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II. The Resonating [126-127]

Instead, the name machination [Machenschaft] should immediately refer to making [Machen] (ποίησις, τέχνη), which we assuredly know as a human activity. This latter, however, is itself possible precisely only on the grounds of an interpretation of beings in which their makeability comes to the fore, so much so that constancy and presence become the specific determinations of beingness. The fact that something makes itself by itself and consequently is makeable in a corresponding operation: the making itself by itself is the interpretation of φύσις carried out in terms of τέχνη and its outlook on things, in such a way that now already the emphasis falls on the makeable and the self-making (cf. the relation between ἰδέα and τέχνη), which is called, in brief, machination. Since φύσις is starting to lose its power at the time of the first beginning, machination does not yet step into the light of day in its full essence. It remains veiled in the concept of constant presence, which is determined as ἐντελέχεια ["consummation"] at the apex of primordial Greek thinking. The medieval concept of actus already covers over the primordial Greek essence of the interpretation of beingness. Connected to this is the fact that the machinational now thrusts itself forward more dearly and that, through the coming into play of both the Judeo-Christian thought of creation and the corresponding representation of God, ens becomes ens creatum. Even if a crude interpretation of the idea of creation is foregone, the fact that beings are caused remains essential. The cause-effect connection comes to dominate everything (God as causa sui). That is an essential deviation from φύσις and is at the same time the transition to the emergence of machination as the essence of beingness in modern thought. The mechanistic and the biologistic modes of thinking are always only consequences of the concealed machinational interpretation of beings.

Machination as the essential occurrence of beingness provides a first intimation of the truth of beyng itself. We know little enough of machination, despite its dominating the history of being in the previous Western philosophy, from Plato to Nietzsche.

It seems to be a law of machination (the ground of this law is still unfathomed) that the more prescriptively machination unfolds—thus in the medieval period and in the modern era—-all the more obstinately and machinationally does it conceal itself as such: in the Middle Ages behind the ordo and the analogia entis, in modernity behind objectivity as the basic form of actuality and thus of beingness.

To this first law of machination, a second is joined: the more decisively machination conceals itself in this way, all the more does it press toward the predominance of that which seems completely opposed to its essence and yet is of its essence, i.e., toward lived experience (cf. everything on lived experience in "The resonating").


Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) (GA 65) by Martin Heidegger