Sartre's second century

30 Chapter Two
or wider circuit of the accessible, here [...] so that the produced being
stands-for-itself on its own account and remains able to be found there and
to lie-before as something established stably for itself" 33
Heidegger will use a variety of strategies in his attempt to recall the
genuine meaning of this originally Greek conception of thingness,
acknowledging that things in their essential being are also expressive of
cultural and spiritual values above and beyond, but frequently
incorporating, their use-value. This shift allows us to understand the
importance of the 1935 essay, The Origin of the Work of Art. Even though
it is a produced artefact, the work of art has a "thingly" nature that
transcends its source in human productivity. In fact, Heidegger focuses
less upon the work of art as the product of human labour in emphasizing
the fact that "great" works of art are less the product of individual artists
than they are the "product" of an historical era. Major works of art, such as
the Greek temple, are central points of cultural illumination in which the
light of disclosure (Being) struggles with the concealing darkness of the
earth in order to establish the presence of things. The voice of Being is
announced in great works of art, an announcement that celebrates human
doing as a response to the historical disclosedness of a world and not as
the inspired behaviour of a single individual within the confines of a
purely pragmatic intervention in the world.
Let us term this a shift from a work-centered to a "cultural" view of the
products of human labour. It is this shift that dominates Heidegger's
central argument in the important The Question of Technology. Heidegger
understands technology to be a global, all-encompassing framework
defining the modern world. Technology is defined as a "setting upon", a
"standing reserve", an "ordering". By "standing reserve", Heidegger
means "nothing less than the way in which everything presences that is
wrought upon by the challenging revealing. Whatever stands by in the
sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over and against us as an
object." 34 Heidegger continues: "Yet an airliner that stands on the runway
is surely an object. Certainly. We can represent the machine so. But then it
conceals itself at to what and how it is. Revealed, it stands on the taxi strip
only as standing-reserve, inasmuch as it is ordered to ensure the possibility
of transportation." 35
Technology is the transformation of thing-hood, the object standing
before us in its accessibility on its own terms, into the instrumentality of
worldly Dasein. The opposite of technology is poesis. The Question of
Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 108.
34 Heidegger, The Question of Technology, 17.
35 Ibid.