Will the rapid spreading of technological things not finally bring about an essential poverty, from which a turning around of the human to the truth of its essence becomes possible, even if by a detour of errancy?
6) Or are we to accept that a new dimension of the essence of the human is to be discovered on the basis of the human’s experience of mastery over nature? The scientific interpretation of the world and of natural phenomena brings about a situation where everyday the human loses more and more of an already immemorial naturalness. But what harm does that do when it makes us attentive to what is indicated by these now and henceforth mastered world phenomena— when, as a result, other more original ways of expressing the secret are unfolded, something which the appearances attest to in their own way nonetheless? What significance are we to confer upon the new, unpoetic vision of the world in which we live?
7) In fact, everything advanced above rests on suppositions. We are not yet any further than when we first inquired into the meaning of this technological world, whose power grows daily. May we hope that this meaning will grow in clarity in harmony with the essence of the human, or must it remain of its own accord closed to us? How is that statement, according to which “the meaning of the technological world conceals itself,”82 to be understood?
After the reading of these questions, Heidegger recalled that they were presented to him in writing three years ago and until now have remained unanswered.
The time passed since then sufficiently indicates the difficulty that they raise. It is not easy to answer these questions. Perhaps it amounted above all to preparing the right position of inquiry presupposed by these questions; otherwise said: to unfolding the question concerning technology.
Now it so happens that by a fortunate coincidence the work undertaken in the last two sessions at Le Thor was immersed in the theme of the text, “Kant’s Thesis About Being,”83 in which the interpretation of being that lays in an unrecognized manner at the bottom of all modern science and its technological character is investigated.
From the outset, then, we have a unified question where the modern interpretation of being as position converges with the totality of selfevident presuppositions and this convergence nourishes, as it were, modern technological thinking.
There is a text by Kant in which this unity expressly appears: the preface to the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science,84 where the title already indicates the unity of the two regions.
This preface, Heidegger remarks in passing, would be an exceptional text for a seminar: the problem of movedness [Bewegtheit] is taken up