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Heidegger: Index
**Topshelf** ......................................................................................... 3
Heidegger 1NC (1/3) ............................................................................. 3
Heidegger 2NC Overview...................................................................... 6
**Links** ............................................................................................... 7
Links: Critiques of Anthropocentrism ..................................................... 7
Links: Ethics .......................................................................................... 8
Links: Energy (1/2) ................................................................................ 9
Links: Hegemony (1/2) ........................................................................ 11
Links: Management/Science ............................................................... 13
Links: Manifest Destiny ....................................................................... 14
Links: Mars ......................................................................................... 15
Links: Nuclear Power (1/2) .................................................................. 16
Links: Nuclear War .............................................................................. 18
Links: Problem/Solution Mindset ......................................................... 19
Links: Security..................................................................................... 20
Links: Space Technology (1/2) ............................................................ 21
Links: Space Colonization ................................................................... 23
Links: Space Exploration ..................................................................... 24
Links: Space Leadership/NASA .......................................................... 25
Links: State vs. Individual Role in Space Exploration .......................... 26
Links: Technology ............................................................................... 27
Links: Terraforming ............................................................................. 28
**Impacts** ......................................................................................... 29
Impact: Biopower ................................................................................ 29
Impact: Genocidal Politics ................................................................... 30
Impact: Loss of Being Outweighs Nuclear War.................................... 31
Impact: Standing Reserve ................................................................... 32
Impact: Value to Life ........................................................................... 33
Impact: Value to Life Outweighs Nuclear War ..................................... 34
Impact: Zero Point of Holocaust .......................................................... 35
**Alternative** .................................................................................... 36
Alternative: Anti–Subjectivism ............................................................. 36
Alternative: Better than the Plan .......................................................... 37
Alternative: Break with Tech Though Solves Freedom ........................ 38
Alternative: Key to Meaning ................................................................ 39
Alternative: Meditative Thinking Solves ............................................... 40
Alternative: Ontology First (1/2) ........................................................... 41
Alternative: Rejection Key ................................................................... 43
Alternative: Rejection Solves ............................................................... 44
Alternative: Solves Nature ................................................................... 45
**Answers to Answers** ................................................................... 46
A2 “Calculative Thought Good” (1/2) ................................................... 46
A2 “Calculative Thought Inevitable” ..................................................... 48
A2 “Deep Ecology Turns” .................................................................... 49
A2 “Ethics Outweighs Ontology” (1/3) ................................................. 50
A2 “Framework” (1/2) .......................................................................... 53
A2 “Inaction is Immoral” ...................................................................... 55
A2 “Nietzsche” .................................................................................... 56
A2 “Heidegger Was a Nazi” ................................................................. 57
A2 “Must Act Now” .............................................................................. 58
A2 “Nihilism” ....................................................................................... 59
A2 “Our Tech is Better!” ...................................................................... 60
A2 “Performative Contradiction” .......................................................... 61
A2 “Permutation” (1/2) ......................................................................... 62
A2 “Poetry Bad” .................................................................................. 64
A2 “Policy First”................................................................................... 65
A2 “Utopian Alternative” ...................................................................... 66
A2 “Rorty” ........................................................................................... 67
A2 “Tech Good” (1/2) .......................................................................... 68
A2 “Tech Inescapable” ........................................................................ 70
A2 “There’s Always Value to Life” (1/2) ............................................... 71
A2 “We Don’t Use Tech” ..................................................................... 73
A2 “We Help Nature” ........................................................................... 74
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**Affirmative Answers** .................................................................... 75
Aff: Extinction Outweighs Ontology ..................................................... 75
Aff: Extinction Outweighs Value to Life ................................................ 76
Aff: Ethics Outweighs Ontology ........................................................... 77
Aff: Heidegger Reaffirms the Status Quo............................................. 78
Aff: Nuclear War Outweighs Ontology ................................................. 79
Aff: Forgetting WW2 DA ...................................................................... 80
Aff: Forgetting WW2 DA: Link Ext. (1/2) .............................................. 81
Aff: Forgetting WW2 DA: Impact Ext. .................................................. 83
Aff: Transhumanism DA (1/2) .............................................................. 84
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**Topshelf**
Heidegger 1NC (1/3)
The affirmative’s perception of the world as mere planetary matter that we are destined to
escape and surpass reduces our being in the world to mere fluff – the aff places us in a cosmic
standing reserve.
Neil Turnbull, Professor of Philosophy, Nottingham Trent University, “The Ontological Consequences of Copernicus:
Global Being in the Planetary World”, SAGEJOURNALS ONLINE, 2006.
In the ‘parable of the madman’, Nietzsche addressed what he believed to be the consequences of
Copernican astronomy and Darwinian evolutionary theory for Western culture’s most cherished and deeply
held moral and metaphysical convictions (Nietzsche, 1977: 202–3). In his view, rather than producing
‘Enlightenment’ and liberating humanity from the dead hand of religious dogma and superstition,
these theories threatened to undermine the moral and intellectual foundations of life in the West.
According to Nietzsche, Copernicanism and Darwinism endangered the ancient, residual, yet still ubiquitous,
metaphysical idea that there is an ultimate foundation or ‘ground’ to the universe, capable of
cognizance, and of ‘rationally supporting’ judgement in all its forms. Nietzsche encapsulated the theological
dimensions of these anxieties in his claim that ‘God is Dead’. However, as many have pointed out, this was no simple counter-theological statement,
but a warning about the bottomless void – what might be termed the ‘spatial nihilism’ – implicit
within the ‘new cosmology’. For in Nietzsche’s view, with the quest for greater epistemological selfassuredness, modern humanity is in danger of not only sacrificing its traditional bases of
meaning, but of losing the very idea that the world exists as something fixed, stable and
significant. Thus the madman asks the crowd: ‘[w]hither are we moving now? Away from all suns?
Are we not perpetually falling? Backward forward, sideward in all directions? Is there any up or
down left? Are we not straying as if through an infinite nothing?’ (Nietzsche, 1977: 203). Essentially, Nietzsche’s claim is that
Copernicanism and Darwinism force us to question the significance of both the Greek Humanist and theJudeo–Christian conceptions of humanity and its world (that is, to think beyond the
territorialization of Western philosophy as somewhere between ‘Athens’ and ‘Jerusalem’). In Nietzsche’s view, modern metaphysics is both ‘groundless’ and ‘simian’ because, after Copernicus and
Darwin, ‘the earth does not stand fast’ (Nietzsche, 1998: 2) and ‘man is more of an ape than any ape’ (Nietzsche, 1969: 42). In such a context Nietzsche’s madman is not a prophet of lost archaic
theological certainties, but a new voice of sanity, castigating, warning and exhorting his ‘metaphysically somnambulant’ audience to wake up to the truly frightening placelessness of modernity’s
Copernican and Darwinian forms of life. And many who have followed Nietzsche in this regard have noted that the key to understanding the significance of modernity’s unheimlich ontology resides
As Nietzsche’s heir Martin Heidegger famously
claimed, when seen in Copernican planetary-cosmological terms, the earth is no longer the earth
in any vital or lived sense but simply an object comprised of ‘purely technological relationships’
and an object, moreover, that is subjectivized into a representation, a vorstellung, that ‘stands before us’
rather than as something in ‘our midst’ (Heidegger, 1993: 105–6). For Heidegger, once perceived and conceived as a visual
representation of a planetary bounded whole, the earth becomes ‘deworlded’: appearing as just one more casual
system within a much wider cosmological causal order. And this is why for Heidegger – in his much-cited reflections on this
matter – the interplanetary images of the earth from space are not simply the end product of a rather
complex and powerful set of technological process that enframe the earth as a mass
industrialized object, but are images that radically diminish the meaning of the earth, rendering
humanity without a world within which to dwell (a theme that I return to later). When seen in Heideggerian terms,
Copernicanism reduces the earth to mere ‘planetary matter’; an absurd and inhuman cosmic
accident devoid of any ultimate sense or significance. In such a context we can no longer speak
of a meaningful world at all, because when the earth is ‘reduced’ to a visual representation, it
ceases to be a context of significance but stands as something that ‘transcends all tacitly shared
assumptions’. As such, it is ‘beyond all frameworks – an abyss’ (Wood, 2002: 15). It becomes a ‘spectral earth’ – a
mere flicker of light in the cosmological void. As Lyotard claimed, as a Copernican technologized object the earth ‘isn’t at all
originary’ but merely a ‘spasmodic state of energy, an instant of established order, a smile on the surface of matter in a remote
corner of the cosmos’ (Lyotard, 1991: 10). Thus the modern astronaut is seen as one of the primary agents
of modern worldlessness in Heideggerian philosophy (and one is immediately struck by the phenomenological similarities between the spatial
nihilism of Nietzsche’s madman and the free-floating placeless experience of the modern astronaut). For when the earth is seen from an
astronautic point of view, all traditional human concerns are deterritorialized and strangely
diminished to the extent that interplanetary representations of the earth threaten to sever the
connection between humanity and its traditional ontological supports. Heideggerian scholars such
as Robert Romanyshyn have developed this idea and used it as the basis for an existential critique of ‘the
mad astronaut’: the quintessentially modern avatar that stands as the highest expression of
modernity’s unheimlich rootlessness. Romanyshyn’s is a critique of what might be termed ‘the astronautic condition of modernity’ (1989; 200), as, in
Romanyshyn’s view, the modern astronaut – what so many modern Western children want to ‘grow up to
be’ – is a metaphor for a hypermodern cultural-psychological dream of distance, departure and
escape from matter that reveals a world of pure ‘spectacular wonder’, and that disguises and
perhaps even obliterates those deep and emotional connections to the earth that maintain a
sense of ontological security and lived reality.
within a broader appreciation of the way in which the new cosmology has undermined traditional conceptions of earth.
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B. Extinction pales in comparison to the loss of our being – the assumption that loss of
humanity outweighs is the link – only by accepting our finitude in comparison to Being can we
open a clearing for existence.
Michael Zimmerman, Professor of Philsophy, Tulane University, CONTESTING EARTH’S FUTURE, 1994,
p. 118-121.
Despite such differences with Heidegger, Jonas joins him and Werner Marx in saying that only
an ethics grounded in human finitude
can lead to a nondomineering attitude toward nature.49 But another of Heidegger's students, Karl Löwith, regarded his mentor's
refusal to conceive of humans as animals as consistent with his refusal to take seriously Heraclitus' claim that humanity must conform itself to the cosmos. By
defining Dasein as essentially different from all other entities (only Dasein "exists," whereas other entities merely "are"), Heidegger promoted a new version of
Christian-Cartesian 8anthropocentrism. A number of deep ecologists influenced by Spinoza's stoicism share Löwith's suspicion that transcendental philosophy,
including Heidegger's thought, denies a cosmic order to which humans are subordinated. Transcendental philosophy describes the cosmos either as a correlate of
consciousness or as an entity that appears within the human clearing. For Löwith, however, no
matter how consciously we may exist,
"the world does not belong to us, however—we belong to it."50 George Sessions says that if Heidegger had begun
with the cosmos and worked his way toward human beings, humans would have seemed less significant in his scheme. Yet by beginning with
human Dasein, he disclosed nature as ancillary to human concerns.51 Sessions says that this anthropocentric turn
began when Socrates insisted that philosophy concern itself primarily with human affairs and was reinforced by Aristotle's suggestion that nature "has made all things
for the sake of man." This view was popularized by Stoicism and later by Christianity, which depicted Creation as the backdrop for the drama of human salvation. 52
reformers emphasized the nonsacred charter of
nature, thus opening the way for a new burst of empirical inquiry and technological exploitation
of nature. The triumph of scientific positivism culminated the drive to interpret all phenomena,
including humans, as nothing more than quantifiable material events. That Sessions and Heidegger arrive at such
Self-assertive Renaissance men intensified this anthropocentrism Later, Protestant
similar conclusion about modernity indicates that both are critics of anthropocentric humanism, even though they seem to differ on the source for such humanism.
Sessions says tha humanism stems from arrogance in the face of nature. Later Heidegger
said that humanism stems not so much
from human arrogance, though this does play a role analogous to hubris in Greek tragedy, but
rather from the fateful self-concealment of being. Heidegger asserted that human self-assertion, combined
with the eclipse of being, threatens the relation between being and human Dasein.53 Loss of this
relation would be even more dangerous than a nuclear war that might "bring about the complete
annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the earth."54 This controversial claim is comparable to the Christian
teaching that it is better to forfeit the world than to lose one's soul by losing one's relation to God.
Heidegger apparently thought along these lines: it is possible that after a nuclear war, life might once again emerge, but it is far less likely that
there will ever again occur an ontological clearing through which such life could manifest itself. Further, since modernity's onedimensional disclosure of entities virtually denies them any "being" at all, the loss of humanity's openness for being is already
occurring.55 Modernity's background mood is horror in the face of nihilism, which is consistent
with the aim of providing material "happiness" for everyone by reducing nature to pure energy. 56
The unleashing of vast quantities of energy in nuclear war would be equivalent to modernity's
slow-motion destruction of nature: unbounded destruction would equal limitless consumption. If
humanity avoided nuclear war only to survive as contented clever animals, Heidegger believed
we would exist in a state of ontological damnation: hell on earth, masquerading as material
paradise. Deep ecologists might agree that a world of material human comfort purchased at the price of
everything wild would not be a world worth living in, for in killing wild nature, people would be as
good as dead. But most of them could not agree that the loss of humanity's relation to being would be worse than nuclear omnicide, for it i s wrong to
suppose that the lives of millions of extinct and unknown species are somehow lessened because they were never "disclosed" by humanity. Later Heidegger
became attracted to the view of nature found in the poetry of Hölderlin, who proclaimed "the coming god," the Dionysian divinity who would restore meaning and
weight to a nature flattened by excessive rationalism and commercialism. 57 In the 1930s, Heidegger believed that his own thought and National Socialism were
opening the way for this god. Years later, though chastened because he had supported a regime that contributed to modern nihilism, Heidegger still concluded that
"only a god can save us."58 Political
activism reinforces the slide into nihilism, for politics manifests the
subject's striving for control, from which the coming god was to free humankind. Similarly, deep ecologists say that reformism will only reinforce
the status quo, unless people undergo a spiritual conversion. From Heidegger's viewpoint, however, the Deep Ecology Platform, ostensibly broad enough to be
embraced by activists of many stripes, may itself be influenced by the modern control impulse criticized by deep ecologists. The DEP justifies mass movements,
which, despite their noble aim of halting ecological destruction, may unwittingly trigger off events with the opposite effect, for example, the Wise-Use Movement's
growing opposition to deep ecology. To avoid being seduced by their own version of self-righteous subjectivism, then, deep ecologists must be skeptical about
whether they have in fact achieved nondualistic, ecological sensibility.59 Heidegger's perceived anthropocentrism, his concerns that the DEP manifests modernity's
control-impulse, and the fact that some deep ecologists adhere to progressive views of history, indicate problems in attempts to read Heidegger as a forerunner of
deep ecology. But Arne
Naess sympathizes with Heidegger's view that humankind is the site through
which entities show themselves: "Man may be the measure of all things in the sense that only a
human being has a measuring rod, but what he measures he may find to be greater than himself
and his survival."60 Since our "measuring rod" is language, we fulfill ourselves when we
responsibly and joyfully "speak" the world anew . With Heidegger, then, Naess calls for a "more lofty image" of human maturity, in
which human interests can be harmonized with deep ecological norms. It is a "sorry underestimation'' of humanity's potential to think that humanity is "destined to be
the scourge of the earth." An
"eradicable part" of humankind's "evolutionary potential" involves being "the
conscious joyful appreciator of this planet as an even greater whole of its immense richness."61
Apart from the reference to "evolutionary potential," which is reminiscent of Hegel's progressive reading of history, Heidegger could agree with much of this. He once
said that insofar as man is an entity, ‘the belongs to the totality of being—just like the stone, the tree, or the eagle. To "belong" here still means to be in the order of
being. But man's distinctive feature lies in this, that he, as the entity who thinks, is open to being, face to face with being; thus man remains referred to being and so
answerable to it.’ Suggesting that human existence lets things manifest themselves in a way not otherwise possible, Naess cites the following remarks. 62
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C. The Alternative.
Text: Reject the affirmative in order to embrace meditative thought.
The question of this debate is one of competing ontologies. The affirmative staked out an
ontology of calculative thinking. A competing ontology is meditative thinking. As long we
leave calculative thinking unquestioned we are doomed to the ethos of mastery. Meditative
thinking offers us a way of non-dominating thinking.
Ingrid Scheibler, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Boston College, 76 Chi.-Kent. L. Rev. 853, 2000, p. 862864.
When Heidegger thematizes the Being question in relation to modern subjectivism, he seeks to
effect a shift from representational thinking, which conceives truth and the locus of objectivity exclusively in the human
subject, to what he calls a more meditative thinking (besinnliches Denken). Heidegger's discovery, the
"alternative" to instrumental thinking and modern subjectivism, (1) displaces the rootedness in
subjective states and (2) reconceives the strict subject/object distinction, and the objectification
and domination of the object-domain that results from this. This can also be described as the effort to shift
from a transcendentalist focus. This focus views truth in terms of the certainty of representation, rooted in subjectivity and,
more generally, conceives the parameters of inquiry - awareness of a world of objects - from within the vantage point of the
subject's own human "horizon." Heidegger seeks to reconceive the traditional conceptions of truth and
Being, and shift our focus to an awareness of the ground, or field, of the human horizon.This
antisubjectivist critique, made in the name of a [*865] thematization and recognition of Being as the sustaining ground "in
reference to which the diverse meanings of Being arise," has significant critical force. Heidegger's critique here can be
placed along with other powerful critiques of modern instrumentalist calculative reason, like the efforts of the early Frankfurt
School, Adorno, and Horkheimer n28 and, more recently, Habermas. n29 Heidegger powerfully examines the
workings of this objectifying, calculative reason in examining the effects of its domination of
things in the world and nature. That is to say, Heidegger's own explicit concern in these writings is
with domination, the ethos of mastery, as it is deployed against things and nature. n30 To find an
alternative, non-dominating and non-objectifying conception of our relation to the world, he does
two things: First, he calls our attention to the way that human being is "in" the world in a more
relational, rather than divisive, situation of belonging to the world, rather than standing over and
against it, as subject over object, lord or master. Second, he calls for a recognition of Being as
the ground of the human, transcendental horizon. This is his antisubjectivist thematization of the ground or
field of human awareness. In my view, the antisubjectivist critique at the center of Heidegger's project has a powerful critical
force, especially in analyzing the genesis and effects of environmental degradation. n31
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The alternative solves the aff – a more critical examination of the history of exploration opens
space for discourses to emerge that better understand transnational drives for space
exploration.
Asif A. Saddiqi, assistant professor of history @ Fordham University, “Competing Technologies, National(ist)
Narratives, and Universal Claims: Toward a Global History of Space Exploration”, Technology and Culture Vol.
51 Number 2, 2010.
My goal in this essay has been to explore the relationship between nationalism and spaceflight, problematize it, and, using
insights from that process, suggest some possible new avenues in the practice of space history. Although nationalist
narratives (and nationalism) have been essential to the project of space exploration and its retelling, barring a few
exceptions, space historians have not critically explored the relationship between spaceflight and
national identity.43 Deconstructing this relationship has become more urgent as a flotilla of nonWestern nations are becoming more visible in the endeavor of space exploration, rendering the
old cold-war dynamic—both in reality and in memorialization—less effective as an explanatory tool for
understanding the process of space exploration. Deterministic explanations from the cold war often rely on
simplistic binary and oppositional divisions; although not trivial, these display their limitations as tools to fully explain the
complexities of space exploration both during and after the cold war. Without disposing of technological determinism, I
would urge historians to incorporate a broader matrix of approaches, including, particularly, the highlighting of
global flows of actors and knowledge across borders, communities, and identities. Ultimately, this
approach might lend itself to constructing for the first time a global and transnational history of
rocketry and space travel. Since a global history would theoretically be decentered and a nation's
space program rendered as a more nebulous transnational process, one might expect a
multitude of smaller, local, and ambiguous processes and meanings to become visible. With a
new approach grounded in a global history of spaceflight, we might learn much more about how
individuals, communities, and nations perceive space travel, how they imbue space exploration
with meaning, and especially how those meanings are contested and repeatedly reinvented as
more and more nations articulate the urge to explore space.
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**Links**
Links: Critiques of Anthropocentrism
Criticisms of anthropocentrism pose an understanding of intrinsic worth which distorts our
relation to nature.
Kevin Michael DeLuca, Associate Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia,
“Thinking with Heidegger: Rethinking Environmental Theory and Practice,” Ethics & the Environment, 2005
Project Muse.
Now certainly this base anthropocentrism has come under attack from various radical environmentalisms that posit
biocentrism or ecocentrism. I would argue, however, that these anti-anthropocentric positions have not
escaped the gravity of Cartesianism. This is evident at both theoretical and practical levels.
Theoretically, in the effort to avoid the stain of anthropocentrism all beings are posited as having
equal intrinsic worth/value and difference is leveled. The banana slug is equal to homo sapiens. There are
problems with this. Most obviously, the concept of intrinsic worth/value is philosophically incoherent—
worth/value by definition is always relational. More significantly for this discussion, to posit
intrinsic worth/value is to deny the ecological insight that all beings are constituted in relation to
other beings and their environment. Further, to deny difference is to blunt analysis of our current situation and to
deny the differential levels of effects different species have. Homo sapiens is not another type of slug and must be analyzed
with that awareness.
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Links: Ethics
Ethics reifies responsibility over any other mode of revealing – it represents just another way
of managing being.
LaDelle McWhorter, Professor of Philosophy, Northeast Missouri State, also of the bumbles, HEIDEGGER
AND THE EARTH, ed. McWhorter, 1992.
And shattered we may be, for our self-understanding is at stake; in fact, our very selves – selves engineered by the
technologies of power that shaped, that are, modernity – are at stake. Any thinking that threatens the state. As a result,
guilt is familiar, and, though somewhat uncomfortable at times, it comes to feel almost safe. It is no surprise, then, that
whenever caring people think hard about how to live with/in/on the earth, we find ourselves growing anxious and, usually,
feeling guilty about the way we conduct ourselves in relation to the natural world. Guilt is a standard defense
against the call for change as it takes root within us. But, if we are to think with Heidegger, if we are to heed
his call to reflect, we must not respond to it simply by deploring our decadent life-styles and indulging ourselves in a fit of
remorse. Heidegger's call is not a moral condemnation, nor is it a call to take up some politically
correct position or some privileged ethical stance. When we respond to Heidegger's call as if it were a
moral condemnation, we reinstate a discourse in which active agency and its projects and
responsibilities take precedence over any other way of being with the earth. In other words, we
insist on remaining within the discourses, the power configurations, of the modern managerial
self. Guilt is a concept –whose heritage and meaning occur within the ethical tradition of the western world. But the
history of ethical theory in the west (and it could be argued that ethical theory only occurs in the West) is one with
the history-of technological thought. The revelation of things as to-be-managed and the imperative
to be in control work themselves out in the history of ethics just as surely as they work
themselves out in the history of the natural and human sciences.
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Links: Energy (1/2)
The development of energy is the key arena in which technology establishes dominance over
nature – the drive to master the resources of the earth as renewable energy sources reduces
the globe to standing reserve.
Tad Beckman, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Humanities and Social Sciences at Harvey Mudd College,
“Martin Heidegger and Environmental Ethics,” 2000, http://thuban.ac.hmc.edu/~tbeckman/personal/Heidart.html.
Perhaps it is not difficult to understand the separate paths of the fine arts, craftsmanship, and modern technology. Each
seems to have followed different human intentions and to have addressed different human skills. However, while the fine
arts and craftsmanship remained relatively consistent with techne in the ancient sense, modern technology withdrew in a
radically different direction. As Heidegger saw it, "the revealing that rules in modern technology is a
challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply
energy that can be extracted and stored as such." {[7], p. 14} Modern technology sets-upon
nature and challenges-forth its energies, in contrast to techne which was always a bringing-forth
in harmony with nature. The activity of modern technology lies at a different and more advanced
level wherein the natural is not merely decisively re-directed; nature is actually "set-upon." The
rhetoric in which the discussion is couched conveys an atmosphere of violence and exploitation. To uncover the essence of
modern technology is to discover why technology stands today as the danger. To accomplish this insight, we must
understand why modern technology must be viewed as a "challenging-forth," what affect this has on our relationship with
nature, and how this relationship affects us. Is there really a difference? Has technology really left the domain of techne in a
significant way? In modern technology, has human agency withdrawn in some way beyond involvement and, instead,
acquired an attitude of violence with respect to the other causal factors? Heidegger clearly saw the development
of "energy resources" as symbolic of this evolutionary path; while the transformation into modern
technology undoubtedly began early, the first definitive signs of its new character began with the
harnessing of energy resources, as we would say. As a representative of the old technology, the
windmill took energy from the wind but converted it immediately into other manifestations such
as the grinding of grain; the windmill did not unlock energy from the wind in order to store it for
later arbitrary distribution. Modern wind-generators, on the other hand, convert the energy of
wind into electrical power which can be stored in batteries or otherwise. The significance of
storage is that it places the energy at our disposal; and because of this storage the powers of
nature can be turned back upon itself. The storing of energy is, in this sense, the symbol of our
over-coming of nature as a potent object. "...a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of
coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit."
{[7], p. 14} This and other examples that Heidegger used throughout this essay illustrate the
difference between a technology that diverts the natural course cooperatively and modern
technology that achieves the unnatural by force. Not only is this achieved by force but it is
achieved by placing nature in our subjective context, setting aside natural processes entirely,
and conceiving of all revealing as being relevant only to human subjective needs . The essence of
technology originally was a revealing of life and nature in which human intervention deflected the natural course while still
regarding nature as the teacher and, for that matter, the keeper. The essence of modern technology is a revealing of
phenomena, often far removed from anything that resembles "life and nature," in which human intrusion not only diverts
nature but fundamentally changes it. As a mode of revealing, technology today is a challenging-forth of nature so that the
technologically altered nature of things is always a situation in which nature and objects wait, standing in reserve for our
use. We pump crude oil from the ground and we ship it to refineries where it is fractionally distilled into volatile substances
and we ship these to gas stations around the world where they reside in huge underground tanks, standing ready to power
our automobiles or airplanes. Technology has intruded upon nature in a far more active mode that represents a consistent
direction of domination. Everything is viewed as "standing-reserve" and, in that, loses its natural
objective identity. The river, for instance, is not seen as a river; it is seen as a source of hydroelectric power, as a water supply, or as an avenue of navigation through which to contact inland
markets. In the era of techne humans were relationally involved with other objects in the coming to
presence; in the era of modern technology, humans challenge-forth the subjectively valued
elements of the universe so that, within this new form of revealing, objects lose their significance to
anything but their subjective status of standing-ready for human design.
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Links: Energy (2/2)
Technology compels us to view the world as nothing more than potential energy to be
extracted, obscuring the essence of the natural world.
Mahon O’Brien, Professor of Philosophy at University College, Cork, Ireland, “Commentary on Heidegger’s
‘The Question Concerning Technology,” Thinking Together. Proceedings of the IWM Junior Fellows'
Conference, 2004, http://www.iwm.at/publ-jvc/jc-16-01.pdf.
It is a charge which many are wont to make and one which is facilitated by the widespread conviction that it is entirely
reasonable to both bracket certain features of Heidegger’s thought with a view to reappropriating them or to distinguish between Sein und Zeit and much of his subsequent work. 50 With respect to the revelatory capacity of modern
technology, Heidegger is not simply bemoaning the loss of the world of yesteryear in misty-eyed
sentimentality, this is not a doleful, nostalgic essay – “there is no demonry of technology” to
begin with. Rather Heidegger is trying to discover what the exclusive feature of modern
technology is which distinguishes it essentially from earlier types. To recapitulate, the difference
pertains to the way in which modern technology reveals, the manner in which it allows us, and
seemingly compels us, to view the world we live in and the Earth we live on. 51 Where once a
windmill relied on the wind for its operative success or lack of it, now energy is unlocked from
air currents, “a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now
reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit.” 52 One might object that this is to ignore
the various ways in which we tradition- ally, even in our capacity as agriculturalists, challenged the Earth to provide us with a bountiful
harvest, a harvest which emerged through human manipulation and contrivance of a technological, though admittedly more primitive and
rustic nature. Farmers reaped what they sowed, not what the Earth chanced to grant them through multiple windfalls. How then do we
reconcile this claim with Heidegger’s thoughts on technology? That is, where do we draw the line between earlier manifestations of
technology, with their concomitant attempt to provide for ourselves in a way that required our very own peculiar intervention, and the modern
technological attitude toward the world? In a way, the question will always resist any attempt to demarcate things rigidly – there will always be
a penumbra where it is not yet clear if the transition has already been made in any genealogical account. That is not to say however, that
along a spectrum we cannot notice degrees of difference which ultimately resolve into a completely new type or kind – a categorically different
thing which at one end of the spectrum is easy to set in relief against the other end. Of course, part of Heidegger’s strategy in this essay is to
show that such problems stem from our inability to move out from under the shadow of Enframing and some of its more conspicuous offspring
such as the instrumental definition of tech- nology. With respect to agriculture for instance: The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and
set in order [be- stellte] appears differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and maintain. The work of the peasant
does not chal- lenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over
its increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon [stellt]
na- ture. It sets upon in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. 53 What Heidegger seems
very much concerned with is this imposition on the Earth, that the Earth is set upon in a way which is
disturbing from the standpoint of the sheer scale of its intrusiveness, its lack of reverence for that which it disman- tles. We
no longer are part of the Earth but look to exploit it as a resource rather than seeing it as our
wonderful, at times numinous home. We disassemble the natural configuration and look to
manipulate and to disintegrate until something is no longer the structural item it once was but is
a collection of forces, reduced to nothing but energy and resource to be exhausted or stockpiled. There is a difference, not just in degree or intensity here, but in kind – what is revealed through modern technology
is very different from what is revealed through older, cruder methods of, among other things, agriculture. For instance,
Heidegger would almost certainly insist that there are important differences between the revealing which occurs within
traditional planting and harvesting and that which is undertaken in genetic engineering and scientific intensive farming.
Another feature which Heidegger believes is unique to the setting-upon which obtains within the essence of modern –
technology is the fact that it stockpiles materials and resources: The coal that has been hauled out in some mining district
has not been supplied in order that it may simply be present somewhere or other. It is stockpiled; that is, it is on call, ready
to deliver the sun’s warmth that is stored in it. 54 The world around us is something that we view rather differently,
Heidegger argues, than earlier peoples were given to perceive, our perceptual goggles, if you will, have radically different
filtration systems.
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The quest for hegemonic control is rooted in technological thought. The attempt to rationalize
quick solutions to geopolitical problems conceals our only hope for avoiding conflict
William V. Spanos, Ph.D.-University of Wisconsin, Distinguished Professor, English Department- Binghamton
University, HEIDEGGER AND CRITICISM: RETRIEVING THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DESTRUCTION,
1993, p. 225-226.
The repressive hypothesis normally functions below the threshold of visibility, since it is a ruse,
a disarming strategy of the disciplinary discourse of hegemony. But it surfaces at times of sociopolitical crisis, when the
contradictions inhering in the discourse of disinterested truth—its complicity with the structures of visible and direct power—activate critical consciousness in the
hitherto acquiescent mass. What Foucault says only indirectly about the historical dynamics of the relationship between the discourse of "truth" and the use of overt
Gramsci (clearly one of Foucault's sources), who points both to the hidden complicity of the
discourse of hegemony with the state and to its vulnerability at moments of sociopolitical
discontent: The intellectuals are the dominant group's "deputies" exercising the subaltern
functions ol social hegemony and political government. These comprise: (I) The "spontaneous" consent given by the great
force is explicitly theorized by Antonio
masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social hie by the dominant fundemental group, this consent is “historically" caused by the prestige (and
the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of
production. The apparatus of state coercive power which “legally” enforces discipline on those
groups who do not “consent” either actively or passively. This appartatus is, however, constituted, for
the whole of society in anticipation of moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous
consent has failed.As I have suggested, the period of the Vietnam War was such a moment of crisis. The
refusal of spontaneous consent by "the great masses of the population" to the discourse and practice
of hegemony provoked the direct use of force by the otherwise invisible apparatuses of state
power; which is to say, the self-exposure of the complicity of knowledge production with power. It
consequent confidence) which
thus bore dramatic witness to the way the humanist ruse of the repressive hypothesis functions in so-called liberal democratic societies to displace critical attention
away from the micro-physics of power. But
in the present historical occasion—by which I mean the cultural context into which American
break in the
logical economy of the discourse of humanism has been all but forgotten by the massive
renarrativization of the crucial demystifying testimony of the Vietnam decade: an amnesia aided
and abetted by the events in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, which the late capitalist world
represents as the triumph of the "new world order" under the aegis of the principles of humanist
democracy. Further, this forgetful recollection of the history of the American intervention in Vietnam has
also obscured the historically specific origins of the posthumanist critique of the repressive hypothesis. It
is important for these reasons to repeat this history, however briefly, at the site of knowledge
production: where, that is, the protest against the American intervention in Vietnam was enacted. More
specifically, the rewriting of the relationship between knowledge and power in the present historical conjuncture compels
us to retrieve the response of the majority of American liberal humanist intellectuals to the
student activists' indictment of and action against the university.
humanists have imported the renewed European "debate" over the complicity of Heidegger's philosophy and the Nazi "Final Solution"—this
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Attempts to indoctrinate order upon the world is based in a managerial logic that constructs
all things as standing reserve
Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New South Wales, Sydney,
Johns Hopkins University Press, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, 2007,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v010/10.2burke.html.
