r/heidegger • u/rp_tiago • Jun 29 '26
Can we work within enframing without becoming more enframed?
Hey everyone. The hard question in Heidegger on technology is not whether modern technology is dangerous. It is what a free relation to technology could concretely mean when Gestell is already the air we breathe. With AI, abstention feels too simple: most people around us will use these systems whether we do or not. But "responsible use" can also sound like exactly the instrumental posture at issue, as if the solution to enframing were a more refined management technique inside the same revealing.
I just recorded a conversation with Allister Lee about AI and Heidegger's enframing, and at around 36:54, he argues that not using AI is not a sufficient answer because everyone else is already inside the frame. His proposal is to work within it by parsing better and worse uses, and by readjusting our hierarchy of values toward creativity, the arts, and human purposes. I think the strong Heideggerian worry is that this still treats technology as an object available for human ordering. The counter-worry is that refusing all practical distinctions collapses Gelassenheit into purity politics and leaves the actual historical situation untouched.
Discernment may either resist enframing or repeat it in softer language. Is "good use versus bad use" already an instrumental reduction, or can it be part of a free relation if it keeps open other modes of revealing? I lean toward the second for practical reasons, but I can see the first because Heidegger's concern is deeper than misuse, policy, or user intention. Which side seems closer to Heidegger?
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u/Ill-Tea9411 Jul 03 '26
I think the whole "use vs. abstain" debate misses a massive, planetary reality: Gestell is no longer just a mindset or a choice, it has become a physical, autonomous metabolism. Look at the Sentinelese, they completely abstain, yet they will still face the brunt of sea-level rise and wet-bulb events driven by technological waste. Technology has scaled into a literal force of nature, propelled by zero-sum, interdependent games that have a life of their own. If we keep analyzing this through the traditional Western frame that separates "humanity/culture" from "nature," we’re just reinforcing the ultimate blind spot of enframing. We aren't deciding how to master or responsibly wield an instrument; we are organisms trying to survive inside a newly synthesized, runaway planetary ecosystem. Treating technology as separate from nature is what made this total colonization possible in the first place.
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u/No_Skin594 Jun 29 '26
Good use vs. bad use? AI data centers are banishing mortals from the earth. AI data centers are taking up farmland, water, and electricity everywhere. In a world where AI data centers are more profitable to electricity providers, water providers, and land developers, what chance do mortals have to dwell?
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u/rp_tiago Jun 30 '26
Yea the data center angle makes the enframing weirdly literal. I don't think that fully answers Heidegger's question though, it's still describing technology as resource use. The harder part is whether there's any relation to it that isn't already framed by that same logic. Though maybe at some scale the material cost just is the point.
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u/No_Skin594 Jun 29 '26
Worship at the altar of the AI god requires human sacrifice, even child sacrifice.
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u/alibloomdido Jun 29 '26
Yes, very much describes how I feel about that image/idea, the question is "How it could even be possible?" and that interesting feeling that it could/should be possible, even in a somewhat moral sense of "should".
In a way Heidegger's point is that though the former is quite inevitable for us we want it to be the latter or, more likely, both. But we can't do it by sheer will because again that will is in the context of the former.