The Essence of Technology and Art

In the realm where art and technology intersect, the philosophy of Martin Heidegger offers a profound, if controversial, lens through which to examine their entanglement. Heidegger, a thinker deeply engaged with the question of Being and the existential structures of human life, was also a member of the Nazi Party—a fact that cannot and should not be overlooked. His involvement remains a serious ethical problem in any engagement with his work.

Yet, Heidegger’s reflections on technology and art are striking in their depth. He did not conceive of technology merely as a collection of tools or techniques, but as a mode of revealing—a way in which the world is disclosed to us. Likewise, art, in his view, was not simply a matter of aesthetic production, but a space where truth emerges into the open.

This text attempts to navigate these ideas through my own interpretive lens, with the aim of understanding how technology and art, often treated as opposites, are in fact intertwined within the structures of human existence. Heidegger’s writing is neither easy nor unproblematic—its mysticism and opacity can frustrate as much as they illuminate. Yet it resonates with an intuition of the world not as an objective collection of facts, but as the lived, finite domain in which we are always already embedded—the world in which we live, act, and ultimately, die.

For Heidegger, art is not simply a form of representation or decoration; it is a fundamental event in which truth comes into being. Art discloses the world—not as a collection of objects, but as a meaningful whole, where beings emerge from concealment into presence. In Heidegger’s rethinking of truth, it is no longer understood as a fixed correspondence or absolute essence. Instead, truth becomes a process—an event of unconcealment (aletheia)—in which things show themselves as what they are. This does not mean truth is relative, but that it is always situated, unfolding within a historical and ontological horizon.

Seen through this lens, art and technology are not simple opposites. Both are modes of revealing, ways in which we encounter the world. Technology, in its essence, has the power to disclose—but it also carries the danger of enframing (Gestell), in which all things, including human beings, are seen merely as resources to be optimized and controlled. Art, by contrast, has the capacity to interrupt this enframing—to open a space where beings can appear in their own right, beyond mere utility. In this way, art offers a counterweight to the technological mindset, making visible the depths of our being-in-the-world.

While there are intriguing parallels between Heidegger’s and Luhmann’s views on art—particularly in how both see art as a mode of revealing or meaning production—their underlying philosophies are profoundly divergent. Heidegger’s often romanticized conception of art, and his emphasis on the privileged ontological status of Dasein, stands in contrast to Luhmann’s post-metaphysical, systems-theoretical approach, which rejects anthropocentrism in favor of autopoietic sense-making systems.

As Derrida observed, Heidegger’s effort to deconstruct the metaphysical tradition did not fully escape it; instead, it culminated in what Derrida saw as a reconfiguration—rather than a dissolution—of metaphysics. Derrida’s concept of différance articulates an internal deferral and displacement within thought itself, undermining any fixed grounding—a move that resonates with Luhmann’s understanding of the psychic system as a recursive sense-producing operation that never fully accesses external reality.

In comparison, Heidegger’s ontological vision may seem rooted in a more essentialist and foundational mode of thinking. Nevertheless, one could argue that his critique of representational thinking, his redefinition of truth, and his questioning of metaphysics laid essential groundwork for the postmodern turn—even if his own stance remained tied to an earlier philosophical epoch.

While I remain wary of the dangers that romanticism can pose—especially when it drifts into mythic essentialism or political idealism—I also recognize its enduring appeal. Heidegger’s poetic language and his focus on Being touch a part of experience that resists cold rationalism. In this, I find a resonance with Richard Rorty’s reflections in Philosophy as Poetry [Ror16], where he suggests that philosophy might best be understood not as the pursuit of metaphysical foundations, but as an imaginative endeavor—a practice of redescribing the world.

Rorty, drawing from both pragmatist and romantic traditions, invites us to see thinkers like Heidegger not as bearers of hidden truths, but as creators of new vocabularies—new ways of seeing and saying. Rather than seeking a final answer to the “essence” of technology or art, we are invited to engage in ongoing conversations that open up new possibilities of understanding. This perspective harmonizes the poetic impulse in Heidegger with a post-metaphysical humility: the recognition that our interpretations are contingent, historical, and yet profoundly meaningful.

In this spirit, I invite readers not to revere Heidegger, but to think with and against him—to ask what his language of Being and revealing might still illuminate in our current technological epoch, and where it might obscure more than it reveals. As Rorty reminds us, philosophy, like poetry, is a conversation—one that never ends, and never settles.

Heidegger and the Nazis

Before we go further, it is essential to address the deeply troubling aspect of Heidegger’s legacy: his involvement with National Socialism. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and served briefly as rector of Freiburg University, where he publicly endorsed Hitler and Nazism. His inaugural rectoral address spoke of the “inner truth and greatness of this movement.” He used his position to marginalize colleagues—including those of Jewish descent—though in other instances, he also aided some students in avoiding persecution. These contradictions do not cancel each other out; rather, they complicate an already fraught ethical record.

Most disturbing is that Heidegger never clearly renounced his Nazi affiliation. Even after the war, in his writings and interviews, he offered evasions rather than apologies—even as his mentor, Edmund Husserl, and his student and former lover, Hannah Arendt, were Jewish. In posthumously published texts, including the Black Notebooks, Heidegger voiced conspiratorial and anti-Semitic ideas, deepening the concern that his political views were not incidental but intertwined with his ontology.

Critics—including Karl Jaspers, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Kurt Tucholsky, and Karl Popper—have raised serious objections, not only to his politics but also to his style and substance. Popper famously mocked Heidegger’s writing as impenetrable and accused it of masking banalities behind mystification:

Heidegger is, so to speak, the Hegelian of our time, who was also a Nazi, among other things. The worst part is that in Germany and all over the world, for example in South America, France, and Spain, Heidegger is admired and imitated. […] He usually writes things that one cannot understand at all, and that too, for pages on end! – Karl Popper

Heidegger has been criticized for:

• Lacking ethical grounding in his philosophy

• Reinforcing relativism and the rejection of objective truth

• Engaging in circular reasoning and tautology

• Projecting personal moods onto metaphysics

• Conflating Being with Germanness or rootedness, which some see as ideologically dangerous

Yet despite (or because of) these problems, Heidegger remains enormously influential—especially in France, where thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Tillich drew on his ideas, even as they often departed from or subverted them.

Some argue that Heidegger’s philosophy and politics are inseparable. Others believe that while his politics are abhorrent, his questions—about Being, technology, truth, and art—remain vital. Both positions demand serious engagement.

How is it that such a brilliant mind was taken in by the Nazis? How could Heidegger be so socially irresponsible? It is the same problem as with Celan: here is a wonderful writer who was a rotten anti-Semite […] I have shown Heidegger’s brain with a mushroom-like tumor growing out of it to make the point. – Anselm Kiefer

To read Heidegger today is to walk a dangerous path—not just intellectually, but ethically. His concerns with the threats of technology and the loss of authentic Being may have led him, ironically and tragically, into the arms of a regime that promised order and rootedness. Engaging with his thought requires vigilance, not just interpretation.

What is Phenomenology

Martin Heidegger was deeply influenced by his teacher Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology. Heidegger believed that to truly understand an entity, one must investigate its Being—not through abstract theorization, but by attending to how it shows itself in lived experience.

Before words, before expressions, always the phenomena first, and then the concepts! – Martin Heidegger

Phenomenology is both a philosophical method and a reflective practice that seeks to describe how things appear to us in lived experience—before we interpret them, explain them, or reduce them to scientific categories. Rather than asking what things are in some objective or abstract sense, phenomenology asks: How do things show up to us as meaningful? How does the world present itself to a conscious, embodied subject—not in theory, but in experience? It begins from the insight that we are always already embedded in a world of relations, habits, moods, and concerns. We do not encounter the world as a detached observer, but as someone already involved—seeing, using, caring, suffering, hoping.

