PATHMARKS

Gestalt unfolds into the representation of its power. Thus you can write: "Technology is ... like the destroyer of every belief whatsoever, and thus the most decisive anti-Christian power that has yet appeared" (ibid.).

Already by its subtitle "Domination and Gestalt," your book The Worker maps out the fundamental traits of this emergent new metaphysics of the will to power as a whole, insofar as the will to power now presents itself everywhere entirely as work. Even as I first read this book, the questions that I must continue to pose today arose for me: In terms of what is the essence of work to be determined? Does it follow from the Gestalt of the worker? Through what is this Gestalt that of the worker, unless the essence of work pervades it? Does not this Gestalt thus acquire its presence with respect to a particular humankind from out of the essence of work? From where does the meaning of working and worker arise with the high status that you ascribe to Gestalt and to its domination? Does this meaning spring from the fact that work is here thought as a shaping that belongs to the will to power? Does this specification even stem from the essence of technology "as the mobilization of the world through the Gestalt [228] of the worker"? And does the essence of technology, thus determined, point into still more originary realms?

It would be all too easy to point out that in your analyses of the relationship between the totalitarian character of work and the Gestalt of the worker a circle encloses the reciprocal relationship between that which is determinative (work) and what is determined (the worker). Instead of regarding this as indicative of an illogical thinking, I take the circle to be a sign of the fact that here we must think the circularity of a whole, but in a thinking that can never have as its standard a "logic" measured in accordance with freedom from contradiction.

The questions posed above become worthy of a more incisive questioning if I formulate them as I recently sought to do for you in connection with my lecture in Munich ("The Question concerning Technology"). If technology is the mobilization of the world through the Gestalt of the worker, it occurs through the presence that shapes the will to power belonging to this particular kind of human being. In presence and in representation there is announced the fundamental trait of what was unveiled to Western thinking as being. From the early period of Greek civilization to the recent period of our century, "being" has meant: presencing. Every kind of presence and of presentation stems from the event [Ereignis] of presence. The "will to power" as the actuality of the actual is one way in which the "being" of beings appears. "Work," from which the Gestalt of the worker for its pan receives its meaning, is identical with "being." Here it remains to be

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