Philosophy of Technology: Heidegger, Ellul, Mumford and the Question of Technique

We live surrounded by tools, machines, systems and algorithms with such familiarity that we rarely ask what technology actually is. It tends to appear as a neutral set of means at the disposal of ends we freely choose: a hammer, a power plant, a smartphone are all supposedly “just tools” — good or bad depending on how we use them. The philosophy of technology begins precisely from the suspicion that this neutrality is a comfortable illusion. Since antiquity, but with unprecedented urgency from the twentieth century onward, a lineage of thinkers — from Aristotle to Heidegger, from Ellul to Mumford — has insisted that technology is not an indifferent means to human ends, but a way of being in the world that shapes in advance what we count as real, as nature, as truth, and even as human.

This article traces that lineage: the Greek distinction between téchne and epistéme; the modern project of mastering nature in Bacon and Descartes; Marx’s critique of factory machinery; the core of the problem in Martin Heidegger, for whom modern technology is a mode of revealing that reduces beings to “standing-reserve”; the responses of Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, who describe technique as an autonomous system and as a social megamachine; Günther Anders’s “Promethean gap”; the critique of technological rationality in Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas; and finally contemporary currents — postphenomenology, constructivist critical theory, and transhumanism — that reformulate these questions in the age of automation, networks, and artificial intelligence. This last theme, however, is treated in depth in a dedicated article on the ethics of artificial intelligence, to which we refer at the end.

1. Technique in ancient philosophy: téchne, poiesis, epistéme

For the Greeks, téchne designated a know-how oriented toward producing something that would not exist without human intervention — the art of the carpenter, the physician, the navigator, the sculptor. Aristotle discusses téchne in at least two key places: in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, where he distinguishes it from the other intellectual virtues — epistéme (scientific knowledge, demonstrative knowledge of the necessary), phronesis (practical wisdom about what to do), sophia (wisdom), and nous (intellectual intuition) — defining it as “a true, reasoned productive disposition” (hexis meta logou alethous poietike); and in the Metaphysics, Book I, where he narrates the genesis of human knowledge from perception, memory, experience (empeiria), and only then téchne, which is distinguished from mere experience by grasping the cause rather than the mere fact.

Central to this conception is the distinction between poiesis and praxis. Poiesis is productive activity whose end (telos) lies outside the act itself — the carpenter makes the table, and the table, once finished, subsists independently of the act of making it. Praxis — ethical and political action — has its end within itself: acting well is the very purpose of the action, not a product resulting from it. Téchne, then, belongs to the domain of poiesis: it is a knowledge of how to bring into existence something that could be otherwise than it is, cooperating with processes that nature (physis) already carries within itself in germ. A decisive feature that Heidegger would recover in the twentieth century is that for the Greeks téchne was understood as a mode of unconcealment (aletheia): the craftsman does not violently impose a form upon matter but helps something emerge from what already lay latent within it — the statue that “was already there” in the block of marble, the ship that “was already there” in the timber.

This Greek conception — cooperative, contemplative, subordinate to an ordered cosmos of which the human being is part — contrasts sharply, according to most historians of the philosophy of technology, with the project that would emerge in modernity: a technology that no longer cooperates with nature but interrogates, forces, and subdues it.

2. Modernity and the project of mastering nature: Bacon and Descartes

The modern rupture finds one of its most explicit heralds in Francis Bacon (1561–1626). In the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon proposes replacing the Aristotelian method — oriented mainly toward contemplation and logical disputation — with an experimental science capable of producing “works” useful to human life. The formula traditionally associated with Bacon, and repeated by him in various guises, is that knowledge is power (scientia potestas est): to know natural causes is to acquire the capacity to produce effects, to operate upon nature for human benefit. In his scientific utopia, New Atlantis (published posthumously in 1627), Bacon imagines “Solomon’s House,” an institution devoted to collective, organized experimental research, anticipating the ideal of an institutionalized, cumulative science in the service of humanity’s material progress — the seed of what would become the modern scientific academies.

René Descartes (1596–1650) radicalizes this ambition in Part VI of the Discourse on Method (1637), affirming that practical knowledge of natural causes — in contrast to the speculative philosophy taught in the schools — could render us, in his words, “as it were, masters and possessors of nature” (comme maîtres et possesseurs de la nature). The phrase is decisive for the philosophy of technology: it enshrines, at the heart of modern rationalism, the idea that nature is an object to be mastered by a subject who knows it mathematically and manipulates it technically — the human body included, since Descartes explicitly lists medicine among the expected benefits of this mastery. Greek physis, the ordered cosmos of which the human being was part, becomes res extensa: quantifiable matter, available, without a purpose of its own to be respected, merely mechanisms to be understood and exploited.