Kissinger's conviction was based not merely in his pride in the vast military and bureaucratic apparatus of the United States,
but in a particular epistemology (theory of knowledge). Kissinger asserted that the West is 'deeply committed
to the notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge consists of recording
and classifying data -- the more accurately the better'. This, he claimed, has since the
Renaissance set the West apart from an 'undeveloped' world that contains 'cultures that have
escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking' and remain wedded to the 'essentially preNewtonian view that the real world is almost entirely internal to the observer'. At the same time,
Kissinger's hubris and hunger for control was beset by a corrosive anxiety: that, in an era of
nuclear weapons proliferation and constant military modernisation, of geopolitical stalemate in
Vietnam, and the emergence and militancy of new post-colonial states, order and mastery were
harder to define and impose. He worried over the way 'military bipolarity' between the
superpowers had 'encouraged political multipolarity', which 'does not guarantee stability.
Rigidity is diminished, but so is manageability...equilibrium is difficult to achieve among states
widely divergent in values, goals, expectations and previous experience' (emphasis added). He
mourned that 'the greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept
of order'. Here were the driving obsessions of the modern rational statesman based around a
hunger for stasis and certainty that would entrench U.S. hegemony: For the two decades after 1945,
our international activities were based on the assumption that technology plus managerial skills
gave us the ability to reshape the international system and to bring about domestic
transformations in "emerging countries". This direct "operational" concept of international order has proved too
simple. Political multipolarity makes it impossible to impose an American design. Our deepest challenge will be to evoke the
creativity of a pluralistic world, to base order on political multipolarity even though overwhelming military strength will remain
with the two superpowers. 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. 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' 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'.
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The affirmatives use of science to shift the focus from the “chaotic” environment, to human
environmental interactions leads to the managerial control of both.
Matt Szabo, PhD Candidate in Geography at The University of Manchester, “Managerial ecology: Zygmunt
Bauman and the gardening culture of modernity,” Environments, Vol. 30, No. 3, 2002, p. proquest
Bavington (this volume) identifies three paradigms that have been utilised in the field of environmental
management/managerial ecology: management as control, management as careful use, and management as coping. Due
to fundamental changes in ecological thinking, current eco-managerial thinking shifts the focus of
environmental management away from wildly unpredictable ecological systems onto the realms
of human and human-ecosystem interaction -- where some propose "control is viable" (Holling and
Meffe, 1996: 335). However, despite evolving managerial paradigms and a shift of the managerial focus from ecosystem to
social system, Bavington observes that the underlying equation 'management = control' remains
essentially unchallenged, with obvious political and ethical ramifications. The political and ethical costs of socialengineering or social management have been explored in some detail by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. He pinpoints the
Enlightenment as the principle source of control-oriented science and philosophy, which validates and endorses
modern calls to 'manage' (i.e. control or order) human beings for the sake of the environment, or,
indeed, the environment for the sake of human beings. The chief insight offered by Bauman's thinking viz.
managerial ecology may be an elaborated understanding of order in two senses: Firstly, Bavington's paper considers how
certain control-oriented aspirations of managerial ecology have disturbing implications when
transported to the human realm. Via a little re-ordering, Bauman offers a similar insight in reverse: already
tested forms of managing human beings have ominous implications for humans, non-humans,
and the wider environment alike. Secondly, within any management programme, irrespective of intended targets -humans, ecosystems, both simultaneously or others -- control/ordering remains a central motif. Via the managerial
application of these twin concepts, a variety of issues regarding ethics, power, and politics emerges.
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The aff’s belief that space exploration is the destiny of humanity makes the rise of technology
and denial of being inevitable.
Asif A. Saddiqi, assistant professor of history @ Fordham University, “Competing Technologies, National(ist)
Narratives, and Universal Claims: Toward a Global History of Space Exploration”, Technology and Culture Vol.
51 Number 2, 2010.
Space exploration's link with national identity partly overlapped with its claims to a larger idea that
appealed to a global, even universal, vision of humanity. Counterintuitively, these ideas emerged from
ideas deeply embedded in national contexts. Roger Launius has noted that nations have historically
justified space exploration by appealing to one (or a combination) of five different rationales: human destiny,
geopolitics, national security, economic competitiveness, and scientific discovery.15 The latter four stem from national and
nationalist requirements; the first, human destiny, appeals to the idea of survival of the species. In the
American context, this universal rationale of human destiny combines older traditions of
technological utopianism and an updated version of "manifest destiny." Technological utopianism, i.e.,
a notion that conflates "progress" (qualified technologically) with "progress" (unqualified), has
been an essential part of popular discourse since the late nineteenth century, and if the crisis of modernity and
the Great War made Western Europeans less enamored of the panacea promised by technology, Americans
continued to embrace more fully the idea of technological utopianism than most other
societies.16 As Launius has shown, influential space activists of the past fifty years deployed rhetoric and
rationale to support space exploration that simultaneously invoked romanticized notions of the
American frontier—Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis" was ubiquitous—with emphatic language that
underscored that what was at stake with space exploration was not about Americans but the
entire human race. Commentators as varied as Wernher von Braun, Gerard K. O'Neill, and Robert Zubrin all
couched their arguments with a distinctly American spin—ingenuity, frontier, freedom—in their
search to create the opportunity for global survival in the form of human colonization of the
cosmos.17 Here, the American becomes the normative for space travel for the species.
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The aff enframes Mars and marks the world for usage, commodifying space into standing
reserve.
Jae Jenkins, Florida State University, The Social and Phenomological Construction of Mars”, FLORIDA
PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW, Winter 2009.
Heidegger finds that the consequence of enframing, whereby the entire natural world inevitably becomes “orderable as
standing reserve,” is that “man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve… [who
inevitably] comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve.” 47 We may shape the world,
but the world inevitably shapes us. Failure to See Our Own Constructions This is a central point of concern I
have over the issue of colonization. When Modernity’s gaze upon the world calls forth the
project of colonization, this causes the process of enframing to begin, whereupon we mark the
world for our own usage until the day comes when humanity itself may be commodified as a
standing-reserve. Heidegger explains, “Man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the
manner of its Being and its truth. Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such.” 48 As objects in nature
are relegated to standing-reserve, Heidegger explains, “everything man encounters exists only
insofar as it has his construct.” 49 Since nothing exists outside of humanity’s construction, we
end up only ever encountering ourselves. Yet because we do not realize that the phenomena before us are of
our own construction, a distortion caused by enframing, Heidegger contends that we fail to grasp an
important existential truth—we can never truly encounter ourselves, our world, or Mars for that
matter. 50 When humanity gazes out at the world, “he fails to see himself as the one spoken to.” 51 The dizzying
rise in modern technology has precipitated a fundamental change in our perception of objects
and, inevitably, in ourselves. By turning the world into technology, humankind turns itself into
the world’s technicians. We reassemble and reconfigure the natural world for our own use,
playing the part of the self-made, frontier-forging individual—the modern man. Technology unlocks
the energy in nature, transforming the rushing water of the Rhine into energy, storing up that energy, distributing it to
German power outlets, and thus revealing the concealed power in nature. This challenge to nature, to stop being and to
become a resource/commodity for modern human beings, is how modern technology serves as revealer. The Problem of
Enframing For Mars, the prospect of enframing is extremely problematic, given its phenomenological nature. As
interpretive discourse directs the narratives of Mars (scientific and otherwise), enframing comes rather
easily and often appears as a benign force in the media and public discourse, asking, “What can
Mars do for us?”
Our knowledge of Mars is entirely framed within our minds – we have to reject the resourcedriven enframing of the aff.
Jae Jenkins, Florida State University, The Social and Phenomological Construction of Mars”, FLORIDA
PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW, Winter 2009.
Because the interpretation of Mars precedes any objective knowledge, as illustrated by Lowell’s once
popular canal theories, we must proceed in the awareness that Mars is, in the public mind, what is
said of it. Heidegger warns, “The rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to
enter into a more original revealing,” adding his somewhat romantic call to modernity, “and hence to experience the call of a
more primal truth.” 52 Heidegger’s point is well-taken—what is damaging to our participation in the world is the exclusivity
technology brings to bear as a form of modern revelation. Heidegger explains that when technological enframing takes
place, “it drives out every other possibility of revealing.” When technological ordering comes to be the only
way we perceive the world, then the world becomes revealed to us only through the banal act of
securing natural resources, no longer allowing what Heidegger calls the “fundamental
characteristics” of our resources to appear to us. 54 The Earth becomes minerals, the sky
becomes gases, and the Martian surface becomes whatever those with means will it to be. When
we gaze at Mars with an eye toward technologically enframing it, we deny ourselves the
possibility of other forms of revelation which, given the great passage of time, may come to
make our generation appear quite near-sided and audacious—or worse, cause permanent
damage to a planet we are far from grasping in its sublime entirety. Heidegger describes the enframing
of a tract of earth as “a coal–mining district”; can the enframing of Mars as a natural resource be far from Heideggerian
thought? 55 To appreciate fully the meaning in this world and of the “red planet,” we must come to
terms with our modern predilection for technological enframing and be accepting of other, more
long-term, open-minded and inclusive perspectives of place-making.
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Nuclear power engages in calculative thought kills value to life – turns nature and humanity
into standing reserve
LaDelle McWhorter, Professor of Philosophy, Northeast Missouri State, also of the bumbles, HEIDEGGER
AND THE EARTH, ed. McWhorter, 1992.
The danger of a managerial approach to the world lies not, then, in what it knows - not in its
penetration into the secrets of galactic emergence or nuclear fission - but in what it forgets, what
it itself conceals. It forgets that any other truths are possible, and it forgets that the belonging
together of revealing with concealing is forever beyond the power of human management. We can
never have, or know, it all; we can never manage everything. What is now especially dangerous
about this sense of our own managerial power, born of forgetfulness, is that it results in our
viewing the world as mere resources to be stored or consumed. Managerial or technological
thinkers, Heidegger says, view the earth, the world, all things as mere Bestand, standing-reserve.
All is here simply for human use. No plant, no animal, no ecosystem has a life of its own, has any
significance, apart from human desire and need. Nothing, we say, other than human beings, has
any intrinsic value. All things are instruments for the working out of human will. Whether we
believe that God gave Man dominion or simply that human might (sometimes called intelligence or
rationality) in the face of ecological fragility makes us always right, we managerial, technological
thinkers tend to believe that the earth is only a stockpile or a set of commodities to be managed,
bought, and sold. The forest is timber; the river, a power source. Even people have become
resources, human resources, personnel to be managed, or populations to be controlled.
Nuclear science objectifies nature- objects cease to occur in the world and become
meaningless.
Joanna Hodge, Professor of Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, Heidegger and Ethics, 1995, p. 62.
The nuclear age is special as a planetary epoch of human beings in so far as the power of this
enormously powerful principle, the principle of the giveability of reasons (principium reddendae
rationis) develops, indeed is let loose in an unsettling [unheimliche] manner in the domain which
provides measure for the determinate existence of human beings [des Daseins des Menschen].
He goes on: It is to be thought in word and matter that the unique letting loose of the claim of
presenting and providing reasons threatens everything which is settled [alles Heimische] for
human beings and robs them of every ground and basis for having a sense of groundedness,
robs them of that from which for a long time has grown every great epoch of humanity, every
intellectual activity, opening up of worlds, every stamping of a human image [Menschengestalt].
(SG: 60) He then remarks how few people seem to be aware of this as an issue, and here recurs
the theme that the most obvious is the least thought about, raised, as noted, in the first lecture in
relation to the principle of sufficient reason itself, but also applicable here in the context of the
naming of the current historical epoch. In conclusion to this lecture he says: 'It is important to
notice in what region we find ourselves, when we think about the principle of sufficient reason
reflectively' (SG: 61). With this clue, Heidegger proceeds in the next lecture to consider the effect
of this principle on conceptions of objectivity. He makes connections between atomic energy,
nuclear science and a particular kind of objectivity in the following way: 'The reason whose
production is required accomplishes at the same time what it is to be adequate as a ground, that
is to suffice as fully given. For what? In order to place an object firmly in its place' (SG: 64).
Heidegger goes on to point out that in fact in nuclear physics there are no objects any more, at
least in the Newtonian sense: 'Rigorously thinking, we cannot really any more, as will be shown,
speak of objects. We already move in a world, if we look carefully, in which objects, as things
which stand over against, no longer occur.' He suggests that there is a connection here to the
non-representational character of modern art.
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The storage logic of the aff is the worst form of modern technique manifesting itself in
discourses of the environment in order to place nature in the standing reserve, Only taking a
step back from the development of modern technique can avoid total annihilation.
Thomas Roddey, Engineering Programs Manager, Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station, “Martin
Heidegger: “technique and the turn”, 2002.
2. What bothers the author about the world's status quo? Heidegger is concerned with a number of
things. First, he is bothered by modern man’s universal campaign aimed at “unconcealment” by
means of modern technique. Heidegger distinguishes two ways of modern unconcealment, (a)
through dissection of things [see “The Thing”], and (b) through putting the actual (i.e., things) in
standing-reserve (Bestand) [431]. Putting things into storage/standing-reserve, Heidegger says, is the
essence of modern technique [ibid.]. It does not appear that the actual unconcealing causes Heidegger
concern – after all, he considers unconcealment of what lies concealed to belong to man’s essence. However ,
Heidegger rejects the modern way of unconcealment through scientific methods such as
reductionism and searching for causalities. He states, “In whatever way the destiny of
unconcealment may sway, the unconcealedness in which all that is shows itself at any time,
harbors .. the peril that man goes astray in the unconcealed and misunderstands it.” [433] In an
aim to find the answers to all of his questions, man according to Heidegger is at peril: “The destiny of
unconcealment is in itself not some one peril, but the peril.” [434] The great peril is that modern
technique (e.g., nuclear power plant), unlike ancient technique (windmill), puts “to nature the
demand to deliver energy that can be furthered [extracted] and stored up [as Bestand].” [422]
Heidegger writes, “When man, inquiring and observing, sets out after .. nature as a domain of his
representing .., then he is already claimed by a way of unconcealing that summons him to
approach nature as an object … for research, until even the object … vanishes into the
objectlessness … of Bestand.” [426] Modern technique, Heidegger concludes, “is no mere human doing”
[427] – it is a dangerous summoning of nature, an actual extortion of energy, which may
culminate in nature’s – and thus man’s – total annihilation. Second, in the search for causes, not only
are the essences of things lost, but also man loses his understanding of his relationship to God. God becomes a
mere cause: “Thus when all that is present exposes itself … in the light of the cause-effect nexus, even God can,
for the representation .. of all things holy and exalted, lose the mysteriousness of his distance.” [434] Third, man
becomes alienated because he loses his understanding of his own being in technique and, in the
extreme, sees himself as God. Heidegger writes, “…man goes to the outermost edge of the precipice,
namely where he himself is to be taken as only still Bestand. Meanwhile precisely the man who is so
threatened props himself up in the Gestalt [appearance, form] of lord of the earth. Thus, the
semblance spreads that all one encounters, stands .. only insofar as it is a product of man’s
world.” Interestingly, this is the moral argument that political conservatives have recently used
in opposing bioengineering and genomics regarding cloning and other moleculobiological
research. Last, man’s reliance on modern technique yields him unable to find the truth he seeks.
Heidegger expresses this view in the phrase “the essence of technique is nothing technical.”
[414] By seeking to dissect and analyze things, we miss the thingness that makes the thing a thing; the thingness
remains concealedness in “Bestand” (storage), and the truth is not revealed. “All that is only technical never
reaches into the essence of technique. It cannot even once recognize its front-court.” [452]
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The aff’s language of [nuclear catastrophe/suffering] reveals a world of a bureaucratized
science – objective descriptions of impact scenarios rob death of meaning and replace human
existence with a railway timetable.
Shiv Visvanathan, Fellow, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, “Atomic physics: The career of an
imagination.”Anthropologist, 1988.
Jungk sensitizes us in particular to the language of the discourse. The language of nuclear catastrophe as apocalypse
is marred by an inadequate vocabulary. The literature on plagues, famines, floods, each has in
its own way contributed to the expansion of language, reflected cosmology, mediated between
man and nature and the natural and the supernatural. They have added to the verbal quality of our
deepest imaginings on pain, death and deformity. The 'scenarios' on nuclear catastrophe seem
aridly secular. Denied the availability of both the sacred and the humanist vocabulary, they reflect the terminology of a
bureaucratized science. The bureaucratic normality of the genocidal scenario, its clockwork
predictability, the timetable of deaths, the extrapolated statistics, all hide the inability of science
to talk meaningfully of death and genocide. So lacking in poetry is this futurology that it is forced
to mimic the style of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. This mimicry serves as an ersatz
substitute for the metaphors of the sacred, and also of humanism. The language of the scenarios
is homologous to the machine. Science represents the disembodied mind, the scenario
mirroring the disembodied future, and the computer programme provides the decisional
calculus. Death and destruction sound woefully banal. Yet the structure of evil lies in this very
banality. In the banality of bureaucratic science, genocide becomes an office memo and the
census, a death warrant. The nuclear future as catastrophe has the everyday quality of a railway
timetable. Jungk then questions even the basic claims of these scientists to dispassionate objectivity. Wolf Hafele's advocacy of fastbreeder plutonium technology scares even such ardent supporters of nuclear energy as Edward Teller. The scientist has begun to wallow in
his own power. To Hafele, the objection that such breeder technology is in its infancy is irrelevant. He sweeps aside the time-honoured
practice of painstaking trial runs for new technical installations as irrelevant. According to Jungk, Hafele is not alone in these departures from
the unwritten ground rules of technological innovation: repeated prior testing of a prototype. 'Today, new reactors are put into operation in
densely populated areas without experimental knowledge about the unpredictable interplay between thousands of components which make
up these gigantic systems. Computer simulations and game theory substitute for trial runs.'96 These scenarios function as the equivalent of
verbal machines. Like Bettelheim's Joey, the scientist is plugged into these verbal machines. And these
machines provide a substitute for the human encounter with danger, pain, error. It is not truth but
images that one is concerned with; the necromantic fantasies of Kahn and Hafele masquerade as
theories without experimental verification. Seen in this light, the scientist's belief in the objectivity of
these simulations is truly remarkable. Again, it reminds one of Joey whose 'pantomime was so contagious that those who
watched him seemed to suspend their own existence and become observers of another reality'.97 Yet, Jungk refuses to caricature these
scientists. He shows that the problem lies in their expertise, that many are individuals with intelligence
and sensitivity. The structure of their expertise, however, desensitizes them, draws them into
'objective acts' whose consequences are evil. It is this evil, this banal evil that Jungk sensitizes us to.
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Links: Problem/Solution Mindset
Arguing you solve a problem is the problem – we should approach the crisis from an
ontological standpoint to understand the problem
Bruce V. Foltz, Founder and former president of The International Association for Environmental Philosophy
Program, INHABITING THE EARTH: HEIDEGGER, ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS, AND THE METAPHYSICS
OF NATURE, 1995, p. 3-13.
The question concerning our basic relation to nature, our knowledge of nature as such, our domination of nature, is
not a question of natural science but stands in question itself in the question of how we are still
addressed by what is as such and as a whole.' For some time now, it has been widely acknowledged
that our characteristic relation to the natural environment has resulted in a degradation of the latter
so extensive that its capacity to sustain human inhabitation in the future may be critically
threatened." This situation as a whole is often designated by the appropriate but ambiguous phrase, "environmental crisis." Appropriate
because, with regard to the condition of the natural environment itself, the medical implications of the English word "crisis" are in order: We
have reached a point at which the patient is likely to either get better or die. Ambiguous because, with regard to our role in inducing this
condition, it is more pertinent to speak of a krisis in the ancient Greek sense of a "deciding," a "judgment," or a "sentence" in which not only
our future survival but also our comportment toward nature in general is called into question. As the fact of environmental
crisis has become recognized, largely due to the efforts of scientists and conservationists, a sustained discussion of
the issue has arisen in the American philosophical community, engendering a distinctly
conceived subject area: environmental ethics. Not surprisingly, and not without some justification, philosophical
reflection on the problem has tended to take as its primary point of departure the findings of the
natural sciences, and particularly the science of ecology. This has also been the case when the issue is addressed by historians,
theologians, political scientists, and others." Either tacitly or explicitly, the character of environmental crisis is regarded
as authoritatively defined by the natural sciences. This assumption dictates not only the primacy
of scientifically objectified nature as the subject of the crisis but also the primacy of the
cybernetic concept of ecosystem as the definitive frame of reference for any further analysis.
The problem is thus defined as involving the profound and anomalous disruption by human
beings of a biosphere consisting of overlapping homeostatic or self-regulating "systems." Given
this point of view, the basic problem is solely and simply that we are out of step with the rest of nature. From this it follows that the
philosophical task lies in analyzing and criticizing the principles of action that led to this imbalance, that is, in arriving at an environmental
ethic. Such an ethic, in turn, is likely to be successful only to the extent that its resultant prescriptions conform to the findings of the natural
sciences, again, especially the science of ecology." In view of the magnitude of current ecological problems, the practical expediency of this
type of inquiry is self-evident. Yet it is possible to approach the problem from a different direction
altogether, taking our fundamental relation to nature, rather than nature alone, as the primary
subject of the crisis. The crisis in this case is interpreted as constituting a literal krisis, a radical questioning of the relation as such.
Traditionally, however, this questioning has taken its bearings from a standpoint that attempts to rise above this relation; it has been decided
from a position that strives to establish itself beyond phusis, that is, from a meta-physical position. I propose to consider this
relation, then, with reference to a position that is within the relation itself and thus outside of
metaphysics. Such a position is indicated in the work of Martin Heidegger by the word inhabitation,
designating neither the partwhole relation of ecology nor the standpoint of metaphysical thinking, which situates itself everywhere and
nowhere.
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Links: Security
The affirmative’s focus on security is an obsession with certainty and salvation—turns life into
a standing reserve that necessitates endless warfare.
Andrew J. Mitchell, Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University, "Heidegger and
Terrorism," RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY, Volume 35, Number 1, 2005, p. 181-218.
There can be no security. If
being is what threatens then security as the absence of terror would be the
absence of being. But the absence of being is precisely the threat. Obviously, security is just as little to
be found in the absence of danger as it is in the consummation of the danger, total annihilation.
Instead, security is to be found within the danger and threat of being. But
how? Heideggerlikewise provides us endangered ones with a way of thinking security and preservation. This is his
fourth contribution to a thinking of terrorism. Security and assurance, both equally apt translations of the German Sicherung, are indissociable
from certainty (Gew it) for IHeidegger. In the course of the 1968 seminar in Le Thor, Heidegger provides a brief history of this relation between security and certainty: "the quest for certainty appears first in
the domain of faith, as the search for the certainty of salvation (Luther), then in the domain of physics as the search for the mathematical certainty of nature (Galileo)" (VS, 30/13). Heidegger unites these two concerns for
In the quest for mathematical certainty, what is sought is the assurance
of man in nature, in thesensible, in the quest for the certainty of salvation, what is sought is the
assurance of man in the supra-sensible world" (VS, 30/14).22 Certainty is in the service of assurance or
security and is only the epistemological aspect of a greater ontological condition of
security. Security is freedom from uncertainty in all of its forms, sensible, super-sensible, and
ontological. Salvation and the mathematical certainty of nature are themselves to be understood as instances of an ontological assurance against
uncertainty. Ontological uncertainty would be found in conceptions of singularity, where the
uniqueness of a thing renders it irreplaceable and thus opens us to the possibility of loss, or in
conceptions of alterity, where the other is not anticipated and confined in advance to the
strictures of categorical thought. Uncertainty in this broader sense is eliminated in security. One is securely insulated against these differences of the world. For modern thought, the
securing of representations for representational thinking provided the backdrop for the arrival of certainty (see GA 7: 82; EP, 98). Modern metaphysics itself, according to
Heidegger, "means the securing of the human being by itself and for itself" (GA 67: 167). Such a policy
must be abandoned as the human becomes more and more a piece of the standing-reserve like
everything else . This postmodern security is accomplished through bestowal and appraisal of
value, "Securement, as the obtaining of security, is grounding in valuation" (GA 5: 262/195; tin). What is valued can
be replaced by something of equal value, and this fact lies at the center of our conception of security today . Securement, as a giving of value,
assures us against loss by making the world replaceable. In this respect, security is nothing other than
total availability, imagined as a world of utter transparency where all resources, human and
otherwise, are constantly surveilled and traced through their paths of circulation. The transformation in being
certainty within a single concept: assurance (Sicherung), "
coincident with the end of modern warfare likewise puts an end to modern politics and establishes in its place an impersonal commitment to the furthering of planned
replacement. Security
is only possible when everything works according to these plans, and this
requires "leaders," whose true function now becomes evident. For the plan, "the necessity of
'leadership', that is, the planned calculation of the securing of the whole of beings, is required" (GA
7: 89-90/EP, 105; tm). The demand for security is always a call for such Fiihrers. Planning is a matter of
ensuring the smooth and "frictionless" circulation of resources along channels and pipelines of
order and delivery. The plan's success is assured from the outset, because beings are now in
essence planable. The mathematical tracking of stock and supplies becomes a total tracking when things have become completely available. Nothing is concealed from this taking of inventory, with the
effect that the mathematical model of the thing is no different from the thing itself. The mathematical modeling of things, an operation that Heidegger traces back to Ockham and the nominalist split between word and thing
(see VS, 30-31/13-14), is paradigmatic for the disappearance of identifiably discrete beings under the rule of technology. The model is no longer a representation of what is modeled but, in a paradoxical manner, the thing itself.
Everything essential to the thing is contained in the model, without
remainder. Such is the truth of the standing-reserve; it is a collapse of the distances that made
possible representation. Without that spacing, there is only the suffocating rush of the standingreserve along the circuitry of the plan.The plan makes manifest the self-willing nature of
technology, in that the plan has no purpose other than to assure its own expansion and increase. For the plan to function , it is therefore necessary
that beings be consumed and their replacements follow right upon them. The plan plans for
consumption, outlining the paths and channels that the standing-reserve will occupy in its
compelled obedience to order. The world wars have pointed towards this end, according to Heidegger, for "They press toward a
securing of resources [Bestandsicherung] for a constant form of consumption" (GA 7: 88; EP, 103-4; tm). This consumption is
Nothing beyond the thing's mathematical model is recognized.
synonymous with replacement, since there is nothing lost in consumption that is not immediately replaced. The plan is to protect itself from loss by completely insulating itself from
uncertainty. The
plan seeks "the 'all-inclusive' [restlose] securing of the ordering of order" (GA 7: 92; EP, 107; tm). Order
is only secured when there is nothing that resists it, nothing that remains in "disorder." Any
remainder would stand outside of the prevailing order, as would any difference , in complete disorder. There is
another Nietzschean intimation in this, as Heidegger reads the will to power as a drive to secure and order all chaos. Without remainder (restlose), without rest, the standing-reserve threatens
to encompass everything in a monotonous, swirling sameness. The
more secure the world becomes, the greater is the
abandonment of being as it is further enframed within the plan. Homeland security is thus an
oxymoron, since one of the most prominent effects of planning is the elimination of national
differences and "homelands." Security itself is precisely the planned elimination of differences,
and as for "homeland," it is ever more difficult to conceive of a homeland that would be
nationally distinct from another.
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Links: Space Technology (1/2)
Defining existence through technology in space rids the world of it’s ontological status as a
place of being, reducing it to a technological subject.
Neil Turnbull, Professor of Philosophy, Nottingham Trent University, “The Ontological Consequences of Copernicus:
Global Being in the Planetary World”, SAGEJOURNALS ONLINE, 2006.
As is well known, in Being and Time, the early Heidegger conceived of the world as a phenomenological
space that conditions ‘the totality of our involvement with things’ (1961: 415). For him, the world is
constituted by a tacit set of basic existential attitudes to the world – care, understanding, mood
and so on – and is related to ‘what lies before’ in the sense of being handy or readily available. In
later works such as The Origin of the Work of Art, the world continues to be viewed in a similar way as
the ‘governing expanse’, which ‘gives things their measure’, ‘an open space’ within which things
‘receive protection’ (1978b: 160). Thus, in the early Heidegger’s view, it is the world that provides the
conditions of possibility for the basic shape and character of phenomenological experience as
such. As one commentator has put it: the world . . . gives its rule or law to things as that which directs
the way they come to stand such that the opening of a world measures the relations between
existent things, giving them proximity or distance, their peculiar temporal status and their scope and
limits. (Fynsk, 1993: 141) However, the question of the significance of the earth and its relationship to
both technology and world in the context of ‘dwelling’ – as a key element of the ‘fourfold’ of Earth, Sky, Gods
and Mortals – is the more prominent feature of his later work (and it is for this reason that many Heideggerians read him as
a proto-ecological philosopher [see Foltz, 1995; Zimmerman, 1994]). Some Heidegger scholars recognize that the
new emphasis given to earth in Heidegger’s later philosophy is an ‘attempt to think the essence
of things in a new way’ (Mulhall, 1990: 169) and that, for the late Heidegger, ‘authentic dwelling’ is no
longer a matter of a temporalized ‘being-in-the-world’ – as it was in Being and Time – but is reconceived
as a dwelling ‘poetically on the earth’ and ‘under the sky’ (Heidegger, 1978a: 351). Thus, for the later Heidegger,
authentic ways of living stand radically opposed to what might be termed ‘Copernican modes of
existence’, for to live authentically on the earth is to ‘receive the sky as sky’ and to ‘leave the sun
and moon to their journey, the stars to their courses’ (1978a: 352). As the earth is transformed into
a cosmological representation, the earth loses its ontological status as a site of dwelling and is
reduced to an object of possible knowledge for modernity’s technological subject. The later
Heidegger thus strives to defend an earthbound notion of the world and this, in his view,
requires that we reject Copernican ideas of the primacy of space in that, for him, ‘spaces receive their
essential being from locales and not from “space”’ (1978a: 356). In Heidegger’s view, the earth is the ontological
basis for our localized sense of place. It is what he terms ‘the serving bearer’ – an idea related to
the pagan conception of the earth as the giver of life – and as such a primordial ground
‘blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up in plant and animal’ (1971:
149–50). Thus, for the later Heidegger worlds are only conceivable as such – such that the world is
attained as world – only when they framed by the sky above and the earth beneath (see Malpas,
2000: 227). Clearly, for the later Heidegger, the idea of ‘the world’ is conceptually inseparable from that of
‘the earth’ (and in many ways, for the later Heidegger, the idea of the world within which ‘Dasein is’ is
replaced by the idea of the fourfold within which ‘man dwells’). The close relationship between earth and
world for Heidegger can again be seen in the Origins of the Work of Art, where Heidegger recognizes that ‘[w]orld and earth
are essentially different from one another and yet never separated. The world grounds itself in the earth and the
earth juts through the world’ (1978b: 174).2 When seen in this way, the earth is viewed as forming the ontological
basis for what Heidegger terms ‘the work’ – of both artist and artisan – and its corollary the ‘thingly character of the world’
(1978b: 180). More generally, Heidegger conceives the earth as the ground of all appearance and the
physys out of which the world emerges (a ground that supports the nomos of the world). For, in Heidegger’s
view, only a world supported by the earth can give things their proper measure: and without this
relation, things have no ‘true’ measure (and in such a case, the measurement of the world in terms of an abstract
mathematicized facticity – required for the efficient maintenance of purely technological relationships – becomes the
anthropocentric measure of all things).
