ABSTRACT
The abiding and deep significance of art for Heidegger’s conception of human existence can perhaps be best introduced by considering its extraordinary appearance at the end of an essay from 1953 entitled “The Question of Technology” (Heidegger 1993). In that essay, Heidegger took up a topic which was widely seen as involving a disturbing new presence in the contemporary world: modern machine technology. In what we will come to see as a ‘gearshifting’ gesture utterly characteristic of his thinking, Heidegger regarded contemporary opinion on this matter as completely failing to grasp its essence. Not that Heidegger saw the growing concern as misplaced and modern technology as something to be embraced: if anything, Heidegger thought that the voices of dissent did not go far enough.
