Sciency of Being and Ethics for Science in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks1

Ivo De Gennaro

However, the experience of these circumstances is necessary in order to think clearly, and to bethink as what it is
the decisionless (because already decided) character of this driven driving2, so as to be capable of acknowledging this
effectivity without false prejudices in favor or against. For in this dimension it is no longer a question of enthusiasm or
contempt for science — not of preferences and aversions —, but of whether one is capable of experiencing the grue
vis-à-vis this form of the will to power.3

It cannot come as a surprise that science, and in particular the modern — or “new-timeish”4 —
sciences, are a recurring theme in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks.5 As Heidegger himself writes in
Vigiliae I (1952/53) under the title Wissenschaft:

The circumstance that my thinking since more than three decades again and again, and on different occasions,
thinks after the biding (Wesen) of science, may well indicate how rootedly that biding belongs to what is to be
thought as enowning (das eigentlich Zu-Denkende). Hesperian-European “sciency” is brooked (gebraucht), and finally
be-set (be-stellt),6 from out of the biding of true-hood (Wahr-Heit);7 it belongs unto “being” and its weird (Geschick).8
The thinking-after, to which “science” becomes problematic and worthy of interrogation, does in the first and in the
last place never aim at a mere emendation or deepening of the concept of science, nor at a modification of the
organization of the sciences.9

1
Seven volumes of Black Notebooks, containing considerations from the period going from 1931 to 1957, have been
published between 2014 and 2020: three volumes of Überlegungen (HGA 94, HGA 95, HGA 96), two volumes of
Anmerkungen (HGA 97, HGA 98), and the volumes Vier Hefte I und II (HGA99) and Vigiliae und Notturno (HGA 100).
Quotations will have the form “HGA, x”, where “x” indicates the page number of the edited volume; when a single page
comprises more than one section, the section number will be added in brackets “HGA, x (y)”. Square brackets within
quotations […] contain elucidations or alternative translations, while single chevrons <…> indicate explicative additions
that are to be read as part of the text. German words are, as a rule, written in italics; however, when they are written in
italics in the German text, they appear in normal print in the English translation.
2
“Driven driving” (or “driven drive”) translates Betrieb. See below, n. 00.
3
HGA 97, 316.
4
I prefer this neologism not because it is a literal translation of German neuzeitlich, but because it explicitly indicates
novelty as a constitutive trait of the epoch of this name: modernity (in the sense of the modern age) is not just “a new
time”, but “the time of the new”, to wit, an epoch characterized by the incessant pursuit of “new” occasions for the
enhancement of power. Hence, the words “new-time” and “new-timeish” do not refer to a historical framework, but
belong to a phenomenological reconstruction of the epochs of being and the related diagnosis of the being-forsakenness
of things.
5
Other meditations on science, notably dating from the late thirties, include Propositions about “Science” (in: HGA 65,
145-158; see below, n. 00), Einige Leitsätze über das Wesen der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaften (in: HGA 76, 119-126), Die
Bedrohung der Wissenschaft (in: HGA 76, 157-189), Die Zeit des Weltbildes (in: HGA 5, 75-113). The lecture Wissenschaft
und Besinnung (in: HGA 7, 37-65), held in 1953, addresses the biding of science as “theory of the effective”.
6
In be-setting we need to hear the meaning of “to set” that speaks in expressions such as “to set someone (or: to be set)
to do something”; thus, “to beset” here means: to draw on someone or something in the exclusive view of setting him or
it in a certain (operative) respect, to coerce/exact someone or something into being set in a pre-set manner.
7
Wahr-Heit is the clearance for what is in itself heeded and whole insofar as it gathers what that same clearance shows
as the world. The suffix -heit is the same as “-hood”; it comes from a word meaning “shine, refulgence, appearance”.
8
On this translation see below, p. oo.
9
HGA 100, 59. Wissenschaft is a specifically modern phenomenon: „Science (Wissenschaft) exists only since the
grounding of the certainty (Gewißheit) of self-consciousness (Selbstbewußtsein), of conscientia.” (HGA 98, 24). Science
 What “knowledge”, or rather “sciency” — Wissen —, means in this context will be set forth in
more detail below.10 Here, it suffices to (a) specify that sciency indicates the most originary relation
of man’s being to the inception of all sense, and (b) note that in the quoted text this relation is
bethought and worded in the perspective of Ereignis or enowning: indeed, both brooking and be-
setting indicate ways in which man’s being is called upon and involved in the grounding of being.
However, initially the earliest and most silent origin of this calling keeps itself back and thus does
not become transparent for the thinking that awakens in response to that call. This intransparancy,
and the consequent unawareness, characterize the thinking of the first inception from Anaximander
to present-day bioscience. While within the scope of this unawareness, as the two just mentioned
“extremes” make clear, what is thought, and how, differs vastly, the thinking itself and what it thinks
can however be grasped according to a single constitutive trait, for which the Denkweg has the word
Vorstellen: to represent, to set/stell/place in front, to gain- or foreset11. To say that, within the scope
of the first inception, thinking is Vorstellen and what is thought is Vorgestelltes, is the same as saying
that — again, from Anaximander to bioscience — the relation between man and being is enclosed

(Wissenschaft) in the sense of scientific research (Forschung) in its turn unfolds within the domains of what is
consciously known within and on the basis of that certainty: research is effective ascertainment on the ground of an
already decided certainty. In other words, “[s]cience as absolute sciency is the ontological, science as research is the
ontic manner of the foresetting (Vorstellen) of the obstancy [or obstantness; Gegenständigkeit] of the obstant effective
(des gegenständigen Wirklichen) in its effectivity, which (that obstancy) is itself obstant-present in the foresetting. / In
the biding of technic, both [i.e. ontological and ontic science] are already absconcedly unified.” (HGA 98, 32-33). In HGA
98, 265, we find a sketch of the lineage from the Greek notion of knowledge as οἶδα (“I have seen”) to knowledge as the
technical deployment of research in the form of a methodical scanning of that which abides, which (that scanning) is
out for the latter’s explainability and thus for its controllability for the purposes of be-setting. On stellen see below, n. 00.
10
In this essay I will stick to “science” as a translation of Wissenschaft. In order to maintain the reference between
Wissenschaft and Wissen, I will translate the latter with the now obsolete form “sciency”, which used to indicate the same
as “science” in the sense of the act or fact of knowing. “Sciency” is here recoined as a word of the knowledge of being, i.e.
of the schism making itself known in its scibility. (Latin scire — from which “science”, “conscience”, etc. are derived —
and Greek σχίζω/σχίσµα presumably stem from the same root, whose meaning is “to cut, to scind, to separate”.)
11
“To gain-set” means to set over against; concerning “to foreset”, see below, n. 00.
in the domain of beëntness (i.e. of the beënt as beënt)12, and that, consequently, the truth (also: the
true-hood, or verity13) of being remains unthought.
That the interrogation of science is a constitutive moment of the Seinsfrage, implies that what
one would usually expect from a philosophical meditation on science — to wit, an “emendation or
deepening of the concept of science”, or else “a modification of the organization of the sciences” —
cannot be found in the Black Notebooks or elsewhere in Heidegger’s writings. On the other hand, the
error of assuming the rectorate of the University of Freiburg in 1933 (another recurrent theme in the
Notebooks) has its sciency-related foundation in what Heidegger himself remarks as his failure to
fully acknowledge, and accept in its implications, what the Denkweg already knows, namely the
unbridgeable chasm between the time of the other inception of thinking and that of an institution
which, with regard to science, could at most concede “conceptual emendations” or “deepenings”, as
well as “organizational modifications”, and thus remain unwittingly implicated in, and subservient
to, the decisionless progress of “science” prompted by the be-setting of Gestell and its truthlessness.
More specifically, “conceptual emendations and deepenings” and “organizational modifications”
sum up the two modalities in which today philosophy can “validly” relate to the sciences, namely,
respectively, in the form of a philosophy of science (or theory of knowledge viz. epistemology), and
as an ethics of science: the former — having given up the foundational ambitions that were still alive
in German idealism — as an auxiliary technique for the sharpening of concepts and the construction
of conceptual narratives; the latter — having given up the ambition of conceiving the scope of
scientific knowledge within the project of a human ethos — as a complementary adjustment of the
framework and consequences of scientific research. According to their role as functional facilitators
of scientific practice, both the philosophy of science and the ethics of science adopt the fundamental

12
The translation of das Seiende and Seiendes poses a problem: given that in English both Sein and Seiendes are indicated
with the sound “being” (in one case, as a verbal substantive, in the other, as a participial noun), it is often difficult to
word adequately the schism that atones-and-scinds the two “folds” of the twofold ‘Sein–Seiendes’. In this text, I follow
Gino Zaccaria’s suggestion of using the form “beënt”, previously “introduced to represent Germ. seiend, as expressing
pure being in the Hegelian sense“ (Oxford English Dictionary, ad loc.). Zaccaria writes: “I myself employ the word [beënt]
almost always substantively to indicate a being, an ens, that is already experienced within the schism. In this manner,
the schism achieves its full configuration, which can be expressed in the following way: the scope of being in furthering
favour of the beënt and (this “and” being the fulcrum of the schism, i.e. the instant) the beënt favoured-furthered with
and by the scope of being — according to that favourableness that is the very abode of human existence.” (See the
“Lexicon of a Thought-Path” in: Gino Zaccaria, The Enigma of Art. On the Provenance of Artistic Creation. Leiden: Brill
2021, ad loc. [Schism and Beënt].)
13
Next to truth and, occasionally, true-hood, verity is, depending on the context, another acceptable translation of the
Denkweg-word Wahrheit. Specifically, verity conveys the sense of Wahrheit in the fullness of its dimensional flagrancy as
the tempered-meted, clearing-ensconcing schismatic element for the appearing and disappearing of the very beënts of
a human world. For an exemplary use of this word, see Gino Zaccaria, The Enigma of Art. On the Provenance of Artistic
Creation. Leiden: Brill 2021, especially §§ 5–8 and § 10.
assumptions, hence the constitutive decisionlessness, of the sciences as unquestionable facts, and,
consequently, employ philosophy as a conceptual tool-box on which to draw in order to provide
their services — which certainly can and in the best case will be useful within the scope defined by
that decisionlessness. What, then, can be the import of a “thinking after the biding of science”, if it
is neither that of laying a ground for the sciences nor that of organizationally supporting scientific
research in its groundless functioning? And in what sense, if any, can this thinking be qualified as
“ethical”?
As to the first question, we need to recall what has been stated above: the thinking after the biding
of science is not “about science”, but “about the Seinsfrage”. The latter involves what Heidegger calls
the Auseinandersetzung with metaphysics as the form of thinking that attains its ultimate likelihood
(Möglichkeit), and thus “ends”, in the deployment of new-timeish science.14 Auseinandersetzung
implies setting at difference, or setting in sunder, from one another the thinking of the Denkweg, on
the one hand, and metaphysics and its offspring, i.e. science, on the other. Understanding (a) in what
sense metaphysical and scientific thinking are the same, and (b) how “the difference” that sets apart
the latter two and the thinking of the other inception, is not merely “a relation of difference”, but the
very sake (die Sache) of that thinking — (this understanding) is a constitutive task of the Seinsfrage
itself.15 Finally — and this concerns the second question —, this Auseinandersetzung promises to
provide a sufficient diagnosis of the biding of scientific thinking, whereas a metaphysical diagnosis
cannot be sufficient in this sense due to the mentioned sameness, or indifference, of the two forms
of thinking, both of which are, each in its own way, oblivious of the difference itself. This diagnosis
involves an insight into the origin and destination of the sciences, thus into their likelihood and
unlikelihood; into what is their scope and what is not; into what they can rightly claim and what
they cannot; into how they can take part in the grounding and preservation of a human dwelling

