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KRITIK – ANTHROPOCENTRISM
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2NC Burke Impact 1/3 .......................................................................................................................... 9
2NC – How to write an overview ........................................................................................................ 13
2NC/1NR - Link – Technology/Environmentalism .............................................................................. 14
2NC/1NR - Framework........................................................................................................................ 19
2NC – Impact – Rejecting Anthropocentrism outweighs ................................................................... 22
2NC Impact – Extinction ..................................................................................................................... 24
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A. The affirmative attempts to securitize the world through “environmental
protections”. The 1AC wants to protect the oceans so humans can continue to
exploit them. This anthro-instrumentalization of nature relies on planetary
sacrifice and destroys the intrinsic value of the world
Mitchell 14 (Audra. Jan 30. Department of Politics, University of York, UK. Only human? A worldly approach to
security.)
Many authors suggest that anthropocentrism is the main obstacle to recognizing the constitutive role
and ethical status of nonhumans in international relations (see e.g. Coward, 2009; Cudworth and Hobden,
2013; Eckersley, 2007). Indeed, the logics of security discussed above are premised on a radically
anthropocentric belief: that only human subjects can be the subjects of security. Would it, then, be
possible and desirable to reject anthropocentrism as a feature of international security? To answer this question, it
is crucial to distinguish between different kinds of ‘anthropocentrism’. This term usually brings to mind what I shall
call ‘anthro-instrumentalism’: an ethical orientation that reduces the value of nonhumans to their
instrumental usefulness to humans. Within anthro-instrumental logic, politics is defined by a ‘Great
Divide’ (Latour, 1993), in which human beings are placed on one side and all ‘nonhumans’ on the other.
On the upper side of this divide, human beings are prioritized, to the extent that their non-essential
needs (e.g. for luxury or entertainment) are elevated above the survival or non-suffering of
nonhumans (see Derrida, 2004; Nussbaum, 2006). Moreover, the relation between the needs of humans
and those of nonhumans is assumed to be zero-sum. That is, any consideration given to nonhumans is
thought to detract from the attention or effort devoted to human needs (see Bennett, 2010). Anthroinstrumentalism lies at the foundations of the subject-based notions of security described above. It
has reached its zenith in discourses and practices of ‘human security’, which frame the individual human
subject as the ‘ultimate end’ of international politics (Tadjbaksh and Chenoy, 2007: 13), seeking to ensure
its physical integrity and health, environmental conditions, economic and political participation, rights
and dignity (see Commission on Human Security, 2003; United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 1994).
Sustaining a ‘secured’ human requires the instrumentalization of many nonhumans: the material
beings produced and traded to ensure economic security; the plants and nonhuman animals
cultivated and killed to provide food security; the production of chemical compounds and the
destruction of bacteria to ensure health security. Although nonhumans lend their names to various
dimensions of human security, they are only indirect referent objects; that is, they are secured only
insofar as they contribute to the well-being of humans, who are the real referent objects (see Buzan et
al., 1999). ‘Environmental security’, for instance, is not concerned with securing the environment in and
for itself. Rather, it aims to ensure natural resources for humans – that is, ‘environmental security for
people ’ (Barnett, 2001: 122; emphasis added). Anthro-instrumental logics of this kind reduce the relations
between humans and nonhumans to the mere satisfaction of the needs of the former, and so are
utterly incompatible with the conditions of worldliness described above. However, Eugene Hargrove
(1992) argues that ‘anthropocentrism’ is not a synonym for ‘instrumentality’. It simply refers to values rooted
in the human experience, which can take many forms. So, a ‘weak anthropocentrist’ might value
nonhumans because they meet instrumental human needs, or because doing so fits within a wider
worldview – for instance, the belief that human connection with ‘nature’ is spiritually fulfilling (see
Norton, 1984). Humans can also attribute ‘intrinsic’ value to nonhumans – that is, value independent of
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their usefulness to humans (see also O’Neill, 2003). Indeed, Hargrove identifies four kinds of value that humans
might recognize in nonhumans: (a) anthropocentric instrumental value (as described above); (b) nonanthropocentric instrumental value (the instrumental value that nonhumans – animals and plants, say – have for
each other); (c) non-anthropocentric intrinsic value (the value that nonhumans have, independent of human
judgement); and (d) anthropocentric intrinsic value (value attributed by humans to nonhumans,
regardless of the latter’s usefulness to the former). Hargrove argues that the first form of value is too
narrow, and that humans cannot truly appreciate the second and third forms because we can only, at best,
imagine what it is like to be another form of being. So, from this perspective, our best bet is to embrace the
fourth form of value and harness the power of human reflection and agency – and indeed,
imagination – to act ethically towards other kinds of beings. This argument seems to fit with a worldly
approach to understanding harm and security. Accepting that humans cannot entirely transcend their own
perspective, it mobilizes their capacities for reflection and agency as a means of protecting
nonhumans. It acknowledges that humans are co-constituents of worlds, but does not privilege them in
ontological terms or afford them an exclusive ethical status. It also offers a range of reasons for
humans to protect the worlds of which they are part, and to activate their own capacities to this end.
If we accept this argument, then the question is not whether a worldly approach to security can be
anthropocentric, but rather whether it can fit with existing ontological and ethical categories . I shall
now explore two alternative answers to this question.
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B. The affirmative attempts to manage “nature” through scientific
managerialists and capitalist technocrats—protecting ecosystems is a tool for
global social control
Timothy W. Luke, 95, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science in the College of Liberal Arts
and Human Sciences @ Virginia Tech(On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the
Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism, Cultural Critique, No. 31, The Politics of Systems and
Environments, Part II, Autumn, pp. 57-81, JSTOR, Adi Sudarshan)
No longer Nature nor even ecosystem, the world under this kind of watch is truly becoming "an
environment," ringed by many eco-knowledge centers dedicated to the rational eco-management of
its geo-powers. Being "an environmentalist" quickly becomes a power expression of the ecoknowledge formations of environmentality in which the geo-powers of the global ecosystem can
be mobilized through the disciplinary codes of green operational planning. The health of global
populations as well as the survival of the planet itself allegedly necessitate that a bioeconomic
spreadsheet be draped over Nature, generating an elaborate set of accounts for a terrestrial ecoeconomy of global reach and scope. Hovering over the world in a scientifically centered
surveillance machine built out of the disciplinary grids of efficiency and waste, health and disease,
poverty and wealth as well as employment and unemployment discourses, Brown, Flavin, and Postel
declare "the once separate issues of environment and development are now inextricably linked" (25).
