Heidegger paid increasing attention to language, to Hölderlin and
the Greeks, and to the role of poetry in thought. He also reflected on historical
developments and on the rise of what he called Machenschaft (machination) or Technik
(technology): modern ways of behaving towards Being which he contrasted with older
traditions. By ‘machination’ he meant the making-machine-like of all things: the attitude
that characterises factory automation, environmental exploitation, modern management
and war. With this attitude, we brazenly challenge the earth to give up what we want
from it, instead of patiently whittling or cajoling things forth as peasant smallholders or
craftsmen do. We bully things into yielding up their goods. The most brutal example is
in modern mining, where a piece of land is forced to surrender its coal or oil. Moreover,
we rarely use what we take at once, but instead convert it to a form of abstract energy
to be held in reserve in a generator or storehouse. In the 1940s and 1950s, even matter
itself would be challenged in this way, as atomic technology produced energy to be held
in reserve in power plants.
One might point out that a peasant who tills the land also challenges it to put forth
grain, and then stores that grain. But Heidegger considered this activity quite different.
As he argued in a lecture-essay first drafted in the late 1940s, ‘The Question Concerning
Technology’, a farmer ‘places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and
watches over its increase’. Or rather, this is what farmers did until modern agricultural
machinery came panting and chuffing along, promising ever greater productivity. In
modern challenging-forth of this kind, nature’s energy is not sown, tended and
harvested; it is unlocked and transformed, then stored in some different form before
being distributed. Heidegger uses military images: ‘Everything is ordered to stand by, to
be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further
ordering.’
It is a monstrous reversal — and for Heidegger humanity has become monstrous. Man
is the terrible one: deinos in Greek (the word also featuring in the etymology of
‘dinosaur’, or ‘terrible lizard’). This was the word that Sophocles had used when he wrote
his chorus about the strange or uncanny quality unique to man.
