This article was initially written (in 2020) for a private collection gifted to Alexander García Düttmann on the occasion of his 60th birthday. It explores themes of education and the transmission of knowledge in relation to figures of youth and extinction. Georg Trakl's poem "Abendlied" serves as the essay's centerpiece and is brought into dialogue with comments made by Levi-Strauss on a 'prima material'. Certain ecological overtones appear when an overzealous Prometheanism is contrasted with a labor of re-creation.

A comprehensive reading of Heidegger's work from the mid-1930s to the 1960s that seeks to develop an ecological thinking rooted in reflections on the Heraclitean 'hen', relationality, and the impossibility of totality. An elaboration of the structural homology between Heidegger's use of the terms 'Technik' and 'metaphysics' sets the stage for his later work or topology. The Spätwerk is presented as an irresolvable polarity between 'Technik' and 'Ereignis', between a totalizing movement and a movement of disruption. This serves as the (...) basis for reflections on human experience of and as the ecological. Nature as Limit serves as a contribution to both eco-philosophy and to philosophical methodology more broadly, with philological and hermeneutic excursions that engage the relationship between language and the ecological motifs being developed in the work. (shrink)