Indeed, they are in the discourses of Worldwatch Institute as its organizational expertise
surveys Nature-in-crisis by auditing levels of topsoil depletion, air pollution, acid rain, global warming,
ozone destruction, water pollution, forest reduction, and species extinction. Environmentality, then,
would govern by restructuring today's ecologically unsound society through elaborate
managerial designs to realize tomorrow's environmentally sustainable economy. The shape of an
environmental economy would emerge from a reengineered economy of environmentalizing shapes
vetted by worldwatching codes. The individual human subject of today, and all of his or her
unsustainable practices, would be reshaped through this environmentality, redirected by practices,
discourses, and ensembles of administration that more efficiently synchronize the bio-powers of
populations with the geo-powers of environments. Traditional codes defining human identity and
difference would be reframed by systems of environmentality in new equations for making
comprehensive global sustainability calculations as the bio-power of populations merges with the
ecopower of environments. To police global carrying capacity, in turn, this environmentalizing logic
bids each human subject to assume the much less capacious carriage of disciplinary frugality instead
of affluent suburban consumerism. All of the world will come under watch, and the global watch will
police its human charges to dispose of their things and arrange their ends-in reengineered spaces
using new energies at new jobs and leisures-around these environing agendas. Sustainability, however,
cuts both ways. On the one hand, it can articulate a rationale for preserving Nature's biotic diversity
in order to maintain the sustainability of the biosphere. But, on the other hand, it also can represent an
effort to reinforce the prevailing order of capitalistic development by transforming sustainability into
an economic project. To the degree that modern subjectivity is a two-sided power/knowledge relation,
scientific-professional declarations about sustainability essentially describe a new mode of
environmentalized subjectivity. In becoming enmeshed in a worldwatched environ, the individual
subject of a sustainable society could become simultaneously "subject to someone else by control and
dependence," where environmentalizing global and local state agencies enforce their codes of
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sustainability, and police a self directed ecological subject "tied to his own identity by a conscience or
self-knowledge" (Foucault, "Afterword" 12). In both manifestations, the truth regime of ecological
sustainability draws up criteria for what sort of "selfness" will be privileged with political identity and
social self-knowledge. Sustainability, like sexuality, becomes a discourse about exerting power over
life. How power might "invest life through and through" (Foucault, History of Sexuality I 139) becomes a
new challenge, once biopolitical relations are established as environmentalized systems. Moreover,
sustainability more or less presumes that some level of material and cultural existence has been
attained that is indeed worth sustaining. This formation, then, constitutes "a new distribution of
pleasures, discourses, truths, and powers; it has to be seen as the self-affirmation of one class rather
than the enslavement of another: a defense, a protection, a strengthening, and an exaltation ... as a
means of social control and political subjugation" (123). The global bio-accounting systems of the
Worldwatch Institute conceptually and practically exemplify the project of environmentality with their
rhetorics of scientific surveillance. How Nature should be governed is not a purely administrative
question turning upon the technicalities of scientific "know-how." Rather, it is essentially and
inescapably political. The discourses of Worldwatching that rhetorically construct Nature also assign
powers to new global governors and governments, who are granted writs of authority and made
centers of organization in the Worldwatchers' environmentalized specifications of managerial "whocan" and political "how-to."
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C. Thus the alternative: reject the affirmative and the technological thought
within it. Rather, we should release our will to control and let things be.
Best and Nocella, 06 –associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso
(Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth, p. 82-84, google books)
Yet, for both Heidegger and revolutionary environmentalists, there exist possibilities for
transformation despite the destructiveness of Enframing. In the midst of technological peril—indeed,
precisely because the peril strikes at and thus awakens us to the bond between human and nonhuman
life—there emerges a sense of solidarity of human with nonhuman beings. Looking at the well-heeled,
bureaucratic discourse of “human resource management” and “personnel resources,” the challenging
forth of human beings into standing reserve is fairly evident. Factory-farmed cows, pigs, and chickens
obviously have it far worse than people, but in both cases the purpose is to harness resources for
maximum efficiency and profit. Ultimately human and nonhuman beings are similarly enframed within
one giant “gasoline station.” It is precisely the experience of this solidarity which must be constantly
rearticulated—in arts, poetry, ceremony, music, and especially in socioeconomic and political action—in
order to provide a historically and ontologically authentic break with the metaphysics of technical
control and capitalist exploitation. Action will only be truly revolutionary if it revolves around
engagement in solidarity with nature, where liberation is always seen both as human liberation from
the confines of Enframing and simultaneously as liberation of animal nations and eco-regions from
human technics. Anything less will always lapse back into the false and oppressive hierarchy of “man”
over “nature” and “man” over animals with attendant effects of technological, disciplinary control over
humans, nonhumans, and the Earth. Using a familiar title from the anarchist Crimethinc collective, revolutionary
environmentalism is truly an instance of “fighting for our lives” where the pronoun refers to all life not just
human life. Heidegger describes the possibility of transformation through a return of Being as a refigured humanism. It is the possibility of suspending the will and attaining a lucid sense of the free play of
Being within which all of life emerges and is sustained. A human being, like any entity, is—s/he stands
forth as present. But “his distinctive feature lies in [the fact] that he, as the being who thinks, is open to
Being….Man is essentially this relationship of responding to Being. Such experience is the clearing of a
space (symbolically represented, for example, in the building of an arbor for a ceremony or in the
awesome silence created by the space within a cathedral or a grove of old-growth Redwoods), and the
patient readiness for Being to be brought to language. Given the appropriate bearing and evocation
through language, human beings can become aware of dwelling, along with all other existent beings,
within Being—the open realm within which entities are “released” into presence (Gelassenhait—or
“releasement”). What comes to the fore in suspension of willed manipulation is an embrace of other
beings and the enduring process of evolution within which all beings emerge and develop. By
reflecting on or experiencing oneself within the dimension of freedom that is the domain through which
all beings pass, human beings can repair the willed manipulation inherent in calculative thinking and
realize a patient equanimity toward Life. It is only in the context of this reawakened sense of the
unity of life that revolutionary action gains an authentic basis. It is the engagement with “the Other”
that shows the ELF actions are truly about defense of plant and animal life, and they demonstrate
genuine liberation concerns that typically are trapped within Enframing. That is to say, ELF (and similar)
actions, show themselves as part of a dynamic and necessary historical evolution and transformation
process, not merely a gesture of opposition and negation, because of their profound solidarity with
animals and the Earth. Such guidance solidarity thus serves as a general basis for a post-Enframing,
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post-capitalist order, an ecological, not a capitalist society. What will change is, first, the pre-eminence of
Enframing as that which animates the epoch and, correspondingly, our relationship to technology. No
longer will technical solutions be sought after in realms of activity where technique is not
applicable. No longer will everyday activities be pervaded by the standardization and frenzied pace of
technology. No longer will nature be looked upon as a homogenous field of resources to be extracted
and exploited. No longer will resource-intensive and polluting technologies be utilized simply because
they serve the blind interests of corporations over the needs of the Earth. No longer will human beings
take from the Earth without thought of the far-reaching consequences of such actions on all present and
future forms of life. Critics would wrongly denounce this position as atavistic, primitivist, or antiscience/technology. But as the turning toward the re-emergence of Being unfolds, both through
revolutionary action rooted in solidarity with nature and through new, non-exploitative modes of acting
in the world, technics will not disappear; instead, the limits of technology as a mode of revealing will
begin to be discerned so that new forms and uses of technology can emerge. Questions about
technology will center on whether a given technology can be developed and used so that plant and animal life can
appear as it is and not be reduced to standing reserve. The question, for Heidegger, is not whether
technology, in the sense of a set of tools, is done away with, but whether Enframing is surmounted. It is
in this sense of releasement Heidegger writes: “Mortals dwell in that they save the earth….Saving does
not only snatch something from a danger. To save really means to set something free intro its own
presencing. I take this as the literal equivalent of the masked ALF activist reclaiming a puppy from a
research lab so that it can become a dog rather than a unit of research, or an ELF activist who stops the
destruction of an aquifer or forest so that it can remain an aquifer or forest rather than become a water
or wood resource. It is just this new ethos which must guide a revolutionary reconstruction of society
on grounds that preserve the openness to Being and the ability of each kind of being to become what it
is in its essence. For those who charge Heidegger with merely recycling, and not transcending, Western
anthropocentrism, it is important to note that there are possibilities here for an emerging posthumanism—a new orientation to nature beyond egocentric forms of human agency and towards
interrelation with other beings and Being itself. Heidegger’s philosophy allows for multiple modes of
engagement with others and nature as equals, all of them rooted in a relationship of solidarity,
respect, and concern. I call this kind of pluralistic, egalitarian, and ecological outlook ontological anarchism. It
begins with the rejection of illegitimate “rule” of metaphysical constructs that have served to justify
unlimited technological appropriation of the world. In place of Enframing with its subjectivist
metaphysical underpinnings, ontological anarchism proclaims a multiplicity of forms of experience in
which a sense of revealing comes to the fore—such as in art, music, religion, and philosophy. One such
experience, a pre-dominant theme of spiritual re-awakening in the ELF communiques, is found in Native
American philosophy and practice.
