Abstract

Our century thinks scientifically. Nothing would be more plausible than that it has the same relation to the world as does Sein und Zeit. This, however, is not the case. For Heidegger, Science and Technology are essential characteristics of our time. Both are rooted in man insofar as he is a "Will to Will." Scientific man is man as subject. As such he does not wish to see the world the way it appears by itself but rather as a field that may be tilled by him and is preordained for him and his activity. The world as the object of action does not merely come to man as a legacy; instead he violently grasps it and makes it his hunting ground. "Man becomes that Seiende, on which is based all Seiende in the manner of its Being and its Truth". Man of the machine-age does not allow for a world "where Being is as Being." The Subject "sets" its world and therefore has a Welt-bild and Welt-anschauungen, all of these being bifurcations indicating the separation of subject and world. A uniform world is replaced by Ego over against World. In this kind of "world" man makes God in his own image by setting the "world" as the stage for his Welt-anschauung, one which aims at utility and plasticity. Man is the director staging the world of his idea. As the objects which are handled have properties which reflect back on the producer, the directing is all the more dangerous. He who in everything that he thinks and does is staging himself might become the victim of his own production; the world of the calculating man has the character of its producer. "The calculating mind, adapting itself, invents 'values'. Value is the transformation of the Essence of Essence into the quantitative and the gigantic." In Holzwege Heidegger shows that the gigantic is a consequence of the way the subject places himself in the world. The world does not appear as what it is, but as what man makes of it. The world of the machine-age is a world-less world and the "world" as it is described in Sein und Zeit and more so in the essay "Vom Wesen des Grundes" does not appear in it.