To leave the region of consciousness and attain that of Da-sein: and thus to see that, understood as Da-sein (that is, from the ek-static), the human only exists in coming from itself to what is wholly other than itself, in coming to the clearing of being.
This clearing—Heidegger points to the difficulty here of saying this—this free dimension, is not the creation of man, it is not man. On the contrary, it is that which is assigned to him, since it is addressed to him: it is that which is destined to him.
On this point, Heidegger refers to the essay on “The Origin of the Work of Art” and to the discussions of the Fourfold, for instance in the lecture “The Thing,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze.114 It is essential to see that, in its new location, thinking abandons from the outset the primacy of consciousness, along with its consequence, the primacy of man. It was already said in “The Letter on Humanism,” in reference to a statement from Sartre (“Précisément nous sommes sur un plan où il y a seulement des hommes”115): “Instead of this, thought from Being and Time, we should say: précisément nous sommes sur un plan où il y a principalement l’Être.”116
This is to be shown in the next step of the work, and, indeed, from a position of extreme opposition. Heidegger opens the volume of Marx’s Early Writings and reads the following sentence, taken from the “Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”: “To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man the root is man himself.”117
Marxism as a whole rests upon this thesis, Heidegger explains. Indeed, Marxism thinks on the basis of production: social production of society (society produces itself) and the self-production of the human being as a social being. Thinking in this manner, Marxism is indeed the thought of today, where the self-production of man and society plainly prevails.
I would like to maintain, or rather presume, Heidegger says, that the self-production of man raises the danger of self-destruction.
What are we witnessing, in truth? What is it that reigns today, determining the reality of earth as a whole?
The imperative of progress. This imperative of progress demands an imperative of production that is combined with an imperative of ever-new needs. The imperative of ever-new needs is of such a sort that everything which is imperatively new is likewise immediately obsolete and outmoded, replaced by something “even newer,” and so forth. In this rush, every possibility of tradition is broken. What has been can no longer be present—except in the form of the outmoded, which as a result is entirely inconsequential.
If it is granted that it is man who brings about all of this, the question arises: Could man ever break the domination of these imperatives himself?
Marxism and sociology name the constraints of today’s reality “imperatives.”