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2NC Burke Impact 1/3
Technological thought is the cause of every war and genocide—it guarantees
extinction
Burke 7 Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
[Anthony, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason]
This closed circle of existential and strategic reason generates a number of dangers. Firstly, the
emergence of conflict can generate military action almost automatically simply because the world is
conceived in terms of the distinction between friend and enemy; because the very existence of the
other constitutes an unacceptable threat, rather than a chain of actions, judgements and decisions. (As
the Israelis insisted of Hezbollah, they 'deny our right to exist'.) This effaces agency, causality and responsibility from
policy and political discourse: our actions can be conceived as independent of the conflict or
quarantined from critical enquiry, as necessities that achieve an instrumental purpose but do not
contribute to a new and unpredictable causal chain. Similarly the Clausewitzian idea of force -- which, by transporting a
Newtonian category from the natural into the social sciences, assumes the very effect it seeks -- further encourages the resort to military
violence. We
ignore the complex history of a conflict, and thus the alternative paths to its resolution that
such historical analysis might provide, by portraying conflict as fundamental and existential in nature;
as possibly containable or exploitable, but always irresolvable. Dominant portrayals of the war on
terror, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, are arguably examples of such ontologies in action. …continued…Kissinger's
statement revealed that such cravings for order and certainty continually confront chaos, resistance and
uncertainty: clay that won't be worked, flesh that will not yield, enemies that refuse to surrender. This is
one of the most powerful lessons of the Indochina wars, which were to continue in a phenomenally destructive fashion for six years after
Kissinger wrote these words. Yet as his sinister, Orwellian exhortation to 'evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world' demonstrated, Kissinger's
hubris was undiminished. This
is a vicious, historic irony: a desire to control nature, technology, society and
human beings that is continually frustrated, but never abandoned or rethought. By 1968 U.S. Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara, the rationalist policymaker par excellence, had already decided that U.S. power and technology could not prevail in
Vietnam; Nixon and Kissinger's refusal
to accept this conclusion, to abandon their Cartesian illusions, was to condemn
hundreds of thousands more to die in Indochina and the people of Cambodia to two more decades of horror and misery.59 In
2003 there would be a powerful sense of déja vu as another Republican Administration crowned more than decade of failed and destructive
policy on Iraq with a deeply controversial and divisive war to remove Saddam Hussein from power. In this struggle with the lessons of
Vietnam, revolutionary resistance, and rapid geopolitical transformation, we
are witness to an enduring political and
cultural theme: of a craving for order, control and certainty in the face of continual uncertainty.
Closely related to this anxiety was the way that Kissinger's thinking -- and that of McNamara and earlier imperialists like
the British Governor of Egypt Cromer -- was embedded in instrumental images of technology and the machine: the
machine as both a tool of power and an image of social and political order. In his essay 'The Government of Subject Races' Cromer envisaged
effective imperial rule -- over numerous societies and billions of human beings -- as best achieved by a central authority working 'to ensure the
harmonious working of the different parts of the machine'.60 Kissinger
analogously invoked the virtues of 'equilibrium',
'manageability' and 'stability' yet, writing some six decades later, was anxious that technological
progress no longer brought untroubled control: the Westernising 'spread of technology and its
associated rationality...does not inevitably produce a similar concept of reality'.61
We sense the rational policymaker's frustrated desire: the world is supposed to work like a machine,
ordered by a form of power and governmental reason which deploys machines and whose desires and
processes are meant to run along ordered, rational lines like a machine. Kissinger's desire was little different from that
of Cromer who, wrote Edward Said:...envisions a seat of power in the West and radiating out from it towards the East a great embracing
machine, sustaining the central authority yet commanded by it. What the machine's branches feed into it from the East -- human material,
material wealth, knowledge, what have you -- is processed by the machine, then converted into more power...the immediate translation of
mere Oriental matter into useful substance.62
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This desire for order in the shadow of chaos and uncertainty -- the constant war with an intractable
and volatile matter -- has deep roots in modern thought, and was a major impetus to the
development of technological reason and its supporting theories of knowledge. As Kissinger's claims about the
West's Newtonian desire for the 'accurate' gathering and classification of 'data' suggest, modern
strategy, foreign policy and Realpolitik have been thrust deep into the apparently stable soil of
natural science, in the hope of finding immovable and unchallengeable roots there. …continued…There is
a breathtaking, world-creating hubris in this statement -- one that, in many ways, came to
characterise western modernity itself, and which is easily recognisable in a generation of modern
technocrats like Kissinger. The Fall of Adam was the Judeo-Christian West's primal creation myth, one that
marked humankind as flawed and humbled before God, condemned to hardship and ambivalence.
Bacon forecast here a return to Eden, but one of man's own making. This truly was the death of God, of putting man into God's
place, and no pious appeals to the continuity or guidance of faith could disguise the awesome epistemological violence which now
subordinated creation to man. Bacon indeed argued that inventions are 'new creations and imitations of divine works'. As such, there is nothing
but good in science: 'the introduction of great inventions is the most distinguished of human actions...inventions are a blessing and a benefit
without injuring or afflicting any'.70
And what would be mankind's 'bread', the rewards of its new 'empire over creation'? If the new
method and invention brought modern medicine, social welfare, sanitation, communications,
education and comfort, it also enabled the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust and two world wars;
napalm, the B52, the hydrogen bomb, the Kalashnikov rifle and military strategy. Indeed some of the 20th
Century's most far-reaching inventions -- radar, television, rocketry, computing, communications, jet aircraft, the Internet -- would be the
product of drives for national security and militarisation. Even the inventions Bacon thought so marvellous and transformative -- printing,
gunpowder and the compass -- brought in their wake upheaval
and tragedy: printing, dogma and bureaucracy; gunpowder, the rifle and the artillery battery; navigation, slavery and the genocide of
indigenous peoples. In short, the legacy
of the new empirical science would be ambivalence as much as
certainty; degradation as much as enlightenment; the destruction of nature as much as its utilisation.
