew.” (Heidegger)
Heidegger posits that while old technology did not change the conception of nature, modern technology does. (Cohen) Modern technology entails a new type of enframing that distorts how we view the natural world. Heidegger poses the example of the contrast between the windmill and the hydroelectric power plant to explain this point. According to Heidegger, windmills do not frame the world in the same way that modern technologies do. This is because the windmill “does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it” in the same way that a modern technology such as the hydroelectric power plant does, the latter revealing latent natural power while the former doesn’t. (Heidegger) Heidegger states that the windmill’s “sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind’s blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it.” (Heidegger) As Dustin Cohen explains, “With the windmill, the wind turns the turbines, the wind-energy instantaneously powers the turbines. At no point is the wind’s energy manipulated or stored up as a different kind of energy. The windmill only transfers motion, it “reveals” wind energy, but does not commandeer nature’s energy or store it for future use.” (Cohen) Windmills bring forth energy from nature, but to not challenge it forth. (Marvin)
In contrast, Heidegger has this to say of modern technologies:
“The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It sets the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines turning. This turning sets those machines in motion whose thrust sets going the electric current for which the long-distance power station and its network of cables are set up to dispatch electricity. In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears as something at our command. The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station.”
Rather than being outside of the river, the hydroelectric power plant is “set in the current of the river”. (Cohen) The river then appears to us to be under control of human beings. (Cohen) Cohen assures us that “The hydroelectric plant challenges the energies of the Rhine, stores them in a non-sensuous abstract form whose value is discernible by, and exclusively for, the will of human beings.” (Cohen) This is how our view of the river changes. Its challenging-forth “substantiates Heidegger’s claim that the world has been turned into “standing-reserve” as a result of modern technology.” (Cohen) This challenging “happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing . But the revealing never simply comes to an end.” (Heidegger)
In our harnessing of the power of rivers through technology, we come to view water and its power in a virtual manner. Water in rivers, when considered from an energy-production perspective, becomes merely potential energy which must be stored and distributed. We no longer have a visceral connection to its power. Instead, its power is expressed through our conception of its value as stored energy, which we cannot quantify or measure in a visceral way. We cannot hold all of the electricity dams produce in our hands. We no longer consider the river in itself. Technology changes the way in which we view rivers.
Technology removes the now. Because we view the world through technology, we view the world through standing-reserves, which makes us view everything as only its potential. We can no longer focus on what a river actually is. We see only what is can be transformed into.
This worldview has serious repercussions when it comes to preservation of natural resources. Unable to grasp the ontological nature of water, viewing it only as potential energy, we risk our ability to be aware of the true nature of water as it exists by itself, in nature. Not knowing its real nature, only virtually conceiving of it as a potential energy source, we cannot hope to preserve it as it exists in the natural world. Preservation necessitates knowledge of a resource’s current state of being. As long as we we all view things through the technological lens, we don’t have a hope of preserving our rivers. It is no wonder, then, that many of our best sources of freshwater have been polluted beyond their ability to be useful to us. Perhaps the problem is that we can’t conceive of our natural world in any other capacity other than its utility. We have technology to thank for that.
The Question Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger
Some Notes of Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology, Dustin Cohen
Lecture on Water and Ethics, Dr Bill Marvin
