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link: data
Data revealed by technology is inherently used for calculative purposes.
Antolick 2 [Matthew Anolick; August 20, 2002; Deep Ecology and Heideggerian Phenomenology; MV]
“What technology is,” says Heidegger, “when represented as a means, discloses itself when we trace instrumentality
back to fourfold causality.”8 Of fourfold causality, he states “they differ from one another, yet they belong together.”9 We
are questioning concerning technology, and we have arrived now at aletheia, at revealing. What has the essence
of technology to do with revealing? The answer: everything. For every bringing-forth is grounded in revealing.
Bringing- forth, indeed, gathers within itself the four modes of occasioning – causality – and rules them throughout. Within its domain belong
ends and means, belong instrumentality. Instrumentality is considered to be the fundamental characteristic of
technology. If we inquire step by step, into what technology, represented as means, actually is, then we shall
arrive at revealing. The possibility of all productive manufacturing lies in revealing…Technology is therefore
no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. Technology, as instrumental (and causal) is a bringing-forth. That is,
technology is a way of bringing things to presence in an instrumental (means-ends) manner. But such bringingforth is not merely instrumental. All bringing-forth, says Heidegger, is “poiesis,”11 through which “the growing things of nature as well as
whatever is completed through the crafts and the arts come at any given time to their appearance.” Within the questioning span between
causality and revealing [aletheia], Heidegger progresses through a trail of concepts: 1) Legein – “to consider carefully,” which, he claims13, has
its roots in aphophainesthai – “to bring forward into appearance”14; 2) Hypokeisthai – “lying before and lying ready” – as that for which
the four causes, as four ways of being responsible, are responsible, insofar as such characterizes “the presencing of something that presences”15; 3) Veran-lassen – “an occasioning or inducing to go forward” of something “into its complete arrival”16; which leads to 4) Physis – “the arising of something
from out of itself” which is also a “bringin
link: empiricism
Mistaking empiricism for truth embodies the technological thought that reduces all of
humanity to standing reserve.
Spanos, 93 – Heideggerian literary critic, Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at
Binghamton University, completed his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison [1993, William V.
Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, University of Minnesota Press,
ISBN: 9780816684427, pg. 174-7, Accessed through Ebrary]
I have in the foregoing reading of Heidegger with Foucault suggested the weakness of Heidegger's discourse as an instrument of sociopolitical critique: its
tendency, despite its essence, to separate theory from practice, thinking from politics, or, at worst, to distort the representation of the latter. It will be the
purpose of this concluding section, then, to suggest the weakness of Foucault's discourse disclosed by a reading of Foucault with Heidegger. To put it
provisionally, what is missing or underdeveloped in Foucault's genealogy of modern power relations is explicit and sustained reference to the ultimate
ontotheological origins of "panopticism" or "the regime of truth": this historically specific and concrete technology of discreet power in which the subject
(the individual) is constituted in order to better serve a privileged sociopolitical identity. To thematize and thus bring to bear on the critique of modernity
what his discourse more or less leaves unsaid in what I take to be a disabling way, it will be necessary to repeat Heidegger's more inclusive, if rarefied,
but finally not radically different thematization of the metaphorics of the centered circle informing the philosophical discourse of the ontotheological
tradition. This time, however, I will emphasize the consequences of this inscribed figural complex for the modern age, which, after all, no less than
Foucault's genealogy, is the primary concern of Heidegger's destruction of the ontotheological tradition. According to Heidegger, we recall, the
metaphysical mode of inquiry decisively inaugurated by the Roman translation of the Greek a-letheia to veritas
extends through the Patristic theologians and exegetes not only to modern empirical philosophers like Descartes, Locke, and
Bentham but also to idealists like Leibnitz, Kant, and Hegel. In the process of this history, it eventually hardened into a derivative or
secondary discursive practice, a viciously circular thinking about temporal phenomena, that reduced being ,
including Da-sein, being-in-the-world, to the status of a thing that is present-to-hand (vorhanden). What this process of reification
means in terms of Western history is that the hardening culminates— has its fulfillment and end (in both senses of the word)—in the
complete "technologization" (understood in a broader sense than merely the empirical scientific) of the continuum of being: not only the earth
but also human being in its individual and social capacity. Put figuratively, it ends in the re-presentation of being as totally spatialized
object in the modern period. For Heidegger, in other words, the triumph of humanism— or alternatively, of "anthropology"—in the postEnlightenment (what Foucault analogously refers to as the triumph of "panopticism") precipitates "the age of the world picture" (die Zeit des
Weltbildes): The interweaving of these two events, which for the modern age is decisive— that the world is transformed into a picture and man into
subjectum— throws light at the same time on the grounding event of modern history.... Namely, the more extensively and the more effectually the world
stands at man's disposal as conquered, and the more objectively the object appears, all the more subjectively, i.e., the more importunately, does the
subjectum rise up, and all the more impetuously, too, do observation of and teaching about the world change into a doctrine of man, into anthropology.
It is no wonder that humanism first arises where the world becomes picture. . . . Humanism, therefore, in the more strict
historiographical sense, is
nothing but a moral-aesthetic anthropology. The name "anthropology" as used here . . . designates that philosophical
fundamental event of
the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word "picture" [Bild] now means the structured
image [Gebild] that is the creature of man's producing which represents and sets before [des vorstellenden Herstellens]. In such
producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and
draws up the guidelines for everything that is.52 Like Foucault's analysis of the panopticism of the disciplinary society, Heidegger's
analysis of the "age of the world picture" exposes the "calculative thinking" (rechnende Denken) of anthropological
representation (Vorstellung) to be a problematic that constitutes ("produces") the subject as "technological"
consciousness. In turn, this subject, as Heidegger puts it elsewhere, "enframes" (Ge-stell) the temporality of being in its own
(anthropological) image. And by thus achieving such a deceptive representational technique of mastery over physis in
the modern age, this subjected subject has come perilously close to reducing "its" dynamic and "proliferating"—
its differential— processes, including human being, into not simply knowable objects, but objects as "standing
reserve" (Bestand), as "docile and useful bodies," as it were. This technological "achievement" of humanistic retro-spection or, what is the
same thing, re-collection, is not simply the blindness of the anthropological version of metaphysical oversight. It is a forgetting of the be-ing
of being (the ontological difference) with a vengeance: an amnesia, no less repressive than the super-vision that, according to
Foucault, is the essential agent of discipline in the "regime of truth." This retrieval of Heidegger's version of the origins of the
interpretation of man which explains and evaluates whatever is, in its entirety, from the standpoint of man and in relation to man. . . . The
modern age of the world picture suggests that Foucault's limitation of his genealogy of the disciplinary society to the site of a historically specific politics
obscures and minimizes what in Heidegger's interrogation of the ontotheological tradition constitutes a persuasive enabling disclosure, however limited
in the opposite direction, about the essence of modernity. I mean the prominence of the ideal figure of the centered circle and its discreetly repressive
operations in the discursive practices of modernity at large. The disclosure of the complicity between knowledge and power enabled by Heidegger's
interrogation of the ontotheological tradition, that is, is not finally limited to the site of the positive sciences precipitated in and by the Enlightenment as
the predominant documentary evidence Foucault brings to bear on the question in Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, and
The History of Sexuality, Vol. I seems to suggest. It also includes the site of the so-called litterae humaniores— philosophy, literature, the arts, and so on— privileged by the
cultural memory of modern humanism.
link: democracy promotion
Terrorism is a manifestation of the American project to homogenize Being through democracy
promotion.
Mitchell, 05 (Andrew J Mitchell. Research in Phenomenology. Pittsburgh: 2005.Vol.35 pg. 181, 38 pgs,
Proquest, HEIDEGGER AND TERRORISM, (Philosophy Fellow, Stanford)).
Terrorism will take place in the withdrawal of being, in the unworld of machination. The modern
configuration of war is surpassed by the technological plan of homogenized circulation, and the
distinction between war and peace falls away in their mutual commitment to furthering the
cycle of production and consumption. The abandonment of being that forms this unworld by draining
the world of its being does not occur without a trace, however, and terror in its trembling corresponds to that
trace. Terrorism necessarily results from such a devastation-or, "becoming-desert," Verwüstung-of
the world; terrorism is always born in the desert. Terrorism is metaphysical because it touches everything,
every particular being, all of which may be attacked and annihilated. The circulation of the standingreserve sets an equivalence of value among things with a resulting worldlessness where
existence is another name for exchangeability. The exchanged and replaceable things are already replaced and exchanged, not serially, but essentially.
They are not fully present when here. Terrorism names this absence, or rather is the effect of this absence, which is to say it is that absence itself, since here we are not dealing with an absence that could be
the effect of any loss of presence. The absence in question is not an absence of presence, but an absence in and through presence. It would be ridiculous to think that such a change in being would lack a
corresponding change in beings. This change in the nature of being shows itself in the fact that all beings today are terrorized. They all stand under a very real threat of destruction via terrorist acts. There
would be no terrorist threat were it not for these terrorists, yet there would be no possibility of a threat were it not for being. Certainly terrorism is not the only "effect" of this absence in presence;
Heidegger frequently refers to the atomic bomb in precisely this regard. Terrorism's claim, however, is distinct from that of atomic war. Like the atomic bomb, terrorism operates at the level of threat.
Insofar as it calls into question all beings, terrorism is itself a metaphysical determination of bang. Terrorism makes everything a possible object of terrorist attack, and this is the very terror of it.
Everything is a possible target, and this now means that all beings exist as possible targets, as possibly destroyed. But this should not be taken to mean that there are discrete beings, fully present, now
threatened with destruction. The ineradicable threat of destruction transforms the nature of the being itself. The being can no longer exist as indifferent to its destruction; this destruction does not reside
outside of the being. Instead, destruction inhabits the being and does so, not as something superadded to the being, but as the essence of the being itself. Beings are henceforth as though destroyed. Terror
brings about an alteration in the very mode of being of reality, the real is now the terrorized. Reality is already terrorized; the change has already taken place, and this regardless of whether an attack comes
. Beings exist as endangered, as terrorized, and this means as no longer purely self-present. It means that, in
terms of pure presence, beings exist as already destroyed. Destruction is not something that comes at a
later date, nor is it something that may or may not already have taken place. Destruction exists now as threat.
or not
Positing democracy as the system that will end all conflict makes alternative modes of thinking
impossible. If only one mode of Being is correct—that of the liberal capitalist manager—then all
of humanity becomes a disposable standing reserve.
Spanos, (Professor of English at SUNY–Binghamton) 03 (The Question of Philosophy and Poiesis in
the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/Imagining the Shadow of Metaphysics, William V. Spanos, boundary 2 30.3
(2003) 29-66).
What I want to underscore, in other words, is that the dominant liberal democratic/capitalist culture’s
representation of the post–cold war as the advent of the peace of the new world order must be understood not
simply as the global triumph of an economic-political system. Equally, if not more, important for the present
historical conjuncture, though more difficult to perceive, it must also be understood, as the alignment of this
end-of-history discourse with the new (political) world order clearly suggests, as the global triumph of an
indissolubly related ontology and its banalizing instrumentalist language. It must be understood, that is, not
simply as the Pax Americana but also, and perhaps above all, as the Pax Metaphysica: that teleological
representation of being which, unlike all other past representations, now, at the end of the dialectical
historical process, claims to be noncontradictory, that is, devoid of conflict, and which, therefore,
renders any alternative representation of truth—and of the truth of history—in the future
impossible. In short, it should be understood as the completion of the perennial Occidental project that is and,
however unevenly in any historically specific moment, always has been simultaneously and indissolubly an
imperial political practice and an imperial practice of thinking as such, a polyvalent praxis, in other
words, the end of which is the enframement, colonization, and reduction of the differential human mind as
well as the differential human community to disposable reserve. In his late essays, Heidegger insistently
called for the rethinking of thinking itself as the first praxis in a “destitute time,”14 because “it lies under a
double lack and a double Not: the No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is
coming.”15 In the process, Heidegger proleptically referred to this representation of being in modernity as the
planetary triumph of technology in the “age of the world picture.” By “world picture,” he meant the
global triumph of a mode of knowledge production—and the language, the saying, inherent in it—
inaugurated by the imperial Romans that reduces the differential force of the being about which it is inquiring
into an inclusive and naturalized spatial trope: a “world picture” (Weltbild), or, to invoke an undeveloped but extremely suggestive motif
in Foucault’s thought, a “domain,” an “area,” a “region,” a “field,” a “territory” to be conquered and colonized, as the (Roman/Latin) etymologies of these metaphors make
forcefully clear. “Region” (of knowledge), for example, derives from the Latin regere, “to command”; “domain,” from dominus, “master” or “lord”; “province,” from vincere, “to
conquer.”17 This is what Heidegger meant when, in response to his Japanese interlocutor’s reference to the East’s increasing temptation “to rely on European ways of
representation,” he said that this “temptation is reinforced by a process which I would call the complete Europeanization of the earth and man.”18 It is this fulfillment, or,
rather, consummation, of the logical economy of metaphysics that, despite the failure of the opposition to hear its claims—not to say the haunting silence on which they are
based—announces itself at the end of the cold war as the end of the dialectical historical process and the advent of the end of history. And it is this consummation—this “end of
philosophy,” as it were—that calls for the retrieval of Heidegger’s project, or, at any rate, the retrieval of the de-structive or deconstructive initiative instigated by his
interrogation of instrumental thinking, the anthropological or post-Enlightenment modality of the end-oriented or retro-spective calculative thinking privileged by the
Occidental tradition. This time around, however, the deconstructive initiative should be undertaken with fuller awareness than in the 1960s and 1970s of the indissoluble
relationship between being and “the world,” between thinking/language and praxis. For it is not simply that the triumph of metaphysical/technological thought in the post–
cold war era has “universalized” thinking from above or after the-things-themselves—which, say, with Heidegger, has demonized “as unreason” “any thinking which rejects the
In thus delegitimizing every other kind of thinking, actual or imaginable, than
the dialectical/instrumental—and inexorably reductive—thinking allegedly precipitated by History itself,
or, to invoke a language usually and disablingly restricted to geopolitics, in thus “totally” colonizing thinking in
general, this metaphysical/technological thought has also, as Antonio Gramsci anticipated in thinking the
political defeat of his antifascist emancipatory movement in the early part of this century as the interregnum,
made it virtually impossible for an adversarial constituency to oppose the imperial discourse in
other than the latter’s terms. To be recognized, an adversarial discourse and practice must be answerable to the
triumphant imperial mode of instrumental thinking.
claim of reason as not originary.”19
link: reading a 1AC
The affirmative’s snapshot of the world poses them as the subjects and the world as their object.
