Sérgio Tavares
When we talk about technology, we tend to think of tools. A hammer, a car, a phone—objects that help us do something faster or better. In this everyday sense, technology is an instrument: something that extends our capacity to act. But that, German philosopher Martin Heidegger says, is only the surface of the story.
Why it matters:
If we see technology only as tools, we will think the world is what technology has revealed to us. But if our thinking is always technological, we will become as narrow as our machines.
Spoiler alert: it’s how we discover the world
In The Question Concerning Technology, he invites us to see technology not as a collection of devices but as a way of revealing. Let’s pause here, and think deep. Think of technology as the fundamental act that allows us to discover the possibilities this world—this universe, made of particles, and energy, and laws—can offer us.
Every invention discloses a bit of the universe. Technology, according to Heidegger, is the act of revealing that the wind can be harnessed by a mill, and barley may turn into food, and electricity into light and so on. Technology, in this deeper sense, is the process through which the potential of the world becomes visible and usable.
The universe holds countless latent possibilities—structures of energy, matter, and relation—and technology is how some of these become accessible. It’s a mode of discovery, not just construction, as we commonly think it is.
The hidden cost
But there’s a cost hidden in this power. When technology becomes our dominant way of seeing, we start to treat everything—including ourselves—as something to be optimized, calculated, or revealed on demand. We start confusing thinking with calculating.
The problem isn’t technology itself but our confinement to the calculative mindset it encourages. And let’s make no mistake, logic and calculation, and for that matter, science, are extremely effective ways of managing the world around us.
But if we only think in terms of what can be revealed by technology and calculated, we lose touch with what resists revelation. I am not talking about a spiritual world, or any of the holy-book-based systems of belief.
I refer to the quiet, unquantifiable parts of existence that resist optimization, calculation, or explanation. This is the thinking that has been obfuscated by calculation: the awareness of being, and just being, and contemplating the mystery of being in this universe, being human, being yourself; being. This is why an experience cannot be fully accounted by words or numbers (this is part of my work, even though I don’t think many in the market will be interested in a Heidegger lecture).
For Heidegger, the task isn’t to reject technology but to remember that revealing (that is, calculating, measuring, classifying, optimising) is never total. The same world that allows us to build machines also hides infinities we can never measure. To think freely, then, is to dwell in both realms, the revealed and the concealed, and to let the mystery remain part of what we call the experience of this world.