of being and praxis, of substance and action. The virtuous (or the virtual) is
not opposed to the real: on the contrary, it exists and is in use in the mode of
habituality; however, it is not immaterial, but, insofar as it never ceases to cancel
and deactivate being-at-work, it continually restores energeia to potential and
to materiality. Use, insofar as it neutralizes the opposition of potential and act,
being and acting, material and form, being-at-work and habit, wakefulness and
sleep, is always virtuous and does not need anything to be added to it in order
to render it operative. Virtue does not suddenly develop into habit: it is the
being always in use of habit; it is habit as form of life. Like purity, virtue is not a
characteristic that belongs to someone or something on its own. For this reason,
virtuous actions do not exist, just as a virtuous being does not exist: what is vir-
tuous is only use, beyond—which is to say, in the middle of—being and acting.
7
The Animate Instrument
and Technology
7.1. In Being and Time, familiarity and handiness define the place of the
originary and immediate relation of Dasein with the world. This re-
lation, however, is intrinsically determined by an irreducible instrumental char-
acter, which constitutes it as a relation of use: “when I open the door, I make
use [ mache ich Gebrauch] of the latch” (Heidegger 1, p. 67/96). What the human
being primarily encounters in the world is, as we have seen, “equipment” ( Zeug),
but in the proper sense equipment “is” not but exists solely in the form of an
“in-order-to” ( um-zu), is always inserted into a multiplicity of instrumental re-
lations ( Zeugganzes; ibid., p. 68/97). The first of these relations is utility ( Dienlichkeit, a term in which one must perceive proximity to service— Dienst—and servant— Diener). In this sense, familiarity with the world always necessarily has
to do with a “serviceability,” must “subordinate itself to the ‘serves-for’ [ um-zu]
which is always constitutive for the instrumentality of the equipment” (p. 69/98).
Years later, in the essay on The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger returns
to the theme of equipment. And he does so by means of the analysis of the
most common and ordinary equipment possible: a pair of peasant shoes ( ein
paar Bauernschuhe—evidently something of the kind still existed, even if he
must exemplify it with a Van Gogh painting). The equipment chosen belongs
to the class that Aristotle defined as ktema praktikon, “practical equipment,”
from which one obtains nothing other than its use. But even more than to the
handle, the hammer, and the other equipment mentioned in Being and Time,
to the peasant shoes there belongs the magical power, for the person—or to the
woman, since it is a question of a peasant woman—who uses them, of disclosing
her world, conferring meaning and security on it. Certainly, “the being equip-
ment of the equipment consists in its utility” ( Dienlichkeit, “serviceability”), but this is not exhausted in simple instrumentality:
The equipment vibrates with the silent call of the earth, its silent gift of the
ripening grain, its unexplained self-refusal in the wintry field. This equipment is
pervaded by uncomplaining worry as to the certainty of bread, wordless joy at
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having once more withstood want, trembling before the impending birth, and
shivering at the surrounding menace of death. (Heidegger 3, p. 23/14)
That is to say, the essence of equipment, its “fullness,” rests in something more
than instrumentality, which Heidegger calls “reliability” ( Verlässlichkeit).
Thanks to this, the peasant woman is admitted into the silent call of the earth;
in virtue of the reliability of the equipment she is certain of her world. World
and earth exist for her and those who share her mode of being only here—in
the equipment. We say “only” but this is a mistake; for it is the reliability of the
equipment which first gives the simple world its security and assures the earth
the freedom of its steady pressure. The equipmental being of the equipment, its
reliability, keeps all things gathered within itself. . . . (Ibid., p. 23/14–15)
Here Heidegger refers to the conceptuality that he had developed in the 1929–30
winter semester course on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, in which the
stone, the animal, and the human being were defined according to their having or
not having a world. It is in virtue of equipment that the peasant woman, in contrast
with the plant and the animal who remain imprisoned in their environment, has
a world, “stays in the openness of being” (p. 34/23). Equipment, in its reliability,
gives to the world its necessity and its proximity and to things their time and their
proper measure. And yet it still remains in some way imprisoned in the sphere of
utility. This essential limit of equipment appears clearly if one compares it to the
work of art. While the work of art exposes beings in their truth (for example, the
Van Gogh painting, which shows what the peasant shoes really are), the being
equipment of the equipment always already dissipates into its “serviceability.”
