ABSTRACT
For many, technology has become a double-edged sword, both saving and consuming our time and resources. As technological development runs ahead and makes advancements barely imaginable a few decades ago, we increasingly live in a condition of technological and digital fatigue. More than 60 years ago, Martin Heidegger offered a prescient critique of modern technology. This chapter introduces the aim of the volume by situating the reader within the philosophical and historical context of Heidegger’s thinking through technology. The chapter introduces the two most salient philosophical terms in Heidegger’s account of technology: enframing (Gestell) and releasement (Gelassenheit). Enframing is Heidegger’s term for the essence of modern technology, the human orientation towards making everything, including ourselves, part of a system ready to be called on at a moment’s notice in the service of technology. The antidote to this condition is releasement (Gelassenheit), a mode of being that is open to the world and which forestalls the imposition of a dominating will on other things. The chapter concludes by outlining the creative and thoughtful ways in which the volume’s contributors have taken up Heidegger’s challenge to think through technology and thereby lead us to a more authentic relation with ourselves and others.
