Heidegger contrasted traditional farming with modern technology as unforced versus forced extraction of nature

Evidence

But Heidegger considered this activity quite different. As he argued in a lecture-essay first drafted in the late 1940s, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, a farmer ‘places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase’. Or rather, this is what farmers did until modern agricultural machinery came panting and chuffing along, promising ever greater productivity. In modern challenging-forth of this kind, nature’s energy is not sown, tended and harvested; it is unlocked and transformed, then stored in some different form before being distributed. Heidegger uses military images: ‘Everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.’ — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 581

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘standing-reserve’ / challenging-forth dichotomy connects to the reader’s prior readings on how technology reshapes perceived reality (Communication as Culture and The Soundscape both address technology’s reorganization of experience). — connects to: Heidegger’s forest imagery and craft metaphors came from childhood experience — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 179; Heidegger equated philosophical thinking with the physical labours of farmers and herdsmen. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 313; Heidegger characterized technology’s danger as ontological rather than merely catastrophic — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 584 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern societies adopt a gardener’s stance of engineered order over nature #exemplifies (0.78) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 171