incorporate the definitive limit into the attained sphere of power itself) is completely unnatural on the inevitable higher level of power and is an offense and a neglect in relation to the “life”-interests of the being with power. In correspondence, the respective determination of order and disorder also changes. “Order” is that machinational institution of national borders, ethnic memberships, economic relations, and cultural pursuits which at any time secures the unrestricted exercise of the increase in power to be planned by a “power” according to its essence. Every power must look to bring about at once a situation of disorder for the justification of its imposition of order. The more unobtrusively and comprehensively this happens, all the more powerful is the power.
The establishment of new orders within the age of machination is always a question of power—not merely in the sense of the “implementation” of something planned—but rather with respect to the essence and the type of the planning itself. The dimensions of the increase in power | determine the type of the required “order.” And only this order prescribes the corresponding basic notion of what has to count as “natural.” Thus within the machination of beings, precisely the “natural” is subject to the arbitrariness of power and is the veiling of that arbitrariness. The veiling itself and the need for it are consequences of the unshaken metaphysics demanding an explanation for everything—whether the explanation lies in a creator God or in “nature.” The cost of making such explanations credible and current is paid most easily when technology and historiology incorporate the human being himself into machination and thus the possibility of essential decisions, even in its most provisional conceptuality, is stricken from the horizon of “life.” But where in various forms the execution of the power of machination is relegated completely to “politics,” there it seems as if everything is in essence “political” and this essence itself the first of all the being of humanity. In truth, however, this complete “politics” is merely an offshoot of the machinational essence of beings, an offshoot transplanted into a purely technological-historiological institutionalizing and only thereby capable of executing a power. Machination | retains genuine power all the more securely, the more exclusively the execution of political power considers itself the be-all and end-all.
3
The human being.—The succession of days and nights draws human “life” out into a “length” and lets that “life,” calculated in millennia,