The Age of the World View*

Martin Heidegger
translated by Marjorie Grene

Metaphysics reflects on the nature of the existent and on the nature of truth. Metaphysics lays the foundation of an age by giving it the basis of its essential form through a particular analysis of the existent and a particular conception of truth. This basis dominates all the phenomena which distinguish the age. Conversely, it must be possible to recognize the metaphysical basis in these phenomena through sufficient reflection on them. Reflection is the courage to question as deeply as possible the truth of our own presuppositions and the exact place of our own aims.

Among the essential phenomena of modern times we must count science. A phenomenon with the same degree of importance is mechanical technique. This should not be misinterpreted, however, as a mere application of modern mathematical natural science to practice. Mechanical technique is itself an independent transformation of practice such that it of itself demands the application of mathematical natural science. Mechanical technique remains the most visible product to date of the essence of modern technology, which is identical with the essence of modern metaphysics.

A third equally important phenomenon of modern times consists in the process by which art comes within the horizon of aesthetics: the work of art becomes the object of an experience; as a result, art is viewed as the expression of the life of man.

A fourth modern phenomenon is exhibited in the fact that human activity is understood and accomplished as culture. Culture thus becomes the realization of the highest values through the cultivation of the highest goods of man. It is part of the essence of culture, as such cultivation, to cultivate itself and so become “culture politics.”

A fifth phenomenon of modern times is the transition to godlessness. This expression does not mean the mere displacement of the gods — coarse atheism. The transition to godlessness is a twofold process: on the one hand the world view becomes Christianized in so far as the cause of the world is conceived as the infinite, the unconditioned, the absolute; on the other hand Christendom transforms its Christianity into a world view (the Christian world view) and so adapts itself to modern times. The transition to godlessness is the state of indecision about God and the gods. Christianity has contributed most to its development. But the transition to godlessness is far from excluding religiosity; on the contrary, it is through religiosity that the relation to the gods becomes, for the first time, a religious experience. When it has come to that, the gods have fled. The resulting void is filled by the historical and psychological investigation of the myth.

On what conception of the existent and on what interpretation of truth do these phenomena rest?

We limit our question to the first phenomenon, to science.

Wherein lies the essence of modern science?

On what conception of the existent and of truth does this essence rest? If we succeed in reaching, finally, the metaphysical foundation on which modern science is grounded, then it must be possible to perceive the very essence of modern times.

When we use the word science today, it means something which differs essentially from the doctrina and scientia of the Middle Ages, but also from the Greek episteme. Greek science was never exact — precisely for the reason that it could not by its nature be exact and did not need to be exact. There is therefore no sense whatever in supposing that modern science is more exact than that of antiquity. Nor can we say that Galileo’s doctrine of freely falling bodies is true, and that Aristotle, who teaches that light bodies strive upward, is wrong; for the Greek conception of the nature of body and place and their relation to one another rests on a different explanation of the existent, and therefore requires a correspondingly different kind of viewing and questioning of natural processes. No one would think of maintaining that Shakespeare’s poetry is more advanced than that of Aeschylus. But it is even more impossible to say that the modern apprehension of the existent is more correct than the Greek. Thus if we want to understand the essence of modern science, we must first of all free ourselves of the habit of contrasting the newer science with the older simply by applying the standard of gradual progress.

The essence of what we now call science is research. What is the essence of research?

It is the fact that knowledge establishes itself as a procedure in a realm of the existent, of nature or of history. Procedure means here not only method, a way of proceeding — for every procedure needs a sphere in which it can move — but, more precisely, the opening of such a sphere; this is the basic procedure of research. It is accomplished through the projection of a definite ground plan of natural processes in a sphere of the existent, for example, in nature. The projection indicates the way in which the cognitive procedure must adhere to the sphere it has opened up for itself. This adherence is the discipline of research. Through the projection of the ground plan and the condition of exactitude the method secures for itself its proper area within the sphere of being. A glance at the earliest, and normative, modern science, mathematical physics, reveals what is meant. In so far as modern atomic physics is still physics, the essential aspect — the only one we are concerned with here — is applicable.