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Links: Space Technology (2/2)
The concept of a planetary earth provides for the limitless extension of capitalist exploitation
Neil Turnbull, Professor of Philosophy, Nottingham Trent University, “The Ontological Consequences of Copernicus:
Global Being in the Planetary World”, SAGEJOURNALS ONLINE, 2006.
These Heideggerian concerns are echoed in the claim that the ‘planetary earth’ is a symbol of
Western capitalism’s domination of nature and global exploitation of cultural life . Seen thus, the
image of the earth from space can be seen as the aesthetic core of the ideology of the
expansionary – neo-liberal – phase of global capitalism and the sublime object of the postideological West. It is an object that conveys a new ‘satellite geography’ (see Redfield, 1996) and a
placeless map that is the representational condition of possibility for the establishment of global
surveillance and communication systems (Western capital’s command-and-control system). This placeless
space of the planet is seen as challenging traditional notions of space and perhaps even
traditional conceptions of the real itself. And according to Paul Virilio, the interplanetary idea of the
earth is not only internally related to the idea of limitless capitalist expansion (see Virilio, 2002: 63)
because, in his view, planetary technologies are bringing about an ‘exotic reorganisation of sight
enabling perception to escape from the “real space of our planet”’ into what he terms ‘a
horizonless perception under a vanished sky’ (see Virilio, 1997: 2, 2000: 63). Here, as with more orthodox
Heideggerian analyses, the representation of the earth as planet is seen as a symbol of the
deterritorializing technological power of global capitalism: a power that renders the ‘sphere of
experience’ as ‘a synthesis of home and non-place, a nowhere place’ (Beck, 2002: 30).
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Links: Space Colonization
Space colonization is inevitably bound up with nationalism, technology, militarism and
imperialism. Space becomes the new frontier to be managed and destroyed.
Jodi Dean, PhD in PolySci from Columbia and Professor of Political Science @ Hobart and William Smith
College, “The familiarity of strangeness: aliens, citizens, and abduction” Theory and Event 1:2, 1997.
What makes ufology significant among these challenges (which include a variety of alternative sciences and other rejections
of consensus reality) is its connection to the broader "theatrics of space" played out in the United States since the Cold War.
Most societies have cultural traditions establishing and interpreting relationships between Earth, its people, and the cosmos.
The United States is exceptional in that within a hegemonic discourse of "frontier" experience the
exploration of outerspace has been linked to the achievements of technology and democracy. As
Spigel writes: "Ideas like freedom need an image, and the ride into space proved to be the most vivid concretization
of such abstractions, promising a newfound national allegiance through which we would not only diffuse the
Soviet threat, but also shake ourselves out of the doldrums that 1950s life had come to symbolize." The American
space program was produced with an eye to audiences at home and abroad who would view its
achievements as indications of the success of the democratic project. Anyone now or in the future could
look to the Americans who walked the moon and know that communism would not triumph. Through the space
program, America produced a narrative of freedom and progress that would structure popular
understandings of truth and agency. In this context, asking what ufology says about "us" reaches for that vague
sense of America as ethos, popular opinion, self-understanding, mentality. The American articulation of outer
space with technology and democracy incorporates an uneasy mix of colonialist, nationalist, and
globalist ideals. Until the space program, the United States rarely explicitly presented itself as a colonial power,
although expansionism has been integral to its self-understanding. By reiterating the expansive fantasy of the
wild, lawless west, the metaphor of a "frontier" continued earlier notions of American
exceptionalism. Indeed, this very exceptionalism, the success of America's democratic experiment, was to be
revealed, proven, by breaking the laws of gravity, escaping the confines of earth, conquering
space itself. As America reached out into this "new frontier," however, the rhetoric of outposts,
settlements, colonies, and colonization became part of the public language of outer space. This
language is fitting in that "space technology and communications," as Elayne Rapping points out, " make possible
new extensions of American imperialism, both cultural and military. Once linked to a growing
critique of the excesses of the military-industrial complex, increased attention to the histories
and situations of Native Americans, and continued struggle in former colonies throughout Africa
and Asia, such rhetoric disrupted the space program's smooth presentation of democratic
freedom.
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Links: Space Exploration
The affirmative’s “exploration of space” masks the steady march of technological progress.
We explore beyond the world only to gain mastery of the universe and to catalogue resources
for our use.
Karyn Ball, Professor of Critical theory and literary theory @ University of Alberta, “Paranoia in the Age of the
World Picture: The Global “Limits of Enlightenment”, CULTURAL CRITIQUE 61, 2005, pgs. 117-18.
The 1989 photographs of Neptune are an artifact of the collaboration between political economy
and scientific authority: the modes of production that are symbiotically harnessed to research in
the extraction of resources, the design of machines, and the disclosure of the intrinsic properties of
objects and materials. This collaboration wields a far-reaching power not only to secure diverse fields
of belief and action but also to transform and petrify the visual contents of the cultural imaginary. To capture Neptune
in photographic light is thus to seal its fate as an image of our knowledge while forgetting its Great Dark Spot—a natural
metaphor for the possible and for all that remains unthought or unseen. Emmanuel Levinas has foregrounded the
"totalitarian" character of this imperialism of the visible that he associates with metaphysical
reason: a violent light that encloses transcendence in immanence and thereby establishes the object as a
manageable stasis (a definition that strikes me as profoundly resonant with photographic technology itself). But this last
poeticism enjoins a double-edged question. The photographs of Neptune presumably perform a service for us [End Page
118] by replacing our naive inner visions with a more accurate description, but do they not also ensure the homogeneity of
representa-tions (under the rubric of democratic freedom of the press), hence effecting a contraction rather than an
extension of imagination and fantasy? And does this very question not fall prey to a romantic nostalgia for "pure"
expression, a paranoid reaction formation against modernization? My introduction is intended to raise the issue of
paranoia by performing a prototypically romanticist or humanist reaction against the "advances" of modernity. It
consequently treats the photographs of Neptune and the redemptive political rhetoric they inspired
as a tableau of the global confluence of technology and the mass media to encompass the
invisible. In this tableau, the invisible retains its traditional function as a figure for epistemological
transcendence and for thought beyond episteme. The combined technologies of newsprint,
photography, and space exploration overdetermine the organization and transmission of
pictures of the solar system, which can only thereafter certify the value of the pregiven frame.
Certainty would then be the sensation affected by this indisputable confirmation of the rigor of mathematical science
that produces the ground of what Heidegger calls Weltbild, or "world picture," to mark the closure of modern
thought. Heidegger writes that "the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world
picture," by which he means a "structured image" [Gebild] "that is the creature of man's producing which represents and
sets before."4 He adds that this process of producing and structuring provides a venue through which
man strives to give the measure and draw up the guidelines "for everything that is" and thus
occupy a position of mastery over "the whole." This observation leads him to argue that the emergence of
the world as picture coincides with the constitution of man as subjectum: the center of all relation,
the Cartesian cogito that only grants being to "life experience" and that "explains and evaluates whatever is in
its entirety, from the standpoint of man and in relation to man."5 The historical conjuncture that inaugurates
this solipsism is earmarked by the oxymoron of an ahistorical subject who misrecognizes his own moment as firmly and
expressly "new."6
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Links: Space Leadership/NASA
The affirmative’s use of NASA attempts to posit technology as the source of national pride and
leadership – creates a nationalistic and exceptionalist division from our being.
Asif A. Saddiqi, assistant professor of history @ Fordham University, “Competing Technologies, National(ist)
Narratives, and Universal Claims: Toward a Global History of Space Exploration”, Technology and Culture Vol.
51 Number 2, 2010.
The launch of Sputnik starkly accentuated the relationship between national identity and
technology. Soviet and American commentators actively encouraged this link, using many of the same rationales
advanced previously for technological prowess, albeit in entirely different conditions. Sputnik, launched on the same night
that Leave It to Beaver premiered on U.S. television, awoke a nation now seen as far too complacent. Walter Mc-Dougall
notes that "no [single] event since Pearl Harbor set off such repercussions in public life."7 A crisis
of confidence washed over most of American society, an anxiety that depended on an intrinsic
equation between modern America and science and technology. The political response unfolded
with the legislation to create several new agencies focused on science, technology, and innovation, including the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). On the basis of the belief that better education in Soviet Russia
contributed to Sputnik, federal money poured into the American higher education system, making it a key component in the
battles of the cold war. These policies—the creation of new government agencies, further increases in state-sponsored
R&D, and expansion and restructuring of higher education—had enormous influence on America's political,
social, and cultural trajectory during the cold war.8 In the years after Sputnik, space exploration
assumed a critical role in the projection of American identity both at home and abroad. More than
anything, human spaceflight, in the form of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, solidified this link. The rhetoric of
politicians, media commentators, and NASA spokespersons helped to mobilize support for one of the most
expensive civilian endeavors in the history of the nation, the Apollo Moon landing. Rieger's comment about Britain and
Germany in the early twentieth century, that "playing up technology's national significance . . . engendered
understandings that overcame public resistance to new artifacts and instead highlighted their promise and led ... laypersons
to embrace advances" anticipates the rhetoric surrounding Apollo.9 Mark E. Byrnes, in his Politics and Space: Image Making
by NASA, has traced the effects of NASA's image-building policy on popular perceptions of the organization as well as
broader support for the cause of space travel.10 He argues that NASA primarily used three images—nationalism,
romanticism, and pragmatism—to create and consolidate political support across the nation for
its major endeavors in space. During the early years of NASA, no one infused these arguments with more passion
than then-vice president Lyndon B. Johnson, who characteristically noted that "Failure to master space means being
second best in every aspect, in the crucial area of our Cold War world. In the eyes of the world, first in space means
first, period; second in space is second in everything."" In a well-received 2002 book on Apolloy popular
science writer David West Reynolds distills his belief in the connection between national identity and Apollo succinctly and
emotionally: [The Moon race] was a Cold War battle to demonstrate the superior ability of the
superior system, capitalism versus communism. And the battle did prove out the more capable system. The
reasons are many, but among them the power of free enterprise ranks high. Free competition motivated American workers
whose livelihoods were related to the quality and brilliance of their work, and we saw extraordinary, impossible things
accomplished by ordinary Americans. The American flag on the Moon is such a powerful symbol because it is not a vain
one. America, like no other nation, was capable of the Moon.12 Such self-congratulatory and nationalistic
sentiments, rooted in broader notions of American exceptionalism, are common in much of the popular literature
on Apollo.
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Links: State vs. Individual Role in Space Exploration
The aff posits the nation-state as the agent that drives space exploration – this is ahistorical
and locks in a nationalist ontology that erases the history of migrant workers and their role in
space – only the alternative opens space for a global history that affirms the fluid process of
space exploration that neither begins nor ends at the state.
Asif A. Saddiqi, assistant professor of history @ Fordham University, “Competing Technologies, National(ist)
Narratives, and Universal Claims: Toward a Global History of Space Exploration”, Technology and Culture Vol.
51 Number 2, 2010.
I am not suggesting that we should ignore nations, national identity, or vital indigenous innovation. But I believe that
nation-centered approaches, useful and instructive as they were, occlude from view important
phenomena in the history of space exploration. My hope is that by deemphasizing ownership and
national borders, the invisible connections and transitions of technology transfer and knowledge
production will be become clear in an abundantly new way. Such an approach would inform a project
encompassing the entire history of modern rocketry and space exploration, from the late nineteenth century to the present,
focusing on Europe, America, Russia, and Asia. Most important, a global history of rocketry and space
exploration would avoid the pitfalls of the "discursive battles" between nation-centered histories and
open up the possibility to revisit older debates in the historiography of space exploration in
entirely new ways. Taking a global history approach, one that favors decentering the conventional
narrative, would allow historians to redirect their attentions in three ways: we can shift our gaze from
nations to communities, from"identification" to identities, and from moments to processes. These three
strategies, in one way or another, are inspired by the problems posed by historicizing the ambitions and achievements of
emerging space powers, which operate in a postcolonial context where categories such as indigenous, modern, and
national are problematic. I offer some brief examples of each below. In the space imagination, nations typically
represent airtight constituencies despite evidence to the contrary that communities cutting across
borders and cultures—national, institutional, and disciplinary—represent important actors and actions. The
most obvious example here, of course, is the German engineers who formed the core of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in
the United States in the 1950s and who later directed the development of the Saturn V rocket that put Americans on the
surface of the Moon. Wernher von Braun's team represented a unique mix of Germans and Americans who worked together
with several different communities, from Boeing, North American Aviation (including its separate Space and Rocketdyne
divisions), Douglas Aircraft Company, and International Business Machines. These communities represented scientists and
engineers, the government and private industry, and customers and contractors. In the rush to draw up airtight
national narratives, we inevitably tend to gloss over the ambiguities and flows among each of
these communities. By highlighting communities, we can also avoid the reductive problems of
essentialization (another way of talking about "national styles" of science and technology) that aspire to explain
everything but fail to elucidate much at all. Instead, one might think in terms of fluid identities of
scientists and engineers engaged in particular projects, identities which are not only tied to national
identification but also regional, professional, cultural, religious, and educational markers, to name only a few
categories. Using the perspective of mutable identity—different in different circumstances—we might be able
to understand more clearly the ways in which space exploration has not only been a project of national consideration
but also the result of communities (or individuals) who identify with a whole host of other markers that are not connected to
national claims. In other words, it is a way to prob-lematize the notion that space exploration represents
national aspirations. Finally, space historians have tended to focus on moments in history that define the story. For
example, we use the notion of "achieving a capability" (the space equivalent of "going nuclear") as shorthand for
encompassing a variety of complex processes. Whether it be the first indigenous launch of a satellite or the first test of a
liquid hydrogen rocket engine, these moments become historical signposts, turning points, bereft of the messiness inherent
in the process of innovation. As a result, space history slips into the comfort mode of "what and when" instead of the more
illuminating path of "how and why." The focus on process would highlight the ambiguities instead of the binary poles
(success, failure) inherent in isolated moments, thus encompassing both the material event and how the event becomes
constructed as a historical moment. All of these approaches also reinforce and foster the kind of social history
that has become fundamental to most histories of technology but is largely absent in the literature on
spaceflight, a lacuna explicable by the fetish for nation-centered cold-war geopolitics as the
central organizing framework for most histories of space exploration. Barring a few notable examples, space
historians have avoided in-depth inquiries into the lived experiences of large demographics such as engineers, servicemen
and -women, military and intelligence personnel, launch crews, staff workers, and spouses and families of engineers.
Likewise, little work has been done on public enthusiasm for the space program, mass campaigns in support of space
exploration, and popular participation in programs usually identified with state-centered institutions.
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Links: Technology
Technology is not just a tool or an object – it establishes an entire mode of Being and
interacting with the world – the question in this debate should not be what we can do with
technology, but how we can understand what technology does to us.
Charles J. Sabatiano, Daemen College. “A Heideggerian Reflection on the Prospects of Technology”
reprinted in Janus Head 10.1. 2007, p. 63-76.
This understanding is significant for Heidegger’s reflections concerning technology. He addresses technology not as an
object for analysis, but as a way in which Being has come to have meaning in our time in light of
our manner of dealing with things. Technology represents the manner of inter-acting in terms of
which humans encounter everything within the world as object, to be taken up, used, disposed
of at will. The terms of this framework are so taken for granted as the foundation for the meaning of the being of both humans and
things that we do not even acknowledge that this represents a manner of being and relating within the world
that does have a history, both in how we think and act. Heidegger believes this history has fateful
consequences for our time; and that is something we need to think about and question. His reflections are an
invitation for us to think, not about technology specifically, but more importantly, on who we are
becoming and what everything within our world is coming to mean when the framework cast by
technology rules.
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Links: Terraforming
Terraforming other planets imposes human technology, land use justifications, and history
onto nature.
Robert Markley, Jackson distinguished chair of British Literature @ West Virginia University, 1997, “Falling
into Theory: simulation, terraformation, and eco-economics in Kim Stanley robinson’s Martian Trilogy”, Modern
Fiction Studies 43.3
At stake in Ann's comments is the moral relationship of humankind to the land. For her, the Martian
landscape itself challenges androcentric and biogenic justifications for terraforming the planet;
creating the conditions for life is purposeless in her mind because the geology of the planet is inherently
valuable as a "record" of planetary and solar systemic history that dwarfs human technologies,
intentions, and desires. If Red Mars is "pure," however, its purity can be appreciated only through what are ultimately
anthropocentric perceptions and values, through an aesthetic appreciation of its beauty and an intellectual, and even
spiritual, recognition of the knowledge it offers. In response to Ann, Sax emphasizes our inability to imagine beauty, or
knowledge, or usefulness without giving in to a mystical anthropocentrism. His scientific defense of rapid terraformation
makes heroic the irrevocable imposition by humans of a metaphysics of order on physical reality: "'The beauty of Mars
exists in the human mind,' [Sax] said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. 'Without the human
presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It's we who
understand it, and we who give it meaning'" (177). Sax's pronouncements suggest something of the attraction and
limitations of his traditional scientific outlook, a worldview which itself will evolve throughout Green Mars and Blue Mars. If
Ann's defense of a "pure" Mars provokes a questioning of biocentrism, Sax identifies knowledge rather than the exploitation
of resources as the ultimate rationale for terraformation. In this regard, his response to Ann becomes a kind of philosophical
one-upmanship; it is precisely human intervention that produces the "meaning" that structures even her celebration of an
aesthetics and science of "pure" observation, an ideal of nonintervention. 11 Yet Sax's insistence on the anthropocentric
nature of meaning in the universe ironically reveals the accuracy of Ann's criticism : the basis of terraformation, of
Baconian science itself, is an adolescent faith in human significance, a will-to-play (and play God)
with the universe. For Sax, at least in Red Mars, science may be unpredictable and modeling techniques limited, but
the mind remains capable of constructing knowledge by the inductive method, of organizing experimental programs and
then using the results to generate rather than simply recognize meaning in the cosmos.
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__________________________________________________
**Impacts**
Impact: Biopower
The technological mindset manifests itself in the form of biopower that renders all life to
standing reserve.
Mitchell Dean, Sociologist at Macquarie University, "Always Look on the Dark Side: Politics and the Meaning
of Life", 2000, http://apsa2000.anu.edu.au/confpapers/dean.rtf.
Aristotle said that while the polis ‘comes into existence for the sake of life, its exists for the good life’ (1967, 9, I.i.8). Today
the good life has come to require a politics ‘for the sake of life’. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we appear to be
crossing ever-new thresholds towards learning the secrets of the creation of life itself. Rarely a week goes by when
there is not a new biotechnological discovery or application which allows us to use and
manipulate the processes of life itself for any number of ends. Post-menopausal women can now bear
children. Infertile women and men can become parents. The genes from an animal can be implanted into a vegetable.
Sheep and other animals can be cloned. Evidence of criminality or innocence can be discovered through DNA testing.
With the Human Genome Project – in competition with private companies – engaged in
completing the map of the human genome, we are issued with extraordinary promises in disease
detection, prevention and eradication. We are also issued with warnings concerning ‘designer
babies’, the new eugenics, and the uses of genetic information by governments, private
companies and employers. The possibilities for the manipulation of the very biological processes life
are not limited to what has been called the ‘genetic age’ made possible by molecular biology and
human genetics. There are advances in organ transplantation and in our medical capacities to
sustain life. All of these processes of the manipulation of life contain what we like to think of as
‘ethical’ questions. Notions of ‘brain death’ and the ensuing ‘futility’ of further attempts to restore normal life functioning
redefine problems of euthanasia. Various forms of prenatal testing and screening of pregnant women redefine the
conditions of acceptability of abortions. Other such ethical questions concern the harvesting of organs for
transplantation, or of the maintenance of the integrity and diversity of biological species in the
face of genetically modified crops and seeds, etc. The capacity to manipulate our mere biological
life, rather than simply to govern aspects of forms of life, implies a bio-politics that contests how
and when we use these technologies and for what purposes. It also implies a redrawing of the relations
between life and death, and a new thanato-politics, a new politics of death. At some distance from these advances in
biomedicine and biotechnology are the issues of life and death that are played in various arenas
of international politics and human rights. These concern the effects of the break-ups of nation-states from
Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union to Indonesia, the subsequent movement, detention and mass death of refugees and illegal
immigrants, and the conditions and forms under which military action, ‘peacekeeping’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’ are
acceptable. Detention camps are becoming a feature of modern liberal-democratic states. On the
one hand, the twentieth century gave us a name for the death of a whole people or ‘race’,
genocide. On the other, it sought to promote the universal rights of individuals by virtue of their mere existence as human
beings. Bio-politics and thanato-politics are played out in war, in torture, and in biological,
chemical and atomic weapons of mass destruction as much as in declarations of human rights
and United Nations’ peacekeeping operations. The potentialities for the care and the manipulation of
the biological processes of life and of the powers of death have never appeared greater than they
do today. But how do we consider this problem as a political problem? How are issues of life and death related to our
conceptions of politics and to the way in which we think about states and societies, and their futures? Are the ideas of
powers of life and death peculiarly modern, or do they lie at a deeper strata?
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Impact: Genocidal Politics
The metaphysical logic the informs aff’s thinking is the same logic that drove the death camps
of Auschwitz, the genocide of Native Americans and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. The
alternative is essential to new visions of global politics.
Jim George, Lecturer in the Dept. of Poly Science, Australian National University, “Of Incarcaeration and
Closure: Neo-Realism and the New/Old World Order”, MILLENNIUM: JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL
STUDIES, Vol.22 No. 2, 1993.
The sense that something fundamental has to change if we are to live better together as human beings is integral to feminist scholarship in International Relations. 66
Jane Flax's contribution, for example, speaks very powerfully to IR in this context with her observation that: [s]omething has happened, is happening to Western
societies. The beginning of this transition can be dated somewhat arbitrarily from after the First World War in Europe and after the Second World War in the United
States. Western culture is in the middle of a fundamental transformation: a 'shape of life' is growing old. The demise of the old is being hastened by the end of
colonialism, the uprising of women, the revolt of other cultures against white Western hegemony, shifts in the balance of economic and political power within the
world economy, and a growing awareness of the costs as well as the benefits of scientific 'progress'. [Moreover] Western intellectuals cannot be immune from the
the Enlightenment dream is
over, that people everywhere are increasingly awake to dangers of the Enlightenment narrative
of reason, knowledge, progress and freedom. This is an important theme in any context concerned to open up
incarceration and closure because it allows for (effectively) silenced voices to be heard again, including
those associated with anti-Enlightenment sentiments, such as Nietzsche. It is important, in this sense, because it acknowledges the
nightmarish dimensions of the Enlightenment dream, which, for example, connects the ascent of the
modern, rational subject with the experiences of Hiroshima and Auschwitz. The point, of course, is that a
celebration of the age of rational science and modern society cannot simply be disconnected
from the weapons of mass slaughter or the techniques of genocide. Nor can the language and
logic of liberty and emancipation be easily detached from the terror waged in their names, by, for
example, the major Cold War foes—each proclaiming itself the natural systemic heir to the Enlightenment dream. And while many in the 1990s
celebrate the `end' of the Cold War, as the victory of one Enlightenment based economic
doctrine over another, the other side of this particular coin must also be confronted, in the poverty of so
much of the world, and in the growing underclasses in `developed' societies where neo-classical and neoMarxian `scientific' approaches have dominated the economic debates. It is worth pondering too, in this context, that the issue of 'ethnic cleansing'
rightly condemned by the Western powers in the 1990s (and resisted in the 1940s) is an integral part of modern Western
history, particularly via its Realist narrative which celebrates the process of modern state making, the
march to the present of modern rational man. Most significantly, ethnic cleansing is an intrinsic element of the story of
Anglo-American triumph over imperial adversity. Even a rudimentary appreciation of silenced
histories implies as much—the histories, for example, of the Huron, the Ogala, the Mandika and the
Pitjantjatjara—all victims of 'ethnic cleansing' for the greater good of a unified, homogeneous
state system, and the eradication of (anarchical) difference. The point made here is not the simple one, nor is it riven with
profound shifts now taking place in contemporary social life.67 For Flax this represents a growing recognition that
the kind of paradox characteristic of IR study in general. It is not an attempt at impossible detachment from subjects. Similarly it resists any grand theorised
condemnation of the Enlightenment (or more precisely its dominant scientific project) in favour of some ready made alternative 'realism', unfettered by its distorting
influences. It is consistent, rather, with the Foucault of 'What is Enlightenment?' who, in retaining a deep suspicion of modernist rhetoric and ambition, acknowledges
that: the thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude—that is of a
This perspective, which dissents against
the dominant discursive practices of modem life, while acknowledging the positive ontological
and social potentials of modernity, connects a reflectivist CST approach to the 'concrete' policy
concerns of Post on Bosnia, Lapham on US strategy and Havel on Eastern Europe, and distinguishes it from the narrow, abstract 'problem solving' rituals of
the neo-Realists. It does so in its understanding of the need to go beyond simple dichotomy, traditional
formulae and respectable polemic. It does so in Flax's terms in its acknowledgement of the need for a positive critical ambivalence to the
philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era.68
ambiguities, paradoxes and uncertainties of everyday realities and the way we understand and cope with them.69 This perception, of course, is no source of comfort
for contemporary thinkers, critically inclined or otherwise. Indeed, as Flax has put it, `the more the fault lines in previously unproblematic ground become apparent,
the more frightening it appears to be without ground'. 7° Hence the 'intellectual vertigo' she speaks of. There are, however, many who have taken up the challenge of
modernity in a positive, constructive manner: still suffering from 'vertigo' to be sure, still shaken by both the extraordinary achievement and colossal brutality that is
This has meant more than a surface
level consciousness of the need to think and act in more sensitive and tolerant ways. It has meant a more profound willingness
to critically confront the way we think and act, to strip bare the very basis of thinking and acting,
to reinterrogate its meaning and the ways we legitimate the social and intellectual 'givens' that
for so long have been reality: the way the world is 'out there'. It has resulted in a range of works which
resonate with alternative images of global politics derived often from previously alien sources , e.g., German
their heritage, but now no longer willing to celebrate the former while remaining blind to the latter.
Critical Theory, Gramsci and varieties of post-modernism.
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Impact: Loss of Being Outweighs Nuclear War
Loss of being is the biggest impact of all—outweighs nuclear war and extinction.
Michael Zimmerman, Professor of Philosophy, Tulane University, CONTESTING EARTH'S FUTURE:
RADICAL ECOLOGY AND POSTMODERNITY, 1997, p.119-120.
human self-assertion, combined with the eclipse of being, threatens the relation
between being and human Dasein. Loss of this relation would be even more dangerous than a
nuclear war that might "bring about the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of
the earth." This controversial claim is comparable to the Christian teaching that it is better to forfeit the world than to lose one's soul by losing one's relation to God. Heidegger apparently
thought along these lines: it is possible that after a nuclear war, life might once again emerge, but it is far less
likely that there will ever again occur an ontological clearing through which such life could
manifest itself. Further, since modernity's one-dimensional disclosure of entities virtually denies
them any "being" at all, the loss of humanity's openness for being is already occurring.
Modernity's background mood is horror in the face of nihilism, which is consistent with the aim of providing material "happiness" for
Heidegger asserted that
everyone by reducing nature to pure energy. The unleashing of vast quantities of energy in nuclear war would be equivalent to modernity's slow-motion destruction of nature: unbounded destruction
If humanity avoided nuclear war only to survive as contented clever animals,
we would exist in a state of ontological damnation: hell on earth, masquerading as
material paradise. Deep ecologists might agree that a world of material human comfort purchased at the price of everything wild would not be a world worth living in, for in killing wild
would equal limitless consumption.
Heidegger believed
nature, people would be as good as dead. But most of them could not agree that the loss of humanity's relation to being would be worse than nuclear omnicide, for it is wrong to suppose that the lives
of millions of extinct and unknown species are somehow lessened because they were never "disclosed" by humanity.
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Impact: Standing Reserve
Calculative thought incorporates all surroundings into a homogenous standing reserve. Even
human beings become objectified and replaceable.
Andrew J. Mitchell, Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University, "Heidegger and
Terrorism," Research in Phenomenology, Volume 35, Number 1, 2005, pp. 181-218.
Opposition is no longer an operative concept for Heidegger, since technology
has served to eradicate the distance that
would separate the supposedly opposed parties . The analysis of technology in Heidegger's work is guided by the
(phenomenological) insight that "All distances in time and space are shrinking" (GA 79: 3; cf. GA 7: 157/PLT, 165).13 Airplanes, microwaves, email, these serve to abbreviate the world, to be sure, but there is a metaphysical distance that
has likewise been reduced, that between subject and object. This modern dualism has been surpassed by what Heidegger
terms the standing-reserve (Bestand), the eerie companion of technological dominance and "enframing." Insofar as an object (Gegenstand) would stand over
against (Gegen) a subject, objects can no longer be found. "What
stands by in the sense of standing-reserve, no longer
stands over against us as object" (GA 7: 20/QCT, 17). A present object could stand over against another;
the standing-reserve, however, precisely does not stand; instead, it circulates, and in this
circulation it eludes the modern determination of thinghood. It is simply not present to be cast as a thing. With enframing,
which names the dominance of position, positing, and posing (stellen) in all of its modes, things are no longer what they were. Everything becomes
an item for ordering (bestellen)and delivering (zustellen); everything is "ready in place" (auf der Stelle zur
Stelle), constantly available and replaceable (GA 79: 28). The standing-reserve "exists" within this cycle of order and
delivery, exchange and replacement. This is not merely a development external to modem objects, but a change in their being. The
standing-reserve is found only in its circulation along these supply channels, where one item is just as good as any other, where, in fact, one item is identical to any
other. Replaceability is the being of things today. "Today being is being-rephlceable" (VS, 107/62), Heidegger
claims in 1969. The transformation is such that what is here now is not really here now, since there is an item identical to it somewhere else ready for delivery. This
cycle of ordering and delivery does not operate serially, since we are no longer dealing with discrete, individual objects. Instead, there
is only a steady
circulation of the standing-reserve, which is here now just as much as it is there in storage. The
standing-reserve spreads itself throughout the entirety of its' replacement cycle, without being
fully present at any point along the circuit. But it is not merely a matter of mass produced products being replaceable. To
complete Heidegger's view of the enframed standingreserve, we have to take into consideration
the global role of value, a complementary determination of being: "Being has become value" (GA 5: 258/192). The
Nietzschean legacy for the era of technology (Nietzsche as a thinker of values) is evident here. But the preponderance of value is so far from preserving differences
and establishing order of rank, that it only serves to further level the ranks and establish the identity of everything with its replacement. When
everything
has a value, an exchangeability and replaceability operates laterally across continents,
languages, and difference, with great homogenizing and globalizing effect. The standing-reserve
collapses opposition. The will that dominates the modem era is personal, even if, as is the case with Leibniz, the ends of that will are not completely
known by the self at any particular time. Nonetheless, the will still expresses the individuality of the person and one's
perspective. In the era of technology, the will that comes to the fore is no longer the will of an individual,
but a will without a restricted human agenda. In fact, the will in question no longer wills an object outside of itself, but only wills itself; it
is a will to will. In this way, the will need never leave itself. This self-affirming character of the will allows the will an independence from the human. Manifest in the
very workings of technology is a will to power, which for Heidegger is always a will to will. Because the will to will has no goal outside of it, its willing is goalless and
endless. The human is just another piece of a standing-reserve that circulates without purpose. Actually,
things have not yet gone so far; the human still retains a distinction, however illusive, as "the most important raw material" (GA 7: 88/EP, 104). This importance has
"The human is the 'most important raw
material' because he remains the subject of all consumption, so much so that he lets his will go
forth unconditionally in this process and simultaneously becomes the 'object' of the
abandonment of being" (GA 7: 88/EP, 104). Unconditioned willing transcends the merely human will, which satisfies itself with restricted goals and
accomplishments. Unconditioned willing makes of the subject an agent of the abandonment of being, one whose task it is to objectify everything. The more
the world comes to stand at the will's disposal, the more that being retreats from it. The human
will is allied with the technological will to will . For this reason-and the following is something often overlooked in considering
nothing to do with the personal willing of conditional goals, as Heidegger immediately makes clear,
Heidegger's political position between the wars-Heidegger is critical of the very notion of a FR'hrer, or leader, who would direct the circulation of the standing-reserve
according to his own personal will. The
leaders of today are merely the necessary accompaniment of a
standing-reserve that, in its abstraction, is susceptible to planning. The leaders' seeming
position of "subjectivity," that they are the ones who decide, is again another working of
"objectification," where neither of these terms quite fits, given that beings are no longer
objective. The willfulness of the leaders is not due to a personal will: One believes that the leaders had presumed everything of their own accord in the blind
rage of a selfish egotism and arranged everything in accordance with their own will [Eigensinn]. In truth, however, leaders are the necessary consequence of the fact
that beings have gone over to a way of errancy, in which an emptiness expands that requires a single ordering and securing of beings. (GA 7: 89/EP, 105; tin) The
leaders do not stand above or control the proceedings, the proceedings in question affect beings as a whole, including the leaders. Leaders are simply points of
convergence or conduits for the channels of circulation; they are needed for circulation, but are nowhere outside of it. No leader is the sole authority; instead, there
are numerous "sectors" to which each leader is assigned. The demands of these sectors will be similar of course, organized around efficiency and productivity in
distribution and circulation. In short, leaders
serve the standing-reserve.
