FOR OTHER NOTES ON TECHNICS, SEE HERE
the question concerning technology
the turning
the word of nietzsche: god is dead
the age of the world picture
ON ENFRAMING:
THE QUESTION CONCERNING TECHNOLOGY [PDF]
The essence of technology lies in Enframing. Its holding sway belongs within destining. Since destining at any given time starts man on a way of revealing, man, thus under way, is continually approaching the brink of the possibility of pursuing and pushing forward nothing but what is revealed in ordering, and deriving all his standards on this basis. Through this, the other possibility is blocked […] [26]
Q: what is the other possibility? how does it relate to the sunset, (esp. with respect to the discussion of time in Agamben)?
For Heidegger, the other possibility is within the danger (encoded?). Enframing functions like the Roman Empire (Black Iron Prison, PKD).
But Enframing does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is. As a destining, it banishes man into that kind of revealing which is an ordering. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every possibility of revealing. Above all, Enframing conceals that revealing which, in the sense of poiesis, lets what presences come forth into appearance. [27] [this is what we are looking for in the excursion].
*
THE TURNING
the lighting up
technohistory
The essence of Enframing is that setting-upon gathered into itself which entraps the truth of its own coming to presence with oblivion. [36]
Enframing comes to presence as the danger. […] the danger, namely, Being itself endangering itself in the truth of its coming into presence, remains veiled and disguised. This disguising is what is most dangerous in the danger.
If Enframing is a destining of the coming to presence of Being itself, then we may venture to suppose that Enframing, as one among Being’s modes of coming to presence, changes. [37]
That which has the character of destining moves, in itself, at any given time, toward a special moment that sends it into another destining […] [37]
We locate history in the realm of happening, instead of thinking history in accordance with its essential origin from out of destining.
The coming to presence of Enframing is the danger. As the danger, Being turns about into the oblivion of its coming to presence, and in that way, simultaneously turns counter to the truth of its coming to presence. In the danger there holds sway this turning about not yet thought on. In the coming to presence of the danger there conceals itself, therefore, the possibility of a turning in which the oblivion belonging to the coming to presence of Being will so trun itself that, with this turning, the truth of the coming to presence of Being will expressly turn in – turn homeward – into whatever is. [41]
NB: see section on the katechon here.
something concealed in the danger that will reveal itself through the turn has a very Pauline feel (as he is read by Agamben)
See on this point notes made on The Time that Remains. Interesting to think about Agamben’s refernence to Holderlin in that book (here). Holderlin speaks of the departure of the Gods at the very moment that his rhyme scheme breaks down (the poem belonging to messianic time) – comparion made with Mallarme, where the apotheosis is figured as a sunset.
But where the danger is, grows
The saving power also.
If now we think these words still more essentially than the poet sang them, if we follow them in thought as far as they go, they say: Where the danger is as danger, there the saving power is already thriving also. The latter does not appear incidentally. The saving power is not secondary to the danger. The selfsame danger is, when it is as the danger, the saving power. The danger is the saving power, insamuch as it brings the saving power out of its – the danger’s – concealed essence that is ever susceptible of turning.[…] [42]
But where is the danger? What is the place for it? Inasmuch as the danger is Being itself, it is both nowhere and everywhere. It has no place as something other than itself. It is itself the placeless dwelling place of all presencing. The danger is the epoch of Being coming to presence as Enframing.
When the danger is as the danger, with the turning about of oblivion, the safekeepingof Being comes to pass; world comes to pass. That world comes to pass as world, that the thing things, this is the distant advent of the coming to presence of Being itself. [43]
What is meant here by ‘world’? The text makes reference in a footnote to ‘The Thing’, in Poetry, Language, Thought.
