Heidegger thinks of machination as the power controlling, shaping, and holding sway over the world by turning everything, including humans and nature, into mere resources awaiting and in need of making and optimizing. It belongs in what he sees as the danger, that is, calculative thinking.
Heidegger says that nothing escapes machination. All entities, including humans, are seen as makeable, producible, malleable, and optimizable. All entities require and are subject to mathematical-scientific addressing and ordering in the technological age.
Although making or producing has been traditionally thought of as something carried out by humans in the sense that humans are the makers and producers of entities, including themselves, Heidegger says that Being is what carries out the sending of machination.
Machination, in its being sent to humans by Being, marks a shift from modernism to what follows it, a shift from Descartes’s thinking of entities as objects to Nietzsche’s thought that the will to power is that which gives rise to or produce entities in the world: “Will to power is the highest form of machination”.
This is why and how power (Macht) and machination (Machenschaft) belong to each other in Heidegger’s thought, and this is why he approaches and investigates machination frequently in his readings of Nietzsche’s will to power. Yet the difference between Nietzsche and Heidegger is that whereas Nietzsche sees humans as possessing power, Heidegger thinks that it is power that possesses humans.
For Heidegger, Nietzsche’s philosophy is the site where the end of metaphysics is to be observed in full. Machination happens and is fully in control of the world, including humans, at the end of Western metaphysics; it is unchallenged in all thinking of the will to power: “The essence of power as machination. . . is itself the end of metaphysics”. This is why to Heidegger’s questioning of machination belongs the attempt at glimpsing another inception of thought. This is also why he grounds his questioning in that to which he refers as the overcoming of metaphysics. For machination offers itself to thought in full only if metaphysics is overcome, since only then can it appear in its belonging to the history of being.
This means that machination is that through which the other inception and the end of metaphysics are to be glimpsed in such a way that it itself is closed off from metaphysics and metaphysical thinking, which means that it can only be revealed and brought fully into view by being placed into and referred back to the history of being, and this can only happen if thinking turns itself toward Being itself and not toward beings, which are constantly confused with Being everywhere in metaphysical thinking-philosophizing in its repeated attempts at thinking and questioning what Being is. This is why all thinking of machination is thinking in relation to the history of being.
Thinking of machination in terms of the history of being reveals a unity connecting together the end of metaphysics and the beginning of philosophy. For Western metaphysics, from its inception, has thought of and turned toward entities as produced, which is the manner of thinking lying at the heart of and dominating the technological world at the end. This means that the end of metaphysics has been in preparation since the beginning of philosophy.
The word ‘machination’ already appears in Heidegger’s thinking-philosophizing, in 1930-1931, in his reading of and working on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. But in the context of Hegel’s philosophy, it only means a form of scheming. Its relation to the technological age and to the danger, that is, calculative thinking in the sense of seeing the world, nature, and humans as makeable, that is, as mere resources requiring producing and optimization, took shape only after 1937 in Heidegger’s tracing of the dominance of making throughout Western metaphysics, the world wars, and the attempts at dominating the world, humans, and nature back to Ancient Greek thinking-philosophizing. This tracing made clear to him that the technological age and its thoughtlessness have been in preparation since the beginning of Western philosophy.