To practice phenomenology is to bracket our assumptions and attend closely to how things actually show themselves in our experience—whether it’s the feel of a tool in our hand, the silence of a room, or the sudden anxiety of being watched. It is a disciplined return to the immediacy of lived meaning. In short, phenomenology is a way of doing philosophy that starts not with theory, but with experience—with the world as it is lived.

For Heidegger, philosophy had too long forced beings into rigid metaphysical categories. He sought a return to the phenomena themselves—to what is disclosed in practice and use, rather than detached theorization.

Husserl asked: How do we experience the world in consciousness? Heidegger asks: How does the world show itself to us because we are already beings involved in it?

The Essence of Technology

In Being and Time (1927) [Hei08], Heidegger argues from a phenomenological perspective that scientific and theoretical modes of understanding presuppose—and often obscure—a more primordial way of being-in-the-world. The natural sciences rely on abstract conceptions of space and time, but these are derived from a more immediate, lived experience of orientation, distance, and concern. It is only through our practical engagement with the world—what Heidegger calls our concernful dealings (Besorgen)—that space and time gain existential meaning.

From this perspective, science’s ‘objective’ viewpoint is not neutral but reductive. It strips away the meaningfulness that arises from everyday life and replaces it with a flattened, calculative framework. Rather than enhancing our grasp of reality, this scientific abstraction narrows it. Ordinary action, embedded in care and purpose, offers a richer path toward understanding Being than detached analysis can provide.

Heidegger deepens this critique in his later essay The Question Concerning Technology (1954) [Hei54]. There, he challenges the dominant instrumental definition of technology as a set of tools used to achieve human ends. While this definition seems intuitive, Heidegger argues that it is itself a symptom of a deeper technological mode of revealing—one that enframes the world as standing-reserve (Bestand), a stockpile of resources to be ordered and exploited.

Technology, then, is not just a collection of devices or applications. It is a way of understanding and relating to Being—one that prioritizes control, efficiency, and utility above all else. The danger lies not in technology per se, but in the dominance of this technological worldview, which increasingly constrains how we think, act, and perceive. Heidegger warns that when everything is seen through the lens of functionality, we risk losing sight of other, more poetic or meaningful modes of revealing.

To uncover a pre-scientific understanding of technology, Heidegger turns to the ancient Greeks. For them, the word téchne referred not only to what we would now call technology but also to art and craft. It described a form of knowing that involved the skilled bringing-forth of something into appearance—a process in which the artisan did not impose form upon matter but worked in concert with it. Téchne, in this sense, was aligned with poiesis—a revealing, a letting-be.

The causes bring something into appearance. They let it come forth into presence. – Martin Heidegger

The craftsman, in this older view, did not see themselves as the absolute origin of the created thing but as a participant in a process of emergence. The role of the artisan was to assist in allowing something to manifest according to its own essence.

In stark contrast, modern technology is no longer understood as a cooperative revealing. It is, as Heidegger argues, a challenging-forth (herausfordern), a mode of revealing that imposes order and extracts resources. We no longer see ourselves as stewards or collaborators with nature; rather, we perceive ourselves as its masters—as the origin of everything we produce.

This shift is not just a change in technique but a transformation in how we encounter Being itself. The modern technological worldview reveals the world as standing-reserve (Bestand): a resource to be optimized, stored, and controlled. In doing so, it conceals other, more poetic ways of encountering the world.

The essence of modern technology, Heidegger tells us, is not technological in a narrow sense. It lies in the framework of enframing (Gestell)—a mode of revealing that simultaneously unveils and conceals. It shapes how entities present themselves to us, and how we relate to them. Under Gestell, everything—from rivers to human beings—becomes something to be used, measured, and managed.

Importantly, Heidegger insists that this mode of revealing has deep historical roots. Although it becomes dominant with industrialization and modern science, its seeds were sown in Western metaphysics—in the idea that being is something that can be grasped, represented, and mastered. Technologies such as the nuclear bomb are not merely threats in themselves; they are expressions of this deeper enframing. Thus, the danger of technology is not any particular machine or device, but the way it shapes our understanding of all things—including ourselves. Technology is challenging not just in its effects, but in its essence. It configures a totalizing perspective that transforms the world into a resource field, narrowing our openness to other forms of being and meaning.

[Because of technology] all distances in time and space are shrinking [and] yet the hasty setting aside of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in a small amount of distance. – Martin Heidegger

We seem to have become nearly incapable of experiencing nearness in its full existential sense—let alone comprehending it—as all things increasingly reveal themselves to us in a technological mode. As Heidegger describes, they appear as standing-reserve (Bestand): inventory-like items, ready for mobilization, manipulation, and disposal. Objects are no longer encountered in their uniqueness or integrity, but only in terms of their usefulness–as energy sources or resources awaiting orchestration.

This logic extends beyond machines. Human capacities are also reduced to instruments within technological systems. A laborer becomes a component of the production process. Leaders and planners are themselves transformed into managerial assets—optimized, repurposed, or discarded according to need. The result is that everything—tools, people, even time and space—forfeits its autonomy, its inner form, and its capacity to disclose alternative ways of being.

The mode of revealing that prevails in modern technology is not the gentle bringing-forth of poiesis—the creative emergence once found in art and craft. Instead, it is a challenging-forth (Herausfordern), a forceful demand imposed on nature to yield energy, order, and efficiency. This challenge does not follow from modern science; it precedes it. For Heidegger, technological thinking is what first disclosed nature as something that could be challenged, extracted from, and quantified. It is this revealing—this essence of technology as Gestell—that gives rise to science’s calculative gaze. The technological worldview thus underlies not only the way we build machines, but the way we perceive existence itself.

Modern technology is not applied natural science, far more is modern natural science the application of the essence of technology. [Nature is therefore] the fundamental piece of inventory of the technological standing reserve—and nothing else. – Martin Heidegger

The nature of being-in-the-world (Dasein)—basically Heidegger’s concept of a human being—is such that we can never escape concerns about our concerns (Sorge), which originates from our finitude, but we frequently attempt to deny them. We distract ourselves from our worries, the primary of which is death. To live authentically means not to “live as you truly are” but to live with the certainty of the end of all possiblities on your side.
Death is not just an endpoint but a companion—a reminder that gives our life meaning and let’s us care. Our relationship with technological tools, techniques, and devices can aid a distraction, diverting us from our fundamental experience and enticing us into a false sense of security. This can be dangerous if it impedes the lived awareness of our ultimate existence

as beings in trouble in a world of uncertainty.

We become accustomed to the internet, smartphones, social media, platform economies, and the endless repetition of trivialities. As individuals, we can often feel powerless in the face of new technologies, and occasionally experience a lack of depth provided by the scattered and dissected elements of our existence. The essence of technology deprives us of experiencing nearness because to truly experience it, we must encounter things in their truth. And no matter how deeply we believe that science will allow us to engage with reality in its actuality, science only provides us with representations of things. It only ever encounters that which its manner of representation has previously admitted as a possible object for itself.

Today the representational character of the digital shapes the physical. Speaking in Baudrillardian terms: through the colonization of the last frontier—our immediate consciousness—companies are constructing a virtual yet hyper-realistic world that suggests that there is no truth behind it. This process is evolving so rapidly that meaningful analysis becomes impossible. Our children will navigate a “meta”-reality. They won’t believe that the world depicted on their screens and other devices is real—that is not the danger! I also doubt that they will consciously believe the fake stories of this realm saturated by advertisement. Instead, they run the risk of becoming cynical; of perceiving the real world as if it is virtual. Therefore, they may consider everything as a scene to be observed, and all their actions as performances that can be captured and reviewed at any given moment. This would deny them a life of moments and turn it into a plan for later presentation and peer evaluation.