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Impact: Value to Life
Faith and reliance in technology destroys the primal value of life
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, p. 14, 1977
In contrast, a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining
district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set into order [bestellte] appears
differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain. The work of the peasant does
not challenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed in the keeping of
the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the
field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets
upon it in the sense of challenging it Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now
set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set
upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use. This settingupon that challenges forth the energies of nature is an expediting, and in two ways. It expedites
in that it unlocks and exposes. Yet that expediting is always itself directed from the beginning
toward furthering something else, i.e., toward driving on to the maximum yield at the minimum
expense. The coal that has been hauled out in some mining district has not been supplied in
order that it may simply be present somewhere or other It is stockpiled; that is, it is in call, ready
to deliver the sun’s warmth that is stored in it. The sun’s warmth is challenged forth for the heat,
which in turn is ordered to deliver steam whose pressure turns the wheels that keep a factory
running.
No value to life in their framework- Embracing technology prevents ones ability to reveal
themselves in the world, and thus cannot experience a more primal truth
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, p. 28, 1977.
Enframing blocks the shining-forth and holding-sway of truth. The destining that sends into
ordering is consequently the extreme danger. What is dangerous is not technology. There is no
demonry of technology but rather there is the mystery of its essence. The essence of
technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger. The transformed meaning of the word
“Enframing” will perhaps become somewhat more familiar to us now if we thing Enframing in the
sense of destining and danger. 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. 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.
Enframing the world as a standing reserve of resources eliminates its value
Zoe Sofia, Senior Lecturer in feminist studies and cultural studies and Chair of the School of Cultural Histories and
Futures at the University of Western Sydney, “Container Technologies”, Hypatia 15.2, 2000, p. 181-201, Project Muse)
The outcome of this challenging-forth is a macro-technology of re-sourcing that Heidegger calls
the Bestand. This "standing-reserve" is a mobilizable stockpile of resources available for instant
supply: "Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to
stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering" (1977b, 17). The plane on the
runway, ready for take-off, epitomizes this on-call orderability of resources: the plane might look
like an autonomous machine, but it only exists "to ensure the possibility of transportation"
(1977b, 17). Another image might be rows of stacked large containers ready equally for transport
by road, rail, or sea. In this modern formation, making resources available predominates over
appreciating the unique qualities of the thing. The object loses its qualities as the Gegenstand-that which resists and stands against--and the machine loses its standing as an autonomous
tool, dissolved into the Bestand, where it is just another "completely unautonomous" element in
the abstract and global grid of the resourced world (1977b, 17).
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Impact: Value to Life Outweighs Nuclear War
Our evidence is comparative- Loss of essence outweighs extinction and makes extinction
from nihilism inevitable- Recapturing the essence of being is a prerequisite to reestablishing a
proper form of ethics and politics.
Miguel de Beistegui, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, Heidegger and the Political, ed.
by K. Ansell-Pearson and S. Critchely, 1997, p.71.
Yet, at this point, everything happens as if our postmodern condition were nothing but the
experience of the unlimited acceleration of time, an acceleration that results in the
“spatialisation” of the planet (and of the universe as a whole), that is, in the absolute domination
of space in the form of total and readily available presence. The need of being is no longer
needed. The essential unfolding of presence has withdrawn, and we are left with beings in the
form of standing-reserve. As a result, man is for the first time confronted with the greatest of all
dangers, a danger far greater than that of the total and destructive unleashing of power over the
earth, and that is the danger of the threat of the annihilation of his essence. The essence of man
consists in being needed by being. So long as we do not envisage the destination of man
according to his essence, so long as we do not think of man together with being, but solely with
the unrelentless releasing of beings, nihilism will continue to prevail, both in essence and in
actuality. In essence, as the most extreme manifestation of the Seinsvergessenheit; in actuality, as the politics of
world domination, which our “democracies” seem to carry out with particular effectiveness.
Thus, a politics that concerns itself only with “man,” and not with the essence of man is bound to
nihilism as to its most intimate fate. Does this mean that Heidegger promotes something like a politics of being?
No, insofar as politics is always and irreducibly ontic: it concerns man’s relation to man. Yet this relation is itself made
subject to the way in which being claims man. There can be no politics of being, whether in the sense of a politics
inspired by being or with being as its object, because being cannot be the stake of a political program or
will. A politics of being is as meaningless as an ethics of being. Yet neither ethics nor politics
can be without the prior disclosure of the epochal configuration within which they emerge. In
this sense, ethics and politics are always of being. Both ethics as dwelling and politics as place
point to man’s necessity to find an abode on this earth and to dwell amongst beings. And if
Heidegger is so weary of ethics and politics, it is precisely insofar as these modes of dwelling no longer satisfy
man’s essence, no longer provide man with an abode that is adequate to his essence, in other
words, no longer constitute the space of his freedom understood as freedom for his essence (for
his relation to the default of being), but are entirely summoned by the power of machination. Unless we
come to think of ethics and of politics as the site of a conversion toward the essence of being, a site in which man would find
his proper place.
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Impact: Zero Point of Holocaust
Calculative thinking leads us to the zero point of holocaust.
Michael Dillon, Professor of Politics at the University of Lancaster. "Another Justice," POLITICAL THEORY, v.
27 n. 2, 1999, p. 164-165.
Quite the reverse. (Me subject was never a firm foundation for justice, much less a hospitable vehicle for the reception of the call of another Justice. It was never in
possession of that self-possession which was supposed to secure the certainty of itself, of a self-possession that would enable it ultimately to adjudicate everything.
The very indexicality required of sovereign subjectivity gave rise rather to a commensurability much more amenable to the expendability required of the political and
material economies of mass societies than it did to the singular, invaluable, and uncanny uniqueness of the self. The
value of the subject
became the standard unit of currency for the political arithmetic of States and the political economies of
capitalism." They trade in it still to devastating global effect. The technologisation of the political has become manifest and global.
Economies of evaluation necessarily require calculability." Thus no valuation without mensuration and no mensuration without
indexation. Once rendered calculable, however, units of account are necessarily submissible not only to valuation but also,
of course, to devaluation. Devaluation, logically, can extend to the point of counting as nothing. Hence, no
mensuration without demensuration either. There is nothing abstract about this: the declension of economies of value leads to the
zero point of holocaust. However liberating and emancipating systems of value-rights-may claim to be, for example, they run the risk of counting out
the invaluable. Counted out, the invaluable may then lose its purchase on life. Herewith, then, the necessity of championing the invaluable itself. For we must never
forget that, "we are dealing always with whatever exceeds measure."" But how does that necessity present itself? Another Justice answers: as the surplus of the duty
to answer to the claim of Justice over rights. That duty, as with the advent of .another Justice, is integral to the lack constitutive of the human way of being.
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**Alternative**
Alternative: Anti–Subjectivism
Adopting an anti-subjectivist perspective is crucial to altering thought away from calculation
and representation.
Ingrid Scheibler, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Boston College, 76 Chi.-Kent. L. Rev. 853, 2000, p. 864865.
When Heidegger thematizes the Being question in relation to modern subjectivism, he seeks to
effect a shift from representational thinking, which conceives truth and the locus of objectivity
exclusively in the human subject, to what he calls a more meditative thinking (besinnliches Denken).
Heidegger's discovery, the "alternative" to instrumental thinking and modern subjectivism, (1)
displaces the rootedness in subjective states and (2) reconceives the strict subject/object
distinction, and the objectification and domination of the object-domain that results from this.
This can also be described as the effort to shift from a transcendentalist focus. This focus views truth in terms of
the certainty of representation, rooted in subjectivity and, more generally, conceives the
parameters of inquiry - awareness of a world of objects - from within the vantage point of the subject's
own human "horizon." Heidegger seeks to reconceive the traditional conceptions of truth and
Being, and shift our focus to an awareness of the ground, or field, of the human horizon. This
antisubjectivist critique, made in the name of a [*865] thematization and recognition of Being as
the sustaining ground "in reference to which the diverse meanings of Being arise," has
significant critical force. Heidegger's critique here can be placed along with other powerful critiques of modern
instrumentalist calculative reason, like the efforts of the early Frankfurt School, Adorno, and Horkheimer n28 and, more
recently, Habermas. n29 Heidegger powerfully examines the workings of this objectifying, calculative
reason in examining the effects of its domination of things in the world and nature. That is to
say, Heidegger's own explicit concern in these writings is with domination, the ethos of mastery,
as it is deployed against things and nature. n30 To find an alternative, non-dominating and non-objectifying
conception of our relation to the world, he does two things: First, he calls our attention to the way that human
being is "in" the world in a more relational, rather than divisive, situation of belonging to the
world, rather than standing over and against it, as subject over object, lord or master. Second,
he calls for a recognition of Being as the ground of the human, transcendental horizon. This is his
antisubjectivist thematization of the ground or field of human awareness. In my view, the antisubjectivist critique at
the center of Heidegger's project has a powerful critical force, especially in analyzing the genesis and
effects of environmental degradation. n31
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Alternative: Better than the Plan
Instead of taking energy and the natural world for granted we must invoke the question—true
questions and thinking cannot take the form of a simple plan, but must remain continually
interrogatory.
Kevin Michael DeLuca, Associate Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia,
“Thinking with Heidegger: Rethinking Environmental Theory and Practice,” Ethics & the Environment, 2005
Project Muse.
First off, Heidegger's work offers a way of thinking. In the beginning of "The Question Concerning
Technology" Heidegger writes, "Questioning builds a way. We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to
the way and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics. The way is one of thinking" (1993, 311). These words
suggest an approach to environmental issues (and a way of reading Heidegger). The first paragraph of "The Age of the
World Picture" offers more explicit advice: "Reflection is the courage to make the truth of our own
presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called
into question" (1977, 116). What is crucial here is that Heidegger is offering us the gift of distress if we have the courage
to embark on the path of questioning, of mindfulness, that casts into doubt all of our taken-for-granted. Heidegger is not
offering us answers or programs or utopian projections. Traveling the path is our task of
thinking. Perhaps a groundplan can be cobbled out of Heidegger's work, though I think such a project is antithetical to
Heidegger's thought. Michael Zimmerman attempts to answer a groundplan-like question: "the extent to which Martin
Heidegger's philosophy manages to carry out the task proposed by Passmore: to provide a nonanthropocentric way of
thinking that will lead us out of the current crisis in culture and environment" (1983, 100). Fortunately, Zimmerman's work,
while perhaps harnessing Heidegger to provide "a basis for radical environmentalism" (1983, 128), falls short of providing a
groundplan. Throughout this essay I want to insist on reading Heidegger as offering not groundplans,
but the gift of distress that provokes us to question our presuppositions and goals. The
presuppositions and goals that we need to question include humanity's relation to nature, humanity's and environmental
groups' relation to industrialism and technology, and the strategic practices of environmental groups, including lobbying,
public relations, the dissemination of wilderness images, the promotion of ecotourism, and the goal of saving wilderness.
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Alternative: Break with Tech Though Solves Freedom
Breaking with technological thinking is key to freedom.
Louis E. Wolcher, Professor of Law, University of Washington School of Law, Washington Law Review,
February 2004, LN.
A word or two on method: we have both "found" freedom in our meditation on the ultimate end
of technology and laid freedom down as an axiom for the assessment and further development
of technology. It bears repeating that in social criticism the relation between Is and Ought [*360] is always dialectical.
Those who wish to "prove" freedom's impossibility do not escape it: they merely lay it down in a
negated form (unfreedom) as the axiom of their lives. They freely choose to bend their necks to the
yoke of technological thinking. We choose otherwise. For us, "freedom" names the possibility of decisively
breaking with technological thinking - the possibility of changing history, for better or worse. If we define technology as such
to be technical means in the service of an ultimate end, then we are forced to conclude that the previously described
essence of modern technology is at war with freedom as its ultimate end - at war with that of which it is the essence! In this
curious state of affairs, it is as if the essence of the human being - animal rationale ("rational animal"), as traditionally
determined - were subverting the very purpose and meaning of human life: as if man had finally succeeded in outsmarting
himself. For the essence of modern technology, as technological thinking, has no ultimate end. In
this dimension its rationality is fundamentally irrational, at least if one takes the viewpoint that the purpose
of society as a whole is to preserve and unfetter the people of which it is composed. n102 Like all things human, the
essence of modern technology makes a world - an odious world, perhaps, but a world
nonetheless. In a world in thrall to technological thinking, freedom's mode of abiding consists for the most part in its
withdrawal and quiescence. A manifestation of human being-in-the-world, technological thinking
stands in the sharpest possible contrast to what we will now call freedom for responsibility. The
latter is also a manifestation of human being-in-the-world, but unlike technological thinking it maintains a certain critical
distance between itself and its world. In it, freedom awakes. Technological thinking falls into its world wholeheartedly,
becoming its world to such a degree that it is incapable of imagining any other possibility of existence. In a manner that will
become clear later, however, freedom for responsibility always remains on the hither side of its world in the form of
freedom's possibilities and freedom's responsibility. Modern technology, in the sense of technics, has been "captured" by
technological thinking to such a degree that the latter has driven the ultimate end of technology as such into darkness and
obscurity. It is high time for freedom to rediscover that end - namely, itself - and in so doing to
transform modern technology's essence, its mode of being. [*361] We will attempt to show in the next
section that there can be only one ultimate end for technology that is worthy of the name: freedom to take responsibility for
what humans-and-nature are becoming together. But it is clear that the ultimate effect of technological thinking in present
circumstances is precisely the opposite. Marcuse is right in saying that, for the most part, in modern technological societies
"the individual's performance is motivated, guided and measured by standards external to him, standards pertaining to
predetermined tasks and functions," and that "his liberty is confined to the selection of the most adequate means for
reaching a goal which he did not set." n103 As this passage suggests, freedom should never be confused with liberty. If
license is the power to satisfy instinctual drives whenever external constraints are absent, liberty is merely the unimpeded
power to follow your motives around, like a dog follows its master. But freedom for responsibility has nothing to
do with choosing this or that good from a set of goods that has been extracted, usually by
someone else, from the standing-reserve that nature and human relations have become. Rather,
genuine freedom is openness to destiny - openness to being claimed by something: an aphorism
that must remain obscure so long as freedom itself is not thought down to its roots.
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Alternative: Key to Meaning
Meditative thinking most necessary – essential to meaning.
Igor Stramignoni, Prof. London School of Economic and Political Science – Department of Law, San Diego
International Law Journal, 2003, LN.
The distinction between calculating thinking and meditating thinking is a recurrent theme in Heidegger's existential
analytic. n21 For the moment, suffice to say that through "calculating thinking" man always attempts to measure out
(rechnen) the circumstances in which he must begin to act. Characteristic (but not exclusive) of scientific thinking,
calculating thinking is instrumental thinking - it always counts in advance on the results it hopes to achieve. An estimate as
much as an actual measurement, calculating thinking is, so to speak, "restless" thinking - one which is constantly out to
calculate the world in some new, more efficient, useful way. If, however, calculating thinking does not meditate the
meaning which dominates what there is, n22 "meditating thinking" does. In particular, meditating thinking meditates
what, at first, will seem to have hardly any obvious, practical use - it meditates over what, at first,
will seem to be of no use if one is to achieve one particular goal or another. For, Heidegger points out,
the meaning of things is indeed, strictly speaking, quite useless. Yet, the meaning of things is
also what is most necessary - for without meaning even what is useful would be meaningless,
and so would no longer be of any use. n23 So, again, poetic comparisons of law's many domains are meditating
[*64] thinking - meditating comparisons - not calculating thinking. In particular, they are meditating thinking in that, as
we will shortly see, they seek to think what difference the law makes.
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Alternative: Meditative Thinking Solves
Meditative thinking can overcome calculative thinking.
Igor Stramignoni, Prof. London School of Economic and Political Science – Department of Law, San Diego
International Law Journal, 2003, LN.
There are here two main points which Heidegger makes in Intimations and from which we can learn in view of our
investigation into poetic comparisons of law's many domains. The first point is that the relationship between poetic,
meditating thinking and (on the other hand) poetry, philosophy, or any other calculating, instrumental
thinking, must be fundamentally reinvented - in the original sense of having to be discovered again (inventio).
So, then, the relationship between poetic, meditating thinking and Western legal thinking must too be reinvented - for, just
like poetry and philosophy, Western legal thinking is calculating, instrumental thinking. The second point is
that the relationship between poetic, meditating thinking and what Western metaphysics have
traditionally called "Being" must be thought afresh just as well. To be sure, poetic, meditating thinking is
the thinking of Being. n30 But can we think such relationship afresh - beyond, that is, the smoky screen built, throughout
much of the history of Western thinking, by what has developed into merely calculating, instrumental thinking? Consider
again The Candlestick. Light and Candlestick, "one by the other", are bound in a way which, on first examination, is neither
causal nor formal. Yet, there can be hardly any doubt that they are bound all the same. So, there must be some relationship
between them - much like the relationship between thinking and Being - and, yet, such relationship must be, again, neither
causal nor formal. n31 Here, Western philosophical thinking can be of little help - for, again, Western
philosophical thinking has long developed into mere calculating thinking. Poetic thinking, by
contrast, promises (in the sense purported by Heidegger) to be meditating thinking, that is
"other-thinking". Importantly, otherthinking is not only no out-and-out thinking (thinking as
thinking is commonly understood to be, thus calculating, instrumental thinking) but also no
other-than-thinking. Instead, other-thinking is thinking which is radically other - more precisely,
one which is other than the "frantic measuring and calculating" of today's philosophical (or
other) calculating thinking. n32
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Alternative: Ontology First (1/2)
We have to understand ontology in the context of space because the drive for space
exploration is a byproduct of how we come to imagine ourselves as a nation – this process of
identity construction shapes our actions and truths.
Jodi Dean, PhD in PolySci from Columbia and Professor of Political Science @ Hobart and William Smith
College, “The familiarity of strangeness: aliens, citizens, and abduction” Theory and Event 1:2, 1997.
Despite public apathy toward the space program, outer space remains a theater within which American selfunderstandings are played, if not exactly worked, out. During the eighties, inclusion on the crew of the space shuttle
symbolized the arrival and acceptance of diverse groups in American society. Discussion of the future of space
exploration often provides a vehicle for thinking about American lack of will, the possibility for
global cooperation, or the outcome of recent policies of privatization. Initial responses to the
announcement of the possibility of life on Mars and Europa further illustrate the interconnections
between space and American identity. On the Internet and other media, speculations focused more on
the discovery's impact on what it means to be human and what it says about America than on
what was learned about the solar system. Some said the discovery meant life was no longer
special. Others said it ended human isolation. In addition to the playful paranoids on SCHWA's abduction list
wondering about the tie-in with ID4, a number of people connected the discovery with a governmental interest in restoring
confidence after the Oklahoma and Atlanta Olympic bombings. And, a few thought this was just the tip of the
iceberg. After all these years of denial, why would the government reveal the possibility of life in
two places in less than a month? Surely the government is about to reveal the truth about the
crashed saucers and alien bodies. As the manager of a local market said as I leafed through her tabloids, "Aliens
in space? I want to know about the ones who are already here."
Ontology necessarily precedes epistemology and methodology, especially in evaluation of
meta-theoretical claims concerning social science.
Mario Auguste Bunge, Frothingham Professor of Logics and Metaphysics, McGill University, FINDING
PHILOSOPHY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE, 1996, p. 242-3.
Every conceptual view of any natural object has two components: an ontological and a methodological one. The former concerns the nature of the object, the latter
the proper way to study it. But if the object is social, such as a school or a business firm, a third feature must be added: namely, values and morals, for these arc
what guide or misguide human behavior. That is, in metatheoretical matters concerning social science, X-ism = <OntoIogical X-ism, Methodological X-ism,
The inclusion of an
ontological component in any X-ism is bound to raise positivist eyebrows, particularly for assigning it
pride of place in the ordered triple. Such priority may be justified as follows. First, being precedes
knowing: cognition is only one of the functions of the human being (as well as of other higher vertebrates).
Second, whoever investigates a real object assumes, at least tentatively, that the latter exists or
may exist. Moreover, the investigator starts by having at least a rough idea of the nature of the
object of interest, since he must know what to investigate and why. Third, the explorer or
investigator chooses his research method according to what (little or much) he knows or suspects
about the nature of his object. Thus ontology precedes (or ought to precede) epistemology and, in
particular, methodology.
Axiologico-moral X-ism>. The isms to be analyzed in this chapter and the next are, of course, individualism, holism, and systemism.
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Alternative: Ontology First (2/2)
The ontological position of human beings is a prior question to its relationship to nuclear
weapons. The prioritization of survival and the avoidance of technological destruction over the
uniqueness of Being damns humanity to annihilation.
Andrew Feenberg, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication,
Simon Fraser University, HEIDEGGER AND MARCUSE: THE CATASTROPHE AND REDEMPTION OF
HISTORY, 2005, p. 2.
Heidegger's language sounds mysterious. We will return to the reason for his peculiar locutions in a later chapter. Here it is enough to consider what he is saying at
meaning is tied up with our existence as
experiencing, active beings. As such we encounter them as this or that particular object available for this or that role in our lives. A thing that was
the simplest level. He is not claiming that things exist because we use them but rather that their
in principle out of any possible contact with a being such as ourselves, would not "make sense" but would be a bare existence, its infinite potentials a meaningless
blur. It is we who order experience into recognizable objects. Without us. chairs and tables would not be the sort of things one calls chairs and tables (e.g., things to
sit on, to eat at, to set and stack and clean, and so on). Mountains and stars too would be empty of meaning out of the context of a world in which such things have a
without a finite being-in-the-world to encounter
them, things are literally meaningless, non-sense, without distinction, boundaries, or definiteness. It is absurd to talk about "things" on this
hypothesis. What we normally call "objective reality" is perfectly real, but it falls under this finite
horizon we cannot coherently think our way around, behind, or beyond. This picture of Dasein is
active and engaged being-in-the-world is obscured in modern limes by technological thinking which treats
everything as essentially an object of cognition, a simple matter of fact, including human beings themselves. Heidegger argues that this
objectivistic outlook is not innocent. It goes along with the fundamental restructuring of the world by
technoscience. Eventually human beings as well as things become mere components in the
technical system. The modern world is a place of total mobilization for ends that remain obscure. It is this apparent "value freedom"
or "neutrality*' of technology that Heidegger and later, Marcuse, identify as the source of the uniqueness and the tragedy of modernity. This is what
allows technology to destroy both man and nature. A world "enframed" by technology is
radically alien and hostile. The danger is not merely nuclear weapons or some similar threat to
survival, but the obliteration of humanity's special status and dignity as the being through which
the world takes on intelligibility and meaning; for human beings have become mere raw
materials like the nature they pretend to dominate (Heidegger 1977).
place even if it be purely aesthetic, imaginary, or scientific. The difficult point is that
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Alternative: Rejection Key
Only by rejecting calculative thinking in favor of meditative thinking can we address the
relationship of nation-states and democracy.
Igor Stramignoni, Prof. London School of Economic and Political Science – Department of Law, San Diego
International Law Journal, 2003, LN.
After the fall of the Berlin wall and, now, September 11, 2001, many feel that the nature and
relationship of nation states and democracy might be set to change - when it has not already
changed. If that is the case, then surely such changes must be addressed - and with them must
be addressed those changes that primarily affect the law. Indeed, law's many domains might
have to be thought entirely afresh. That is of course quite a project - yet, it is an urgent project to think about, one
that can no longer be sensibly postponed. Whether, in particular, by law one refers to legal rules, legal institutions, legal
procedures, [*89] legal concepts, or, indeed, legal conceptions n112 - one can no longer be concerned, simply, with law as
it was. Unlike what is sometimes suggested by certain writers, legal comparatists might well be in a rather eminent position
to contribute to that particular project - which concerns political theory, law, and everyday life alike. But, first, comparatists
must think the question of comparative law entirely afresh. What, then, is comparative law? Rather than stopping at
function, efficiency, history, or even ordinary language, legal comparatists might wish to begin by
thinking afresh the is of that question. That is, they might begin by turning to poetic, meditating
comparisons. A radical answer to the question of comparative law shows how poetic comparisons of law, as meditating
comparisons, require us to bring language and difference back at the center stage of comparative analysis. By language
and difference poetic comparisons mean neither ordinary language nor difference in the sense normally employed by most
comparative law studies. Instead, by language poetic comparisons mean both a pointing and a hearing, and by difference
what they mean is difference as such. Yet, it is precisely by putting language as a pointing and as a hearing, and difference
as such, back at the center of legal analysis that, poetic comparisons suggest, meaningful comparisons can still be sensibly
pursued in today's changing, increasingly abstract society. In fact, that is indeed what was earlier meant by saying that the
originality of poetic comparisons lies in that they set out to think what difference the law makes. One concluding remark. The
question of comparative law invites of itself to meditate comparisons. Meditating comparisons, however, is less
a what than a how - how can comparative law be thought afresh? It might well be that it is only
the perdurance of the question that, each time, allows the question to be asked and the answer
to be answered. If that is the case, then meditating comparisons - to meditate comparisons - is
meditating thinking in the most original sense of that expression.
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Alternative: Rejection Solves
Rejection of technological thinking can overcome the thinking of standing-reserve.
Louis E. Wolcher, Professor of Law, University of Washington School of Law, Washington Law Review,
February 2004, LN.
A word or two on method: we have both "found" freedom in our meditation on the ultimate end of
technology and laid freedom down as an axiom for the assessment and further development of
technology. It bears repeating that in social criticism the relation between Is and Ought [*360] is always dialectical.
Those who wish to "prove" freedom's impossibility do not escape it: they merely lay it down in a negated form (unfreedom)
as the axiom of their lives. They freely choose to bend their necks to the yoke of technological thinking. We choose
otherwise. For us, "freedom" names the possibility of decisively breaking with technological
thinking - the possibility of changing history, for better or worse. If we define technology as such
to be technical means in the service of an ultimate end, then we are forced to conclude that the
previously described essence of modern technology is at war with freedom as its ultimate end at war with that of which it is the essence! In this curious state of affairs, it is as if the essence of the human
being - animal rationale ("rational animal"), as traditionally determined - were subverting the very purpose and meaning of
human life: as if man had finally succeeded in outsmarting himself. For the essence of modern technology, as
technological thinking, has no ultimate end. In this dimension its rationality is fundamentally
irrational, at least if one takes the viewpoint that the purpose of society as a whole is to preserve
and unfetter the people of which it is composed. n102 Like all things human, the essence of modern
technology makes a world - an odious world, perhaps, but a world nonetheless. In a world in thrall to technological thinking,
freedom's mode of abiding consists for the most part in its withdrawal and quiescence. A manifestation of human being-inthe-world, technological thinking stands in the sharpest possible contrast to what we will now call
freedom for responsibility. The latter is also a manifestation of human being-in-the-world, but
unlike technological thinking it maintains a certain critical distance between itself and its world.
In it, freedom awakes. Technological thinking falls into its world wholeheartedly, becoming its world to such a degree
that it is incapable of imagining any other possibility of existence. In a manner that will become clear later, however,
freedom for responsibility always remains on the hither side of its world in the form of freedom's possibilities and freedom's
responsibility. Modern technology, in the sense of technics, has been "captured" by technological thinking to such a degree
that the latter has driven the ultimate end of technology as such into darkness and obscurity. It is high time for freedom to
rediscover that end - namely, itself - and in so doing to transform modern technology's essence, its mode of being. [*361]
We will attempt to show in the next section that there can be only one ultimate end for technology that is worthy of the
name: freedom to take responsibility for what humans-and-nature are becoming together. But it is clear that the ultimate
effect of technological thinking in present circumstances is precisely the opposite. Marcuse is right in saying that, for the
most part, in modern technological societies "the individual's performance is motivated, guided
and measured by standards external to him, standards pertaining to predetermined tasks and
functions," and that "his liberty is confined to the selection of the most adequate means for
reaching a goal which he did not set." n103 As this passage suggests, freedom should never be confused with
liberty. If license is the power to satisfy instinctual drives whenever external constraints are absent, liberty is merely the
unimpeded power to follow your motives around, like a dog follows its master. But freedom for responsibility has
nothing to do with choosing this or that good from a set of goods that has been extracted,
usually by someone else, from the standing-reserve that nature and human relations have
become. Rather, genuine freedom is openness to destiny - openness to being claimed by
something: an aphorism that must remain obscure so long as freedom itself is not thought down
to its roots.
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Alternative: Solves Nature
Refusing to think nature as an object or resource allows us to be free from technology as
thought and restore a relation of wonder to the world.
Richard Grego, Associate Professor, Department of Humanities/Culture,Daytona Beach College, “Global
Warming, Environmental Philosophy and Public Policy: John Dewey vs. Martin Heidegger,” PATHWAYS,
December 28, 2007, http://www.philosophypathways.com/newsletter/issue132.html.
Heidegger, in contrast, tends to view nature more as 'something which must be accepted and submitted to...', as the
unfolding of something sacred and supernatural ('Being') with which humanity looses touch when it is treated as an object of
scientific knowledge or commercial exploitation. Our destruction of the natural world is symptomatic of our spiritual
alienation from the ultimate source of meaning in our lives. Having reduced 'Being' to a scientific-
technocratic-commercial world of objectified 'beings', humanity now finds itself alone in a
trivialized world of 'resources' and 'commodities'. Having separated nature from its sacred
animating ground, humanity has robbed nature (and itself, for that matter) of intrinsic value.
Nature now seems lifeless and meaningless in any deep sense. Thus a kind of 'Homelessness', as Heidegger calls it, 'has
come to be the destiny of the world' (LH, 243), and the only remedy for this dilemma (which Heidegger seems
dubious about, even while advocating it) is for humanity to reject the 'frenzy of rationalization',
technology, and commercialism (QT, 449) in favor of 'freedom'. Heidegger describes this 'freedom'
as the 'letting-be of beings' (ET, 125). It involves an attitude of quietism, reverence, and profound appreciation for
nature as a sacred incarnation of 'Being'. In this state of mind, nature would be celebrated once again as a
source of wonder, and would no longer be used merely as an object of exploitation.
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__________________________________________________
**Answers to Answers**
A2 “Calculative Thought Good” (1/2)
1. Calculative thinking risks the loss of humanity. We become dominated cogs in the machine.
That’s the Meyer 98 evidence.
2. Technological thinking inevitably fails -- We must recognize that we are only players and not
authors; only this awakening will solve domination.
Michael Zimmerman, Professor of Philosophy, Tulane University, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity:
Technology, Politics, Art, 1990, p. 97-98.