If Bacon could not reasonably be expected to foresee many of these developments, the idea that scientific and technological progress could be
destructive did occur to him. However it was an anxiety he summarily dismissed:...let none be alarmed at the objection of the arts and sciences
becoming depraved to malevolent or luxurious purposes and the like, for the same can be said of every worldly good; talent, courage, strength,
beauty, riches, light itself...Only let mankind regain their rights over nature, assigned to them by the gift of God, and obtain that power, whose
By the mid-Twentieth Century, after the destruction of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such fears could no longer be so easily wished away, as the physicist and scientific
exercise will be governed by right reason and true religion.71
director of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer recognised. He said in a 1947 lecture: We felt a particularly intimate responsibility
for suggesting, for supporting and in the end in large measure achieving the realization of atomic weapons...In some sort of crude sense which
no vulgarity, no humor, no over-statement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge they cannot
lose.72Adam
had fallen once more, but into a world which refused to acknowledge its renewed intimacy
with contingency and evil. Man's empire over creation -- his discovery of the innermost secrets of matter and energy, of
the fires that fuelled the stars -- had not 'enhanced human power and dignity' as Bacon claimed, but instead brought
destruction and horror. Scientific powers that had been consciously applied in the defence of life and
in the hope of its betterment now threatened its total and absolute destruction. This would not
prevent a legion of scientists, soldiers and national security policymakers later attempting to apply
Bacon's faith in invention and Descartes' faith in mathematics to make of the Bomb a rational
weapon.
Oppenheimer -- who resolutely opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb -- understood what the strategists could
not: that the weapons resisted control, resisted utility, that 'with the release of atomic energy quite revolutionary
changes had occurred in the techniques of warfare'.73 Yet Bacon's legacy, one deeply imprinted on the strategists, was his view that truth and
utility are 'perfectly identical'.74 In 1947 Oppenheimer had clung to the hope that 'knowledge is good...it seems hard to live any other way than
thinking it was better to know something than not to know it; and the more you know, the better'; by 1960 he felt that 'terror attaches to new
knowledge. It has an unmooring quality; it finds men unprepared to deal with it.'
Martin Heidegger
questioned this mapping of natural science onto the social world in his essays on technology --
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which, as 'machine', has been so crucial to modern strategic and geopolitical thought as an image of
perfect function and order and a powerful tool of intervention. He commented that, given that modern technology
'employs exact physical science...the deceptive illusion arises that modern technology is applied physical science'.76 Yet as the essays and
speeches of Oppenheimer attest, technology
and its relation to science, society and war cannot be reduced to a
noiseless series of translations of science for politics, knowledge for force, or force for good.
Instead, Oppenheimer saw a process frustrated by roadblocks and ruptured by irony; in his view there was no smooth,
unproblematic translation of scientific truth into social truth, and technology was not its vehicle.
Rather his comments raise profound and painful ethical questions that resonate with terror and
uncertainty. Yet this has not prevented technology becoming a potent object of desire, not merely as an instrument of power but as a
promise and conduit of certainty itself. In the minds of too many rational soldiers, strategists and policymakers,
technology brings with it the truth of its enabling science and spreads it over the world. It turns
epistemological certainty into political certainty; it turns control over 'facts' into control over the
earth.
Heidegger's insights into this phenomena I find especially telling and disturbing -- because they underline the ontological force of the
instrumental view of politics. In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger's striking argument was that in the modernising West
technology is not merely a tool, a 'means to an end'. Rather technology
has become a governing image of the modern
universe, one that has come to order, limit and define human existence as a 'calculable coherence of
forces' and a 'standing reserve' of energy. Heidegger wrote: 'the threat to man does not come in the first instance from the
potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence.'77
This process Heidegger calls 'Enframing' and through it the scientific mind demands that 'nature reports itself in some way or other that is
identifiable through calculation and remains orderable as a system of information'. Man is not a being who makes and uses machines as means,
choosing and limiting their impact on the world for his ends; rather man has imagined the world as a machine and humanity everywhere
becomes trapped within its logic. Man, he writes, 'comes
to the very brink of a precipitous fall...where he himself
will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile Man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of
lord of the earth.'78 Technological man not only becomes the name for a project of lordship and mastery
over the earth, but incorporates humanity within this project as a calculable resource. In strategy,
warfare and geopolitics human bodies, actions and aspirations are caught, transformed and perverted
by such calculating, enframing reason: human lives are reduced to tools, obstacles, useful or obstinate
matter.
This tells us much about the enduring power of crude instrumental versions of strategic thought, which relate not merely to the actual use of
force but to broader geopolitical strategies that see, as limited war theorists like Robert Osgood did, force as an 'instrument of policy short of
war'. It was from within this strategic ontology that figures like the Nobel prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling theorised the strategic role
of threats and coercive diplomacy, and spoke of strategy as 'the power to hurt'.79 In the 2006 Lebanon war we can see such thinking in the
remark of a U.S. analyst, a former Ambassador to Israel and Syria, who speculated that by targeting civilians and infrastructure Israel aimed 'to
create enough pain on the ground so there would be a local political reaction to Hezbollah's adventurism'.80 Similarly a retired Israeli army
colonel told the Washington Post that 'Israel is attempting to create a rift between the Lebanese population and Hezbollah supporters by
exacting a heavy price from the elite in Beirut. The message is: If you want your air conditioning to work and if you want to be able to fly to
Paris for shopping, you must pull your head out of the sand and take action toward shutting down Hezbollah-land.'81Conclusion: Violent
Ontologies or Peaceful Choices?
I was motivated to begin the larger project from which this essay derives by a number of concerns. I felt that the available critical,
interpretive or performative languages of war -- realist and liberal international relations theories,
just war theories, and various Clausewitzian derivations of strategy -- failed us, because they either
perform or refuse to place under suspicion the underlying political ontologies that I have sought to unmask and
question here. Many realists have quite nuanced and critical attitudes to the use of force, but ultimately
affirm strategic thought and remain embedded within the existential framework of the nation-state.
Both liberal internationalist and just war doctrines seek mainly to improve the accountability of decisionmaking in security affairs and to limit some of the worst moral enormities of war, but (apart from the more
radical versions of cosmopolitanism) they fail to question the ontological claims of political community or
strategic theory.82
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In the case of a theorist like Jean Bethke Elshtain, just war doctrine is in fact allied to a softer, liberalised form of the Hegelian-Schmittian
ontology. She dismisses Kant's Perpetual Peace as 'a fantasy of at-oneness...a world in which differences have all been rubbed off' and in which
'politics, which is the way human beings have devised for dealing with their differences, gets eliminated.'83 She remains a committed liberal
democrat and espouses a moral community that stretches beyond the nation-state, which strongly contrasts with Schmitt's hostility to
liberalism and his claustrophobic distinction between friend and enemy. However her
image of politics -- which at its limits, she
the resort to war as the only existentially satisfying way of resolving deep-seated
conflicts -- reflects much of Schmitt's idea of the political and Hegel's ontology of a fundamentally alienated world of nation-states,
in which war is a performance of being. She categorically states that any effort to dismantle security dilemmas 'also requires
implies, requires
the dismantling of human beings as we know them'.84 Whilst this would not be true of all just war advocates, I suspect that even as they are so
concerned with the ought, moral theories of violence grant too much unquestioned power to the is. The
problem here lies with the
confidence in being -- of 'human beings as we know them' -- which ultimately fails to escape a
Schmittian architecture and thus eternally exacerbates (indeed reifies) antagonisms . Yet we know from the
work of Deleuze and especially William Connolly that exchanging an ontology of being for one of becoming, where the boundaries and nature
of the self contain new possibilities through agonistic relation to others, provides a less destructive and violent way of acknowledging and
dealing with conflict and difference.85
My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for the eventual abolition of war, militates against excessive
optimism.86 Even as I am arguing that war
is not an enduring historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral
and rational instrument of policy -- that it is rather the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about
political action and community -- my analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions about its power as an idea and formation.
