Heidegger on technics, power, and the planetary

This essay examines Heidegger’s reflections on the essence of technology in the context of his remarks on power and planetarism. Heidegger’s approach to the essence of technics is often misunderstood as a “critique” of technology, while, in fact, Heidegger makes it explicit that the essence of technology (Technik) is nothing technological. It is not to be confused or identified with technology, techno-science, production, or technological products but approached instead as the originary modality of revealing characteristic of the modern, increasingly globalized, world after the Enlightenment. That is why Heidegger on technology should be understood in relation to the question of an alternative mode of revealing, which Heidegger terms poietic. Though Heidegger’s writings date from half a century ago, since what he calls the technic revealing only keeps intensifying, the exigency of the poetic becomes all the more apparent.