Walter A. Brogan
In a rather remarkable passage in Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie, Heidegger asks:
What happens to nature in technicity, when nature is separated out from beings by the natural sciences? The growing—or better, the simple rolling unto its end—destruction of “nature.” What was it once? The site for the moment of the arrival and the dwelling of gods, when the site—still physis—rested in the essence of be-ing. Since then, physis quickly became a “being” and then even the counterpart to “grace”—and, after this demoting, was ultimately reduced to the full force of calculating machination and economy. . . . Why does earth keep silent in this destruction? Because earth is not allowed the strife with a world, because earth is not allowed the truth of be-ing. Why not? Because, the more gigantic that giant-thing called man becomes, the smaller he also becomes? Must nature be surrendered and abandoned to machination? Are we still capable of seeking earth anew? Who enkindles that strife in which the earth finds its open, in which the earth encloses itself and is earth?1
In this paper, I will claim that at the time of the writing of this manuscript, which is so preoccupied with the problem of Machenschaft, in the late 1930s, and even later in the 1950s, when Heidegger wrote his essay on “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger’s thought is centered around the recovery of the question of the intractable interrelationship of physis and techne. For Heidegger, it is never a question of thinking physis apart from techne. Not even in his analysis of our time, which Heidegger calls the age of Machenschaft, does Heidegger claim that something like techne, transformed into technicity, truly operates outside of its relationship to physis. Machenschaft relies upon what Heidegger calls the disempowerment