For Heideggger, the move from Aristotle to Kant contains a shift from a conception of phusis as growth to the modern conception of physics as a science amongst others, charting the relations between certain kinds of postulated entity. In parallel with this shift there is the move from the Greek conception of wisdom as virtue, spontaneously producing the right action at the right time, and the modern conceptions of value-neutral science and of a quite distinct domain of universal prescription. Heidegger thus detects in both Aristotle and Kant a nature opposed not to morals but to techne, which is then subordinated to techne. Thus, for the Heideggerian reading, the oppositions between moral freedom and deterministic nature, for Kant, and between ethical value and metaphysical fact, for Aristotle, mask the more significant opposition between phusis, as what there is and how it comes to be, and techne, as governing a domain of relations amenable to human control. The subordination of phusis to techne eliminates any domain other than that subject to human control. This subordination Heidegger traces back from Kant to Aristotle, and it constitutes for him the continuity of the tradition of European philosophy. Heidegger thus identifies in the transmission of the philosophical tradition from Aristotle to Kant a reduction of nature from a set of forces external to human beings, to which human beings are subject, into a set of forces which can be controlled by human beings. This, for Heidegger, is the flight of the gods responded to by Hölderlin; it is the death of God diagnosed by Nietzsche. There is a cumulative denial of superhuman forces at work in the world, bringing that world into existence. This has an effect on philosophical enquiry. Philosophy surrenders its stance of contemplation, wonder and responsiveness to otherness. Instead it intervenes in the construction of the concepts required for the development of positive science and for it to appear that human beings can control their circumstances. Here it is metaphysics, as the stance of detachment, which has been erased in favour of ethics, as the stance of involvement. This is the shift in philosophy Heidegger detects at work between the presocratics and Aristotle, but which takes the intervening period up until the present for its full development in the emergence of modern science and technology.
This transformation of phusis into what can be controlled by human beings is the reduction of the earth to nothing but world, nothing but the relations constructed by human beings. Thus, by contrast with the claim in the 1936 essay on Hölderlin, that a construction of world is required in order for there to be history, I suggest that Heidegger comes to the view that a difference between earth and world is required if there is to be history, if there is to be a distinction between chance and destiny. This reduction of earth to world is akin to the process Löwith identifies as taking place in Being and Time. Thus the very process that Löwith supposes occurs in Being and Time Heidegger himself criticises at a later date. The reduction of earth to world emphatically elides the question whether what there is can be systematically represented and ordered, whether indeed it is entirely available for inspection and can (153) be considered as a totality. The conception of ‘word’ sets up what there is as representable to and by human beings. There is no unrepresentable other, precondition for what there is and source of transformation into different orderings. Heidegger identifies this reduction of earth to world as a strategy assisting the production of scientific theories of what there is, for it makes it possible to suppose that all processes and entities are observable and measurable. It has the catastrophic consequence of making it difficult to consider processes and entities which have not as yet been observed or which cannot be measured. The unmeasurable, unobservable becomes the uncanny, a source for completely inarticulable unease and disquiet. The erasure of metaphysics in favour of ethics erases the difference between metaphysics as detachment and ethics as involvement; this in turn makes ethics empty. Without the moment of detachment, there can not be involvement, only immersion. (HODGE, Joanna. HEIDEGGER AND ETHICS, p. 152-153)