Modern physics is called mathematical because it distinctively applies a very definite mathematics. But it can proceed mathematically in this way only because it is in a deeper sense already mathematical. Ta mathemata means for the Greeks that which man knows prior to his observation of the existent and his acquaintance with things: of bodies — the corporeal; of plants — the vegetative; of animals — the animate; of man — the human. Numbers, too, belong to this category of the already known, that is, the “mathematical.” If we find three apples on the table, we recognize that there are three of them. But the number three, threeness, we know already. This means that number is something “mathematical.” Only because numbers represent, as it were, the most obvious of things always known beforehand, and hence the best known in the class of the mathematicals, was “mathematical” forthwith reserved as the name of things of the nature of number. But the essence of the mathematical is by no means determined by the numberable. Physics is in general the knowledge of nature, then in particular the knowledge of the substantially corporeal in its motion; for this appears immediately and universally, even if in different ways, in all natural phenomena. If, then, physics explicitly takes on a mathematical form, this means that something is emphatically defined in advance as the already known. This definition means nothing less than the demarcation of what nature is to mean for the knowledge of nature that is sought, that is, the self-sufficient kinetic relation of points of mass connected in space and time. On this blueprint of nature that is assumed to be already known, the following conditions — among others — are entered. Motion means change of place. No motion or direction of motion is preferred to another. Every place is like every other. No point of time is superior to any other. Every force is determined only by — is only — its consequences in motion, that is to say, by the magnitude of change of place in the unit of time. Every event must be read into this blueprint of nature. It is only within the framework of this blueprint that a natural event becomes visible as such. This design of nature therefore contains its verification in the fact that for every step of its investigation physical research depends on it in advance. The character of dependence, the discipline of research, is in each case derived from the “ground plan.” The discipline of mathematical natural science is exactitude. All events, if they are to be perceived as natural events at all, must here be determined in advance as spatiotemporal kinetic magnitudes. Such determination is carried out through measurement with the help of number and calculation. But mathematical science is not exact because it makes exact calculations; rather it must make such calculations because its way of adhering to its sphere has the character of exactitude. On the other hand, all humanistic disciplines, in fact, all sciences of living things, must, precisely in order to remain disciplines, necessarily be inexact. To be sure, the living can also be apprehended as a spatiotemporal kinetic magnitude — but then it is no longer understood as living. The inexactitude of the historical disciplines is not a shortcoming, but only the fulfillment of a demand essential to their kind of research. Of course, the delineation and the fixation of the object area of the historical disciplines remains not only different from but, as a task, much more difficult than the realization of the discipline of exact science.

Science becomes research through the projection and through the verification of the projection in the discipline of the procedure. But projection and discipline develop into what they are only in the procedure. This is the mark of the second essential characteristic of research. If the projected area is to become objective, then we must make it accessible in all the complexity of its layers and interlacings. Therefore the procedure must have its vision free for the mutability of the given. Only within the orbit of the ever-otherwise of change is the plenitude of the particular, of the facts, revealed. But the facts must become objective. The procedure must therefore represent the changeable in its change, bring it to a standstill, and nevertheless let the motion be as motion. The permanent in the facts and the permanence of their change as such are the rule. The permanence of change in the necessity of its course is the law. Only within the boundaries of rule and law are facts revealed as the facts they are. The investigation of facts in the sphere of nature is in itself the establishment and preservation of rule and law. The procedure through which an object area is apprehended has the character of clarification. It always remains twofold. It founds an unknown by means of a known, and at the same time preserves this known through that unknown. Clarification is carried out in investigation. This occurs in natural science — according to the type of field investigated and the aim of the clarification — by means of experiment. However, natural science does not become research through experiment; on the contrary, experiment becomes possible where, and only where, natural knowledge has already been transformed into research. It is because, and only because, modern physics is essentially mathematical that it can be experimental. But because neither the medieval doctrina nor the Greek episteme is science in the sense of research, they leave no room for experiment. It was indeed Aristotle who first understood what empeiria (experientia) means: the observation of the things themselves, of their properties and alterations under changing conditions and therewith the knowledge of the way in which things as a rule behave. But an observation which is aimed at this kind of knowledge, the experimentum, remains essentially different from the research experiment which belongs to science as research — essentially different even when the ancient and medieval observations work with number and measurement, and when the observation makes use of particular contrivances and instruments. For in this the decisive feature of the experiment is entirely lacking. This begins when a law is taken as a point of departure. To set up an experiment means to assume a situation where it becomes possible to trace a definite nexus of motions in the necessity of its course, that is, to control its calculation in advance. But the determination of the law occurs with a view to the ground plan of the object area. The latter gives the measure and fixes in advance the representation of the situation. Such representation, in which and with which the experiment starts, is no capricious imagining. That is why Newton said: hypotheses non fingo, the bases are not arbitrarily invented. They are developed out of the ground plan of nature and are written into it. The experiment is that procedure which in its arrangement and execution is borne and guided by the law basic to it, in order to produce the facts which confirm the law or deny confirmation. The more exactly the ground plan of nature has been projected, the more exact will be the possibility of the experiment. The much cited medieval schoolman Roger Bacon can therefore never be the forerunner of the modern experimental research scientist, but he remains simply the successor of Aristotle. For in the interval Christianity has assigned the genuine possession of truth to faith, to the acceptance of Holy Writ and church doctrine. The highest knowledge and doctrine is theology as the exegesis of the divine word of revelation which is set down in the Scriptures and is proclaimed through the Church. Knowledge is here not research, but the correct understanding of the authoritative word and the authorities proclaiming it. Therefore, in the acquisition of knowledge in the Middle Ages the exposition of the sayings and doctrines of the various authorities takes precedence. The componere scripta ex sermones, the argumentum ex verbo is decisive and is at the same time the reason why the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy transmitted to the Middle Ages had to become scholastic dialectic. If Roger Bacon here demands the experimentum — and he does demand it — he does not mean the experiment of science as research; but he requires, instead of the argumentum ex verbo, the argumentum ex re, and instead of the exposition of doctrines, the observation of the things themselves, that is, Aristotelian empeiria.

