Descartes: The “Beginning” of Modern Technology

Abstract

The possibility and the grounds of the possibility of falling-away from the primordial Inception — which possibility is prefigured in the Platonic Interpretation of Being as $i\delta \varepsilon '\alpha$ in accordance with which unconcealment, i.e. the truth Being, becomes “relative” to the subjective — asserts itself as the prevailing reality at the outset of modernity. It is “demanded” (“gefordert”)¹ of Descartes that man become the “subject” in an unprecedented sense in order to provide a new foundation for an equally novel determination of “freedom”. Such an event, which is no less than decisive for traditional “Metaphysics”, did not, however, come to pass overnight, but has its most immediate source in a tradition predominately influenced by the “Platonic-Aristotelian” way of thought. This proximate source, whose understanding is indispensable for Heidegger’s Descartes-Interpretation, will be called the tradition of “reality” (“Wirklichkeit”).²