ALBERT BORGMANN

of technology he dropped terms such as circulation and rotation, which had been parts of the framework in the Bremen lecture, and machination and machinery, which were remnants of the older terminology in Contributions (GA 79: 29, 34, 35, 38). Distrusting his description of “The Thing,” he turned instead to art as a possible turning point, although he had, in the postscript to “The Origin of the Work of Art,” agreed with Hegel that the vigor of art had passed and was lost (GA 5: 67–70).

In the prefatory remark to the 1962 edition. Heidegger claimed that the Bremen lecture "The Danger" "remains unpublished" (Heidegger 1962: 3). But the crucial part was in fact incorporated in "The Question." What Heidegger tellingly omitted was the danger that lay in the "refusal of world" that comes to pass "as the neglect of the thing"(GA 79: 51). It Is not only the unwelcome mention of the thing that made Heidegger think better of including this part. The German for "neglect," die Venwahrlosung, derives from a verb that means "to run down," "to mistreat," "to make shabby" This was the kind of anger and distress that Heidegger wanted to avoid (although here. as in Being and Time, Heidegger, having introduced a damning vocable, immediately denies that it carries a "value judgement")(GA 79: 47).

The same concern to move away from involvement in the issues of the day and the promptings of the heart governed the transition from “The Framework” to “The Question.” Compare these two passages, both at the conclusion of a paragraph, the first from The Bremen Lectures, the second from “The Question.” “Agriculture is now mechanized food industry, essentially the same thing as the production of corpses in gas chambers and annihilation camps, the same thing as the blockade and intentional starvation of countries, the same thing as the production of hydrogen bombs” (GA 79: 27). “Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry. Air is positioned to yield nitrogen, the ground to yield ore, the ore to yield, for example, uranium, this to yield nuclear energy that can be released for destruction or peaceful use” (GA 7: 18–19).

One has to respect Heidegger’s decision to make his case for the essence of technology in the kind of judicious and even-minded manner that was least likely to be rejected because of incidental and subsidiary issues. But even in its more orderly version, the analysis of technology digresses and wanders. By the standards of reasoning that proceeds from premises and evidence via rigorous inferences to clear conclusions, “The Question” does not score very well (Feenberg forthcoming). To be told that his essay wanders might not have troubled Heidegger. He begins, after all, by characterizing the piece as a path rather than an argument.

The objection that "The Question" concludes with an unsatisfactory answer and that the thing in his eminent sense rather than art should be the reply to the danger of technology might have mattered more to Heidegger. In fact, eight years after the first publication of “The Question,” he added the concluding Bremen lecture, "The Turn," to the reprinting of "The Question." The last Bremen lecture asserts a close connection between the framework of technology and the fourfold of the thing (and Heidegger inserted a direct reference to "The Thing" in "The Turn"; Heidegger 1962: 42).

But that connection raises a problem that goes deeper than the economy of presentation and pedagogy. In The Bremen Lectures, “The Thing” comes first, and “The Framework” follows as the subversion of the thing and its world. The proposition that the thing in turn follows the framework as the response to the danger of technology is asserted but not credibly disclosed (Feenberg forthcoming). Whether the case can be

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