anything that is when it can either calculate it in its future course in advance or verify a calculation about it as past. Nature, in being calculated in advance, and history, in being historiographically verified as past, become, as it were, "set in place" [gestellt].11 Nature and history become the objects of a representing that explains. Such representing counts on nature and takes account of history. Only that which becomes object in this way is—is considered to be in being. We first arrive at science as research when the Being of whatever is, is sought in such objectiveness.
This objectifying of whatever is, is accomplished in a setting-before, a representing, that aims at bringing each particular being before it in such a way that man who calculates can be sure, and that means be certain, of that being. We first arrive at science as research when and only when truth has been transformed into the certainty of representation. What it is to be is for the first time defined as the objectiveness of representing, and truth is first defined as the certainty of representing, in the metaphysics of Descartes. The title of Descartes's principal work reads: Meditationes de prima philosophia [Meditations on First Philosophy]. Prote philosophia is the designation coined by Aristotle for what is later called metaphysics. The whole of modem metaphysics taken together, Nietzsche included, maintains itself within the interpretation of what it is to be and of truth that was prepared by Descartes (Appendix 4).
Now if science as research is an essential phenomenon of the modem age, it must be that that which constitutes the metaphysical ground of research determines first and long beforehand the essence of that age generally. The essence of the modern age can be seen in the fact that man frees himself from the bonds of the Middle Ages in freeing himself to himself. But
11. The verb stellen, with the meanings to set in place, to set upon (i.e., to challenge forth), and to supply, is invariably fundamental in Heidegger's understanding of the modern age. See in this essay the discussion of the setting in place of the world as picture, p. 129. For the use of stellen to characterize the manner in which science deals with the real, see SR 167-168 for a discussion in which stellen and the related noun Ge-stell serve centrally to characterize and name the essence of technology in this age, see QT 14 ff.