IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Summer 2013 - 16

Heidegger offering just such a
justification. He does this as an
aside in one of his most lucid and
brilliant lecture courses on Aristotle in the Summer Semester of 1931:
Now the Greeks, Plato and
Aristotle, not only carried out
the interpretation of this phenomenon of production, but
the fundamental concepts of
philosophy grew out of and in
this interpretation. (Why that
is so and what this all means
and why ancient philosophy
was nevertheless not the philosophy of the cobblers and
potters cannot be discussed
here.) (Aristoteles Met. Theta
1-3 Sommer semester 1931
GA33:137)2
A further possible justification for
the narrowing of meaning can be
found also in an earlier text from
1922, published in the DiltheyJahrbuch [Volume 6 1989] under
the title Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle (Indication
of the Hermeneutic Situation).
There we read a central thesis
that Heidegger never subsequently
retracts, namely, that, for the
Greeks, or more specifically, for
Plato and Aristotle, the meaning
of being is Hergestelltsein: "For,
the meaning of being is originally
having been made." (MS:50).3 But
are these assertions by Heidegger
really justifications for excluding
consideration of phenomena of
technique that do not fit the mould
of know-hows of making? Doesn't
the narrowing of meaning point
rather to something unthought in
the metaphysical tradition?
It is apparent that Heidegger has
his gaze fixed on fu /sij as what
he regards as the earliest Greek
2
Throughout, references to the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe will be given in the form GA33:137 [5].
All English translations of Heidegger quotations
are my own.
3
Cf. [4], especially Section 3 "Being as Hergestelltsein," at http://www.arte-fact.org/untpltcl/
rstrpltc.html#3.

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experience of being that was in the
sights of the first Greek thinkers,
those preceding Plato and Aristotle
who represent already the late culmination of Greek philosophizing.
There is undeniably a movement
and an undertow in Heidegger's
entire thinking "back to nature,"
back to the simplicity of living in
harmony with the earth and its
bearing of the emergence into the
clearing of beings bringing themselves to presence. Especially the
later Heidegger's terminology, such
as Lichtung, Aufgehen, Geviert,
(clearing, emergence, fourfold)
and his entire later thinking is
redolent of this closeness to nature.
The focus on fu /sij as the original Greek experience of being in
its simplicity, Heidegger claims,
could not be held onto in the "overfullness of the first, incipient
beginning" (GA69:62) [6].
Heidegger poses the question
concerning Technik only against the
foil of the early Greek experience
and thinking of being as fu /sij, and
his questioning of the modern world
in its oblivion to being and what he
sees as "devastation" is summed
up in what he calls technology that
has gone mad and is racing out of
control. Heidegger's conception of
power, therefore, is also derived
from this unwavering fixation on
fu /sij and its degeneration from
the first beginning into modern
technology. In the 1938/40 manuscript entitled The History of Beyng
he asks "Whence being as power?"
(GA69:62) and replies by way of
assertion, "Being as power is the
degenerate essence of the essencing
of being as fu /sij [left] ungrounded
in the first beginning" (GA69:62).
Heidegger's thesis is that the
very first beginning with the thinking of fu /sij itself contained an
ambiguity, a negation, so that the
essence of fu /sij, because it was
left ungrounded, could degenerate
into a prevailing of power. In tracing back the philosophical tradition
to this first Greek beginning, Heidegger sees the task for thinking

in grounding an Other Beginning
as a grounding of what remained
ungrounded in the first beginning. According to Heidegger, the
first beginning starts to go off the
track and into degeneration very
early on, in fact, as soon as fu /sij
itself comes to be experienced and
thought as a kind of making, culminating in what Heidegger sees
in today's world as the machinations of power in every conceivable
domain of human being:
The word "machination"
here has an essential historical semantic relation
to fu /sij insofar as it was
soon taken to be a mode of
poi /hsij (making) in the
broadest sense. (GA69:46f)
This says that the understanding
of fu /sij as self-poiesis, its conceptualization as such by Aristotle,
was already a first, fatal step in the
degeneration of the experience of
nature with the ultimate historical
consequence at the consummation
of metaphysics, in an end-game
of the world, that nature itself is
exposed ruthlessly to the making
and machinations of technological
power. Thinking fu /sij as selfpoiesis, according to Heidegger,
already infects it with making,
with effective causes, with endless
chains of mere cause and effect,
with manipulation and the whole
string of metaphysical consequences that Heidegger sets out in
his history of being, which we will
now briefly take up.
The Dire Consequences of
Sein Thought as Wirklichkeit
The stages in the thinking of
the history of being which
attempts to think power in
its essence and in whose own
history the essence of power
is questioned and solely
remains questionable can be
indicated by the following
sequence:

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SuMMEr 2013
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