Why does Heidegger place a special emphasis on art as the ‘saving power’ in the technological

age?

In Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1950)1 and ‘The Question Concerning
Technology’ (1954) the philosopher is not concerned in the least by the concept of art as an
expression of the vision of a creative or in terms of an individual viewer engaging an aesthetic
experience. In fact, that which Heidegger says about individual works of art themselves is of
little accuracy.2 However, what he does provide in these two essays is a new way of thinking
about art as a wider phenomenon that exerts a significant influence on philosophy, as opposed
to the perhaps more common approach of remarking how philosophy can inform art. In regard
to technology, Heidegger does not serve-up art as a direct and unmediated antidote to what he
perceives as being the ills it inflicts on Dasein; in itself, art is not the ‘saving power’ of
technology. However, art does have a remedial application if an understanding of its essence
can be arrived at and, potentially, emulated. An essential part of art's nature is its capacity for
questioning - for the irruption, movement and the dislocation of paradigms - in contrast to the
fixity and disclosure is accommodated by the technological mode of Being. Both art and
technology’s basis as technē, their common statuses as metaphysical modes of ‘revealing’,
allows Heidegger to draw art comparatively in relation to technology in order to demonstrate that
it harbours a ‘saving power’ within itself despite the dangers that emanate from it.

If indeed, as I will attempt to show, art and technology act in a similar manner, then art (like the
current state of technology) has the possibility to malfunction too.3 Neither is entirely without
flaw and neither are inherently neutral forces. Later in this essay I would like to draw upon the
concurrence, divergence and reflexivity fostered in the relationship between art and technology
through an exploration of Heidegger’s use of language that frames the two concepts in the
‘Origin’ and ‘Question’ essays. Yet firstly I aim to elucidate the ways in which both technology
and art function in these two works and arrive at an explanation of the way in which art can act
in provoking the advent of technology’s ‘saving power’ from within; this will require an
exploration of differing provisions of ‘Being’ by art and technology and an excavation of the
notion of ‘clearing’ in regard to them both.

1 Originally drafted 1935 but first published 1950. Bowie, p257.

2 The shoes of a “peasant woman” painted by Van Gogh that Heidegger dedicates so much attention to
in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ are actually widely believed to be the artist’s own.
3 This will be addressed when I question what it means for an artwork to ‘work’.
Fundamentally, in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ Heidegger inquires into the essence
of, particularly, modern technology and its relationship to human existence. Recognizing that
there is no chance of returning to a nostalgic age without technology, he maintains that we must
learn to live harmoniously with it, and questions, in that vein, whether it is possible to cultivate a
“free relationship” to it at all.4 This would be a way of living alongside technology that ensures
that our essence as ‘man’ - the experience of ‘Being’ that is specific to human beings or Dasein
- is not eclipsed by technology entirely.5 In this way, technology would not infiltrate our
experience as man enough to “warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature.”6 Our nature as ‘man’,
to Heidegger, as expressed within the term Dasein, positions us as being ‘the being for whom
Being is a question”7 where the ‘Being’ of things can be characterised as the way in which
things are made intelligible to us as ‘man’. Unless we learn to “experience the technological
within its own bounds”8 we leave ourselves vulnerable to a dire “forgetting of Being”, or,
forgetting of our essence as man; as the being who questions whose questioning at least gives
the impression of his being able to freely exercise his own destiny according, in part, to his will.9

While the common (the ‘instrumental’ and ‘anthropological’) conception of technology is that of a
neutral instrument under human control is not incorrect to Heidegger it is not exactly true either
as viewing technology in this way does not reveal its essence. In belonging to technē, the Greek
word expressing the notion of ‘bringing forth’10, technology itself is not an instrumental means; it
is instead “a way of revealing” through enframing (Ge-stell).11 It is a mode of ‘Being’; a way of
disclosing the world. Everything that is appears as such because it has been presented by the
technological mode which renders it intelligible. Modern technology undergoes a certain
characterisation in belonging to technē; taking this ‘revealing’ essence to a violent extreme;
anything that is rendered intelligible must be made so through the paradigms of measurability,
orderability and calculability. Powered by the extractive aggression of scientific developments,
technology ‘sets upon’ the earth, expediting all that is naturally ‘revealed’ and challenging it to
‘yield-forth’ its bounty to humans;

4 Heidegger, ‘Question’, p3.

5 On ‘Being’: Glendinning, ‘The End of Philosophy as Metaphysics’, p569.
6 Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p54.
7 Heidegger, Being and Time, 3: 31.
8 Heidegger, ‘Question’, p4.
9 “Europe is the world-historical happening of technology as the acme of the forgetting of Being.” Gasché,
EIT, p102.
10 Heidegger, ‘Question’, p13.
11 Heidegger, ‘Question’, p12.
 “Agriculture is now the mechanised food industry. Air is now set upon to yield
nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to
yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use.”12

Whichever objects arise from completing this yielding journey from nature to object are called
resources or ‘standing-reserve’ (Bestand).13 This way of treating nature is the framework, or the
essence, of modern technology according to Heidegger. As our current mode of ‘Being’, this
framework colours our world. As ‘man’, it is in our nature to be world-disclosers.14 That is, we
search for patterns of coordinated practices - very much like that which we would call ‘cultural
paradigms’ - that deliver coherent, distinct contexts in which we are able to feel ontologically
secure and, with this security, perceive, act, and think in an ordered manner that makes sense
to us and aligns with others around us. Heidegger calls this interpretive tool for engaging with
‘Being’ a ‘clearing’ or “truth setting itself to work”.15 Truth to Heidegger, then, is anything but
universal and absolute, it is something that develops out of socialised disclosure.

