Abstract

Heidegger’s understanding of technology advances a conceptual critique of what he calls “the enframing” (Gestell), the epistemological and ontological presuppositions underlying technology. Reconstructing the central argument of Country Path Conversation (1945), the chapter focuses the positive contrast to “the enframing” Heidegger finds in the idea of Gelassenheit (“releasement”): releasement defines a form of life marked by an intellectual independence from technology achieved through a specific form of thinking. Drawing from Haugeland, section 1 establishes “enabling” as genuine sense of the German verb lassen (to let); in contrast to the form of thinking determinative of technology, which Heidegger describes as imposing, the “released” and genuine form of human thinking is an enabling thinking. In sections 2 and 3, I reconstruct the reductio ad absurdum Heidegger uses to distance this form of thinking from forms of transcendental philosophy embracing (mediational) representationalism. In section 4, I highlight the (ontic) correlate of such thinking, namely the individual things (Dinge) manifest outside the horizon of understanding presupposed by technology. Not based on or anticipating any positive ontology, I argue that “enabling” thinking is ontologically non-committal. Section 5 contrasts this understanding of Gelassenheit with views advanced by Dreyfus, Rojcewicz, Belu, and Feenberg.