can be owned, stockpiled, marketed, sold, and consumed. And in a perverse phenomenological correlation, human beings are valued only for their ability to extract, work, shop, and consume. Exploitability for production and consumption has become the “truth” (the ἀλήϑεια-2) of things, the dominant way they are now disclosed and will continue to be disclosed for the foreseeable future. And as exploitability for production and consumption becomes the ἀλήϑεια-2 of things, ἀλήϑεια-1 as the origin of such “truth” has fallen into complete oblivion. Both ontology as a vision of reality and philosophical anthropology as an understanding of man are now in the thrall of an ideology that views everything as raw material for rationalization by techno-think and cybernization by techno-do.
Ex-sistence today has lost its grounding in the groundless clearing and runs amuck by first quantifying everything and then reducing it to the correlation of instrumental rationality and commodification. The clearing, that ur-phenomenon, does not show up on the radar screen of modern technology and finance, and given the global spread of Western culture, hardly at all (if at all) in the consciousness of most denizens of the globe. Over the past five centuries, the ethos of exploitation has colonized the world, and today it is not only Europe and North America but the whole planet that is in crisis. In Heidegger’s catastrophic view of modernity, “the entire globe is shifting out of joint.”35
Heidegger’s nightmare vision of a world dominated by the techno-mentality of exploit-produce-consume may well resonate with some of his readers—although not necessarily for the reasons he gives. The conviction that drives Heidegger’s own analysis is that all of this is the result of metaphysics. That is, while all epochés in his history of metaphysics are characterized by the overlooking of the appropriated clearing, what makes the current epoché of technik different from all the others, and dangerous in the extreme, is the fact that the overlooking has reached such a pitch that today we overlook the fact that the clearing has been overlooked at all. The epoché of technik not only omits the clearing but “omits even the omission of its own act”36 and is characterized by “the forgetting of the forgottenness.”37 Together with the increasing oblivion of the thrown-open clearing, the powers of productive subjectivity have grown to such a degree that everything is taken to be within our current or eventual control. With that, the true essence of human being—mortal ex-sistence as the site of finite yet endless intelligibility—has devolved into nil-status. Hence the age of nihilism: the no-thing that is the clearing has become . . . simply nothing.38
35. GA 9: 242.4 = 185.23: “der Erdkreis geht aus den Fugen.”
36. GA 6, 2: 325.22–23 = 219.30–31: “auch dieses Auslassen . . . ausläßt.”
37. GA 79: 75.19–20 = 71.11–12: “so wie das Vergessen von etwas sich selber vergißt.” My emphasis.
38. See GA 9: 106.11–12 = 84.22: “die Wissenschaft will vom Nichts nichts wissen.”