Neither Bacon nor Descartes is a “philosopher of technology” in the sense the term would acquire in the twentieth century — neither problematizes technology as an autonomous phenomenon — but both supply the conceptual matrix that later critics of modern technology (Heidegger foremost among them) would identify as the metaphysical origin of the project of technical domination over nature.

3. Marx: machinery and the subsumption of labor

Karl Marx (1818–1883) did not formulate a systematic “philosophy of technology,” but he offered, in Capital (Volume I, especially the chapter on machinery and modern industry) and in the manuscripts known as the Grundrisse (1857–58), one of the most influential analyses of the relationship between technique and capital. For Marx, machinery is not a neutral instrument that merely increases productivity: under capitalism, it becomes a means of intensifying the extraction of surplus value, disciplining the worker’s body to the machine’s rhythm, and deskilling artisanal labor, replacing the individual worker’s skill with the impersonal cooperation of a mechanical system. Marx distinguishes the formal subsumption of labor under capital — in which the capitalist merely takes command of pre-existing labor processes — from real subsumption, in which the technical organization of production itself (the factory, the system of machines) is restructured to maximize the valorization of capital, turning the worker into an appendage of the machinery. In the famous “fragment on machines” in the Grundrisse, Marx observes that the general scientific knowledge accumulated by society (the “general intellect”) becomes objectified in the system of machinery, progressively displacing living labor as the immediate source of wealth — an insight that anticipates contemporary debates on automation and work.

4. Heidegger: The Question Concerning Technology and the Gestell

It is with Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) that technology becomes, for the first time, the central and autonomous object of philosophical inquiry — and it is on his lecture The Question Concerning Technology (Die Frage nach der Technik, delivered in 1953 and published in 1954) that much of subsequent philosophy of technology rests. Readers interested in Heidegger’s broader ontology — the analytic of Dasein, being-in-the-world, the question of Being — will find detailed treatment in the article on Heidegger, Being and Time, and Dasein; here we focus specifically on his philosophy of technology.

Heidegger begins by rejecting the two current definitions of technology — instrumental (“technology is a means to ends”) and anthropological (“technology is a human activity”) — not because they are false, but because, being correct, they fail to touch the essence of technology. And the essence of technology, for Heidegger, is nothing technological: it is a mode of revealing (Entbergung), a way in which Being manifests itself historically to human beings. Here Heidegger recovers Greek poiesis: the ancient craftsman “brings forth” (Her-vor-bringen) something that cooperates with nature’s own growth, like the peasant who still cultivates the land, letting it produce according to its own rhythm.

Modern technology, however, is a revealing of a radically different kind: no longer a cooperative “bringing-forth,” but a challenging (Herausfordern) that demands of nature that it supply energy which can be stored and distributed as such. Heidegger contrasts the old windmill — which merely makes use of the wind as it blows, without capturing it — with the hydroelectric plant set into the Rhine, which dams the river, turning it into a mere supplier of hydraulic pressure. Under this regime, everything — the river, the forest, the ore, and finally the human being, summoned as “human resource” — comes to be revealed as Bestand, a term rendered as “standing-reserve”: no longer an object standing before a subject, but a stock on hand, orderable, replaceable, awaiting requisition for further use.

The name Heidegger gives to this challenging mode of revealing is Gestell — a term whose translation has varied considerably across English (and other) renderings: “enframing” is the most common English translation, though “framework,” “com-posit[ion],” or the untranslated German are also found. The prefix Ge- gathers, in the manner of other Heideggerian compounds (Gebirge, “mountain range,” as a gathering of Berge), the various modes of “positing” (stellen) that characterize modern technology: to set upon, order, requisition, establish. The Gestell is not a machine or set of machines: it is the mode of revealing — historically determined, prior to any specific technical apparatus — according to which everything that appears already shows up in advance as a standing-reserve on call. This is why Heidegger insists that “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological”: we will not solve the problem of technology by building better machines or “using it responsibly,” because the very way in which the real is given to us to see is already technologically configured prior to any decision by the subject.

The danger (Gefahr) Heidegger identifies in this process is twofold: on one hand, the risk that the human being itself will be revealed as Bestand — a mere manageable “human resource,” something he already glimpsed in the harshest forms of industrial labor and that would only worsen in the bureaucratic administration of populations; on the other, the even more radical risk that human beings lose the capacity to relate to any other mode of revealing — including the poetic — closing themselves entirely within the logic of requisitioning. Still, Heidegger rejects both naive technological optimism and the pessimism that would recommend fleeing or destroying technology (which, he notes, would itself be just another way of technologically mastering it). Instead, he cites a verse from the poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s hymn Patmos: “But where danger is, grows / The saving power also” (Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch). For Heidegger, the possibility of a free relation to technology lies not in abandoning it, but in cultivating, alongside it, other modes of revealing — art in particular — capable of reminding us that the real can manifest itself in ways other than calculative requisitioning.