14
Metaphysics as such notably finds its final form in “psychology”: “The final form of accomplished metaphysics is
biological-characterological psychology as the tool of the possible computation and steering of all life at the service of
the securing of life itself for the purpose of the enhancement of the will to life.” (HGA 97, 32; on psychology see also HGA
97, 25, and HGA 97, 81-82).
15
That philosophy increasingly becomes a “take”, if not a spoil, of science (which springs from philosophy itself); that, in
other words, ontology more and more comes under the sway of the ontic, is a likely consequence of the circumstance
that the (ontological) difference as such cannot be experienced within the scope of metaphysics (see HGA 98, 146-47).
In fact, metaphysics and the sciences “have built their abidance in the schism (Unterschied) in such a way that the latter
remains forgotten as such, namely, in the question-worthiness of its biding. / Metaphysics and the sciences are, each in
its own way, claimed by that which is scinded in the schism. They answer to it insofar as — in the way of metaphysics
— they represent (con-ceive) the being of the beënt, and — in the way of the sciences — they explain and describe the
beënt (in being). / Insight: neither metaphysics nor the sciences are from out of themselves capable of bringing each
other into the playing-space of a productive setting-each-other-at-difference from one another, through which they
could, in the first place, come back unto what is their own.” (HGA 100, 156-57).
and how they are not capable to do so; in other words, it contributes to building what can, I think,
legitimately be called an ethical stance vis-à-vis and indeed within the sciences themselves: not (and
for constitutive reasons)16 an ethics “of” science, but rather an ethics for science.
The following notes have two extrinsic limitations (the intrinsic ones being given by the limits of
understanding on the side of who is writing). First, they can only present some major motives and
arguments of Heidegger’s meditation on scientific research in the Notebooks; moreover, they will
leave out almost entirely his critical considerations both on the institutional abode of science,
namely university, and on his own rectorate.17 Second, and more important, they will tacitly accept
certain insufficiencies concerning the translation of a number of primary words, and therefore in
the wording of what they attempt to indicate.18 In fact, since the meditation on science (in the
Notebooks and elsewhere) is not an isolated episode, but a constitutive moment of the diagnostics
of the tradition of metaphysics, any discussion of that meditation must take place within this wider
context, and this means: at the level of the language in which it is articulated. However, for reasons
of economy, as a rule I will mostly resort to previously elaborated translative solutions19 or else to
commonly used translations — even when I am aware of their insufficiency. A partial exception to
this rule is the problem of the translation of the Denkweg-words Geschichte and Historie.

1. Geschichte and Historie

A constant theme in Heidegger’s writings in the period spanned by the Notebooks is the difference
between Geschichte and Historie. The meditation on science, too, is embedded in this distinction. In
fact, if for Heidegger the name that indicates the fundamental character of new-timeish science is
Forschung, research,20 the constitutive trait of Forschung itself — no matter in which discipline or
field — is found in its belongingness to Historie. This, in turn, makes for the predominant role of
scientific thinking in forging new-timeish man as an “historical animal”, to wit, the form of man
required by the biding of technic.21 In this regard, in Überlegungen X we read the following:

16
See below, section four of this essay.
17
These considerations are not only found in the notes dating from the time of, or immediately after, the rectorate
(collected in HGA 94), but also in later years; see, e.g., HGA 95, 432-434 and HGA 96, 182-83.
18
A notable example is the word Entscheidung.
19
Mostly in my The Weirdness of Being. Heidegger’s Unheard Answer to the Seinsfrage. London: Routledge 2013.
20
HGA 95, 315.
21
“The biding of technic is the unconditional setting up (Herstellung) of the boundless set-up-ability (Herstellbarkeit) of
all the abiding (das Anwesende) into set-up-ness (Hergestelltheit) […] In the set-up-ness resides the obstancy into the
 Nietzsche’s reflection on Historie touches upon a constitutive question of new-time — yet, Nietzsche does not
attain an interior overcoming of Historie based on the biding of Geschichte — he merely protects Historie against
science. The consequence of his | reckoning up of Historie [in terms of its “utility for life”] is the enhanced power of
“Historie” in the sense of the forward-turned Historie, i.e. the Historie which reckons the future. Thanks to Nietzsche’s
determination of Historie, the latter merely becomes even more new-timeish — that is, definitively subservient to
“life” as such, <that is> to the self-securing of man.
Historie: the technic of “Geschichte”.
Technic: the Historie of “nature”. (Cf. earlier considerations).
Insofar as Historie and technic are metaphysically the same, this sameness at the same time corresponds to the
sameness of nature and Geschichte in the sense of “life” as the pressing, self-framing power.
The beënt’s forsakenness by being (die Seinsverlassenheit des Seienden), in the form of the needlessness [on the
side of the beënt] of being, is accomplished. Man is only capable of seeing what is his making; “man”, however, <is
here intended> in his new-timeish form, hence necessarily singularized into comprehensive “subjects”.22

As to the implications of the mentioned sameness of Historie and technic, in Überlegungen IX we

find this clarification:

In the sameness of Historie and technic lies the ground for which the <form of> man who has actuated it, and
finally established its primacy, has become unbearable to the gods and is abandoned to his unbiding, which now
completely empowers the beënt to an exclusive predominance over the verity of beȝng (Seyn). The sameness itself,
however, is based on the construction of beëntness as steady abidingness (beständige Anwesenheit) — which sets
itself forth and renders itself to the fore-setting [re-presenting] setting-up (to de-claring [ex-plaining] and its clarity
– correctness of foresetting [representing] as truth).23 That very construction of beëntness is the going-under [the
setting] that is already decided in, and together with, the first inception of the thinking of being <insofar> as <it is

self-foresetting foresetting [the self-representing representing] (das sich vorstellende Vorstellen).” (HGA 98, 24; see below,
n. 00).
22
HGA 95, 351.
23
“Fore”, here, has the sense of “in front”; setting-forth, foresetting and setting-up, translate, respectively, darstellen,
vorstellen and herstellen. — A short note on translation: The Denkweg is a path through language in its primary capacity
for naming and indicating the uncommon, i.e. beȝng. This implies that its speaking is essentially and necessarily a
coining, or rather a re-coining. “(Re-)Coining”, here, means: electing a word — which in most cases has a common use
and meaning — as (what it shows to be in the first place, namely) a word of beȝng (i.e. the uncommon). In all languages,
thinking in the style of the Denkweg will hold itself in this same relation to language. Inter-lingual translation (that is,
translation from one language to another) is a peculiar instance of such thinking, in that it unfolds as a close dialogue
with an already spoken word, which (that dialogue) is bound to maintaining a certain measure of correspondence, or
mirroring. Given that translating, as an instance of thinking, is also essentially and necessarily a coining of words that
indicate the uncommon, the mirroring-constraints that translation has to creatively deal with will most likely be best
satisfied by complying with the following rule: when the “word of beȝng” of the language from which we translate also
has a common use and meaning, the word elected for translation can be a mirror-word of the translated one, considered
in its common use and meaning, if and only if the mirror-word lets itself be (re-)coined, that is, in its turn elected as the
“word of beȝng” that it will have shown to be in light of what is to be thought in the first place; on the other hand, if no
mirror-word lets itself be elected (coined) in this sense, in short: if there is no suitable coinable common word, the
coining will have to resort to an uncommon word (i.e. a word that, presently, has no, or no comparable, common use
and meaning), and make sure that, first of all, “the uncommon” that is indicated in the word of the translated language
“has its say” in the translating language as well. Success in doing so no doubt justifies the double price paid, namely first
(and most important), in terms of the peculiar refulgence and depth of resonance of re-coined common words (i.e.
common words “reduced” to, or translated unto, the word of beȝng); and second (and less important), in terms of the
fact that the translated and the translating word do not mirror each other at the surface level of common use and
meaning. An evident implication of the thus formulated rule is that, as stated above, translation can in no case forego
coining, and instead elect a word merely due to the fact that it mirrors, to an extent, the common use and meaning of
the word that is to be translated. A failure to comply with this rule will result in the fact that thinking remains confined
to the common (i.e. the beënt) and excluded from the uncommon (i.e. beȝng).
 precisely this:> an inception. With this going-under begins the Geschichte of philosophy with its yet unrecognized
tragedies of cognition.24