This enframing mission makes the world the standing reserve and every part of it replaceable.
Mitchell, 5 - , Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University (Andrew J, “Heidegger and
Terrorism”, Research in Phenomenology, 35, http://www.technischedaten.com/view/mitchell-heidegger-and-terrorism(2005)/45247219/207zwqqe8tjq9369ypv6/)
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, e-mail, 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 modern 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 beingreplaceable” (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 standingreserve, 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
standing reserve, 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.
link: technology
The drive to develop tech without questioning our relationship with it changes the world into
standing reserve.
Heidegger 49 [Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”, December 1, 1949,
http://www.wright.edu/cola/Dept/PHL/Class/P.Internet/PITexts/QCT.html, MV]
Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence [West] in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where
aletheia, truth, happens. In opposition to this definition of the essential domain of technology, one can object that it indeed holds for Greek thought and
that at best it might apply to the techniques of the handcraftsman, but that it simply does not fit modern machine-powered technology. And it is precisely
the latter and it alone that is the disturbing thing, that moves us to ask the question concerning technology per se. It is said that modern
technology is something incomparably different from all earlier technologies because it is based on modern
physics as an exact science. Meanwhile we have come to understand more clearly that the reverse holds true as well :
Modern physics, as experimental, is dependent upon technical apparatus and upon progress in the building of
apparatus. The establishing of this mutual relationship between technology and physics is correct. But it remains a merely historiographical
establishing of facts and says nothing about that in which this mutual relationship is grounded. The decisive question still remains : Of what essence is
modern technology that it happens to think of putting exact science to use?
What is modern technology? It too is a revealing. Only when we allow our attention to rest on this fundamental characteristic does that which is new in
modern technology show itself to us.
And yet the revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis. The revealing
that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern] ,13 which puts to nature the unreasonable demand
that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails
do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind's blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it.
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 in 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 [stellt] 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 setting-upon that challenges forth the energies of nature is an expediting [Fordern] , 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 on call, ready to deliver the sun's warmth that is stored in it. The sun's warmth is
challenged forth for heat, which in turn is ordered to deliver steam whose pressure turns the wheels that keep a
factory running.
.
link: policy making
Debating about what to do is the wrong approach and guarantees the enforcement of
sovereignty discourse—examining what is going on and how we should understand the world
has to come first.
Shaw, 99 (Poli Sci Professor University of Victoria), 99 (Karena, 9 Transnational Law & Contemporary
Problems 569, lexis).
Consequently, politics today is at least as much about probing and rearticulating the limits of how we
conceptualize the political as it is about mobilizing resources to include people in existing political
arrangements. We cannot assume (and leave others to document) what is going on politically. Nor can we
assume how we should come to understand what is going on, or consider it to be obvious, and
only debate "what to do." In an important sense it is the obvious that is our greatest enemy. It is in the
obvious that our most deeply held assumptions are lodged. Thus, we must simultaneously pursue the questions
of what is going on and how we should understand what is going on. We can only pursue these questions
through a critical relation to our own categories and assumptions. More precisely, our work must come to grips
with the spatial and temporal preconditions for the constitution of subjectivity, political authority and
sovereignty. We must come to grips with the architecture articulated by Hobbes, as it is instantiated today. It is
through seeing how the spatial and temporal preconditions for the constitution of subjectivity and sovereignty
are already being reconstituted and rearticulated that we can come to develop a critical perspective on the
categories through which we discipline the political.
Avoiding ontological questioning for the sake of management turns all life into standing
reserve.
Thiele, 97, - Ph.D. department of politics at University of florida, [Leslie Paul Thiele, “Postmodernity and the Routinization of Novelty: Heidegger
on Boredom and Technology”, Polity, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Summer, 1997), pp. 489-517, jstor]
Busy-ness is the chief means by which everyday life evades ontological questioning. The everyday achieves its
escape from anxious thought in heightened worldly activity. The "tranquillity" of inauthentic Being "drives one
into ininhibited 'hustle.' "41 Boredom does not preclude such activity. Indeed, a continuous flurry of activity often becomes
boredom's chief defense against thoughtful anxiety. The engines of convention and coping that propel our
everyday busy-ness find a particularly powerful fuel in modem technology. Technology, for Heidegger, does not
refer to the development of machines, tools, or skills but to the "enframing" (Gestell) of the world under the
imperial mandate of efficient exploitation. Deep boredom evidences itself today not so much in Hamlet-like brooding as in this fast-paced
enframing of the world Heidegger observes that we are increasingly reluctant to "station ourselves in the storm of Being.
Yet everything today betrays the fact that we bestir ourselves only to drive storms away. We organize all
available means for cloudseeding and storm dispersal in order to have calm in the face of the storm. But this
calm is no tranquillity. It is only anesthesia; more precisely, the narcotization of anxiety in the face of thinking."42 In
other words, technological hyperactivity ensures that philosophic thought seldom surfaces and that existential
anxiety never gains sway. Vast in its reach and furious in its pace, modern technological activity proves the most effective means of dissipating
the storm of Being. It also allows us to bear the burden of boredom in relative comfort, even with a heightened sense of excitement. Each age, Heidegger
indicates, is dominated by a basic mood that structures its development. Boredom is the basic mood of the technological age. It accompanies another
basic mood of the times-horror-a state of spiritual shell-shock that, no less than boredom, paralyzes one in the face of utter meaninglessness.
Horror( Erschreckungi) is an appropriate, but often repressed, reaction to the experience of a nihilistic world in which everything is permitted. Its
relationship to boredom is complementary. A deep, pervasive boredom, a boredom with life and being, may induce forms
of nihilistic behavior-as Dostoevsky graphically observes-to which horror seems the only appropriate, if
ineffective, response.43 John Stuart Mill described his own own time as "destitute of faith, but terrified at skepticism." Faith may indeed be
scarce today. But terror at skepticism is increasingly absent in the postmodern world. Such terror has been largely replaced with technological
preoccupations. From an ontic perspective, technology is tremendously creative and its productive capacities
give
no indication of abating. From an ontological viewpoint, however, the totalizing reach of modern technology
reveals a nihilistic core. Modern technology belies a vast and powerful ordering of an absence, an absence that can
find no corrective in the over-production of things. "The emptiness of Being," Heidegger writes, "can never be filled up by the fullness of beings,
especially when this emptiness can never be experienced as such, the only way to escape it is incessantly to arrange beings in the
constant possibility of being ordered as the form of guaranteeing aimless activity. Viewed in this way, technology is the
organization of a lack."44 Technology replaces the emptiness of Being revealed in the mood of boredom
with the production and consumption of artifacts and the unrelenting manipulation of the
world. It reduces the world to a "standing reserve" (Bestand).
link: truth claims
Our hubristic assumption that we can know the world inherently justifies domination.
Spanos, 93 – Heideggerian literary critic, Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at
Binghamton University, completed his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison [1993, William V.
Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, University of Minnesota Press,
ISBN: 9780816684427, pg. 138-9, Accessed through Ebrary]
Understood in the context of this destructive reading of history, then, the
temporal "progress" of Western civilization, including the cultural and
the eventual
recognition and exploitation of the indissoluble relationship between visual (spatial) perception of things-as-theyare and cultural, economic, and sociopolitical power. What from the beginning of the Western tradition was a
tentative, discontinuous, and unevenly developed intuition of this relationship coalesced in the episteme variously
called the Enlightenment, the age of reason, or bourgeois capitalism, (and, not incidentally, the Augustan Age). According to Heidegger, this is the
historical conjuncture that bore witness to the triumph of "re-presentation," the thinking of being as "world
picture": the hardening of metaphysical speculation into a calculative technology of "enframing" (Gestell), in which
being (including Dasein [being-in-the-world]) has been reduced to "standing reserve" (Bestand). According to Foucault's remarkably analogous, if
political narrative paradigms it has elaborated to legitimate its particular allotropes, has in a general, however uneven, way involved
more decisively concrete diagnosis, it is the episteme that bore witness to the emergence of the "panoptic" schema, the microphysics of power that constituted
the subject (the sovereign individual) to facilitate the achievement of sociopolitical consensus (identity) in the volatile social context precipitated by a
rapidly changing demography. To anticipate the affiliative relationship between Heidegger's and Foucault's discourses that I will treat more fully, this
"progress" has involved the eventual recognition and exploitation of the integral relation-ship between the perennially and increasingly privileged figure
of the centered circle as the image of beauty and perfection and the centered circle as the ideal instrument of a totalized sociopolitical domination. PostRenaissance Man
intuited the inherent "strength" (which from a destructive perspective discloses the essential weakness) of metaphysical
epistemology: its ability to see or re-present the differential temporal process as integral and
inclusive picture (table, blueprint, grid, design, strategic map, etc.) or, negatively, to lose sight of and forget difference, in the
pursuit of the certainty (distance) of logocentric order. This intuition, in turn, enabled the transformation of the oversight of the metaphysical overview (survey) into a pervasive methodological or disciplinary instrument for the
discreet coercion of difference into identity all through the field of forces that constitute being, from the
ontological and epistemological sites through language and culture to economics and sociopolitics (gender, race, family,
state, etc.). In the "age of the world picture," more accurately, metaphysical speculation was transformed into a
disciplinary instrument positively capable of colonizing the "other," of harnessing difference (the individual entity) in
behalf of normalization and utility: that is, exploitation. This centered "speculative instrument," which has inscribed its
recollective/visual interpretive imperatives into all phases of Western culture, was and continues to be defined
by that dominant social formation that benefits most from the circumscription and colonization of the earth . It
therefore also serves, however inadvertently in some instances, to legitimate the dominant political/economic power structure
(and its hegemonic purposes)—now become the computerized late capitalist establishment— that has largely determined the societies of
Europe (including, until recently, the Soviet bloc) and America and their extraterritorial (colonial) ends since the Enlightenment. The difference between
past and present is not ontologically substantive: whereas before the Enlightenment the center or eye that dominated was visible, in the age of the world
picture or, alternatively, of panoplies, it has become "a center elsewhere . . . beyond the reach of [free] play": in Gramsci's term, "hegemonic."
The humanist claim to “know” justifies Western management and imperial domination.
Spanos, 93 – Heideggerian literary critic, Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at
Binghamton University, completed his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison [1993, William V.
Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, University of Minnesota Press,
ISBN: 9780816684427, pg. 140-2, Accessed through Ebrary]
Indeed, this possibility of destructive hermeneutics is reflected, however minimally thought in terms of its historical specificity, in several crucial, albeit largely overlooked,
moments in Heidegger's texts, especially after his realization that the Nazi project to which he had committed his energies in the period of the rectorship
was itself "caught up in the consummation of nihilism." 11 Thus, for example, in "Letter on Humanism," written in 1947, Heidegger extends his
ontological/epistemological genealogy of the "truth" of modernity— the truth of disinterested inquiry— in Being and Time to encompass its affiliative
relationship to sociopolitics. In this essay, Heidegger shows that the epochal Roman translation of the Greek aletheia to veritas enabled not only the truth
of the ontotheological tradition at large but also— and contrary to its modern apologists, who trace its origins to Greek thought— the truth of humanist
modernity. In so doing, he implicates the discourse of humanism and the sociopolitical practice of modern democratic/humanist states with Rome's
imperial project. According to Heidegger's genealogy of humanist truth, we recall, the decisive event in the historical process of the Occident's selfrepresentation occurred when the Romans translated the Greek understanding of truth as aletheia (unconcealment) to veritas as adequaetio intellectus
et rei, which, whether understood as " 'the correspondence of the matter to knowledge' or 'the correspondence of knowledge to the matter' has
continually in view a conforming to ... and hence think[s] truth as correctness [Richtigkeit]." 12 The epochal turning point occurred when the Romans
began to think temporal phenomena "technologically": on the basis of aground achieved by originary Greek thinking. The "translation of Greek names
into Latin," Heidegger writes, "is in no way the innocent process it is considered to be to this day. Beneath the seeming and thus faithful translation there
is concealed, rather, a translation, of Greek experience into a different way of thinking." Roman thought emphatically and insistently "takes over Creek
words without a corresponding, equally original experience of what they say, without the Greek word. The rootlessness of Western thought begins with
this translation." 13 Henceforth and increasingly, "the ontology which . . . has thus arisen has deteriorated to a tradition in which it gets reduced to
something self-evident— merely material for reworking, as it was for Hegel." Greek ontology thus uprooted becomes "a fixed body of doctrine," 14 a
"free-floating" discourse that, remote from the historicity of being-in-the-world, nevertheless determines history from that remoteness. 15 Truth as
veritas involves the transformation of the uncentered— originary and errant— thinking of the Greeks into a secondary and derivative— and calculative—
technology, in which the end determines the process of inquiry. To invoke the visual metaphorics underlying Heidegger's differentiation between aletheia
and veritas— the metaphorics that brings Heidegger's interrogation of modernity into convergence with Foucault's— the Greek aletheia Heidegger would
retrieve enables the always already de-structuring process of inquiry that he calls "repetition" (Wiederholung). This is the paradoxical circular movement
that always already dis-closes (brings to light/liberates) the difference ordinarily closed off and concealed (by being "spoken for") by the identical
discourse of "structure." It is the movement that precipitates an Erwiderung: a "reciprocal rejoinder" (which is a "disavowal") of what has been handed
down (now understood as "forestructure," as opposed to "presupposition," that necessarily begins inquiry). Repetition, [we recall], is handing down
explicitly— that is to say, going back into the possibilities of the Dasein that have-been-there. But when one has, by repetition, handed down to oneself a
possibility that has been, the Dasein that has-been-there is not disclosed in order to be actualized over again. The repeating of that which is possible does
not bring down again [ Wiederbringen] something that is "past," nor does it bind the "Present" back to that which has already been "outstripped." . . .
Rather, the repetition makes a reciprocative rejoinder to the possibility of that existence which has-been-there. But when such a rejoinder is made to this
possibility in a resolution, it is made in a moment of vision [Augenblick]; and as such it is at the same time a disavowal of that which in the "today" is
working itself out as the "past."16 The Roman veritas as adequaetio intellects et rei involves a derivative mode of inquiry in which
the principle that identity is the condition for the possibility of difference is determinative . It is a logocentrism
that begins inquiry into the differential phenomena (objects and events) disseminated by a temporality "grounded" in
nothing (das Nichts) from the end. To emphasize its visual orientation, inquiry understood as adequation of mind and thing proceeds from above (meta-taphysika): from a fixed transcendental vantage point— a "Transcendental Signified" or "center elsewhere," in Derrida's terms, which is beyond the reach of free play. In thus
privileging the surveying and globalizing eye of vision, it has as its ultimate purpose the coercion of
difference into the circumference of the identical circle. The center spatializes and reifies the
disseminations of temporality in order to "comprehend" them: not simply to know but to "take hold
of" or "manage," that is, dominate and use them. The comportment toward phenomena the center
enables is thus that of the commanding eye, that is to say, the panoptic gaze. It is a visual comportment that
represents the force of difference as that which truth is not, as false (falsum) and thus as a threat to truth that must
be domesticated or pacified, willfully reduced to the same in the name of this justice. From this genealogy of the concept
of the "truth" of modernity— of the humanist post-Enlightenment— which discloses its origins in the Roman translation of the
Greek aletheia to veritas, the hermeneutic circle (repetition) to the drculus vitiosus (recollection) that would pacify the
force of difference (of that which is "outside" the boundary of the centered circle), Heidegger proceeds to implicate this Romanized
"truth" explicitly with modern cultural production— specifically humanist paideia— and implicitly with the modern
Western state: Humanitas, explicitly so called, was first considered and striven for in the age of the Roman Republic. Homo humanus was opposed to homo barbarus.
Homo humanus here means the Romans, who exalted and honored Roman virtus through the "embodiment" of the paideia [education] taken over from the Greeks. These
were the Greeks of the Hellenistic age, whose culture was acquired in the schools of philosophy. It was concerned with eruditio et institutio in bonas artes [scholarship and
training in good conduct]. Paideia thus understood was translated as humanitas. The genuine romanitas of homo romanus consisted in such humanitas. We encounter the first
humanism in Rome: it therefore remains in essence a specifically Roman phenomenon which emerges from the encounter of Roman civilization with the culture of late Greek
civilization. The so-called Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Italy is a renascentia romanitatis. Because romanitas is what matters, it is concerned with
humanitas and therefore with Greek paideia. But Greek civilization is always seen in its later form and this itself is seen from a Roman point of view. 17
Modernity’s quest for truth is tied to the creation of hegemonic empire.
Spanos, 93 – Heideggerian literary critic, Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at
Binghamton University, completed his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison [1993, William V.
Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, University of Minnesota Press,
ISBN: 9780816684427, pg. 143-4, Accessed through Ebrary]
In this very resonant, but largely neglected, passage from "Letter on Humanism," Heidegger ostensibly restricts the genealogy of modernity to the complicity between
humanist ontology and humanist pedagogy: the logocentrism (and its will to power) informing Roman veritas also informs the Roman paideia. Truth and
knowledge production in the anthropological tradition, according to Heidegger, are, however unevenly developed, coextensive. But if we read this essay
in the historically specific context in which it was written— the catastrophe of Europe precipitated by the Third Reich— a further extension in the relay of power
disclosed by the
discourse and practice of humanist modernity announces itself, one that implicates truth and knowledge
with the politics of imperialism. For clearly, what Heidegger is saying here is not simply that the "disinterested truth" and the "liberal" cultural
apparatuses of the post-Enlightenment tradition (humanism) have their origins in a pedagogical technology designed to produce "Romans," a "manly"
citizenry, which, as the embodiment of a paideia that "exalted and honored Roman virtus" would constitute a disciplined and dependable (or in
Foucault's terms, "useful and docile") collective of individuals. As the resonant opposition between homo humanus, which "here means the Romans,"
and homo barbarus makes clear, the ultimate purpose of the logocentric Roman veritas and its paideia was the production
of a disciplined and dependable citizenry committed to the achievement of the hegemonic empire, an
efficient army of citizens, as it were. To put this relay of knowledge/power relations in terms of the metaphorics of the centered circle
privileged by the humanist tradition, the self-present subject as citizen/soldier produced by the discourse of veritas and its paideia became the structural
model of the Civitas. Just as the humanist anthropologos justifies the domestication by "cultivation" of the
differential "provincial" energies of immature and deviant youth, so the self-present Capitol, or the Metropolis,
justifies the colonization of the barbarian energies of the provincial peoples, who, as "other," threaten its
civilized space. It is no accident, I would add to Heidegger's genealogy of humanism, that the English words "cultivate" and "culture"
privileged by this tradition, especially since the Enlightenment, are cognates of "colonize" (from the Latin colonus, "tiller,"
"cultivator," "planter," "settler") and colere (to cultivate or plant). Nor is it accidental that these privileged counters have their
ideological origin not in ancient Greek words referring to such agents and practices, but in the Latin circulus: the figure appropriated from the Greek words
KOKXos (cycle) or KipKos (ring) to represent and symbolize beauty, truth, and perfection. In sum, the Roman ideological reduction and codification of the
"errancy" and "prodigality" of originary (aletheiological) Greek thinking— their circumscription, cultivation, and colonization of truth-as-always-already
aletheia— gave rise to its disciplinary educational project, and also legitimated the Romans' will to power over the peripheral and lowly— provincial—
"barbarians." In short, the Roman translation of Greek thinking enabled in some fundamental way the Roman "imperium sine jini" (as Virgil puts it in
the Aeneid), which goes by the duplicitous name of the Pax Romana. It is, according to Heidegger's genealogy, this relay of repressions at the sites of the
subject, cultural production, and the City, and enabled by the idealization of the circle, the center of which is both inside and outside (above) that
constitutes the origins of the discourse and practice of the modern West. 18 The circle and the affiliated metaphors constellated around its center— the
polarities of light/darkness, high/low, prelapsarian/fallen, and so on— are polyvalent in their material applications. To put Heidegger's genealogy of the
discourse, cultural institutions, and sociopolitical practices of humanist modernity in terms of the legacy of imperial Rome is to indicate how near,
however more generalized, it is to Michel Foucault's genealogy of the modern disciplinary society. I mean specifically the panoptic society eventually
precipitated by an Enlightenment that deliberately appropriated the Roman model (specifically, the diagram of the military camp structure) to articulate
its disciplinary epistemology, pedagogy, cultural agenda, and internal and external politics.
Truth and power are co-productive—to claim to know is to enable imperial domination.
Spanos, 93 – Heideggerian literary critic, Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at
Binghamton University, completed his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison [1993, William V.
Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, University of Minnesota Press,
ISBN: 9780816684427, pg. 147-8, Accessed through Ebrary]
The relay in this extraordinary passage between Roman truth (and falsehood), Roman cultural production, and Roman politics determined by the metaphorics of the
supervisory gaze and the transcendental center is obvious. What should not be overlooked, however, is the historically specific context Heidegger's Parmenides addresses. At
its most general level, it constitutes a genealogy of modern power relations. More specifically, it demonstrates that the
"strong" discursive practices of what
he calls "humanism" in his postwar "Letter on Humanism" have their origins, not in Greek thought, as it is assumed in modern Europe at large, but in the
circular (anthropo)logic, the disciplinary pedagogy, and the imperial practice of Rome. It is no accident that in the latter half of
the passage Heidegger carefully distinguishes between two kinds of domination that have a single origin. One kind of power over the fallen "other"
operates directly (is immediate) and is thus visible; the other operates by indirection or detour (Hintergehung), is mediate, and
is thus invisible. The "bringing-down-to-ground" can be accomplished in a direct assault (Sturm) or repressive
conquest; or it can be achieved by discursive practices that are deceptively benign. But what is crucial is not simply that they are
both determined by a fixed center that is above or beyond the reach of free play— of "reciprocal rejoinder," as it were— but also, and above all, that it is the latter—
specifically, the discourse enabled by the Roman veritas/fahum opposition— that characterizes the developed form of
"imperial" domination: "It is not in war, but in the fallen of deceptive outflanking and its appropriation to the
service of dominion that the proper and 'great' trait of the imperial reveals itself." However generalized Heidegger's formulation,
we are not far here from the poststructuralist and neo-Marxist interrogation of power relations in modernity: Foucault's analysis of the repressive hypothesis determining the
practices of the disciplinary society, Gramsci's analogous analysis of capitalist hegemony, Althusser's analysis of the ideological state apparatuses, 23 and Said's analysis of the
effects of the "strong languages" of the West vis-a-vis the "weak languages" of the "Third World," all of which implicate the "truth" of the dominant discursive practices with
power and domination over the threatening "other." Indeed, if, as there is every justification to do, we conflate the passages from the lectures on the Parmenides and the
"Letter on Humanism" addressing the Roman reduction of Greek thinking, we arrive at the following proposition: Truth
and power, knowledge
production and repression, according to Heidegger, are not external to each other (as they are assumed to be in the discursive
practices of humanism), but continuous and complicitous with each other . To put it in terms of the figure informing this relation, the circle
of truth/beauty/perfection is also the circle of domination. The violence that accompanies overt imperialism is
not incommensurate with but latent in the truth of humanism. Remarkably like Foucault, the benign discursive practices
of humanism collectively constitute a "regime of truth."
link: hegemony
Acting as if our military can guarantee world peace is inherently colonialist and ensures
domination.