The individual piece of equipment becomes worn out and used up. But also,
use itself falls into disuse, becomes ground down and merely habitual. In this
way equipmental being withers away, sinks to the level of mere equipment. Such
dwindling of equipmental being is the disappearance of its reliability. . . . Now
nothing but sheer serviceability remains visible. (p. 24/15)
Equipment, which opens to the human being its world, nevertheless always risks
falling back into instrumentality and service. And yet this decadence of equip-
ment, “to which the objects of use owe their boringly oppressive usualness,” is
still “a testament to their originary essence” (ibid.).
7.2. The human beings whom Heidegger describes are at the mercy of equip-
ment, they rely on its “serviceability,” and only by means of it do they enter
into their world. In this sense, the relation with equipment defines the human
dimension. And yet one could say that Heidegger seeks in every way to liberate
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the human being from the narrow limits of this sphere, which coincides with
that of use. And he does it in Being and Time by substituting care for use and in
the essay on The Origin of the Work of Art, first by means of reliability and then by subordinating equipment to the work of art, which puts to work that truth of
being, which equipment always ends up losing in serviceability.
It should not be surprising, then, that instrumentality appears once again
in the 1950 essay on The Question Concerning Technology, that is, precisely in the context of the central problem of the late Heidegger’s thought. Against Spengler,
who in his 1931 book on Man and Technology had affirmed that technology can-
not be understood starting from the instrument, the essay opens by affirming an
essential connection between technology and instrumentality. Technology is in
fact nothing other than a human action directed at a goal.
For to posit ends [ Zwecke] and procure and utilize the
means [ Mittel ] to them is a human activity. The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and
machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends
that they serve, all belong to what technology is. The whole complex of these
apparatuses [ Einrichtungen] is technology. Technology is itself an apparatus—in
Latin, an instrumentum. . . . This instrumental definition of technology is indeed so uncannily correct that it even holds for modern technology, of which, in other
respects, we maintain with some justification that it is, in contrast to the older
handicraft technology, something completely different and therefore new. Even
the power plant with its turbines and generators is a man-made means to an end
established by man. Even the jet aircraft and the high-frequency apparatus are
means to ends. (Heidegger 4, p. 10/312)
In the rest of the essay, however, this instrumental determination of technology is
left aside as insufficient. Instrumentality is in fact only a form of causality, and only
a correct understanding of this latter can allow access to the true nature of tech-
nology. But to cause means to carry something from non-being to being, which
is to say, it is a form of what the Greeks called poiesis. This is explained in turn as a pro-ducing, a leading-forth from latency to illatency, from untruth to truth, in
the Greek sense of a-letheia, “unveiledness, unconcealment.” Technology is there-
fore an eminent mode of this unveiledness and, as such, belongs to the historical
destiny of the West, from time immemorial held in the dialectic of latency and
illatency, truth and untruth. For this reason, as long as we limit ourselves to view-
ing technology from the perspective of instrumentality, we will not understand its
true nature and will remain held in the illusion of mastering it. Only if we instead
understand the instrument as a mode of causality will technology then be revealed
for what it is, which is to say, as a “destining of revealing” (ibid., p. 36/337).
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Only at this point, when instrumentality has once again set aside and tech-
nology has been restored to its epochal rank in the historical destiny of Being,
can Heidegger reconcile himself with it and perceive in it, according to one of
his preferred citations from Hölderlin, both danger and salvation:
If the essence of technology, the apparatus [ das Ge-stell], is the extreme danger, if there is truth in Hölderlin’s words, then the rule of technology cannot exhaust
itself solely in blocking all lighting-up of every revealing, all splendor of truth.
Rather, precisely the essence of technology must harbor in itself the growth of
the saving power. (p. 32/333–334)
7.3. Let us attempt to go against the Heideggerian current and interrogate
anew the idea of instrumentality as an essential characteristic of technology. As
he is tracing instrumentality back to causality (and thus to ontology), Heidegger
evokes Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes:
the causa materialis, the material, the matter out of which, for example, a silver chalice is made; the causa formalis, the form, the shape into which the material enters; the causa finalis, the end, for example, the sacrificial rite in relation to which the required chalice is determined as to its form and matter; the causa efficiens, which brings about the effect that is the finished, actual chalice, in this instance,
the silversmith. What technology is, when represented as a means, discloses itself
when we trace instrumentality back to fourfold causality. (pp. 11–12/313–314)
The project of bringing instrumentality into the sphere of Aristotle’s doctrine of
causality, however, is not easily realizable. In the Metaphysics, where the problem of the four causes is fully treated, Aristotle never mentions an instrument among
the examples of causes. In the Physics, where the term “instrument” ( organa) appears, it is referred not to the efficient cause (which Aristotle calls “principle of
movement,” archè tes kyneseos) but to the final cause; within this cause, instruments do not figure, as Heidegger seems to imply, as examples of causes but, obviously,
as examples of what is caused: health is the final cause of walking, as much as it is
of purification ( katharsis), of medicine ( pharmaka), and of instruments ( organa, here understood, like the rest of the other terms, only in the originary medical
sense of “surgical instruments”; 194b 36–195a 1). The classical world, which, as we
have seen in Aristotle’s conception of productive instruments like the spool and
the plectrum, certainly did think the connection between the instrument and its
product, seems to conceive this connection in such a narrow and immediate way
that the instrument could not appear as an autonomous form of causality.