Both Historie and technic indicate a relation to beings via their — ontologically or ontically —
construed beëntness, which is in turn understood as steady abidingness. On this basis, Historie,
taken in its most ample and constitutive scope, indicates nothing else than the domain of
vorstellendes Rechnen, or, as we can tentatively translate, “foresetting computation”25; in other words,
Historie is the “exploratory [investigative, ascertaining, reccing] setting (Feststellen) of what is
extant, ‘present’”.26 The focus on what is “’present’” (this is what the quotation marks suggest) does
not concern what is “now” in its constitutive reference to what is “yet to be” and what is “no longer”:
rather, “present” here means: straightaway available to life and the computational operations
through which life itself secures its own continuity and enhancement. The immediate scope of the
computational-setting life-sphere defines what is heutig, that is, “of today”. The regard of this scope
— the eye of Historie — can then be directed to what was in the past or will come in the future, so
as to absorb and incorporate both as an “input” for the empowerment of the will to life. However,
whatever falls into this sphere — be it, in a chronological sense, past, present or future — is
vergangen from the point of view of the genesis of its sense: it “has had” what it is, i.e. its sense, and
has left this sense definitively behind; in other words, it is positively senseless, and therefore
absolutely available for computative investigation, that is, for research.27
In a nutshell, the domain of Historie is that of the beënt left to itself. This domain is not opposed
to that of Geschichte, but different from it. Again, the difference, or schism (Unterschied), is not a
given relation that subsists between two separately constituted domains (i.e. Historie and
Geschichte). Rather, Geschichte itself is nothing else than the breaking and inception of the schism
itself, its coming as a coming in upon man, which turns him over to his belongingness to Da-sein.
Geschichte: the breaking of the schism as inception; Historie: the lack of and needlessness with regard
to the schism. This needlessness is what is meant when we say that the beënt “is forsaken by being”
and left to itself. When Historie (in the form of science, of Wikipedia, of common sense, etc.), being
constitutively excluded from Geschichte, envisages “Geschichte”, it does so technically, that is, in the

24
HGA 95, 236.
25
HGA 95, 91.
26
HGA 95, 100.
27
What is given to Historie as erkundbar, i.e. such that can be explored, investigated, recced, ascertained, is (again:
independent of its chronological location) already vergangen (cf. HGA 97, 491). On the “present” as the “past” in the sense
of “the needless in the form of the highest driven drive, and of the denial of any likelihood of Geschichte”, see HGA 95,
111.
set of foresetting setting-up, which implements “the set” for the unrestrained setting of the will to
will. The exclusive technical prompting of the beënt, which characterizes Historie, intercepts the
inception (i.e. the “jolts of beȝng”28), and thus perpetuates the staying away of Geschichte. The “time”
of Historie is this — timeless, futureless — “perpetuity”, while Geschichte is “the abruptness of the
round dance in which consists the world”29, or, to quote one the numerous definitions that we find
in the Notebooks,

Geschichte — when a clearing trail of beȝng bolts through [the beënt]30 and, as it goes out, invisibly stalls,31
always to offer a maze to the beënt, and an expanse for man to come to be at home, who, on the run from his biding,
puts the beënt before beȝng and therein snatches a temporary satisfaction.32

As becomes clear from these brief indications, to say that Historie is the domain of beings (or of
the ontic), while Geschichte is the domain of being itself (or of the ontological), is somehow correct,
but in no way sufficient, and therefore not true. For Historie is precisely the exclusive confinement
to the beënt that, left to itself, appears exclusively in the form of operable resources in a
computational setting that is the extreme reinforcement of the staying away of Geschichte, and thus
“one unique walling-up of any space-of-time for an attuning hint of the refusal of beȝng”33, and this
means: of beȝng itself as refusal.
On this basis, how are we to render Geschichte and Historie in English?
For Historie it seems acceptable to stick to “history”, provided that we hear this word in the ample
sense in which it indicates the new-timeish form of ἱστορεῖν, that is, the domain of historing and
historiating qua “declaratory [explanatory] foresetting”34 of the beingless beënt.35 In other words, the
meaning of history is not to be sought, in the first place, in the realm of past occurrences or facts,
nor in whatever form (including the historiographic one) of the account thereof, but in a
fundamental relation to the beënt; this relation — marked by the extreme forgottenness of the
ontological difference — constitutes the “historial36 facts” not only of the science of history (which
we call “historical”), but also, for instance, of mathematical physics (e.g., the historial-computable-

28
HGA 95, 1.
29
HGA 97, 492.
30
Editor’s amendment.
31
This is another formulation of what is otherwise (notably in HGA 65) indicated as das zögernde Sichversagen.
32
HGA 95, 46.
33
HGA 95, 298.
34
HGA 95, 224.
35
History is an instance, as well as the gathering and domain of all forms of historing and historiating, just as memory is
the same with regard to memorating, and trickery with regard to tricking.
36
I suggest to use this adjective, rather than “historical”, when the reference to Historie is explicit.
explainable fact “atom”, the historial-computable-explainable fact “light”, etc.), and likewise of all
sciences as setting-theories of the factual and effective (das Wirkliche).
As to Geschichte, previous considerations strongly suggest that no version or understanding of
history, notably insofar as is involves the character of a process, or a development, or even the
reference to an exceptional and incisive event, or series of events, can in any way indicate anything
else than — the domain of Historie. Furthermore, the reference to cognate words such as Geschehen
or Geschick, which often appear in the contexts in which the Denkweg bethinks Geschichte, remains
sterile for the task of translation as long as we understand those words, respectively, as a factual
occurrence (albeit at the “ontological” level), and as the power of fate viz. a factual development
ruled by such power. On the other hand, based on the borne experience of a “clearing trail of beȝng”
(which is a rigorous manner of indicating what a more “plain”, but phenomenologically insufficient
language would call “a decision concerning the being of the beënt”), we remark how these words
name constitutive traits of the phenomenon Geschichte, and in the first place “the phenomenon of
phenomena”, to wit: the schism as the abruptness of the halting of abscondence (Verbergung).37 The
abruptness of the schism is the phenomenon without which the constitution of space and time, and
therefore of the inscape of all appearing, cannot but remain (as in metaphysics) a mere condition of
likely appearances relegated to the function of pure intuition in the act of objectizing, or (as in
physics) an obscure miracle forever enshrined in the unquestionable obviousness of operative
assumptions concerning the movement of things.
The word family of the verbs “to worth” (in the sense of “to come about, to happen”) and “to
weird” (“to destine, to assign or apportion as one’s lot or destiny”), both related to German werden,
would seem to provide at least a first stepping stone on the way towards the coining of a sufficient
English response to the Denkweg-word Geschichte. The reason for this is not the semantic affinity of
“weird” and Geschick/Schicksal,38 but the circumstance that, as far as I can see, usage has spared the
trait of abrupt coming of what is in itself strange and uncanny, which is named in those words, from
being customarily associated with “past” (as to their sense-constitution) and as such recountable
events. Hence, we say “weird” for Geschick, “wyrd” (an older writing of the same word) for Geschichte,

37
The phenomenon is: abscondence itself qua withdrawing refusal halts while withdrawing.
38
To charge Historie with a value in terms of “fate”, “destiny” and “lot” does not approach it to Geschichte — on the
contrary. In Überlegungen VIII (HGA 95, 141 [31]) we read: “As to ‘destiny’ [Schicksal] — what if this concept was just the
last way out [escape] of Historie — a way out into the wayless, the renouncement of any mindfulness?”
and “wyrdal” for geschichtlich (hence “being-wyrdal” for seinsgeschichtlich, etc.)39. This results, for
instance, in the following English versions:

Wyrd — who could decide whether the verity of beȝng absconds only for some who are <in their turn>
absconded, and, like a lost wind gust in a remote valley floor, drifts away above the earth, and one day lets all
belongingness enown itself for <the time of> a glance, thus letting the god be rememberable for man, and man brook-
able for the god.40

Nietzsche, too, with his three kinds of history, remains caught in the wyrdal <grasped only insofar> as it is in each
case historically determined [namely, computed and evaluated by and for the sake of life] in this or that manner. On
the other hand, “wyrd” is to be enthought only as the struggle against the threat <posed> by beȝng | in the form of its
refusal —, which (that threat) urges man into the driven drive of the activation and operation of the beënt, and
commits him unto history. History springs from a nescience of — and a failure to suffer — the wyrd, and this means:
from the being-forsakenness of the beënt, which, in the form of the oblivion of being, captivates man.41

2. Science as nescience

One of the main motives of the diagnosis of new-timeish science in the Notebooks is its lack of
Wissen, or sciency, in other words: its ignorance or nescience.

The prevailing deification of science and its performance — which (that deification) today [1931] has only lapsed
into its contrary. At a closer look, there is agreement and “progress” everywhere in what is superficial, technical, in
the task and gathering of immediate “results” — however, in all that is constitutive, where it comes down to actual
sciency, everything comes apart and, above all, is characterized by a deplorable dilettantism.42

Science — is cognition without sciency, i.e. without insistency (Inständigkeit) in the verity of beȝng. Sciency is
cognition without objectizing the cognized, and without shifting it into the beënt.43

An adequate construction of this nescience is necessary for understanding the ethical scope of
Heidegger’s diagnosis. By way of introduction, we can recall what is said in section 75 (“On Being
Mindful of Science”) of Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) concerning the “two and only
two ways of being mindful of ‘science’”44: “one way grasps science” in the perspective of the “building

39
The Oxford English Dictionary has the verb „yworth” (where “y” corresponds to German ge-) as an obsolete form of
“worth”, meaning “to happen, occur, become”. Why, then, not say “yworth” for Geschehen and “ywyrd” for Geschichte,
given that the prefix ge- indicates not only the gathering of all “occurrences”, but — as the primary, inceptive trait, and
therefore in the first place — their withdrawn origin? We might repudiate a similar proposal, and not even deem it
worthy to be taken into consideration. Fine. However, the question remains if a “thinking of being”, if it is to take place
in English, can do without the aforementioned coining (be it of common or of uncommon, or even of newly formed
words), and the transformation of our relation to language that such coining requires.
40
HGA 95, 38
41
HGA 95, 336.
42
HGA 94, 33 [92].
43
HGA 96, 275.
44
Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), p. 100 (HGA 65, 144). Section 75 introduces the “Propositions about
‘Science’” of the following section, which constitute one of the key texts of Heidegger’s meditation on this issue.
of a knowledge [sciency] whose essence is primarily rooted in a more originary grounding of the
truth of be-ing [of the verity of beȝng].”45 Part of what is set forth in Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede, as
well as in different passages of the Notebooks, belongs to this way. “The other way”, which is but the
reverse of the first, and quantitatively more present in the Notebooks, “grasps science in its present
and actual constitution”46 — not, however, in a descriptive, but rather in a diagnostic perspective,
namely by attempting “to grasp the essence [biding] of modern science in terms of the strivings that
belong to this essence [biding]”47; this, however, can only take place within the same “coming to
terms” with the first inception of thinking (i.e. the aforesaid “setting at difference” and “setting in
sunder”) that also characterizes the previously indicated way.
In terms of the three unitary moments of phenomenological method, we can say that the second
way prevalently belongs to the moments of destruction (namely, of science in its new-timeish biding
or constitution) and reduction (namely, [reduction] to the first inception, insofar as that which
remains withheld in it ultimately determines the “strivings” of new-timeish science), while the first
way pertains to the moments of reduction (again, to the first inception, but now as an inrun for the
leap into the other inception and its grounding) and construction (namely, of a future sciency).
The diagnosis of new-timeish science is exposed to being misunderstood in the same way as any
other diagnosis of the Denkweg. However, for reasons that the insights gathered on both “ways” allow
to grasp, it is also, and especially, met with suspicions of hostility, and accusations of arrogance, with
respect to science, and with the ensuing indignation and outrage. The “reason of reasons” for this
attitude lies in the failure to appreciate “how rootedly” the biding of science “belongs to what is to
be thought as enowning”.48 One might initially be suspicious with regard to a thinking that attempts
to unearth the threat posed to science by (and indeed the temptation in which consists) its own
biding. But what becomes of that suspicion when it dawns that, for that same thinking, beȝng itself
is, i.e. consists in, a threat and temptation (Bedrohung and Gefahr), namely to itself? In fact, only the
realization beȝng is an attempt on itself is originally freeing, in that it frees man’s being unto the off-
ground (Abgrund) and its in itself “turnsome”, brooking ascendancy49. Only this originary freedom