Kids already sense the digital world in a peculiar, allusive, and meta-like state. This is why their memes are perpetually ironic, detached, self-referential, and buried beneath twenty layers of irony; the truth is completely dead to them. They look at a postmodern president and culture and ask: what on earth is this? They see Coca Cola advertisements that are knowingly winking and smiling at them, and they see through this nonsense. Advertisers realize this and put yet another layer on top.

But I digress. Let me go back to the challenging aspect of technology. It implies that functioning things lead to more functioning things. Everything is challenged to serve as a systematic resource for technological application, which we subsequently utilize as a resource for further applications, perpetuating a cycle. For instance, we challenge land to produce coal, considering the land as nothing more than a coal deposit. The coal is then stockpiled, always ready to unleash the stored solar heat it contains, which is then called upon for warmth, which subsequently is commanded to yield steam whose pressure drives the wheels that sustain a factory’s operations. The factories themselves are challenged to create tools through which machines are once again put into service and preserved.

Heidegger argues that this chain does not move toward anything that has its own presence, but, instead, “only enters into its circuit”, and is “regulating and securing” natural resources and energies in a never-ending fashion. Heidegger’s argument is at least interesting. Given the complexity of modern life, we often lack a clear understanding of how our contributions to the advancement and “improvement” of technology lead to a “better” society. Beyond meeting basic needs such as housing, food, education, healthcare, social life, and intimacy, it is often difficult to discern how the introduction of new technological gadgets aids this objective.

For example, how does the newest iPhone, with its ability to take more refined pictures, contribute to a “better” society? The existence of the iPhone and the pressure to create appealing pictures for our profiles prompts many to purchase and use it. This, in turn, increases the demand for memory and computation, subsequently escalating the need for earthly materials. Many would probably be content if that new phone didn’t exist, primarily because they need it only because it exists, not because they truly desire it.

I argue that our understanding of progress being equivalent to technological progress in the form of more and “better” technology is more a question of faith than an envisioned future based on rigid justifications. Luhmann might point out that technological progress is a value stabilized via communication. We communicate about the installation of nuclear power plants and buy new gadgets which is a kind of communication. However, this does not explain why we believe in this value. I would argue that many people would willingly hit the pause button on all technological progress, at least temporarily. No one asked for the Metaverse, but we will build it anyways because we are challenged to do so.

Luhmann probabobly would offer a more nuanced explanation: interdependent self-generating social systems which “feed” us into them. Heidegger’s argument seems quite reductive but it captures my personal feeling of a reality that feels thinner and thinner.

Marxists might argue that my feeling is more related to our socio-economic system. However, I find it hard to attribute the cause solely to capitalism. The origin of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism is not so much capitalism but a functional differentiated society. Of course, capitalism plays a huge role in shaping our social systems. Heidegger, on the other hand, might attribute capitalism and Luhmann’s functional differentiation to the essence of technology. These are different perspectives on our modern and technology driven society.

A success is that type of consequence that itself remains assigned to the yielding of further consequences. – Martin Heidegger

As already mentioned, Heidegger thinks of technology as a mode of seeing where every “seeing” has its necessary blind spots. He expands on the example of the hammer to illustrate his thoughts about technology: when using a hammer (a form of technology), you don’t even think about the tool itself; instead, you focus on the nail. The hammer recedes from your awareness, and you concentrate on the task at hand. The hammer is ready-to-hand (zuhanden).

Consider a more modern example: the keyboard. As you become proficient at typing, your attention focuses on the words appearing on the screen—not on your fingers pressing keys. The keyboard becomes invisible in use. Furthermore, when you recognize a keyboard, you don’t just see a thing—you perceive the affordances it provides. The keyboard is not just an object; it’s an invitation, a call to explore, to write, to engage the world in a certain way. This phenomenological way of thinking—in which things appear with value, meaning, and purpose—was already present in Edmund Husserl, Heidegger’s teacher:

This world is not there for me as mere world of facts and affairs, but, with the same immediacy as a world of values, a world of goods, a practical world. Without further effort on my part I find the things before me furnished not only with the qualities that benefit their positive nature, but with value-characters such as beautiful or ugly, agreeable or disagreeable, pleasant or unpleasant, and so forth. Things in their immediacy stand there as objects to be used, the “table” with its “books”, the “glass to drink from”, the “vase”, the “piano” and so forth […] The same considerations apply of course just as well to the men and beasts in my surroundings as to “mere things”. They are my “friends” or my “foes”, my “servants” or “superiors”, “strangers” or “relatives” and so forth. – Edmund Husserl

Equipment vanishes from our world. Only if it breaks or fails to perform as expected it introduces itself again as present-at-hand (vorhanden). Otherwise, it simply serves as a medium through which we experience our world. Things in the world are not simply passive objects. They invite us to interact with them. Take a small child in an elevator, for example—notice how the child is immediately drawn to press the buttons. Or take the child to a lake and wait until it throws small stones into the water.

For Heidegger, technology withdraws from our attention and becomes transparent as we use it. And if it does, it is all the more genuinely what it is. In that sense, it needs us to be; to act itself out. Furthermore, we don’t experience technology itself, but rather the world through it. Consequently, technology introduces its own mode of seeing.

When you drive a car proficiently, you develop a sense of the vehicle’s size and whether it can fit through a gap. Similarly, wearing nail extensions frequently can cause you to forget about them, even though they change how you interact with objects. Part of the allure of technology is found in the diverse opportunities it provides for unique forms of embodiment. Sociologist and Philosopher Bruno Latour posits that when technology becomes sufficiently transparent, it becomes an intrinsic part of our self-perception and our experience of the world, thereby giving rise to a new, compound entity [Lat92]. According to Latour, technological artifacts can act as social agents and if they become routine or transparent, they “disappear” from our conscious perception but remain deeply entangled in our actions and identities. Evidence from cognitive science supporting this viewpoint is substantial. Our enjoyment of driving stems from the fact that we transform into “the driver”, a being with speed and power surpassing any land creature. Likewise, our delight in operating digital devices arises from the sensation of becoming a being that can converse with someone on the opposite side of the globe at a speed comparable to a lightning strike. Similarly, a person wielding a hammer essentially evolves into a new being, equipped with its own unique way of perceiving the world. This newly formed being, as a result of the technology’s influence, experiences the world from a distinct perspective and possesses an individualized subjectivity.

Given that technology represents a mode of understanding the world, and acknowledging that our understanding of the world is not entirely self-determined, this perspective seems to envelop us; it is greater than us as individuals. Heidegger sees the highest danger of technology as its potential to erode our ability to interpret reality profoundly. The moment we start viewing ourselves as manipulable raw materials, we cease to see ourselves as the ultimate source from which fresh interpretations of the world can spring. Furthermore, technology can trap us in a specific worldview because as soon as we attempt to devise a new way of interpreting the world, we find ourselves trying to exert power over our inherent will to power. In essence, we attempt to control our very propensity for control. Every effort to overcome this will to power only serves to reinforce it. Consequently, every attempt to break free from this technological mindset only propels us back into it.

The essence of technology is by no means anything technological. – Martin Heidegger

Beyond Subject and Object

The self is a relation that relates itself to itself. – Soren Kierkegaard

Heidegger’s emphasis on ordinary life may seem trivial, yet, how frequently do we feel lost, overwhelmed, and alienated in the world, even though we are experts in navigating this chaos? Often, we forget that we are temporal beings in a world where we are deeply rooted. This fact becomes crystal clear when considering all the small habits our bodies carry out so effortlessly that we hardly give them a thought. All the smells we can perceive, all the various tactile experiences we can receive and give, all the sounds we can differentiate, and the ways in which we can walk, sit, run, and dance. Sometimes, when one feels lost in the digital spectacle, returning to the simplicity of the ordinary can offer a reassuring sense of home—and we are deeply home here and now.

