WHY POETS?


It is not as a particular deadly machine that the much discussed atom bomb is deadly. What has long threatened man with death, indeed with the death of his essence, is the absoluteness of his sheer willing in the sense of his deliberate self-assertion in everything. What threatens man in his essence is the willful opinion that through the peaceful release, transformation, stockpiling, and delivery of natural energies, man could make man's being bearable for all and happy in general. However, the peace of this peacefulness is merely the undisturbed, lasting frenzied restlessness of self-assertion deliberately thrown back on itself. What threatens man in his essence is the opinion that this assertion of production would be risked without danger if only other interests in addition to it, perhaps those of a faith, remain valid - as though the present relationship of our essence to the entirety of beings (a relationship into which the technological mode of willing has shifted us) could still be housed in some separate annex, some residence on the side that would be able to offer more than temporary resorts to self-deception, such as the flight to the Greek gods. What threatens man in his essence is the opinion that technological production would bring the world into order, when it is exactly this ordering that flattens out each ordo, that is, each rank, into the uniformity of production and so destroys in advance the realm that is the potential source from which rank and appreciation originate out of being.

It is not only the fact that this willing has become total that is the danger; rather, the danger is willing itself in the form of self-assertion within a world that is allowed to be only will. The willing that is willed in terms of this will has already decided on absolute command. With this decision willing is already delivered into the service of total organization. Above all, however, technology itself precludes any experience of its essence. For while technology is being fully realized, it develops in science a knowledge of a kind that is prevented from ever gaining access to the essential realm of technology, let alone thinking back to its essential source.

The essence of technology is dawning only slowly. This day is the world's night made over as the purely technological day. This day is the shortest day. It raises the threat of a single endless winter. Man now forgoes not only defense, but the unbroken entirety of beings remains in darkness. What is whole [das Heile] withdraws. The world is being emptied of what is whole and heals [heil-los]. As a result, not only does the holy [das Heilige] remain hidden as the track to the godhead, but even what is whole, the track to the holy, appears to be extinguished. Unless there are still mortals capable of seeing what is unwhole and unhealing threaten as unwhole and unhealing.


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The Origin of the Work of Art (GA 5) by Martin Heidegger