See here for Blanchot on lighting up of the essential word in the work (reading of Mallarme)
THE LIGHTING UP
When, in the turning of the danger, the truth of Being flashes, the essence of Being clears and light itself up. The truth of the essence, the coming to presence, of Being turns and enters in. [44]
‘To flash [blitzen], in terms of its derivation and of what it designates, is ‘to glance’ [blicken]. In the flashing glance and as that glance, the essence, the coming to presence, of Being enters into its own emitting of light. Moving through the element of its own shining, the flashing glance retrieves that which it catches sight of and brings it back into the brightness of its own looking.[…]
The in-turning [Einkehr] that is the lightning-flash of the truth of Being is the entering, flashing glance – insight [Einblick]. We have thought the truth of Being in the worlding of world as the mirror play of the fourfold of sky and earth, mortals and divinities [another ref to Poetry, Language, Thought] […] [45]
In-flashing of world into Enframing is in-flashing of the truth of Being into truthless Being. In-flashing is the disclosing coming-to-pass within Being itself. Disclosing coming to pass is bringing to sight that brings into its own.
The in-flashing, lighting up, occuring within Enframing really needs to be read along with PKD, the pink light and the Black Iron Prison.
The ordering belonging to Enframing sets itself above the thing, leaves it, as thing, unsafeguarded and truthless. In this way, Enframing disguises the nearness of the world that nears in the thing […] [46]
And yet – in all the disguising beloning to Enframing, the bright open-space of world lights up, the truth of Being flashes. At the instant, that is when Enframing lights up, in its coming to presence, as the danger, i.e., as the saving power. [47]
Insight into that which is – thus do we name the sudden flash of the truth of Being into truthless Being.
TECHNOHISTORY
Only when insight brings itself desclosingly to pass, only when the coming to presence of technology lights up as Enframing, do we discern how, in the ordering of the standing-reserve, the truth of Being reminas denied as world.
so catching sight of Enframing creates the possibility of its being overcome.
Only then do we notice that all mere willing and doing in the mode of ordering steadfastly persists in injurous neglect.
All mere chasing after the future so as to work out a picture of it through calculation in order to extend what is present and half-thought into what, now veiled, is yet to come, itself still moves within the prevailing attitude belonging to technological, calculating representation. All attempts to reckon existing reality morphologically, psychologically, in terms of decline and loss, in terms of fate, catastrophe, and destruction, are merely technological behaviour. [48]
That behaviour operates through the device of the enumerating of symptoms whose standing-reserve can be increased to infinity and always varied anew.
Such analyses of the ‘situation’ do not notice that they are working only according to the meaning and manner of technological dissecting, and that they thus furnish to the technological consciousness the historiographical-technological presentation of happening commensurate with that consciousness.
All that is merely technological never arrives at the essence of technology.
Therefore, as we seek to give utterance to insight into that which is, we do not describe the situation of our time. It is the constellation of Being that is uttering itself to us. [48]
*
NIETZSCHE
NB. See also notes on Heidegger’s Niezsche here
THE WORD OF NIETZSCHE: ‘GOD IS DEAD’
nihilism
revaluation of values
incomplete / complete nihilism
on becoming / value positing (will to power)
overman
overman as consummation of metaphysics
sun / sea / horizon
metaphysics as nihilism
The exposition stems from a thinking that is for once just beginning to gain some clarity concerning Nietzsche’s fundamental position within the history of Western metaphysics. [53]
Nietzsche’s thinking sees itself as belonging under the heading ‘nihilism’. That is the name for the historical movement, recognised by Nietzsche, already ruling throughout the preceding centuries, and now determining this century. Nietzsche sums up his interpretaiton of it in the brief statement: ‘God is dead’. [57]
The word of Nietzsche speaks of the destining of two millennia of Western history.
‘The greatest recent event – that ‘God is dead’, that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable – is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe’. [60]
From this sentence it is clear that Nietzsche’s pronouncement concerning the death of God means the Christian god. But it is no less certain, and it is to be considered in advance, that the terms ‘God’ and ‘Christian god’ in Nietzsche’s thinking are used to designate the suprasensory realm of Ideas and ideals. [61]
This realm of the suprasensory has been considered since Plato, or more strictly speaking since the late Greek and Christian interpretation of Platonic philosophy, to be the true and genuinely real world. In contrast to it the sensory world is only the world down here, the changeable, and therefore the merely apparent, unreal world. The world down here is the vale of tears in contrast to the mountain of everlasting bliss in the beyond.