Few would dispute that technology has transformed our self-perception. It is clear to me that we are more and more humiliated by what we see through science:

• Copernicus: Earth is not the center of the universe.

• Nietzsche: God is dead, implying that normative values are constructed and lack any metaphysical essence.

• Darwin: Humans are not the apex of creation but part of an ongoing and contingent evolutionary biological process.

• Freud: The human “ego” is not fully in control but is governed by unconscious processes.

• AI: Machines can execute task that we thought require human thinking.

A scientific definition of beings will make us blind for their mysterious and unexplainable presence in the world. In Heidegger’s term: it will make us blind for Being. Importantly. this term refers not to a specitic being, that is, indivudual things like rocks, chairs, animals and humans but the condition or mode of existence that allows beings to be at all. Heidegger’s ontology is therefore not about what exists, but how existence shows up to us. To approach Being, he then analyzes a special kind of being: the human being, which he calls Dasein (literally, “being-there”).

Dasein is unique because:

• It has a pre-understanding of Being.

• It cares about its own being.

• It exists in a state of thrownness.

• It is being-towards-death–its tmporality shapes its understanding of existence.

So, Dasein is the gateway to understainding Being in general. It is the being that has an understanding of Being. For Heiddegger, there is no such thing as an “inner self” divorced from the world. Therefore, ontoloty must begin with lived, situated existance—not abstract thought.

He also attacks the subject-object dichotomy by poiting out that, most of the time, we encounter things through use (they are ready-to-hand) not detached reflection (present-to-hand). Furthermore, for him, time is not just a succesion of “nows,” but a structure of existence:

• Past (facticity): We ar thrown into the world.

• Future (projection): We are always projecting ourselves towards possibilities (we have projects).

• Present (fallenness): We are often distracted by daily routines and the expectations of others (“the they”—das Man).

The danger, for Heidegger, is to lose the ability of seeing the world and its beings as they appears to us and to understand ourselves not as mere thinking subjects but as Dasein that is in the world in a mode of uncovering, i.e. disclosing other entities as well as ourselves. He intentionally used the term because he felt as though the words most often used by philosophers to designate human beings, words like “consciousness”, “self-consciousness”, “subject”, “soul”, etc., carried far too much metaphysical baggage, and, thus, found it necessary to come up with a new term for human beings.

Decartes view of the self as self-subsistent and worldless subject changes in Heidegger’s phenomenologically perspective because Dasein is always Being-(involved)-in-the-world. To be a self is to have a world. Like Husserl’s world, Heidegger’s world is a practical world of interconnected beings where equipment presupposes other equipment and is truly what it is only when it is being used transparently. We can reformulate Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” from a Heideggerian perspective: I am, therefore the world is.

We shall call those entities which we encounter in concern “equipment”. In our dealings we come across equipment for writing, sewing, working, transportation, measurement. […] Taken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment. To the Being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment that it is. Equipment is essentially ‘something in-order-to […]’. A totality of equipment is constituted by various ways of the ‘in-order-to’. […] In the ‘in-order-to’ as a structure there lies an assignment or reference of something to something. […] Equipment—in accordance with its equipmentality—always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. […] What we encounter as closest to us (though not as something taken as a theme) is the room; and we encounter it not as something ‘between four walls’ in a geometrical spatial sense, but as equipment for residing. Out of this the ‘arrangement’ emerges, and it is in this that any ‘individual’ item of equipment shows itself. Before it does so, a totality of equipment has already been discovered. Equipment can genuinely show itself only in dealings cut to its own measure (hammering with a hammer, for example); but in such dealings an entity of this kind is not grasped thematically as an occurring Thing, nor is the equipment-structure known as such in the using. The hammering does not simply have knowledge about the hammer’s character as equipment, but it has appropriated this equipment in a way which could not possibly be more suitable. In dealings such as this, where something is put to use, our concern subordinates itself to the “in-order-to” which is constitutive for the equipment we are employing at the time; the less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment. […] The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. – Martin Heidegger

Heidegger’s concerns of technology also raise several difficulties. It tends to romanticize certain types of tools. His texts are filled with what we may call a romanticization of German country life that is hard not to relate to Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism. And isn’t the distinction between affirming (ancient Greeks) and dominating technologies (modern times) just a subjective preference. Why exactly does the hydroelectrical dam on the Rhine provoke nature whereas the temple doesn’t? Is the manner in which beings reveal themselves to us meaningful only in Heidegger’s terms, or can a rationale be provided for this meaning that simultaneously permits and even requires openness to Being beyond Heidegger’s limits? In other words, can a scientific view enrich the mystery of the world? Richard Feynman, at least, seems to think so.

I have a friend, who is an artist. And he is sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He hold up a flower and says: “Look how beautiful it is.” And I agree. And he says: “I as an artist can see how beautiful that is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a doll thing.” And I think he is kind of nutty. First of all the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too. I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is but I can appreciate the beauty of the flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can image cells in it; the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean it is not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there is also beauty at a smaller dimensions; the inner structure also the processes; the fact that the colors and the flowers evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting. It means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery in the aura of a flower; it only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts. – Richard Feynman

It would be foolish to advocate for a return to some mythical naturalistic past or some elusive authenticity. This would only lead to disillusionment because such authenticity was never present to begin with. Nature is a splendid beast; it is the real that pursues us. It is not our tools, methods and techniques that are at the center of Heidegger’s concerns but our way of seeing the world. He sees danger in the domination of nature which, for him, ultimately leads to the domination of humanity. But is it a question of black and white? Is there room for both instrumental and non-instrumental thinking and seeing? Can we see the mystical whole—the world as it appears to us—and its no less magical parts, structure, and abstraction? I believe there is.

For all of us, the arrangements, devices, and machinery of technology are to a greater or lesser extent indispensable. It would be foolish to attack technology blindly. It would be shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the devil. We depend on technical devices. – Martin Heidegger

Let’s consider an analogy: the concept of free and instrumental play, as introduced by Wolfgang Iser in [Ise93]. Iser labels play in games with specific goals as instrumental play. At the other end of the spectrum is free play, a form of play devoid of definite endpoints, perpetuating the continuity of play. Instrumental play is a goal-oriented approach that values efficiency, expertise, and optimized strategies as components of play. For instance, if children engage with their surroundings, such as running around, this can be considered free play. However, when they introduce goals like catching one another, the play tends more towards instrumental play. The aim of playing isn’t solely to reach the end but to discover the most effective way of getting there. However, there’s no such thing as pure free or pure instrumental play. Playing chess to win money leans heavily towards instrumental play, while playing with a ball purely to enjoy the physical experience is predominantly free play. Furthermore, there’s no inherently “good” or “bad” style of play. In fact, the issue sometimes arises when we deem instrumental play to be the correct, or “good,” way to play. But here’s the crucial point: instrumental play isn’t the opposite of free play; instead, there exists a tension between the two. One can derive deep enjoyment from improving a skill, achieving goals, or uncovering solutions to complex problems. Similarly, we can perceive the earth and its inhabitants instrumentally (as a means to an end) or appreciate them for what they are (as ends in themselves).