Heidegger developed in his own way the theme that humanity is a participant in a drama or play that is not of human origin. He
claimed that human existence was the clearing (the mask) through which entities could display
themselves Discarding the usual notion that humans are active subjects who gaze upon and
understand entities, Heidegger maintained that they look at themselves through the ontological
"openness" which has appropriated humanity. "Looking" (Blicken). we are told, is best understood in terms of die
Gteek verb theo. Usually this verb has been iegarded only in its medial form, theaomai, which may be translated as "to look at." From
this verb, we have the word theatron, the showplace, ordinarily understood as the theater, the site where people go to look at something
Conceived mote radically, however, theaomai means for something to bring itself to view, in the sense of the view which a thing offers
from and gives of itself That, viewing, thus does not ai all mean "looking" in the sense of the re-presenting viewing through which the
ego-subject directs itself toward and grasps the object. Rightly understood, human existence is in effect
"grasped" by the being of entities so that they may show themselves and thus "be." We do not
encounter things; rather, things encounter us [GA, 54; 152ft.] In effect, then, Western humanity has
been unwittingly playing the role of mask or clearing or theater by virtue of which the being of
entities may display itself as a cosmic spectacle. We must be careful, however, in saying that "the being of entities
displays itself for "being" names no entity at all and can never itself "appear." It may, then, be better to say that human existence
is the clearing through which entities may display themselves (and thus "be") as a cosmic
spectacle This spectacle occurs not for any "purpose," especially not for any merely human end,
but instead is ultimately purposeless, the cosmic-ontological version of a work of art.5 Having become blind to its
supporting role in this event of ontological disclosedness, man has arrogantly presumed that he
is the lead actor, author, producer, witness, and beneficiary of the drama called 'Western
history." Gripped by hubris, man races toward the ever-receding goal of controlling all things: bv
rewriting the script ot history, by rewriting the world in his own image the essence of this quest
for control., Heidegger maintained, is the craving for more power as an end in itself. Hence, the
technological era is essentially a Will to Will, a self-empowering process that has no "purpose" beyond its own
expansion If human Dasein could only awaken to the ultimate purposelessness of history. if Dasein could only see that
people are players in a cosmic game which transcends human ends, so Heidegger believed, that
awakening in and of itself would make possible a new, non-instrumental. non-domineering era of
history.
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3. Management is impossible.
LaDelle McWhorter, Professor of Philosophy, Northeast Missouri State, HEIDEGGER AND THE EARTH, ed.
McWhorter, 1992, p.4-6.
We are living in a veritable age of management. Before a middle class child graduates from high school
she or he is already preliminarily trained in the arts of weight management, stress management, and
time management, to name just a few. As we approach middle age we continue to practice these essential
arts, refining and adapting out regulatory regimes as the pressures ot life increase and the body
begins to break down. We have become a society of managers - of our homes, careers, portfolios, estates, even of our own
bodies - so is it surprising that we set ourselves up as the managers of the earth itself? And yet, as thoughtful earth-dwellers we must ask, what does this signify? In numerous essays in particular the beautiful 1953 essay, "The Question Concerning Technology" - Heidegger
speaks of what he sees as the danger of
dangers in this, our, age. This danger is a kind or forgetfulness - a forgetfulness that Heidegger
thought could result not only in nuclear disaster or environmental catastrophe, but in the loss of
what makes us the kind of beings we are, beings who can think and who can stand in thoughtful
relationship to things. This forgetfulness is not a forgetting of facts and their relationships; it is a forgetfulness of something far more important and far more
fundamental than that. He called it forgetfulness of 'the mystery*. It would be easy to imagine that by 'the mystery' Heidegger means some sort of entity, some thing, temporarily
hidden 01 permanently ineffable. But 'the mystery* is not the name of some thing; it is the event of the occurring together of revealing and concealing. Every academic discipline,
whether it be biology or history, anthropology or mathematics, is interested in discovery, in the revelation of new truths. Knowledge, at least as it is institutionalized in the modern
world, is concerned, then, with what Heidegger would call revealing, the bringing to light, or the coming to presence of things. However, in order (or any of this revealing to occur,
in order to any attention to
one thing, we must stop paying close attention to something else. In order to read philosophy we
must stop reading cereal boxes older to attend to the needs of students we must sacrifice some of our research time. Allowing for one thing to reveal itself
Heidegger says, concealing must also occur. Revealing and concealing belong together. Now, what does this mean? We know that
means allowing for the concealing of something else. All revealing comes at the price of concomitant concealment. But this is more than just a kind of Kantian acknowledgment of
human limitation. Heidegger is not simply dressing up the obvious, that is. the fact that no individual can undergo two different experiences simultaneously. His is not a point about
When revealing reveals itself as temporally linear and
causally ordered, for example, it cannot simultaneously reveal itself as ordered by song and
unfolding in dream. Furthermore, in revealing, revealing itself is concealed in order tor what is
revealed to come forth" Thus, when revealing occurs concealing occurs as well. The two events
are one and cannot be separated.' Too often we forget. The radiance of revelation blinds us both to its own event and to the shadows that it casts, so that
human subjectivity at all. Rather, it is a point about revealing itself.
revealing conceals itself and its self-concealing conceals itself, and we fall prey to that strange power of vision to consign to oblivion whatever cannot be seen. Even our forgetting is
forgotten, and all traces of absence absent themselves from our world. The noted physicist Stephen Hawking, in his popular book A Brief History of Time, writes, "The eventual goal
of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe."* Such a theory, many people would assert, would be a systematic arrangement of all knowledge both
already acquired and theoretically possible. It would be a theory to end all theories, outside of which no information, no revelation could, or would need to, occur. And the advent of
such a theory would be as the shining of a light into every corner of being. Nothing would remain concealed. This dream of Hawking's is a dream of power; in fact, it is a dream of
We
dream of knowing, grasping everything, for then we can control, then we can manage,
everything. But it is only a dream, itself predicated, ironically enough, upon concealment, the self-concealing of the mystery. We can never
control the mystery, the belonging together of revealing and concealing. In order to approach the world in a manner
exclusively technological, calculative, mathematical, scientific, we must already have given up for
lost, or been expelled by, or perhaps ways of being such as we are even impossible within) other approaches or modes of revealing char
would untold into knowledges ot other sores. Those other approaches or paths of thinking must
already have been obliterated; those other knowledges must already have concealed themselves
in order for technological or scientific revelation to occur. The danger of a managerial approach
to the world lies not, then, in what it knows - not in its penetration into the secrets of galactic emergence or nuclear fission - but in what
it forgets, what it itself conceals. It forgets that any other truths are possible, and it forgets that the belonging
together of revealing with concealing is forever beyond the power of human management. We can never have, or know, it all; we can never
manage everything.
absolute power, absolute control. It is a dream of the ultimate managerial Utopia. This, Heidegger would contend, is the dream of technological thought in the modern age.
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1. Doesn’t assume the alternative. Mediative thinking is the alternative to calculative thinking
and can overcome it. This is the Scheibler 2000 evidence.
2. We are in a try-or-die situation. We have no choice but to reject the calculative dystopia.
Louis E. Wolcher, Professor of Law, University of Washington School of Law, Washington Law Review,
February 2004, LN.
Let us end where we began, and ask once again: What is the end of technology? What this question asks in its deepest signification is nothing technological.
Although technology in the largest sense of the word consists of human beings uncovering beings and making them accessible, technology as such is not ultimately
for the sake of any particular project or outcome. Technology thus conceived exists ultimately for the sake of human freedom, which can only express itself in and by
means of technology. Genuine freedom is freedom for responsibility: the kind that knows that it is freedom itself that constructs the very obstacles to freedom that
continue to confound a suffering humanity. Freedom from necessity is not a logical condition of the possibility of freedom for responsibility, but it is nonetheless an
empirical condition of the latter's spreading and flourishing. The harried and overworked, the hungry, the sick, and the downtrodden: their gnawing need to survive a
struggle for existence that modern technological progress could make unnecessary relentlessly devours their chances to live in freedom. Thus, not only does
freedom begin only when "the I-will and the I-can coincide," n214 as Arendt puts it, but it is also the case that those who are already free for responsibility wear other
people's avoidable lack of freedom as a shameful stain on their sense of responsibility. Marx once uttered the profound truth that "we have to emancipate ourselves
The grip that
technological thinking exercises on our imagination must be broken, and technology must return to the status of a
before we can emancipate others." n215 If this essay has achieved its goal, then its most important argument will have landed on fertile soil:
means to the ultimate end of universal human emancipation. All progressive thought about the consummation and the ultimate end of technology requires, first and
foremost, what Marcuse calls a "consciousness of the blatant contradiction between the scientific-technological possibilities and their destructive and repressive
realization." n216 This
consciousness means the ability to think the category of individualism beyond
the making of market choices that implement a life of unnecessary toil and servitude. It means defining
individuality in terms of being able to speak one's own language, to have one's own emotions, and to follow one's own heart. And it requires the conviction that true
To those
who would disparage and scorn this vision of human emancipation as unrealistic and naively
utopian, we say: So what? We have seen the world that technological thinking has made, and the
irrationality of its rationalism shows itself to the faculty of judgment in a way that is every bit as
dysutopic in fact as our idea of universal human emancipation is mythological and "unrealistic."
individualism can only begin beyond the realm of necessity: a truth that well-paid tenured legal academics ought to know from personal experience.
3. Meditative thinking can overcome calculative thinking
Igor Stramignoni, Prof. London School of Economic and Political Science – Department of Law, San Diego
International Law Journal, 2003, LN.
There are here two main points which Heidegger makes in Intimations and from which we can learn in view of our
investigation into poetic comparisons of law's many domains. The first point is that the relationship between poetic,
meditating thinking and (on the other hand) poetry, philosophy, or any other calculating, instrumental
thinking, must be fundamentally reinvented - in the original sense of having to be discovered again (inventio).
So, then, the relationship between poetic, meditating thinking and Western legal thinking must too be reinvented - for, just
like poetry and philosophy, Western legal thinking is calculating, instrumental thinking. The second point is
that the relationship between poetic, meditating thinking and what Western metaphysics have
traditionally called "Being" must be thought afresh just as well To be sure, poetic, meditating
thinking is the thinking of Being. n30 But can we think such relationship afresh - beyond, that is,
the smoky screen built, throughout much of the history of Western thinking, by what has developed into merely
calculating, instrumental thinking? Consider again The Candlestick. Light and Candlestick, "one by the other", are bound in
a way which, on first examination, is neither causal nor formal. Yet, there can be hardly any doubt that they are bound all
the same. So, there must be some relationship between them - much like the relationship between thinking and Being - and,
yet, such relationship must be, again, neither causal nor formal. n31 Here, Western philosophical thinking can be
of little help - for, again, Western philosophical thinking has long developed into mere
calculating thinking. Poetic thinking, by contrast, promises (in the sense purported by
Heidegger) to be meditating thinking, that is "other thinking". Importantly, otherthinkingis not
only no out-and-out thinking (thinking as thinking is commonly understood to be, thus
calculating, instrumental thinking) but also no other-than-thinking. Instead, other-thinking is
thinking which is radically other - more precisely, one which is other than the "frantic measuring
and calculating" of today's philosophical (or other) calculating thinking. n32
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1. Non-Responsive. Our argument does not forward the critique of anthropocentrism. We do
not critique a human-centered world view. We critique calculative thinking as dominating and
hierarchical. They are answering a different critique.
2. Meditative thinking does not require rejection of technology or use of resources.
Louis E. Wolcher, Professor of Law, University of Washington School of Law, Washington Law Review,
February 2004, LN.
Although our previous survey of the effects of technological thinking may sound pretty grim, to
loosen natura's grip on our minds and to begin thinking of nature in terms of physis does not
have to transform us into Luddites or revolutionaries. No reasonable person could doubt that
human beings need natural resources in order to live and prosper. Nature in this sense is the
irreplaceable source of all our food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and art. However cruelly and unequally distributed they are
at the present time, scientific discoveries, the fruits of modern technology, and technological planning are obviously
essential means for maintaining and enhancing conditions of life on this planet. It is not the technological base
that presents the problem: it is the superstructure of technological thinking that we must break
with. Like Rousseau, n128 we do not urge humanity as a whole to renounce technology's
advances in order to avoid the vices of technological thinking. For it is not a question of either/or
here. The most pressing question for humanity is whether we also need, or even are able to recognize, nature in the sense
of physis. Treating nature as natura enables life to live. But treating it (including ourselves) as physis can begin to make life
worth living.
3. Turn: Meditative thinking enables deep ecologists to rethink their relationship with the
environment.
Louis E. Wolcher, Professor of Law, University of Washington School of Law, Washington Law Review,
February 2004, LN.
Although we obviously need nature's resources, we do not need technological instruments as
such nearly as much as we need freedom for responsibility. While the attempt to fly from freedom may
quench the fires of responsibility and guilt, at least for a while, such an attempt is none other than a cowardly acquiescence
in the status quo. As long as [*372] we think of nature exclusively in terms of natura, neither humans nor nature will ever be
free. Just as the institution of slavery demeans both slave and master, so too treating nature
merely as natura demeans both nature's creatures and the human beings who exploit or protect
them. From the standpoint of natura, environmentalism will never be more than an emotionally
driven "preference" to protect and preserve some of Mother Nature's beings while ignoring or
decimating others. According to the scientific maxim "What matters gets measured," the earth
has to get completely mapped and measured before the reality of environmental degradation can
acquire any political currency. n149 Nature recedes, as it were, so that her beings may be computed and counted
in that simulacrum of her that is called "the environment." n150 But from the standpoint of physis, the environmentalist, no
less than the anti-environmentalist, freely decides to take a stand within existence, and steers it, for good or for ill, in a
direction. If natura gives humans the power to dominate nature, physis gives nature and humanity the warrant, and the
responsibility, to be what they are becoming together.
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1. We outweigh. Our Zimmerman 94 evidence says that the loss of relation between Being and
Humans is worse than a nuclear war. Whatever impact they may win on the case debate is
meaningless if we suffer the ontological damnation assured with calculative thought.
2. Turn: The ontological question of the critique comes before the case advantages.
Michael Dillon, Political Theory, Vol. 27, No. 2, April 1999, p. 145-147.
I take the defining feature of contemporary continental thought to be the return of the ontological.
The return of the ontological has been developed in terms of a critical genealogy of political problematisations consequent upon a fundamental reappraisal of the
basic categories of philosophical modernity. Specifically, the
modern understanding of narrative, order and justice,
value, identity, and continuity, together with an aspiration to a rigorously methodological access
to truth and totality, secured always from the perspective of the cogito (without asking about the
sum), were all disrupted by the ontological turn. It was precisely because the ontological turn did devastatingly target the sum that
the putatively secure ground of the cogito was radically unsecured. Because you cannot say anything about anything, that is, without always already having made
assumptions about the is as such, however, the return of the ontological has even wider ramifications than that of genealogy .
For any thought,
including, therefore, that of Justice, always already carries some interpretation of what it means
to be, and of how one is as a being in being. To call these fundaments into question is to gain
profound critical purchase upon the thought that underpins the thought and practices of
distributive justice itself. We are at the level of those fundamental desires and fears which confine the imagination and breed the cruelties upon
which it relies in order to deflect whatever appears to threaten or disturb its various drives for metaphysical security.12 Politics and philosophy
have always been wedded since their first inception in the polis. The return of the ontological was therefore prompted by the twin
political and philosophical crises that assailed European civilisation at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Hence the crisis of
(inter)national politics (to which E. H. Carr, for example, responded) was as much a crisis of thought as the crisis of thought, as expressed in debates about
Empiricism, Scientism, Positivism, and Historicism at that time, was a crisis of politics. For what was at issue was a thinking way of life—complexly diverse and
radically plural in its composition—that had hit the buffers in terms of the elevated universal expectations of reason and justice which its thought and politics had
promised. Historicism’s failure to meet the challenges of Empiricism, Positivism, and Scientism nonetheless served to expose the crisis of political modernity itself:
bureaucratisation, rationalisation, global industrialisation, technologisation, the advent of mass society, world war and genocide.13 On the one hand, a return to
“basics” was prompted by the ways in which the slaughter of the Great War, the holocaust of the Second World War, and the subsequent advent of the terminal
dangers of the nuclear age undermined the confidence of a European civilisation gone global. This “failure of nerve” was enhanced by the impact of its racial and
the return of the ontological was
indebted philosophically, amongst other influences to Nietzsche’s overturning of the metaphysical deceits of onto-theology, and to
Heidegger’s early attempt to formulate a fundamental ontology. In neither instance am I claiming that the outcome of the
economic imperialism, together with the subsequent experience of postcolonialism. On the other hand,
ontological turn has resulted in some new orthodoxy or canon.14 Levinas, for example, through moves too complicated to retrace in this exercise, championed the
The question of ontology has, instead, been split wide open,
and the formulations, desires, institutions, and practices of our established ways of being—
justice and Justice included—are shown to be suspended in that very opening.
metaphysical over against the ‘ontological’. Quite the contrary.
3. The belief that we can solve the case is false – only by recognizing that we are only players
not authors can we solve domination.
Michael Zimmerman, Professor of Philosophy, Tulane University, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity:
Technology, Politics, Art, 1990, p. 97-8.
Having become blind to its supporting role in this event of ontological disclosedness, man has
arrogantly presumed mat he is the lead actor, author, producer, witness, and beneficiary of the
drama called "Western history." Gripped by hubris, man races toward the ever-receding goal of
controlling all things: by rewriting the script of history, by recreating the world in his own image.
The essence of this quest for control, Heidegger maintained, is the craving for more power as an
end in itself. Hence, the technological era is essentially a Will to Will, a self-empowering process that has no
purpose" beyond its own expansion. If human Dasein could only awaken to the ultimate purposelessness of history, if Dasein
could only see that people are players in a cosmic game which transcends human ends, so
Heidegger believed, that awakening in and of itself would make possible a new, non-instrumental. nondomineering era of history.
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4. This argument makes no sense—ontology comes first—the way we think about something
frames how the problem is perceived. The moment of decision—the way we act towards the
other—is determined by how we know the world, which means it’s impossible to develop an
ethics towards the other without having an ontology first.
5. Ethics reifies responsibility over any other mode of revealing – it represents just another
way of managing being.
LaDelle McWhorter, Professor of Philosophy, Northeast Missouri State, also of the bumbles, Heidegger and
the Earth, ed. McWhorter, 1992.
And shattered we may be, for our self-understanding is at stake; in fact, our very selves – selves engineered by the
technologies of power that shaped, that are, modernity – are at stake. Any thinking that threatens the state. As a result,
guilt is familiar, and, though somewhat uncomfortable at times, it comes to feel almost safe. It is no surprise, then, that
whenever caring people think hard about how to live with/in/on the earth, we find ourselves growing anxious and, usually,
feeling guilty about the way we conduct ourselves in relation to the natural world. Guilt is a standard defense
against the call for change as it takes root within us. But, if we are to think with Heidegger, if we are to heed
his call to reflect, we must not respond to it simply by deploring our decadent life-styles and indulging ourselves in a fit of
remorse. Heidegger's call is not a moral condemnation, nor is it a call to take up some politically
correct position or some privileged ethical stance. When we respond to Heidegger's call as if it were a
moral condemnation, we reinstate a discourse in which active agency and its projects and
responsibilities take precedence over any other way of being with the earth. In other words, we
insist on remaining within the discourses, the power configurations, of the modern managerial
self. Guilt is a concept –whose heritage and meaning occur within the ethical tradition of the western world. But the
history of ethical theory in the west (and it could be argued that ethical theory only occurs in the West) is one with
the history-of technological thought. The revelation of things as to-be-managed and the imperative
to be in control work themselves out in the history of ethics just as surely as they work
themselves out in the history of the natural and human sciences.
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6. Placing ethics before ontology presupposes a neutral, generic, homogenized Other towards
which we have responsibility – this is an INDEPENDENT internal to damnation – the aff is too
busy stuffing the Other’s mouth with rice to hear the Other speak.
Rudi Visker, Professor, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, “Is ethics fundamental? Questioning Levinas on
irresponsibility”, Continental Philosophy Review, 2003, p. 263–302.
These broad strokes should suffice to give us the outline of Levinas’ ethics of responsibility. Admittedly, it not only seems to be coherent; but is also quite attractive.
For it is no doubt the central place this ethics reserves for the Other that explains why people are so impressed by it, as Levinas himself seems have realized quite
early. “In 1968 . . . all values were being contested as bourgeois – this was quite impressive – all except for one: the other. . . . [E]ven when a language against the
the otherness of the Other seems to have become
our obsession. It is an otherness we should respect, learn from, and refrain from reducing to a copy of
ourselves – as we have done for too long – in a euro- or occidentalocentrism that, like king Midas, fatally turned whatever it encountered, into of copy of what it had wished to be the ideal
other resounds, language for the other is heard behind it” (RTB, p. 99). Indeed,
world.17 But this world turned out to be uninhabitable, the lonely world of knowledge where everything has finally become familiar and thus uninteresting, and where we have become, as a result,
terribly alone, bored by everything including ourselves. In short, we’re faced with the crisis of the European sciences that, as Husserl remarks in the opening of his last great book, “no longer seem to
have anything to say” about “the questions that are decisive for genuine humanity.”18 Is it not time to dig a hole in which we can bury our shame? “First philosophy has donkey’s ears” – is it not that
confession for which we are truly grateful to Levinas, whose ethics of the Other finally justifies our desire to break with the past? And what a break it is: The discovery of the value of cultures and of the subcultures within these
cultures. A vulgar critique of pure judgment (Bourdieu). The triumph of multiculturalism. And within that triumphant celebration of alterity, a new sobriety: one should learn one’s lessons from the past, and avoid, for example,
reducing the Other to a culture – not ours, but his/hers/theirs! One should avoid homogenization by letting him/her/them be absorbed by a new totality – the “other” culture(s) – for that would be but another way of labeling
and controlling others by making them recognizable. Besides, one should perhaps mistrust all this talk about multiculturalism. Is it not, in truth, an ideology that simply serves to mask late capitalism’s true contradictions:
exploitation, deprivation, repression?19 A false consciousness, to be sure! But then again, for Marx, ideology is not simply a false consciousness but the correct consciousness of a false world. In covering up its injustice,
multiculturalism at least indirectly testifies to the need for such a cover-up, and in the false harmony it preaches, there is nonetheless the desire for happiness, for a better world.20 In all this confusion, clearly
one value keeps us going: the Otherness of the Other. His/Her hunger, as Levinas says, is sacred. But can this hunger be approached, as Levinas believes, “objectively” (TI, p. 201, quoted above)?
Does it provide us with a firm standard? Couldn’t it be confusing us, in its turn? For human beings not only need to be kept alive. The food one offers to humans should, lest one treats them as cattle,
The reverse side
of the humanitarian concern with suffering,” he says, “is a disdain for everything in life which does
not let itself be reduced to Life in the biological sense of the term.”22 And in a chilling passage in which he protests
be spiced. Alain Finkielkraut, who considers himself a disciple of Levinas,21 comes across this complication without noticing that it makes the whole edifice tumble. “
again “against this Olympian indifference toward a peasant humanity” (CC, p. 88) – a humanity that is more than such a biological life, that has all sorts of customs
and practices which divide it – he writes, “To
save lives, such is the global task of the doctor without frontiers; he
is too busy filling the hungry mouth with rice, to still have time to listen to what it is trying to say”
(HP, p. 128). Finkielkraut protests against a uniformization in suffering. In the end, pain would be the final
equalizer; we all moan and cry the same way. The Olympian indifference about which he is so shocked would be,
in fact, a refusal to take into account “the meaning which people give to their existence” (CC, p. 88) – a
meaning about which, needless to say, they do not agree. Spices are important, but it is hard to prove why they are. Like
everything important in life, they are without reason. We do not bury our dead simply because we are afraid of epidemics – there would then be more efficient ways of
getting rid of them, some sort of garbage-service, perhaps. It is important how we bury them; and on this, there is no agreement – not even among the monotheistic
religions. We can, of course, give some sort of “explanation” for our practices (e.g., for being buried on your right side, with your head facing Mecca rather than
end
Madrid), but the process will soon come to a fruitless
(why the head and not the feet? why lying on the right side, rather than on the left or the back?) Such
things are extremely important (hence the existence of ‘multicultural’ graveyards), but we cannot “prove” why they are. They are, so to speak, both necessary and
arbitrary. They are like that because they are like that. And it
may not always be pleasant to be confronted with our
incapacity to fully argue for what is truly important to us, to fully account for those practices that
constitute the inner core of our intimacies. It is as if this incapacity is somehow improper. How can what
is most our own be something we so poorly possess that we cannot even give conclusive argument for it? Finkielkraut’s protest against a humanitarianism that does not allow “the words [of the Other]
to reach the domain of its care” (HP, p. 128) is no doubt justified. But what exactly is happening here? Why do these words not reach me? Could it be that precisely because these words do not reach
me, I prefer to stuff the Other’s mouth with rice? What is the status of this “not reaching,” this “not hearing”? Is there, then, some sort of appeal, which – contrary to what Levinas had told us – I can
not hear? Can there be some sort of insensitivity or impassibility between me and the Other that points to something other than the attempt to sedate/anaesthetize a prior sensitivity? Could it be that,
if there is something in this life of the Other to which I do not respond, this lack of response on my part is something quite different from any attempt to muffle what in me has already responded?
Insensitivity, impassibility, non-response: could it be that what announces itself here, should not be understood in the privative mode? Is any other way to understand these non-responses possible,
however, once one has embraced (like Finkielkraut, in the same book) the principles of a philosophy like that of Levinas – a philosophy which has perhaps not by accident expressed a similar disdain
for what is peasant in humanity and sung the praise of Socrates “who preferred the town to the countryside and the trees”? Here is the passage immediately preceding this sentence, where Levinas
seems to speak from his heart: One’s implementation in a landscape, one’s attachment to Place, without which the universe would become insignificant and would scarcely exist [Levinas is rendering here
what he sees as Heidegger’s view], is the very splitting of humanity into natives and strangers. And in this light [supreme provocation against Heidegger] technology is less dangerous than the spirits of the Place.
Technology does away with the privileges of this enrootedness and the related sense of exile. It goes beyond this alternative. It is not a question of returning to the nomadism that is as incapable as
sedentary existence of leaving behind a landscape and a climate. Technology wrenches us out of the Heideggerian world and the superstitions surrounding the Place. From this point on, opportunity
appears to us: to perceive men outside the situations in which they are placed, and let the human face shine in all its nudity (DF, pp. 232–233). Let us linger with this passage, for it is crucial if we are
As Levinas sees it, the
choice is either being “attached” to or “complemented” in a landscape, a Place, a climate – in
short, being en-rooted – or being without such attachment. This latter “unrootedness,” however, is no mere absence. It is
not, for Levinas, a handicap, but a positive capacity: the ability to leave behind all such roots. To truly perceive the Other as a human
being presupposes that one is wrenched out of one’s native world – that the ties by which that world holds us are broken. It thus
to understand why Finkielkraut may be raising an issue that can only be taken seriously once one leaves the alternatives that Levinas allows here.
presupposes an emancipation: a doing away with that mancipium that holds us in its spell.23 Technology can break that “grip” by situating us in a space in which the division between the
autochthonous and the allochthonous no longer makes sense. Hence, it is surely no coincidence that Levinas never employs the latter term in reference to the Other. Whereas the I is said to be
autochthonous – “enrooted in what it is not [and yet] within this enrootedness, independent and separated” (TI, p. 143) – the Other is never referred to as the one belonging to a different (allo) soil
(chthoon). He or she is, instead, consistently called a Stranger, someone without a homeland (apatride) who is “outsid the situation in which he or she is placed.” And again this “outside” or this
“without” are positive qualifications, not privative ones: it is thanks to them, it seems, that the human face can shine in all its nudity. Whoever is “native” will first have to unlearn his/her inborn
tendency to treat that nudity as a lack of something the Other should have in order to belong to the community of those who are “inside.” To overcome the division between natives (inside) and
strangers (outside of that inside), means to break with the meaning privative reasoning bestows on these terms. Better still, it means to turn this reasoning against itself. For, to be a native – to be
“inside” – is in fact itself a shortcoming. It refers to the incapacity to have broken with what Totality and Infinity calls participation. In this condition, one is still part of a whole to which one finds oneself
subjected. One is spell-bound, under the spell of some Difference to which one finds oneself attached to the point of being pre-judged, for it is precisely this difference which will render one indifferent
to those who seem to lack these very same ties. It is only by breaking its spell – whether with the help of technology, as the above quote suggests, or through the appeal of the Other, as other texts
tell us24 – that one is able to accede to that “non-indifference” which Levinas sees as our deepest essence: responsibility. The above is as fair a comment as I could give on the passage that
concerns us here and in which, as I now hope to have shown, Levinas indeed speaks from his heart. Leaving the polemics with Heidegger aside,25 one can perhaps begin to see why Finkielkraut, in
complaining about the “Olympian indifference toward a peasant humanity,” may have raised an issue that does not fit at all well with the way Levinas would want to approach this issue. Indeed,
whereas for Levinas “peasantism” breeds “indifference” – both categories characterizing the “native” – Finkielkraut seems to see in “peasantism” something that characterizes both my humanity and
There is, as it were, something “peasant” about the human condition as such. Whether it be that
of beings who live in the town or in the countryside, the human condition would appear to owe its humanity to what Finkielkraut – with another (and to my mind:
that of the Other.
Without such inscription, a human being would be reduced to
anonymity, i.e., would be “nothing more than a collection of bodily functions, nothing else than the anonymous organic life that pulsates in him” (HP, p. 128).
better) metaphor – calls “an inscription in a world.”
One would be what Finkielkraut elsewhere calls a “victim” – “a human being severed from its surroundings and its roots, who no longer has a spot and a situation of
his own, whose essence and possibilities are taken away from him” (HP, p. 132). Our question then is this. Is the Levinasian Other such a victim? If so, is this due to
an implicit naturalization of his/her otherness? Let us not discuss this question straightaway, but try to clear up the apparent confusion of tongues that may make it
difficult to hear what exactly is being addressed by it.
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1. Turn: The problem-solution framework is another link into our criticism — the managerialism requires policymakers to supervise and dominate the problem to be solved.
William V. Spanos, Prof, of Comparative Lit, SUNY-Binghamton, AMERICA'S SHADOW, 2000.
To commanding as the essential ground of domination belongs “being on high” [or “above,”
Obensein] That is only possible through constant surmounting of others [Uberhohung], which are thus
the interiors [Unteren]. In this surmounting, in turn, there resides the constant ability to oversee
[supervise and dominate Ubersehen-konnen]. We say “to oversee something,” which means “to dominate it”
[beherrschen]. (P, 40) This oversight of an Absolute Subject, understood in Derrida’s terms as a “Transcendental
Signifier” or “center elsewhere” that is “beyond the reach of free play,” is not, as it is understood in ordinary discourse, a
matter of the failure of attention. It is the proper form of vision. Seeing, as it is understood in the
ontotheological tradition, is not passive reception of that which the eye perceives. It is an action,
a praxis. “To this commanding view, which includes surmounting belongs a constant being-onthe-lookout [Auf-der-Lauer-liegen]. That is the form of all action that oversees [dominates from the
gaze], but that holds to itself: in Roman, the actio of the actus.” And it is this reifying oversight, which,
in putting everything/time it sees in its “proper” place, is an action, that identifies it essentially
with the imperialist project.
2. Extend the link debate. You have to decide the substance of the criticism before you
evaluate fiat. Our challenge of calculative thought comes before the question of whether the
affirmative is a good idea.
3. Counter-Interpretation: The criticism is a gateway issue. The ontological question of the
critique comes before the question of whether the affirmative is a good idea.
Michael Dillon, Political Theory, Vol. 27, No. 2, April 1999, pg. 145-147.
I take the defining feature of contemporary continental thought to be the return of the ontological.
The return of the ontological has been developed in terms of a critical genealogy of political problematisations consequent upon a fundamental reappraisal of the
the modern understanding of narrative, order and justice,
value, identity, and continuity, together with an aspiration to a rigorously methodological access
to truth and totality, secured always from the perspective of the cogito (without asking about the
sum), were all disrupted by the ontological turn. It was precisely because the ontological turn did devastatingly target the sum that
basic categories of philosophical modernity. Specifically,
the putatively secure ground of the cogito was radically unsecured. Because you cannot say anything about anything, that is, without always already having made
For any thought,
including, therefore, that of Justice, always already carries some interpretation of what it means
to be, and of how one is as a being in being. To call these fundaments into question is to gain
profound critical purchase upon the thought that underpins the thought and practices of
distributive justice itself. We are at the level of those fundamental desires and fears which confine the imagination and breed the cruelties upon
which it relies in order to deflect whatever appears to threaten or disturb its various drives for metaphysical security.12 Politics and philosophy
have always been wedded since their first inception in the polis. The return of the ontological was therefore prompted by the twin
assumptions about the is as such, however, the return of the ontological has even wider ramifications than that of genealogy.
political and philosophical crises that assailed European civilisation at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Hence the crisis of
(inter)national politics (to which E. H. Carr, for example, responded) was as much a crisis of thought as the crisis of thought, as expressed in debates about
Empiricism, Scientism, Positivism, and Historicism at that time, was a crisis of politics. For what was at issue was a thinking way of life—complexly diverse and
radically plural in its composition—that had hit the buffers in terms of the elevated universal expectations of reason and justice which its thought and politics had
promised. Historicism’s failure to meet the challenges of Empiricism, Positivism, and Scientism nonetheless served to expose the crisis of political modernity itself:
bureaucratisation, rationalisation, global industrialisation, technologisation, the advent of mass society, world war and genocide.13 On the one hand, a return to
“basics” was prompted by the ways in which the slaughter of the Great War, the holocaust of the Second World War, and the subsequent advent of the terminal
dangers of the nuclear age undermined the confidence of a European civilisation gone global. This “failure of nerve” was enhanced by the impact of its racial and
the return of the ontological was
indebted philosophically, amongst other influences to Nietzsche’s overturning of the metaphysical deceits of onto-theology, and to
Heidegger’s early attempt to formulate a fundamental ontology. In neither instance am I claiming that the outcome of the
economic imperialism, together with the subsequent experience of postcolonialism. On the other hand,
ontological turn has resulted in some new orthodoxy or canon.14 Levinas, for example, through moves too complicated to retrace in this exercise, championed the
metaphysical over against the ‘ontological’. Quite the contrary. The
question of ontology has, instead, been split wide open,
and the formulations, desires, institutions, and practices of our established ways of being—
justice and Justice included—are shown to be suspended in that very opening.
