Just as a warning, this probably won't make a lick of sense if you haven't read "The Question Concerning Technology" by Heidegger, the other two articles by Dreyfus/Spinosa and Feenburg are also useful for interpreting the Heidegger and hence the direction I'm taking with it. The purpose of Heidegger's ambiguity and wordplay is to draw our attention away from old ways of thinking which conceal as much or more than they reveal. Heidegger takes a divergence from the traditional debate in order to conspicuously draw attention to the process of concealing and revealing truth as such. What do I take the final point of this paper to be? Heidegger has found a solution to postmodernism that escapes the limitations of determinism but avoids the blind spots of arbitrary individualism. The Stratactical Polemic Things draw our attention to our status as conditional beings in a becoming world. The thing invites reflection upon oneself and attunement to the world, ultimately revealing how self and world resonate together. How pleasant is the crackle of a wood fire as opposed to the monotonous drone of central air; consider how one's attention simultaneously lingers on the flames and on one's human relation to the fire while the ventilation duct hides out of site in an inconspicuous location. It is often a thing (such as “ball!â€) that is a child's first utterance – the presencing of the ball immediately and pressingly upon the infant's world is undeniable, it is only later that we are taught to regard the outside realm in the language of subjectivity and objectivity. Heidegger's exploration of the German Thing “a gathering to deliberate on a matter under discussion†(Poetry, 174) or more generally, “anything that in any way bears upon men, concerns them†(Poetry, 174) (my emphasis) is useful here as a way of understanding how the thing is entangled in the conditional relationship to it. It is by this type of conditional relationship that things presence in the world of being. This presencing and a mindfulness towards been, being, and becoming is the gathering of the fourfold. Under the context of such a gathering one participates most authentically and experiences with utmost clarity the world of being, such earthly events invite a meditative equipoise in the moment. It could be said it is during these times that human beings are being maximally. Subtly Heidegger suggests that the ultimate nature of our being is a revealer of contextual meaning, both as conditioned experiencers and as free participants in the world. In a world reduced solely to transparent devices even we become transparent, passive entities. This is so because one loses one's awareness of conditionality. Very rarely does the modern Westerner toil in or even pass through the fields and workshops that allow him to persist. The world can seem disembodied, everybody is selling something and nobody is making anything. The threat is that we cease to be free in the meaningful sense of expressing our potential as revealers and instead be free in the meaningless manner of arbitrary choice. When arbitrary choice rules completely over revealing one only functions as perpetuator of the challenging forth to standing reserve – one has become ordered. Subsistence, even persistence of being are disguised in a cloud of consumer choices and the marketing thereof. This is the great danger of the technological enframing into standing reserve which is exemplified in consumerism and exasperated by clinging to old notions of the autonomous self that have allowed us to reduce the world beyond even object into mere function and process. We cannot satisfy ourselves with these empty choices because we are equally empty. There is no substance left to ground us, so the next move is to embrace the power of pure process to move us (and this movement will become us). It could be from the Western conception of God that we came to view the self as an autonomous unmoved mover, it it time to reaffirm ourselves (and everything) as moved mover. Primitive conceptions of one-directional causality instead of multideterminate fields are equally to blame here. What then is the positive reaction to technology? The first element can most clearly be articulated with Certeau's strategic/tactical distinction (that also runs parallel to Heidegger's device/attitude ambiguity) (Feenberg 334). The strategic viewpoint plans and engineers from the perspective of systems and rules, apprehending the fashion in which forces mutually interact (from relationships as wide as how the automobile leads to urban sprawl to those as small as how the ergonomics of a handle will effect generic user experiences). The tactical viewpoint is engaging and improvisational, within the phenomenon of agency the individual must adapt to the ever changing conditions at hand. The tactical perspective can be subversive and revolutionary whereas the strategic perspective is primarily reformist in searching for how things can be rearranged to operate better in conformity with established operational laws. A full understanding is only disclosed upon revealing this mutual play between design and participation. A post-postmodern agent constantly takes their own causedness into consideration with their causal power. This could show the influence of Buddhism on Heidegger's thought because play between conditionality and phenomenon is the true meaning of refined interpretations of Buddhism's