Neither the progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of
republican states will save us. The violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the
conceptual and policy frameworks of modern republican states and have come, against everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for
progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues, I think with some credibility, is that the enframing world view has
come to stand in for being itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply endanger man in his
relationship to himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other possibility of revealing...the
rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a
more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.'87
What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political
existence and security -- is a view that the
challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon,
government, technology or policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and understanding that
lays claim to our entire space of truth and existence. Many of the most destructive features of
contemporary modernity -- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention,
geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological destruction -- derive not merely from particular
choices by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical' discourses
of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined within
such an epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices become necessities, their actions
become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die. Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the
chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of action, however
violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very operation and existence. It
creates both discursive constraints -- available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material
constraints that derive from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then
preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective, dysfunctional or
chaotic.
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2NC – How to write an overview
Every 2NC should begin with a brief thesis statement/story that frames the
negative argument. Effective framing, with a coherent thesis and meaningful
impact/link work will prevent repetition later in the debate. You should always,
always, always be specific to the 1AC that you are debating. Kritik arguments
can be very complex, and only the best debaters can deploy the argument
effectively, given the narrow time constraints.
So, example overviews –
The affirmative endorses an anthropocentric, or human centered,
understanding of the world. The 1AC protects sanctuaries and reefs so humans
can continue to exploit them for human-centered activity like economic
exploitation or trading of the natural world. This is tantamount to slavery, but
this time it is the non-human world that is enslaved and exploited. This
outweighs and turns the affirmative for the following reasons (INSERT YOUR
IDEAS HERE. I SUGGEST THAT YOU ALSO INCLUDE SPECIFIC REFERENCE TO 1NC
Authors)
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2NC/1NR - Link – Technology/Environmentalism
The affirmative’s attempts to help the environment place anthropocentrism at
the forefront of an ecological approach—a radical rethinking is necessary.
Lintott ’11 Sheila Lintott. Fall 2011. “Preservation, Passivity, and Pessimism”. Ethics & the
Environment. 16:2. Pages 104-106.
Striking parallels exist between the old domination program and restoration. The most basic is that in
both systems humans hold the place of highest authority and power within the world. Also, neither
view recognizes any limits to the scope or range of legitimate human manipulation in the world. This
does not mean that there are no constraints— only beneficial manipulations should be undertaken—but
it does mean that nothing is intrinsically off-limits. A further parallel is that because the fate of the world
rests on humans, they must have a clear idea of what needs to be done. They must know what
conditions are good (or at least what conditions are better) and then work to bring them about. Their
activity, then, requires them to shape the world after ideas in their own mind. (Kane, 227; see also Katz
1997b) In other words, despite claims to the contrary, despite good intentions, and despite some
manner of improvements, the logic of restoration implements the allegedly jettisoned domination
model according to which humans are superior to and thus justified in shaping nature as they see fit,
whether they act on behalf of what they deem to be in their own or in nature’s interest. This logic of
domination is coupled with the hierarchical dualism of the active and the passive in restorationist
criticisms of preservation. An appreciation of the activity, the effort, and the work required in
preservation is often lacking in restorationist critiques of preservationism. The debate has absorbed the
active/passive dualism in its full normative force. Preservation is not a merely negative policy; it
mandates and requires a great deal of activity. However, it is the sort of activity that too frequently goes
unnoticed and almost entirely unappreciated. It is the sort of activity usually associated with the female
side of the male/female dualism. It is activity that, although its interaction isn’t always obvious, does
positively or negatively affect others, through the agent’s self-control, restraint, respect, and patience,
all of which demand great strength and effort. It is not the case that these seemingly passive acts
happen without effort, without agency, without activity, as it is often supposed. (Think, for example,
about the lack of credit given to mothers because they are allegedly naturally nurturing, doing, it seems,
what comes naturally to them; their care work is often construed passively, as if it happens through
them, rather than being work that requires serious effort, intellect, and conscious sacrifice.) Jordan
maintains that a successful environmentalism will be one that satisfies individuals at a personal level,
and he does not believe preservationism can. At a personal level, [preservationism] survives in a culture
that provides only an extremely limited repertory of ways for contacting nature—ways, I mean, that
engage only a limited range of human interests, talents, and abilities. The result—unintended of
course—is a kind of psychological elitism that accommodates those inclined by nature to the experience
of observation and appreciation, but has less to offer the mechanics, nurturers, healers, hunters,
gatherers, artists, craftsmen, pilots, planners, leaders, and ditch diggers among us. (And at a personal
level, of course, it leaves those parts of each of us unsatisfied.) (Jordan 2000a, 31) The conclusion is that
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restoration is the more promising policy when it comes to forging a culture of nature. Preservationism is
inept; it offers an “extremely limited” list of ways to engage with nature and appeals only to a select few
of us, and only to a small part of each of us psychologically— the part that is interested in the relatively
passive habits of “observation and appreciation.” Yet Jordan’s charges of elitism should be turned on his
own view. He suggests that “mechanics, nurturers, healers, hunters, gatherers, artsheila lintott
preservation, passivity, and pessimism 105 ists, craftsmen, pilots, planners, leaders, and ditch diggers
among us” are not “inclined by nature to the experience of observation and appreciation.” This
divides people into those who ‘do’ and those who ‘think,’ with the doers digging ditches and the
thinkers satisfied with observation and appreciation. This is a double insult. For one, the suggested
division of labor is faulty, for ditch diggers, hunters, and mechanics certainly better observe and
appreciate, i.e., think before they act, lest they dig into a gas line, hunt a pet, or damage an engine in
their rush to act. Second, while preservationists, whether they spend their time writing books or walking
in the woods (or, most likely, both), certainly do observe and appreciate nature, in doing so, they engage
in a great many additional activities. In selecting subjects for study, they discriminate between subjects
according to their capacities, behaviors, and an array of other aspects, exerting effort to avoid
influencing the objects of their study, and they work to make what they study meaningful in a broader
context and to a broad audience. These are some of the many things that preservationists do when they
“observe and appreciate.” Also, the talents that a preservationist has are shared with those engaged in a
variety of other activities Jordan mentions; for example, the ability to detect subtle signs of flourishing
would also be beneficial for a healer. Moreover, to cultivate environmental virtues, profound cultural
and individual changes are in order. Given this, we should be concerned about restorationists’
willingness to cater to existing attitudes, perceived needs, and desires in the environmental policy
they endorse. Those attitudes, perceived needs, and desires are at the very heart of the problem of
environmental degradation; many of them underwrite the environmental crisis in which we find
ourselves today. The fact that preservation doesn’t satisfy such preexisting desires is not necessarily
to be counted against it; indeed it may be part of its strength. Link—“Save” Nature
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Human solutions to environmental problems reinforce human chauvinism—
nature/culture binaries must be questioned before environmental destruction
can be confronted.
Lintott ’11 Sheila Lintott. Fall 2011. “Preservation, Passivity, and Pessimism”. Ethics & the
Environment. 16:2. Pages 100-102.