Spanos 8 [William V. Spanos, 2008, “American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization”, Chapter 1 Pages 19-22, MV]
Given the glaring visibility of Fukuyama’s invisibilizing of the Vietnam War—a process further abetted by Richard Haass's, and, as l will show later,
Samuel P. Huntington's and the numerous Straussian neoconservatives' "realisitic" representation of the post-9/11 world—it is surprising, in other
words, that these oppositional discourses should have been blind to his arrogant (or incredibly naive) re-visionary/recuperative strategy, to the fact
that this end-of-history discourse of what, since then, has come to be called "the American Century" relies on
a now anachronistic ontological justification. I mean a rationale that reverts to the very episteme—the ground of legitimacy—that the
singular event of the Vietnam War and the "theory" it precipitated had decisively delegitimized by revealing the truth discourse of liberal capitalist
democracy to be a social construction—that of the "Anglo-Protestant core culture," as Huntington will put it after 9/11-infused by a totalizing will to
power that is characterized by its suppression or accommodation, the colonization, as it were, of the entire relay of Others composing the continuum of
being to its polyvalent Identity. To put that which these oppositional discourses overlook succinctly, Fukuyama's representation of the end of the Cold
War or, to emphasize that it is the hegemonization of this end-of-history discourse with which l am concerned, the
mediatization of his representation, is informed by a metaphysical ontology that willfully subdues actual
history, its differential dynamics, to its secularized transcendental Logos. In short, the
calculative/instrumentalist thinking it privileges as the agency of truth is essentially imperial. It is not so much
liberal capitalism's practical colonization of the planet as such that this end-of-history discourse is celebrating.
After all, Fukuyama, Haass, and the culture they and their neoconservative col- leagues represent acknowledge the
possibility of future setbacks and dis- appointments in this geopolitical "American" project. lt is, rather, its
planetary colonization of thinking in its technological/instrumentalist mode, though the two are not mutually
exclusive, indeed, are indissolubly related. The fundamental ideological purpose of this discourse is to delegitimize every other form of
thinking than that dialectical/instrumental reasoning that, according to the Kojevian/Hegelian perspective informing it, History's Aufhebung has
precipitated as the planetary absolute-the Pax Metaphysica, as it were.
This total "victory” of a historically "perfected" calculative metaphysics means, of course, the decisive preclusion as a viable option of the kind of
ontological political thinking precipitated as an imperative by the recognition of the Vietnam War as a radical contradiction in the discursive practices of
liberal capitalist democracy, the kind of differential thinking, that is, that haunts the legitimacy of the latter's "benign" global narrative. The massive
post-Cold War representation of every manifestation of such thinking first as "politically correct." a "new McCarthyism of the Left,” by the "victors" has
contributed significantly to the demise of the little authority it originally achieved, indeed, as I will show, to their demonization after 9/11 as complicitous
with, if not acts of, terrorism as such. It thus bears emphatic witness to the success of the dominant culture's recuperative project of delegitimizing-which
is to say, of colonizing-a thinking that would think the spectral difference that cannot finally be contained by the imperial (onto)logic of liberal
democracy.
link: avoiding impacts
The impact claims of the affirmative present us with an opportunity to NOT act in the face of
fear. This confronts us with dread and enables ontological grappling.
Thiele, 97, - Ph.D. department of politics at University of florida, [Leslie Paul Thiele, “Postmodernity and the
Routinization of Novelty: Heidegger on Boredom and Technology”, Polity, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Summer, 1997), pp.
489-517, jstor]
The mood Heidegger is best known for investigating, which became the basis for much existentialist interest in him, is anxiety
or dread (Angst). Anxiety is the disposition in which thrownness is made self-conscious and experienced most
profoundly. Anxiety disallows our everyday turn- ing away from thrownness, maintaining the relation of Beingin as prob- lematic. Heidegger states succinctly that "anxiousness as a state-of-mind is a way of Being-in-the-world; that
in the face of which we have anxiety is thrown Being-in-the-world."29 When anxious, one fears nothing in
particular, nothing identifiable. Yet there remains a certain foreboding. A dread of confronting one's finitude,
one's ungroundedness, persists. The worldly stage is nervously sensed as not of one's making or choos- ing. One
finds oneself cast in a role beyond one's power fully to direct or control. Anxiety is perhaps best described as
the state of unease in which one's "there" is revealed to be not fully one's own. One feels displaced. The world is disclosed as foreign.
Anxiety is the foreboding of home- lessness. Heidegger describes anxiety as "unheimlich." Translators have gen- erally
rendered this as uncanny. The connotation of uneasy strangeness is also present in the German. Literally, however, unheimlich means unhomelike.
Anxiety brings us back from our absorption in the world such that everyday familiarity collapses. This collapse
of routine worldli- ness is ontologically definitive of human being. Anxiety, then, is the mood of homelessness
that tears one away from moods of habitual coping. Anxiety is neither a deprived state of human being nor a deficient state of mind.
On the contrary, from an ontological perspective, anxiety is a fundamental disposition, a home(less) base from which other moods depart.30 Being at
home in the world, in the manner of feeling comfortable within the weave of convention, signals a fleeing into ontic familiarity in the face of ontological
uncanniness. What is dangerous, Heidegger main- tains, is not that this flight occurs. We all necessarily live in the manner of everydayness as a condition
of human being, shifting for ourselves and with others. Life itself, one might fairly say, depends upon this ingenious or routine self-management. At the
same time, anxiety should not be deprecated. It brings to light the ontological reality of our thrown, ungrounded,
and contingent nature. We cannot achieve and should not seek a permanent escape from our
existential homelessness and the anxiety it engenders.31 Indeed, the uniqueness and greatness of human
being lies in its capacity reflectively to experience its ungrounded contingency. What is dangerous, Heidegger
maintains, is the systematic effort to forego the struggle with contin- gency.32 Human being oscillates
between an ontic ensconcing in the world and an ontological alienation from it. While one never truly secures a
home on this earth, the effort to discover a home (in homeless- ness) is imperative. To abandon this effort.
Heidegger suggests, is to embrace nihilism. Heidegger challenges us to dwell in the homelessness that
anxiety brings to light. Indeed, the "becoming at home in not being home" (das Heimisch werden im Unheimischsein) is
announced as the meaning of our worldly dwelling. What is truly dangerous, then, is not our un- grounded thrownness or
contingent finitude, but our lack of concern for these states of homelessness. What is dangerous is not the mood of
anxi- ety that brings us to contemplate nothingness, but the nihilistic refusal to engage in such
contemplation.
***ALT
Alt solves global domination
Releasement creates an ethical engagement with the world that can break us from the quest for
global domination.
Thiele, 4, - Ph.D. department of politics at University of florida, [Leslie Paul Thiele, August, “Review: A
(Political) Philosopher by Any Other Name: The Roots of Heidegger's Thought”, jstor]
In a 1955 address delivered at his birth town of Messkirch, Heidegger discussed the significance of "homeland." Avoiding nationalist overtones but
focused on place, Heidegger was revisiting a concern for Bodenstandigkeit, or "rootedness," that occupied him since the early 1920s and rose to political
prominence the following decade. Homelessness, Heidegger continued to lament after the war, was becoming the global destiny of humankind.
Technology and its socio-political handmaid, liberal cosmopolitanism, were depicted as the chief threats. A recovery from the enframing
grasp of technology was to be gained, if it was to be gained, only through a (re)discovery of our capacity for
rootedness and releasement (Gelassenheit). Releasement-a 'letting-be' and a bearing witness-would serve along
with rootedness as antidotes to the will to mastery over space and time that was tightening technology's grip . To
the extent that moral systems remain characterized by the willful ordering of the world, they were depicted as
(just) another form of enframing. In their stead, Heidegger asked that we shift our attention back to the
Heraclitean notion of ethics as ethos or dwelling place. The alternative to humanistic ethics in a cosmopolitan age
of technology is an "originary ethics" marked by the rediscovery of our potential for dwelling in place, poetically
and politically. Stuart Elden's Mapping the Present is a lively discussion of the importance of place in the writings of Heidegger and Foucault.
Though the least compelling of the books examined here, Mapping the Present is rightly directed in its recommendation that theorists" spatialize history
and not simply historicize space" (p. 153). Elden argues that Heidegger shaped Foucault's historical approach, and, more specifically, helped him develop
a concern for spatial history, understood not in terms of physical extension through a series of chronological moments (a la Descartes), but as a concern
for a place of dwelling that is experienced historically, which is to say, authentically. As Elden observes, Dasein is the point of collision of a
historical being with a futural orientation in a situated present. In the Augenblick, an authentic grappling with the
space-time of Dasein, one effectively maps the present. Heidegger's effort to overcome metaphysics chiefly
constituted the rejection of a modern understanding of time and space, an understanding Heidegger deemed fit
only for world domination. In Hilderlin's tributes to journey and place, Heidegger found the voice for a new, or
rediscovered, relationship. Elden argues that Foucault's concern with space demonstrates his indebtedness to Heidegger. This assertion is
thinly documented, notwithstanding Foucault's own high estimate of Heidegger. To be sure, Foucault analyzed the geography of power. He investigated
the policing of modern spaces, whether these were the collective places of surveillance-madhouses, prisons, and clinics-or the compartmentso f the soul
where disciplineb ecomes internalized. But describing Foucault as a thinker interested in the exercise of power within and between bodies, psyches, and
social networks does not go very far in demonstrating his Heideggerian roots.
Alt solves ethics
Ontological questioning is grounded in a radical notion of human freedom that demands deep
reflection on ethics.
Dallmayr, 84 - Professor in the departments of philosophy and political science at the University of Notre
Dame, [Fred, may, “Ontology of Freedom: Heidegger and Political Philosophy”, Political Theory, Vol. 12, No. 2
(May, 1984), pp. 204-234, jstor]
The implications of Heidegger's conception of freedom for contemporary political and social theory are
numerous and, I believe, far-reaching. Clearly the most important feature is the dislodging of freedom from human willfulness and subjectivity-a
decentering deviating radically from the modern tendency to treat freedom as individual (or collective) property and thus as a particular quality of
individual (or collective) decisions. From his earliest to his latest writings, Heidegger has tried to explore the presubjective or ontological grounding of
freedom an exploration, however, that did not sacrifice free initiative or action to a blind fate or to the mechanical operation of environmental and
structural constraints. In addition to challenging the traditional doctrine of free will, his conception also implies a
departure from the conventional framework of causality and especially from the view that willing, as the core of
freedom, signifies the causation or causal production of effects. In light of the frequent charge of amoralism (if
not immoralism), it is important to note the ethical connotations of Heidegger's perspective-although this perspective
is patently incompatible with both naturalistic and voluntaristic versions of ethics. As it seems to me, instead of simply perpetuating (or
abolishing) traditional value theories, Heidegger's work seeks to uncover the ontological conditions of
possibility of valuing or-more appropriately phrased-of "goodness" and "evil."37 Particularly his lectures on Schelling
adumbrate the intimate connection between freedom and the "capacity for good and evil." From this vantage point, the genuine or unperverted
exercise of freedom is shown to be a persistent tendency or inclination toward the good life, that is, toward
human reconciliation and peace-an aspect that casts a stark new light on such customary ideological antitheses
as liberalism and socialism. Instead of vouchsafing individual isolation and selfishness, freedom in this view is
not merely an accidental ingredient, but the essential grounding of human solidarity (or socialism)-just as solidarity
properly construed denotes a reciprocal effort of liberation or a mutual "letting-be."
Alt solves technological thought
A refusal to act enables us to break from technological thought.
Thiele, 97, - Ph.D. department of politics at University of florida, [Leslie Paul Thiele, “Postmodernity and the Routinization of Novelty: Heidegger
on Boredom and Technology”, Polity, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Summer, 1997), pp. 489-517, jstor]
To avoid this reduction, Heidegger writes, we must "overcome the compulsion to lay our hands on everything. "
45 Though Heidegger is frequently misinterpreted on this point, refusing to lay our hands on everything does not signal a retreat
from the world, nor even an end to the use and development of machines or other products of technology . The
problem is not the human creation and use of machines but rather the creation and use of
human machines-the making of ourselves into mere extensions of technological forces and
processes. Refusing to lay our hands on everything simply means a halt to the imperial attitude which
enframes everything, everywhere, as raw material awaiting exploitation. The link between modern technology and deep
boredom is perhaps best illustrated by examining their common relation to time. The essence of technological activity is efficiency. Its
goal is to achieve given ends such as the production of energy, artifacts, knowledge, wealth, power, or pleasure-with a minimum expenditure of resources.
Foremost among these resources is time itself. Modern technology assails time in its effort to speed through atomic, global,
and cosmic space, and by accelerating daily routines and functions. This victory over time bears a price:
humanity comes to relate to time as an obstacle and antagonist, as a recalcitrant force that demands harnessing.