Since “the essence of technology lies in enframing”16 and this ‘enframing’ provides man with an
understanding of being able to unlock what is concealed in nature on demand as a resource for
his immediate purposes, even “the Rhine itself appears as something at our command.”17 As a
result, the scope of what man under the technological paradigm can understand as being
‘revealed’ or ‘able to be understood’ is rendered singularly in terms of what is calculable and
orderable and thus seemingly masterable; anything that differs will not be ‘revealed’ to exist.18
The ‘clearing’ then produced in the technological mode of ‘Being’ is emphatic and fixed; it is one
that denies any mystery to ‘revealing’. While “[t]here is no demonry in technology” itself,
Heidegger maintains that “the essence of technology,” enframing, or, “the destining of revealing,
is the danger.”19 Technological ‘enframing’ fixes ‘destining’, it cements in place that possibilities
of revealing are restrained to solely one which is ordering. This is only one of the major dangers
of technology. The other is that all that appears to ‘be’ will be consumed by technological
ordering, and as a consequence, will appear solely as ‘standing reserve’. This too includes man;
we will develop from seeing ourselves as the orderer of the ‘standing-reserve’ to a resource in

12 Heidegger, ‘Question’, p15.

13 Heidegger, ‘Question’, p17.
14 Dreyfus & Spinoza, p159.
15 Dreyfus, ‘Nihilism, Art, Technology and Politics’, p297.
16 Heidegger, ‘Question’, p26.
17 Heidegger, ‘Question’, p16.
18 “So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain held fast in the will to master it.”
Heidegger, ‘Question’, p32.
19 Heidegger, ‘Question’, p28.
ourselves. What is needed is a liberation of ‘clearing’, an encouragement for the technological
mode of ‘Being’ to embrace something other than fixity in providing meanings in the world. It is
here that technology, indisputably and unrelentingly at the centre of our experience in the
modern age, is in need of a ‘saving power’.

While we have seen how the very essence of technology - ‘enframing’ - produces its own
dangers, yet, as Heidegger expresses in appropriation of the words of the German poet
Hölderlin, within this very essence “roots and thrives the saving power.”:20

“But where danger is, grows/ The saving power also.”21

The saving power itself “lets man see and enter into the highest dignity of his essence. This
dignity lies in keeping watch over the unconcealment [...] of all coming to presence on this
earth.”22 It invokes the questioning that is found central to man’s essence and, with that, a
surveillance over that which is revealed. It is a remedy to the enframing “which threatens to
sweep man away into ordering as the supposed single way of revealing, and so thrusts man into
the danger of the surrender of his free essence.”23

But as the Hölderlin quote suggests, “the coming to presence of technology harbours in itself
what we least suspect, the possible arising of the saving power.”24 Heidegger outlines that man
just needs to be aware of exactly “what comes to presence in technology, instead of merely
staring at the technological.”25 We need to know what is at work; we need to be aware that the
very mode of ‘Being’ that technology provides, and the ‘clearing’ into which we enter when
situated within this mode, is one that entrenches a staticism of ‘revealing’, a fixity in the way we
approach the world.

Enter art. Art itself highlights the notion of ‘clearing’ as something that is actively ‘at play’ and
proves that ‘clearing’ does not have to be absolute and singular; it can be instead displaced and
dislocated. As a mode of ‘Being’, ‘a way of revealing’ belonging to technē, art can perform a
“decisive confrontation” with technology because it is at once akin to its essence and

20 Heidegger, ‘Question’, p29.

21 Heidegger, ‘Question’, p28.
22 Heidegger, ‘Question’, p32.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
“fundamentally different from it”.26 Art calls-up, according to Heidegger, a “primally granted
revealing” that differs from the contrived and fixed brand of revealing that technology invokes.27
As mentioned, art is not, in itself, the direct ‘saving power’ of technology, as this remedy must
be self-administered. Yet it provides the potential for such a force to be evoked from within the
technē to which technology belongs. I say potential here because art, to Heidegger in ‘The
Origin’, “is nothing more than a word to which nothing actual any longer corresponds.”28 In the
modern age, art does not work as it should because its mode of ‘revealing’ has been eclipsed
by that of technology.29 But understanding what it means for an artwork to ‘work’ will provide a
solution to technology’s ills.