45
Ibid. Square brackets contain my alternative translations.
46
Ibid.
47
Ibid.
48
See above, p. 00.
49
Here not in the sense of domination, but as an indication of the “abysmally vertical” trait through which the off-ground
— as it absconds into the groundlessness from which it descends — attains man, thus engaging him to ground the verity
of that descent, in order for the off-ground itself to sway as a ground for a human world. This very engaging (the
circumstance that the schism “avails itself” of man’s being) is what Heidegger refers to with the word brauchen, to brook.
finally frees the human being from the mind-set that gives rise to the mentioned attitudes, namely,
the mind-set that consists in thinking in terms of values and through values. Such thinking can only
evaluate an ontological diagnosis as if it were itself a “morally charged” valuation, while it cannot
liberate itself from seeing in success and performance a criterion of scientificity, thus remaining
spellbound by that which the Notebooks call the Reklame — publicity, propaganda, self-promotion
—50 produced by the sciences and the media apparatus to which they are subservient. This kind of
evaluative thinking is only capable of a quasi-religious idolization, or “deification”51 of science, but
not of a love of it.52
What does it mean that the new-timeish sciences — Wissenschaften — are incapable of sciency
— Wissen —, and therefore nescient? An expansion of the previously suggested equation (i.e. beȝng
= threat, temptation/attempt) is the shortest way to an answer. The expansion goes as follows:

beȝng (qua refusal) = threat (to itself) and temptation (of itself) = evil53

If sciency is precisely the borne knowledge of the phenomenon indicated by this equation, we
can see why science — that is, the new-timeish sciences with their form of knowledge — are
excluded from that sciency, and therefore nescient. Why? Because, due to their historial character,
they are entirely confined to the functional setting, and computative enhancement, of the beënt that
is forsaken by being, without the awareness that this setting is, in truth, the implementation of
beȝng’s turning against itself and setting itself on itself, and therefore the consolidation of
wyrdlessness, and thus, finally, the perpetuation of evil as willed by evil itself. On the other hand,
sciency — Wissen — is (or has its root in) precisely that awareness, which is accessible to every
scientist, albeit not as a scientist, to wit, with the methods and procedures of scientific research.54

50
See HGA 98, 78-80, where the reference is specifically to the erroneous self-representation of new-timeish (natural)
science, insofar as the latter pretends to change the image of the world and to change the categories, when in fact it
consists in an implementation, or playing out, of previous (here: Kantian) ontological decisions, and remains unaware
of the provenance of its biding from the biding of technic, i.e. Gestell. (See also HGA 98, 269: “The industrial character of
science entails the traits of coterie and promotion.”)
51
HGA 94, 33 (92).
52
Arguably, the Denkweg’s meditation on science is the highest form of love for it — higher still than that of new-timeish
metaphysics, which, based on the unawareness of what is absconced in the ontological difference (i.e. the schism or
Unter-schied), is incapable of setting itself at difference from it, and, consequently, setting it free unto what is its own.
53
“Wyrd is, where no one senses it; it stands in a rare, itself absconced refulgence. The wyrdal can carry in itself a grim
malignity, which is not to be mistaken for the historial concept of ‘moral’ wickedness and mere meanness.” (HGA 95, 167
[47])
54
This awareness could be the prelude to a “fruitful crisis” “of science and of the concept of science”, for which however
“the space and the perspectives” are lacking (cf. HGA 94, 52). See also HGA 97, 278, where Heidegger quotes a sentence
Bearing this awareness, insisting in beȝng’s constitutive attempt on itself, and thus holding open the
turning-space (called Da) for beȝng to turn away from turning against itself, is what the Denkweg
calls (the preparatory practice for) thinking; this bearing and insisting is indeed the Denkweg itself.55
The wyrdal sciency of being is no less involved in the evil than the historial nescience of the sciences;
however, the kind of involvement is different, in that only that sciency holds (bears, sustains, keeps,
safeguards) the turning point for beȝng’s return from turning against itself. This return, on the other
hand, defines the beȝng-wyrdal notion of “good”.
A different manner of saying the same is the following: the sciences, qua “functional theories of
the effective”, consist in different historial implementations of a mode of the beëntness of beings56,
which they unawares “inherit” from a jolt of wyrd.57 However, only the latter involves the openness
of an Entscheidung — a “decision” —, in that it consists in an absconced turn of the schism itself,
which (that jolt or turn) informs a true-hood (or truthlessness) for the beënt. Hence, the sciences are
incapable of decisions: their domains of investigation (the sectors of new-timeish ἱστορεῖν) consist
in a never remarked, hence not interrogated decisionlessness, which makes for their “constitutive
unconstitutiveness”, or “essential inessentiality”58. The capacity for decisions does not consist in
some kind of hominal “decisiveness” or “resoluteness”, but in the insistency in the openness of the
turning point for a return in en-owning; in the bearance of the open undecidedness of beȝng; in the
sufferance of the staying away of the true-hood for a world in the form of the needless driven drive59

from Being and Time (HGA 2, 13): “The level of a science results from the extent to which it is capable of a crisis of its
fundamental concepts.”
55
This characterization might help to put in perspective the often cited proposition “science doesn’t think” in the 1950
lecture course What Heights Thinking? (HGA 8).
56
Here, the mode set by the biding of technic, or willed by the will to will, such as beëntness qua information.
“Implementation” indicates how an ontological determination is merely played out at the operative-functional level.
57
On these jolts see HGA 95, 1 (1) and HGA 95, 15 (15).
58
HGA 94, 460.
59
“Driven drive” or “driven driving” translate Betrieb when the latter is as a word, or rather a wording-itself, of being;
resonances from its common meaning are therefore relevant only insofar as they indicate in their turn traits that pertain
to the wording of being. Betrieb commonly means business, bustle, operation; the verb betreiben, on which it is formed,
includes the meanings “to operate, to practice, to conduct, to run, to control”, while the base verb treiben refers to what
in English would be indicated as “to bustle, to move, to force, to drive”. What is the trait that we need to retain? In Vier
Hefte I, we read: “Gestell and Betrieb; (force); machine; Getriebe [gear, transmission, drive]. / Since Gestell, in its setting,
everywhere stabilizes as a standing resource the effective in its effectivity, and since what is set up in this effectivity is
‘force’, and therefore Treiben and Getriebe, Gestell has, as a trait that constitutively belongs to it, Betrieb. / Cf.
Anmerkungen VI, 82.” (HGA 99, 50). The reference to Anmerkungen VI (HGA 98, 51-52) is to a passage that shows how
two being-traits, namely the Auf-stand (literally: the up-stand or up-stance; commonly: insurgency, uprising) of man and
the Gegen-stand (literally: the ob-stand or ob-stance) of things, belong together in the trait of Beständigung (i.e. the
aforementioned “stabilization as a standing resource”), and thus in Gestell. Aufstand, which refers to the “insurgency” of
man into subjectity (Subjectität), implies a number of supplementary being-traits, to wit, Aufregung (stir, agitation),
Unrast (restlessness), Raffen (grubbing, reaping) and Hast (haste, hurry, precipitation). As we can see, the traits that in
of the only-beënt — in one word: (that capacity for decisions consists in, and is indeed the same as)
Da-sein or there-being.

Sciency and science. — Any great and whole sciency finds itself — and thus spreads out its biding in its mightiness
and duration — in philosophy. Philosophy is the fundamental supposition and the court of law for the waxing and
waning as well as the mere drifting away of science — insofar as the latter, in one manner, makes of sciency itself an
institution and a task.60

Science is always distance to the object [the obstant; Gegenstand], and thus a fortiori to the beënt, and therefore
it is necessary to install the makingness [Machenschaft] and computation in order to undo that distance.61 The
sciency of science is very much conditional und therefore never “compelling”62.
Sciency in the true sense is belongingness to beȝng, and requires the leap into the verity of beȝng. The grounding
of the belongingness is there-being qua wyrd.63

Being mindful of science can now just have the meaning of recognizing “science” as that which it had to become,
to wit, a subordinate64 technic, | which, according to its constitution, can no longer have a future of its own, but only
dissolves itself and thus becomes part of [is absorbed in] human behavior. This future inessentiality of science,
however, does not mean that unscientificity could be equated with nescience; for constitutive sciency can neverbe
obtained and grounded through “science” in the first place.65

