alone will allocate the reciprocality of the human and being and thus the constellation of the two. The leap is the sudden entrance into the realm from which being and the human have each time already reached one another in their essence.
A strange leap that presumably brings us the insight that we still do not sufficiently reside there where we authentically already are. Where are we? In which constellation of the human and being? Which belonging-together, which identity, and what kind, pervades the essence of being and the human? Out of what region does the claim of this identity, thought as belonging-together, speak?
Today it at least appears that one no longer requires laborious references, as was the case for years, to catch sight of the constellation in which the human and being belong together. One would like to imagine that it is enough to say the name “atomic age” in order to find out which being [Sein] it is that presences for us today. But are we allowed, then, to posit the technological world as at one with being? Apparently not, not even if we representatively understand this world as the whole of unleashed atomic energy together with the calculative planning and automatization that permeate all areas of human dwelling. Why does the reference to the technological world still not bring the contemporary constellation of the human and being into view? Because it thinks too briefly. For the whole of the technological world just mentioned is conceived in advance as something made by humans. The technological, taken in its broadest sense and in its manifold appearances, counts as the plan that the human projects, a plan that finally urges the human into the decision of whether he is to become a servant of his plan or to remain its master.
With this representation of the whole of the technological world, one winds everything back upon the human and, at best, arrives at the demand for an ethics of the technological world. Caught up in this conception, one opines that technology would be merely the affair of humans, no claim of being would speak in it. Obsessed with this opinion, we still do not even attend just once to the togetherness of the human and being, much less do we attempt to listen for the belonging that first extends both of these, the human and being, to one another.