What Kind of Existence Do Our Machines Have?

In his famous 1954 text The Question Concerning Technology Martin Heidegger famously insisted that “the essence of technology is nothing technological,” meaning that modern technology is not just about tools or machines, but about a mode of revealing, a way in which reality is made to appear.

French philosopher Gilbert Simondon went in the opposite direction: machines are technical; that is their essence. They evolve, change, and individuate.

In the late 1950s, Simondon wrote a long, difficult thesis with an almost dry title: On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Beneath that academic surface hides a radical proposal. Instead of treating machines as neutral tools that wait passively for human intentions, Simondon suggests we look at them as beings in their own right. Not “beings” in some mystical sense, but entities with their own trajectories, their own internal logic, their own way of changing.

Simondon’s key gesture is simple. Instead of asking “what is a machine?”, he asks: how does it come into being? What problems bring it into existence? What tensions shape it? A technical object isn’t defined by what it does at this moment but by the path, the genesis, that made it what it is.

From “What is it for?” to “How does it hold together?”

Our usual way of thinking about technology is functional. We classify objects by what they do: engines, tools, devices, instruments. A coffee machine makes coffee. A car drives. A phone calls. Function gives us a quick way to navigate the world of objects. It tells us what they are for.

For Simondon, this is exactly the problem. Function tells us what something does for us, not what it is in itself. Many different mechanisms can “do the same job” while belonging to entirely different technical lineages. A wind-up spring and an internal combustion engine can both make things move, but their materials, structures, and internal dynamics have almost nothing in common.

Simondon proposes another way of understanding, a so-called genetic method. Every technical being, he says, passes through a process of concretization. Early machines are abstract. Their parts coexist but do not truly belong to one another. They require external support - skilled operators, constant adjustments, carefully controlled environments.

As they evolve, their components begin to resonate together. Control systems move inside the object. Feedback loops are internalized. Regulation, timing, and coordination are no longer imposed from outside but are built into the structure of the machine itself. It becomes more self-sustaining, more internally coherent, more concrete.

A contemporary engine is not just a 1910 engine plus improvements. It is a different individual, held together by a denser web of interdependencies. Change one part and the whole responds. The individuality of the technical object lies in this web of internal compatibility, not in the label we slap on it.

Take the smartphone. We still call it a “phone”, but almost nothing about its inner life is organized around the act of making a call. That function is a historical remnant, an echo of its ancestry.

Inside, what we find is not a single purpose but a choreography of constraints. A larger camera sensor affects battery consumption. A bigger battery changes the chassis design. A thinner chassis forces new thermal strategies. A brighter, higher resolution screen demands a different graphics pipeline. The processor generates more heat; the operating system must manage performance and power under those conditions. You cannot change one element without reconfiguring the rest. The device holds together as a system or not at all.

From the standpoint of function, the smartphone and a landline phone belong to the same category. From the standpoint of Simondon’s genetic approach, they are different beings entirely. They arise out of different technical problems, different materials, different networks of interdependence. They inhabit different technical worlds.

If you tried to “strip away everything except the ability to make calls”, the object you would be left with would no longer be a smartphone. Its identity is not guaranteed by what it does for us. It is guaranteed by the internal coherence that allows it to exist at all.

Paul Klee - “Highways and Byways” (1929)

Machines and Their Milieus

Simondon introduces another essential concept: the associated milieu. A technical object never exists alone. It co-produces an environment that sustains it, and that it, in turn, modifies.

Think of a turbine. It is not simply a piece of metal turning in a neutral space. It works only within a tightly specified configuration of water flows, pressures, temperatures, and energy transfers. These are not just external conditions; they are part of what it means for this turbine to exist. The turbine and its milieu form a loop, a recurrent causality. The machine shapes its environment, and the environment shapes the functioning of the machine.

Some technical beings can only exist in this all-or-nothing way. They cannot be slowly assembled and tested piece by piece. Their conditions of operation arise only when the entire system - object plus milieu - is in place. A nuclear reactor, a supersonic jet engine, a large-scale data center: these cannot be fully understood as isolated devices. They are technical individuals inseparable from their associated milieus.

For Simondon, invention is not simply tinkering with tools. It is not the linear improvement of a pre-existing device. Invention occurs when someone manages to anticipate a future coherence that does not yet exist - a complete individual together with its environment. The inventor projects a possible system and then gradually materializes the elements that will allow it to hold together.

Technical Mentality and the Human Task

Underlying all this is what Simondon calls a technical mentality - a way of understanding that is attentive to regimes of operation, thresholds, and levels of organization. To think technically is not to worship machines. It is to learn how to distinguish parts from wholes, how to see where an object is fragile, where it can be repaired, where it might be reintegrated into a larger milieu.

This has consequences beyond technology itself. It becomes a way of approaching institutions, habits, even ourselves: not as indivisible blocks to be either preserved or destroyed, but as systems that can be analyzed, adjusted, concretized, reinserted.

To ask “what kind of existence do our machines have?” is therefore to ask, indirectly, what kind of existence we want to have with them. If technical objects are not just tools but individuating beings with their own histories, milieus, and aesthetic possibilities, then the world we inhabit is not a flat landscape dominated by “Technology” with a capital T. It is a layered, dramatic space where different forms of becoming intersect.

Simondon invites us to look at our devices, our infrastructures, our landscapes, and our practices not as finished products but as ongoing processes of individuation. He asks us to see machines as part of the same drama of becoming that shapes living beings, thoughts, and works of art.

In that sense, a philosophy of technical objects becomes something more than a niche corner of philosophy of technology. It becomes a way of rethinking our place in a world where existence itself is always a matter of how things hold together.