Therefore, I favor the Kantian notion extended to all beings as well as things—never viewing anything merely as a means to an end, but always as an end in itself. But I also acknowledge Richard Rorty for pointing out that such an ethical principle can not be seen as an absolute rule but something we can consider when we try to make the right decision. There is no authority, no rule, no algorithm that will forever and in any situation provide us with the right answer. What we think is right or wrong is contingent on how we grow up—in our culture, history, and environment. The answer is neither absolutism nor absolute relativism but the willingness to acknowledge to myself, that my conscience is the internalized consciousness of a specific historical-contingent culture. Furthermore, just as instrumental play can enrich free play, such as by enabling other forms of free play via the acquisition of new skills and habits, I also believe that the scientific perspective, which necessitates objectifying entities and often neglects the broader context, can still enhance our appreciation of the whole.

Nonetheless, it remains challenging to dismiss Heidegger’s concerns especially if we keep in mind that, because of seeing earth as standing reserve, we are currently destroying the ground that feeds us. Can we become aware of our instrumental thinking, of our own will to power? We are at a point in time where the standing reserve seems to break under the pressure of dominance. We are likely to encounter significant issues if we believe that technology alone, i.e., further instrumental thinking will resolve all of today’s major challenges, while it undeniably contributes to many of them. Thinking in cause and effect to the end of day will not provide us with the wisdom to overcome the breaking down of earth. At the same time, throwing our tools away will not change the way we think and see the world.

It certainly is not a matter of condemning the industrial and technological fate of humanity. Rather, it is a case of reinventing this fate. – Bernard Stiegler

The Essence of Art

If, at this point, you have an idea of Heidegger’s phenomenological thinking, it should be no surprise that for him, not only is the artist the cause of the work, but the work, in turn, is the cause of the artist.

The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other. Nevertheless, neither is the sole support of the other. In themselves and in their interrelations artist and work are each of them by virtue of a third thing which is prior to both, namely, that which also gives artist and work of art their names—art. – Martin Heidegger

Art, as a mode of Being, makes both artist and artwork ontologically possible. To discover the essence of art, we must investigate artworks phenomenologically. Yet here we encounter a strange loop: we must understand art through artworks, and artworks through the essence of art.

These loops evoke Hofstadter’s concept of self-reference in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid [Hof79]. Similarly, Husserl (and to an extent Kierkegaard) thought of consciousness as a strange loop—a structure that relates to itself in a back-and-forth motion between perception and self-relation. In systems theory, cybernetics, and especially Luhmann’s social systems theory, this oscillation becomes the movement between self- and other-reference—between system and environment.

Heidegger was indeed circling around something profound, though his writing on art can feel incomplete or vague. But this may be intentional. His goal was not to create a theory, but to uncover a process. We are thrown into a process already underway. We enter the circle and move within it, gradually revealing both artist and artwork—but never definitively.

To understand art in a Heideggerian sense, we must first revisit his distinction between things, tools, and equipment. Heidegger differentiates between substances—present-at-hand (vorhanden) entities such as stones or water—and equipment—ready-to-hand (zuhanden) things integrated into practical networks of use.

Interestingly, Heidegger treats artworks as present-at-hand—they have a strong thingly character. At first, this may seem reductive. Are great works of art no more than purposeless stones in a sea of things?

There is something stony in a work of architecture, wooden in a carving, colored in a painting, spoken in a linguistic work, sonorous in a musical composition. – Martin Heidegger

This mirrors Luhmann’s distinction between form (e.g., building) and medium (e.g., stone). Great artworks, in my view, unveil a mystical truth that resists conclusion. They invite questions but refuse final answers. They offer an internal logic alien to our world—untranslatable into language or abstraction—yet they speak through structure and form.

If the essence of technology is enframing (Gestell), then the essence of art may be the opposite: that which cannot be enframed, and which opens a new horizon of possibilities. In The Origin of the Work of Art [Hei50], Heidegger claims:

to be a work [of art] means to set up a world. – Martin Heidegger

Setting up a world is essential to the Being of a work of art. This resonates with Luhmann’s view that art reshapes its medium to present an alternative version of reality.

Earth, World, and Strife

What does Heidegger mean by “setting up a world”? He turns to the Greek temple. The temple doesn’t merely represent something—it institutes a world. It gives meaning, order, and orientation to human existence. The temple provides a world in which the lives of the Greeks were organized. Similarly, cathedrals structured medieval Christian life, and mosques shaped Islamic civilizations. Heidegger chooses the temple because it is non-representational—it does not symbolize, but discloses.

Van Gogh’s painting of a peasant’s shoes is another example. The painting doesn’t merely depict the shoes—it reveals the peasant’s life-world.

World, for Heidegger, is not the objective cosmos but the network of significance through which Dasein relates to Being. It is the cultural, historical, and meaningful context that makes things intelligible. The temple “gathers” the possibilities and outlook of a historical people—giving structure to their destiny.

Heidegger’s use of the term “world” carries with it the sense not only of life-world (Lebenswelt) but of historical epoch as well, with the suggestion that the life-world is an historical structure. – Sandra Lee Bartky

Husserl viewed the world as a universal, shared horizon—the Lebenswelt. Heidegger, however, was less concerned with its universality and more with its existential specificity. For Heidegger, the world is disclosed through practical engagement, not theoretical abstraction. In Being and Time [Hei08], Heidegger shows that the world is not a set of objects but a phenomenon saturated with meaning, understood pre-reflectively. The objective world is derivative—it abstracts from a world already lived in.

The world is always in progress. It orients, guides, and structures Dasein’s existence. A temple, by organizing existence, also opens a world—and closes another.

In contrast to world, earth (Erde) is concealment—the material basis of things; their hidden, resistant, mysterious side. Earth is the rock, the soil, the material—not simply nature, but the mysterious ground. It bears resemblance to Lacan’s “real”—that which resists symbolic representation yet constantly presses against it. The earth is always there—stuck to us like dirt on our shoe. It cannot be fully absorbed into world. Earth and world exist in strife—a productive, irreducible tension. While tools disappear in use, artworks do the opposite. Art reveals earth by presencing it.

In fabricating equipment—e.g., an ax—stone is used, and used up. It disappears into usefulness. The material is all the better and more suitable the less it resists vanishing in the equipmental being of the equipment. By contrast the temple-work, in setting up a world, does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time and to come into the open region of the work’s world. The rock comes to bear and rest and so first becomes rock; metals come to glitter and shimmer, colors to glow, tones to sing, the word to say. All this comes forth as the work sets itself back into the massiveness and heaviness of stone, into the firmness and pliancy of wood, into the hardness and luster of metal, into the brightening and darkening of color, into the clang of tone, and into the naming power of word. – Martin Heidegger

Earthly elements are transfigured in artworks. They remain stubbornly material—unassimilable. A great artwork makes the earth shine forth. It is precisely in this strife—between concealment (earth) and unconcealment (world)—that truth happens. The artwork sets up a world (order, meaning), but simultaneously sets forth the earth (materiality, opacity). The tension between them is what allows the artwork to reveal truth. The artwork, unlike a broken tool, cannot be fixed—its resistance is ontological. Earth reveals itself only through the transparency of the world that cannot fully contain it.

Earth is something, which makes up everything around us and gives our reality a context for us to sort our place in the world, by gaining reference from its physicality. However, we can never see this earth for what it is, except in the special instance of when it is presented in an artwork.

Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws up out of the rock the mystery of that rock’s clumsy yet spontaneous support. Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence. The luster and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, yet first brings to light the light of the day, the breath of the sky, the darkness of the night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air […] The Greeks early called this emerging and rising in itself and in all things phusis. It clears and illuminates, also, that on which and in which man bases his dwelling. We call this ground the earth. – Martin Heidegger

So, because we see the temple as an art-thing, and also experience the world it creates, this highlights to us that it is made from something. The rocks that may have been concealed from our attention before, because they used to be mixed in with nature, are now something else all together. They are at one with the temple, but still we know they are rocks. They shine out at us. Their true nature is revealed in the tension between the rocks trying to be a temple but remaining rooted as earth. Again, this is similar to Luhmann’s claim that the form (the temple) reveals the medium (earth).