The sciences never research the biding of the beënt, but in their own way avail themselves of, and use up [for the
extraction of discoveries], a [elsewhere decided] constitutive determination. The biding of the beënt — being itself
— is not researchable in the first place, if “research” is taken to denote the scientific relation to the beënt.
Only once being and the interrogation after it fall prey to oblivion, research comes to be noted in its procedures
and results; it then takes over the role of “spiritual” creation; “art” and “science” are now named together. Sciences
are decisionless, | they lack the capacity to let arise the need for, and to unfold, a constitutive decision.66

the first place speak in Betrieb are those of Treiben and Getriebe (which is the gathering of modes and instances of
Treiben) in an ontological sense; these traits resonate in betreiben as operating, running, controlling, and in Betrieb as
operation, while at the same time informing the ontological sense of agitated, restless, reaping, hasteful operating that
is indicated in Betrieb qua business and bustle. How, then, are we to translate Betrieb, when it speaks distinctly from out
of the biding of Gestell? “Business” and “bustle” don’t seem to be sufficient solutions, as they forego the reference to
treiben (driving as forcing, and this as a mode of entbergen, or disabsconcing); on the other hand, “drive” and “driving”
do not indicate, at least immediately, the trait of agitation etc. that belongs to the uprising of man into subjectity. Yet,
somebody who “is driven” (in German: ein Getriebener) is pressured, compelled, and thus restless, if not obsessed. Why,
then, not translate this forceful pressure and restlessness into its ontological trait and coin “driven driving” (or, when the
verbal aspect is not primarily meant, “driven drive”) as a tentative translation of Betrieb?
60
HGA 94, 129.
61
Implicit in this remark is a diagnosis of the peculiar, obtrusive proximity of things in the domain of makesomeness, i.e.
of the itself made relation between computable-livable values (as “proxies” of things themselves), and our computing
animality. This relation, if it is truly experienced, reminds of — and, to an alerted ear, already “sounds” — Ereignis.
62
The compellingness of science has the character of the demonstration of a thesis; on the “dogmatic” scope of such
demonstrating see HGA 98, 54.
63
HGA 94, 372 (100).
64
Subordinate because subservient to, and steered by, operative purposes, as well as the powers pursuing those purposes,
and ultimately unwittingly obeisant to makingness itself, i.e. the beëntness willed by the will to will. In this context,
Heidegger (see HGA 94, 431 [22]) speaks of Dienerhaftigkeit, servantship.
65
HGA 94, 383 (115).
66
HGA 95, 101. In light of the ‘driven-drive’-character of the sciences in the age of time of unfettered makingness, “[a]ny
attempt to bring the sciences into a connection with ‘sciency’ in the sense of the grounding and decision of a truth, must
fall prey to general ridicule.” (HGA 96, 44 [23]). On the other hand, “[t]he claim of sciency on the side of the sciences,
and of the representatives of ‘the’ science, is by no means based on a sciency, but on a belief, namely, the misbelief that
all that is, is for the sake of science.” (HGA 98, 350).
 “Science” as an “ideal” of knowledge can be ambivalent. “Science” can indicate that mere cognizance and
explanation does not yet make for knowledge — that the latter only begins in constitutive, interrogating, deciding
sciency. In this case, “scientificity” is but a title for the attitude that has left behind all computative “science” in the
form of “positive research”; however, it is a title that merely expresses a helplessness, as “science” meanwhile has
taken on that other meaning, according to which not sciency — qua deliverance of the biding-ground of the beënt
(in other words, qua waging the verity of beȝng) — is essential, but the disbandment of such sciency in favor of
scientia in the sense of science67, that is, the explaining-dominating computation of what happens to be obstantively
(Gegenständlich [sic]) useful and relevant.68

Sciences can never — and never need to — go through decisions; it is always decided on them;69 the deciding
forces and institutions differ depending on wyrdal circumstances. The fact that sciences not only can at any one time
conform to those differences, but at the same time always obtain their impulses from those more or less explicit
decisions, is not proof of their “time-transcendence” [“supratemporality”], but of their procedural and operative
character.70 Consequently, the progress of the sciences does not consist in the production of new results, but in the
simplification and ever growing naturality of the flow of organized driven driving.71 With time, the requirement of
cognitions will therefore become smaller and smaller, hence also the demands on those who are in charge of keeping
the scientific “business” going.72

“Sciences” — what we call that way is not even science any more, namely the unfolding of and tying back unto
sciency, but the elopement of a bustling occupation, which is even “beneficial” — <it consists of> effluents, which
are still taken as self-streaming rivers; and as something that present arrogance and lack of judgement would once
more want to trim.73

Scientific nescience implies the ignorance of what thinking, on the other hand, cannot cease to
bethink, namely of science’s own biding insofar as it “belongs to what is to be thought as enowning.”

67
French.
68
HGA 95, 249 (84). Note the difference between gegenständig (indicating the verbal trait of standing-against, opposing;
I translate: obstant) and gegenständlich (indicating the nominal trait of having the character of a Gegenstand, i.e. an
object or an obstant; I translate: objective or obstantive). — The feeling of doing something relevant, the seemingly life-
affirming character of planned-out research activities, makes for the peculiar “glee” or “jollity” that characterizes science
(namely, researchers themselves whose results cater to the will to life), and its administrative institution, i.e. university;
on the other hand, “traditional” erudites or scholars (as opposed to “modern” researchers) can only take comfort in
thinking that what they found out will “one day, for someone, somewhere, be a ‘building stone’ — but for what building?”
(see HGA 95, 9 [9]).
69
Cf. HGA 95, 126.
70
In other words: The circumstance that the sciences obtain their decisive “inputs” from a domain (i.e. “the realm of
decisions”, wyrd itself) in which as sciences they are not involved, and for which they are therefore (again, as sciences)
blind, can generate the impression that they proceed according to their own, autonomous “logic” or “dynamic”. That
sciences have, despite this absconced conditionality, emancipated themselves from philosophy, is therefore not a sign
of independence, but of their restrictedness to the domains defined by changing “procedural and operative character[s]”.
Incidentally, what we know as “philosophy of science” and “epistemology” shares the sciences’ blindness with regard to
themselves, which is why (as mentioned in the introductory remarks, p. 00) Heidegger’s meditation on science cannot
be counted as a contribution to those disciplines; put differently: there is no such thing as a “Heideggerian philosophy
of science” — just as there is no “Heideggerian ethics of science”.
71
This progress requires the progressive abandonment of any experience of the phenomena whose “proxies” are being
researched for explanations and results; for instance, concerning the phenomenon of life, “[t]he progress of science does
not so much consist in the producibility of the living [the degree to which it lets itself be set up], as in the definitive
renunciation of experiencing the living as such” (HGA 95, 131).
72
HGA 95, 124 (24). Science is capable of producing something “new” thanks to the “adoption” for its own purposes of “a
different horizon of explainability”, which (that horizon) has however been opened — “discovered” — elsewhere,
namely in thinking and in poetry; science itself progresses to novel insights only on the basis of such previously made
“discoveries” (see HGA 95, 231 [57]).
73
HGA 94, 177 (162). See also HGA 94, 176 (158) and HGA 94, 179 (168).
In other words, that nescience is, in the first place, an insufficient self-awareness on the side of
science: while the latter is convinced of its “spiritual leadership” and its central role in society thanks
to its successes and results,74 actually it unawares holds in itself — namely, in its very biding — the
absconced core of what is and is in this manner constitutive of the epoch:

The enigmatic circumstance however is that the “sciences” least of all are capable to see how within their driven
drive as such (and by no means just on the basis of its “results”) that which in this age of time is and will be,
consolidates and sets itself up [arms itself] towards [in view of attaining] its unconditional form.
Why <is there> still the “romanticism” of the “spirit” and the “mysticism” of “culture” in the sciences —? Because
they have no sciency and cannot interrogate, because they cannot see the greatness [das Große] of an | incomparable
brutality of unleashed being, and, if they could see it, do not want to admit it.75

In reading that someone “sees” the “greatness” of “a brutality”, we might be inclined to assume
that this “someone” “is finding” that “brutality” “great”, and therefore, by implication, “approves of
it”. However, in the present context this assumption would amount to ignoring all constitutive
references of what is being said. Here, “greatness” is a trait of being — not, though, in the sense that
there is a given notion of greatness that, in the case at hand, is applied to “being”; rather, only the
insight into the latter provides a sense and notion of the trait named in that word. Based on this
preliminary cue, we can tentatively grasp the meaning of “greatness” as the free-ascendant,
absconced sway of the jolt of wyrd that, availing itself of man’s being, bides as the space-(out-)of-
time for all appearing and disappearing of the beënt. As a reminder of this sense of “the great” we
might turn to a word from Sophocles’s Ajax (646 sq): ἅπανθ᾽ ὁ µακρὸς κἀναρίθµητος χρόνος / φύει τ᾽
ἄδηλα, καὶ φανέντα κρύπτεται: all — the great and uncounted time — lets arise that abides not
manifest, just as all that abides in appearance it conceals.
Within the biding of science’s driven drive — namely, as that in which this same biding consists
— sways absconcedly being itself qua “incomparable brutality”. What kind of brutality, though, can
be termed “incomparable”? Answer: only the brutal violence of being against itself, to wit, its going or
setting after itself, such that all “selecting” (i.e. schismatically gathering and sundering, atoning and
scinding) true-hood stays away, and, in the resulting “global” “spacelessness-(out-)of-untime”,
neglected things are left to the unleashed drive of makingness. Seeing the violation of being by being

74
The satisfaction of “researchers” in observing “the unfailing recognition or their performances and tasks” shows them
as the “true enemies of sciency — to wit: of the mindfulness of and passion for the question-worthiness of beȝng.” (HGA
94, 462 [71]). In Überlegungen XII we read: “The more concordantly the two — mockery of sciency and exploitation of
the sciences — go together, the more genuinely the ‘spirit’ of the age of time informed by makingness comes to power.”
(HGA 96, 13). For a phenomenological elucidation of how Erfolg — success — retroacts in a historicizing manner on the
past, thus making it the basis for new “successes” as part of an overall “history of progress”, see HGA 95, 316-17.
75
HGA 95, 394 (41).
itself, and hence the annihilation of all sense in makingness’s “making for the sake of making”, in
short: seeing the brutality of being in the biding of science’s drive, amounts to diagnosing science in
its innermost, being-wyrdal, and therefore “great” brutality. As is now transparent, this diagnosis is
entirely alien to any “finding brutality great” or even “finding science brutal” (while, on the other
hand, this same diagnosis is “capable of experiencing the grue vis-à-vis this form of the will to
power”). In the context of being-wyrdal thinking, the word “brutality” is strictly to be understood as
the “unconditionality of the makingness of being”, and therefore has nothing to do with “a
derogatory and bourgeois ‘moral’ evaluation“.76 The “brutality of being is the reverberation of the
biding of man, of the animalitas of the animal rationale — hence also and precisely of the
rationalitas”; both the latter and the brutality in which it is reflected have one and the same ground,
to wit: the “metaphysics of being”.77