Perhaps I am being too literal; perhaps Jordan is merely suggesting that seeing nature as something we
can affect—positively and negatively— illustrates its dependence on us, which is conducive to our
bonding with nature by cultivating a sense of responsibility for our actions regarding it. Maybe seeing
nature’s dependence on us can motivate us to act more responsibly in the way that grasping his baby’s
dependence and vulnerability can motivate a father to act responsibly toward the baby. Parents
frequently are touched by their children’s vulnerability in this way. However, nature simply is not
vulnerable in this way. Nature does not need us to survive; nature will continue long after us and
would probably, in some sense, be better off without us. Truth be told, we are the vulnerable,
dependent ones in the human-nature relationship. Restorationists sometimes seem reluctant to admit
this. Some restorationists emphasize the collaborative nature of their practice, seeing restoration
ultimately as a way to (re-)enfranchise and (re)liberate nature. For example, Trish Glazebrook describes
the practice of restoration in the oil industry as follows: “The actual practice of restoration in the oil
industry does not ‘make nature’ at all, but rather involves providing the right conditions, and then
allowing the time for nature to heal itself. The process is more about patience than mastery and
control” (Glazebrook, 30). One sometimes finds evidence of such an attitude in the best versions of
restoration; however, one should look carefully at the sentiments expressed in public and professional
debates on the topic and at how the practice actually plays out to discern whether restoration is always
as humble, collaborative, and patient as Glazebrook’s recount makes it seem. For example, take Turner’s
excitement and optimism about restoration as a normative paradigm; it is, literally, otherworldly: If we
are alone [i.e. if we are the only intelligent life in the universe], then we carry a gigantic responsibility.
We are the custodians of life in the universe, and the only plausible vector by which life may
propagate itself to other worlds…. But one day the long discipline of restoration may bear a strange and
unexpected fruit, and an alien sun may shine on miles of blowing prairie. (Turner, 203) I am sincerely
taken aback by such a suggestion and do not detect any humility or collaboration in it. Perhaps a few
readers are thinking that colonizing other worlds is ethically unproblematic, so long as no persons or
sentient beings are colonized in the process. However, there are two things to note about this. First, the
attitude expressed here is compatible with a willingness to accept degradation as given and to simply
move on and away from it via technological means—an attitude that sees human life as the most
important life on this planet (and perhaps on others). This is not an attitude that is conducive to
healthy human-nature relationships. And this leads to another issue, if we deal with past mistakes by
leaving them and moving on to new venues, what’s to stop humanity from continuing on in this
manner—world-hopping, as it were? Add to this the fact that many astronomers now believe that in all
probability we are not alone, that is, that we do not represent the only intelligent life in the universe. If
so, then dreams of colonizing other planets need to be checked by the possibility that other beings
may already inhabit those worlds. I find myself here reminded of Val Plumwood’s wise counsel against
even contemplating colonizing distant planets before we can learn to live well on this one. As she says,
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“Perhaps the most important task for human beings is not to search the stars to converse with cosmic
beings but to learn to communicate with the other species that share this planet with us” (Plumwood
2002, 189). I find similar reasoning applicable to the debate over restoration and I suggest that the most
important task for human beings is not to seek greater mastery over nature to create nature anew (here
or elsewhere), but to learn to coexist peacefully with and to fully respect the nature that exists here and
persists in each of us. I partially agree with Jordan that “the real challenge of environmentalism is not to
preserve nature by protecting it from human beings or rescuing it from their influence, but to provide
the basis for a healthy relationship between nature and culture” (Jordan 2000b, 208). My agreement is
partial because, at this point in time, forging “a healthy relationship between nature and culture”
necessarily involves privileging the preservation and protection of nature from human influence.
Moreover, we also need to worry about the likely cultural uptake of the practice of restoration; that is,
how non-participants in the research and physical work of restoration, which will be the vast majority of
people, are likely to interpret and understand the process of restoration. Most likely participants will
already be relatively virtuous concerning environmental matters. Those most in need of character
remediation might be aware of the projects but are far less likely to freely participate in them. From the
point of view of a non-participating observer, Robert Elliot’s feared “replacement thesis” might come
alive—that is, restoration projects might just provide what seem to be valid grounds to excuse the
initial degradation and even justify future degradation (Elliot 2000). A non-participating observer who
has heard talk of, for example, efforts to return wolves to Yellowstone Park might be impressed with the
work and the science involved, and might then find in restoration a source of optimism regardless of
how she or other humans continue to behave. Given how the shock and awe of war seems to impress
the public, it is reasonable to worry that many could interpret restoration as the human ability to
pillage and then restore nature, giving us the justification for consumerism in every corner of life–
from big cars and big houses to big planes flying us to remote locations for big vacations in restored
nature that can be re-restored when need be. Of course, this does not mean that restoration does
justify degradation, but it might easily be interpreted that way. So, restoration needs to be secondary to
preservation unless we want to be satisfied with restored and re-restored nature, which will ultimately
leave us with nothing tangible on which to base restorations.
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The desire to preserve the current ecosystem reflects anthropocentric bias
Grey 1993 William Grey, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland, 1993 [Australiasian
Journal of Philosophy, Vol 71, No 4 (1993), pp. 463-475]
Finally, I consider the "ecocentric" approach advocated, for example, by J. Baird Callicott (1989), which
is another attempt to develop a non-anthropocentric basis for value. This "deep" approach, inspired by
Aldo Leopold (1949), on examination also reveals covert anthropocentrism. For example, in "On the
Intrinsic Value of Nonhuman Species" Callicott explores various grounds on which we might extend
moral consideration to nonhuman individuals. One particular line which he explores, and revealingly
rejects is "holistic rationalism". Goodness, on this view, is identified above all with the objective
harmony of the biosphere as a whole, which "exemplifies or embodies the Good" (Callicott 1989, p.
142). Since species serve the good of the biotic whole (which is quite independent of human interest)
we have a non-anthropocentric justification for species preservation. But individual species, from this
perspective, are transitional components of developmental stages of the planet's evolutionary
odyssey: The Age of Reptiles came to a close (for whatever reason) to be followed by the Age of
Mammals. A holistic rationalist would not regret the massive die-off of the late Cretaceous because it
made possible our yet richer mammal-populated world. The Age of Mammals may likewise end. But the
"laws" of organic evolution and of ecology (if any there be) will remain operative. In time speciation
would occur and species would radiate anew. Future "intelligent" forms of life may even feel grateful,
if not to us then to their God (or the Good), for making their world possible. The new Age (of Insects,
perhaps) would eventually be just as diverse, orderly, harmonious and stable and thus no less good
than our current ecosystem with its present complement of species. With friends like the holistic
rationalists, species preservation needs no enemies. (Callicott 1989, p. 142) This passage is revealing.
Note the characterization of the Age of Mammals as "richer" than the Age of Reptiles. As mammal
chauvinists we might agree, but it is not clear on what grounds Callicott can justify the claim. It is also
easy to agree that our demise, and the demise of the ecosystem which currently supports us, would be
a matter of regret. But clearly it would be regrettable because of a decidedly anthropocentric set of
values, interests and perceptions—if Callicott really eschews such concerns entirely, the grounds on
which his regret is based are deprived of any foundation.
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2NC/1NR - Framework
1. Framework is a link—It is the type of logical thinking that tries to control
being. The attempt to exclude our criticism prevents an ontic shift that makes
all life meaningless.