The world is usually invisible or transparent to us in our everyday activities. It becomes visible through the opacity of earth in an artwork. In a great work of art there’s always a strife between transparent intelligibility (world) and opaque unintelligibility (earth). In that sense, earth is like the breakdown of equipment: The equipment withdraws from us (ready-to-hand) but it introduces itself as present-at-hand if it breaks or is missing. But, unlike a breakdown of a tool, earth is unfixable.

The artwork ‘holds its ground’—it is there as itself, resisting instrumental thinking.

Furthermore, it is only through the transparency of the world that earth can strike us as unintelligible, perplexing and mysterious. The happening of truth in the work of art and the Being of the work of art is essentially the instigation of the strife between world and earth. A great work of art intensifies this strife while establishing it.

Art can be thought of in terms of Being, truth, world, earth and strife, and according to Heidegger, the two essential features of great artwork are setting up of a world and setting forth of earth. Furthermore, an epochal understanding of Being and a particular world are opened and held opened in Dasein’s clearing by a specific being, i.e., a work of art.

I think, for Heidegger, art has more to do with truth than beauty. He wanted to understand the ontological “function” of art: what art does in relation to truth and Being. Truth and art are deeply interconnected—not mutually exclusive. Art is a way in which truth happens.

Artworks don’t just show us objects—they open a world.

But, of course, I am not talking about the truth as correspondence or agreement (adaequatio) but truth as unconcealment or uncovering. Like the objective world is based on Lebenswelt, for Heidegger, the former is based on the latter.

Heideggerian Cinema

After this introduction of a Heideggerian perspective on art, let me now turn to examples in the medium I am most interested in: film in general, and the works of Andrei Tarkovsky, Terrence Malick, and Michael Haneke more specifically. While Tarkovsky and Malick are existential filmmakers, Haneke can be seen more as a critic of his own medium—more postmodern in his sensibility. However, all three are more interested in posing questions than offering answers.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky viewed art as revealing the transcendental. He believed that art was the only path toward this realm of meaning:

It appears as a revelation, as a momentary, passionate wish to grasp intuitively and at a stroke all the laws of this world—its beauty and ugliness, its compassion and cruelty, its infinity and its limitations. – Andrei Tarkovsky

For Tarkovsky, embracing art comes close to a spiritual experience, and its creation resembles an act of faith. Through his films, he explored our world in search of understanding—observing Dasein’s questioning of its own Being, praying through cinema. As his characters say:

We need a mirror.

For Tarkovsky, this mirror would not reflect our experiences as a linear sequence of events, captured objectively and logically in what might be called a plot. nstead, we would see a complex web of thoughts, memories, and emotions—all deeply interconnected with other beings: with other Daseins, with tools, or with things present-at-hand. We would see a being that experiences a practical world subjectively, gives shape to it, and is shaped by it in return. A being rooted in its past, projecting itself into the future, and perceiving each new moment through a consciousness formed by impressions, distortions, and associations.

Tarkovsky, like Heidegger, wrestled with time as an essential feature of the human condition. Dasein is always ahead-of-itself—projecting itself into its possibilities. It imagines itself as becoming.

Time is said to be irreversible. And this is true enough in the sense that “you can’t bring back the past,” as they say. But what exactly is this “past”? Is it what has passed? And what does “passed” mean for a person when, for each of us, the past is the bearer of all that is constant in the reality of the present, of each current moment? In a certain sense the past is far more real—or at any rate more stable, more resilient—than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight only in its recollection. – Andrei Tarkovsky

To capture truth as unconcealment, the artist must trust their own heart, follow instinct, and hope that what resonates with them—however intangible or unexplainable—will do the same for others. For both Tarkovsky and Heidegger, art is not meant to be analyzed or consumed purely for aesthetic pleasure. Rather, it opens up a space of truth. For Heidegger, this is the opening of a world; for Tarkovsky, it is the opening of a spiritual world. Both, I believe, see in great art a guide toward self-discovery—or, in Heidegger’s terms, a path toward authenticity through being-toward-death. Again, this does not mean “being true to oneself” in the contemporary psychological sense, but rather something closer to its Greek roots: to take a stand, to make a final and irreversible decision—to choose one possibility while killing off all others. This clearly echoes Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith and commitment. It is existential time and our finitude that make authenticity possible.

And here we return to the essence of technology, which makes everything measurable and exchangeable by assigning value to all things. In the consumerist and technological age of the twenty-first century, we are surrounded by exchange values. More and more areas of our lives are technologized and marketed, introducing anonymity at the expense of authenticity. Making a definitive, irreversible choice becomes increasingly difficult in a world of endless options. Life begins to feel unlimited—and so we delay choices, only to experience a crisis of meaning and identity. And when someone cannot find identity within themselves, they may seek it in groups or ideologies. Eventually, even something destructive can appear attractive—simply because it has clarity and strength of purpose.

I believe that our ability to see the world opened by works of art is conditioned on our belief that such an opening is possible—a belief that becomes harder to sustain in a world that actively discourages us from looking beyond the immediate, material surface. Tarkovsky (especially in Stalker), like Kierkegaard, warns of a society that tries to conquer the infinite with the finite. If we lose our ability to hope, to believe in something greater than ourselves—if we reject the irrational, the poetic, the spiritual—we risk falling into what Heidegger called inauthenticity, or what Kierkegaard called despair. A world stripped of spirituality will be a cruel one—not because of punishment or divine absence, but because it will no longer prepare us for death.

Terrence Malick

Another film director whose work is even more closely aligned with Heidegger’s philosophy is Terrence Malick. Malick once began a doctorate at Harvard on Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein—and his films often explore, in both form and content, ideas about the essence of humanity and phenomenology as advanced by Heidegger. This is evident not only in his existential style but in the use of ever-questioning voiceovers—what I see as Dasein’s questioning of Being. The whispering narration turns the film into poetry in motion.

Malick, like no other, depicts a practical world of phenomena, not a world of facts or a linearly progressing story. He lets us experience the mystical in the ordinary, which is, in fact, extraordinary. His camera is constantly moving—it follows characters from shifting angles, but also lingers or wanders away entirely. It focuses not only on the figures but on the world that surrounds them. The camera seems more interested in exploring the beauty and mystery of the characters’ world than the characters themselves—just as Malick is less interested in story than in disclosure. The camera looks at beings as they are, thus revealing the multiplicity of Being.

All of [Malick’s] movies are about worlds. […] Each film is about some aspect of the world. – Hubert Dreyfus

As Martin Woessner writes in What Is Heideggerian Cinema? Film, Philosophy, and Cultural Mobility [Woe11], film gives us a meaningful world—even as it reflects our alienation from that world. Cinema offers us what we so often take for granted or fail to notice in everyday life: the world itself. For Malick, this is what he sought as a student of philosophy—a sense of the world, if not a full knowledge of one’s place within it.

Malick does not insist; he invites. Rather than filling space, he opens it up. His work is playful, wasteful, ambiguous—and deliberately resists utilitarian structure. Especially in his later films, narrative and dialogue all but vanish. His cinema is not bound by the technical language of film, just as a poet is not bound by ordinary syntax.

If one wishes to understand Heidegger’s kind of thinking, The Tree of Life offers a profound experiential entry point. It is a meditation on Being. It begins with the same question that begins Being and Time:

Why is there something rather than nothing?