The modern research experiment, however, is not only an observation more exact in degree and scope, but the radically different procedure of the confirmation of a law in the framework and in the service of an exact projection of nature. In the historical disciplines the critique of sources corresponds to the experiment in scientific research. Let this name designate here the whole process of finding, sifting, confirming, evaluating, preserving, and interpreting sources. Historical explanation grounded on the critique of sources does not, indeed, reduce the facts to laws and rules. But neither is it limited to the mere reporting of facts. In the historical disciplines just as in the natural sciences the procedure aims at representing the permanent and making history an object. But history can become objective only if it is past. The permanent in history, that with reference to which historical explanation assesses the unique and the diverse in history, is that-which-has-always-already-happened-once, the comparable. In the constant comparison of everything with everything the intelligible is figured out and is indicated as the ground plan of history. The sphere of historical research extends only as far as historical explanation reaches; the unique, the infrequent, the simple — in short, the great — in history is never self-evident and therefore remains inexplicable. Historical research does not deny greatness in history but explains it as the exception. In this explanation greatness is measured against the common and the average. Nor is there any other historical explanation so long as explanation means reduction to the intelligible, and so long as history remains research, that is, explanation. It is because history as research projects and objectifies the past in the sense of a nexus of events which can be explained and surveyed that it requires the critique of sources as the instrument of objectification. In the measure in which history approaches the journalistic, the standards of this critique are altered.

Every science is, as research, founded on the projection of a limited object area and is therefore necessarily specialized science. But, in the development of the projection, every specialized science must, through its procedure, separate itself into definite fields of investigation. But this separation or specialization is by no means only the unavoidable concomitant of the increasing vastness of the results of research. It is not a necessary evil, but the necessary essence of science as research. Specialization is not the consequence, but the cause of the progress of all research. In its procedure the latter does not fall apart into arbitrary investigations in which it loses itself; for modern science is determined by a third basic procedure: busy-ness.

By this we understand, first of all, the phenomenon that a science, whether a natural science or a humanistic discipline, today attains the prestige of a science only when it has become capable of being institutionalized. However, research is not busy-ness because its work is carried on in institutes; but the institutes are necessary because science as research has acquired the character of busy-ness. The procedure through which the particular object areas are mastered does not simply pile up results. Rather, with the help of its results, it always organizes itself for a new procedure. The whole of physics up to the present is contained in the mechanical apparatus which physics needs in order to smash the atom. Similarly, in historical research, the available sources can be used for the purpose of explanation only after the sources themselves have been substantiated on the basis of historical explanation. In these processes the procedure of science is circumscribed by its results. The procedure is adjusted more and more to the possibilities of the method which it has itself laid bare. This necessity of accepting its own results as determining the ways and means of the advancing method is essential to the business character of research. This, however, is what forces upon research its institutional character.