5. Ellul: technique as an autonomous system

The French sociologist and theologian Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) published, the same year Heidegger’s text appeared in print, The Technological Society (La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle, 1954), a work that would become an essential reference in the sociology of technology. Ellul uses the French term technique in a deliberately broad sense that goes beyond machines: it designates the totality of rationally elaborated methods for achieving, in any field of human activity — industrial, but also administrative, legal, pedagogical, propagandistic — absolute efficiency. Ellul’s central thesis is that this technique has ceased to be a means subordinate to human ends of our choosing and has become an autonomous system, governed by its own logic of self-augmentation: each technical advance generates the conditions and the necessity for further technical advances, in a chain that no longer answers to moral or political decisions external to it, but to the internal imperative of “the one best way” of doing anything. For Ellul, modern technique tends to impose itself over every sphere of social life, subordinating even politics and economics to the pursuit of efficiency, and escaping the control of those who supposedly wield it as a mere instrument.

6. Mumford: eotechnic, paleotechnic, neotechnic, and the megamachine

The American historian and social critic Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) offered, in Technics and Civilization (1934), a historical periodization of Western technology into three phases: the eotechnic phase (roughly 1000 to 1750), based on water and wind power, wood and glass, and still proportionate in scale to human communities; the paleotechnic phase (18th–19th centuries), marked by coal, iron, and the steam engine, which Mumford associates with predatory capitalism, pollution, intensive exploitation of labor, and an aesthetic of disorder and waste; and the neotechnic phase, inaugurated by electricity and light metal alloys, which Mumford — with expectations he would later temper considerably — hoped might open the possibility of a cleaner, more decentralized technology, better suited to broader human needs.

Decades later, in The Myth of the Machine (published in two volumes: Technics and Human Development, 1967, and The Pentagon of Power, 1970), Mumford radically revises and deepens this narrative. He introduces the concept of the megamachine: an organization of human beings — not of metal — structured hierarchically like a machine, in which each individual performs a rigidly specialized function subordinate to a central command. Mumford locates the first megamachine not in the Industrial Revolution but millennia earlier, in the great works of collective mobilization in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia — the building of the pyramids, for instance — which already required the disciplined organization of thousands of workers under a centralized, priestly, and military power. Modern technology, for Mumford, does not invent the megamachine; it merely supplies it with new instruments (bureaucracy, the computer, the nuclear weapon) with which to reconstitute itself on a global scale.

To this historical analysis Mumford adds a decisive normative distinction between polytechnics (or “democratic technics”) and monotechnics (or “authoritarian technics”). Polytechnics gathers a plurality of technical resources in the service of diverse human needs, under distributed control adapted to the scale of communities; monotechnics concentrates on a single large-scale technical system, oriented toward efficiency, power, and centralized control, subordinating human diversity to a single standard. Mumford saw in the modern megamachine — bureaucratic, militarized, dependent on technologies of surveillance and mass destruction — the historical triumph of monotechnics over polytechnics, a threat to human autonomy comparable in gravity to what troubled Ellul.

7. Günther Anders: the Promethean gap

The Austrian philosopher Günther Anders (1902–1992, born Günther Stern, Hannah Arendt’s first husband) developed, in The Obsolescence of Man (Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, 1956), one of the most original and darkest reflections on the technological age, shaped by his own experience as a witness to the consequences of Hiroshima. Anders coined the concept of the Promethean gap (prometheisches Gefälle): the growing distance between humanity’s capacity to make (to produce atomic bombs, for instance) and its capacity to imagine, feel, and morally respond to the consequences of what it makes. We are capable of producing effects — the destruction of entire cities, irreversible alterations of the planet — that infinitely exceed our capacity to represent or morally own them; we produce faster than we understand what we produce.

From this gap Anders derives what he calls Promethean shame (prometheische Scham): the embarrassment human beings feel before the technical superiority of their own products — a shamed envy of the human before the precision, durability, and functional perfection of the machine, which leads people to feel inferior, “outdated,” before what they themselves have fabricated. For Anders, this shame feeds a desire to become more machine-like — more efficient, more replaceable, less “human, all too human” — a movement he considered deeply dangerous, especially in an age in which humanity had acquired, with nuclear weapons, the technical power to bring about its own extinction.

