primal meanings

To Henk:  you recommended "The Question Concerning Technology" to me -- I
read it the other day and greatly enjoyed it - so thanks :) 
Just a couple of points:

I realise that Heidegger's insistence on getting back to the primal meanings
of various terms, or uncovering the _actual_ concepts in use in a given
epoch, is really essential if one is to understand what the greeks ( or
whoever) were doing, and also how our present conceptual scheme differs etc
... but the emphasis of Heidegger on these "primal" meanings ( the
translation I read uses this word a lot - not sure what the original would
be) seems to be more than just descriptive - i.e. I'm sure if Heidegger had
found out in his lifetime that the greek language had grown out of the
language of Atlantis, a highly technical civilisation, - so really the
origin of the greek concepts lay in a technological society ( bizarre
thought experiment, but anyway!) - he would still have _preferred_ the greek
concepts, even though they weren't "original" anymore ... 
 According to Heidegger, the greeks had a society where a certain mode of
"revealing" was dominant , now we live in a culture where some other mode is
on the ascendant, with the "danger" being that this will eclipse other ways
of conceptualising/responding to the world - but it can't be just the
monopoly on revealing that Heidegger is worried about - ( which would be
more of a Mill/Feyerabend type line) - there seems to be a strong aesthetic
element  ( the dammed river is "monstrous" ( my translation)   ( the
monstrosity of this is ambiguous though - is it the "harnessing" of the
object for use, which is (somehow) an "afront" to its own independant
reality --- or is it that in harnessing it, we change the object beyond
recognition ?  If the former , than even the sails of a boat, _are_
monstrous, contra what Heidegger says, if the latter then Heidegger
shouldn't object to something like the tapping of geothermal energy or solar
power...) - 
or is he suggesting something more ethical/metaphysical that there is a kind
of "preferred" direction for the revelation of Being to take place in ( I'm
still not sure what "destining" really means) - and that technological
thinking is somehow perverting this ??




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