in the essential form of positionality. The essence of positionality, however, is the danger. But let us consider it clearly: Positionality is not the danger because it is the essence of technology and because threatening and dangerous effects can arise from technology. The danger is positionality, not as technology, but rather as beyng. What essences of danger is beyng itself insofar as it pursues the truth of its essence with the forgetting of this essence. Because the essence of technology is nothing less than beyng itself; the essence of technology has been named with the bewildering name “positionality.”
Having considered in a few strokes the issue of the essence of technology as the being of contemporary beings, a few things can likewise now briefly be said concerning the name for this essence of technology, concerning the word “positionality.”
The word “to position, place, set” [stellen] corresponds to the Greek θέσις, assuming that we think θέσις in a Greek manner. What does it mean in this case to “think in a Greek manner”? It means: attending to which illuminated clearing of the essence of beyng it is that has laid claim to the Dasein of the Ancient Greeks and to the way in which it has done so; it means considering from the outset under which dispensation of which unconcealment of being the Greeks stood, for according to the claim of this dispensation their language spoke and every word of this language so speaks. Such attention to the Greek is a little more difficult than the pursuits of classical philology. Such attention is thus even more exposed to the possibility of error than the latter science. To think in a Greek manner does not mean to conduct oneself merely according to the doctrines of classical philology. If it only meant this, we would run the danger that thinking and what is to be thought would be delivered over to a historiological representing that, as a science, lives by not acknowledging its specious presuppositions. What does the word θέσις say when we think it in a Greek manner? θέσις means positioning, placing, setting [stellen]. This positioning corresponds to Φύσις, so much so that it is defined by Φύσις, within the region of Φύσις, and from its relation to Φύσις. This points out that within Φύσις itself a certain θέσις-character is concealed. In the Greek world a chief distinction was expressed by the words φύσει and θέσει. It concerns what presences as such in the way that it presences. The