ABSTRACT
Theoretical physics, Heidegger once said, “is the proper, pure technology.” To understand what he meant, we need to remember that he first presented “The Question Concerning Technology” in the form of a lecture delivered at a conference as part of a critical exchange with the theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg. According to Heisenberg, quantum theory radically altered the image of nature informing classical physics. With the discovery of quantum indeterminacy, he maintained, “for the first time in the course of history man on earth faces only himself.” Heidegger insists, on the contrary, that modern physics constitutes no essential change in the metaphysical conception of nature that arose in the early modern age, namely the aspiration to a maximally correct mathematical representation and ordering or “enframing” of entities as a whole. In spite of its mathematical rigor and objective correctness, however, contemporary physics cannot grasp nature in all its intractable, inexhaustible complexity. Nature qua physis remains, he says, “uncanny.” To suppose that quantum theory represents not just our most fundamental knowledge of nature, but moreover an authentic encounter with ourselves, is to forget the mystery and obscurity essential to our primordial relation to being understood as physis.
