Technē and bringing-forth (p. 13)
In this page, Heidegger elaborates on technē. Technē means to know in the widest sense, and is a mode of alētheuein, which reveals what is to be brought forth. Technology is thus a mode of revealing.
two things with respect to the meaning of this word. One is that technē is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Technē belongs to bringing-forth, to poiēsis; it is something poietic.
The other point that we should observe with regard to technē is even more important. From earliest times until Plato the word technē is linked with the word epistēmē. Both words are names for knowing in the widest sense. They mean to be entirely at home in something, to understand and be expert in it. Such knowing provides an opening up. As an opening up it is a revealing. Aristotle, in a discussion of special importance (Nico-machean Ethics, Bk. VI, chaps. 3 and 4), distinguishes between epistēmē and technē and indeed with respect to what and how they reveal. Technē is a mode of alētheuein. It reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another. Whoever builds a house or a ship or forges a sacrificial chalice reveals what is to be brought forth, according to the perspectives of the four modes of occasioning. This revealing gathers together in advance the aspect and the matter of ship or house, with a view to the finished thing envisioned as completed, and from this gathering determines the manner of its construction. Thus what is decisive in technē does not lie at all in making and manipulating nor in the using of means, but rather in the aforementioned revealing. It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that technē is a bringing-forth.
Thus the clue to what the word technē means and to how the Greeks defined it leads us into the same context that opened itself to us when we pursued the question of what instrumentality as such in truth might be.
Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence [West] in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where alētheia, truth, happens.
In opposition to this definition of the essential domain of technology, one can object that it indeed holds for Greek thought and that at best it might apply to the techniques of the handcraftsman, but that it simply does not fit modern machine-powered technology. And it is precisely the latter and
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