The first emphatic word in Heidegger's Die Frage nach der Technik highlights not technology, its how, its about, or wherefore, but questioning. This for Heidegger is because 'Questioning builds a way.'(10) What is to be built by way of questioning is extraordinary, if in the midst of Heidegger's many remarkable claims, often too little analysed if routinely remarked upon. The way is a way of freedom, an opening toward a relationship to essence of technology. Heidegger's project of 'questioning concerning technology' seeks 'to prepare a free relationship' to technology, where the freedom of this relationship of human existence to technology is determined in terms of response to the 'essence' of technology. Heidegger's brief is not against technology. He speaks in the name of liberation but not mastery.

Because 'technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology,' that is, because the essence of technology is nothing technological, the free or open relationship of human existence to technology is not a matter of the technical facility or experience with technology so often invoked by commentators arguing against or on behalf of Heidegger's analysis of the technological essence of modernity. Nor it is a mater of detachment, Gelassenheit alone. This in turn means that any neutral perspective on technology is a convicted relationship to technology, just as being for or against technology is an entrapment within the technological setup.

By means of the anti-adjectival definition of essence ordinary enough in Heidegger, it is because 'the essence of technology is by no means anything technological' and not because of our philosophical thickness that we remain barred from experiencing 'our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it' (Q 4). In other words, we are excluded from anything like a relationship to the essence of technology exactly when we conceive technology as the technological.

To articulate his project of questioning within the framing constraint of technoscience, Heidegger invokes a backwards and forwards dynamic. Questioning the usual adjectival force of essence as whatness, quiddity reveals the instrumental and anthropological definitions of technology as manifestly related terms: to ' posit ends and procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity' (4) poised, as the instrumental always is in anthropocentric terms.

In this questioning of technology, the instrumental and anthropological definitions, and the observation that the one entails the other, are not denied. They are as Heidegger says 'correct.' For Heidegger the instrumental definition is anthropological. It defines both technology and, as homo faber, the human being. This in turn locks us into the defining problem of our age, which is now no longer if it ever was, How does it stand with being, but rather How does it stand with technology? And like the being question, this question can be parsed in many ways.

Heidegger weaves technology in its essence into the original meaning of the ancient Greek word for 'art' in all its breadth: techne referring to 'the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts'(13). As art, as techne, technology is at least potentially, that is, from its origins, poietic. Recalling the likewise coordinate sense of techne and episteme, Heidegger claims that 'technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, wherealetheia, truth happens' (13).

But exactly this definition of technology seems counter-intuitive, to say the very least. As many of Heidegger's critics have noted: it seems to ignore the many different aspects and experiences of contemporary technology. If we are pleased to think of Heidegger's thought as a species of (to follow one commentator's colloquialisation) 'pine tree mysticism,' this is surely pine tree pretentiousness. How does the aletheiological event of technology enable us to understand our relationship to technology?

Heidegger expresses the essence of modern technology as what he names a challenging-forth or challenging-revealing. This challenging sets upon what is, nature, the genetic profile of the individual human being, the graphic imagination of the human relationship to the cybernetic domain, and so on and reveals it on the terms of that same technical challenge or set up. For a farmer with a a plow what there is are fields of earth to be cultivated; for a farmer at war, what a plow always retains is the aspect of matter beyond form: raw materials for a sword. This is not opposed to the determination of a plow for plowing, it is because (i.e., the how) of that determination. For the genome project, what there is what counts as the makeup of the human being, mind and body/body and soul, there will be assayable, measureable nucleotide sequences.

The contrast to challenging forth is the contrast Heidegger suggests between the care of husbandry and challenge of technological control or domination. The game is the same: agriculture. In the latter case we can speak of forbearance because, to use Heidegger's much maligned black forest imagery, the saw mill on the river is a tool to turn the flow of the river into the turning of a wheel for human advantage and appropriation. There is or better: there has to be forbearance or restraint to the extent that without great care for the flow and force of the river, its bends, its banks, depths, recent meteorological history, the saw mill cannot function. The sheer will to power of the woodcutter, his ambition, his dreams of rapacity, as some philosophers of technology have observed to be more rather than less characteristic of the users of pristine or early forms of technology are all irrelevant. The technological condition or hypothetical imperative of technology means that in premodern times the only way to realize such ambitions is to husband one's energies to the limits of the river and to reflect that same care in the design and operation of the saw mill. The hydroelectric dam, on the other hand, forces the question for once and for all. The scope of the river is altered, dammed into the requisite domain and so dammed, the challenging of the hydroelectric plant reveals the river in terms not of its history or its contours or what lies upstream, but eliminating all that, as hydroelectric source. Here one misses the point if all one sees is the quaint image of the oldfashioned water mill in a nostalgic contrast with the modern advances of hydroelectric power. Rather Heidegger offers a reflection on the difference between modern technology and premodern technology in the way this difference yet reflects the essence of technology

