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The Question Concerning Technology

in a very godly way about the divine essence. Never can man put himself in the place of God, because the essence of man never reaches the essential realm belonging to God. On the contrary, compared with this impossibility something far more uncanny can happen, something whose essence we have scarcely begun to consider. Thought metaphysically, the place that is peculiar to God is the place of the causative bringing about and preserving of whatever is, as something created. That place of God can remain empty. Instead of it, another, i.e., a place corresponding metaphysically, can loom on the horizon—a place that is identical neither with the essential realm belonging to God nor with that of man, but with which man comes once more into a distinctive relationship. Overman never enters at all into the place of God; rather the place into which his willing enters is another realm belonging to another grounding of what is, in its other Being. This other Being of what is, meanwhile—and this marks the beginning of modern metaphysics—has become subjectness.

All that is, is now either what is real [das Wirkliche] as the object or what works the real [das Wirkende] , as the objectifying within which the objectivity of the object takes shape. Objectifying, in representing, in setting before, delivers up the object to the ego cogito. In that delivering up, the ego proves to be that which underlies its own activity (the delivering up that sets before), i.e., proves to be the subiectum. The subject is subject for itself. The essence of consciousness is self-consciousness. Everything that is, is therefore either the object of the subject or the subject of the subject. Everywhere the Being of whatever is lies in setting-itself-before-itself and thus in setting-its elf-up. Man, within the subjectness belonging to whatever is, rises up into the subjectivity of his essence. Man enters into insurrection. The world changes into object. In this revolutionary objectifying of everything that is, the earth, that which first of all must be put at the disposal of representing and setting forth, moves into the midst of human positing and analyzing. The earth itself can show itself only as the object of assault, an assault that, in human willing, establishes itself as unconditional objectification. Nature appears everywhere—because willed from out of the essence of Being—as the object of technology.

From the same period, 1 881-82, in which the passage "The


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