If, as still happens in Kant, we name the sensory world the physical in the broader sense, then the suprasensory world is the metaphysical world. [61]
The pronouncement ‘God is dead’ means: The suprasensory world is without effective power. It bestows no life. Metaphysics, i.e., for Nietzsche Western philosophy understood as Platonism, is at an end. Nietzsche understands his own philosophy as the countermovement to metaphysics, and that means for him a movement in opposition to Platonism. [61]
If God as suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is dead […] then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself.
NIHILISM: ‘Are we not straying through an infinite nothing?’
The pronouncement ‘God is dead’ contains the confirmation that this Nothing is speading out. ‘Nothing’ here means: absence of a suprasensory, obligatory world. Nihilism, ‘the most uncanny of all guests’ , is standing at the door. [61-2]
To attempt to elucidate Nitzsche’s word ‘God is dead’ has the same significance as does the task of setting forth what Nietzsche understands by ‘nihilism’ […]
Nihilism moves history after the manner of a fundamental ongoing event that is scarcely recognised in the destining of the Western peoples. [62]
Nihilism, thought in its essence, is, rather, the fundamental movement of the history of the West. It shows such great profundity that its unfolding can have nothing but world catastrophes as its consequences. Nihilism is the world-historical movement of the peoples of the earth who have been drawn into the power realm of the modern age [so all peoples then].
The speech of the madman says specifically that the word ‘God is dead’ has nothing in common with the opinions of those who are merely standing about and talking confusedly, who ‘do not believe in God’. […]
So long as we understand the word ‘God is dead’ only as a formula of unbelief, we are thinking it theologically […] and we are renouncing all claim to what matters to Nietzsche, i.e., to the reflection that ponders what has already happened regarding the truth of the suprasensory world and regarding its relation to man’s essence. [63]
Christendom for Nietzsche is the historical, world-political phenomenon of the Church and its claim to power within the shaping of Western humanity and its modern culture.
Christendom in this sense and the Christianity of the New Testament faith are not the same. Even a non-Christian life can affirm Christendom and use it as a means of power […]
In the word ‘God is dead’ the name ‘God’, thought essentially, stands for the suprasensory world of those ideals which contain the goal that exists beyond earthly life for that life and that, accordinly, determines life from above, and also in a certain way from without. [so transcendent] [64]
‘What does nihilism mean?’ ‘That the highest values are devaluing themselves’ [Will to Power, Aph. 2]
According to this note Nietzsche understands nihilism as an ongoing historical event.
The highest values are devaluing themselves through the emerging of the insight that the ideal world is not and is never to be realised within the real world.
The obligatory value of the highest values begins to totter. [66]
For Nietzsche nihilism is not in any way simply a phenomenon of decay; rather nihilism is, as the fundamental event of Western history, simultaneously and above all the intrinsic law of history. […] Nietzsche thinks nihilism as the ‘inner logic’ of Western history. [67]
Nietzsche understands by nihilism the devaluing of the highest values up to now. But at the same time he takes an affirmative stand toward nihilism in the sense of a ‘revaluing of all previous values’. Hence the name nihilism remains ambiguous, and seen in terms of its two extremes, always has first of all a double meaning, inasmuch as, on the one hand, it designates the mere devaluing of the highest values up to now, but on the other hand it also means at the same time the unconditional countermovement to devaluing. [67-8]
An ‘in-between situation’ comes to prevail in which it becomes evident that, on the one hand, the realisation of the highest values hitherto is not being accomplished. The world appears value-less. On the other hand, through this making conscious, the inquiring gaze is directed toward the source of the new positiing of values, but without the world’s regaining its values in the process.
