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3 The Intractable Interrelationship of Physis and Techne Walter A. Brogan In a rather remarkable passage in Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie, Heidegger asks: What happens to nature in technicity, when nature is separated out from beings by the natural sciences? The growing—or better, the simple rolling unto its end—destruction of “nature.” What was it once? The site for the moment of the arrival and the dwelling of gods, when the site—still physis—rested in the essence of be-ing. Since then, physis quickly became a “being” and then even the counterpart to “grace”— and, after this demoting, was ultimately reduced to the full force of calculating machination and economy. . . . Why does earth keep silent in this destruction? Because earth is not allowed the strife with a world, because earth is not allowed the truth of be-ing. Why not? Because, the more gigantic that giant-thing called man becomes, the smaller he also becomes? Must nature be surrendered and abandoned to machination? Are we still capable of seeking earth anew? Who enkindles that strife in which the earth ¤nds its open, in which the earth encloses itself and is earth?1 In this paper, I will claim that at the time of the writing of this manuscript , which is so preoccupied with the problem of Machenschaft, in the late 1930s, and even later in the 1950s, when Heidegger wrote his essay on “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger’s thought is centered around the recovery of the question of the intractable interrelationship of physis and techne. For Heidegger, it is never a question of thinking physis apart from techne. Not even in his analysis of our time, which Heidegger calls the age of Machenschaft, does Heidegger claim that something like techne, transformed into technicity, truly operates outside of its relationship to physis. Machenschaft relies upon what Heidegger calls the disem- powerment of physis, the failure to acknowledge the dynamis that belongs to physis and makes human undertakings possible.2 This disempowering is not the result of human activity. It is rather, in fact, the opposite. Human activity and human making are themselves dependent upon Machenschaft . Beings give themselves over machinationally, not because of the force of human intervention, but because of the abandonment of beings by being. At the summit of the reign of technicity, calculative thinking, and measureless repetition, physis still reigns in its abandonment. There can be no techne, not even the absolute reign of techne without nature, outside of the relationship of techne to physis. But for Heidegger, it seems to me, the opposite is equally true. That is, there can be no revealing of physis without techne. The distortion of the meaning of nature, its virtual disappearance in the technological age, occurs in part as a result of the severance of this interrelationality. What Heidegger calls for is not the turn away from techne, back to physis, but a return to the mutual favoring that inclines one to the other. In the opening remarks to his Physics B 1 essay, Heidegger speaks of the many different interpretations of nature that have been offered in history. He points out that these interpretations were always offered in dichotomies on the basis of which, under the guidance of an underlying understanding of nature, beings from nature were differentiated from another way of being .3 He calls this originary event an Ent-scheidung, a de-cision, recalling (to me) the power of Zeus in Hesiod’s account of the genealogy of the gods, when Zeus distributed the territory belonging to each of the gods. Increasingly in later decades, Heidegger became convinced that the decisive incision, on the basis of which being as physis is partitioned into regional ontologies, is the division between the natural and the arti¤cial. What I would like to suggest is that this originary parting of being that gives rise to history is not in itself the decline into metaphysics and the forgetting of being, which culminates, on Heidegger’s reading, in the reign of the gigantic and machination in our times. This parting belongs to physis. Rather, it is the failure to think from out of this division of being and beings that Heidegger’s philosophy calls us to question. Both beings from techne and those from physis have being, but they have their being in different ways. In other words, it is not a question of two different senses of being, but of two different ways in which beings belong...

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