It is only in busy-ness that the projection of the object area is incorporated in the existent. All arrangements which facilitate coordination of procedures according to plan, which facilitate the checking and communication of results and regulate the exchange of talents, are measures which are by no means merely the external consequence of the fact that research work is spreading and expanding. Rather, it is a symptom, coming from far back and largely not yet understood, that modern science is beginning to enter upon the decisive phase of its history. Only now is it taking possession of its own real nature.

What is really happening in the expansion and consolidation of the institutional character of the sciences? Nothing less than that the procedure is granted definitive precedence over Being (nature and history), which research makes objective. On the basis of this business character, the sciences provide themselves with the appropriate coherence and unity. For this reason an institutionally conducted historical or archaeological research project more closely resembles physical research that is similarly organized than it does a discipline of its own humanistic faculty which has remained in the area of mere scholarship. The decisive development of the modern business character of science therefore forms men of a different stamp. The scholar disappears. He is replaced by the research man who is engaged in research projects. This, rather than the pursuit of scholarship, gives his work its keen atmosphere. The research man no longer needs a library at home. Besides, he is always moving about. He does business at meetings and gets information at congresses. He contracts to work for commissions from publishers, who now help to determine what books must be written.

The research worker forces himself automatically into the orbit of the technologist in the form essential to his work. Only in this way does he remain effective and thus, in the sense of his age, real. Alongside him, for some time and in a few places there will continue an increasingly thin and empty romanticism of scholarship and of the university. The effective character of the university as a unifier — and hence its reality — does not consist, however, in a spiritual force which proceeds from it because it is nourished by it and preserved in it, that is, the original interrelation of the intellectual disciplines. The university is real as an organization only in a unique, because administratively self-sufficient, form which makes possible and visible the tendency of the sciences to separate into specialties, and the specific unity of these businesslike pursuits. Because the power that is of the essence of modern science takes effect immediately and unequivocally in its busy-nesses, it is only their peculiar research which can designate and organize the inner unity appropriate to them.

The real system of sciences rests on the consistency of its methods and on the attitude with respect to the objectification of Being. The advantage demanded of this system is not that it should offer an abstract and rigid unity of relations among the object areas, but rather the greatest possible ability to switch its research — freedom of research, yet regulated mobility of transference and integration of activities with respect to whatever tasks happen to be of paramount importance. The more exclusively science becomes specialized for the complete pursuit and mastery of its work, and the more realistically these business activities are shifted to separate research institutes and professional schools, the more irrevocably the sciences move toward the fulfillment of their modern destiny. But the more unconditionally science and researchers take seriously their modern nature, the more unequivocally and the more immediately they can offer themselves for the common good, and the more unreservedly they must subordinate themselves and enter the public ambiguity of every socially useful work.

Modern science is at once founded on and specialized in the Plan of definite object areas. This Plan develops in a procedure adequate to it, certified through its discipline. Each procedure is organized as busy-ness. Plan and discipline, procedure and busy-ness, mutually postulating one another, constitute the essence of modern science, transform it into research.

We are reflecting on the nature of modern science in order to find its metaphysical basis. What conception of the existent and what concept of truth cause science to become research?

Understanding as research holds the existent to account on the question of how and how far it can be put at the disposal of available “representation.” Research has the existent at its disposal if it can either calculate it in advance, in its future course, or calculate it afterwards as past. Nature — in advance calculation, history, in retrospection, calculation — is, as it were, held at bay. Nature and history become the object of expository representation, while the latter counts on nature and reckons with history. Only what thus becomes an object is, is recognized as existent. Science as research occurs only when it is in this objectification that the being of the existent is sought.

This objectification of the existent takes place in a re-presentation which aims at presenting whatever exists to itself in such a way that the calculating person can be secure, that is, certain of the existent. Science as research is produced when and only when truth has been transformed into such certainty of representation. In the metaphysics of Descartes the existent was defined for the first time as objectivity of representation, and truth as certainty of representation. The title of his chief work is Mediationes de prima philosophia, Meditations on First Philosophy. Prote philosophia is the designation coined by Aristotle for what was later called metaphysics. The whole of modern metaphysics, including Nietzsche, remains within the conception of the existent and of truth initiated by Descartes.