The effect of technological innovation, in other words, is not so much the saving of time as its conquest. Human
being is a dwelling in time, a disclosive being-in-the-word. Human being's "letting-become present," Heidegger
writes, "is nothing other than time itself."46 Yet one can not truly dwell in time if one orients oneself to it as a
hostile force to be overcome or a fleeting externality to be captured and put to work.47I n fostering an antagonistic
orientation to time, technology disrupts our worldliness. In the same vein, boredom makes our timely Being-in-the-world onerous and the world's
potential for timely disclosure a matter of indifference. Consequently time weighs most heavily on the bored. It is an object of resistance and resentment.
Profound boredom signifies an unwillingness, timidity, or incapacity to experience Being as time.
Alt solves terrorism
The critique turns terrorism:
a) The will to control the world through security planning is what creates terrorism,
b) The drive for security is simultaneously an effort at total surveillance and calculation—
this makes all life into meaningless standing reserve, and
c) Governments create threats to justify their drive for power.
The alternative alone is the only way to solve because the frenzy of management eclipses
ontological questions.
Mitchell, 05 (Andrew J Mitchell. (Philosophy Fellow, Stanford) Research Phenomenology. Pittsburgh:
2005.Vol.35 pg. 181, 38 pgs Proquest, HEIDEGGER AND TERRORISM).
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 a grounding in valuation"
(GA 5: 262/195; tm). 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 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 Fuhrers. 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 ellcct that the mathematical model of QIC
tiling 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. Nothing beyond the thing's mathematical model is recognized. 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 standing-reserve 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 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 die 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. This is not to be understood as a complaint against internationalism either, for 'Just as the distinction
between war and peace has become untenable, the distinction between 'national' and 'international' has also collapsed" (GA 7: 92; EP, 107). We have already seen that
Heidegger attributes a will to the annihilation of homeland to Americanism; what needs to be added to this view is that there is not one form of government any different; each
is run by leaders: “The uniformity of beings arising from the emptiness of the abandonment of Being, in which it is only a matter of the calculable security of its order, an order
which it subjugates to the will to will, this uniformity also conditions everywhere in advance of all national differences the uniformity of leadership [Führerschaft], for which all
forms of government are only one instrument of leadership among others.” (GA 7: 93; EP, 108; tm) Government and politics are simply further means of directing ways of life
according to plan; and no one, neither terrorist nor politician, should be able to alter these carefully constructed ways of life. Ways of life are themselves effects of the plan, and
the predominant way of life today is that of an all-consuming Americanism. National differences fall to the wayside. The homeland, when not completely outmoded, can only
Americanism represents the attempt
to annihilate the "homeland," then under the aegis of the abandonment of being, all governments and forms of
leadership become Americanism. The loss of national differences is accordant with the advent of terrorism, since terrorism knows no national bounds but,
appear as commodified quaintness. All governments participate in the eradication of national differences. Insofar as
rather, threatens difference and boundaries as such. Terrorism is everywhere, where "everywhere" no longer refers to a collection of distinct places and locations but instead to
a "here" that is the same as there, as every "there." The threat of terrorism is not international, but antinational or, to strain a Heideggerian formulation, unnational .
Homeland security, insofar as it destroys the very thing that it claims to protect, is nothing
opposed to terrorism, but rather the consummation of its threat. Our leaders, in their attempt to
secure the world against terrorism, only serve to further drive the world towards its homogenized state. The
elimination of difference in the standing-reserve along with the elimination of national differences serve to identify the threat of terrorism with the quest for security. The
absence of this threat would be the absence of being, and its consummation would be the absence of being as well. Security is only needed where there is a threat. If a threat is
not perceived, if one believes oneself invulnerable, then there is no need for security. Security is for those who know they can be injured, for those who can be damaged. Does
America know that it can be damaged? If security requires a recognition of one's own vulnerability, then security can only be found in the acknowledgment of one's threatened
all of the planned
securities that attempt to abolish the threat can never achieve the security they seek. Security
requires that we preserve the threat, and this means that we must act in the office of preservers
condition, and this means that it can only be found in a recognition of being as threat. To be secure, there must be the threat. For this reason,
As preservers, what we are charged to preserve is not so much the present being as the concealment that inhabits it. Preserving a thing means to not challenge it forth into
technological availability, to let it maintain an essential concealment. That we participate in this essencing of being does not make of it a subjective matter, for there is no
isolated subject in preservation, but an opening of being. Heidegger will name this the clearing of the truth (Wahrheit) of being, and it is this clearing that Dasein preserves
(bawahrf). When a thing truthfally is, when it is what it is in truth, then it is preserved. In preserving beings, Dasein participates in the truth (preservation) of being. The truth
of being is being as threat, and this threat only threatens when Dasein preserves it in terror. Dasein is not innocent in the terrorization of being. On the contrary, Dasein is
For this reason, a Heideggerian thinking of terrorism must remain
skeptical of all the various measures taken to oppose terrorism, to root it out or to circumvent it. These are so many
complicit in it. Dasein refuses to abolish terrorism.
attempts to do away with what threatens, measures that are themselves in the highest degree willful. This will can only impose itself upon being, can only draw out more and
more of its wrath, and this inward wrath of being maintains itself in a never-ending supply.
The will can only devastate the earth. Rather
than approaching the world in terms of resources to be secured, true security can only be found in the
preservation of the threat of being. It is precisely when we are busy with security measures and the
frantic organization of resources that we directly assault the things we would preserve. The threat of being
goes unheeded when things are restlessly shuttled back and forth, harried, monitored, and
surveilled. The threat of being is only preserved when things are allowed to rest.
Terrorism is a product of the quest for security. We are not faced with outside aggressors but
with the flip side of our drive to create global homogeneity. The result is a withdrawal of Being,
a fate worse than death. Only turning away from the slavery of pragmatic utilitarianism can
solve.
Mitchell, 05 (Andrew J Mitchell. Research in Phenomenology. (Philosophy Fellow, Stanford) Pittsburgh:
2005.Vol.35 pg. 181, 38 pgs, Proquest, HEIDEGGER AND TERRORISM).
Heideggerian thinking is a thinking that thinks away from simple presence and absence. It thinks what
Heidegger calls "the between" (das Zwischen). This between is a world of nonpresence and nonabsence.
Annihilation is impossible for this world and so is security. The terror experienced today is a clue to the
withdrawal of being. The world is denatured, drained of reality. Everything is threatened and the danger
only ever increases. Dasein flees to a metaphysics of presence to escape the threatened world, hoping there to
find security. But security cannot do away with the threat, rather it must guard it. Dasein guards the truth of
being in the experience of terror. What is perhaps repugnant to consider in all this is that being calls for
terrorism and for terrorists. With the enframing of being and the circulation of standing-reserve,
what is has already been destroyed. Terrorism is merely the ugly confirmation of this point. As
we have seen, being does not linger behind the scenes but is found in the staging itself. If being is to terrorize-if,
in other words, this is an age of terrorism-then being must call for terrorists. They are simply more "slaves of
the history of being" (614 69: 209) and, in Heidegger's eyes, no different from the politicians of the day in
service to the cause of Americanism. But someone might object, the terrorists are murderers and the politicians
are not. Granting this objection despite its obvious naïveté, we can nonetheless see that both politicians and
terrorists are called for by the standing-reserve, the one to ensure its nonabsence, that the plan will reach
everyone everywhere, and the other to ensure its nonpresence, that all beings will now be put into circulation
by the threat of destruction. In this regard, "human resources" are no different from "livestock,"
and with this, an evil worse than death has already taken place. Human resources do not die, they perish. Insofar as it is
Americanism that is identified with technological domination and the spread of the unworld, then it is no wonder that America is the place where the question of terrorism can
and must be posed. Instead of turning from terror, we are called to respond to it. Not by sealing ourselves off from it in a single-minded deafness, but by preserving the trace of
being in its withdrawal. America is distinct in this because America most faces the challenge of Americanism. America is today fighting the shadow of itself, it yearns to leap
over its shadow and into a state of pure visibility and security.
America is not faced with an outside aggressor, but with its
own photographic negative in Americanism/terrorism. America's challenge is to not recognize itself in Americanism and to
preserve its difference from this ogre. For America to believe that it is the driving force behind Americanism is for America to believe that it is in control of being. Americanism
is a movement of being; it is nothing "American." America's other is neither Greece nor Rome, but Americanism. America must distinguish itself from Americanism in order to
confront Americanism as its ownmost other. Terror can teach us this and lead us to preserve what is our own .
Is this to say that we should remain
forever terrorized? exist forever in a state of terror? Is this supposed to provide a solution to the
problem of terrorism? Surely that would be an outrageous demand (arge Zumutung) to place upon
thinking. The older man says the same thing about malevolence as a basic trait of being; it places an outrageous
demand upon thinking. A first step away from the imposed convenience of Americanism might be heard in the
words of the younger man, "That this should be easy, namely to think the essential, is also a demand which
only arises from the spirit of devastation" (GA 77: 215). If we are to think the essential, to think what withdraws
in concealment before the total availability of the unworld around us, then our thinking itself will have to
change. Thinking the essential, this is a thinking that we can never be done with, a thinking that is never to be
accomplished, a thinking that concerns what can never be thought through. Rather than think from out of the
spirit of devastation, we are called to let it into thought; not to think devastation, but to devastatedly think.
Thinking itself must be devastated and terrorized if we are to think today. Such a thinking would attend to the
uncommon nature of our present situation before the terrorist threat. If America is terrorized, then it is
terrorized by Americanism. But Americanism is nothing more than an epoch of being; it is the withholding
of being in its withdrawal from us. In the face of this withdrawal we are called to think. Perhaps this
is possible nowhere other than America; perhaps this thinking itself will mark another
beginning for America, an American thinking that would not be enslaved to a pragmatic and
utilitarian metaphysics.
Alt solves hegemony
Investigating the ontological grounding of hegemonic theories can allow us to break free.
Spanos 8 [William V. Spanos, 2008, “American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization”, Chapter 1 Pages 21-22, MV]
We are thus compelled by the impasse in which the existing oppositional discourses find themselves to return, despite the invidious associations, to what
l take to be Martin Heidegger's fundamental contribution to the philosophical history of this benighted century and of the present post- Cold War
occasion. I am referring to his enabling reminder in Being and Time that the modem West has forgotten the question of being, or, to put this estranging
inaugural assertion in its later form, to his proleptic announcement of the "end of philosophy." This, to be more specific, was his warning to the modern
age of the impending global triumph of technology, the total enframing [Gestell] and reduction of the differential being of being to standing or disposable
reserve (Bestand) and the coming of thinking to its banalized end in the modem "age of the world picture": precisely, that is, the imperial planetary
condition that the in the Age of Globalization post-Cold War, end-of-history discourse (and practices) of the dominant American culture celebrates. The
retrieval of Heidegger's diagnosis of the culminating moment of modernity as the age of the world picture is thus important because it constitutes a
profoundly different and less sanguine understanding of the end of history from that of Fukuyuma and the dominant ideological culture he represents. In
other words, the recent philosophical and cultural obliteration of the contradictory history of the Vietnam War,
coupled with the impasse of oppositional thinking in the face of the ensuing announcement of the end of
history and the New World Order, compels us to understand the end of the Cold War in terms of its polyvalent
global manifestations. The imperative precipitated by these conditions is to understand this end not only as an
epochal political/economic event as such-the imperial triumph of the liberal democratic/capitalist United
States and its global free market system over the communist Soviet Union and any other polity-but also, and
more fundamentally, as an epochal ontological event. This end does not simply mean, as Fukuyama's emphasis implies,
the imperial triumph of the interpretation of being informing the liberal capitalist democracy of the United
States (and the European Community that has aped its cultural and political identity) over the interpretation of being underlying the
totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and the communism of the Soviet Union. This end means as well, as the
United States' willful effort to impose American-style democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq clearly bear witness,
the imperial triumph of this metaphysical ontology over all other unthought interpretations of being that might inform and enable future cultural
formations and polities. The triumphant culture's airbrushing of the actual history of the Vietnam War, that is,
demands, against the disciplinary tendency to separate theory and practice (a tendency exacerbated by the new historicism
and the initiative "against theory"), that we perceive the American (neo)imperialist project of the post-Cold War era to be
a polyvalent one, in which ontological representation—the Pax Metaphysica—is a praxis that is indissolubly
related to imperial political praxis-the Pax Americana. Such a perception of this increasingly hegemonized
representation of the contemporary occasion, in turn, would convey to oppositional intellectuals the urgency of
breaking this insidiously polyvalent "peace." It would disclose the urgency of retrieving the unfinished
poststructuralist ontological project to rethink thinking itself. By this l mean the need to dis-close, to open up,
to thought that which the triumphant metaphysical/calculative-technological/disciplinary logic of the imperial
West has closed off and accommodated or repressed. To rethink thinking means, in short, to liberate precisely
that relay of differential forces that the structuralizing and disciplinary imperatives of the onto-theological
tradition has colonized in its final "anthropological" phase.
