ABSTRACT
In 1953 Martin Heidegger delivered his famous lecture ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, where technology was defined by using the Greek concept of Technē as a fundamental human activity (as well as the instrumentality) of a bringing forth, a revealing of what is hidden and a revealing of an ordering, as the essence of truth. Behind this definition of modern technology lies an epistemology of religious magnitude that includes not only that claim to truth but also, indirectly, the notions of good and evil and humanity’s very essence. To Heidegger the danger lay when technology becomes determinant of its own truth and in the subsequent enslavement to the objects of technique, while its ‘saving power’ lay in reflection and in technology’s so called essence as art, as a fundamental human activity (Heidegger 1977). It becomes much easier to call his dialectic into question when placing it within the context of Nazi ideology which, 20 years prior to delivering this paper, he so ardently advocated. Within the context of the war, the real danger of technology lies not as a determinant of its own truth, but when it brings forth a hidden presumed truth in the form of an ideology embedded in an unquestionable faith that attempts to contest and destroy fundamental human rights. Furthermore, what Heidegger claimed as technology’s saving power, redemption through art and the act of dwelling, may also be questioned upon examining the consequences of a military space that embodied an architecture created as a means of representing an ideology that was founded upon racial theories, and which had made a claim to truth.