Sawicki, 2003- Ph.D. Columbia University, Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, Chair of Women's
And Gender Studies, Williams College (Jana, “Foucault and Heidegger Critical Encounters”, Heidegger and
Foucault:Escaping Technological Nihilism, University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London, Questia, )
Who accomplishes the challenging setting upon through which what we call the real is revealed as
standing-reserve? Obviously, man. To what extent is man capable of such a revealing? Man can, indeed,
conceive, fashion, and carry through this or that in one way or another … but man does not have control
over unconcealment itself, in which at any given time the real shows itself or withdraws … the
unconcealment itself, within which ordering unfolds, is never a human handiwork, anymore than is
the realm man traverses every time he as a subject relates to an object. (QT, 18)
Here Heidegger asserts that the idea that the mark of the human is the rational ordering and controlling
of reality is itself not something that anyone or any group has consciously chosen. The ideas that reality is
an object for human control and technology merely a human instrument are themselves examples of
the technological thinking that dominates the modern age. Although we do decide whether any given
representation of reality is true or false, or how any particular thing is to be used, which
representations come up as candidates for truth or falsity, which questions are taken seriously, and the very fact
that beings are revealed as things for use, are not themselves up for choice. 9 The background against
which objects appear is neither wholly graspable nor intentionally constituted. It is, instead, a forgotten
horizon of historically transmitted practices and beliefs that we take for granted.
In the Discourse on Thinking Heidegger addresses this unchosen, autonomous feature of technology when he says: “Whenever we plan,
research, and organize, we always reckon with conditions that are given.” In “The Question Concerning Technology” he uses the term
“enframing” (Gestell) to describe the essence of modern technology; it
is “the way in which the real reveals itself as
standing reserve” (QT, 2, 3). Moreover, “enframing” represents a “destining” of revealing insofar as it
“pushes” us in a certain direction. Heidegger does not regard destining as determination (he says it is not a
“fate which compels”), but rather as the implicit project within the field of modern practices to subject all
aspects of reality to the principles of order and efficiency, and to pursue reality down to the finest detail. Thus,
insofar as modern technology aims to order and render calculable, the objectification of reality tends
to take the form of an increasing classification, differentiation, and fragmentation of reality. The possibilities for how
things appear are increasingly reduced to those that enhance calculative activities.
Heidegger perceives the real danger in the modern age to be that human beings will continue to regard
technology as a mere instrument and fail to inquire into its essence. He fears that all revealing will
become calculative and all relations technical, that the unthought horizon of revealing, namely the
“concealed” background practices that make technological thinking possible, will be forgotten. He remarks:
The coming to presence of technology threatens revealing, threatens it with the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in
ordering and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealedness of standing-reserve. (QT, 33)
Therefore, it is not technology, or science, but rather the essence of technology as a way of revealing that
constitutes the danger; for the essence of technology is existential, not technological. 11 It is a matter of how
human beings are fundamentally oriented toward their world vis a vis their practices, skills, habits, customs,
and so forth. Humanism contributes to this danger insofar as it fosters the illusion that technology is the result of a collective human choice and
therefore subject to human control. 12
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2. Counter-interpretation—We should have a race to the middle. The aff can
leverage their 1AC against a competitive advocacy
A. Our offense
1. Ground—they force us to run crappy disadvantages and counter-plans every
round without being about to question the assumptions of the plan
2. Education—Learning about philosophical and epistemological aspects of
policies is key to being better students and policy makers.
3. Ontological examination forms the foundation for all ontic truth- our
knowledge shapes the objects around us, not the other way around
Elden, 2003- BSc (Hons) in Politics and Modern History (1994) and a PhD in Political Theory (1999),
both from Brunel University, Professor in the department of Geography at Durham University (Stuart,
“Foucault and Heidegger Critical Encounters”, Reading Genealogy as Historical Ontology, University of
Minnesota Press Minneapolis London, Questia, )
It is worth drawing out some of the potential implications of Being and Time. From the discussion of
Newton, it is clear that Dasein and truth are fundamentally linked, that truth is context dependent. 22
This does not mean that truth is only what an individual thinks, but that truth only has a context
dependent on the existence of Dasein. 23 Any eternal truths must rest on an eternal immutability to
Dasein. It clearly follows from this that if being changes or is historicized, so, too, is truth. It has been
remarked by some critics that Heidegger does indeed, in Being and Time, suggest such an immutability
to Dasein, examining it and its structures as if they were true eternally. Such critics sometimes point to a
shift in the later Heidegger toward an understanding of the historical nature of being, of Dasein, which
leads to a historicizing of truth. 24
Immediately after Being and Time, Heidegger turned his attention to Kant. In terms of the issues at stake
here, the crucial part of this reading is the suggestion that Kant recognizes the ontic/ontological
distinction. Heidegger suggests that ontic knowledge is knowledge pertaining to the distinctive nature
of beings as such, whereas ontological knowledge is the basis on which any such theory (of ontic
knowledge) could be constructed, the a priori conditions for the possibility of such sciences.
Heidegger's own exercise as fundamental ontology deals with the conditions of possibility not just of
the ontic sciences, but of the ontologies that precede and found them. Ontological knowledge
provides the a priori conditions for ontic knowledge; it concerns being rather than beings. 25 The
predominant strain of Kant interpretation in Heidegger 's time was the neo-Kantianism of the Marburg
school, which argued that the Critique of Pure Reason was a work of epistemology. This view, put
forward by Hermann Cohen, Heinrich Rickert, and Paul Natorp, among others, held sway in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Heidegger, lecturing at Marburg, tackles this interpretation
head on: the Critique of Pure Reason is a theory of knowledge, but it is not a theory of ontic knowledge
(i.e., experience) but rather of ontological knowledge—transcendental philosophy, ontology 26 Ontic
knowledge (of beings) must conform to ontological foundations (being). This is the real meaning of
Kant's Copernican revolution: that instead of our knowledge conforming to objects, objects must
conform to our knowledge. 27
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4. Plan Focus is bad—The plan alone in a vacuum is meaningless; it’s a question
of how we frame and justify policies. They should be responsible for the
framing of their advantages.
5. Our defense
1. Not a voting issue—at worst you default to their interpretation and the alt
goes away
2. Predictability is non-unique—there are already an infinite number of DAs and
CPs—only a risk of our education offense
3. Competition checks—as long as the alternative is mutually exclusive it’s
functionally a counter-plan
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2NC – Impact – Rejecting Anthropocentrism outweighs
Speceism is the root cause of all forms of oppression and domination – we
outweigh on magnitude and this solves the root cause of the affirmative harms
Best 7(Steven, Associate Professor, Departments of Humanities and Philosophy University of Texas, El Paso,
Charles Patterson, The Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust,
www.drstevebest.org/EternalTriblenka.pdf)
"As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other" –Pythagoras¶ It is little understood that the
first form of oppression, domination, and hierarchy involves human domination over animals.2
Patterson’s thesis stands in bold contrast to the Marxist theory that the domination over nature is fundamental to
the domination over other humans. It differs as well from the social ecology position of Murray Bookchin that
domination over humans brings about alienation from the natural world, provokes hierarchical mindsets and
institutions, and is the root of the long-standing western goal to “dominate” nature.3 In the case of Marxists,
anarchists, and so many others, theorists typically don’t even mention human domination of animals, let alone
assign it causal primacy or significance. In Patterson’s model, however, the human subjugation of animals is
the first form of hierarchy and it paves the way for all other systems of domination such as include
patriarchy, racism, colonialism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust (omnicide). As he puts it, “the
exploitation of animals was the model and inspiration for the atrocities people committed against
each other, slavery and the Holocaust (genocide) being but two of the more dramatic examples.”4¶
Hierarchy emerged with the rise of agricultural society some ten thousand years ago. In the shift from
nomadic hunting and gathering bands to settled agricultural practices, humans began to establish their dominance
over animals through “domestication.” In animal domestication (often a euphemism disguising coercion
and cruelty), humans began to exploit animals for purposes such as obtaining food, milk, clothing, plowing,
and transportation. As they gained increasing control over the lives and labor power of animals, humans
bred them for desired traits and controlled them in various ways, such as castrating males to make
them more docile. To conquer, enslave, and claim animals as their own property, humans developed numerous
technologies, such as pens, cages, collars, ropes, chains, and branding irons. ¶ The domination of animals paved
the way for the domination of humans. The sexual subjugation of women, Patterson suggests, was
modeled after the domestication of¶ Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume V, Issue 2, 2007¶ animals,
such that men began to control women’s reproductive capacity, to enforce repressive sexual norms, and to
rape them as they forced breeding in their animals. Not coincidentally, Patterson argues, slavery emerged in the
same region of the Middle East that spawned agriculture, and, in fact, developed as an extension of
animal domestication practices. In areas like Sumer, slaves were managed like livestock, and males were
castrated and forced to work along with females.¶ In the fifteenth century, when Europeans began the colonization
of Africa and Spain introduced the first international slave markets, the metaphors, models, and technologies
used to exploit animal slaves were applied with equal cruelty and force to human slaves. Stealing
Africans from their native environment and homeland, breaking up families who scream in anguish, wrapping
chains around slaves’ bodies, shipping them in cramped quarters across continents for weeks or months with no
regard for their needs or suffering, branding their skin with a hot iron to mark them as property, auctioning them
as servants, breeding them for service and labor, exploiting them for profit, beating them in rages of hatred and
anger, and killing them in vast numbers – all these horrors and countless others inflicted on black slaves
were developed and perfected centuries earlier through animal exploitation.