3. Science and the sciences

“Science”, grasped in its modern sense, is a path of the securance of security.78

A circumstance that is laid out extensively in Heidegger’s meditations on science, is that its
progressive technicization — its becoming not only the guiding form of knowledge, but, as such, the
guiding form of being for the implementation of makingness under the rule of the will to will —
entails an increasing specialization of single scientific disciplines, paired with an ever growing
closeness to, and relevance for, the immediate circumstances, needs and problems of life.79 “Science”
now indicates the exclusive, life-driven focus on the securance of security, and the enhancement of
the makeability or makesomeness that this securance requires. The spiral of securance foregoes any

76
HGA 95, 394 (42).
77
HGA 95, 394-95. See also HGA 97, 41-42, where Heidegger comments on Franz Grillparzer’s saying: “From humanity
through nationality to bestiality”, which he complements with “into brutality” (HGA 98, 45). Concerning brutality, in
Überlegungen XV we read: “The feature of the effectivity of anything effective in the end of metaphysics is the capacity
for brutality (Brutalitätsfähigkeit).” (GA 96, 253-54).
78
HGA 96, 271.
79
This is what the word Lebensnähe, “closeness to life” conveys. Lebensnah, here, does not just mean true-to-life in the
sense of naturalistic, but “close”, that is, in accordance with (everyday) life — where “life” is the historially attuned
animality, i.e. the animality that “encircles” history for the purpose of catering to the brute will to life (see HGA 95, 182-
83). In Überlegungen V we read: “Only now new-timeish ‘science’ comes to be fully itself: for it now becomes close-to-
life, while at the same time it can, more than at other times, become set on what it has been so far. It now gets to do the
trick of being ‘close-to-life’ and ‘solitary’ at the same time, and both with growing praise of the indispensability of such
masters of computation, who presumably are going to achieve ‘gigantic’ accomplishments. / But what if there was no
‘life’ any more (that is, here, no constitutive relations to the beënt itself) — what, then, is the ‘closeness to life’ and the
‘remoteness from life’ and the trick of their coupling good for?” (HGA 94, 109 [158]; see also HGA 94, 461-62).
reference to the biding of what is from the outset envisaged, and consequently pre-set, merely as an
occasion for the deployment of “aggressive” methods of research, whose aggressivity consists in their
complete detachment from the biding of what is being researched.80 For instance, in Anmerkungen
V we read the following with regard to nuclear physics:

How can the whole of a science’s domain of biding ever be beheld by a science whose method is disintegrating
[Zertrümmerung], <that is, a science> that in the first place obtains its object <of research> by disintegration?81

An implication of this passage is the attack- or attempt-character of new-timeish science, and in

particular so-called natural science (as an instrument of technic), with regard to nature. In
Anmerkungen VI it is pointed out that this character (already laid out in the 1938 lecture Die Zeit des
Weltbildes)82 is not to be sought at the level of how single researchers might perceive their attitude
vis-à-vis nature, but at the level of the “ontological biding of their attitude”, and the “fundamental-
ontological ground of that biding”83 — which, we might add, is also constitutive of the
abovementioned “aggressiveness” of methods. The fact that researchers might — in an ontic, self-
observing regard on what they do — find themselves in devotion to nature, “by no means excludes
that the biding of their doing, in its for them absconced ontological trait, has the character of
unconditional objectizing, | of setting-up, of forcing into a setting, of encircling”, which goes to show
how “all research-related doing constitutively ranges within a — for that doing withdrawn [and thus
unnoticed] — uncanniness.”84
The “predominance of the purely makingness-like biding of ‘science’” shows most distinctly not
in the “old” sciences, such as physics or philology, but, for instance, in a field like “<ship-bottom>
fouling research”, which has as its object matter the reduction or elimination of the fouling that,
through increased friction, “substantially limits the speed of navigation. Here lies a ‘vitally’
important ‘problem’, and science can and must be grasped starting from the constitutive character
of this problem.”85 This character, however, consists in a “transformation of the ‘origin of sciency’
and the capacity for sciency, which (that transformation) originates from the bidance of being as

80
“Science. They vibrantly invoke the rigor and sanctity of method precisely when they sense, and want to cover up, the
poverty and misery of the sake (Sache) that is dealt with, whereas, on the contrary, the constitutiveness | of the sake
creates its own method, which, at the same time, it never lets become self-contained; rather, it quasi sucks it in, in such
a manner that even the way, as it belongs to the sake itself, becomes constitutive.” (HGA 94, 64).
81
HGA 97, 438. On the likelihood (Möglichkeit) of a “complete wrecking of the earth” see HGA 99, 15.
82
In: HGA 5, 75-113.
83
HGA 98, 49.
84
Ibid.
85
HGA 96, 119-20.
makingness.”86 The “origin of sciency” is now the will to will, insofar as it fixes the exclusively historial
— hence “wyrd-tight” — perspective that wills the progressive penetration of the preset effective
with regard to its effectivity and makeability. Hence, the progressive specialization of the sciences
into ever narrower domains, or sectors, of research — each one of which defines a “situation of
historial penetrability” — is not the consequence of “scientific progress”, understood as the effective
discovery of an ever growing complexity and differentiation of given natural phenomena thanks to
ever more refined and powerful research methods and tools; rather, the injunction of progressive
penetration at the service of the furthermost set-up-ability devises the domains and perspectives in
which scientific research can more and more unhamperedly proceed by contriving the methods
through which the beënt, based on its already decided biding, can be progressively discovered in its
aspects and levels of makeability and securability. Thus, what appears as a “progress of science” is in
truth the progressive permeation by the will to will of the aptly set beënt. Because this permeation
has no measure and knows no form of completion, the “horizon” of scientific progress is the framing
of a specialized — specifically, makeability-securing — knowledge for anything that qualifies as a
researchable object matter.
Fouling research, or the research in the logistics of army catering, are not examples of “applied”
science which eventually put to “practical use” the results of “theoretical” studies or “pure” research.87
Metaphysically speaking, these domains of scientific investigation show the τέλος of research as
such, and therefore what all research is in the first place: the securance of the preset beënt in the
security-perspective of sheer life, and of the thus envisaged effectivity: independent of who the
formally trained scientists are, “science” — i.e. computative “living” — becomes the fundamental
(technical-historial) relation between man in the form of the brutum bestiale and the beënt in the
form of a factum brutum. Thus, all science is applied, namely by the biding of technic for the
brutalizing attempt of being on itself.
The diagnosis of science as essentially “applied science” is not limited to the natural or technical
sciences. In fact, what for a culturally interested regard appears as a cultural divide between

86
Ibid. See also HGA 96, 191, where the same point is made with regard to the “research work that, for instance, creates
the basis for a latter-day army catering.” For a corresponding example in the field of literary studies, see HGA 96, 272-73.
87
One of the names that dissimulate the constitutive orientation of contemporary science (for instance, in the context
of calls for funding) is “curiosity-driven research”. For one would have to ask: by what is curiosity itself driven in the first
place? What else can such curiosity be if not the technical implementation of care, namely the care for the biding of the
beënt? — Concerning “pure research”, in Überlegungen X we read: “[T]he fact that <in the domain of research> ‘pure
research’ is conducted, that is, research that does not immediately and tangibly pursue a preestablished utility, does not
prove anything for a freedom of interrogation coming from out of the stress (Not) of mindfulness, and thus for the
likelihood of a transformation of the guiding references to the beënt itself.” (HGA 95, 315).
“sciences” and “humanities”,88 remains at the surface of what is constitutively the same, to wit, the
shared historial character:

Historism is not the dissolution of everything into the historical, in the sense of what soon belongs to the past
and “is there” only at any one time, but the computational reduction of wyrd to what is present<, implemented>
with the means of what is of today. The more wyrd-poor an age of time becomes in its constitutive traits, the more
zealously it pursues history. The latter becomes the fundamental form of its self-consciousness. History then
becomes closely united with “technic”; both are fundamentally the same; and this is at the same time the reason for
the fact that new-timeish natural sciences and humanities (Geisteswissenschaften), if considered at the level of the
actual compliance with their essence (that is, at the level of their growing superficiality), turn out to be the same, so
that one cannot even speak of a kinship <between them>. One might perhaps find it curious that today no one sees
that constitutive sameness yet, and that, on the contrary, such a “deep” opposition of the two groups of sciences is
spreading, which excludes an understanding. But this is precisely a sign of that constitutive sameness; for the
understanding can never occur at the level of contents or object matters, as it already consists — albeit unrecognized
— in the <respective> biding, that is, in the mode of proceeding, indeed in the procedure as such. And this sameness
admits, and even promotes, the multiplicity of objects, which becomes | ever more indifferent with respect to the
equable, namely equally enormous, domination of everything and everyone by way of computation and explanation.
Here lies the ground for the fact that the sciences more and more blend into everydayness, and become at the same
time as irrelevant and as useful as bakeries or the sewage system. That is to say: the sciences maintain themselves in
the direction of the foresetting and setting-up of the beënt, and remain within the range of a [weirded] truth about
the beënt as such (which is always inaccessible to them), and its likely articulation in different fields, which, in the
domain of the sciences themselves, can only come to bear as an articulation of object matters (nature and history).89

Finally, the technicization of sciences is not only the ground for their specialization, but also for
what can be called their “politicization”. The fact that science becomes “political” is not a historical
occurrence caused (and therefore explainable) by historical circumstances, but a likely consequence
of the same decision — the same “jolt of wyrd” and the same turn in enowning— that informs the
biding of technic. In other words, “political science” — that is, science pursuing (voluntarily or under
compulsion) effective objectives set by “political” power — is a likely form of new-timeish science
qua technicized science. On this basis, we can see that “political science” is not a phenomenon
limited to the control of science under the regime of National Socialism, for which the very purpose
of scientific research was to serve the operative needs of what the ideology of that regime understood
as Volk (including the operative needs of racial policies); nor is it limited to other instances — past
or present — in which political power more or less forcefully bends science to its will. Arguably,
present-day science is itself — and across the only superficial divide between natural sciences and
humanities — through and through “political science”, where the adjective “political” has its
ultimate (grounding) reference not in the power politics and/or the ideology of a regime, but in the
“political” (“societal”, “economic”, “media-related”, “educational”) control circuits which, at different

