Heidegger - The fullness of beings in the emptiness of Being

The fact that instinct is required for superhumanity as a characteristic means that, understood metaphysically, subhumanity belongs to superhumanity, but in such a way that precisely the animal element is thoroughly subjugated in each of its forms to calculation and planning (health plans, breeding).  Since man is the most important raw material, one can reckon with the fact that some day factories will be built for the artificial breeding of human material, based on present-day chemical research.  The research of the chemist Kuhn, who was awarded the Goethe prize of the city of Frankfurt, already opens up the possibility of directing the breeding of male and female organisms according to plan and need.  The way in which artificial insemination is handled correspond with stark consistency to the way in which literature is handled in the sector of 'culture'.  (Let us not flee because of antiquated prudery to distinctions that no longer exist.  The need for human material underlies the same regulation of preparing for ordered mobilization as the need for entertaining books and poems, for whose production the poet is no more important than the bookbinder's apprentice, who helps bind the poems for the printer...)

The consumption of all materials, including the raw material 'man,' for the unconditional possibility of of the production of everything is determined in a concealed way by the complete emptiness in which beings, the materials of what is real, are suspended.  This emptiness has to be filled up.  But since the emptiness of Being can never be filled up by the fullness of beings, especially when this emptiness can never be experienced as such, the only way to escape it is incessantly to arrange beings in the constant possibility of being ordered as the form of guaranteeing aimless activity.  Viewed in this way, technology is the organization of a lack, since it is related to the emptiness of Being contrary to its knowledge.  Everywhere where there are not enough beings - and it is increasingly everywhere and always not enough for the will to will escalating itself - technology has to jump in, create a substitute, and consume the raw materials.


-'Überwindung der Metaphysik'

trns. by Joan Stambaugh