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4. Our interpretation provides affirmative with predictable ground. If they can defend the
calculative thought inherent in the 1ac, they will have justified their fundamental assumptions.
5. Critiques key to negative flexibility. We need to be able to test both the 1ac and the
framework in which they put the 1ac.
6. Critiques needed to offset critical advantages. They can run critical advantages without
defending the plan. We need to be ready to debate in that framework.
7. Policymaking framework unrealistic. Congress does not have time limits or speech orders
to deal with when deliberating over the bill. Congress also conducts extensive fact finding and
lobbying. Their framework does not actually follow the policymaking in the real world.
8. No right to policy ground. All frameworks create and destroy ground. They eliminate critical
ground just as we eliminate policy ground.
9. Critique is a linear disad. Even if they win their framework you still vote for us because
managerial-ism is impossible. They’ll never obtain their advantages. You vote negative on
presumptions.
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The guilt of inaction allows the system to maintain itself – only the alt solves.
LaDelle McWhorter, Professor of Philosophy, Northeast Missouri State, also of the bumbles, HEIDEGGER
AND THE EARTH, ed. McWhorter, 1992.
one of the most
common ways that modern calculative selfhood will attempt to reinstate itself in the face of
Heidegger's paradoxical call to think the earth is by employing a strategy that has worked so well
so many times before: it will feel guilty. Those of us who are white know this strategy very well. Confronted with
our racism, we respond not by working to dismantle the structures that perpetuate racism but
rather by feeling guilty. Our energy goes into self-rebuke, and the problems pointed out to us
become so painful for us to contemplate that we keep our distance from them. Through guilt we
paralyze ourselves. Thus guilt is a marvelous strategy for maintaining the white racist self.l Those of us who are women have
Those configurations of forces will resist this thinking. Their resistance will occur in many forms. However,
sometimes watched this strategy employed by the caring, liberal-minded men in our lives. When we have exposed sexism, pressed our
criticisms and our claims, we have seen such men - the 'good' men, by far the most responsive men - deflate, apologize, and ask us to
forgive. But seldom have we seen honest attempts at change. Instead we have seen guilt deployed as a cry for mercy or pity on the status
quo; and when pity is not forthcoming we have seen guilt turn to rage, and we have heard men ask, "Why are you punishing us?" The primary
issue then becomes the need to attend to the feelings of those criticized rather than to their oppressive institutions and behaviors. Guilt
thus protects the guilty. Guilt is a facet of power; it is not a reordering of power or a signal of
oppression's end. Guilt is one of the modern managerial self's maneuvers of self-defense. Of course
guilt does not feel that way. It feels like something unchosen, something we undergo. It feels much more like self-abuse than self-defense.
But we are shaped, informed, produced in our very selves by the same forces of history that have created calculative, technological revealing.
Inevitably, whenever we are confronted with the unacceptability of what is foundational for our lives, those foundations exert force to protect
themselves. The exertion, which occurs as and in the midst of very real pain, is not a conscious choice; but that does not lessen - in fact it
strengthens - its power as a strategy of self-defense. Calculative, technological thinking struggles to defend and maintain itself through us and
as us. Some men feel guilty about sexism; many white people feel guilty about racism; most of us feel guilty about all sorts
of habits and idiosyncracies that we tell ourselves we firmly believe should be changed. For many of us guilt is a constant
constraint upon our lives, a seemingly permanent state. As a result, guilt is familiar, and, though somewhat uncomfortable at
times, it comes to feel almost safe. It is no surprise, then, that whenever caring people think hard about
how to live with/in/on the earth, we find ourselves growing anxious and, usually, feeling guilty
about the way we conduct ourselves in relation to the natural world. Guilt is a standard defense
against the call for change as it takes root within us. But, if we are to think with Heidegger, if we are to
heed his call to reflect, we must not respond to it simply by deploring our decadent life-styles
and indulging ourselves in a fit of remorse. Heidegger's call is not a moral condemnation, nor is
it a call to take up some politically correct position or some privileged ethical stance.
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Nietzsche’s criticism of Heidegger is not a reason to reject our argument—Heidegger’s
questioning remains an important approach.
Kevin Michael DeLuca, Associate Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia,
“Thinking with Heidegger: Rethinking Environmental Theory and Practice,” Ethics & the Environment, 2005
Project Muse.
As a prefatory word, even a cursory glance at Heidegger's work reveals him to be a thinker who
deeply ponders humanity-nature relations and how they are mediated by technology. This
recognition will serve as background for our engagement with Heidegger and will displace a preoccupation
with Heidegger as the thinker of the Truth of Being. No doubt he is that, but the question of Being is not what
is at stake in our engagement with Heidegger and environmental theory. I recognize the violence of this move to
Heidegger's thought, but want to also suggest that it is a salvaging. There is no denying the centrality of
the question of the Truth of Being for Heidegger. For instance, Part I of the "Introduction" to Being and Time is titled "The
Necessity, Structure, and Priority of the Question of Being." In Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, Heidegger
asserts, "the question of the truth of being—is and remains my question, and is my one and only question" (1999, 8). In
Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger puts it as a question, "the question" is "is 'being' a mere word and its meaning a
vapor or is it the spiritual destiny of the Western world?" (1959, 37). Heidegger's answer is the latter. His question is in
response to Nietzsche's conclusion that Being is a "vapor and a fallacy" (quoted in Heidegger 1959, 37 ). If Nietzsche is
right, is there any reason to read Heidegger? I think Nietzsche is right yet we should still read
Heidegger, as this essay hopes to demonstrate. To read Heidegger outside the question of the Truth of
Being is to read Heidegger outside of philosophy. It is to read Heidegger for social theory and
the political.
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1. No Impact. We do not advocate that you vote for Martin Heidegger. Our argument is that you
reject calculative thought in favor of meditative thought. Even if they win the full weight of this
argument, it is not a defense of calculative thought or an indict of meditative thought.
2. This is just an ad hom.
3. Turn – The holocaust is the worst example of calculative thought. The Nazi’s saw the Jews
as a “problem” that required a “final solution”. This is precisely what we are indicting.
4. Our alternative solves the impact; read Heidegger against Heidegger – Heidegger’s ontology
responds to his fascist tendencies.
Roland Bleiker, Associate Professor, University of Queensland, POPULAR DISSENT, HUMAN AGENCY,
AND GLOBAL POLITICS, 2000, p. 194.
A discussion of Being is, of course, impossible without an engagement with Martin Heidegger. Yet, Heidegger is
problematic. His writings are dense, by no means easy to digest. There are also the (in)famous fascist overtones
of his inaugural address as rector of the University of Freiburg m 1933, the subsequent one year of open
cooperation with the Nazi regime, and his unwillingness to discuss the issue even long after the
fall of the Third Reich. Yet, few would dispute the status of Heidegger’s philosophical writings as one of the most
insightful and influential contributions of this century. Commentators as diverse as Fred Dallmayr, John Caputo or Leslie
Thiele vehemently criticise Heidegger's political position while drawing heavily on his theoretical
writings to advance such projects as a critical ontology of a conception of justice and obligation.
The main premise of these and many other like-minded approaches is that one can separate the
useful, non-ideological aspects of Heidegger's thought from his fascist comments that one can
discover a politics in Heidegger that is at odds with the one he personally championed. -"that
one can read Heidegger against Heidegger' without engaging the details of this debate, one can employ
Heidegger’s ontology to derive various useful insights info the role that transversal dissent plays
in contemporary global politics. A certain of abstract theorising is, however, necessary to recognize this
usefulness.
5. Heidegger’s confrontation with modernity is only revolutionary insofar as he fully embraced
Nazism—only way to disavow humanism.
Slavoj Zizek, Noted Film Critic, “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933,” INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL
OF ZIZEK STUDIES, 2007, http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/64/129.
However, when
defenders of Heidegger claim that the acquaintance with the Nazi power exercise
precisely enabled him to gain insight into the nihilism of modern technology as the deployment
of the unconditional will-to-power, does this line of defense not sound a little bit like the attitude
of the proverbial prostitute-turned-preacher who, after her conversion, is ferociously attacking carnal sins, claiming that she knows
from her own experience how destructive they are? So when Steve Fuller writes: Ironically, Heidegger’s intellectual stature may even have been helped by the
timehonored practice of ‘learning from the opponent’ in which victors indulge after a war. In this respect, Heidegger’s political ‘genius’ may lie in having stuck with the
Nazis long enough for the Americans to discover him during de-Nazification without ending up being judged an untouchable war criminal whose works had to be
banned. As committed anti-Nazis ensconced in Allied countries, Heidegger’s existentialist rivals never underwent such intense scrutiny nor subsequently acquired
such a mystique for depth and danger. - there is truth in these lines, but a more complex one that a mere luck in Heidegger’s striking the right balance in the depth of
difficult truth to admit is that Heidegger is “great” not in spite of, but because of
his Nazi engagement, that this engagement is a key constituent of his “greatness.” Imagine a
Heidegger without this engagement, or a Heidegger who, after the World War II, were to do what many
colleagues expected of him: publicly renounce his Nazi engagement and apologize for it – would this not
somehow impede on the radicality his insight? Would it not constrain him to humanitarian
political concerns which he so bitterly despised? Michel de Beistegui makes a perspicuous
observation on the fundamental ambiguity of Heidegger’s disillusionment with Nazism: it was his
“resignation and his disillusionment with what, until the end of his life, and with a touch of regret
at not having seen it develop its potential, he referred to as ‘the movement’.” Is, however, this not the reason
his Nazi engagement: the
why Heidegger’s later withdrawal from political engagement also cannot be conceived only in the terms of his insight into the nihilism of contemporary politics? De
Beistegui concludes his book with the statement that Heidegger will not be caught at /a belief in the redemptive power of political engagement/ twice: having burned
his fingers in politics, and lost his illusions in the failure of Nazism to carry out a project of onto-destinal significance, his hopes will turn to the hidden resources of
thought, art and poetry, all deemed to carry a historical and destinal power far greater than that of politics.
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Attempting to transform Heidegger’s philosophy into action only makes us forget his intention
of escaping willfulness that coincides with the technological attitude. Only releasement
through thought will allow us to exist with an openness to Being.
Catherine Frances Botha, Professor of Philosophy, University of Pretoria, "Heidegger, technology, and
ecology," South African Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 22, Iss. 2, 20 03, p. 169-170.
<By giving ontological priority to human being, Heidegger does not suggest that the natural
world exists solely for our benefit. Disclosive freedom only appears in the absence of the
possessive mastery. Human being is the "highest" being only to the extent that she is released
from an arrogant subjectivism. Herbert Marcuse (1966) aims to show how human beings can bring about changes
themselves through praxis, which will enable the overcoming of technology. In the end, however, he admits that he can find no
effective action that can lead humankind out of its predicament. For Heidegger, only releasement
will allow the human being to dwell within the world, not as its master, but as the being which
exists in a relation of openness to Being. The strength of the Heideggerian interpretation of technology, according to
Janicaud (1995:26), consists in " ... showing its unity, in tracing its metaphysical genealogy, in tearing through the horizon and reaching its
immense powers - which have partly come to pass". Janicaud points out that the weakness of Heidegger's interpretation consists in
presupposing that entering this essence will prepare a decisive reversal in an almost Hegelian fashion - as though, after realizing that its
greatness has been penetrated, technology allowed itself to be tamed, or as though this awareness were dependent on an ontological
structure. Janicaud claims that if nothing beckons us but an awaiting possible, perhaps we must admit that the possible is manifested in a
plurality of unassuming ways, and that no saving power will ever completely emerge from the danger. I do not believe that Heidegger's
intention was to assert that the history of Being occurs in a determined, Hegelian fashion. With Kolb (1986: 149), I assert that the process of
metaphysical deformation that Heidegger decries in the history of philosophy has not, in any of its aspects, progressed by means of a
dialectical compulsion. It is understandable that many eco-philosophers and environmentalists have enthusiastically received Heidegger's
critiques of technology. Yet, few of them appreciate the place that technology has in Heidegger's historical scheme as the final "abandonment
of Being", and even if his critique appeals to few of the concepts "sustainable development", "intrinsic values in nature", and so on that today's
environmentalists, "shallow" or "deep", typically employ when complaining of modern technology. (Cooper, 1996:6X) Thus, although
Heidegger's work on technology is valuable to us, it cannot be simply translated into a theory of
action to support the strategies of environmentalists and ecologists. However, Heidegger's
unwillingness to exchange anthropocentrism for biocentrisrn does not weaken his contribution
towards an ecological politics. The fostering of human freedom, understood as a disclosive
letting-be rather than a sovereign control, is precisely that which will best safeguard the earth's
ecological diversity, as well as mark the preservation of the uniqueness of the human being.
Attempts to force Heidegger's ideas into a framework of action forget his intention of escaping
the willfulness inherent to the technological attitude. He tells us explicitly that "Human activity
can never directly counter this danger. Human achievement alone can never banish it. But human
reflection can ponder the fact that all saving power must be of a higher essence than what is endangered, though at the same time kindred to
it" (Heidegger 1993:399). The question asked at the beginning of this article is therefore inappropriate in the context of Heidegger's views on
technology. Heidegger wants us to respond to the question "what shall we think?" rather than "what
shall we do'!" Thought must first save us from our typical modes of behaving, namely those
oriented towards possessive mastery, before we can move to action. Heidegger tells us that
"[Thinking does not become action only because some effect issues from it or because it is
applied. Thinking acts insofar it thinks. Such action is presumably the simplist and at the same time the highest, because it
concerns the relation of Being to man" (Heidegger, 1993: 217). In this sense, the question of what we should do in the
face of the technological crisis we are experiencing today can only be meaningful in terms of
what we should think. Trying to force Heidegger’s work into a “ecological” framework of action
might convert into the very willing which is it is trying to escape. In our time, the world will still remain largely
technological, but we can launch an incisive critique of technology that exposes the hegemony of its present reign. From this the saving
power could grow. Admittedly, Heidegger does not give us much in terms of a political programme for change in terms of action, but in view of
his definition of technology, this is warranted. >
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Turn – Calculative thinking is the true nihilism – it calculates for the sake of calculation,
divorced entirely from values.
Michael Dillon, Professor of International Relations – University of Lancaster, Politics of Security: Towards A
Political Philosophy of Continental Thought, 1996, p. 21.
The essence of metaphysics, then, is nihilistic, as the best of the realists fear that it is, precisely because it does not matter
what you secure so long as security itself is secured. That is to say, so long as things are made certain,
mastered and thereby controllable. Securing security does not simply create values. In essence indifferent to any
particular value, and committed as it must ultimately be merely to rendering things calculable so that the
political arithmetic of securing security can operate, it must relentlessly also destroy values when
they conflict with the fundamental mathesis required of the imperative to secure. Its raison d’etre in
other words, masquerading as the preservation of values, is ultimately not valuation at all but calculation. For without
calculation how could security be secured? And calculation requires calculability. Whatever is must thereby be
rendered calculable -whatever other value might once have been placed upon it -if we are to be as certain
of it as metaphysics insists that we have to be if we are to secure the world.
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It doesn’t matter what technology we are talking about, the nature of technology has not
changed—technological thinking remains a method of revealing, rather than receiving the
world.
Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, “MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS,” 2000,
http://www2.hmc.edu/~tbeckman/personal/HEIDART.HTML.
As mentioned earlier, Heidegger believed that there was a basic correctness both in our view of
technology as an instrument, the view we have just interpreted, and in our use of the name "technology"
itself. The word 'technology' is derived from the Greek word 'techne' and the analysis of this word leads us to essentially
the same place. For the Greeks, 'techne' belonged to the general notion of bringing-forth, 'poiesis.' Techne and episteme
are linked together, the latter related to that which comes-forth out of its own nature alone and the former related to that
which comes-forth only by our intervention with that nature. As forms of poiesis, both techne and episteme are modes of
revealing; but, in contrast to episteme, "techne ... reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here
before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another... Thus what is decisive in techne does
not lie at all in making or manipulating nor in the using of means, but rather in the aforementioned
revealing. It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth." {[7], p. 13} Both paths of
interpretation lead to the same thing. "Technology [in its essence] is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence
[West] in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens." {[7], p. 13} (4) What
Heidegger wanted us to recognize by bringing technology to the concept of revealing is that
technology's essence is to be found in the most basic realm of experience. That realm is the
realm of "truths happening." It could be argued, of course, that all of this analysis takes ancient Greece as
its focal point and that modern technology has little or nothing to do with ancient Greece. This is true,
of course, in the sense that technology has obviously developed far beyond its origins in
Greece; however, it is also misguided if it tries to convince us that technology's essence has
been fundamentally changed. Heidegger's point is precisely the assertion that the basic essence
of technology has remained unchanged and that this essence is most readily observed in the Greek origins of
our thinking about these things. The problem remaining, then, is to understand how modern technology
has evolved within this essential nature as a mode of revealing.
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1. No contradiction. We do not argue calculative thought bad, calculative thought good. There
are consequences to action, but we do not attempt to use human labor for a specific end, we
do not advocate the use of regulation to control the actions of others, and we do not operate in
a problem/solution framework. We do no propose a solution, only indict their methodology.
2. The contradiction proves the link. To the extent that there is a contradiction, it just shows
what calculative thinking is, and demonstrates the need for meditation.
3. The criticism is a gateway issue. Like in a thesis defense, once the candidate gets by the
criticism we move on to the next issue. If they fail, you vote against them and they go back to
the drawing board.
4. The alternative solves the impact. Meditative thought will solve the dominating and
objectifying impacts for the calculative thought. That is the Scheibler 2000 evidence.
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1. The Perm is severance. The alt is to reject calculative thought of the 1AC. The aff severs
both mode of thinking as well as its plan and solvency mechanism, which present the
calculative thought as the solution to the harms they isolate. Severance perms are a voter
A. They do not test the desirability of the kritik, but the desirability of the severed planks of the
plan, which confirms the claim that the kritik is superior.
B. They make the affirmative a moving target, eliminating neg offense and absolutely skewing
strategy – they could sever out of any offensive argument.
2. Plan and alternative cannot co-exist. Meditative thought is the alternative to
calculative thought. That’s the Scheibler 2000 evidence.
3. The perm doesn’t solve: the dominance of technology will co-opt attempts to stand outside
the technological framework.
Bruce V. Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature, 1995,
p. 166.
But what, after all, does Heidegger's understanding of "saving the earth" have to do with backyard gardens and compost
heaps, with recycling aluminum toil and cans, with the saving of wilderness areas? A great deal. I believe. It is precisely
the uncanny dominance of technology that enables it to co-opt and incorporate any attempts to
stand outside the technological framework that are not derived from, and solidly rooted in, a
thinking that approaches the earth poetically. Wilderness areas can be set aside as inventories for special sorts
of recreation, which in turn allow for a more efficient output of job energies. Recycling can be undertaken from the point of
view of consumption (and its opposite, waste) and hence incorporated into the stockpiling of inventories. And composting
can be understood as merely a more clever and more efficient gardening technology, yielding a more constant availability of
nutrients. Such efforts would serve onlv to enhance the reign of technology by increasing its range
while obscuring its pervasiveness. Yet composting can also be a saving of the earth's own nourishment, which
grants to it its darkness, heaviness, pungency, and pace. Recycling can be a reminder that even the aluminum can bears
the pliant yet sustaining character of the earth itself-and hence can be a saving of that character along with the metal. And
wilderness areas may be genuinely saved as those places of the earth where the mystery of self-seclusion consorts in
splendor with the wonder of self-emergence. Everything depends on whether the saving arises from
dwelling, and thus whether it is founded on the poetic.
4. The permutation is impossible –the aff begins from an ego-centric view cosmos as a
territory to be conquered. This crowds out other ways of thinking about the universe.
Karyn Ball, Professor of Critical theory and literary theory @ University of Alberta, “Paranoia in the Age of the
World Picture: The Global “Limits of Enlightenment”, CULTURAL CRITIQUE 61, 2005, pgs. 117-18.
The shadow that, for Heidegger, represents a perilous unthought has obvious implications for a
world in which the technologies that brought Neptune to us in 1989 have also extended the
chilling afterlife of Ronald Reagan's ludicrously xenophobic characterization of the former Soviet
Union as the "Evil Empire." Among the many pressing tasks of critics today is therefore to divine the destiny of
Reagan's paranoid "regression" in the 1980s from current affairs and the shape of things to come. Reagan's shadow falls on
a "concealed land" in economically overdetermined military ends and in the rhetoric of the "War on Terrorism" and
Republican mobilizations of the world-as-picture toward increased surveillance of its citizens and immigrants. If those
who publicly criticize current U.S. government policies are not paranoid yet, perhaps they should
be, for the technological advances that allowed physicists to "capture" Neptune in photographic
light can capture critics by hook, crook, or satellite, or, [End Page 125] at the very least, eclipse their
dissent by relegating it to the invisible space behind and beyond the photographic frame. In short,
critics find themselves in a situation that attests to the abiding relevance of the Frankfurt School's attention to the internal
impact of rationalization, which spawns aggressive paranoia as a focal point for continuing anxiety and critical vigilance.
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5. Our attempts to use technology or manage our relation to it are useless—we have no ability
to grasp its meaning or function unless we let it reveal itself.
Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, “MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS,” 2000,
http://www2.hmc.edu/~tbeckman/personal/HEIDART.HTML.
The major difficulty with the present discussion of technology is the fact that we focus attention
on what we call technology in its everyday sense and we ignore technology in its essence. In
this situation, it matters little whether we embrace technology or condemn it, for we are all
equally enslaved by our misunderstanding of what technology actually is. According to Heidegger,
"technology [in its everyday sense] is not equivalent to the essence of technology." {[7], p. 4} To be free of
misunderstandings, to relate to technology intelligently, we must find its central meaning and
that can be done only by discovering its essence. In our present point of view, we see
technology as a complex of contrivances and technical skills, put forth by human activity and
developed as means to our ends. Technology, in this view, is an object, or a complex of objects and techniques,
that seems passive itself; indeed, we conceive of it as activated by us only. According to Heidegger, however, we
are fundamentally mistaken in this; "we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when
we regard it as something neutral." {[7], p. 4} On the contrary, the essence of technology reveals it
as something far from neutral or merely an instrument of human control; it is an autonomous
organizing activity within which humans themselves are organized. Viewing technology as a means to an
end, "everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner...We will, as we say, 'get' technology
'spiritually in hand.'...But suppose now that technology were no mere means, how would it stand with the will to master it?"
{[7], p. 5} How, indeed, can we cope with it if it encompasses us in its organizational activity ? In summary, the
problem with our critique of technology lies at two levels. First, while we argue and take sides on
the issue of technology, none of us is really free to deal with it constructively because none of
us really understands it in its essence, i.e., in its entirety and in its central sense. Second, our limited
understanding of technology is so misguided that little of value can be salvaged from it. This is
because all discussions are prefaced on the view that technology is an object which we
manipulate as a means to our own ends. In fact, the essence of technology reveals it as a vast system of
organization which encompasses us rather than standing objectively and passively ready for our direction and control. If
our discussion of technology is so far off its mark, then, how can we anticipate discovering its
essence? Heidegger's method is to assume that the instrumental view of technology has a basic
correctness even though it is not true. That basic correctness explains why we have dealt successfully with it at a
practical level as long as we have. For Heidegger, this basic correctness offers a pathway for investigative
thinking by pursuing the concept of "instrument" and the roots of the word 'technology.' These
are the only correct clues that we have.
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Their poetry bad cards do no apply – poetic thinking is not poetry itself.
Igor Stramignoni, Prof. London School of Economic and Political Science – Department of Law, San Diego
International Law Journal, 2003, LN.
But that is not all. Indeed, not only Heidegger's poetic thinking is no mere philosophical thinking but
there is no mere poetry (no mere representational thinking) either - in so far that poetic,
meditating thinking (unlike poetry itself) is in fact image-less (bildlos). The point of poetic thinking, for
example, would be neither to construct metaphors nor to lay out descriptions - considering that, in the end, metaphors and
descriptions must be representations and, so, thinking which is merely (re)presented in a different way. One may well, of
course, encounter suggestive images on the way - one, for example, may well encounter suggestive images in Intimations
which could be considered "poetic" in the usual sense of that word - but that is not what poetic thinking as meditating
thinking is primarily about. The Candlestick, it would seem, is not about a particular, imagined, Heideggerian "silent world"
(and, to the extent that it is, it does not greatly matter) - while, at the same time, it does, no doubt, set a world of silence on
its way. In that sense, Heidegger's poetic thinking (whether in Intimations or elsewhere) is image-less, for no image or group
of images can adequately encompass it. So, it is not, like some would mistakenly have it, image-less in the rather different
sense of there not being images in it, which can and must evoke it. Quite the opposite, such thinking is indeed
characterized, if at all, by an excess of images rather than a lack thereof.
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We need to mediate on questions of the relationship of individuals to space presented in the
1ac before examining the policy therein.
Igor Stramignoni, Prof. London School of Economic and Political Science – Department of Law, San Diego
International Law Journal, 2003, LN.
3. Contract, Murder, Citizenship and War. Surely, to ask what is thinking - what is each time at
stake in thinking - asks us to begin with thinking thought afresh. That is, it asks us to begin with
what Martin Heidegger called "meditating thinking," a thinking that meditates thought - as opposed to
"calculating thinking," a thinking that measures, calculates thought. n41 But what in particular might
lawyers need to think afresh? One obvious answer is that lawyers might need to think afresh the many theories
and practices they put in [*156] place - those, for example, that tell us what counts as contract, murder,
citizenship or war. In other words, lawyers might need to interrogate what I would like here to call the characteristic
"space" that each time such theories and practices institute and rule. Indeed on inspection it is precisely the status of such
space - the status of the space that is each time traced out by what legal theory or practice is each time in place - that is in
my view so dramatically at stake today in so many current debates over the future of Western democracy and the rule of
law. n42 Initially, however, to interrogate legal space as a way of thinking thought afresh must mean,
I suggest, to question the origins of legal space rather than to examine the form or contents of a
particular theory or practice - thereby positing those origins as given. n43 As we will see, to posit the
origins of legal space as given would be to imply the universality and neutrality of legal space and so to deny, in particular,
what I would describe as the evidence of its politics. n44 By contrast, I [*157] suggest that the question
initially must be: what is each time at the beginning of legal space? How may a certain legal
theory or practice have originated? Did it really stem from, as the prevailing legal-philosophical
tradition of the West would normally hold, one or another of the innumerable, usually written
texts of yet another legal theory or practice? Or is it perhaps the institutional context of any such
theory or practice that - in a socio-legal tradition closer to our own - we should be looking at,
instead? What is that which is at the beginning of legal space - text, institutional context or - and this would be a third
possibility - some other sort of "space"? Is my contractual space, for example, truly that which my written or oral contract
says it is or even that which, say, my specific economic position allows or induces me to negotiate? Or is it perhaps the
case that, by contrast, such space is in fact some other sort of space - neither textual nor properly institutional-contextual?
Is it my being a murderer really, principally linked to my evil deeds, or even to the institutional context that calls me a
murderer? Perhaps not, as shown for example by Raskol'nikov's odd fortunes in Crime and Punishment. n45 Am I a
citizen of this country only so long as my papers say so, or so long as I live and work here, or
can it be the case that I am a citizen because of something else that, quite literally, makes me a
citizen? And is war simply what international treatises say that it is, n46 or even that which a
particular institutional context, for example, a supposed "clash of civilizations" n47 may or may
not be said to trigger - or is it perhaps something else that makes the war? And, finally, if contract,
murder, citizenship or war are not only what they appear to be, but something else - what then is every time at stake in legal
space? These are by and large the sort of questions that interest me here - the questions that I here begin to ask as a way
into what I propose to call the heartland of legal space, as well as a contribution towards the debate over the future of
Western democracy and the rule of law. In particular, to interrogate legal space - to walk back toward what must be the ever
mobile heartland of legal space - is, I suggest, to ask how is each time [*158] the legal space that is each time at stake. Or,
to put it somewhat differently, to start on the way back towards the heartland of legal space is to think about the originality of
that space - so that it is really on that originality and the inauguration thereof (rather than the "origins" as one might think at
first) that I wish to offer here some preliminary considerations.
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There is no impact to the claim that the alternative is utopian – technological thinking is a
dystopia that must be rejected.
Louis E. Wolcher, Professor of Law, University of Washington School of Law, Washington Law Review,
February 2004, LN.
Let us end where we began, and ask once again: What is the end of technology? What this question asks in its deepest
signification is nothing technological. Although technology in the largest sense of the word consists of human beings
uncovering beings and making them accessible, technology as such is not ultimately for the sake of any particular project or
outcome. Technology thus conceived exists ultimately for the sake of human freedom, which can only express itself in and
by means of technology. Genuine freedom is freedom for responsibility: the kind that knows that it is freedom itself that
constructs the very obstacles to freedom that continue to confound a suffering humanity. Freedom from necessity is not a
logical condition of the possibility of freedom for responsibility, but it is nonetheless an empirical condition of the latter's
spreading and flourishing. The harried and overworked, the hungry, the sick, and the downtrodden: their gnawing need to
survive a struggle for existence that modern technological progress could make unnecessary relentlessly devours their
chances to live in freedom. Thus, not only does freedom begin only when "the I-will and the I-can coincide," n214 as Arendt
puts it, but it is also the case that those who are already free for responsibility wear other people's avoidable lack of freedom
as a shameful stain on their sense of responsibility. Marx once uttered the profound truth that "we have to emancipate
ourselves before we can emancipate others." n215 If this essay has achieved its goal, then its most important
argument will have landed on fertile soil: The grip that technological thinking exercises on our
imagination must be broken, and technology must return to the status of a means to the ultimate end of universal
human emancipation. All progressive thought about the consummation and the ultimate end of technology requires, first and
foremost, what Marcuse calls a "consciousness of the blatant contradiction between the scientific-technological possibilities
and their destructive and repressive realization." n216 This consciousness means the ability to think the
category of individualism beyond the [*387] making of market choices that implement a life of
unnecessary toil and servitude. It means defining individuality in terms of being able to speak one's own language,
to have one's own emotions, and to follow one's own heart. And it requires the conviction that true individualism can only
begin beyond the realm of necessity: a truth that well-paid tenured legal academics ought to know from personal
experience. To those who would disparage and scorn this vision of human emancipation as
unrealistic and naively utopian, we say: So what? We have seen the world that technological
thinking has made, and the irrationality of its rationalism shows itself to the faculty of judgment
in a way that is every bit as dysutopic in fact as our idea of universal human emancipation is
mythological and "unrealistic."
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Without a theoretical foundation for decisions, Rorty’s calculus is impossible. Further, Rorty’s
understanding of politics and theory is flawed – only his interpretation allows the holocaust
Michael E. Zimmerman, Professor of Philosophy, Tulane University, Heidegger’s Confrontation with
Modernity, 1990.