***Ontology
ontology precedes ethics
Ontology precedes ethics—we must know who we are before we can know how we must act,
otherwise, our ethical rules repeat the errors of instrumentalism.
Antolick 2 [Matthew Anolick; August 20, 2002; Deep Ecology and Heideggerian Phenomenology; MA University of Florida MV]
Traditional ethics, as based upon the traditional substance ontology, is typically an instrumentalist ethics,
grounded in the mathematical grid-framework out of which the substance ontology functions. The isolation of fact from value, and the
corresponding distinction between them, is made possible through such a framework. Although this distinction makes sense according to the
architecture of the substance metaphysical grid framework, Heidegger’s event ontology undermines the inevitability of such a rigid distinction. This
becomes clearer in what follows. We mentioned how Naess speaks of Kant’s conception of beautiful actions (in Chapter Two). Such actions are
performed not merely out of a strict adherence to rules: they come out of themselves. The event ontology that gets expressed in Heidegger’s writings, and
especially the concept of Ereignis, provides a basis for an ethics based in such “beautiful actions” that the traditional substance ontology cannot provide.
“Beautiful actions” express the categoricalness of Kant’s Categorical Imperative. The Categorical Imperative is not an isolated rule to which an individual
subject has a duty. The Categorical Imperative is truly fulfilled when the “commanded” action comes of itself. Kant claims that an action performed out
of inclination is higher than an action done merely because one has been ordered to do so, or because one will feel guilty if one does not perform the
action.
Naess’s statement of the need in Deep Ecology to move “from ethics to ontology and back” is founded upon the interrelatedness of these two
disciplines. Normative values are indeed, as Naess says, based upon non-normative conceptions, although it remains
an open question for our discussion whether such a distinction can ever be truly made. The event ontology requires an
interpretation of this statement that holds the normative and the non-normative as inextricably interwoven as a unity. Such interrelatedness is
due to the mutual origin of ontology and ethics, fact and value, Ereignis and Da-sein. In terms of the event
ontology, this mutual origin gets expressed in answers to questions like: what exactly must Da-sein do? What
is the imperative for Da-sein according to the event ontology? Heidegger writes: Only so far as man, ek-sisting in the truth of
Being, belongs to Being can there come from Being itself the assignment of those directives that must become law and rule for man. In Greek, to assign
is nemein. Nomos is not only law but more originally the assignment contained in the dispensation of Being. Only such dispatching is capable of
supporting and obligating. Otherwise, all law remains merely something fabricated by human reason. More essential than instituting rules is that man
find the way to his abode in the truth of Being. This abode first yields the experience of something we can hold on to. The truth of Being offers a hold for
all conduct. Being is always made possible by an event of truth. Da-sein must be open to receive this truth. Truth
It is upon this event-ontological basis that we get our
answer to the question of what Da-sein must do: Da-sein must both open itself to, and be the clearing for,
Being. The event ontology thus provides an answer to what Da-sein “must” do in noninstrumentalist terms,
since instrumentalism, as a function of the substance ontology, remains in the mathematical realm of
objecthood and efficient causality: Today we are too easily inclined either to understand being responsible and being indebted moralistically
comes by way of an “assignment contained in the dispensation of Being.”
as a lapse, or else to construe them in terms of effecting. In either case, we bar to ourselves the way to the primal meaning of that which is later called
causality. So long as this way is not opened up to us we shall also fail to see what instrumentality, which is based
on causality, actually is. We must now proceed with an investigation into the nature of this “mutual origin” of
ethics and ontology: that which is the origin of all origins – the primal source of the event ontology.
ontology precedes everything
Ontological questions logically ground all thinking—both ethical and political—and therefore
must be grappled with first.
Dillon 99 [Michael Dillon; Professor of Politics at University of Lancaster; Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics; 97-99; MV]
As Heidegger—himself an especially revealing figure of the deep and mutual implication of the philosophical and the political—never
tired of
pointing out, the relevance of ontology to all other kinds of thinking is fundamental and inescapable. For one
cannot say anything about any-thing that is, without always already having made assumptions about the is as
such. Any mode of thought, in short, always already carries ontology sequestered within it. What this
ontological turn does to other-regional-modes of thought is to challenge the ontology within which they
operate. The implications of that review reverberate through-out the entire mode of thought, demanding a
reappraisal as fundamental as the reappraisal ontology has demanded of philosophy. With ontology at issue, the
entire foundations or underpinnings of any mode of thought are rendered problematic. This applies as much to any
modem discipline of thought as it does to the question of modernity as such, with the exception, it seems, of science, which, having long ago given up the
ontological questioning of when it called itself natural philosophy, appears now, in its industrialized and corporatized form, to be invulnerable to
ontological perturbation. With its foundations at issue, the very authority of a mode of thought and the ways in which it characterizes the critical issues of
freedom and judgment (of what kind of universe human beings inhabit, how they inhabit it, and what counts as reliable knowledge for them in it) is also
put in question. The very ways in which Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other continental philosophers challenged Western ontology, simultaneously,
therefore reposed the fundamental and inescapable difficulty, or aparia, for human being of decision and judgment. In other words, whatever
ontology you subscribe to, knowingly or unknowingly, as a human being you still have to act. Whether or not you know or
acknowledge it, the ontology you subscribe to will construe the problem of action for you in one way rather than
another. You may think ontology is some arcane question of philosophy, but Nietzsche and Heidegger showed that
it intimately shapes not only a way of thinking, but a way of being, a form of life. Decision, a fortiori political decision, in
short, is no mere technique. It is instead a way of being that bears an understanding of Being, and of the fundaments of the human way of being within it.
This applies, indeed applies most, to those mock- innocent political slaves who claim only to be technocrats of
decision making. While certain continental thinkers like Blumenberg and Lowith, for example, were prompted to interrogate or challenge the
modem's claim to being distinctively "modern,” and others such as Adorno questioned its enlightened credentials, philosophers like Derrida and Levinas
pursued the metaphysical implications (or rather the implications for meta- physics) of the thinking initiated by Kierkegaard, as well as by Nietzsche and
Heidegger. The violence of metaphysics, together with another way of thinking about the question of the ethical, emerged as the defining theme of their
work! Others, notably Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Bataille turned the thinking of Nietzsche and Heidegger into a novel kind of social
and political critique of both the regimes and the effects of power that have come to distinguish late modem times; they concentrated, in detail, upon how
the violence identified by these other thinkers manifested itself not only in the mundane practices of modem life, but also in those areas that claimed to
be most free of it, especially the freedom and security of the subject as well as its allied will to truth and knowledge. Questioning the appeal to
the secure self- grounding common to both its epistemic structures and its political imagination, and in the
course of reinterrogating both the political character of the modern and the modern character of the political,
this problematization of modernity has begun to prompt an ontopolitically driven reappraisal of modern
political thought. This means that the ontological constitution of politics itself- its legislating categories of time,
space, understanding, and action, and of what it is to be-prompted by the politics of the specific (ontological)
constitutional order of political modernity, has begun to come under sustained scrutiny.
ontology precedes science
All truths, even scientific ones, are truths for Dasein. Investigating those ontological roots
comes first.
Elden 2 [Stuart Elden, Philosophy Professor, Durham University, “Mapping the Present: Hedegger and the Project of a Spatial History.” 2002, pg. 9
MV]
Husserlian phenomenology was basically ahistorical, 3 perhaps because of Husserl’s background in mathematics and logic. For Heidegger however, as
Krell has argued, the history of philosophy was an ‘essential counterweight to phenomenology’: whereas Husserl had once remarked that he had
‘forgotten about history’, Heidegger never did. 4 In Being and Time Heidegger makes some comments indicating the importance of the historical project,
though, as shall be seen, his later work suggests that here he did not go far enough. The basic issues at stake can be seen if the
distinction Heidegger makes between ontic and ontological knowledge is examined. Ontic knowledge is
knowledge pertaining to the distinctive nature of beings as such, it is the knowledge of the sciences, whereas
ontological knowledge is the basis on which any such theory (of ontic knowledge) could be constructed, the a
priori conditions for the possibility of such sciences. Heidegger’s own exercise of fundamental ontology deals with the
conditions of possibility not just of the ontic sciences, but also of the ontologies that precede and found them.
This is the question of being (GA2, 11; see GA26, 195– 202). 5 A glimpse of the possibility this insight allows is found in Heidegger’s discussion
of Newton: To say that before Newton his laws were neither true nor false, cannot signify that before him there
were no such beings as have been uncovered and pointed out by those laws. Through Newton the laws became
true; and with them, beings became accessible in themselves to Dasein. Once beings have been uncovered, they
show themselves precisely as beings which beforehand already were. Such uncovering is the kind of being
which belongs to ‘truth’. That there are ‘eternal truths’ will not be adequately proved until someone has succeeded in demonstrating that Dasein
has been and will be for all eternity. As long as such a proof is still outstanding, this principle remains a fanciful contention which does not gain in
legitimacy from having philosophers commonly ‘believe’ it. Because the kind of being that is essential to truth is of the
character of Dasein, all truth is relative to Dasein’s being (GA2, 227). 6 From this, it is clear that Dasein and truth are
fundamentally linked, that truth is context dependent. This does not mean that truth is only what an individual
thinks, but that truth only has a context dependent on the existence of Dasein (GA3, 281– 2). Any eternal truths
must rest on an eternal immutability to Dasein. It clearly follows from this that if being changes, or is historicized, so
too is truth. It has been remarked by some critics that Heidegger does indeed, in Being and Time, suggest such an immutability to Dasein, examining
it and its structures as if they were true eternally. Such critics sometimes point to a shift in the later Heidegger towards an understanding of historical
nature of being, through a historical sense of Dasein, which would, following the quotation and explication here, lead to a historicizing of truth. 7 The
ontic/ontological difference – especially when historicized – is one that Foucault would go on to elaborate and use in the distinction between
connaissance and savoir in The Archaeology of Knowledge, where he examined what he called the ‘historical a priori’. 8
***IMPACTS
impact: war & terrorism
The reduction of Being to standing reserve is the root cause of war and terrorism. When we
think in terms of threats to the population, we all become replaceable in the calculus of
decision makers, and war can go on forever.
Mitchell, 05 (Andrew J Mitchell. (Philosophy Fellow, Stanford) Research in Phenomenology. Pittsburgh:
2005.Vol.35 pg. 181, 38 pgs, Proquest, HEIDEGGER AND TERRORISM).
With everything available as standing-reserve, troops included, the exhaustion of resources is no longer
possible. Resources are precisely in themselves replaceable, to the extent that, in being given over to replacement, even the idea of an "in itself" is already drained of
reality ahead of time. There are no longer any "losses" that cannot be replaced. In other words, there is no longer any friction. All uncertainty is lost, since it is not recognized
Everything is monitored and controlled. The whole "battle" is given over to a planning that is able to
incorporate everything it encounters, since it only ever encounters what is already planable in essence, the
standing-reserve. Strategy's demise is the ascendancy of planning. What this means is that war can now go
on interminably, subject to no other logic or obligation than its own. Nothing can resist it. But without resistance, war must end. Peace can now go on
in the first place.
interminably as well, subject to no other logic or obligation than its own. The logic in question for both war and peace is the logic of replacement, the obligation for each is the
obligation to consume. There is no law that would supervene or subtend consumption; there is no order outside of it that could contain it. Clausewitz's ideal is realized in a
The name for this new
amalgam of war and peace is terrorism. Terrorism is Clausewitz's absolute war in the mirror of technology.
War and peace come to complete agreement and lose their oppositional identity in the age of
value and the ersatz. Without concern for resources, consumption continues untroubled, since war is a kind of
"consumption of beings" no different from peace: "War no longer batties against a state of peace, rather it
newly establishes the essence of peace" (GA 69: 180). The essence of peace so established is a peace that defines
itself in regards to war, which binds itself inseparably to war, and which functions equivalently to war. In cither
case, it is simply a matter of resource consumption and replenishment. In Clausewitzian terms, there is perhaps too much continuity
manner that collapses the very distinctions that gave it birth. "War" is no longer a duel; it recognizes no authority outside of itself.
or "continuation" between war and peace, "War has become a distortion of the consumption of beings which is continued in peace" (GA 7: 89/EP, 104). The peace that
technology brings is nothing restful; instead it is the peace of unhindered circulation. We cannot even ask when there will be peace or when the war will end. Such a question,
Heidegger specifies, cannot be answered, "not because the length of the war cannot be foreseen, but because the question itself asks for something which no longer is, since
already there is no longer a war that would be able to come to a peace" (GA 7: 89/EP, 104; tm). The basic oppositions of Clausewitzian warfare are undone at this point, an
It also includes the distinction between soldier and civilian. Since such
distinctions depend upon a difference between war and peace, they too can no longer apply. Everyone is now a
civilian-soldier, or neither a civilian nor a soldier-a "worker," one might say, or otherwise put, a target. With
everyone involved in the same processes of consumption and delivery, everyone is already enlisted in advance.
undoing that includes the distinction between ideal and real.
