Again, this process is rooted for Heidegger in the first beginning, in ancient Greek thought, in the overpowering of phusis through techne. This process begins with the Greek experience of being as phusis, i.e., as an emerging of beings. But soon techne, the “know-how” to make things, determines the Greek approach to being so that being comes to be presented analogously to makeable beings. Consequently, being is determined as beingness (Seiendheit) and appears to be makeable and quantitatively calculable, like beings. And, as is the case with the abandonment of being and machination, at the end of metaphysics the gigantic tends to permeate the being of beings completely in the reign of technology. Representation (Vor-stellen) becomes “a grasping that reaches ahead, plans and arranges everything before everything is already conceived as particular and singular.” This representing finds “no limit in the given”; it is “bound to no given and to no giveable as limit” (C94f; B136). If we conceive what is given as the horizon of objectivity or of the phenomena that show themselves, we may say that in the gigantic this horizon becomes totally enveloped in the presenting productivity of a subjectivity. Beings lose their own being to the productivity of subjectivity which ¤nds no limits in what is given because what is given is given by itself in a motion of endless overpowerment.
In the thirties and forties, Heidegger develops his interpretations of the end of the first beginning, in terms of the completion of metaphysics in boundless subjectivity, primarily in his Nietzsche lecture courses. Later on, he develops his thought of machination in what he calls “Gestell.” The Nietzsche lecture courses, as well as all his writings on technology after the thirties, develop against the background of the be-inghistorical thought of Contributions and, more speci¤cally, of the “Echo” joining. Concerning Nietzsche, Heidegger re¶ects critically in several places on the position Nietzsche occupies in his be-ing-historical thinking. 5 In Heidegger’s view, Nietzsche occupies the positions of one who
5. Martin Heidegger, Was heisst Denken? (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1984), p. 21; “The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics,” in Nietzsche, Vol. III, pp. 156– 157. German edition: Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis (GA 47, p. 272).