Conclusion: Metaphysics and Production

Summary

This is what Spinoza calls Nature: a life no longer lived on the basis of need, in terms of means and ends, but according to a production, a productivity, a potency, in terms of causes and effects.

Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy

One of the constant points of reference for Heidegger when he interrogates the field of human activity is that he lets himself be guided by the Greek language and therefore by the immediate relation with pragma and pragmata, that is to say, with things insofar as they are useful and utilisable. He also translates praxis by Handlung, which is distinguished by the presence of the hand (der Hand) insofar as it manipulates and utilises things. This reduction of praxis to a preoccupation with things insofar as they are manipulable and usable is manifest in Being and Time, notably in §15, where Heidegger writes that ‘the Greeks had an appropriate term for “things”, pragmata, that is, that with which one has to do in taking care of things in association (praxis)’. In referring praxis immediately to pragmata, however, Heidegger is perhaps led to deny praxis any autonomy with respect to poiesis: the latter appears to be the central category through which human activity is understood, at least insofar as that activity is undertaken and conducted in a manner that could be described as inauthentic. According to Heidegger, this reduction of praxis to poiesis is not his doing, but that of metaphysics itself, insofar as it naively returns to a meaning of action as the quality through which human beings relate to the world productively as a world of things that are useful and manipulable, that is, to things produced which are capable of being used in order to further production. Hence, according to Heidegger, the analysis of this productive comportment is the analysis of a comportment that has determined the history and orientation of western metaphysics, and the totality of this history, up to today, that is to say, up to the epoch of the achievement of metaphysics in the world of technology, the world of the productive control of the being of everything.