One could counter this by saying that technology, as the control of space and time, is surely never undertaken for its own sake, and is therefore by no means an end in itself. And if it is not the end itself, then it can and indeed must remain only a "means." Such considerations, which sound plausible to our common understanding, are nonetheless erroneous. For who says that Sl1111ething that is not a means necessarily has to be an end, and conversely. that whatever is not an end can only be held to have the character of a means? Who says that this end-means relationship is immediately adequate at all as the either/or into which the determination of modem technology has to be forced? The question as to whether modem technology is a means or an end is erroneous already as a question, because it utterly fails to grasp the essence of modem technology. And we fail to grasp this essence because we accept without question precisely that which underpins it, namely, the spatio-temporal order and the unity of space and time.
This same lack of questioning concerning space and time and their unity, which has now become a formula, is what offers itself to us as an immediate place of refuge with whose aid we might determine the unity of locality and journeying and thereby locality and journeying themselves in what is peculiar to them. It is because we have a high degree of machinelike security in our control over spatio-temporal relations that the widespread appearance has arisen that we are also certain of the essence of space and time. Because for physicists and technologists the four-dimensional manifold x. y, z, t remains what is unquestioned in physics and technology, and indeed must remain so, it looks as though the unity of space and time is something that not only requires no interrogation but indeed no longer admits of any questioning. Yet this security of what is unquestioned here is merely an illusion. A few steps are sufficient to destroy this illusion.
§8. The questionableness of the metaphysical representation of space and time
We ask: What is, and how is, the self-evident within which we move and Which we call space and time? Are space and time something "objective"—present at hand in the manner of "objects," like some gigantic containers In which all possible spatial and temporal positions are accommodated? In that case, where—and that at once means. in what space—is the container itself that we call "space"? And "when" (at what time) is the container itself that we call time'? Or is space itself to be found nowhere, and time itself not to be found at any time?
So long as we continue to think space and time as appearing within a space and a time, we are not yet thinking space itself or time itself. We