🔁 “What is deadly is not the much-discussed atomic bomb as this particular death-dealing machine…The danger consists in the threat that assaults ...

Forwarded From Continental-Conscious

“What is deadly is not the much-discussed atomic bomb as this particular death-dealing machine…The danger consists in the threat that assaults man’s nature in his relation to Being itself, and not in accidental perils. This danger is the danger.”

— Martin Heidegger, “What are Poets for?” (1946)

“Man stares at what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He does not see that the atomic bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened.”

— Martin Heidegger, “The Thing” (1950)

"But for the time being —we do not know for how long— man finds himself in a perilous situation. Why? Just because a third world war might break out unexpectedly and bring about the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the earth? No. In this dawning atomic age a far greater danger threatens—precisely when the danger of a third world war has been removed. A strange assertion! Strange indeed, but only as long as we do not meditate.

In what sense is the statement just made valid? This assertion is valid in the sense that the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.

What great danger then might move upon us? Then there might go hand in hand with the greatest ingenuity in calculative planning and inventing indifference toward meditative thinking, total thoughtlessness. And then? Then man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature—that he is a meditative being. Therefore, the issue is the saving of man's essential nature. Therefore, the issue is keeping meditative thinking alive. Yet releasement toward things and openness to the mystery never happen of themselves. They do not befall us accidentally. Both flourish only through persistent, courageous thinking… And it is we who think if we know ourselves here and now as the men who must find and prepare the way into the atomic age, through it and out of it.”

— Martin Heidegger, “Memorial Address” (1955)