Existence-Emptiness/Self-Noself doctrines. A thing is, but is only by virtue of it being a conditioned thing. Here Buddhist Sunyata (emptiness) doctrine is apparent, there is much in common with Heidegger's talk of clearings and Sunyata's root meaning of “hollowâ€. Neither existence nor emptiness are in any meaningful sense, rather it is a polemic meant to direct scrutiny to a truth that eludes conceptualization. What it is meant to express is essentially that there is no fixed essence, but the other-constituting always shines with the luminosity of conceivable potential. We can explain what we mean by luminous potential by considering the sculptor for whom for luminosity penetrates the stone, guiding the sculptor's hand as he reveals the entanglement between himself and the marble through the statue. For a thing to be luminous is to shine with possibilities within the realm of contextualized freedom. Being is formless yet formable. This is what the Mahayana (New Vehicle) Buddhists mean when they make their final and most shocking conclusion: Samsara (the conditional) is Nirvana (the liberating release); understood for our purposes we may re-represent it as: The present is the potential. In Heidegger's terms one might say: The opening/clearing is simultaneous with the revealing. The second element is that we no longer, or perhaps were never able to, reveal ourselves as disclosing the world according to some fixed identity which expresses maturation along a path (the long-term commitments that Borgman foresaw being consumed by a hyperreality of pure desire (Dreyfus & Spinosa 316). This is where Borgman made his biggest mistake, for the pure subjectivity he advocated as an alternative is the least “focused†of all possible existences. In a world without condition there could be no true being, only the shadow of being projected from one's conditions prior to hyperreality. Here is Heidegger's most redeeming feature despite the ambiguities: in the fluid postmodern lifeworld we've inherited we cannot dwell on stable identities such as “Eric, son of Eric the blacksmith†could have easily done. Instead we must conspicuously operate as world revealers, realized by engagement and revealing a multiplicity of worlds. We must be sensitive to our own fluidity both in terms of affective power and affected nature in order to operate authentically in the world. With this sensitivity we also become more open to revealing non-technological/instrumental worlds of being alongside operating in proper alignment with the techno-world (Dreyfus & Spinosa 323). Heidegger would characterize this proper alignment as a “free relation†to technology. In such a relation devices are present but let alone to themselves. Devices are not bad, but a pure device will rarely if ever gather in the sense of drawing one to persist in a reflexive conditional mindset. Rather the rightful purpose of devices should be to eliminate that which already does not gather and bring us to dwell in the present. The dishwasher is perfectly acceptable in replacing hand washing because repetitive unrewarding labor draws attention away from itself and the present; the mind instead drifts because there is no sense of divinity (or belonging/centeredness) to the scene. Devices ought to replace that which draws attention away and never encroach upon that which draws attention towards. It might be useful to make a distinction between device and tool however, because a tool is a type of thing that can participate in revealing, the graphic designer's computer has strong potential to be a tool while the inane-media-devourer's computer is a device. Sculpture has ceased as a dominant art form because an autonomous perspective of freedom lacks the attentiveness to nurture by refining; the orderer cannot order a statue from the stone like one can order paint upon canvas. The painter can regard the scene as an object in his mind wholly understood through representation and order it into being as such while the sculptor must reveal a thing in the world. The sculptor has the least whim of all arts to make corrections and alterations, but at the same time this art participates in the entanglement of revealing more intimately than any other. The delusion of autonomous freedom does not reveal the glow of luminous potential, while ordering to the instrumental it casts a ghost light that conceals far more than it reveals. The autonomous musician expresses himself upon an instrument but is incapable of expressing alongside the music, he conceals the composition with his ordering-upon; meanwhile the contextualized musician reveals an entanglement between herself and the music through the performance, she is attentive to her instrument, the other band mates, and the song itself as it flows into being. The contextualized musician participates in an experience of simultaneous shaping and being shaped that is paradigmatic of conditionally informed liberation. The saving power of technology that grows alongside the danger is not just the power to undo the ills of modernity, it is liberating power beyond anything yet known to man. When one realizes that one is just as fluid as the world they exist in, yet both equally condition upon each other, they open up the potential to be a purely existential being, a constant world-poet both acting and acted upon. Objects and identities do not need to be re-added to save post-modernity'ss disunified array of functions and processes; rather