8. Marcuse and Habermas: technological rationality and ideology

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), a former student of Heidegger’s who later broke with him politically, gives the critique of technology a social and political inflection in One-Dimensional Man (1964). For Marcuse, in advanced industrial society technological rationality has ceased to be a neutral instrument for solving problems and has become, itself, a form of domination — all the more effective for not presenting itself as ideology but as pure technical and administrative efficiency. Modern technology, Marcuse argues, creates “false needs” and absorbs potential opposition into the very system it is supposed to challenge, producing a “one-dimensional” individual incapable of conceiving radical alternatives to the established order — a society that satisfies materially while closing off the horizon of critical imagination.

Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929), in the essay “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’” (1968), takes up and reformulates this critique in terms of his own theory of action. Habermas distinguishes labor (instrumental action, purposive-rational, governed by empirically verifiable technical rules) from interaction (communicative action, governed by intersubjectively binding social norms and oriented toward mutual understanding). His thesis is that in advanced technocratic societies, technical-instrumental rationality — legitimate and necessary in its own domain, that of labor and the administration of means — expands illegitimately into the domain of communicative interaction, “colonizing” spheres that ought to be regulated by normative deliberation and public discussion. Questions that are, by their nature, practical and political — how to distribute resources, which values to collectively pursue — come to be treated as if merely technical, resolvable by experts, which hollows out the democratic public sphere and replaces politics with administration.

9. Recent currents: postphenomenology, the device paradigm, constructivist critical theory, and transhumanism

From the last decades of the twentieth century onward, the philosophy of technology diversified into programs seeking to move beyond both Heidegger’s and Ellul’s essentialist pessimism and the naive optimism of automatic technological progress.

The American philosopher Don Ihde developed postphenomenology, applying the phenomenological method (inherited from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty) to examine how concrete artifacts mediate human perception and action. Ihde describes different relations between humans and technologies — “embodiment” relations (when an instrument, like eyeglasses, becomes nearly transparent to perception), “hermeneutic” relations (when an instrument must be “read,” like a thermometer), “alterity” relations (when technology is treated as a quasi-other, like an ATM), and “background” relations (when technology operates invisibly, like the electrical grid) — proposing an empirical, less apocalyptic approach than Heidegger’s, attentive to the concrete multiplicity of technical mediations.

The American philosopher Albert Borgmann proposed the concept of the device paradigm, in Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984): modern technological devices tend to separate means from ends, delivering “commodities” — warmth, information, entertainment — instantly and effortlessly, thereby displacing the “focal things and practices” that once required skill, bodily engagement, and sustained attention — such as the hearth, which provided heat but also gathered the family around a shared ritual. For Borgmann, the ethical task is not to abolish devices but to deliberately cultivate focal practices that restore engagement and meaning.

The Canadian philosopher Andrew Feenberg developed a constructivist critical theory of technology, arguing — against Ellul’s technological determinism and the more pessimistic reading of Heidegger — that technical artifacts have no fixed essence, but embody “technical codes” reflecting specific social choices and power relations; it is therefore possible, through democratic intervention, to redesign and “democratically rationalize” technology, rather than simply submit to it or reject it.

Finally, transhumanism — the movement advocating the deliberate use of technology (biotechnology, neurotechnology, artificial intelligence) to overcome biological human limitations such as aging and death — revisits, in an optimistic key, questions that run through this entire tradition: to what extent can and should technology transform human nature itself? The specific debates on artificial intelligence, alignment, algorithmic bias, and the moral responsibility of automated systems, which engage directly with this question, are treated in depth in the article on the ethics of artificial intelligence.

The philosophy of technology offers no single answer to whether technology liberates or enslaves us, whether it is a neutral means or a historical destiny. What it offers, from Aristotle to Feenberg, is the insistence that this question cannot be answered without first asking what technology is — and that, as Heidegger suggested, this question can never be answered by purely technological means.

References

ARISTOTLE. Nicomachean Ethics. Book VI. ARISTOTLE. Metaphysics. Book I. BACON, F. Novum Organum. 1620. BACON, F. New Atlantis. 1627. DESCARTES, R. Discourse on Method. Part VI. 1637. MARX, K. Capital, Volume I. 1867. MARX, K. Grundrisse. 1857–58. HEIDEGGER, M. “The Question Concerning Technology.” 1954. ELLUL, J. The Technological Society (La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle). 1954. MUMFORD, L. Technics and Civilization. 1934. MUMFORD, L. The Myth of the Machine, 2 vols. 1967, 1970. ANDERS, G. The Obsolescence of Man (Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen). 1956. MARCUSE, H. One-Dimensional Man. 1964. HABERMAS, J. “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’.” 1968. IHDE, D. Technology and the Lifeworld. 1990. BORGMANN, A. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. 1984. FEENBERG, A. Questioning Technology. 1999.

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