44	SCIENCE’S POSITIVE SIDE

There is a page in Heidegger that I have twisted and turned in every possible way, because it’s the only one in which he says that maybe the new event of Being, an eventuation of Being different from metaphysics, can come about in the ensemble of the technological world, which may be the extreme point of damnation, the most total forgetting of Being, but might also turn out to be a first flash of the event.

Surprising. Gadamer personally confirmed to me that when Heidegger made that statement during a lecture, it wasn’t just an offhand remark. Indeed, he was perfectly well aware of the “scandalous” character of what he was saying. Except that he never said it again.

In the same text, Heidegger maintains that this possible flashing of a new mode of Being’s eventuation in the totality of the technological world cannot correspond to a return to the pre-Socratics. Rather, it comes about in the technological world, because there man and world lose the characters of subject and object that metaphysics had conferred upon them.

This leads me to think that Heidegger must have had in mind a possibility, however inchoate, of a new mode of Being no longer grounded in the subjectivization of the subject and the objectivization of the world. And that led me to think a lot about the information society, the electronic society, about problems that are current right now: the copyright of everything that goes onto the Internet . . . which is also a way to raise doubts about the whole structure of property: who gets paid for the copyright?

And I’m inclined to think that late modernity, as well as being a time of great peril, might be just the opposite, something exciting and different.

Young people have never read a book? Okay, maybe so, it’s monstrous, but who knows how many other things they have discovered in the meantime?

So I think of what’s happening the world right now not in purely negative terms, but also in providential ones. Where the danger grows, there also grows that which saves: another line of Hölderlin that Heidegger often cites.