we must operate as constant craftspersons of reality. To use some Heideggerian romance, the dance hall is a gathering paradigmatic of the constant flux, the dance-hall exists as an empty space for motion to reveal itself, and so each dancer reveals the interplay between themselves and the music, in the field of bodies all adjust interdependently as they reveal. The answer in the face of consumerism is not to stop consuming, but rather consider in its entirety how one's consumption is crafting the world. To conjure more democratic and American language every action is a vote in the electorate of being. The electorate accurately portrays the saving power because the vote must coalesce the tactical (agential/particular) with the strategic (determinist/universal). The voter must simultaneously consider their power of change and conditions of determination under the context of the interdependent relationship between their own well being and the well being of the country. If all aspects of life could be grasped fully in this nuanced interplay only absolute liberation would proceed. We had to step up to the precipice of the standing reserve in order to cast our illusions of autonomy to the sea of reductive emptiness. Completely stripped of predispositions one walks away liberated. This is the fashion in which the saving power grows alongside the danger. All has been thrown to the standing reserve except for our identities, and if we are not attentive that we are not an autonomy we risk allowing the standing reserve to drag us to the void by a chain of mistaken personal identity. The enframed man finds himself pulled into an emptiness of categorical order rather than revealing particulars out of the emptiness by our entanglement with it. Man becomes standing reserve when he allows the challenging fourth to pull him into the aggregate of forces with his mistaken conviction of autonomy serving as the anchor that reduces all to ordered irrelevance ala Kant's categorical. Consciousness and being are not one of the aggregates however, rather they are the very ground upon which the aggregates aggregate and disclose themselves as things at all. The ground of reflexive consciousness (which provides the foundation for contextualized consciousness) that is finally unburied by the dangerous reduction project of enframing is “the innermost indestructible belongingness of man within granting†that ultimately eludes all decontextualization and reduction to standing reserve (Question 112). From these observations it seems the frequent problem with most philosophers engaging technology is a tendency to essentialize it too far in either direction of being or nonbeing – the technological phenomenon rests between the two as do all phenomenon. Perhaps what hides the double nature of technology more than anything is the fact that it exemplifies the fuzzy boundary between existence and emptiness more than any other mode of thought by the way in which it deconstructs and reconstructs the world. It does not seem so apparent that it is subject to the same simultaneous deconstruction and reconstruction. This two-sided process will yield the flexible and free relationship to technology that Heidegger sought for. The ambiguity between device and attitude reform in Heidegger's thought is the same ambiguity between self and no-self that is supposed to lead to a finer realization; in some sense we are wholly constituted but at the same time completely open. All of reality, both the micro and the macro, shares this feature with us. When we embrace a fluid identity as a dynamic revealer we become artists as naturally as the acorn falls to the earth. The natural artist ultimately replaces instrumentalization with phenomeno-conditional reasoning and frees himself from false subjectivity through the play of being as opposed to hopeless attempts towards the acquisition and ordering of being. All of this considered the best disclosure at hand is a passage from Heidegger concerning the relationship between freedom and revealing (Heidegger, 109) : Freedom governs the open in the sense of the cleared and lighted up, i.e the revealed. To the occurrence of revealing, i.e of truth, freedom stands in the closest and most intimate kinship. All revealing belongs within a harboring and a concealing. But that which frees – the mystery – is concealed and always concealing itself. All revealing comes out of the open, and brings into the open. The freedom of the open consists neither in unfettered arbitrariness nor in the constraint of mere laws. Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light, in whose lighting shimmers that veil that hides the essential occurrence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils. Freedom is the realm of the destining that at any given time starts a revealing on its way. Works Cited Andrew Feenburg. “Critical Evaluation of Heidegger and Borgmanâ€. Philosophy and Technology: The Technological Condition. Eds. Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek. Blackwell Publishing 2003. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa. “Heidegger and Borgman on Technologyâ€. Philosophy and Technology: The Technological Condition. Eds. Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek. Blackwell Publishing 2003. Martin Heidegger. “The Question Concerning Technologyâ€. Technology and Values. Ed. Craig Hanks. 2010. Martin Heidegger. Poetry, Language, Thought. 1971.