Now, if science as research is an essential phenomenon of modern times, then whatever constitutes the metaphysical basis of research must determine, first and far in advance, the nature of modern times as such. We can see the essence of modern times in the fact that man sets himself free from the medieval bonds, by freeing himself to himself. Nevertheless, this correct characterization remains superficial. It leads to those errors which prevent our grasping the real basis of modern times, and from this, determining its full significance. It is certain that as a consequence of the liberation of man the modern age has produced subjectivism and individualism. But it is just as certain that no age before this has created a comparable objectivism, and that in no previous age did the nonindividual in the form of the collective come into its own. The essential point here is the necessary interplay between subjectivism and objectivism. It is precisely this mutual conditioning which points in turn to deeper processes.

What is decisive is not that man frees himself to himself out of his previous commitments, but that the essence of man as such changes in that man becomes a subject. To be sure, we must understand this word subjectum as the translation of the Greek hypokeimenon. The word designates what lies before us, that which gathers everything to itself to become its basis. This metaphysical meaning of the concept of subject has at first no specific relation to man and none at all to the I.

But when man becomes the first and real subjectum, then man becomes that existent, in which all that exists is grounded in the character of its existence and its truth. Man becomes the center to which the existent as such is related. But this is possible only if the conception of the existent as a whole is transformed. Where does this transformation appear? What accordingly, is the essence of modern times?

When we reflect on modern times, we ask about the modern “world view.” We characterize it by a contrast with the medieval and the ancient world view. But why, in the analysis of a historical period, do we ask about the world view? Does every age of history have its world view, and precisely in the sense that in each case it is concerned about its own particular world view? Or is it characteristic only of the modern type of representation to ask about the world view?

What is a world view? Obviously a view, or picture of the world. But what does world mean here? And what does view or picture mean? World stands here as the designation of the existent as a whole. The name is not limited to the cosmos, to nature. History also is part of the world. But even nature and history, as they interpenetrate and affect one another, do not exhaust the world. In this term the foundation of the world is included, regardless of how its relation to the world is conceived.

Hence the world view would be, as it were, a painting of the existent as a whole. Yet world view means more. We mean by this the world itself, the existent as a whole, as it is for us normative and binding. View or picture means here not a copy, but the notion reflected in the idiom: we are “in the picture” with respect to something. This means the matter is present to us in so far as, in its actuality, it matters to us. To “put oneself in the picture about something” means to represent to oneself the existent itself with respect to its state and as so presented to keep it constantly before one. But one decisive aspect of the essence of the view or picture is still lacking. “We are in the picture” with respect to something does not mean only that the existent is simply presented to us, but that, in everything that belongs to it and constitutes it as a system, it stands before us. “To be in the picture” connotes having the know-how, being equipped and oriented toward the matter in question. Where the world becomes a view, the existent as a whole is posited as that with respect to which a man orients himself, which therefore he wishes to bring and have before himself and thus in a decisive sense re-present to himself. World view, properly understood, therefore means, not a view of the world, but the world understood as view. The existent as a whole is now so understood that it is existent when and only when and in the degree to which it is held at bay by the person who represents and establishes it. Where a world view arises, an essential decision takes place about the existent as a whole. The being of the existent is sought and found in the representational character of the existent.

But wherever the existent is not conceived of in this sense, the world cannot change into a view; there can be no world view. The fact that the existent becomes existent as representation makes the age in which this happens a new one over against the preceding one. The phrases “world view of modern times” and “modern world view” say the same thing twice and suppose something which could never before exist, namely, a medieval and an ancient world view. The world view does not change from a previous medieval to a modern one, but this fact — that the world as such becomes a view — is the distinguishing mark of modern times. For the Middle Ages, on the other hand, the existent is the ens creatum, that which is created by the personal Creator-God as highest cause. To be existent here means to belong to a definite level in the order of created things, and thus caused to correspond to the cause of creation (analogia entis). But here the being of the existent never consists in the fact that it is brought before man as what is objective, is present and alone existent within the area susceptible to his skills and at his disposal.

