San Francisco Philosophy Reading Group

For this session, we’ll be reading Martin Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology ” (1954) alongside the introduction and third chapter (“Technology and Dominance.") from Pope Leo XIV’s 2026 encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. Both texts refuse the comfortable assumption that technology is just a neutral tool waiting to be used well or badly, and consider what happens to us when an entire civilization adopts a technological frame.

Heidegger argues that technology is fundamentally a way of revealing the world: modern technology “enframes” everything, including people, as standing-reserve or raw material on call. The real danger lies not in any single invention or techne, but in coming to see ourselves this way and forgetting that there was ever another way to look.

Writing seven decades later under the pressure of AI, Leo XIV reaches a strikingly similar diagnosis. His encyclical argues that technology is never neutral, and that the “technocratic paradigm” threatens to reduce the person to mere data and performance. Unlike Heidegger, Pope Leo grounds his resistance to the paradigm in human dignity and the image of God. The choice for Leo is between building Babel or rebuilding the Holy City.

Reading them together sets up the session’s central question: if a secular phenomenologist and a pope share the diagnosis, do Heidegger’s “releasement” and Leo’s appeal to dignity and governance point toward the same cure, or pull in opposite directions?

Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash

The readings can be found here and here