Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology"

Martin Heidegger first delivered "Die Frage nach der Technik" as a lecture on November 18, 1953, at the Technische Hochschule München, as part of a lecture series titled "Die Künste im technischen Zeitalter" organized by the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts; it was published the following year in the essay collection Vorträge und Aufsätze (1954), and reached English readers through William Lovitt's translation in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (1977). Heidegger opens by distinguishing the "correct" instrumental and anthropological definition of technology — that it is a means to an end and a human activity — from what he calls the "true" essence of technology, arguing that the correct definition, while not false, fails to disclose what technology fundamentally is. This distinction between correctness and truth sets up the essay's central, and famously counterintuitive, claim: "the essence of technology is by no means anything technological."