74 | Heidegger’s Poietic Writings
It is because beyng remains outside the domain of power that it remains sheltered from machination. Yet on the other hand, machination, that is, the abandonment of beings by being, has its roots in the truth of beyng (roots from which, at the completion of metaphysics, it begins to uproot itself in the self-encircling will to will). Again and again, Heidegger rethinks this event of the first beginning, the beginning of the abandonment of beings by beyng, in which being arises in its determination as presence. In the accounts he gives, at the beginning, being occurs as presencing of beings (φύσις) so powerfully that the truth of being (the unconcealing-concealing of beyng) remains unthought and ungrounded. What is interesting, here, is that Heidegger attributes to inceptive φύσις power in a “positive” sense.
In Contributions, Heidegger thinks the first beginning in which the truth of beyng remains ungrounded, in terms of the “Entmachtung der φύσις,” that is, the disempowerment of φύσις, and in connection with the collapse (Einsturz) of ἀλήθεια. Φύσις loses its power with respect to τέχνη in that through τέχνη humans gain a stance (indeed, find themselves compelled to take a stance) in the midst of the overwhelming power of being (φύσις). Heidegger already worked these relations out in the lecture course Introduction to Metaphysics (SS 1935).19 In Basic Questions of Philosophy20 (a lecture course he held at the same time he was writing Contributions in WS 1937/1938), he describes the relation of τέχνη to φύσις roughly in the following way. Originally, τέχνη is a know- how, a form of knowledge through which beings are grasped as they emerge, that is, as they appear and are seen (eidos) in unconcealment. Τέχνη is literally a productive knowledge, a knowledge that brings forth and holds pres ent what presences. “Τέχνη is a mode of proceeding against φύσις, though not yet in order to overpower it or to exploit it ... but on the contrary, to retain the holding sway of φύσις in unconcealedness” (GA 45: 179–180; BQP: 155). Yet, as a consequence, thinking unfolds as a stance toward beings, in a “constant assimilation to them” (GA 45: 181; BQP: 156). Thus truth begins to have the character of correspondence between things and intellect and the original essence of truth as unconcealment (ἀλήθεια) remains unthought. At the same time, φύσις is disempowered (entmachtet). Yet in Heidegger’s reading, with the earliest Greek thinkers, τέχνη does not overpower φύσις; this happens only later when the stance of thinking against beings develops in such a way that the eidos or ἰδέα is taken as the essence of being itself. The presencing (φύσις in its arising) recedes for the sake of what is constantly pres ent (beings in their eidos).
The phrase Heidegger uses to describe the beginning demise of Western history: “disempowerment of φύσις” betrays an affirmation of the notion of power as something “positive.” If we look at his notebooks from 1932, we can see that he speaks of a necessity of empowering being (Seinsermächtigung) (GA 94; Ü II, 46, 48, 54, 57, 74–75, 83, 238, 243) and in Contributions to Philosophy, he also speaks of
19 In this lecture course, see Heidegger’s interpretation of the chorus of Antigone in Sophocles’s Antigone, where Heidegger thinks through the emerging of the diferentiation of being and thinking (GA 40, sections 52–56).
20 GA 45, section 38. English translation, Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of “Logic,” trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) (hereafter cited as BQP).