Incomplete / complete nihilism
Incomplete nihilism places new values in the vacated place of the old.
Incomplete nihilism does indeed replace the former values with others, but it still posits the latter always in the old position of authority that is, as it were, gratuitously maintained as the ideal realm of the suprasensory. Completed nihilism, however, must in addition do away even with the place of value itself, with the suprasensory as a realm, and accordingly must posit and revalue values differently. [69] [on autonomy]
Revaluing becomes the overturning of the nature and manner of valuing. The positing of values requires a new principle, i.e., a new principle from which it may proceed and within whicih it may maintain itself. The positing of values requires another realm. [70]
on becoming / value positing (will to power)
following the sunset (which it should be clear we are coordinating with the death of God) and the becoming immanent of the world (which is another way of speaking about the overturning of the suprasensible), a new process of valuing emerges. this is what we are calling autonomy, but which FN discusses in terms of Will to Power. It will be necessary to take FN, and MH’s extensive reading of him into account.
Value is, according to Nietzsche’s words, the ‘point-of-view constituting the preservation-enhancement conditions with respect to complex forms of relative duration of life within becoming’. [73]
When Nietzsche concludes his characterisation of the essence of value with the word ‘becoming’, then this closing word gives the clue to the fundamental realm within which alone values and value-positing properly belong. [74]
Within becoming, life – i.e., aliveness – shapes itself into centres of the will to power particularised in time. These centres are, accordingly, ruling configurations. Such Nietzsche understands art, the state, religion, science, society, to be. Therefore Nietzsche can also say: ‘Value is essentially the point-of-view for the increasing or decreasing of these dominating centres.
Inasmuch as Nietzshe […] understands value as the conditoion – having the character of point-of-view -f the preservation and enhancement of life, and also sees life grounded in becoming as the will to power, the will to power is revealed as that which posits that point of view […]. The will to power is the ground of the necessity of value-positing and of the origin of the possibility of value judgment. Thus Nietzsche says: ‘Values and their changes are related to the increase in power of that which posits them‘. [74]
Only where the will to power, as the fundmental characteristic of everyting real, comes to appearance, i.e., becomes true, and accordingly is grasped as the reality of everything real, does it become evident from whence values originate and through what all assessing of value is supported and directed.
It is new because for the first time it takes place consciously out of the knowledge of its principle. [75]
As the principle of the new value positing, however, the will to power is, in relation to previous values, at the same time the principle of th revaluing of all such values.
Yet, because the highest values hitherto ruled over the sensory from the height of the suprasensory, and because the structureing of this dominance was metaphysics, with the positing of the new principle of the revaluing of all values there takes place the overturning of all metaphysics.
Nietzsche holds this overturning of metaphysics to be the overcoming of metaphysics.
Inasmuch as Nietzsche understands nihilism as the intrinsic law of the history of the devaluing of the highest values hitherto, but explains that devaluing as a revaluing of all values, nihilism lies, according to Nietzsche’s interpretation, in the dominance and in the decay of values, and hence in the possibility of value-positing generally. Value-positing itself is grounded in the will to power.
Therefore Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism and the pronouncement ‘God is dead’ can be thought adequately only from out of the essence of the will to power. Thus we will complete the last step in the claryfying of that pronouncement when we explain what Nietzsche thinks in the name coined by him, ‘the will to power’. [75]
The name ‘will to power’ is a fundemental term in the fully developed philosophy of Nietzsche. Hence this philosophy can be called the metaphysics of the will to power.
[…] we will understand only on the way that is a reflection beyond metaphysical thinking, ans that means at the same time beyond the whole of the history fo Western metaphysics. [76]
In the second part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which appreared the year after the work The Gay Science (1883), Nietzsche for the first time names the ‘will to power’ in the context out of whihc it must be understood: ‘Where I found the living, there I found will to power […]’
NB reading paused here (start up again from p.76)
[…]
overman
With the consciousness that ‘God is dead’, there begins the consciousness of a radical revaluing of the highest values hitherto. Man himself, according to this consciousness, passes over into another history that is higher, because in it the principle of all value positing, the will to power, is expereinced and accepted expressly as the reality of the real, as the Being of everything that is.
