Heidegger - The Consumption of beings in the World Wars of the Unworld

 The consumption of beings is such and in its course determined by armament in the metaphysical sense, through which man makes himself the 'master' of what is 'elemental'.  The consumption includes the ordered use of beings which become the opportunity and the material for feats and their escalation.  This use is employed for the utility of armaments.  In that in the unconditionality of escalation and of self-guaranteeing armament runs out and in truth has aimlessness as its aim, the using is a using up.

The 'world wars'  and their character of 'totality' are already a consequence of the abandonment of Being.  They press toward a guarantee of the stability of a constant form of using things up.  Man, who no longer conceals his character of being the most important raw material, is also drawn into this process.  Man is the 'most important raw material' because he remains the subject of all consumption.  He does this in such a way that he lets his will be unconditionally equated with this process, and thus at the same time become the 'object' of the abandonment of Being.  The world wars are the antecedent form of the removal of the difference between war and peace.  This removal is necessary since the 'world' has become an unworld as a consequence of the abandonment of beings by Being's truth.  For 'world' in the sense of the history of Being means the nonobjective presencing of the truth of Being for man in that man is essentially delivered over to Being.  In the age of the exclusive power of power, that is, of the unconditional pressing of beings toward being used up in consumption, the world has become an unworld in that Being does presence, but without really reigning.  As what is real, beings are real.  There are effects everywhere, and nowhere is there a worlding of the world and yet, although forgotten, there is still Being.  Beyond war and peace, there is the mere erring of the consumption of beings in the plan's self-guaranteeing in terms of the vacuum of the abandonment of Being.  Changed into their deformation of essence, 'war' and 'peace' are taken up into erring, and disappear into the mere course of the escalating manufacture of what can be manufactured, because they have become unrecognizable with regard to any distinction.  The question of when there will be peace cannot be answered not because the duration of war is unfathomable, but rather because the question already asks about something which no longer exists, since war is no longer anything which could terminate in peace.  War has become a distortion of the consumption of beings which is continued in peace.  Contending with a long war is only the already outdated form in which what is new about the age of consumption is acknowledged.  This long war in its length slowly eventuated not in a peace of the traditional kind, but rather in a condition in which warlike characteristics are no longer experienced as such at all and peaceful characteristics have become meaningless and without content....



-from, 'Overcoming Metaphysics'; trns. by Joan Stambaugh


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