In the related case of agriculture, Heidegger traces the transformation into modern agribusiness as the transformation into the rule of modern method and technique, the radicality of his claim is that the farmer as well as the farm and the farmed are thereby transformed. So it goes with sheep-farming. Formerly, Heidegger notes, to cultivate and to set in order 'meant to take care of and to maintain' (14-15). An entirely different ideal rules in mechanized or 'factory' efficient farming. Rather than the ambiguities of stewardship however close to dominion in a patriarchical scheme, we have an undisguisedly brutal, patently and shockingly efficient industrial enterprise. The earth no longer gives or withholds anything. Thus there is no need to thank the earth or the gods for nature's bounty: that would be true nostalgia and superstition. Today modern means guarantee crop yields.

It is easy to overlook the economic engine that leads to the biological jackpot that culminates in the Human Genome project.(11) But it is to this effect that Heidegger argues that 'Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry' (15). The recent cloning of an adult sheep near Rosslyn in Scotland helps to recall the force of Heidegger's original insight into the issue of the mechanization of nature and the calculation of life itself beyond what remains the horribly cathected resonances of the full quotation:

Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and death camps, the same thing as the blockades and reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs. (GA 79, p. 27.)

It is important to emphasise in this context that the political force of the historical associations inevitably entangled in this statement -- the anger that can still be elicited by the implications of such a statement on the part of a defeated opponent -- means that few readers are inclined to see what Heidegger is arguing. Victors still in a war more than half a century cold, we are outraged interpreters of the range of things Heidegger ought to have said. In the previous example, the politicized moral confidence of a Caputo(12) or course, of Levinas himself, can persuade us that such a Heideggerian reduction to the 'same' must miss the point thoroughly and completely, that equations such as these betray the excesses of Heidegger's own rhetoric and a failure of philosophic insight.(13) As critics, we evaluate Heidegger as thinker of the ethical above all, and find him morally lacking.(14) This same evaluative, calculative passion is what it means to be ourselves caught in the draft of the Ge-stell or the constructions of modern technology. According to measuring, evaluative, moral fashion, Heideggers's Ackerbau image has everything to do with Heidegger (and Nazism) and nothing to do with technology and nothing to do with us. Neglecting what Heidegger means when he says 'the same,' 'das Selbe, we stubbornly maintain in the indignation of blindness that that there is nothing the same in the cadence of the examples sequenced in Heidegger's comparisons. Technology, according to its instrumental, humanist ideal, is neutral. Thus nuclear energy can destroy or else it can yield life. Recoiling from Heidegger's comparisons, deploring his associations as outrageous, condemning his lack of taste, his crassness, we stubbornly refuse to connect agriculture, however modernized and bio-technized (which it has been for quite some time, especially and rather dramatically in the USA: land of no-holds-barred capital opportunism), with the enduringly horrible phenomena of gas chambers and death camps. We will not see anything 'the same' in the 'manufacture of corpses' and the meat processing industry, which last includes and which was in fact the motor of the experimental procedure of cloning as an advantage or progressive improvement over even such a mechanical means of reproduction as artificial insemination.

For Heidegger, the key, and this is, alas -- and I cannot emphasise that alas too keenly or too much -- unchanged, it is the same, in the example of (say) organ reserves grown in cloned organisms to be harvested as a reserve, a stockpile, for projected needed transplant possibilities. What sets upon and challenges forth the dynamic force of nature is what Heidegger calls a twofold Fordern, an expediting, a summoning, calling forth, a compelling. That is also, for Heidegger, 'the revealing that rules throughout modern technology' (16). What we want in good English is to force nature, like a bonsai tree or the English gardener's art that is the garden itself: botanical presentation, maze, topiary. This is what is desired and this is what we do: driven to secure 'the maximum yield at the minimum expense' (15). This is the modern meaning of efficiency: technology as causa efficiens.

