Technology, Technique, Interplay: Questioning Die Frage nach der Technik

Heidegger´s reading of the essence of Technik is beset with a fatal ambiguity between technology and technique, which can be traced back further to an ambiguity lodged in the heart of Aristotle´s metaphysical concept of power. This unresolved ambiguity, in turn, is intimately related to the historical cover-up of the twofold in the manifold of being between whatness (quiddity) and whoness (quissity). This cover-up is exposed using the example of the art of rhetoric. Ultimately the fog has to lift from the clearing to see, through adequate ontological concepts, that and how all beings are in estimating interplay with one another (the much abused phenomenon of value) and above all, that human beings strive to be somewho in a free power play with each other.