For Heidegger, then, our existence in a World is ‘spread’ over the people who are in the place with us, and the ‘things’ that share these places. In Heidegger’s later work, this notion of Being-in-the-World is extended to include the notion of ‘dwelling’. With dwelling, our self, ‘stretched’ in time and place, exists in a manner that cares for the people and ‘things’ that are incorporated into this ‘stretching’.

[Heidegger] is not attempting to reveal the application of mathematical knowledge as faulty: there is far too much evidence in support of the effectiveness of mathematical method in problem solving, scientific experimentation, and so-called “mastery” of nature by humans. The problem lies in the assumption that such successes point to the mathematical comportment as the comportment: as the one way of grasping the real. To put it another way: while Heidegger clearly acknowledges the correctness of mathematical method, he doubts the mathematical as primordially true.

To free ourselves of the alienating influence of technology and recover our rootedness in the world, Heidegger maintains that we must cultivate a mode of being he calls a “releasement toward things.” To be “released” toward a thing is to attend to it as the particular thing that it is, rather than as a placeholder for some other thing that would serve the same function.

Because phenomenological methods undercut mind/world dualism, phenomenology is able to recognize the reality of environmental ‘values’, the alleged ‘fact’ that certain pro-environmental values are ‘always already in the world’ and so simply await the appropriate phenomenological approach in order to be discovered and made the basis of a new environmental ethics.

[I]n Heidegger, dwelling involves an attunement to the given, it is itself not given, either by place of birth or ancestral belonging, even if your dwelling place does in fact happen to be that of your forefathers.

At the end of “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger leaves us with the cryptic suggestion that a “saving power” lies concealed in this “dangerous” moment in the destiny of the West. We are at a stage in the history of being where the human being no longer fully encounters itself because everywhere it finds only itself.

Crucially, physis does not rely on the materiality of the planet, but rather on its dynamic of obscurity and emergence into the light of truth, aletheia. Physis is, at once, aspects of the earth coming forth and at the same time, necessarily, retaining a hidden element.