enframing

is a term that captures how modern technology strips things of all mystery and places them in a gigantic framework that feeds on itself. Things become a mere stockpile or standing reserve.

enframing. Modern technology strips things of all mystery and places them in a gigantic framework that feeds on itself. Things become a mere stockpile or standing reserve.

is when true nearness withheld, reduced to presence, then we have the enframing.

All true nearness is nearness through the concealed mirror-play of the fourfold. When this nearness is withheld, reduced to presence, then we have the enframing.

is the name for the entire system of stockpiled present-at-hand things.

Heidegger’s name for the entire system of stockpiled present-at-hand things is the enframing.

is not hopeless. While we are not the lords of being, nonetheless, we are still the shepherds of being; and being needs us, for without us it will never come to presence as what it is.

Humans are not the lords of being. Nonetheless, humans are still the shepherds of being. We are not completely helpless in the face of enframing or the stockpiled standing reserve. In fact, Heidegger holds that the essence of being needs us, for without us it will never come to presence as what it is. But for this to happen, humans must first open themselves to the essence of technology.

is indifferent to whether efficiency is useful or monstrous. Good or bad, modernity tends to reduce the things of the world to stockpiled presence-at-hand, just as the history of philosophy since ancient Greece has reduced the world to presence.

It is true that some of these things are generally seen as efficient and useful, while others are viewed as inhumane monstrosities. But for Heidegger, the “essence” in all cases is the same. All of them reduce the things of the world to stockpiled presence-at-hand, just as the history of philosophy since ancient Greece has reduced the world to presence. The damnable atrocities of the past century are the result of a metaphysics of presence that began a long time ago, and give us nothing more than its logical outcome. For Heidegger, databanks and mass-produced shoes are essentially the same as Auschwitz, Hiroshima, or Verdun.

Only by thinking do we learn to overcome enframing. Being itself is the danger, and for this reason it turns against itself in forgetfulness.

is not the fault of humans. It is, rather, being itself that guides us into taking the world as mere resource.

Strangely enough, Heidegger does not believe that humans are to blame for this horrible predicament—instead, being itself is to blame! For it is being that passes itself off as mere presence, and thereby invites us to convert things into a stockpile of manipulable slag. It is not just inanimate objects that become standing reserve, but humans as well. We are all reduced to the status of crude oil or coal. This is true not only when we are exterminated in death camps or blown up by mass-produced bombs, but even when we are simply “treated as numbers” by university administrators, telemarketers, or military draft boards. All this ordering of stockpiles has only one goal: to treat the whole of presence as a standing reserve. The system /of ordering is not made up of all individual human purposes, but is something deeper than all of them.

is problematic because it does not protect the thing, as a thing, in the things depth, leaving behind a world that is not world.

The enframing happens because it does not preserve the thing as thing, just as Plato, Aristotle, and all later thinkers did not. The enframing does not protect the thing, or take custody of it in any way. The thing as thing is neglected: according to Heidegger this is not a judgmental statement, given that it is not humans who do this, but being itself. When the thing is neglected, then the world is not world.

enframing, n.All

enframing