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And voting negative solves the root cause of racism – its grounded in humanist
notions of domination of humans over all else
Best 7(Steven, Associate Professor, Departments of Humanities and Philosophy University of Texas, El Paso,
Charles Patterson, The Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust,
www.drstevebest.org/EternalTriblenka.pdf)
Patterson underscores the crucial point that the domination of human over human and its exercise
through slavery, warfare, and genocide typically begins with the denigration of victims. But the means
and methods of dehumanization are derivative, for speciesism provided the conceptual paradigm that
encouraged, sustained, and justified western brutality toward other peoples. “Throughout the history
of our ascent to dominance as the master species,” Patterson writes, “our victimization of animals has
served as the model and foundation for our victimization of each other. The study of human history
reveals the pattern: first, humans exploit and slaughter animals; then, they treat other people like
animals and do the same to them.”5 Whether the conquerors are European imperialists, American
colonialists, or German Nazis, western aggressors engaged in wordplay before swordplay, vilifying their
victims – Africans, Native Americans, Filipinos, Japanese, Vietnamese, Iraqis, and other unfortunates –
with opprobrious terms such as “rats,” “pigs,” “swine,” “monkeys,” “beasts,” and “filthy animals.”
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2NC Impact – Extinction
Absent a shift towards a more fundamental understanding of the universe
extinction is inevitable
Henning 09 (Brian; Associate Professor of Philosophy at Gonzaga University; “Trusting in the 'Efficacy
of Beauty: A Kalocentric Approach to Moral Philosophy”; Ethics & the Environment- Volume 14, Number
1)//RSW
In the opening decade of this new millennium, long-simmering
conflicts have exploded into a rolling boil of fear,
hostility, and violence. Whether we are talking about the rise of religious fundamentalism, the so-called "war on
terror" or the much touted culture wars that define the [End Page 101] contemporary American political
landscape, there is a move away from tolerance and appreciation of diversity toward the ever more
strident formulation of absolutist positions. Dogmatism in its various forms seems to be on the rise as
the rhetoric and reality of compromise and consensus building is replaced with the vitriol of moral
superiority and righteousness. As the psychologist and philosopher William James noted more than a century ago, the problem is
that we are in a world where "every one of hundreds of ideals has its special champion already provided in the shape of some genius expressly
born to feel it, and to fight to death in its behalf" (James 1956 [1891], 207–08). The force of this point was made brutally clear by the events of
and following September 11, 2001. Given
a world fraught with such conflict and tension, what is needed is not a
moral philosophy that dogmatically advances absolute moral codes. More than ever, what is needed is an
ethic that is dynamic, fallible, and situated, yet not grossly relativistic. This project takes on added urgency when
we consider the environmental and social crises that threaten not only human civilization, but all forms
of life on this planet. Unhealthy air and water, species extinction, overpopulation, soaring food prices,
fresh water shortages, stronger storms, prolonged droughts, the spread of deserts, deforestation,
melting ice caps and glaciers, the submersion of low-lying lands—there are no shortage of challenges
facing us in this young century. Complex and multifaceted, these issues are at once technological, scientific,
economic, social, and political. Yet we will have no hope of successfully addressing the root cause of
these crises until we also squarely confront fundamental issues concerning epistemology, axiology,
aesthetics, and metaphysics. Although debates over carbon taxes and trading schemes, over carbon
offsets and compact fluorescents are important, our efforts will ultimately fail unless and until we also
set about the difficult work of reconceiving who we are and how we are related to our processive
cosmos. What is needed, I believe, are new ways of thinking and acting grounded in new ways of
understanding ourselves and our relationship to the world, ways of understanding that recognize our
fundamental interdependence and interconnection with everyone and everything in the cosmos, ways
of understanding that recognize the intrinsic beauty and value of every form of existence. What is needed, I
suggest, is a moral philosophy grounded in Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism. Recognizing this [End Page 102] need, it is the
primary aim of this essay to present the key elements and defend the value of a moral philosophy inspired by, though not dogmatically
committed to, Whitehead's organic, beauty-centered conception of reality.
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Anthropocentrism K
Anthropocentrism makes human extinction inevitable
Linda Destefano 1990 [http://www.peacecouncil.net/history/PNLs1981-90/PNL570-1990.pdf.]
It is the
human species which has brought the entire ecosystem to the brink of disaster- whether by
poison- ing the biosphere with out deadly chemicals and radioactive garbage or by using up all earth's
resource s through overpopulation and extravagant, wasteful lifestyles, or by nuclear holocaust because of the ultimate
ego-trip (that is, being will- ing to destroy everything rather tha n give up the childish fascination
with human cleverness as manifested i n the latest "advance" in weapons tech- nology) Human oppression of other
species is a flaw which turns back on u s because everything in the environ- ment is related; the
attitude and behavior of one species influences the others, and eventually the result returns to
initiator. For instance, there is the willingness of many per - sons to drive other species to
extinc- tion. Example: many plants are endangered. Research is being con - ducted on the potential
treatment of cancer by plant extracts. Will we extinguish a plant species which could have treated
cancer? Example: whales, dolphins, gorillas an d elephants are among the many endangered animals . If
they are decimated, we may lose more than the beauty and wonder of these earth companions. We
may lose the pos- sibility to learn from them a wiser way to treat the earth and each other. Dr. John Lilly
(a medical doctor and scientist) has worked thought his Human-Dolphin Institute to develop a better
means of com- munication between humans and dolphins, who he regards as probabl y more intelligent
and ethical than humans.(l) If we drive them to extinction, we will never learn whether Lilly is right or
wrong . In many ways, people are very intelligent, adaptable, empathetic an d loving. If we love
ourselves an d Mother Earth, let's use those traits to eradicate lethal ways of looking at the world, such
as a speciesist view, and acquire an earth nurturing outlook . The survival of all of us depends on it
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