There are no longer any "innocent" victims or bystanders in this, and the same holds true of terrorism. Terrorism is not the use of warfare against
civilians (pace Carr), for the simple reason that there no longer are any civilians.14 It is equally not war against soldiers, and for this reason we go wrong
to even consider it war. Terrorism is the only conflict available and the only conflict that is in essence available and applicable. It can have everything as
its target. Terrorism follows from the transformation in beings indicative of the technological age.
This transformation remains important at each point of a Heideggerian thinking of terrorism
and is the ultimate consequence of the abolition of war and peace; beings have become uncommon.
impact: terrorism
Terrorism and its political responses frame all Being as standing reserve—resources to be
consumed and replaced. War and peace have merged as an un-ending cycle of violence. Only a
Heideggarian turn in thinking can break this cycle.
Mitchell, 05 (Andrew J Mitchell. (Philosophy Fellow, Stanford) Research in Phenomenology. Pittsburgh:
2005.Vol.35 pg. 181, 38 pgs,
Proquest, HEIDEGGER AND TERRORISM).
With everything available as standing-reserve, troops included, the exhaustion of resources is no longer
possible. Resources are precisely in themselves replaceable, to the extent that, in being given over to replacement, even the idea of an "in itself" is already drained of
reality ahead of time. There are no longer any "losses" that cannot be replaced. In other words, there is no longer any friction. All uncertainty is lost, since it is not recognized
Everything is monitored and controlled. The whole "battle" is given over to a planning that is able to
incorporate everything it encounters, since it only ever encounters what is already planable in essence, the
standing-reserve. Strategy's demise is the ascendancy of planning. What this means is that war can now go
on interminably, subject to no other logic or obligation than its own. Nothing can resist it. But without resistance, war must end. Peace can now go on
in the first place.
interminably as well, subject to no other logic or obligation than its own. The logic in question for both war and peace is the logic of replacement, the obligation for each is the
obligation to consume. There is no law that would supervene or subtend consumption; there is no order outside of it that could contain it. Clausewitz's ideal is realized in a
The name for this new
amalgam of war and peace is terrorism. Terrorism is Clausewitz's absolute war in the mirror of technology.
War and peace come to complete agreement and lose their oppositional identity in the age of value and the
ersatz. Without concern for resources, consumption continues untroubled, since war is a kind of "consumption
of beings" no different from peace: "War no longer batties against a state of peace, rather it newly establishes
the essence of peace" (GA 69: 180). The essence of peace so established is a peace that defines itself in regards
to war, which binds itself inseparably to war, and which functions equivalently to war. In cither case, it is
simply a matter of resource consumption and replenishment. In Clausewitzian terms, there is perhaps too much continuity or
manner that collapses the very distinctions that gave it birth. "War" is no longer a duel; it recognizes no authority outside of itself.
"continuation" between war and peace, "War has become a distortion of the consumption of beings which is continued in peace" (GA 7: 89/EP, 104). The peace that technology
brings is nothing restful; instead it is the peace of unhindered circulation. We cannot even ask when there will be peace or when the war will end. Such a question, Heidegger
specifies, cannot be answered, "not because the length of the war cannot be foreseen, but because the question itself asks for something which no longer is, since already there
is no longer a war that would be able to come to a peace" (GA 7: 89/EP, 104; tm). The basic oppositions of Clausewitzian warfare are undone at this point, an undoing that
It also includes the distinction between soldier and civilian. Since such
distinctions depend upon a difference between war and peace, they too can no longer apply. Everyone is now a
civilian-soldier, or neither a civilian nor a soldier-a "worker," one might say, or otherwise put, a target. With
everyone involved in the same processes of consumption and delivery, everyone is already enlisted in advance.
There are no longer any "innocent" victims or bystanders in this, and the same holds true of terrorism.
Terrorism is not the use of warfare against civilians (pace Carr), for the simple reason that there no longer are
any civilians.14 It is equally not war against soldiers, and for this reason we go wrong to even consider it war.
Terrorism is the only conflict available and the only conflict that is in essence available and applicable. It can
have everything as its target. Terrorism follows from the transformation in beings indicative of the
technological age. This transformation remains important at each point of a Heideggerian
thinking of terrorism and is the ultimate consequence of the abolition of war and peace; beings
have become uncommon.
includes the distinction between ideal and real.
Political approaches to terrorism are destined to fail because terrorism is a metaphysical issue
regarding a new mode of relating to the world through pure violence. Terrorism is a
transformation of Being that results in political implications, not the other way around.
Mitchell, 05 (Andrew J Mitchell. Research in Phenomenology. Pittsburgh: 2005.Vol.35 pg. 181, 38 pgs,
Proquest, HEIDEGGER AND TERRORISM, (Philosophy Fellow, Stanford)).
Terrorism is a metaphysical problem that concerns the presence of beings today. Heidegger's own thinking of
being makes possible a confrontation with terrorism on four fronts: 1) Heidegger's conception of war in the age of technological replacement
goes beyond the Clausewitzian model of war and all its modernist-subjectivist presuppositions, 2) Heidegger thinks "terror" (Erschrecken) as the fundamental mood of our
time, 3) Heideggerian thinking is attuned to the nature of the terrorist "threat" and the "danger" that we face today, 4) Heidegger rethinks the notion of "security" in a manner
that alerts us to the oxymoronic character of "homeland security." The epoch of terrorism is likewise the era of political transformation that Heidegger identifies with
"Americanism." In this essay an effort is made to think terrorism qua metaphysical problem and to inquire into the perhaps privileged role of America for the thinking of
terrorism today. Heideggerian thought is a thinking that is engaged with its times. Whatever we might make of Heidegger's political choices, the fact remains that even these
decisions can be seen as attempts to think with and against the times. It is no stretch to say that our time today is the time of terrorism-an uncommon time, no matter how
common a claim this may be-especially in the United States. What then might a Heideggerian engagement with our time of terrorism bring to light? To answer this, it is
important to note that Heideggerian thinking, as a thinking of being, must engage with its times precisely because it is through these times that we first find our access to being
(or rather "being," Seyn). For Heidegger, however, the contemporary scene is dominated by technology and, as his later writings endeavor to show, this is indicative of a
"withdrawal" of being. Heidegger distinguishes himself from the various foes of technology, however, by viewing this withdrawal as nothing negative on its own. Instead, this
withdrawal is a further dispensation of being. Being withdraws and grants us these withdrawn times. This does not mean that being exists unperturbed somewhere behind or
beyond these beings. The withdrawal of being is found in these abandoned beings themselves and is determinative for the way they exist.
Heideggerian thinking,
then, allows us to ask the question of our times and to think terrorism. My contention in the following is that
the withdrawal of being shows itself today in terrorism, where beings exist as terrorized.
Terrorism, in other words, is not simply the sum total of activities carried out by terrorist groups,
but a challenge directed at beings as a whole. Terrorism is consequently a metaphysical issue, and it
names the way in which beings show themselves today, i.e., as terrorized. This "ontological" point demands
that there be the "ontic" threat of real terrorists. Further, this metaphysical aspect of terrorism also
indicates that a purely political response to terrorism is destined to fail. Political reactions to
terrorism, which depict terrorism from the outset as a political problem, miss the fact that terrorism itself, qua
metaphysical issue, is coincident with a transformation in politics. That is to say, political responses to
terrorism fail to think terrorism. In what follows I will elaborate some of the consequences of thinking terrorism as a question of being and sketch a few
characteristics of the politico-technological landscape against which terrorism takes place. In order to do so, I will address the role of America in Heidegger's work, for it is in
"America" that politics and technology are driven the furthest toward interdependency. "Americanism" names the project of technological domination and the will to world
homogenization. This is not a reason to dismiss Heidegger as "anti-American," however, regardless of how strong the grounds for such an assessment might appear. If we hold
Heidegger to his own insights, then even he would have to admit that there remains a crucial role for America in the face of "Americanism," a role which itself might constitute
an American "privilege" for the thinking of our times (and thus, perhaps, for the thinking of being today). The logic of this privilege in the midst of extreme denigration is
perhaps the most important point for a proper understanding of Heidegger's views on technology. In the pages that follow, an attempt is made to pose the question of this
privilege in regard to both technology and the land of America.
Insofar as Heideggerian thinking is a thinking of being, then it must be
able to think terrorism, for the simple reason that terrorism names the apparent countenance of being for our
times, and without such a correspondence to being, Heideggerian thinking is nothing. The issue is not one of
applying a preestablished Heideggerian doctrine to an object or situation that would remain outside of thought.
Rather, the issue is one of recognizing that the objects and situations of our world themselves call for thought,
and that in thinking the world, we enter into a correspondence with being.
***AT
AT: Heidegger = Nazi
Focus on Heidegger’s Nazism irresponsibly is an excuse to exclude his philosophy.
Dallmayr, 84 , - Professor in the departments of philosophy and political science at the University of Notre
Dame, [Fred, may, “Ontology of Freedom: Heidegger and Political Philosophy”, Political Theory, Vol. 12, No. 2
(May, 1984), pp. 204-234, jstor]
The mortgage encumbering Heidegger's work dates back to the years 1933-1934, that is, to the time of his service as rector of the University of Freiburg.
The episode has been recounted frequently in the literature-not always with a sober attention to factual details.' Heidegger's endorsement of
the Nazi regime at the time is undeniable; but the precise character of his motives and expectations is hard to
pinpoint. Probably an array of factors influenced his attitude during that period: among them a distaste for the
chaotic condition of the late Weimar Republic; the desire for a political reorientation or rebirth beyond the
spectrum of traditional ideologies; perhaps also-as Otto Pdggeler suggests-the hope for a strengthening of central Europe and a "great
(European) politics" as a counterpoint to the emerging technological superpowers in the East and the West.' That such expectations were egregious
misjudgments or else the outgrowth of gross political naivete is beyond question. Still, in view of the relative brevity of his official role
as rector (altogether ten months) and his vast productivity both before and afterwards, an exclusive focus on the
episode seems to me both lopsided and unfair. The chorus of accusations and condemnations almost but not entirely has been
able to drown out more balanced and conciliatory voices. Already in 1953 the philosopher Max Muller remarked about Heidegger's political venture: "We
encounter here the limits of his concrete political judgment-limits which, in the end, do not jeopardize his philosophical stature and the integrity of his
endeavors. " Almost two decades later, at the time of his eightieth birthday, Hannah Arendt placed the episode into the gentle light of personal catharsis
and absolution. Now we all know [she wrote at the time] that Heidegger, too, once succumbed to the temptation to change his "residence" and to get
involved in the world of human affairs. “As to the world, he was served somewhat worse than Plato, because the tyrant and his victims were not located
beyond the sea, but in his own country. As to Heidegger himself, I believe that the matter stands differently. He was still young enough to learn from the
shock of the collision, which after ten short hectic months 37 years ago drove him back to his residence, and to settle in his thinking what he had
experienced. What emerged from this was the discovery of the will as "the will to will" and hence as the "will to power."3 Arendt's phrase of the native
"residence" (angestammter Wohnsitz) is of course a reference to philosophical reflection or the philosophia perennis. What renders the
exclusive emphasis on 1933 frequently annoying is its complicity with a strategy of avoidance: the tendency to
ignore or bypass Heidegger's philosophy in favor of a time-bound set of political speeches. This tendency was noted by
Bernard Willms in 1977, shortly after Heidegger's death, when he portrayed the fascination with 1933 as an attempt "to circumvent the confrontation
with the thought and philosphy of Martin Heidegger." As he added: "The superficial dispute about the topic 'Heidegger and the
Nazis' or-seemingly more penetrating-'Heidegger and fascism' only solidifies ideological pre-occupations; it
does not unlock a single political problem, including the problem of politics or 'the political' in Heidegger's
philosophy. To probe the latter, however, is far from unimportant."4 A decade earlier, Francois Fedier had formulated a similar
opinion perhaps even more poignantly. Following a critical review of some polemical books on Heidegger's politics, Fedier reached this conclusion.