Richard Rorty, for example, another pragmatist influenced by Heidegger's deconstructive method, suggests that
deconstruction has and ought to have no real political effect. It is one thing, he suggests, to speak as
intellectuals about deconstructing Western metaphysics; it is quite another to take that deconstruction into the political
domain. In other words, while we may abandon our search for the chimera of "absolute foundations" or "final truths" in
epistemology, science, and political theory, we should not confuse such abandonment with relinquishing our social solidarity
as expressed in the liberal humanism which defines the Western world. 34 Hence, while Rorty likes Heidegger's method,
he accuses Heidegger's critique of modernity and industrial technology of being in some respects naive. There is
really no alternative, so Rorty insists, to increasing our commitment to the industrial technology which has
come out of the Enlightenment —unless we are willing to see millions of people starve to death around the
world.35 In a world bereft of foundations for making monumental decisions, however, we may well
ask: On what basis are we to say that it is better to feed starving millions, for example, than to worry
about the fate of the entire human species in the face of a population explosion which threatens the stability of the
biosphere? Moreover, are there not empirical questions to be asked regarding the relationship between those starving
millions, on the one hand, and the influence of colonial-imperial economic practices—including those sponsored by the rich
industrial democracies praised by Rorty—which helped to create the conditions for "overpopulation"? Rorty justifies his
attempt to separate the activity of deconstructing the Western fascination with "objectivity" and "foundations"
from the commitment to democratic-liberal social solidarity by saying that theory has not played a
significant role in the praxis involved in establishing and furthering American democratic principles.36
Unfortunately, however, we may not so readily separate cultural criticism from its possible political consequences.
Political theory, including the Enlightenment universalism of America's "founding fathers,"
played an important role in the history of American democracy. Rorty tends to downplay this particular case of a
beneficial consequence of political-cultural theory, however, in order to highlight the dangers involved in attempting to force
social reality to live up to the "objective" demands of a particular theory, whether it be as sophisticated as Marxism or as
primitive as National Socialism. Rorty, then, believes that his resistance to foundational theoretical
schemes is the best way of defending against totalizing schemes which purport to be grounded in an
objective, universal understanding of human nature and the purpose of historical existence. Unfortunately, National
Socialism swept into power in part because of its attack upon the Enlightenment principles of universalism, rationality, and
objectivity. Deconstructing the theoretical foundations of Weimar parliamentarianism helped to create a power vacuum that
was quickly filled by Hitler's violent reaction against everything decadent and "Western.''
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1. Technology is distinct from technological thinking. Even if they win that a specific
innovation is good, it is not relevant to our link.
Linda Ross Meyer, Professor of Law – Quinnipiac Law School, “Is Practical Reason Mindless?”,
GEORGETOWN LAW JOURNAL, January 1998, LN.
Both Nietzsche and Heidegger foresaw the emergence of this mode of thinking/being that Heidegger
calls technology, though the term is easily misunderstood. We usually think of technology as a set of tools
or machines that enable us to reach our goals more efficiently and completely. But the mindset
that thinks in terms of means and ends, causes and effects, is not itself a mere tool. Its way of
looking at nature, the world, and even human talent as raw material for achieving human goals is
itself what opens the possibility of building and using machines. As Heidegger says, "our age is
not a technological age because it is the age of the machine; it is an age of the machine because
it is the technological age." n111 Technology, he says, is the way of being in the world in which everything appears
as a stockpile of fungible stuff to be ordered and used, managed and regulated, as we will. All matter (the effect of a cause)
is transformable to energy (the cause of an effect). n112 All is either cause or effect; our physics and metaphysics are
inhabited only by fungible energy/matter shifting and moving. Our role in this monochromatic universe is to
predict, and ultimately harness, the patterns of cause and effect. We ask not, "what is it?" but
only "what is it for?" or "what can we do with it?" n113
2. This is another link. It proves that they are wedded to technology without meditating on its
essence.
3. Turn - Technological thinking co-opts the benefits of technology.
Louis E. Wolcher, Professor of Law, University of Washington School of Law, Washington Law Review,
February 2004, LN.
Like all things human, the essence of modern technology makes a world - an odious world,
perhaps, but a world nonetheless. In a world in thrall to technological thinking, freedom's mode
of abiding consists for the most part in its withdrawal and quiescence. A manifestation of human
being-in-theworld, technological thinking stands in the sharpest possible contrast to what we
will now call freedom for responsibility. The latter is also a manifestation of human being-in-the-world, but unlike technological thinking it
maintains a certain critical distance between itself and its world. In it, freedom awakes. Technological thinking falls into its world wholeheartedly, becoming its world to
such a degree that it is incapable of imagining any other possibility of existence. In a manner that will become clear later, however, freedom for responsibility always
remains on the hither side of its world in the form of freedom's possibilities and freedom's responsibility. Modern
technology, in the sense of
technics, has been "captured" by technological thinking to such a degree that the latter has
driven the ultimate end of technology as such into darkness and obscurity. It is high time for
freedom to rediscover that end - namely, itself - and in so doing to transform modern
technology's essence, its mode of being.
4. Calculative thinking leads us to the zero point of holocaust – regardless if their tools are
sweet, their ontology is what damns us.
Michael Dillon, Professor of Politics at the University of Lancaster. "Another Justice," POLITICAL THEORY, v.
27 n. 2, 1999, p. 164-165.
Quite the reverse. (Me subject was never a firm foundation for justice, much less a hospitable vehicle for the reception of the call of another Justice. It was never in
possession of that self-possession which was supposed to secure the certainty of itself, of a self-possession that would enable it ultimately to adjudicate everything.
The very indexicality required of sovereign subjectivity gave rise rather to a commensurability much more amenable to the expendability required of the political and
The value of the subject
became the standard unit of currency for the political arithmetic of States and the political economies of
capitalism." They trade in it still to devastating global effect. The technologisation of the political has become manifest and global.
Economies of evaluation necessarily require calculability." Thus no valuation without mensuration and no mensuration without
indexation. Once rendered calculable, however, units of account are necessarily submissible not only to valuation but also,
of course, to devaluation. Devaluation, logically, can extend to the point of counting as nothing. Hence, no
mensuration without demensuration either. There is nothing abstract about this: the declension of economies of value leads to the
zero point of holocaust. However liberating and emancipating systems of value-rights-may claim to be, for example, they run the risk of counting out
material economies of mass societies than it did to the singular, invaluable, and uncanny uniqueness of the self.
the invaluable. Counted out, the invaluable may then lose its purchase on life. Herewith, then, the necessity of championing the invaluable itself. For we must never
forget that, "we are dealing always with whatever exceeds measure."" But how does that necessity present itself? Another Justice answers: as the surplus of the duty
to answer to the claim of Justice over rights. That duty, as with the advent of .another Justice, is integral to the lack constitutive of the human way of being.
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5. Attempts to control our destiny through technological thinking risk ontological blindness
which leads to war and environmental destruction.
Michael Zimmerman, Professor of Philosophy, Tulane University, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity:
Technology, Politics, Art, 1990, p. 95.
Influenced by Nietzsche. Heidegger began interpreting the decline of the West as a kind of tragedy,
resulting from the tact that "man had fallen out of being without knowing it " [GA, 40* 40/30] He
believed that ontological blindness led to hubris in the form of arrogant optimism about humanity's
prospects for gaining total control of its own destiny. After the great age of the Greeks, "the light of [the
human] clearing was dimmed by the blazing fire of arrogance [Vermessenheit], which only calculated
the measure from the entity " [GA, 55 327] Humanity's "insurrection" against being invited nemesis, in the form of the
technological nihilism While capable of making everything present and disposable as standing-reserve,
technological humanity had become completely blind to the presencing (being) thai enables
entities to be disclosed as entities. Events such as world wars, destruction of traditional values,
global uniformity, and industrial pollution clouded the smug optimism of those whom Nietzsche called 'last
men."
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We should not rely on overly simplistic solutions or imagine that we can fully explain the
alternative—we must derive possibilities of overcoming the technological through the
technological.
Charles J. Sabatino, Daemen College, “A Heideggerian Reflection on the Prospects of Technology,” Janus
Head, 2007, http://www.janushead.org/10-1/sabatino.pdf.
It is not easy to imagine what could be different should we heed such reflections. Everything
seems so locked into the world as it is. And yet, perhaps Heidegger is correct when he says that
precisely there, where such dangers lurk, hope can arise. It would be not just overly simplistic, but also
mistaken, simply to identify this hope with nostalgia for some former or pristine manner of living
closer to nature. Such is not likely to be; and likely never was what nostalgia imagines, at least for most upon the earth.
Instead, the possibilities for hope must arise precisely from within the technological society,
even as it becomes global in scope, from those willing to question what is becoming of our world and what is
becoming of ourselves.
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Existence doesn’t ensure value – we must accept our meaningless to find value.
Leslie Paul Thiele, Ph.D. from Princeton, professor of political science at the University of Florida, TIMELY
MEDITATIONS: MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND POSTMODERN POLITICS, 1995, p. 45-47.
With the exchange of subjectivity tor worldliness the problem of empathy is en route to being solved. But doubts persist. How does one really know that the disclosed
world actually, exists, that anything, is what it seems to be and is not merely the product of one's imagination? In Other words, how
does one
overcome recurring Cartesian doubts about the reality of the world? Heideggers answer is that
one does not try. An unassailable demonstration of the world's existence is impossible. "A sceptic can
no more be refuted," Heidegger straightforwardly admits, "than the Being of truth can he 'proved'". But refutation is unnecessary and unwarranted. Indeed, it is
illegitimate, for implicit in any attempt to prove the existence of the world is the unfounded premise of an isolated subject engaged in the effort of proving. The
skeptic's problem of worldly reality is correctively dissolved by Heidegger's refusal to entertain this premise. Heidegger refuses to posit the primacy of an isolated "I"
or "ego" that subsequently comes to doubt the reality of its world, for any such doubting exposes its precondition, namely, an already-in-the-world doubter. Heidegger
writes: "To wish to prove that the world exists is a misunderstanding of the very questioning. For such a questioning makes sense only on the basis of a being whose
constitution is Being-in-the-world. World in its most proper sense is just that which is already' on hand for any questioning". Faced with the impossibility and
illegitimacy of proof of an external reality, we are not to assume that the
only available alternative is a leap of faith. Any leap
of faith would necessarily be grounded in the supposed preexistence of a leaper. Again, the
(potentially faithful) subject is already illegitimately posited in distinction to its world. "With such
presuppositions," Heidegger explains, Dasein always comes 'too late'; for in so far as it does this
presupposing as an entity (and otherwise this would be impossible), it is, as an entity, already in
a world. 'Earlier' than any presupposition which Dasein makes, or any of its ways of behaving, is
the a priority character of its state of Being". The metaphysical tradition, as Heidegger
summarizes the problem, must always first "bury the 'external world' in nullity 'epistemologically'
before going on to prove it". Heidegger wants to he done with this metaphysical sleight of hand. The metaphysical trick works only because it has
been carefully prepared. First, Being is reduced to beings. Subsequently, beings are reduced to things defined only by their extantness, their
"presence-at-hand" (Vorhandenheit). With Being fully encompassed by presence-at-hand, and this presence verifiable only by the perceiving subject, reality appears
to the individual as a subjective experience, as being "merely inner'". Having first created the conditions for this subjectivist doubt, metaphysics then presents us with
the impossible task of welding together subjective experience with objective reality. Rather than take on this task, Heidegger begins with a relation of Being-in-theworld. He rejects the metaphysical supposition, first articulated by Plato, that "man is, in the first instance, a spiritual Thing which subsequently gets misplaced 'into' a
space". It
is a grave mistake to separate epistemologically' the perceiving and knowing subject from
its concrete worldliness and it is a vain effort to try to bridge this chasm once it is formed. Hence
Heidegger insists that we do not have bodies. Rather, "we 'are' bodily". Likewise, we do not have
a world" Rather, we "are" worldly. Our concrete, spatial existence is not separate from our perceiving, mental existence. A structural unity
exists. Knowledge, therefore, is not something gleaned by mind from a separate, external reality, but something absorbed in the midst of worldly existence. In
Heidegger's words, "the Dasein is not also extant among things with the difference merely that it apprehends them. Instead, the Dasein exists in the manner of Beingin-the-world, and this basic determination of its existence is the presupposition for being able to apprehend, my thing at all'. The upshot is that "every act of knowing
always already takes place on the basis of the mode of being of Dasein which we call Being-in, that is, Being-always-already-involved-with-a-world". To know
or
to question is already to have evidence of one's situated, worldly being and to undercut any
prerogative to a more radical doubt. Heidegger’s understanding of Being-in-the-world allows him to reject both radical (Nietzschen)
individualism and Cartesian dualism. Rethinking the nature of knowledge and perception is called for. Metaphysics
posits knowledge in terms of a subject's representational apprehension of an external state of affairs. Heidegger insists in contrast that "what is knowable
and what knows are each determined in their essence in a unified way from the same essential
ground. We may not separate either one, nor wish to encounter them separately'. Knowing is not like a bridge
that somehow subsequently' connects two existent banks of a stream, but is itself a stream that ill its flow first creates the banks and turns them toward each other in
a more original way than a bridge ever could”. The image Heidegger presents here is remarkable. But it remains somewhat misleading of his intent. One is still asked
to conceive of a subject distinct from its object, represented as opposing banks of a stream, separated yet joined by something called knowledge. Perhaps a better
is to visualize human being as a
diffused radius of disclosure. The world of beings is disclosed as it comes to presence in the
diffusely illuminated "there" of human Being. What comes to presence always stands within this
populated clearing. Not everything is disclosed at once, of course. There are horizons to an individual's world. And certain features within the lighted
way to understand the unified structure of Being-in-the-world, equally' inspired by Heidegger's own imagery,
area will be partially obscured by shadows, which give depth to what is illuminated. In turn, perspective plays its part. What is revealed is revealed in the context of its
particular surroundings, a context ambiguous but always in evidence. Finally what appears does so not as a singular object but as part of an environment that
surrounds, structures, and sustains it. Importantly, the clearing symbolizes not simply the visual perceptions of human being, nor even simply its complete sensory
field, but also its demeanor, comportment and mood. It’s lighting never outlines an object standing completely apart from it, as a spotlight would. The primary relation
is not that of observer to observed. Rather, human being illuminates its world by way of holistic embeddedness Like light traversing empty space, human being would
be dark indeed with out its world.
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Life is always inessential – accepting that is the only way to escape the inevitable extinction of
humanity and nature.
George Kateb, Professor of Political Science, Princeton University, THE INNER OCEAN, 19 92, p. 146-7.
this zealous rationalism, aspires to global mastery, that one or another nation will be the
the immediate result will be an inhuman life more dangerous in its
manipulative power, especially genetically, than the risk of extinction itself, and that this very
inhumanity will somehow engender its correction, the saving remedy. What matters more than any of this, however,
is that Heidegger draws out of the death of God the possibility that a few will glimpse the truth, which is that all existence is not necessary, is
an accident, is something arbitrary or. contingent. There could have been, could be, nothing.
Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? The question is destructive because it presupposes that a rationalist answer of
some kind must and will be found 0 And this assumption, in the age of science and technology, will lead humanity to
force an answer by remaking its world to suit whatever master passion or intention now drives it,
whether resentment of inequality in human endowment, or resentment of impairment in humanity, or resentment of
imperfection in the rest of earthly nature, or simply an "insurrection" (as he puts it) against
anything in nature which resists man's will or his effort to make all things bear a human look and
serve a human purpose. To want the world to have been made, and made well, but to regard the given world as
something that would be poorly made if it had been made at all, prompts the desire to make it
over. This desire is preliminary to regarding it as disposable, to unmake it, to destroy it. (Analogous to this is the spectral sequence in which the state, seeing itself
as the source and sustainer of human life, comes to feel licensed to destroy it in massive quantities.) As against such sequences, hope lies in seeing
life on earth as inessential. To receive beings or a particular being adequately, one must always be mindful that
they or it did not have to be. They were caused to exist by no supreme will. (It is true, contrastingly, that Marx held, in the z 844 Manuscripts, that
Heidegger holds that this rapacity,
vanguard of such mastery, that
beings would have inessentiality [Unwesentlichkeit 1 only if a supreme will did cause them: it need not have, but chose to. Atheism begins the process of thinking that
The thought of inessentiality, not remote from Nicrvxchc, is the heart of Heidegger's
endeavor. He announces the death of God with his own emphasis. The world was not made; it is there, for no cause, reason, or purpose. It is
there just "because," as a child would say when refusing to explain. I believe that this emphasis is
seen better when contrasted to that of Richard Rorty, another theorist of the death of God. Rorty says in "The Contingency of
beings necessarily arc.)
Language," "For genuine novelty can, after all, occur in a world of blind, contingent, mechanical forces. Think of novelty as the sort of thing when a cosmic ray
scrambles the atoms in a DNA molecule, thus sending things off in the direction of the orchids or the anthropoids. The orchids, when their time came, were no less
novel or marvellous for the sheer contingency of this necessary condition of their existence." Heidegger is suggesting rather that things are contingent despite all
local causal necessities, and are all the more marvelous for being contingent. Existence
is unsponsored, unguaranteed,
unguarded. Existence as such and in its indefiniteness is a source of unwearying astonishment or wonder, a
wonder that altogether surpasses the imme¬no rial wonder at nature's supposed order or harmony. We must learn to be "astonished
especially about [a] being and that it is and what it is," 'that it is as it is and not otherwise." But human and natural
existence on earth is now imperiled. To the Heideggerian thought that it is an accident that there is not nothing (I know that the word
"accident" is inadequate, as any such word must be), it now depends on human choice whether, one day, there will be
nothing. . The death of God coincides with the birth of humanity-as-God-the destroyer, able to
choose to preserve what it did not and could not create, what was not created and did not have to exist. It is then possible to
extend Heidegger's thought and say that the liberated sense of inessentiality, and the radicalized wonder that grows out of it when joined
now () the novel sense of earthly precariousness, provides the scarcely namable passion that informs the affirmation of life
and hence the disposition to feel a preserving, protective attachment to earthly existence as
such in it s ungraspable indefiniteness. I know of no philosopher who imparts such a vivid and saving sense of the inessentiality of things
as Heidegger. To be sure, his sense that the source of the danger lies in man's resentment must be
supplemented, though not necessarily abandoned. It is an nhanccment of Nietzsche's notion of vengeful moralism. Yet even if
t''icntment of the human condition had no conceptual place in the u i cmpr to understand the nuclear situation, Heidegger's thought on the response to it would be of
considerable importance.
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A2 “We Don’t Use Tech”
1. Let’s face it, you probably do.
2. Even if you somehow don’t, NBD. That’s not our link story. It’s not that the plan uses
technology; it’s that the plan uses calculative, instrumental, technological thinking.
3. Technology is distinct from technological thinking.
Linda Ross Meyer, Professor of Law – Quinnipiac Law School, “Is Practical Reason Mindless?”,
GEORGETOWN LAW JOURNAL, January 1998, LN.
Both Nietzsche and Heidegger foresaw the emergence of this mode of thinking/being that Heidegger
calls technology, though the term is easily misunderstood. We usually think of technology as a set of tools
or machines that enable us to reach our goals more efficiently and completely. But the mindset
that thinks in terms of means and ends, causes and effects, is not itself a mere tool. Its way of
looking at nature, the world, and even human talent as raw material for achieving human goals is
itself what opens the possibility of building and using machines. As Heidegger says, "our age is
not a technological age because it is the age of the machine; it is an age of the machine because
it is the technological age." n111 Technology, he says, is the way of being in the world in which everything appears
as a stockpile of fungible stuff to be ordered and used, managed and regulated, as we will. All matter (the effect of a cause)
is transformable to energy (the cause of an effect). n112 All is either cause or effect; our physics and metaphysics are
inhabited only by fungible energy/matter shifting and moving. Our role in this monochromatic universe is to
predict, and ultimately harness, the patterns of cause and effect. We ask not, "what is it?" but
only "what is it for?" or "what can we do with it?" n113
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Even if they “help” nature, it remains within a technological framework, ensuring the
replication of the impacts.
Eric Katz, associate professor of philosophy and director of the Science, Technology, and Society Program,
New Jersey Institute of Technology; recognized pioneer, environmental ethics, “Nature as Subject: Human
Obligation and Natural Community”, ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS, 2000.
Even more important, the
question arises whether or not Nature can heal these wounds of human
oppression. Consider the reverse process, the human attempt to heal the wounds of Nature. We often tend to clean up natural areas polluted or damaged by
human activity, such as the Alaskan coast harmed by the Exxon Valdez oil spill. But we also attempt to improve natural areas dramatically altered by natural events,
such as a forest damaged by a massive brush fire, or a beach suffering severe natural erosion. In most of these kinds of cases, human science and technology are
capable of making a significant change in the appearance and processes of the natural area. Forests
can be replanted, oil is removed
from the surface of bays and estuaries, sand and dune vegetation replenish a beach. But are
these activities the healing of Nature? Has human activity—science and technology—restored
Nature to a healthy state? No. When humans modify a natural area they create an artifact, a product
of human labor and human design. 12 This restored natural area may resemble a wild and unmodified natural system, but it is, in actuality, a product of
human thought, the result of human desires and interests. All humanly created artifacts are manifestations of human interests—from computer screens to rice
pudding. An ecosystem restored by human activity may appear to be in a different category—it may appear to be an autonomous living system uncontrolled by
human thought—but it nonetheless exhibits characteristics of human design and intentionality: it is created to meet human interests, to satisfy human desires, and to
maximize human good. Consider again my examples of human attempts to heal damaged natural areas. A forest is replanted to correct the damage of a fire because
humans want the benefits of the forest—whether these be timber, a habitat for wildlife, or protection of a watershed. The replanting of the forest by humans is
different from a natural re-growth of the forest vegetation, which would take much longer. The forest is replanted because humans want the beneficial results of the
mature forest in a shorter time. Similarly, the eroded beach is replenished—with sand pumped from the ocean floor several miles offshore—because the human
community does not want to maintain the natural status of the beach. The eroded beach threatens oceanfront homes and recreational beaches. Humanity prefers to
restore the human benefits of a fully protected beach. The restored beach will resemble the original, but it will be the product of human technology, a humanly
designed artifact for the promotion of human interests. After these actions of human restoration and modification, what
emerges is a Nature with
a different character than the original. This is an ontological difference, a difference in the
essential qualities of the restored area. A beach that is replenished by human technology
possesses a different essence than a beach created by natural forces such as wind and tides. A savanna replanted
from wildflower seeds and weeds collected by human hands has a different essence than grassland that develops on its own. The source of these new areas is
different—man—made, technological, artificial. The restored Nature is not really Nature at all. A Nature healed by human action is thus not Nature. As an artifact, it is
In using our scientific
and technological knowledge to restore natural areas, we actually practice another form of
domination. We use our power to mold the natural world into a shape that is more amenable to
our desires. We oppress the natural processes that function independent of human power; we prevent the autonomous development of the natural world.
To believe that we heal or restore the natural world by the exercise of our technological power is,
at best, a self-deception and, at worst, a rationalization for the continued degradation of Nature—
for if we can heal the damage we inflict we will face no limits to our activities. This conclusion has serious
designed to meet human purposes and needs—perhaps even the need for areas that look like a pristine, untouched Nature.
implications for the idea that Nature can repair human destruction, that Nature can somehow heal the evil that humans perpetuate on the earth. Just as a restored
human landscape has a different causal history than the original natural system, the reemergence of Nature in a place of human genocide and destruction is based
on a series of human events that cannot be erased. The natural vegetation that covers the mass grave in the Warsaw cemetery is not the same as the vegetation
that would have grown there if the mass grave had never been dug. The
grass and trees in the cemetery have a different
cause, a different history, that is inextricably linked to the history of the Holocaust. The grassy
field in the Majdanek parade ground does not cover and heal the mud and desolation of the death camp—it rather grows from the dirt and
ashes of the site's victims. For anyone who has an understanding of the Holocaust, of the innumerable evils heaped upon an oppressed people by
the Nazi regime, the richness of Nature cannot obliterate nor heal the horror. In this essay I question the environmentalists' concern for the restoration of nature and
argue against the optimistic view that humanity has the obligation and ability to repair or reconstruct damaged natural systems. This conception of environmental
policy and environmental ethics is based on a misperception of natural reality and a misguided understanding of the human place in the natural environment. On a
simple level, it is the same kind of "technological fix" that has engendered the environmental crisis. Human science and technology will fix, repair, and improve natural
processes. On a deeper level, it is an expression of an anthropocentric world view, in which human interests shape and redesign a comfortable natural reality. A
"restored" nature is an artifact created to meet human satisfactions and interests. Thus, on the most fundamental level, it is an unrecognized manifestation of the
insidious dream of the human domination of nature. Once and for all, humanity will demonstrate its mastery of nature by "restoring" and repairing the degraded
ecosystems of the biosphere. Cloaked in an environmental consciousness, human power will reign supreme.
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**Affirmative Answers**
Aff: Extinction Outweighs Ontology
Action to prevent mass catastrophe precedes ontology
Arnold I. Davidson, Coeditor, Critical Inquiry and Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Chicago,
“Questions Concerning Heidegger,” CRITICAL INQUIRY, v 15 n 1, Winter 1989, p. 426.
I understand Levinas' work to suggest another path to the recovery of the human, one that leads through or toward other human beings: The dimension of the divine
opens forth from the human face. ... Hence metaphysics is enacted where the social relation is enacted— in our relations with men. . . . The Other is not the
incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed. It is our relations with men .. .
Levinas places ethics before ontology by beginning
with our experience of the human face; and, in a clear reference to Heidegger's idolatry of the village life of peasants, he associates
that give to theological concepts the sole signification they admit of.55
himself with Socrates, who preferred the city where he encountered men to the country with its trees.36 In his discussion of skepticism and the problem of others,
Cavell also aligns himself with this path of thought, with the recovery of the finite human self
through the acknowledgment of others: As long as God exists, I am not alone. And couldn't the other suffer the fate of God? ... I
wish to understand how the other now bears the weight of God, shows me that I am not alone in
the universe. This requires understanding the philosophical problem of the other as the trace or
scar of the departure of God. [CR, p. 470] The suppression of ihe other, the human, in Heidegger's
thought accounts, I believe, for the absence, in his writing after the war, of the experience of horror. Horror is
always directed toward the human; every object of horror bears the imprint of the human will.38 So
Levinas can see in Heidegger's silence about the gas chambers and death camps "a kind of consent to the horror."39 And Cavell can characterize Nazis as "those
who have lost the capacity for being horrified by what they do." 40
Where was Heidegger's horror? How could he have failed to know what he
Arendt associates Heidegger with Paul Valery's aphorism, " 'Les evenements ne sont que
I'ecume des choses' ('Events are but the foam of things')."41 I think one understands the source of her intuition. The mass
extermination of human beings, however, does not produce foam, but dust and ashes; and it is
here that questioning must stop.
had consented to? Hannah
Extinction outweighs ontology.
Hans Jonas, Former Alvin Johnson Professor of Philosophy, New School for Social Research and Former
Eric Voegelin Visiting Professor, University of Munich, MORALITY AND MORTALITY: A SEARCH FOR THE
GOOD AFTER AUSCHWITZ, 1996, p. 111-112.
With this look ahead at an ethics for the future:, we are touching at the same lime upon the question of the future of freedom. The unavoidable discussion of this
question seems to give rise to misunderstandings. My dire prognosis that not only our material standard of living but also our democratic freedoms would fall victim to
the growing pressure of a worldwide ecological crisis, until finally there would remain only some form of tyranny that would try to save the situation, has led to the
accusation that I am defending dictatorship as a solution to our problems. I shall ignore here what is a confusion between warning and recommendation. But I have
indeed said that such a tyranny would still be better than total ruin; thus, I have ethically accepted it as an alternative. I must now defend this standpoint, which I
continue to support, before the court that I myself have created with the main argument of this essay. For are we not contradicting ourselves in prizing physical
survival at the price of freedom? Did we not say that freedom was the condition of our capacity for responsibility—and that this capacity was a reason for the survival
of humankind?
By tolerating tyranny as an alternative to physical annihilation are we not violating the
principle we established: that the How of existence must not take precedence over its Why? Yet
we can make a terrible concession to the primacy of physical survival in the conviction that the
ontological capacity for freedom, inseparable as it is from man's being, cannot really be
extinguished, only temporarily banished from the public realm. This conviction can be supported by
experience we are all familiar with. We have seen that even in the most totalitarian societies the urge for
freedom on the part of some individuals cannot be extinguished, and this renews our faith in
human beings. Given this faith. we have reason to hope that, as long as there are human beings
who survive, the image of God will continue to exist along with them and will wait in concealment
for its new hour. With that hope—which in this particular case takes precedence over fear—it is permissible, for the sake of physical survival, to accept if
need be a temporary absence of freedom in the external affairs of humanity. This is, I want to emphasize, a worst-case scenario, and it is the foremost task of
This is in fact one of the noblest of duties (and
at the same time one concerning self-preservation), on the part of the imperative of
responsibility to avert future coercion that would lead to lack of freedom by acting freely in the
present, thus preserving as much as possible the ability of future generations to assume
responsibility. But more than that is involved. At stake is the preservation of Earth’s entire miracle of
creation, of which our human existence is a part and before which man reverently bows, even
without philosophical “grounding." Here too faith may precede and reason follow; it is faith that longs for this
responsibility at this particular moment in world history to prevent it from happening.
preservation of the Earth {fides quaerem intellectual), and reason comes as best it can to faith's aid with arguments, not
knowing or even asking how much depends on its success or failure in determining what action to take. With this confession
of faith we come to the end of our essay on ontology.
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Aff: Extinction Outweighs Value to Life
Preserving existence is the primary obligation to the other and precedes value-to-life
questions.
Paul Wapner, Associate Professor and Director of the Global Environmental Policy Program, American
University. “Leftist Criticism of "Nature" Environmental Protection in a Postmodern Age,” DISSENT, Winter
2003, http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/archives/2003/wi03/wapner.htm.
All attempts to listen to nature are social constructions-except one. Even the most radical postmodernist must
acknowledge the distinction between physical existence and non-existence. As I have said,
postmodernists accept that there is a physical substratum to the phenomenal world even if they argue
about the different meanings we ascribe to it. This acknowledgment of physical existence is crucial. We can't
ascribe meaning to that which doesn't appear. What doesn't exist can manifest no character. Put differently,
yes, the postmodernist should rightly worry about interpreting nature's expressions. And all of us should be wary of those
who claim to speak on nature's behalf (including environmentalists who do that). But we need not doubt the simple idea that
a prerequisite of expression is existence. This in turn suggests that preserving the nonhuman world-in all its
diverse embodiments-must be seen by eco-critics as a fundamental good. Eco-critics must be supporters, in some fashion,
of environmental preservation. Postmodernists reject the idea of a universal good. They rightly acknowledge the difficulty of
identifying a common value given the multiple contexts of our value-producing activity. In fact, if there is one thing they
vehemently scorn, it is the idea that there can be a value that stands above the individual contexts of human experience.
Such a value would present itself as a metanarrative and, as Jean-François Lyotard has explained, postmodernism is
characterized fundamentally by its "incredulity toward meta-narratives." Nonetheless, I can't see how postmodern critics
can do otherwise than accept the value of preserving the nonhuman world. The nonhuman is the extreme
"other"; it stands in contradistinction to humans as a species. In understanding the constructed quality of human
experience and the dangers of reification, postmodernism inherently advances an ethic of respecting the "other."
At the very least, respect must involve ensuring that the "other" actually continues to exist. In our day and
age, this requires us to take responsibility for protecting the actuality of the nonhuman. Instead, however, we
are running roughshod over the earth's diversity of plants, animals, and ecosystems. Postmodern critics should find this
particularly disturbing. If they don't, they deny their own intellectual insights and compromise their fundamental moral
commitment.
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Aff: Ethics Outweighs Ontology
Ethics must precede ontology—prioritizing ontological thinking risks totalitarianism and
genocide.
Leonard Grob, Professor of Philosophy, Farleigh Dickinson University, ETHICS AFTER THE HOLOCAUST,
1999, p. 8-11.