The name for this form of man’s essence that surpasses the race of men up to now is ‘overmsn’. By this name Nietzsche does not mean any isolated exemplar of man in whom the abilities and pusrposes of man ans ordinarily known are magnified and enhanced to gigantic proportions.
‘Overman’ is also not that form of man that first originates upon the path of the practical application of Nietzsche’s philosophy of life.
The name ‘overman’ designates the essence of humanity, which, as modern hyumanity, is begining to enter into the consummation belonging to the essence of its age. ‘Overman’ is man who is man from out of the reality determined through the will to power, and for that reality. [96]
It is easy but irresponsible to be indignant at the idea and figure of overman, which has clothed itself in the very misunderstanding that attaches to it, and to make this indignaiton pass for a refutation.
It is difficult, but for future thinking it will be inescapable, to attain to the high responsibility out of which Nietzsche pondered the essence of that humanity which, in the destining of Being as the will to power, is being determined toward the assuming of dominion over the earth. [98]
The attempt to experience the truth of that word concerning the death of God without illusions is something different from an espousing of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
Overman never enters at all into the place of God; rather the place into which his willing enters is another realm belonging to another grounding of what is, in its other Being. [100]
This other being of what is, meanwhile – and this marks the beginning of modern metaphysics – has become subjectness.
Man, within the subjectness belonging to whatever is, rises up into the subjectivity of his essence. Man enters into insurrection. The world changes into object. In this revolutionary objectifying of everything that is, the earth, that which first of all must be put at the disposal of representing and setting forth, moves into the midst of human positing and analysing. The earth itself can show itself only as the object of assault, an assault that, in human willing, establishes itself as unconditional objectification. Nature appears everywhere – because willed from out of the essence of Being – as the object of technology.
nb. the above gives direction to the reading of Fludd that organises worldmaking. the various technics in his wheel, are both symptomatic and instrumental in the domination of the globe (what we are calling the disclosure) that characterises the modern period. we are interested in the way in which they affect the spatio/temporal orientation of the subject (maps, horologoies, geodecies, telecommunications).
overman as consummation of metaphysics
The struggle for dominion over the earth is in its historical essnce already the reslut of the fact that whatever is as such is appearing in the mode of the will to power without yet being recognised or without being understood at all as that will.
With the beginning of the struggle for dominion over the earth, the age of subjectness is driving toward its consummation. […] Every analysis of the situation is grounded, whether it konw it or not, in the metaphysics of subjectness.
‘The great noon’ is the time of the brightest brightness, namely, of the consciousness that unconditionally and in every respect has become conscious of itself as that knowing which consists in deliberately willing the will to power as the Being of whatever is; and, as such willing, in rebelliously withstanding and subjugating to itself every necessary phase of the objectifying of the world, thus making secure the stably constant reserve of what is for a willing of the greatest possible uniformity and equality. [102]
FN is therefore the consummation of metaphysics.
What is? We do not ask concerning this or that particular being, but rather we ask concerning the Being of whatever is. More especially, we are asking what is happening to Being itself. What is happening to Being in the age of the dominion, now beginning, of the unconditonal will to power?
The making constant of the stability of the constant reserve is a necessary conditioon of its own securing of itself, which the will to power itself posits.
When the Being of whatever is, is stamped as a value and its essence is thereby sealed off, then within metaphysics – and that means continually within the truth of what is as such during this age – every way to the experiencing of Being itself is obliterated.
Unmindful of Being and its own truth, Western thinking has since its beginning continually been thinking what is in being as such.