The modern conception of the existent is even farther from the Greek nature. One of the oldest expressions of Greek thought about the being of the existent reads: To gar auto noein estin te kai einai. This statement of Parmenides means that the perception of the existent belongs to being, because it is demanded and determined by it. The existent is what rises and opens itself, that which being present comes upon man as the one who is present, that is, upon the one who opens himself to what is present by perceiving it. The existent does not become existent through the fact that only man faces it in the sense of subjective perception. Rather is it man who is faced by the existent, who is gathered into its presence by the self-disclosing. To be faced by the existent, to be drawn into its disclosure and included and so borne by it, to be harassed by its contradictions and marked by its conflict — that is the essence of man in the great age of Greece. Therefore, Greek man, in order to fulfill his nature, must collect (legein), the self-disclosing in its disclosure and save it (sozein), catch it up and preserve it, and remain exposed to all sundering confusion (aletheuein). The Greek man is as he who perceives the existent, wherefore in Greece the world cannot become a view. On the other hand, the fact that for Plato the existent character of the existent is determined as eidos (appearance, view) is the presupposition, coming far in advance and for a long time acting secretly and indirectly, for the eventual transformation of the world to a view.

Quite different, in contrast to the Greek perception, is the modern representation, significance of which is best expressed by the word representatio. To re-present here means to bring what is present before one as something confronting oneself, to relate it to oneself, the person representing it, and to force it back into this relation to oneself as the normative area. Where this kind of thing happens, man “gets into the picture” with respect to the existent. But in so far as man thus puts himself in the picture, he puts himself into the setting, that is, into the open horizon of the universally and openly represented. Therefore man posits himself as the setting, in which the existent must from now on represent itself, present itself, that is, be a view or picture. Man becomes the representative of the existent in the sense of the objective.

But what is new in this process by no means consists in the fact that now the viewpoint of man in the midst of the existent is simply different over and against that of medieval and ancient man. What is decisive is that man himself takes this viewpoint as produced by himself, maintains it voluntarily as that taken by himself, and as the basis of a possible development of humanity. Now, for the first time, there is such a thing as a viewpoint of man. Man takes on himself the manner in which he is to stand to the existent as the objective. That type of being-a-man begins which uses the sphere of human powers as the place for measuring and accomplishing the mastery of the existent as a whole. The age which is determined by this event is not only for retrospective reflection a new one as against the preceding one, but it asserts itself specifically as the new one. To be new is peculiar to the world which has become a view.

If, therefore, the view-character of the world has been made clear as the fact that the existent is represented, then in order to grasp fully the modern nature of representation we must feel out the original power of speech in the banal word and concept “represent”: to place as present before and near one. Thus the existent assumes the position of object and only in this role does it receive the seal of being. That the world becomes a view is one and the same process with that by which man, within the existent, becomes a subjectum.

Only because and in so far as man as such has essentially become subject must there consequently arise for him the express question: whether it is as the I limited to his own whim and let loose for his own caprice or as the We of society, whether it is as man as individual or as community, whether it is man as personality in society or as mere group member in the corporate body, whether it is as state and nation and people or as the universal humanity of modern man that man wants to and must be the subject which as a modern being he already is. Only where man is already essentially subject does there exist the possibility of slipping into the monstrosity of subjectivism in the sense of individualism. But only where man remains subject does the open battle against individualism and for the community as the goal of all achievement and usefulness have a meaning.

The interweaving of both processes — that the world becomes a view and man a subjectum, which is decisive for the essence of modern times — at the same time throws a light on the basic process of modern history, which at first sight seems almost absurd. To wit: the more completely and thoroughly the conquered world stands at our disposal, the more objective the object seems to be, the more subjectively — that is, the more prominently — does the subjectum rise up, and the more inevitably do contemplation and explanation of the world and doctrine about the world turn into a doctrine of man, into anthropology. It is no wonder that humanism arises only when the world becomes a view. But as little as a world view was possible in the great age of Greece, so little could a humanism come into effect then. Humanism in the strict historical sense is therefore nothing but a moral-aesthetic anthropology. This term does not mean here natural scientific investigation of man. Nor does it mean the doctrine established within Christian theology about man as created, fallen, and redeemed. It designates that philosophical interpretation of man which explains and evaluates the existent as a whole from the viewpoint of and in relation to man.