This face-to-face encounter is thus no cognitive event. As we have seen, I cannot know the Other as Other without
diminishing his or her otherness. I can, however, encounter that Other in what Levinas terms an ethical event. Indeed, it is
only with the rending of the ontological schema that ethics first becomes possible. Prior to my meeting with the Other, there
is no ethics as such. Within the totality of being, I am limited in my egoist ambition only by a lack of
power. The Other who meets me face-to-face challenges my very right to exercise power. In so
doing, ethics is born. Cognition no longer represents the highest activity of which a human is capable; it is replaced by
"revelation" of the Other as an ethical event in which, for the first time, I come to realize the arbitrariness of my egoist
ambitions. The thematizing of the cognitive subject is replaced by nothing short of an act of witness on the part of a being
who now becomes an ethical subject. The Other who contests me is an Other truly independent of my appropriative powers
and thus one to whom I can have, for the first time, ethical obligations. As Levinas puts it, this Other is the first being whom I
can wish to murder. Before the totality is rent by the manifestation of the face, there can be no will to
act immorally, as there can be no will to act morally, in any ultimate sense of that word. If one
begins with the "imperial I" appropriating its world, ethics as such can never be founded. The other
with whom I interact is simply a datum, an aspect of my universe. Morality makes its first appearance when I
confront the Other who is truly Other. Although the Other appears to me now, on principle, as someone I could
wish to kill, he or she in fact summons me to respond with nonviolence: I am called to willingly renounce my power to act
immorally. What I hear from the Other, Levinas claims, are the words "Thou shalt not kill." Harkening to this injunction
constitutes my inaugural act as an ethical being. In Levinas's words, "Morality begins when freedom, instead of being
justified by itself, feels itself to be arbitrary and violent." Addressing the face of the Other I become ethical. In a
turnabout from what has been the norm in the history of Western thought, ethics now is seen, by Levinas, to constitute the
essence of philosophy. Ethics is now "first philosophy," a position usurped until now by the ontological enterprise. The
meeting with the Other-who-is-truly-Other is a primordial event: "Since the Other looks at me," Levinas exclaims, "I am
responsible for him [or her], without even having taken on responsibilities in his [or her] regard " In encountering the Other, I
assume responsibility for him [or her]. "Responsibility," Levinas proclaims, "is the essential, primary and fundamental
structure of subjectivity.... Responsibility in fact is not a simple attribute of subjectivity, as if the latter already existed in itself,
before the ethical relationship."'" In other words, my structure as a human being, in any significant sense of that word, is to
be responsible to the Other. My personhood is not to be identified with that of the solitary ego
appropriating its world; it is rather a personhood fundamentally oriented toward the Other.
Ethics, for Levinas, is thus not to be identified with any ethical or even meta-ethical position.
Levinas speaks neither as deontologist nor consequentialist. He does not attempt to articulate
any list of rights or obligations, or even the principles on which the latter would be based. All
ethical theories, he implies, are secondary to, or derivative from, a primordial or founding moment: the
encounter with the face of the Other. It is this moment-of-all-moments which institutes the very possibility of the
"ethical" systems so hotly debated within the history of Western thought. Before there can be any ethical positioning—
before there can be discussions of virtue, happiness, duties—there is the meeting with the Other. Ethics is no set of
directives; rather, in Levinas's words, “Already of itself ethics is an 'optics,'” a way of seeing which precedes—and founds—
all that has heretofore been identified as ethical philosophy. The import of this notion of the primacy of ethics
for a rethinking of philosophy in the post-Holocaust age cannot be emphasized strongly enough.
For Levinas, philosophy-as-ontology reveals being as nothing short of "war": The visage of being that shows itself in war is
fixed in the concept of totality which dominates Western philosophy. Individuals are reduced to being bearers offerees that
command them unbeknown to themselves. The meaning of individuals (invisible outside of this totality) is derived from the
totality. Individuals within the "being" constructed by philosophers are merely creatures of the
schematizing mind. Such a concept of philosophy is ill-equipped to address the great ethical
issues which arise in the study of the Holocaust. Indeed, for Levinas, "War is not only one of the ordeals—the
greatest—of which morality lives; it renders morality derisory." Within the terms of warfare, lying, stealing—even killing—
lose whatever ethical import they might have. I simply engage in these acts as "necessary" within the universe created by
war. If the being studied by traditional philosophy is conceived of as war, morality loses its core
meaning. Not only is no fundamental ethical critique of the events of the Holocaust possible within the terms of
philosophy-as-ontology, but, as I have noted above, it can be argued that the mode of appropriative thinking of philosophers
in our Western tradition has contributed to the creation of a climate in which genocide can flourish. If, in ontological
terms, individual beings are said to have their meaning solely within the totality in which they
find themselves, totalizing thinking may well become totalitarian. Jews and other victims of Nazi
oppression were dehumanized precisely by being viewed in terms of racial categories applied to
them as a whole. If philosophy is a mere egology, as Levinas claims, the totalizing cognitive subject can, at the far end
of a continuum, be seen to pass over into the autocratic "I" of the leaders of the Third Reich.
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Aff: Heidegger Reaffirms the Status Quo
Their notion of ontological difference is a fraud. Ontological inquiry merely serves to re-affirm
the way things are and the way things will be in the end. The Kritik is an affirmation of status
quo structures of power.
Carsten Strathausen, Associate Professor of German and English, University of Missouri at Columbia, “A
Critique of Neo-Left Ontology”, POSTMODERN CULTURE, v 16 n 3, 2006, Project Muse.
Ontological argument is static, undialectical, and unhistorical. It apodictically posits a truth that,
following Adorno, can only be thought in and through a continuous process of self-critical reflection.
The truth about ontology, therefore, is its untruth and philosophical sterility. Ontology begets
ideology, because it refuses to think through and beyond contradiction the way dialectics does.
Instead, Heidegger allegedly praises the mere existence of paradox as if it were truth itself. In doing so,
ontology succumbs to the apologetic "affirmation of power" (136), and Adorno spends numerous pages on
Heidegger's use of the predicate "is" to substantiate this claim.5 The brute fact that the world exists and that Being "is,"
so Adorno, seduces Heidegger to abandon dialectical reflection in favor of mere tautologies that refuse to mediate
between the constitutive poles of subject and object, Being and beings. Instead, ontology ultimately collapses the two into
one. "The whole construction of [Heidegger's] ontological difference is a Potemkin Village" (122), Adorno
concludes, because this alleged difference only serves to advocate the self-identity and self-
righteousness of the way things always already are in the beginning and will have been in the
end. In Heidegger, "mediation [succumbs] to the unmediated identity of what mediates and what is being mediated"
(Adorno 493).
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Aff: Nuclear War Outweighs Ontology
A. Their Zimmerman evidence is cut out of context- he is restating an argument made by
Heidegger which he explicitly disagrees with. Furthermore it is warrant-less and logically
incoherent—we will assert the converse—nuclear war outweighs loss of being because if
humanity survives a crisis of being only to be obliterated by a nuclear war there would be no
clever contented animals left
B. Nuclear war outweighs dasein—their ev is anthropocentric and stupid.
David Macauley, MINDING NATURE: THE PHILOSOPHERS OF ECOLOGY, 1996, p. 74.
We may approach the issue of what Heidegger may teach today’s radical environmentalists by examining an issue about
which they and Heidegger would profoundly disagree. Heidegger claimed that there is a greater danger than the
destruction of all life on earth by nuclear war.40 For radical environmentalists, it is hard to imagine anything more dangerous
than the total destruction of the biosphere! Heidegger argued, however, that worse than such annihilation would he the
totally technologized world in which material “happiness” for everyone is achieved, but in which humanity would be left with
a radically constricted capacity for encountering the being of entities. This apparently exorbitant claim may be partially
mitigated by the following consideration. If human existence lost all relationship to transcendent being,
entities could no longer show themselves at all, and in this sense would no longer “be.” Who
needs nuclear war, Heidegger asked rhetorically, if entities have already ceased to be? For many
environmentalists, such a question reveals the extent to which Heidegger remained part of the
human-centered tradition that he wanted to overcome. By estimating so highly human Dasein’s
contribution to the manifesting of things, Heidegger may well have underestimated the
contribution made by many other forms of life, for which the extinction of humankind’s
ontological awareness would be far preferable to their own extinction in nuclear war!
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Aff: Forgetting WW2 DA
The loss of conservative ideology in WW2 led to a movement to HIDE a defense of Violence
and Domination. This explains the TEXTUAL defense… and the hidden underside of the theory
of Heidegger.
Geoff Waite, Prof of Comparative Literature @ Cornell, “HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS- THE HIDDEN
MONOLOGUE, OR, CONSERVING ESOTERICISM TO JUSTIFY THE HIGH HAND OF VIOLENCE,” Cultural
Critique 69—Spring 2008.
A dual premise. First,
it is primarily in the sphere of military history that "1945" demarcates a radical
break between whatever preceded and followed it, by far the most salutary consequence being
the termination of the shoah, holocaust, or "final solution." In the capital- ist economy and its
superstructural effects (which did not produce necessarily but maximally accelerated the shoah), the termination of this one
manifestation of "the father of all things" necessitated noth- ing less or more than retuning the
global distribution of capitalist power, which ever renders some "slaves, others freemen." Second, but
concomitantly, from the point of view that I—with much help from Leo Strauss albeit to radically opposed ends—identify as the transhistorical conservation of
esotericism (the almost un- broken philosophical and political tradition dating from archaic and 2 ancient Greece), 1945
could effect nothing less
or more than the always already anticipated necessity to retune the exoteric 'form' of expression of an
esoteric 'substance' that forever remains the same. This 'substance' (or Wesen) is indeed "the
intention that there always be rulers and ruled," hereby conserving the version of natural law or
right called "order of rank" (Rangordnung in Nietzschean and Nazi German, gerachia in Fascist Italian, and with a precise equivalent in Imperial
Japanese) by means of the perpetual retuning necessitated by tactical and strategic considerations
exclusively. Yet, as Spinoza justly saw in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670): "The application of the word Taw' to things of nature is merely figurative,
and the ordi- nary signification of law is simply a human command that men can either obey or disobey" (Spinoza opera, 3: 38; TPT P4). In the Hobbes- ian variant
reaffirmed by Carl Schmitt, "Autoritas, non Veritas facit legem" (Schmitt, Begriff des Politischen, 122). It is to prevent some people from disobeying this command and
law, understood to be "the truth about all crucial things," which has been the transhistori- cal (never a-historical) mission of the conservers of esotericism, who have
Persecution, then, gives rise to a
peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things
is presented exclusively between the lines. That literature is addressed, not to all readers, but to
trustworthy and intelligent readers only. It has all the advantages of private communication with- out having its greatest disadvantage—
every right to feel persecuted by us always rambunctious, poten- tially really disobedient men and women.
that it reaches only the writer's acquaintances. It has all the advantages of pubic communication without having its greatest disadvantage—capital punishment for the
Accordingly, Martin Heidegger remarks in 1951, "Only once or twice in my
thirty to thirty-five years of teaching have I ever spoken what really matters to me [meine Sache]"
author. (Strauss, Persecution, 25)
(Gesamtausgabe, 15: 426), without saying whether this was one of those only two occasions. As Bcethius wrote in prison just before his brutal execution in 524 CE
(for having violated his very dictum), "You are a true philosopher only if you can be silent [si tacuisses]" (Philosophic consolationis, 2: 74-77). As for capitalism, "You
know capitalism is above the law. . . . / Democracy don't rule the world, you'd better get that through your head. / This world is ruled by violence, but I guess thaf s
better left unsaid" (Dylan "Union Sundown," 1. 38,11. 58-61). With regard to the expression of the hegemonic Christian rule and law within which Heidegger and
Schmitt (neither of whom unambiguously opposed the shoah, to be as charitable as possible, at the time or thereafter) wrote (no matter how reluctantly or
enthusiastically), Jesus Christ spoke himself ex- clusively in parables "in order that" (Greek 'iva) some men be saved and "lest" ([XIIJTOTE) disobedient people "turn
against" them (Mark 4:11-12; see Kermode, Genesis of Secrecy, 23-A7)?—I stand with the disobedient. Thus, there are most excellent dual grounds—politicoeconomic with the conservation of esotericism—for Heidegger to pronounce, also in 1951, the only scandalous-sounding sentence: "This world war has decided
nothing [dieser Weltkrieg hat nichts entschieden]" (Heideg- ger, Was heisst Denken? 65). Schmitt, I will also argue, changed his mind about both Heidegger and
esotericism due in certain measure to what Heinrich Meier seminally has called Schmitt's "hidden dia- logue" with Strauss (see Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss),
but the Strauss who, in the perennial debate between "Athens and Jeru- salem," ultimately takes the side of the former, albeit prudently. My appreciation of Meier's
thesis is severely qualified, however, inas- much as all three men—Heidegger,
Schmitt, Strauss—are more properly viewed
in terms of their hidden monologue, which is built upon bedrock agreement on the necessity of
esotericism to conserve order of rank, including by the high hand of violence. Yet this
monologue is barely audible, written preeminently only between their lines.
The hidden monologue reveals an acceptance of total violence.
Geoff Waite, Prof of Comparative Literature @ Cornell, “HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS- THE HIDDEN
MONOLOGUE, OR, CONSERVING ESOTERICISM TO JUSTIFY THE HIGH HAND OF VIOLENCE,” Cultural
Critique 69—Spring 2008.
The fundamental difference between Schmitt and Heidegger in this and any other ultimately
important regard was that Heidegger always holds the esoteric card as close to his chest as
possible, except for a year or so ca. 1933-34, and that Schmitt showed his hand, more than Heidegger
did, in 1929 and in 1933-34, and somewhat longer. So it then was, in archaic Greek terms, that Jurist Schmitt confirmed and
even outstripped Rector Heidegger in embodying Creon's dic- tum: "There is no way to learn the soul and thought and
judgment of a man until he has been seen in the practice of power and law." Finally, however, none of our clear-
sighted troika, in their hidden monologue, is opposed to violence in principle or tout court. To
the precise contrary, theirs is war (polemos) against our war (stasis)—both often being violent. It
is precisely here that Strauss's voice in the hid- den monologue is crucial.
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Heidegger affirmed, in concealed prose, the need for a secret effort to continue the philosophy
of domination.
Geoff Waite, Prof of Comparative Literature @ Cornell, “HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS- THE HIDDEN
MONOLOGUE, OR, CONSERVING ESOTERICISM TO JUSTIFY THE HIGH HAND OF VIOLENCE,” Cultural
Critique 69, Spring 2008.
A scant year later, in the even more desperate summer of 1944, the conclusion of his seminar on
Heraclitus finds Heidegger posing the now less rhetorical question, whether "the Germans, in
harmony with the truth of Seyn," are "strong enough, above and beyond the readiness for death,
to save, from the petty mindedness of the mod- ern world, that which begins in its inconspicuous
embellishment" (Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 55:181). Less than two years later, after the war, in his open letter of
1946 (published in 1949 as Über den Human- ismus [On Humanism]) to Jean Beaufret, his anti-Semite French lackey,
Hölderlin is for Heidegger the sole thinker and writer whose "relation to Greece was something essentially different than
humanism"—at which point Heidegger avers that "the young Germans who knew of Hölderlin thought and experienced
when facing death Other [Anderes] than what the public sphere held to be the German opinion" (Über den Humanismus,
30). Presumably, on this same logic, those young German soldiers also thought and experienced differently when they were
forc- ing others to face death, rape, or mutilation. What matters here is the continuity of Heidegger's
thought such that any mere historical date—"even" 1945—is epiphenomenal com- pared to the task
of conserving esotericism. In 1922, Heidegger had confided to Karl Jaspers the pressing "need"
not only for their own "consciousness of a rare and independent battle action group [einer seltenen
und eigenständigen Kampfgemeinschaft]" but also, Heidegger stressed, "for an invisible society [einer
unsichtbaren Gesellschaft]" (Hei- degger and Jaspers, Briefwechsel, 29, 42). Still in this 'neo-Pietistic' regard, two decades
after World War II, near the end of the famous Spiegel interview (1966; published by mutual agreement only posthumously, in 1976), Heidegger's interlocutors recite from the Freiburg seminar on Nietzsche in which Heidegger had spoken
of the "oppo- sition [Widerstreit] of the Dionysian and the Apollonian [Nietzsche's terms—G.W], of holy passion and of sober
representation [Hölderlin's terms—G.W.]," adding that this opposition constitutes A concealed style-law
of the historical determination of the Germans [ein vorborgenes Stilgesetz der geschichtlichen Bestimmung der
Deutschen], and one day we will have to find ourselves ready and prepared to give it form [und uns
eines Tages bereit und vorbereitet finden muß zu seiner Gestaltung]. (Heidegger, Antwort, 106-7) Der Spiegel
continues to quote verbatim: This contradiction is no formula with the help of which we are
allowed to describe mere "culture." Hölderlin and Nietzsche, with this opposition, have erected a
question mark on the task of the Germans, to find their essence historically. Will we understand
these signs? One thing is cer- tain: History will take its revenge on us, if we do not understand it.
(107) At this juncture, the Spiegel interviewers look up from their notes to remark, "We don't know the year when you wrote
that; we'd guess it was 1935." Heidegger had a prodigious (if appropriately selective) memory and accurately he corrects
them: "Presumably that quotation belongs in the Nietzsche lecture 'The Will to Power as Art,' 1936-37" (indeed, see
Gesamtausgabe, 43:122-23). But then he adds, crucially, "It could also have been said in the following years." With this
shrewd twist, Heidegger can mean: still today and into the distant future. Over- hearing this innuendo, Der Spiegel tried to
press Heidegger on the con- tinuity between a remark made in 1936-37 and reaffirmed in 1966. To press him, moreover, on
his unreconstructed conviction that the Germans have "a unique historical task," indeed "a specific qualifi- cation for a
fundamental reversal [Umkehr]" of world history, which necessarily includes "conversing with Hölderlin" (Antwort, 107).
What his interlocutors likewise, but more crucially, ignored was what Hei- degger had and still meant by "a concealed stylelaw." This law long predates and postdates any merely historical conjuncture. At stake is the esotericism that
must be perpetually conserved. With the phrase "concealed style-law," Heidegger was silently
and affirmatively appropriating one of Nietzsche's most programmatic articulations, viz., of
Greek thought and political economy with their esoteric implementation under modern
conditions. In his early and purloined essay "The Greek State" (1872), Nietzsche had explicitly promoted at
once the modern version of "slavery" (Sklaverei), the necessity for its "conscious or unconscious"
acceptance by "slaves" or "workers" in their expropriated "surplus labor" (Mehrarbeit), and the
concomitant "anti-Liberal" necessity for an "esoteric writing" (Geheim- schrift) appropriate to "the
esoteric doctrine of the relation between the State and genius [Geheimlehre vom Zusammenhang
zwischen Staat und Genius]" (Kritische Studienausgabe, 1: 767, 777). Whatever his quarrel with Nietzsche could ever be on
metaphysical or ontological grounds, Heidegger always affirmed, in principle, this complex artic- ulation
of "esoteric doctrine" or "concealed style-law of the histori- cal determination of the Germans"
with the conservation, today, of social, political, intellectual, spiritual, and economic order of
rank. No one writing in this transhistorical framework need worry, ulti- mately, about any merely historical phenomenon,
since it is epiphe- nomenal in relation to esotericism.
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Even though Heidegger was a genius at hiding his true philosophy- there is sufficient textual
evidence of his support for continuing the Nazi project secretly.
Geoff Waite, Prof of Comparative Literature @ Cornell, “HEIDEGGER, SCHMITT, STRAUSS- THE HIDDEN
MONOLOGUE, OR, CONSERVING ESOTERICISM TO JUSTIFY THE HIGH HAND OF VIOLENCE,” Cultural
Critique 69, Spring 2008.
That "eloquent silence" (Althusser) is indeed absolutely funda- mental to Heidegger should be
audible enough in all his lectures and texts: from 1919, through the Third Reich, and after 1945
until his death in 1976. One mention of silence bears especial recall here. It is in the first lecture series (and last) he
was permitted to deliver at the University of Freiburg after the war, Was hasst Denken! (What Is Called Thinking? or What Is
Thinking's Call?), also to be the last such lectures before his formal retirement in 1952. Having ostensibly long ago returned
(like Plato before him) from his version of Syracuse, it is here that Heidegger asks in 1951 (and today) for all
with ears to hear: "What did the Second World War really decide, not to mention its ter- rible
consequences for our fatherland, especially the fissure through its middle? [im besonderen vom Riß
durch seine Mitte, zu schweigen?]." A deafening silence. Germany, once the en-pincered heart of
Europe, is now itself ripped through its cardiac middle. Heidegger's afore- mentioned answer is
quick to follow and takes no prisoners: "Dieser Weltkrieg hat nichts entschieden" [This war decides
nothing]. (Was heisst Denken? 65)—the bedrock position of all our three deceiving geniuses.
Heideggerian critique of technology served to downplay Nazi atrocity.
Constantin Goschler, Prof History Univ. Bochum, “RADICAL CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT IN THE
INTELLECTUAL CONSTELLATION OF THE EARLY FEDERAL REPUBLIC,” Cultural Critique 69, Spring
2008.
The historian Axel Schildt describes the overall intellectual mood in West Germany around 1950 as one
of crisis: world-weariness and cultural pessimism were common features of the German
intellectual state of mind (Schildt, Moderne Zeiten, 324^6, cf. Laak, "Conservative 3 Revolution"). Intellectual
discourses in the early 1950s focused pri- marily on "technology," the "faceless society," and
"alienation," and right-wing intellectuals played an important role in providing such catchwords.
Heidegger, in particular, who for some time had disap- peared from the public stage, re-emerged
at this time with talks and articles that found an audience in wide segments of the German educated elite. For a number of years, German existentialist philosophy again dominated the tone of feature pages. This
dominance was often reinforced by fashionable French thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Gabriel
Marcel, all of whom were influenced by 4 German existentialism (Schildt, Moderne Zeiten, 327). Lamentations about
alienation in a faceless society ruled by tech- nology clearly stood in the tradition of
conservative German Kulturkritik. What, then, was new about such grievances? The answer is that around
1950 such pessimistic descriptions were frequently accompa- nied by apocalyptic scenarios
anticipating an impending nuclear Armageddon between East and West. In this context, even the highly
decorated warrior Ernst Jünger, who after World War I had praised 5 military violence as the highest form of individual
existence, aban- doned such affectionate rationalizations of war. Influenced by his impressions of World War II, even he
now felt that war threatened humankind with total annihilation (Jünger, Waldgang). The Cold War not only offered a
way to put the Nazi era into the friendlier perspec- tive of a secular confrontation between
"good" and "evil"; it also pro- duced a deep feeling of danger. The Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to
1953, resonated strongly with the German public, creating the impression that Germany might soon be transformed into the
devas- tated battlefield of a third world war. This was, furthermore, not just another case of German angst, but rather a fear
common in European countries at that time.
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The idea of unlimited war was specifically invented to downplay Nazi atrocities.
Constantin Goschler, Prof History Univ. Bochum, “RADICAL CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT IN THE
INTELLECTUAL CONSTELLATION OF THE EARLY FEDERAL REPUBLIC,” Cultural Critique 69, Spring
2008.
The equation of victims of Nazism with German victims of the war formed a common feature of
German postwar political culture for decades (Moeller, "Deutsche Opfer"; Goschler, "Versöhnung und
Viktimisierung"). As can be seen, for example, in the institution of a national day of remembrance, it also became part of
West Germany's official culture of remembrance starting in the early 1950s. The posi- tion of radical conservative
intellectuals, however, in some ways went beyond even such an equation of victims. Carl Schmitt, in particular, questioned
the very idea of basing policy—and especially foreign pol- icy—on moral considerations. He described such moralizing
politics as a regression to the type of politics practiced in the religious wars of the seventeenth century (Schmitt, Ex
Captivitate). In keeping with this argument, the idea of the twentieth century as the age of a "global civil
war" between competing ideologies became a standard trope among conservative intellectuals
in the Federal Republic (Rest- ing, Geschichtsphilosophie; Nipperdey, Weltbürgerkrieg). This concept not only
helped to relativize the Nazi era as just one manifestation of the misery of the twentieth century;
it also allowed one to present the Third Reich as just one phase in the decisive battle between
East and West (Laak, "Trotz und Nachurteil," 65). Moreover, the notion of the twentieth century as the age of a global
civil war among ideolo- gies went hand in hand with a deep distrust of the liberal public sphere, which was viewed as a
breeding ground for the immature passions of the crowd. Hence, radical conservative intellectuals not only
provided useful catchwords for expressing opposition to Allied efforts at denazification; they
also reinforced traditional German caveats with regard to liberal models of society. This brings me to
my second question: Where were these radical conservative intellectu- als—who, according to Armin Mohler, did not
constitute more than a "small bunch of mavericks" ("Deutscher Konservatismus," 44)— situated in relation to the dominant
intellectual tendencies in Ger- many during the 1950s and 1960s?
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A. Ontological critique of technology kills trans-humanism: Heidegger reaches his limit in
genetic technology—we have to embrace the terror of new selves… this transforms our ethics.
Slavov Zizek, Jet-setter, Nature and its Discontents: Beyond Fukuyama, SubStance #117, Vol. 37, no. 3,
2008, Muse.
With the latest developments, the
discontent shifts from culture to nature itself: nature is no longer “natural,”
the reliable “dense” background of our lives; it now appears as a fragile mechanism which, at
any point, can explode in a catastrophic direction. Biogenetics, with its reduction of the human
psyche itself to an object of technological manipulation, is therefore effectively a kind of
empirical instantiation of what Heidegger perceived as the “danger” inherent to modern
technology. Crucial here is the interdependence of man and nature: by reducing man to just
another natural object whose properties can be manipulated, what we lose is not (only)
humanity, but nature itself. In this sense, Francis Fukuyama is right: humanity relies on some notion of “human
nature” as what we inherit as simply given to us—the impenetrable dimension in/of ourselves
into which we are born/thrown. Thus the paradox is that there is “man” only insofar as there is
impenetrable inhuman nature (Heidegger’s “earth”): with the prospect of biogenetic interventions opened
up by the access to the genome, the species freely changes/redefines itself and its own
coordinates. This prospect effectively emancipates humankind from the constraints of a finite
species, from its enslavement to the “selfish genes.” This emancipation, however, comes at a price: With interventions into man’s
genetic inheritance, the domination over nature reverts into an act of taking-control-over-oneself, which changes our generic-ethical self-understanding and can
disturb the necessary conditions for an autonomous way of life and universalistic understanding of morals.10 How, then, do we react to this threat?
Habermas’s logic is here: since the results of science pose a threat to our (predominant) notion
of autonomy and freedom, one should curtail science. The price we pay for this solution is the
fetishist split between science and ethics (“I know very well what science claims, but, nonetheless, in order to retain (the appearance of)
my autonomy, I choose to ignore it and act as if I don’t know it”). This prevents us from confronting the true question: how
do these new conditions compel us to transform and reinvent the very notions of freedom,
autonomy, and ethical responsibility? Science and technology today no longer aim only at
understanding and reproducing natural processes, but at generating new forms of life that will
surprise us; the goal is no longer just to dominate existing nature, but to generate something
new—greater, stronger than ordinary nature, including ourselves (note the obsession with artificial intelligence, aimed
at producing a brain stronger than the human brain). The dream that sustains the scientific-technological endeavor is
to trigger a process with no return, a process that would exponentially reproduce itself and
continue on its own. The notion of “second nature” is therefore today more pertinent than ever, in both of its main meanings. First, literally, as the
artificially generated new nature: monsters of nature, deformed cows and trees, or—a more “positive” dream—genetically manipulated organisms, “enhanced” in the
direction that suits us. Then, the “second nature” in the more standard sense of the autonomization of the results of our own activity: the way our acts elude us in their
It is this horror at the unforeseen results of our own
acts that causes shock and awe, not the power of nature over which we have no control; it is this
horror that religion tries to domesticate. What is new today is the short-circuit between these two senses of “second nature”: “second
consequences, the way they generate a monster with a life on its own.
nature” in the sense of objective Fate, of the autonomized social process, is generating “second nature” in the sense of an artificially created nature, of natural
monsters—the process that threatens to run out of control is no longer just the social process of economic and political development, but new forms of natural
processes themselves, from unforeseen nuclear catastrophe to global warming and the unforeseen consequences of biogenetic manipulations. Can one even
imagine the unforeseen result of nanotechnological experiments: new life forms reproducing themselves out of control in a cancer-like way?11 Here is a standard
description of this fear: Within fifty to a hundred years, a new class of organisms is likely to emerge. These organisms will be artificial in the sense that they will
originally be designed by humans. However, they will reproduce, and will “evolve” into something other than their original form; they will be “alive” under any
reasonable definition of the word. […] the pace of evolutionary change will be extremely rapid. […] The impact on humanity and the biosphere could be enormous,
This fear also has its clear libidinal
dimension: it is the fear of the asexual reproduction of Life, the fear of an “undead” life that is
indestructible, constantly expanding, reproducing itself through selfdivision.
larger than the industrial revolution, nuclear weapons, or environmental pollution. (Farmer and Belin, 815)
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B. This outweighs all their junk. Transhuman ethics are the key to all true extinction scenarios.
Nick Bostrom, Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University, The Transhumanist FAQ- A General Introduction,
Version 2.1, 2003, google.
Yes, and this implies an urgent need to analyze the risks before they materialize and to take steps to reduce them.
Biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence pose especially serious risks of accidents and abuse. [See also “ If
these technologies are so dangerous, should they be banned? What can be done to reduce the risks?” ] One can
distinguish between, on the one hand, endurable or limited hazards, such as car crashes,
nuclear reactor meltdowns, carcinogenic pollutants in the atmosphere, floods, volcano
eruptions, and so forth, and, on the other hand, existential risks – events that would cause the
extinction of intelligent life or permanently and drastically cripple its potential. While endurable
or limited risks can be serious – and may indeed be fatal to the people immediately exposed –
they are recoverable; they do not destroy the long-term prospects of humanity as a whole.
Humanity has long experience with endurable risks and a variety of institutional and
technological mechanisms have been employed to reduce their incidence. Existential risks are a
different kind of beast. For most of human history, there were no significant existential risks, or at least none that our
ancestors could do anything about. By definition, of course, no existential disaster has yet happened . As a species we
may therefore be less well prepared to understand and manage this new kind of risk.
Furthermore, the reduction of existential risk is a global public good (everybody by necessity benefits
from such safety measures, whether or not they contribute to their development), creating a potential free-rider
problem, i.e. a lack of sufficient selfish incentives for people to make sacrifices to reduce an
existential risk. Transhumanists therefore recognize a moral duty to promote efforts to reduce
existential risks.
3. This debate helps reverse the failures of humanism: speciesm, racism, and disposability.
We control access to root causes.
Nick Bostrom, Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University, The Transhumanist FAQ- A General Introduction,
Version 2.1, 2003, google.
Transhumanism is compatible with a variety of ethical systems, and transhumanists themselves hold
many different views. Nonetheless, the following seems to constitute a common core of agreement: According to
transhumanists, the human condition has been improved if the conditions of individual humans have been improved. In
practice, competent adults are usually the best judges of what is good for themselves. Therefore, transhumanists advocate
individual freedom, especially the right for those who so wish to use technology to extend their mental and physical
capacities and to improve their control over their own lives. From this perspective, an improvement to the human condition
is a change that gives increased opportunity for individuals to shape themselves and their lives according to their informed
wishes. Notice the word “ informed” . It is important that people be aware of what they choose between.
Education, discussion, public debate, critical thinking, artistic exploration, and, potentially,
cognitive enhancers are means that can help people make more informed choices.
Transhumanists hold that people are not disposable. Saving lives (of those who want to live) is ethically
important. It would be wrong to unnecessarily let existing people die in order to replace them with some new “ better”
people. Healthspan-extension and cryonics are therefore high on the transhumanist list of priorities. The transhumanist goal
is not to replace existing humans with a new breed of super-beings, but rather to give human beings (those existing today
and those who will be born in the future) the option of developing into posthuman persons. The non-disposability of
persons partially accounts for a certain sense of urgency that is common among
transhumanists. On average, 150,000 men, women, and children die every day, often in miserable conditions. In
order to give as many people as possible the chance of a posthuman existence – or even just a
decent human existence – it is paramount that technological development, in at least some
fields, is pursued with maximal speed. When it comes to life-extension and its various enabling technologies, a
delay of a single week equals one million avoidable premature deaths – a weighty fact which those who argue for bans or
moratoria would do well to consider carefully. (The further fact that universal access will likely lag initial availability only adds
to the reason for trying to hurry things along.) Transhumanists reject speciesism, the (human racist) view
that moral status is strongly tied to membership in a particular biological species, in our case
homo sapiens. What exactly does determine moral status is a matter of debate. Factors such as being a person, being
sentient, having the capacity for autonomous moral choice, or perhaps even being a member of the same community as the
evaluator, are among the criteria that may combine to determine the degree of somebody’ s moral status (Warren 1997).
But transhumanists argue that species-identity should be de-emphasized in this context. Transhumanists insist that
all beings that can experience pain have some moral status, and that posthuman persons could
have at least the same level of moral status as humans have in their current form.
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