Heidegger could have recalled that, as he certainly knew, an attempt to in-
sert the instrument within the category of causality had instead been achieved
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by medieval theologians. Beginning from the thirteenth century, alongside the
efficient cause, they define a fifth cause, which they call instrumentalis. With
a daring reversal, the instrument, which Aristotle could never have classified
among the causes, is now considered as a special type of efficient cause. What
defines the instrumental cause—for example, the axe in the hands of a carpenter
who is making a bed—is the particularity of its action. On the one hand, it acts
not in virtue of itself but in virtue of the principal agent (namely, the carpenter),
but on the other hand, it works according to its own nature, which is that of
cutting. That is to say, it serves the end of another, only to the degree that it real-
izes its own end. The concept of instrumental cause is thus born as a splitting of
the efficient cause, which is divided into instrumental cause and principal cause,
thus securing an autonomous status for instrumentality.
7.4. The place where Scholastic theology developed the theory of the instru-
mental cause is the doctrine of the sacraments. Thus, in the Summa Theologica, it
is treated in question 62 of the third part, the title of which reads: De principali
effectu sacramentorum, qui est gratia (“On the principal effect of the sacraments, which is grace”). The function of the sacrament is to confer grace, and this can
proceed only from God, who is its principal cause: what is proper to the sacra-
ment, however, is that it produces its effect by means of an element that acts as
instrumental cause (for example, water in baptism). More than the distinction
between agens (or causa) principalis and agens (or causa) instrumentalis, Aquinas’s specific achievement consists in the definition of the double action of the instrument: “An instrument,” he writes,
has a twofold action; one is instrumental, in respect of which it works not by its
own power but by the power of the principal agent: the other is its proper action,
which belongs to it in respect of its proper form: thus it belongs to an axe to
cut asunder by reason of its sharpness, but to make a couch, insofar as it is the
instrument of an art. But it does not accomplish the instrumental action save
by exercising its proper action: for it is by cutting that it makes a couch. In like
manner the corporeal sacraments by their operation, which they exercise on the
body that th
ey touch, accomplish through the Divine institution an instrumental
operation on the soul; for example, the water of baptism, in respect of its proper
power, cleanses the body, and thereby, inasmuch as it is the instrument of the
Divine power, cleanses the soul: since from soul and body one thing is made.
(Aquinas 2, III, q. 62, art. 1, sol. 2)
Let us reflect on the peculiar nature of this action, which, by acting accord-
ing to its own law or form, seems to realize the operation of another and has
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been for this reason defined as “contradictory” and “difficult to understand”
(Roguet, p. 330). In the first part of the Summa, Aquinas defines it, with a term
that has often been misunderstood, as “dispositive operation”: “The second-
ary instrumental cause,” he writes, “does not participate in the action of the
principal cause, except inasmuch as by something proper to itself [ per aliquid
sibi proprium] it acts dispositively [ dispositive operatur, acts as an apparatus (It., dispositivo)] to the effect of the principal agent” (Aquinas 2, I, q. 45, art. 4).
Dispositio is the Latin translation of the Greek term oikonomia, which indicates the way in which God, by means of his own trinitarian articulation, governs the
world for the salvation of humanity. From this perspective, which implies an im-
mediate theological meaning, a dispositive operation (or, we could say without
forcing, an apparatus [It., dispositivo]) is an operation that, according to its own internal law, realizes a level that seems to transcend it but is in reality immanent
to it, just as, in the economy of salvation, Christ works dispositive—that is, ac-
cording to an “economy”—the redemption of humanity. As Aquinas specifies
in no uncertain terms: “Christ’s passion, which belongs to him in respect of his
human nature, is the cause of justification, both meritoriously and efficiently,
not as the principal cause thereof, or by his own authority, but as an instrument”
(q. 64, art. 3). Insofar as he has been incarnated in a human body, Christ, who
acts in the sacraments as a principal cause, is an instrumental and not principal
cause of redemption. There exists a theological paradigm of instrumentality, and
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