The increasingly exclusive rooting of world analysis in anthropology which set in at the end of the eighteenth century finds its expression in the fact that the basic attitude of man to the existent as a whole is determined as world view (Weltanschauung). Since then this term has come into common usage. As soon as the world becomes a view or picture, the attitude of man is conceived as a world view. To be sure, the phrase world view suggests the erroneous notion that it is a matter simply of an inactive contemplation of the world. It has therefore been correctly emphasized as early as the nineteenth century that world view also means — and means above all — a view of life. That nevertheless the phrase world view is asserted as the name for the attitude of man in that midst of the existent demonstrates how decisively the world became a view, as soon as man brought his life as subject into the forefront of the frame of reference. This means that the existent holds as existent only in so far as and to the extent that it is drawn into and back to this life, that it is lived through or experienced and becomes experience. As discordant as every humanism must remain to the Greek spirit, just so impossible was a medieval world view, so absurd is a catholic one. As necessarily and fittingly as everything must become experience for modern man, the more limitlessly he penetrates into the configuration of his essence, so certainly could the Greeks at the Olympian festival never have experiences.

The basic process of modern times is the conquest of the world as picture. The word “view” now means the product of representational building. In it man fights for the position in which he can be that existent which sets the standard for all existence and forms the directive for it. Because this position is secure and itself organized and expressed as world view, the modern relation to the existent in its decisive development becomes a debate between world views — and not between world views at random, but only between those which have already taken extreme basic positions of man with the last decisiveness. For this battle of world views, and in accord with the significance of this battle, man brings into play the unlimited power of calculation, planning, and cultivation of all things. Science as research is an indispensable form of this adjustment in the world, one of the paths on which the modern age races to the fulfillment of its nature with a velocity unknown to the participants. It is only with this battle of world views that the modern age enters the definitive and probably the most persistent segment of its history.

It is a sign of this process that everywhere, in the most varied forms and disguises, the gigantic makes its appearance. In this connection the gigantic also announces itself in the direction of the ever smaller. Think of the numbers of atomic physics. The gigantic presses forward in a form which appears precisely to make it vanish: in the destruction of great distances by the airplane, in the unlimited power of representation of foreign and remote worlds, made present by the turn of a hand, through the radio. But we think too superficially if we suppose that the gigantic is simply the endlessly extended emptiness of the merely quantitative. We think too rashly if we believe that the gigantic in the form of the continuously novel springs only from the blind desire to exaggerate and to surpass. We do not think at all if we suppose we have interpreted this phenomenon of the gigantic with the catchword Americanism.

The gigantic is, rather, that through which the quantitative becomes a peculiar quality and thus a distinctive type of greatness. Every historical period differs from others not only in its greatness; it has also in each case its own concept of greatness. But as soon as the gigantic in planning and calculation and organization and affirmation shifts from the quantitative to a peculiar quality, the gigantic and that which can apparently be completely and continually calculated becomes, precisely because of this, the incalculable. This remains the invisible shadow which is cast over all things everywhere when man has become subjectum and the world a view.

Through this shadow the modern world projects itself into a space withdrawn from representation and so grants to the incalculable its proper determination and its historical uniqueness. But this shadow points to something else which it is denied to us of today to know. Yet man will not be able even to experience and consider this forbidden reality so long as he wastes his time in the mere negation of his age. The flight to tradition, which combines humility and arrogance, is powerless, taken by itself, for anything except blindness and self-deception over against the historical moment.

To know, that is, to preserve in its truth, this incalculable, will be possible for man only in creative questioning and shaping of the power of true reflection. It sets the man of the future in that in-between area, in which he belongs to being and yet remains a stranger to the existent. Hölderlin knew of it. His poem which bears the superscription “To the Germans” closes:

Wohl ist enge begrenzt unsere Lebenszeit,

Unserer Jahre Zahl sehen und zählen wir,

Doch die Jahre der Völker,

Sah ein sterbliches Auge sie?

Wenn die Seele dir auch über die eigene Zeit

Sich die sehnende schwingt, trauernd verweilest du

Dann am kalten Gestade

Bei den Deinen und kennst sie nie.

Narrowly bounded is our time to live,

We see and count the number of our years,

But were the years of nations

Seen by a mortal eye?

And if your soul over your own time

Swings, the longing one, mourning you linger

On the cold shore then

Among your own and know it not.

__________________

*This translation first appeared in Measure, 2 (1951), 269-84. Heidegger’s original is included as "Die Zeit des Weltbildes" in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1963), pp. 69-89.