While a deeply personal film, Malick makes clear that:

The “I” who speaks in this story is not the author. Rather, he hopes that you see yourself in this “I” and understand this story as your own. – Terrence Malick

Inspired by his Christian upbringing, Malick develops two central forces: nature and grace. In The Tree of Life, these are narrated as opposing paths. I would argue that nature corresponds with the essence of technology: it is the instrumental, rational, calculating mode of revealing. Malick’s nature is selfish, indifferent, and dominating—it strives to survive at any cost:

Physical life in a world abandoned by the spirit. Organized unreality. The soul a hindrance in one’s dealings here. A burden. A mere quantity of thoughts and desires. – Terrence Malick

Grace, by contrast, is forgiving, vulnerable, selfless, and playful. It is spiritual—not in a doctrinal sense, but in how it dissolves the boundaries of rational understanding. Some call its source God, but Malick writes:

Let us sing a new song, tell a new story; one which, mindful of the ancient tales, takes its inspiration from science. Let us search for the permanent amid the fleeting and mutable, for that which endures through the spectacle of ceaseless change. Let us discover the eternal, the good. – Terrence Malick

For Malick, creation is an eternal birth—a beginning without end, happening in each instant. The same fire that burns in the stars burns equally in us. Our being is a miracle, co-equal with the universe. Each day is a new creation.

In The Thin Red Line, we encounter soldiers thrown into a Pacific island in World War II, suddenly aware of the thin boundary between Being and Nothing. This film most thoroughly explores the transitory nature of the world. The soldiers struggle with existential questions and anxiety because they are confronted with death—they imagine their lives from the end, which Heidegger calls Vorlaufen zum eigenen Tode (anticipatory resoluteness). American and Japanese soldiers, as well as the Melanesian villagers, reveal how fragile our human worlds truly are.

Dreyfus saw this as a concrete, historical example of Dasein’s freedom—a moment where the groundless ground of human action becomes visible. And according to Woessner [Woe11], The Thin Red Line shows us not just the battle but at least three worlds. Its aim is to investigate the meaning of worldhood—a meaning connected to mortality, but not defined by it. This is not merely a war film—it is a confrontation between worlds. It reminds us how difficult it is, in modernity, to recognize that the world itself is fragile—predicated on us, yet pointing beyond us.

In terms of Heidegger’s essence of technology, Malick’s The New World may be his most explicit work. It dramatizes the transformation of the natural world into an artificial one. Scenes of indigenous dwelling are juxtaposed with colonial struggle: the former in harmony with the environment, the latter marked by extraction and strife. Malick uses a romanticized version of the Pocahontas myth to depict the emergence of the modern world—where mortals began to exaggerate their role in the cosmic order. A displaced Pocahontas walks through an English garden, puzzled at how the trees have been tamed and reshaped. This is not just cultural transformation; it’s ontological. The colonists brought with them not only civilization, but metaphysics—Descartes’ vision of a world rendered as object, as standing-reserve. In this way, America is born through enframing.

In A Hidden Life, Malick may be trying to locate a moral compass within Heidegger’s existential framework—even though Heidegger provides no ethical directives. This is a film about goodness without recognition, courage without audience. It is more Kierkegaardian than Heideggerian. Its protagonist is an ordinary Austrian farmer, living a quiet life. He refuses to swear allegiance to Hitler and pays with his life. His existence is unspectacular—but Malick reveals it as extraordinary by letting Being show up through his small acts of faith. We see the farmer within his web of practical tools, land, family, and earth. And we sense Malick’s own confrontation with Heidegger’s legacy—his silence on ethics, and his involvement with Nazism. A world breaks down—again.

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. — Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot)

We are drawn to stories of heroic greatness—the one who saves lives, stands up to tyranny, writes books. But A Hidden Life asks us to consider something quieter: the refusal to comply, the hidden act of conscience. This may be just as significant—if not more so.

Malick’s cinema raises the questions we should have asked ourselves long ago. These are not questions familiar to traditional cultures—they are distinctly modern. They emerge from alienation, disengagement, and anxiety. And as Heidegger knew: to be open to the world is also to be open to its terror.

Michael Haneke

Michael Haneke, like no one else, uses film to unconceal the blurriness of reality and contemporary cinema. If Tarkovsky and Malick uncover existential and spiritual dimensions of Being, Haneke turns his camera on the medium itself, making visible the forms and manipulations of cinematic language. In this way, his cinema is perhaps more Luhmannian than Heideggerian, investigating how social systems—especially media—shape and condition experience.

It’s the duty of art to ask questions, not to provide answers. And if you want a clearer answer, I’ll have to pass. – Michael Haneke

For Haneke, there is not one truth but many. Reality is contradictory, fragmented, and perspectival. His work questions the very possibility of a singular or objective truth, revealing instead the structures through which truths are mediated. He challenges the naive assumption that film mirrors reality. In his view, film doesn’t merely reflect the world; it constructs our very sense of it.

Haneke creates hyper-real cinematic worlds, only to simultaneously expose their artificiality. He draws attention to what lies outside the frame—using off-screen space and sound—to remind us that much of what matters is never shown. Trauma often occurs off-screen. Violence is heard but not seen. The most affecting moments are denied to the viewer, demanding a different kind of attention, one that questions the ethics of looking.

His films expose how media consumption desensitizes us. The illusion of connection masks a growing alienation. Aesthetic distance becomes a metaphor for emotional distance. This is especially evident in Funny Games, where Haneke deconstructs cinematic violence. Unlike stylized Hollywood brutality, the violence here is meaningless, painful, and unrelieved by catharsis or moral resolution. It indicts the viewer, forcing us to confront our role as consumers of cruelty.

Leonard Maltin called the film “nonsensical and highly unpleasant,” but that is the point. Haneke refuses narrative comfort. He gives no backstory, no justification, no redemption. Suffering is not sublime—it is banal, senseless, and real. Haneke’s cinema is not entertainment; it is confrontation.

By resisting closure, Haneke invites us to become critical spectators. His work refuses easy identification or emotional resolution. As viewers, we are placed at a distance from the characters, watching as outsiders. The result is not empathy, but estrangement—what Brecht might call the Verfremdungseffekt. Haneke disrupts traditional cinematic codes to expose their ideological underpinnings. He denies us the fantasy that images offer truth.

In doing so, he aligns with Baudrillard’s diagnosis of hyperreality: a world where simulations replace the real. One need only look at how the Barbie movie reflects this—no longer does Barbie reflect humanity; instead, humanity imitates Barbie. Life imitates advertisement. This is not inherently bad, but it should provoke reflection. If reality imitates media, we must become aware of what we consume.

Haneke’s films are exercises in unconcealment, but not in Heidegger’s poetic sense. Rather, they uncover how the image has displaced experience, how representation replaces presence. They are critiques of the technological mode of revealing, which reduces everything to consumption, to spectacle.

Yet here lies a paradox: even when Haneke breaks the fourth wall or undermines the spectacle, is it not still spectacle? Can one truly escape the logic of representation by critiquing it from within? This is the open question at the heart of his work.

Haneke’s cinema, like that of Tarkovsky and Malick, participates in the struggle between world and earth, between sense-making and that which resists being made fully intelligible. These films never exhaust their meaning. They are not allegories or puzzles with solutions. They resist total interpretation.

In Heideggerian terms, they return us to existential time. They remind us that our being is finite, that the world is fragile, and that meaning is never guaranteed. They provoke anxiety (Angst), the uncanny mood that shakes our complacency and reveals the void beneath our daily certainties. They are not about stories. They are about being.

When the noise stops, the inner voice begins. That is what these films allow—or demand. They open us to the nothing, and in doing so, to ourselves.