This thinking that has remained unmindful of Being itself is the simple and all-sustaining, thus enigmatic and unexperienced, coming-to-pass of that Western history which meanwhile is on the point of broadening out into world history. Finally, in metaphysics, Being has debased itself to a vlue. [104]
If, however, value does not let Being be Being, does not let it be what it is as Being itself, then this supposed overcoming is above all the consummation of nihilism. For now metaphysics not only does not think Being itself, but this not-thinking of Being itself in the illusion that it does think Being in the most exalted manner, in that it esteems Being as a value, so that all questions concerning Being become and remain suerflous.
hence the greatest danger. the turning, etc.
sun / sea / horizon
The pronouncement [‘God is dead’] does not mean, as thoughy it were spoken out of denial and common hatred – there is no God. The pronouncement means something worse God has been killed [‘We have killed him’ ‘And yet they have done it themselves’].
‘But how have we done this?’ Nietzsche elucidates the question as he repeats it, spelling out what is asked in three images: ‘How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun?’
To the last question we could answer: what men did when they unchained the earth from its sun is told in the last three and a half centuries of European history. [106]
When Nietzshe names the relationship between the sun and the earth he is not thinking merely of the Copernican revolution in the modern understanding of nature. The word ‘sun’ at once recalls Plato’s allegory. […]
The sun forms and circumscribes the field of vision wherein that which is as such shows itself.
‘Horizon’ refers to the suprasensory world as the world that rruly is. This is as thh same time the whole which envelops all and in itself includes all, as does the sea.
The earth, as the abode of man, is unchained from its sun.
The realm that constitutes the suprasensory, whcih as such, is in itself no longer stands over man as the authoritative light. The whole field of vision has been wiped away.
The whole of that whcih is as such, the sea, has been drunk up by man [become immanent]
For man has risen up into the I-ness of the ego cogito. Through this uprising, all that is, is transformed into object. That which is, as the objective, is swallowed up into the immanence of subjectivity […] [107]
By means of these three key images (sun, horizon, sea), which are all for thinking presumably something quite other than images, the three questions elucidate what is meant by the event of the killing of God.
The killing means the act of doing away with the suprasensory world that is in itself – an act accomplished through man.
It speaks of the event wherein that which is as such does not simply come to nothing, but does indeed become different in its Being. But above all, in this event man also becomes different.
The uprising of man into subjectivity transforms that which is into object. But that which is objective is that which is brought to a stand through representing.
The doing away with that whcih is in itself, i.e., the killing of God, is accomplished in the making secure of the constant reserve by means of which man makes secure for himself material, bodily, psychic, and spiritual resources, and this for the sake of his own security, which wills dominion over whatever is – as the potentially objective – in order to correspond to the Being of whatever is, to the will to power. [107]
This ultimate blow in the killing of God is perpetrated by metaphysics, which, as the metaphysics of the will to power, accomplishes thinking in the sense of value thinking.
The value thinking of the metaphysics of the will to power is murderous in a most extreme sense, because it absolutely does not let Being itself take its rise, i.e., come into the vitality of its essence. Thinking in terms of values precludes in advance that Being itself will attain to a coming to presence in its truth. [108]
metaphysics as nihilism
The history of Being begins, and indeed necessarily, with the forgetting of Being.
It is not due then to metaphysics as the metaphysics of the will to power that Being itself in its truth remains unthought. This strange remaining-away of Being is due only to metaphysics as metaphysics.
In the age of that completion and consummation of nihilism which is beginning, Nietzsche indeed expereinced some characteristics of nihilism, and at the same time he explained them nihilistically, thus completley eclipsing their essence. And yet Nietzsche never recognised the essence of nihilism, just as no metaphysics before him ever did.
If, finally, metaphysics is the historical ground of world history that is being determined by Europe and the West, then that world history is, in an intirely different sense, nihilisitc. […] In the appearing of whatever is as such, Being itrself remains wanting. The truth of Being falls from memory. It remains forgotten.[110]
Thus nihilism would be in its essence a history that runs its course along with Being itself. It would lie in Being’s own essence, then, that Being remains unthought because it withdraws.
