Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (GA 65) | 29
That thinking is not yet granted a proper saying of the event has, for Heidegger, historical reasons. That it finds itself at the same time necessitated to attempt a saying of the event, also has historical reasons; historical reasons not in the sense of historical facts (Heidegger would say) but in terms of determinations directing how a world and worldly relations unfold. The whole discussion of grounding attunements in Heidegger remains somewhat undetermined, then, as long as one does not look deeper into the plight of our age.
Heidegger addresses the plight of our age especially in the juncture “resonating,” and he meditates on it in relation to the whole history of Western philosophy. The roots of machination are to be found, for Heidegger, already in Ancient Greece. They are marked by the moment in which the notion τέχνη overpowers φύσις, when being comes to be addressed in terms of makeability. Concurrently a sense of truth (ἀλήθεια) as unconcealing “collapses” and gives way to the notion of truth as correspondence— the correspondence between thing and intellect. Being is experienced and understood on the basis of pres ent beings (the being of this or that thing) and becomes merely something represented that the intellect either grasps truly or fails to grasp. Being (in the first beginning the presencing, the coming to presence of something) withdraws “ behind” present and presented beings that thus remain “abandoned” by being.26
The history of the first beginning is the history of the abandonment of beings by being, which corresponds to the history of machination in a larger sense. Heidegger addresses this especially in section 61, “Machination.” Here he tells us that machination names a mode in which being occurs essentially. The name machination (Machenschaft) refers to making (Machen), which in turn addresses the Greek notions of τέχνη and ποίησις. Φύσις (the way being was experienced by the Greeks) begins to be understood in relation to τέχνη as a “making itself by itself.” In the Middle Ages this understanding of being is reinforced insofar as being is understood as God’s creation and all beings are essentially understood as created beings. Only in modern times, however, does the dominance of machination properly come to the fore (machination in the more narrow sense), now on the basis of subjectivity and modern rationality. All disclosure of beings (the being of beings) now stands under the spell of makeability, of calculability (modern science and the mathematization of nature) and productivity of the rational mind.
Heidegger does not think that the dominion of machination is our human fault but rather that this is a necessary consequence of how being initially took place in Western history.27 In our times, we are drawn to think in terms of makeability and productivity. We find ourselves responding to the urge to produce more efficiently and rapidly. We are drawn to plan and calculate more and more
26. See Heidegger’s Basic Questions of Philosophy and, above all, the 1930 “On the Essence of Truth,” in which he traces how truth comes to be understood as correctness.
27. Heidegger tries to show this, for instance, in his lecture course of 1935, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, GA 40, ed. Petra Jaeger (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983). Heidegger thinks that φύσις was so overpowering that it forced humans to find a stance in it by holding on to what presented itself as pres ent (beings).