In ‘The Origin’ essay, art works in a way that is not too dissimilar than that which artist Paul Klee
describes in his own ‘Creative Confession’; “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes
visible.”30 In his essay Heidegger explains how a functioning artwork is able to disclose a whole
‘world’ within itself as a tangible ‘thing’; a ‘thing’ that transcends the status of mere ‘object’. The
most effective way that Heidegger describes this as being at work in the essay is through the
image of a Greek temple;

“It is the temple work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around
itself the unity of those paths and rations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory
and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for the human being.”31

The temple, as a work, harbours that which socialises man, his shared experiences and
practices, providing a background of understanding of what matters and what makes sense in
that specific cultural context. A ‘clearing’ is created, and within that ‘clearing’ the artwork is able
to construct a ‘world’ in action; the Greek work enables the conceptualisation of the pagan gods,
epic heroes as well as slaves. Likewise, the Christian church as a ‘work’ would give meaning to
the notion of martyrdom, monotheism and sinners that the temple could in no way
accommodate. Within the work a mode of ‘Being’ is ‘revealed’.

26 Heidegger, ‘Question’, p35.

27 Heidegger, ‘Question’, p34.
28 Heidegger, ‘Origin’, p143.
29 “Heidegger indicates in a 1950 postscript that in the modern era the work of art was no longer the
tangible ‘thing’ that could gather and centre a world, far less establish the crucial dimensions of an
epoch.” Borgmann, p424.
30 Klee, p6.
31 Heidegger, ‘Origin’, p167.
Yet in the work’s status as a ‘thing’, in its materiality, the artwork undergoes a resistance to the
rationalisation, the encapsulation, that ‘world-making’ entails in its attempt to systematise, or
render a symbol out of, organic, shared practices. This pushback to totalisation and coherence
Heidegger calls the ‘earth’ aspect of the artwork. The temple, in order to function as it does,
must be made out of stone and not steel for example. The tangible aspect of the artwork itself
shows that the practices and paradigms that it organises cannot simply be captured by ordering
values. Central to the artwork, then, is this productive struggle between ‘world’ and ‘earth’,
meaning that no interpretation can truly articulate its essence. The work is constantly situated
between concealing and unveiling. Interpretive leeway here allows for a culture to generate itself
historically; the vacillating movement ensures that the cultural ‘clearing’ projected by the artwork
is mobile and constantly able to transform. Heidegger maintains; “the work casts before itself
the fact that it was created it displaces us out of the realm of the ordinary”32 - ‘earth’ displaces
the claim to knowing, to rationalisation that ‘world’ proffers - “to submit to this displacement
means to transform out of accustomed ties to world and earth and henceforth to restrain all
usual doing and prising, knowing or looking, in order to stay within the truth of what is happening
in the work.”33 In the process of transformation, different cultural ‘clearings’ are revealed and
“new and essential worlds” or modes of ‘Being’ are able to irrupt within the shifting space of
‘revealing’. Art, in this way, provokes beginnings, new histories, new paradigms.

In this way, proffers an essentially mobile mode of ‘Being’. While belonging to technē like
technology, it differs in the extreme in its approach to its own means of ‘revealing’. To
Heidegger, art provokes “manifold revealing” in a “pious” and questioning manner, 34 by acting in
terms of “yielding to the holding-sway and the safekeeping of truth.”35 One singular mode of
‘Being’ is not dictated, contestability and transformation are welcomed. Its method of ‘revealing’,
Heidegger describes as ‘hervorbringen’ or ‘bringing forth’ which speaks to art’s greater
encompassing equivocality in comparison to technology. Even on the level of language art is an
anathema to technology, which is opposingly said to ‘reveal’ in terms of ‘challenging-forth’ or
‘herausfordern’ with its more violatory connotations. This is the semiotic pivot upon which
technē rests in Heidegger; it harbours within itself both its own danger and self-redemption.

An understanding of the mechanics of art’s ‘revealing’ affords man a way into conceptualising

32 Heidegger, ‘Origin’, p190.

33 Heidegger, ‘Origin’, p191.
34 “For questioning is the piety of thought.” Heidegger, ‘Question’, p35.
35 Heidegger, ‘Origin’, p34.
‘Being’ as an open realm. The work of art does not provide ‘truth’ by way of causality, but via
transformation and displacement. The domain of understanding provided is not forced into a
rigid and unitary structure of intelligibility, instead art fosters a mode of ‘Being’ that is more
palatable to Dasein as it accommodates, within its very essence, questioning and reevaluation.
Understanding the mode of ‘Being’ that arises from art encourages us to question the entire
evolution of ‘revealing’ that arises from technē. It would allow us to undergo what Heidegger
would call a ‘destruction’ of such metaphysics; a reconsideration of the enframing that takes
place upon our world.36 In this way, we would be able to navigate technology in a way that does
not threaten our essence as ‘man’, with a constant awareness of the danger that ‘enframing’
poses upon this essence that inherently questions. If clearings are not absolute, as art
demonstrates, then our fate is not to indefinitely suffer in the “forgetting of Being”’. Through art
we can realise that our technological understanding of ‘Being’ is received, it is not absolute or
essential to us as ‘man’.

Catheryne Kelly.

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