According to this, kmetaphysics itself would not be merely a neglect of a question still to be pondered concerning Being.
Metaphysics would be, in its essence, the mystery of Being itself, a mystery that is unthought because withheld.
Metaphysics is an epoch of the history of Being itself. But in its essence metaphysics is nihilism. [110]
In what respect is the man mad [the one who cries ‘I seek God! I seek God!’]? He is ‘de-ranged’. For he is dis-lodged from the level of man hitherto, where the ideals of the suprasensory world, wich have become unreal, are passed off for real while yet their opposite is realising itself. This de-ranged man is carried out beyond man hitherto.
Those standing about in the marketplace have abolished thinking […].
THE AGE OF THE WORLD PICTURE
the world picture
humanism and the world picture
Metaphysics grounds an age, in that through a specific interpretation of what is and through a specific comprehension of truth it gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed.
This basis holds complete dominion over all the phenomena that distinguish the age. [115]
Machine technology remains up to now the most visible outgrowth of the essence of modern technology, which is identical with the essence of modern metaphysics. [116]
Essential phenomena of the modern age:
1. science
2. machine technology
3. art becoming aesthetics
4. human activity as culture
5. loss of the gods
What understanding of what is, what interpretation of truth lies at the foundation of these phenomena?
We shall limit the question to the phenomenon mentioned first, to science.
In what does the essence of modern science lie?
What understanding of what is and of truth provides the basis for that essence? If we succeed in reaching the metaphysical ground that provides the foundation for science as a modern phenomenon, then the entire essence of the modern age will have let itself be apprehended from out of that ground. [117]
The essence of what we today call science is research.
Modern physics is called mathematical because, in a remarkable way, it makes use of a quite specific mathematics. But it can proceed mathematically in this way only because, in a deeper sense, it is already itself mathematical.
In no way is trhe essence of the mathematical defined by numberness.
If physics takes shape explicitly, then, as something mathematical, this means that, in an especially pronounced way, through it an for it something is stipulated in advance as what is already known. That stipulating has to do with nothing less than the plan or projection of that which must henceforth, for the knowing of nature that is sought after, be nature: the self-contained system of motions of units of mass related spatiotemporally.
Every event must be seen so as to be fitted into this ground plan of nature. Only within the perspective of this ground plan does an event in nature become visible as an event.
The rigour of mathematical physical science is exactitude. Here all events, if they are to enter at all into representation as events of nature, must be defined beforehand as spatiotemporal magnitudes of motion.
Such defining is accomplished through measuring, with the help of number and calculation. [119]
Science becomes research through the projected plan and through the securing of that plan in the rigour of procedure.
The real system of science consists in a solidarity of procedure and attitude with respect to the objectification of whatever is – a solidarity that is brought about appropriately at any given time on the basis of planning. [126]
We are reflecting on the essence of modern science in order that we may aprehend in it its metaphysical ground. What understanding of what is and what concept of truth provide the basis for the fact that science is being transformed into research?
Knowing, as research, calls whatecer is to account with regard to the way in which and the extent to whcihy it lets itself be put at the disposal of representation. Research has disposal over anything that is when it can either calculate it in its future course in advance or verify a calculation about the past.
Nature, in being calculated in advance, and history, in being historiographically verified as past, become, as it were, ‘set in place’.
Nature and history become the objects of a representing that explains. Such representing counts on nature and takes account of history.
Only that whcih becomes object in this way is -is considered to be in being.
This objectifying of whatever is, is accomplished in a setting-before, a representing, that aims at bringing each particular being before it in such a way that man who calculates can be sure, and that means certain, of that being. [127]
We first arrive at science as research when and only when truth has been transformed into the certainty of representation.
What it is to be is for the first time defined as the objectiveness of representing, and truth defined as the certainty ofd representing, in the metaphysics of Descartes.
The whole of modern metaphysics taken together, Nietzsche included, maintains itself within the interpretation of what it is to be and of truth that was prepared by Descartes.