88
See, for instance, C. P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures” (in: The Two Cultures and Scientific Revolution, 1959).
89
HGA 95, 100-01.
levels, inform and control — only to be in their turn informed and controlled by — the control
circuits in which the functioning of “research systems” is organized. In fact, I would argue that
“political science” — to wit, science for the “polis” that is the cybernetically globalized earth in the
regime of the will to will — is today the only conceivable notion of science, and the only acceptable
understanding of research.90

The circumstance that present-day “science” even can be altered into “political” science, presupposes the
technical character of new-timeish science. Hitherto science is not overcome through this alteration; on the contrary,
it is now granted its proper status and brought to its end. Thus, something scientifically “new” in a constitutive sense
can no longer come to be; what is new is only the direction of | utilization. And even if the exploitation suddenly
comes to an end and the necessity of “theory” is once again recognized, such “theory” will not bring a transformation
into science, in the sense that, based on this, the biding of sciency would take on a more originary form, given that
what counts as “effective” is not questioned in whole, but used as what is unquestionable.91

4. An Ethics for Science

Based on the thus far outlined diagnosis of the wyrdal status of new-timeish science, it is clear
why, as indicated at the beginning, the Denkweg cannot provide an ethics of science, when this
expression means: elaborating guidelines for the procedures and applications of research on the
basis of ethical principles derived from some form of metaphysical or even “pragmatic” position.
Such guidelines are necessary on the basis of what “is”, when “is” means: being in effect as a beënt.
In this case, they will themselves have an operative or functional character, meaning that whatever
they bring to the table in terms of “measure” and “prudence” remains under the sway of the will to
will; in other words, ethical guidance will itself be guided by the driven drive to set up the setting for
the attempt of beȝng on itself and its verity. On the other hand, the mindfulness concerning what
“is”, when “is” refers to the bidance of beȝng, brings to light that science as such is — to wit, consists
in — procedure and application. This mindfulness answers to a different necessity, namely the need
of the schism to be borne in its truth, and therefore cannot cater to the urges of the will to will; yet,
a “measure” and “prudence” in matters of research, drawn from an explicit or implicit reference to
what is in the sense of beȝng, is no doubt conceivable, and might have its own necessity in our age.

90
“World Wars” and other (global) “states of emergency” will consolidate the “political” trait of science (including its
becoming a “driver” of the quotidian, and quotidian itself) insofar as they absconcedly affirm — i.e. make acceptable
and normal — a new, enhanced form of its technical biding in a more decidedly technical age of time. — In a note
dating from the time of the lecture on technic, which bears the title Das Gestell und die Automatisierung, Heidegger
writes: „Man and animal largely discarded as sources of force. / <As sources> of the development of a unitary system of
automatic control machines. / (The automatic age of time after World War III.)” (HGA 76, 368).
91
HGA 94, 302-03.
 The ethical import of science-related considerations in the Notebooks has two interrelated
aspects, which refer to different moments of phenomenological method: the first aspect (primarily
referred to destruction and reduction) points to the advisability of acknowledging the historial-
technical character of research, rather than attempting to cover that character, together with its
implications, by superimposing an unlikely “spiritual value” on scientific practice, or seeking novel
ways of “bestowing a sense” on something that no longer “is”92. This aspect is, as it were, the “beȝng-
wyrdal analog” (if such a thing exists) of Nietzsche’s admonishment that the attempts to escape
nihilism by substituting new values for old (hence devalued) ones without the polar inversion of
those values (i.e. without Umwertung), are not only baseless, but in fact “exacerbate the problem”.93
The second aspect (primarily referred to construction) consists in the preparation of the ground for
a truly new, future “science”, whose scope and form can only be prefigured. This aspect, however,
implies what appears as the only sufficient exhortation to science to engage in a mindful bethinking
of its present and expectable biding, while a generic exhortation to “reflectiveness”, or even to
“accountability”, no matter how well-intentioned, remains exclusively enclosed in the drive of
technicization.
It was mentioned above that “arguably the Denkweg’s reflection on science is the highest form of
love for it.”94 Indeed, is not the care for the dignity of something or someone, namely the dignity that,
for each thing, forms the innermost trait of its biding, what we might call “love”?

Even once modern science definitely enters its pre-attuned technical biding, it belongs to its biding, and
presumably also to its dignity, to know [to be scient of] what it does. But perhaps this sciency is one that interrogates,
one that is worthy of being interrogated, and that requires a thinking. What if the sciences began to think? Or is the
technical claim that draws on them — including on the “Geisteswissenschaften”95, <namely> for the organization of
the public opinion — already so overpowering that the dignity of this sciency can no longer be of any concern.
Meanwhile, all that counts is “production” for the purposes of publication for the public.96

92
Science “is” no longer insofar as it “is melted into the process of makingness, so as to vanish in it.” (HGA 94, 409).
However, the danger for science is not this vanishing as such, but the failure to acknowledge it. (This same danger,
consisting in the — albeit temporary — “disturbances” which may result from the fact that “scientists realize too late
what is happening with them”, is mentioned in Überlegungen VIII [HGA 95, 125].) On the other hand, “the clear decision
for the biding of new-timeish science — that is, its character of research — is superior to all half measures, which still
try to make of university a ‘spiritual’ educational establishment of the hitherto style.” (HGA 95, 315).
93
„– die Versuche, dem N<ihilismus> zu entgehn, ohne jene Werthe umzuwerthen: bringen das Gegentheil hervor,
verschärfen das Problem.“ (Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe (Vol. 12). München: dtv 1999, p. 476 (10[42]).
94
See above, n. 00.
95
“The mischief of Geisteswissenschaften — how they drown and dissipate and enfeeble all things spiritual.” (HGA 94,
99).
96
HGA 97, 372.
 In the perspective of being-wyrdal thinking it is not “worthwhile” — in terms of that thinking’s
own responsibility — to follow the sciences in their driven drive, in the unlikely attempt to do what
thinking cannot do, namely, alter their biding. It can only let the sciences progress towards their
technical accomplishment, and hold its ground in the inception (to wit, Unterschied itself, or the
schism) that is — topologically speaking — the same as that end, but has no point of contact with
that end. In this manner, thinking helps to clarify, and awaken the awareness of, what can only be
“derailments”97 from the rail, or track, on which science is set, while at the same time exemplifying
the interrogative stance in which a self-awareness can grow. In fact, that stance cannot find its
ground within the domain of the entanglement of metaphysics and science, insofar as the former,
following the initial implication of ἀλήθεια in φύσις, remains confined to the scope of being as
beëntness, and hence to thinking as the foresetting of an extrapolated supplemental being-character
that at any one time offers a stable ground to the beënt. Thus, holding one’s ground in the schismatic
off-ground appears to be the only stance that is sufficient, capable of Auseinandersetzung, conducive
to clarity, and, in this sense, ethical in a manner that is for (i.e. in favour of) science itself.

What has long been surmised finds an ever more distinct confirmation through the organization of the sciences
based on the organization of their problems: during the last hundred years the sciences have come to be set on the
secure track of their technical biding. Therefore, it is no longer worthwhile to spend a thought on them that has in
mind anything else than to point at the likely derailments from that technical biding. Such derailments are <(i)> the
cultural-philosophical exaggeration of the biding of “science”, as if it could ever give rise to a sciency in the sense of
a constitutive experience; moreover, <(ii)> the theological interpretation of the sciences as a way to god; finally,
<(iii)> the epistemological foundations of the sciences, which turn in the void circle of truth qua correctness of
objective predication.98 The detachment of the sciences from philosophy is their reception in <the domain of>
technic. The two [i.e. that detachment and this reception] belong together. This instance has its own relevance in
the fact that philosophy disengages itself from thinking, and technic itself begins to manifest itself as the metaphysics
of the will to will.
[…]
The sciences fulfill their proper function — namely the technical one — the more purely, the less they are still
coated and garnished with remnants of philosophy. The aversion of researchers against philosophy is nothing
negative. It springs from the will to preserve the purity of technic. Hence, it conforms to the importance of the
sciences in today’s world that thinking has abandoned their domain, and freed itself from bringing the constitutive
function of this kind of special technics in a correlation that is — and is to be — thought as a constitutive contiguity
with that which thinking itself bethinks. To want to vex the sciences with thoughts is misguided.99

97
Entgleisung, which in non-technical contexts indicates an inappropriate action or uttering.
98
Related to this derailment are “rescue efforts” which (in a somehow “Hegelian-Cartesian” spirit) consist in the attempt
to preserve science by incorporating into science itself the reflection on its presuppositions. While it appears that this
would elevate science to the level of a higher consciousness, one must ask if, and in what manner, such “going beyond”
in the direction of presuppositions remains subservient to the (scientific) basis of the “going beyond” itself; for such a
subserviency would result in an effective consolidation of the nescience that characterizes that basis (see HGA 94, 99).
99
HGA 97, 388. The same thought concerning the relation between thinking, philosophy, and science, is formulated as
follows in Anmerkungen V: “Philosophy generates and fosters the sciences. Thinking must uproot them. They do not
even need a root any longer, since they live of the servitude within the <domain of the> technical setting-up of the world
as the object [obstant]. Any attempt to still bring the sciences in a correlation with the spirit (Geist) is foolish, the more
 To interpret these remarks as a dismissive demarcation of thinking with respect to the sciences
would not only be overhasty and superficial, but entirely inconsistent with the fundamental tenor
and thrust of the Denkweg. If it is true that the biding of science “belongs”, in a deeply rooted manner,
“to what is to be thought as enowning”100, then the “uprooting” of the sciences, i.e. the highest care
for them that consists in letting them unfold as the end that they are, is a decisive task for thinking
— a task for which thinking itself is hardly prepared. Such uprooting implies freeing the sciences
from unlikely remnants of what used to be a metaphysical provenance, and thus for an experience
of what, being the schism itself, is scinded from the scientific domain, and therefore does not touch
it in any way.
Since its native soil is not the beënt as such, but the off-ground, the mentioned ethical stance
cannot but be of an erring and interrogative101 nature: a ceaseless quest and “patient struggle” to find
the free and liberating point of inception, hence the tone, for the anticipated liberation, which would
at the same time be a deliverance that frees the likelihood of another sciency of the world-domains
that presently are being claimed by scientific method in view of the ultimate form of foresetting
setting-up. How can thinking let the word of the technicized, mathematized sciences be heard while
at the same time holding open the likely space and time for a world-sciency of the mirror-play of the
human and the divine, the sky and the earth; hence a sciency capable of measuring anew the living
and the unliving, the heavy and the light, the high up and the down below, the deep and the shallow,
the resting and the moving, the hospitable and the hostile, the fierce and the gentle, the sound and
the sick, the fair and the foul, the necessary and the superfluous, the shared and the private — and
so on for all instances and modes of a coming wyrdal dwelling? The following remark, contained in
Anmerkungen VII (ca. 1949), gives an insight into what this quest requires in “existential” terms, and
presupposes in terms of experience, as well as into how it is intertwined with the only attempt of
the Denkweg:

