institutional theory from a first philosophy, or as philosophers in early modernity divided general metaphysics into branches of special metaphysics .
For Heidegger, everyday praxis serves to retrieve the more ancient question, Ti to on; What is being? Consequently, the very thrust of his new beginning was mistaken when , shortly after the publication of Being and Time, he was asked: "When will you write an ethics?"11 It was mis taken because the suggestion implied that the phenomenological traits of praxis could somehow be converted into norms, or descriptive categories into prescriptive ones .
However, there is another priority of praxis in Heidegger, which appears as early as in Being and Time and which remains operative throughout all of his work: to retrieve the being question from the point of view of time, a certain way of life is required. To understand authentic temporality, it is necessary to 'exist authentically'; to think being as letting phenomena be, one must oneself 'let all things be'; to follow the play without why of presencing, it is necessary to 'live without why'. Here the priority of praxis is no longer heuristic. It is a practical a priori without which thinking—in the strong sense of complying with the fluctuating loci of presencing—lapses into impossibility. According to the mainstream of the metaphysical tradition, acting follows being; for Heidegger, on the other hand, a particular kind of acting appears as the condition for understanding being as time. Here praxis determines thinking. In writings subsequent to Being and Time, it is suggested that this praxis is necessarily of a political nature.
2. The political character of the economies of presence.
As mentioned before, being can .be understood as time only through its difference from history. The investigation into the concrete epochs and their regulation is what binds the later Heidegger's phenomenology to experience . Since this is, however, not an individual's experience, the issue of phenomenology proves to b e political in a broad sense. An economy of presence is the way in which, for a given age, the totality of what becomes phenomenal arranges itself in mutual relations . Any economy is therefore necessarily public.
But an economy of presence is political also in a stricter sense . This is most obvious in the retrospective reading of the epochs, beginning with technology as the last 'mark' of Western destiny. Enframing (Gestell), as Heidegger calls this mark or stamp, is the inescapable determination of our era. It will not do, then, to describe technology merely as the contemporary public form of presence. As a willful posture , it pushes toward domination. Retrospectively, the trend toward global mastery can be read as far back as the epochal reversal that instituted metaphysics with Plato and Aristotle. It gains momentum with the Cartesian cogito, understood as co-agitatio, 'forcing together'. It triumphs with the Nietzschean will to power as the essence of the 'atomic age'—philosophers are the ones who