Now if science as research is an essential phenomenon of the modern age, it must be that that which constitutes the metaphysical ground of research determined first and long beforehanbd the essence of that age generally. The essence of the modern age can be seen in the fact that man frees himself from the bonds of the Middle Ages in freeing himself from himself. [127]
What is decisive is not that man frees himself to himself from previous obligations, but that the very essence of man itself changes, in that man becomes subject.
Man becomes the relational centre of that which is as such. But this is possible only when the comprehension of what is as a whole changes. In what does this change manifest itself? What, in keeping wiht it, is the essence of the modern age?
the world picture
When we reflect on the modern age, we are questioning concerning the modern world picture [Weltbild]. [128]
We characterise the latter by throwing it into relief over against the medieval and the ancient world pictures. But why do we ask concerning a world picture in our interpreting ot a historical age?
Does every period of history have its world picture, and indeed in such a way as to concern itself from time to time about that woirld picture?
What is a world picture? Obviously a picture of the world. But what does ‘world’ mean here? What does ‘picture’ mean?
‘World’ serves here as a name for what is, in its entirety. The name is not limited to the cosmos, to nature. History also belongs to the world.
With the word ‘picture’ we think first of all of a copy of something. Accordingly, the world picture would be a painting, so to speak, of what is as a whole. But ‘world picture’ means more than this. We mean by it the world itself, the world as such, what is, in its entirety, just as it is normative and binding for us.
‘To get the picture’ with respect to something means to set whatever is, itself, and to have it fixedly before oneself as set up in this way.
[it] does not mean only that what is, is set before us, is represnted to us, in general, but that what is stands before us – in all that belongs to it and all that stands together in it – as a system. [129]
WHere the world becomes picture, what is, in its entirety, is juxtaposed as that for which man is prepared and which, correspondingly, he therefore intends to bring before himself and have before himself, and consequently intends in a decisive sense to set in place before himself.
Hence world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture.
Wherever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety.
The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age. [130]
To be new is peculiar to the world that has become picture.
That the world becomes picture is one and the same event with the event of man’s becoming subiectum in the midst of that which is.
humanism and the world picture
The interweaving of these two events, which for the modern age is decisive – that the world is transformed into picture and man into subiectum – throws light at the same time on the grounding event of modern history, an event that at first glance seems almost absurd. Namely, the more extensively and the more effectually the world stands at man’s disposal as conquered, and the more objectively the object appears, all the more subjectively, i.e., the more importunately, does the suiectum rise up, and all the more impetuously, too, do observation of and teaching about the world change into a doctrine of man, into anthropology.
It is no wonder that humanism first arises where the world becomes a picture. [133]
It would have been just as impossible for a humanism to have gained currency in the great age of the Greeks as it would have been impossible to have had anything like a world picture in that age.
Humanism, therefore, in the more strict historiographical sense, is nothing but a moral-aesthetic anthropology.
[anthropology] designates that philosophical interpretation of man which explains and eveluates whatever is, in its entirety, from the standpoint of man and in relation to man. [133]
As soon as the wrold becomes picture, the position of man is conceived as a world view.
development of perspective (NB Fludd’s diagram)
The fact that […] the phrase ‘world view’ asserts itself as the name for the position of man in the midst of all that is, is proof of how decisively the world became picture as soon as man brought his life as suiectum into precedence over other centers of relationship.
The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. [134]
The word ‘picture’ now means the structured image that is the creature of man’s producing which represents and sets before. In such producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is. Because this psition secures, organises, and articulates itself as a world view, the modern relationship to that which is, is one that becomes in its decisive unfolding, a confrontation of world views; and indeed not of random world views, but only of those that have already taken up the fundamental position of man that is most extreme, and have done so with the utmost resoluteness.
For the sake of this struggle of world views and in keeping with its meaning, man brings into play his unlimited power for the calculating, planning and moulding of all things.