Status Updates From The Question Concerning Tec...

Only to the extent that man for his part is already challenged to exploit the energies of nature can this ordering revealing happen. If man is challenged, ordered, to do this, then does not man himself belong even more originally than nature within the standing-reserve?

reading Question Concerning Technology
I have been avoiding reading this for so long out of intellectual laziness, and I still feel you gotta have a kink for self-harm to read Heidegger, but whatta genius though.

All the dense obfuscation and philosophical ropetrickery reveals another moment of utter clarity, when Heidegger argues against the scholarly life in World Picture in support of a much more appealing and active researcher. That is not to say that there won’t be a place for reflective knowledge-seeking of “more than a mere making conscious of something” (p. 180) beyond what our science has hypothesized.

Three innocuous words to sum up Nietzsche’s nihilism are under investigation, and the point where Heidegger explains how the will to will will will will will will nearly killed off my desire to make meaning from his inquiry. And it is not just the clumsy inflexibility of English translations, as Beständigung der Beständigkeit des Bestandes repeats an infinite loop of equivocation. The verdict? Humanity is guilty!

Good to be warned of the arduous journey an English reader faces in reading Heidegger, where every gerund and question mark signposts a tricky patch of thinking. Not sure that I got there with all the questioning, concerning, turning and being to keep track of, but slowly noticed I was getting somewhere. It may not help me design the killer app, but keeps me attuned to a world far away from smartphones and computers.

Up to 'The Turning'

"Has a thinking man perhaps here really cried out de profundis? And the ear of our thinking, does it still not hear the cry? It will refuse to hear it so long as it does not begin to think. Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff­ necked adversary of thought."

The best and worst of times in reading Heidegger.

"Thus we shall never experience our relation­ship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as some­ thing neutral..."