A Narrow View of Art

Heidegger is largely silent on music. He saw it as the art of feeling, not of form, and distrusted its emotionality. He criticized Wagner for aesthetic excess and linked such artistic elevation to nihilism—a loss of grounding in Being. This may reflect a bias toward visual and architectural arts, rooted in Heidegger’s cultural and historical context.

But I believe Heidegger underestimated music. When absorbed in music, clock time is suspended. Musical temporality is shared, not individual. Like great visual art, music discloses a new world. Its tones form an earth–material, resistant, and grounding—while its structure shapes a world we temporarily inhabit.

Composers who break new ground shift the musical world, changing what is even thinkable in sound. As listeners, we experience this strangeness as the emergence of truth. As already mentioned, I Luhmann provides a more powerful framework to analyze artworks as a relation between medium and form.

Heidegger’s view of art is powerful but arguably narrow. His insistence that art is primarily a site of truth’s unconcealment—a happening of Being—adds profound depth to our understanding of artistic experience. Yet it may leave out other important dimensions.

Kant, for instance, reminds us that art also engages the faculties of judgment and taste. Aesthetic pleasure—our response to the formal beauty of a work—need not be reduced to the work’s world-opening power. To deny this would be to ignore what draws many to art in the first place. Beautiful form, elegance, and composition may not ground truth, but they are not irrelevant. Art can move us by harmony as well as by disruption. Heidegger doesn’t deny this, but he rarely addresses it.

Moreover, not all artworks seem to unconceal a world in the Heideggerian sense. Music, particularly instrumental music without lyrics, offers an example. It can be emotionally overwhelming and spiritually elevating while remaining abstract—without “world” in any literal or symbolic sense. Does this mean it is not art? Or does this suggest that Heidegger’s definition misses something vital?

God has given us music so that above all it can lead us upwards. Music unites all qualities: it can exalt us, divert us, cheer us up, or break the hardest of hearts with the softest of its melancholy tones. But its principal task is to lead our thoughts to higher things… Song elevates our being and leads us to the good and the true – A young Friedrich Nietzsche

While Heidegger’s theory emphasizes earth and world, concealment and disclosure, its opacity—perhaps deliberate—can also frustrate. Whether the vagueness lies in the thought or in our reception of it is difficult to say. What is clear is that others, such as Niklas Luhmann, offer a different lens. In Medium and Form [Luh86], Luhmann frames art as a self-referential system—a social form of communication stabilized through aesthetic differentiation rather than ontological truth.

Still, Heidegger’s contribution remains significant. From him, we inherit the idea that art can unconceal both the world and its technological enframing. It can reveal how we see, what remains hidden in that vision, and whether technology is a tool we use—or a cosmic force that uses us.

Great art may confront us with this dilemma. It may not answer whether technology is a condition we can transcend or a destiny we must endure. But it can illuminate the struggle. It can set up a new world—one in which we may see technology differently, not as neutral instrumentality but as a mode of revealing. In this sense, as Tarkovsky writes, art prepares us:

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good. – Andrei Tarkovsky

Turning Away from Danger

I feel a great tension between Heidegger’s description of technology and my own relationship with it. Technological tools have saved my life. Equipment enables me to explore the world on my own terms. Many technologies serve emancipatory purposes, easing suffering and expanding human potential—developments some reactionary forces would like to reverse. They seek to inject fear of transhumanism into public discourse using arguments eerily reminiscent of Heidegger’s texts. His Nihilophobie—a fear and rejection of nihilism—remains pervasive in Western thought: the anxiety that behind everything, there is nothing, not even Being.

I cannot draw a clear line between “good” and “bad” technologies. When the alphabet was introduced, Plato worried it would erode memory. In some ways, he was right; oral traditions declined. But writing also allowed memory to be externalized and preserved in new ways. Was the alphabet a bad technology? Most of us would disagree. This suggests that we must remain committed to finding new weapons of emancipation—while also recognizing that such tools inevitably shape us in ways we do not control.

Where I agree with Heidegger is in his description of the network of equipment and our place within it: the humbling realization that we are far less in control than we imagine. We inhabit a world shaped by technology—culturally, environmentally, epistemologically. This demands continuous reflection on the essence of technology and its danger. Technological artifacts don’t merely assist life; they generate new worlds and extinguish old ones. They form self-reinforcing feedback loops, what Heidegger and systems thinkers like Luhmann might call autopoietic systems. And yet, we must also resist binary distinctions between what is “natural” and “unnatural.” History has taught us to expand our moral imagination, to welcome more beings into our circle of care—not because of immutable principles, but because of the vividness of our imagining. That is something we should be proud of.

This is not a call for either unconditional acceptance or total resistance. Instead, we need informed ambivalence, deliberate withdrawal, and vigilant anticipation. As Luhmann reminds us, modern society is contingent—everything could be otherwise. Today, even our near future feels radically unpredictable. We no longer imagine the future with the same confidence that ancient societies did.

Still, I must believe that our mode of seeing the world can shift—that it is not fixed. If technology is a mode of revealing, then we must remain open to other forms of revealing as well other approaches to truth and Being. Artists play a vital role in this task. They do not just critique the present—they open space for possible futures. Through aesthetic forms, they disclose reality in ways that neither science nor politics can. Their task is phenomenological: to show how things appear, not merely what they are.

This process must be approached not with cynicism or fear, but with sincere engagement. Technologies, after all, are neither natural facts nor purely human creations. Still, what we co-evolves along side with us is guided by the horizon of possibility that technology itself enframes. Artistic works have the potential to unveil this enframing, to illuminate the stage upon which our futures unfold. Not to engineer it but to guard and provide the possible such that we can endure meaninglessness, not in despair, but with awareness.

We must learn to see again—to enter the realm where beings (and systems) reveal themselves in ways not reduced to function, efficiency, or control. We must resist with serenity (Glassenheit) the automatic embrace of technological challenge and the illusion of inevitability. Neither nostalgia nor minor reform will suffice but we can still preserve diginity to beings.

As Mark Fisher put it: I’m not afraid of a zombie apocalypse; I’m afraid that people find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the current trajectory. The true horror is our lack of imagination. That we’ve already surrendered to the system. That we reach, again and again, for easy answers and charismatic saviors instead of daring new visions.

Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human meditations and endeavors. Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god. — Martin Heidegger, Spiegel interview, 1966

For Heidegger, the danger is not simply that technology obstructs our access to Being—but that it causes us to forget Being altogether. He’s pointing to cybernetics (the science of systems, control, and information flow) as having replaced philosophy as the dominant framework for understanding the world, that is, data and systems theory, not wisdom or metaphysics, now shape our worldview and decision-making is done by algorithms, economics, optimization. In Heidegger’s eyes, this is the ultimate enframing (Gestell): the culmination of seeing the world purely as resource, as system to be controlled, not as mystery to be lived.

Yet it is precisely the danger he is pointing towards that contains the seed of salvation. By confronting the danger, we might remember what has been concealed. We might recognize that technology is just one possible mode of revealing—not the only one.

Perhaps the “god” Heidegger spoke of is not divine at all, but earthly—Gaia returning, not as benevolent mother but as force of reckoning. Climate change, in this sense, is not just a scientific fact or policy failure, but a metaphysical event: the Earth reasserting its withdrawn presence, rupturing our illusion of mastery, and exposing the futility of control. It may yet prepare us—not for salvation, but for an entirely different way of dwelling. This might be our biggest danger but as Hölderlin wrote

[…] where the danger is, there also grows the saving power. — Friedrich Hölderlin

Will earth conceal the world completely? I don’t know. The future looks grim. But imagining catastrophe already feels like an act of resignation. And while the thought of it horrifies me, reflecting on it might be the first step toward a more honest, more courageous beginning.