so as the spirit itself has lost its essence. / Thinking uproots the sciences insofar as it thinks, that is, insofar as it engages
with [lets itself in on] the schism. Thinking does not tamper with the sciences.” (HGA 97, 507; ). Once “the sciences” are
recognized in their exclusive belongingness to the age of time, this “leaves only one way open for philosophy: to go past.”
(HGA 95, 126).
100
See above, p. 00.
101
The interrogating that characterizes this stance is not the same as the questioning that is required for the progress of
science, and the philosophy that follows on the heels of it, where “one asks for questions but actually calls for answers
to be delivered. Interrogating and answering are <thus> placed in the driven drive of delivering. It is seen as obvious to
participate in this delivery business. One calls this: interest for cultural concerns.” (HGA 98, 248).
 It does not suffice for the sciences, and even less for technic, that, on their side, one might perhaps occasionally
condescend to philosophize “about” science and “about” technic. We must learn to exist from out of the biding of
technic. A fundamental presupposition for this is that we experience that biding in the first place. How is that to
happen, if even the researchers and teachers of the sciences | refuse to experience, while “existing it” [holding it out,
bearing the openness for it], and to take on even just the internal ontological transcendence of science; not to speak
of the necessity to abandon transcendence as something provisional, and to enter its absconced biding, to wit, “the
difference”?
Nothing else than this task, <namely> to take on, while existing it, and to unfold the internal transcendence of
the sciences, is voiced in the lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” (1929), and in the rectoral address (1933) “The Holding-
its-Ground of German University”.102

The sciences’ mindfulness concerning themselves and their biding is today already mostly pinned down by the
predominance of the mere implementation of their technical constitution. This is the reason why the sciences
themselves, through this failure of thoughtful mindfulness, cast themselves out of the domain of likely spiritual
decisions and drive themselves into a spiritual palsy and indifference.
That mindfulness however, if it is still sought and attempted here and there, requires a high degree of interior
spiritual freedom. This means: the habit — coming from the driven drive of research — to proceed everywhere on
one and the same track of research, and at the same level (namely, that of the objectivizing [obstantivizing;
vergegenständlichend] foresetting of the beënt), must be abandoned in favor of a readiness to engage with the
constitutive fourfoldness of all world-biding, and to acknowledge the latter at least to the extent to which it can even
show itself in the horizon of the sciences — which, in this case, is a very narrow one.103

The part that immediately follows the last quotation addresses the necessity for each science to
recognize as unforgoable, and at the same time inaccessible for itself, the manner of being of what
that science delimitates as its own domain of research. This consideration is set forth extensively in
Die Bedrohung der Wissenschaft104, and will therefore not be addressed here. However, the
experience of the “inaccessible unforgoable”, and hence the mindfulness concerning its own biding,
requires, on the part of a science, a transition to thinking, which, if that mindfulness “is to remain
fertile”, can only be achieved “coming from <that science’s> own domain of research, but
simultaneously also each time only with regard to that which the interrogation of thinking attempts
to attain. The mindfulness moves in this ‘from and to’.”105 All this implies, in the first place, on the
side of the sciences and of single researchers, the courage of “setting free the otherness of thinking”.106
What can we conclusively identify as moments of an “ethics for science” based on the remarks
contained in the Black Notebooks? The constitutive “imperative” of any ethical stance is the truth
(the being-true) to what is, namely, to what holds sway as a wyrdal decision, and as a consequence
of such a decision. This truth differs in scope according to where one stands with respect to the

102
HGA 98, 153-54.
103
HGA 98, 295-96.
104
See above, n. 00.
105
HGA 98, 296.
106
HGA 98, 297. The unwillingness to set free the otherness of thinking (namely, its otherness with respect to research)
defines the enmity, if not the hatred, towards sciency that oftentimes — indeed, rather unnecessarily — informs the
evaluation machinery that presently drives the global business of science.
sciency of being. For thinking, and with regard to science, the truth to what is imposes to “go past”
the sciences. As we have seen, this is not to ignore them, but to refrain from approaching them with
a somehow amendatory intent — which would inevitably imply a defection from the ownmost task
of thinking, to wit, the pure engagement with the schism. On the other hand, the continuing,
interrogative diagnosis107 of the sciences’ “exclusive belongingness to the age of time” will be, for
thinking, not only an occasion for learning “to exist from out of the biding of technic”, but also a
critical exercise within the attempt at outlining elements for a “science” informed by the “sciency of
the fourfold”,108 and this means: a science coming out of Da-sein or there-being — where the latter
is not a “known thing”, but a manner of being that has overcome the historial animal and its all-
encircling brutality.

“Science” from out of Da-sein and as Da-sein means an entirely different bearing, which presupposes passing
through | research as that which is ineludible at the day-to-day level, and thus (that bearing) masters research itself
from out of a sciency through which any beënt is held into the fire of beȝng. Future science, lighted by the transition
to another site — <a site> from the ground up different from the new-timeish one — is no longer attuned by a
foresetting that, in conformity with its self-establishment as research, obtains as its biding the trait of the driven
drive, and more and more denies sciency; rather, <future science> is attuned from out of sciency itself, to wit, from
an interrogative insistency in the verity of beȝng.109

On the side of those who are involved in research, it seems that the least promising attitude in
view of the arising of a science attuned by sciency, is the attempt to occupy the spiritual or moral
high ground — the ground of “sense-giving” — left void by the forms of knowledge that used to have
that ground for themselves, but are now excluded from it due to their manifest inferiority in terms
of the production of effective results. This does not mean that there should not be a meditation
concerning issues of sense within the sciences — on the contrary. It means that “progress” and
“success” as such — not to speak of the blind euphoria (which matches the blind “aversion” and
“contempt” of those who “oppose” that progress and success) that at times accompanies these

107
The interrogative character of the diagnosis is not a formal aspect, but a consequence of the fact that what is being
interrogated remains enigmatic. In Notturno I we read: “‘Science’ — Just as the biding of technic is not something
technical, the biding of science is not something ‘scientific’; that is, its own biding is not an actual concern for science, it
does not pertain to its prerogatives; <put differently:> science is not competent for its own biding and attunement, and
for their wherefrom. Yet, science has a ‘sciency’ of itself, insofar as it is a scienciness and consciousness (Wissen- und
Bewußtheit), which is always, in a sense, a self-consciousness. But even of what kind this sciency is, cannot be accounted
for by way of science. / Where, then, does ‘science’ itself, as this wholly un-scientific <biding> , belong?” (HGA 100, 227).
108
For instance, the lecture The Thing (in: HGA 7) could be seen as such an outline, waiting for a coming science to unfold
and modulate what is there attempted in a first sketch. On the other hand, the lecture Time and Being (in: HGA 14), while
providing a first, tentative indication towards a new sciency of time, could contribute to “remodulate” our guiding
knowledge and experience of time — which is presently moulded by the functional theories of time elaborated in the
domain of mathematical physics (where originary time has no place) — to a more constitutive dimension.
109
HGA 95, 162 (40).
manifestations of the will to will — should not count as a “legitimation” for that occupation.110 In
fact, it seems that researchers would have to be in the first place puzzled at finding themselves not
only on some remote “frontier of knowledge”, but also alone, and hardly prepared, when it comes to
diagnosing the sense of what is driving them every day, while they are at the same time asked by “the
public” to fill a void of sense that they cannot account for in the first place; as they would have to be
perplexed seeing how any “sense-question” is swiftly solved, before even having been formally
posed, at some “political” level; as they would, finally, have to wonder as to the capacity of present
epistemological and ethical reflection to fill the lack of sciency that they themselves might, at times,
perceive.
An attitude that would appear to be more promising in terms of an “ethics for science” would be
for researchers to embrace the biding of technic that stirs research in the form of the elaboration of
functional theories of the effective, without however attributing to their results a scope they cannot
have (e.g. in terms of answering “Big Questions”), and without letting their capacity for thinking be
stalled by the drive that is attuned to the will to will.111 This might leave the space for what science
qua science — in other words, the implementation of methodical research112 as such — cannot
admit, namely the wonder, if not the perplexity, or the shock, in which consists the experience of
the entirely enigmatic phenomenon that the Denkweg has come to call Seinsverlassenheit, that is,
the beënt’s forsakenness by being. Admitting this experience could indeed open a trail for a
“transition to thinking”. This transition would be unique and unprecedented, as it would not imply
transcending the domain of the beënt toward some metaphysical ground, and thus — because that
transcending, as such, overlooks the difference, and consequently the schism — remaining confined
to the decisionless “waste land” of the long ending of metaphysics.113 It would be a transition into the
groundless errantry that indicates the closeness to the schism — in other words: a transition without
return.114

110
The aspiration of those who most thoughtlessly and “unethically” pursue this occupation is to finally become literati
— scientist-writers who not only “bridge the gap” between the sciences and the humanities, but in that way indeed
ascend to the summit of technical knowledge. (“What is characteristic of the literati constitutes the hidden ideal of the
sciences and their public impact […] The professors have the ambition to become literati.” [HGA 97, 440].)
111
A reference in this respect could be the attitude described in the speech entitled Gelassenheit (in: HGA 16).
112
On method see, i.a., HGA 97, 258.
113
“All lights in the sky go out. / The men of metaphysics will / die under extinguished stars.” (HGA 97, 2).
114
See HGA 65, 492. On errantry, its distinction from errancy (cf. “knight-errant”), and, on the other hand, its relation to
vagancy and vagisness, see the “Lexicon of a Thought-Path”, in Gino Zaccaria, The Enigma of Art. On the Provenance of
Artistic Creation. Leiden: Brill 2021, ad loc. See also my Principles of Philosophy. A Phenomenological Approach. Freiburg:
Verlag Karl Alber 2019, p. 47 (n. 33).