But 'because man is challenged more originally than are the energies of nature, i.e., into the process of ordering, he is never transformed into mere standing-reserve. Since man drives technology forward, he takes part in ordering as a way of revealing' (18), Heidegger finds a saving or better, more accurately said: a twisting power. To assert that the human being is "challenged" into the process of ordering, "taking part in ordering" seems to be a mere subjectivism, like the voluntarist understanding of technology as the will to dominion which Heidegger claims to find in Nietzsche. But such a reading would overlook the aletheiological in Heidegger's account of revealing: 'unconcealment itself, within which ordering unfolds, is never a human handiwork, any more than is the realm through which man is already passing every time he as subject relates to an object' (18).

In this first exposition of a possible saving dimension, 'we need not look far' but only 'apprehend in an unbiased way That which has already claimed man and has done so, so decisively that he can only be man at any given time as the one so claimed' (18). In everything that we do authentically, one could say, without violence to Heidegger I or II, we find ourselves 'already brought into the unconcealed.' Heidegger is famous for the passivity this entails (as this is further articulated in 'The Turn,' or in Gelassenheit, or in the infamousSpiegel interview, 'Only a God Can Save Us'). But what Heidegger intends here is merely an articulation of the aletheiological character of truth. 'When man, in his way, from within unconcealment reveals that which presences, he merely responds to the call of unconcealment even when he contradicts it' (19).

Answering the claim of unconcealment, the key difference to be thought between the scientific method of questioning or reseach and the way of thoughtful questioning is the responding claim of unconcealment: the difference between the calculated or inauthentic, investigative question (ordered in advance to a pre-scribed or expected answer), and attentive, reflective or responsive questioning attuned to that which is to be questioned, just where the ordering intentionality of questioning as such can obstruct -- in every stiff-necked way -- the advance of thinking. Scientific questioning is exactly not the questioning that Heidegger names the piety of thought. And if that latter questioning does not turn of itself into simply saying that is only because the difference between thinkers and poets is made of the simplicity that by its nature (and to the mischance of thinking), yields only to the poet.

For Heidegger, the kind of answer sought by reflective questioning responds in 'the sense of correspond[ing] to the essence of what is being asked about' (23). Rather than the monological order of question and answer, this is the dialogical attention that for Heidegger is already given to us at the heart of intentionality. Heidegger's subtle claim that 'we need only apprehend in an unbiased way' is a coordinate reference.

Kant was able to express the decisive achievement of modern science as exactly scientific questioning (KdrV xiii). This is a questioning set up in advance, ordered to a particular answer (the question-answer style characteristic of scientific questioning is always anything but open). For Heidegger, the very technological order of science begins in theory.(15) Even particle physics, the most advanced and radical bastion of science is bound to this style of scientific and not reflective or thoughtful questioning. Even in the exactly paradoxical realm of quantum mechanical indeterminacy 'nature reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and ... remains orderable as a system of information' (23).

For Heidegger and recent critical reflections in the philosophy of technology increasingly share this perspective, if they do not attribute the insight to Heidegger, it is plain that the traditional theoretical distinction between pure science and applied science or technology is erroneous. Representing modern technology as applied physical science (and the advocates of strong public support for basic science make this identification with all calculated rhetorical intent)(16) is an illusion which dissipates in the wake of questioning into the essence of modern technology and the essential origins of modern science (23).

The danger Heidegger speaks of is not singular but a multifarious danger -- that man might come to take the character of ordering for the essence of unconcealment -- 'thus endangered out of destining' (26). The danger is that reducing the real to nothing more than standing reserve, humanity can lose the world of things that are not merely the products or resources of technology. What is at risk is not the possibility of such a reduction but the truth of what is. The danger too is that this ordering as standing reserve can come to include human beings as a resource, to be managed -- the very vision experimental practice shows to be uncomfortably non-metaphorical. What is in danger thereby is not its contrary but rather its corollary: man 'exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth.' At the end of the day, there is nothing but subjective, idealised humanity: nature is revealed as anthropomorphized construct; deities are demythologized as anthropomorphic projections; the dark night of the soul corresponds to Dickensian bits of beef, Freudian frivolity covered over with shame. At risk is the doubly simple, truth as aletheia.