"The first step which no one can skip" he wrote, "is the serious study of Heidegger's opus. However, one realizes immediately
that there is also a means to prevent ab limine the possibility of objective appraisal: namely, by moralistically sealing off access to his work. This can be
and is done by surrounding the author with a dense fog of rumors and innuendos." Fedier also pointed to Heidegger's increasingly non- or anti-fascist
attitude after 1934-an aspect I consider particularly important and that Beda Alleman (in his commentary on Fedier) seconded with these words:
"Only an analysis of the lectures given between 1934 and 1944- of which several are assembled
in the Nietzsche-volumes (of 1961)- would enable us to grasp the precise sense of Heidegger's
opposition to the Nazi regime, and conversely to clarify the reasons underlying Heidegger's belief in 1933
to contribute to the rise of something other than what national socialism turned out to be." 5 Together with Willms,
Fedier, and Alleman, I am convinced that the episode of 1933 holds the key neither to Heidegger's philosophical opus nor
to the "problem of the political" in his thought.
AT: Sociopolitical Criticism
Focus on sociopolitical critique trades off with ontological questioning
Spanos, 93 – Heideggerian literary critic, Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at
Binghamton University, completed his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison [1993, William V.
Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, University of Minnesota Press,
ISBN: 9780816684427, pg. 174-7, Accessed through Ebrary]
It is this practically polyvalent (idealized) spatial diagram that is inscribed both in the discourses of the physical and
human sciences and in the institutional practices of the dominant sociopolitical order that I want to thematize.
For it is this ideological relay concealed behind the figure of truth/beauty/perfection that is all too often (and, I
submit, disablingly) overlooked by contemporary secular critics of modern power relations , even as their critical discourses, like
Foucault's, circle more or less unthought around this metaphysics, this imaginary real: I mean primarily those critical genealogists and new
historicists whom Foucault has influenced (Jacques Donzelot, Edward Said, Mark Poster, Paul Bove, Jonathan Arac, Frank Lentricchia, Stephen Greenblatt, and Donald
Pease, for example), but also those neo-Marxist critics of the discourse and practice of hegemony (Raymond Williams, Jean
Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Jiirgen Habermas, Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe, for example), and those otherwise diverse
feminist critics of the discursive practices of Western patriarchy (Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, Juliet Mitchell, and Pamela McCallum, for
example), whose oppositional discourses are directed against the hegemony of contemporary bourgeois capitalist
culture. To be sure, the "Heideggerians" he influenced, whether practitioners of deconstruction such as Maurice Blanchot, Derrida, and Lyotard, or practitioners of
hermeneutics such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricoeur, have, like Heidegger, if in different ways, failed to theorize adequately the practical
implications of the polyvalent logo-center. They thus tend
to restrict their critical discourses to the generalized site of ontology at
the expense of sociopolitical critique. On the other hand (though their blindnesses are less disabling), neo-Marxist and genealogical critics of
modern power relations have failed to theorize adequately the theoretical implications of the practical
application of the panoptic mechanisms. They thus tend to restrict their critical discourses to the sites of
sociopolitics at the expense of ontological critique. In both cases, in short, the polyvdency of the privileged figure of the circle and its optics
remains insufficiently thought.
AT: cede the political
Heidegger is explicitly engaging the political—if technological thought has reduced all life to
standard reserve then challenging that ontology is crucial to avoiding the catastrophe of
modern war.
Elden 2 [Stuart Elden, “Mapping the Present: Hedegger and the Project of a Spatial History.” 2002, pg. 77-78 MV]
Nature has become standing-reserve [Bestand], a designation that means something more than merely stock. This, argues Heidegger, is
a fundamental shift from the previous attitude to nature, found, of course, in the rural setting. But even this is changing irrevocably.
‘The forester who measures the felled timber in the woods and who to all appearances walks the forest path in the same way his grandfather did is today
ordered by the industry that produces commercial woods, whether he knows it or not.’ His work is subordinate to the demand for cellulose, for paper,
which is then turned into newspapers and magazines which ‘set public opinion to swallowing what is printed’ (VA 21– 2; BW 323). There is even talk of
the idea of human resources, although the human is never merely standing-reserve, as it is humans, in part, that drive technology forward. However
Heidegger cautions against simply seeing the human as leading technology: ‘It seems time and time again as though technology were a means in the
hands of humans. But, in truth, it is the essence of the human that is now being ordered forth to lend a hand to the essence of technology’ (GA79, 68;
QCT 37). The question of technology is not simply and purely technical, but is something that shapes the whole attitude of our age, ‘not only for humans,
but also upon all beings, nature and history’ (ID 34/98). Now such an understanding of technology would be one thing, but if we consult the transcript of
‘Das Ge-stell’, rather than the version published as ‘The Question of Technology’, we find that the text has been edited. The published version suggests
that the modern mode of agriculture ‘sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now a motorised food industry’ (VA 18;
BW 320). In the transcript published in the Gesamtausgabe Heidegger continues to compare the role of technology in modern
agriculture with events on a wider world stage: ‘Agriculture is now a motorised food industry, the same thing in
its essence [im Wesen das Selbe] as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the
same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the production of
hydrogen bombs’ (GA79, 27). 43 Lacoue-Labarthe has described this remark as ‘scandalous and lamentably inadequate’,
something it clearly is, given Heidegger’s compliance with the Nazi regime in its nascent years, but it should not merely be the cause for
accusations. 44 I am aware that I am on dangerous ground because a reading of this passage that does not condemn it outright could be seen as a
tacit acceptance, but it is worth thinking a little more about it.
In terms of the four examples Heidegger gives – the motorized food industry; the gas chambers and
extermination camps; the blockades and the hydrogen bomb – what they, on his terms, have in common is the
essence of technology. The essence of modern agriculture is something entirely apart from agriculture – it is the
Ge-stell that frames agriculture, that of modern technology, the modern ethos. In Heidegger’s terms this is the inevitable result of
the world made picture, the Cartesian objectification of the world. What Heidegger fails to realize – and this is the scandal, the
inadequacy – is that there is something essentially different between agriculture and the Holocaust. What many of his critics fail to realize is what that
difference is. This is exhibited most obviously in de Beistegui’s book Heidegger and the Political. He suggests that the thinking of the
Holocaust in the same terms as the hydrogen bomb or the Berlin blockade is the problem. Does not, he
suggests, the Holocaust force ‘thinking outside of itself’? 45 This absence, or indeed failure, is particularly obvious in de Beistegui’s
work because his is a book expressly dealing with the political, and yet what links the last three examples is a particular concept of the political. As was
noted in the discussion of the po ´ liQ earlier in this chapter, Heidegger suggests that the failure to question the ‘political’
belongs with its totality. He suggests that the totality of the political is not simply based on the arbitrary
wilfulness of dictators, but in the metaphysical essence of modern actuality in general (GA53, 117– 18). The
modern concept of the political is, like the modern attitude to technology, not merely a regionalized,
historically limited event, but one that has its essence in modern ways of being. The gas chambers and extermination
camps, the blockades and the hydrogen bomb, all exhibit the political thinking of the friend/enemy distinction. There is clearly something in Heidegger’s
critique of the political that aims at Schmitt, yet notably de Beistegui’s book contains no reference to Schmitt. Whereas before a problem of
an enemy was resolved by pogroms and ‘conventional’ weapons, modern technology allows the possibility of a
much more devastating response. The potential of modern technology allows the resolution of a friend/enemy
problem in a way as distinct from previous solutions as modern agriculture is from the peasant in the field.
Ontological reflection is explicitly political because it has the power to reframe international
relations and escape from technological thought.
Thiele, 4, - Ph.D. department of politics at University of florida, [Leslie Paul Thiele, August, “Review: A
(Political) Philosopher by Any Other Name: The Roots of Heidegger's Thought”, jstor]
Norman K. Swazo's Crisis Theory and World Order uses Heidegger to promote authentic planetary dwelling while unsettling the assumptions of the
World Order project, a "systems approach" that theorizes a homeostatic world of enduring peace, justice, economic well-being, and ecological balance,
secured by some form of unitary global governance or a global federalism groundedi n international aw. The first seventy pages of Swazo's book are
devoted to an exposition of the World Order project. This may be off-putting to Heidegger scholars. In turn, Swazo's exegesis of Heidegger, I suspect, will
be obscure to World Order theorists. For those who have an abiding interest in global politics and some background in Heidegger, however, Swazo's
medley may strike a chord. Like Nietzsche, World Order scholars resist the objectification of individuals and cultures. And, like Nietzsche, they fail to
realize that combating objectification by means of a heightened (global) subjectivity only further enmeshes them in metaphysics. The way out, Heidegger
demonstrated was to leave metaphysics alone and attempt to gain greater release from subjectivism in all its forms, including its liberationist guises. All
of Heidegger's later thinking, Swazo asserts, is a meditation on how humanity might prepare itself for global governance while escaping the subjectivism
that inhibits authentic dwelling and caring. Swazo
shares the pragmatic concerns of World Order scholars and he endorses
their "prudential" recommendations such as demilitarization developmental assistance for the South, and increased powers for
the United Nations and the International Court of Justice. But when these "strategies of transition" are placed within an
Enlightenment-style blueprint for world order, something vital is lost. What gets neglected is the opportunity
for authentic politics. World Order theory, Swazo asserts, is best described by what Heidegger called "calculative thinking." It is
opposed to the "meditative thinking" that marked Heidegger's own ontological explorations . Swazo grants that
thinking globally requires some calculative foresight. But he warns that it must not be limited to reckoning and
representation lest we become the victims of our own plans, forever kept from truly dwelling and caring by
means of our "technocratic futurism." World Order scholars must desist from asking" what must be done" long
enough to pose the more essential question "how must we think." Meditative thinking, Heidegger admitted, can
appear quite useless when compared to its calculative counterpart. But ontological reflections also constitute
fundamental historical forces, forces that Heidegger believed bore the potential to (re)define entire epochs. At
this point, Swazo dips his cup deeply into Heideggerian waters, insisting that the "basic words" we employ in our meditative thought
and speech prepare the way for the "world occurrence" of a politics that takes us beyond the state (p. 233). The basic
word that Swazo fixes upon is autarcheia. Autarcheia, or autarchy refers to the self-government of Dasein, the integration of ruler and ruled in the
individual. The autarchos does not simply forge her own laws. Rather, she "lets Being rule-i.e., lets Being grant
'standard' by which she acts. Therefore, she transcends, as it were, the formal rule of law of this or that
the
articular politeia attending instead
always and everywhere to justice as the ordo of Being" (p. 219). Adopting Heidegger's penchant for pure beginnings, Swazo maintains that only with
Plato's depiction of ruling as a skill, a kind of fabrication, does the separation of ruler and ruled, the one and the many, occur. Autarcheia,
therefore, is "the original way to be political" (p. 217).
Ontological interrogation engages us in true emancipatory politics and creates radical freedom.
Dallmayr, 84 - Professor in the departments of philosophy and political science at the University of Notre
Dame, [Fred, may, “Ontology of Freedom: Heidegger and Political Philosophy”, Political Theory, Vol. 12, No. 2
(May, 1984), pp. 204-234, jstor]
As is clear from its general tenor, the argument of the essay proceeds again on an ontological rather than a practical-ethical level. From this perspective,
freedom signifies not so much an exercise of free will or the willful enactment (or omission) of particular deeds,
but rather a mode of being free for the disclosure or unconcealment of Being, differently put: a mode that lets all
beings be what they are without constraint or manipulation. "Freedom for disclosure in an open region,"
Heidegger writes, "lets beings be what they are; freedom now reveals itself as letting beings be." As one should note,
freedom in the sense of letting-be is liberating (or emancipatory) care: "The phrase required in this context-to
let beings be-does not refer to neglect and indifference, but rather the opposite: to let be is to engage oneself
(Sicheinlassen) with beings"-an engagement, it is true, that is not akin to willful management, planning or manipulation: "To let be-that
is, to let beings be what they are-means to engage oneself with the open region and its openness into which
every being comes to stand and which it carries along like an aura. This open region was conceived by Western thought in its
origins as ta alethea, the unconcealed." According to Heidegger, freedom for the disclosure of Being also carries with it the possibility of concealment and
distortion, that is, the possibility of "untruth" or of the "nonbeing of truth" (Unwesen der Wahrheit). "Because truth is in its essence freedom, however,"
the essay states, "historical man-in letting beings be-can also not let beings be what they are and as they are; in this case, beings are concealed and
distorted. Thus, semblance becomes dominant; with it the non-being of truth comes to the fore." Yet, Heidegger adds, since freedom designates not
simply a willful human decision but rather the essential mode of human being, therefore "the non-being of truth cannot arise subsequently from mere
human incapacity or negligence; rather untruth must derive from the essence (or being) of truth." 21 As the essay repeatedly stresses, freedom for truth
and untruth is not simply equivalent to the traditional notion of free will or choice; in fact freedom as being free coincides neither with arbitrary choice
nor with an external constraint or destiny. "Freedom," Heidegger observes, "is not merely what common sense is content to let
pass under this name: the caprice, occasionally present in our choosing, of moving in this or that direction.
Freedom is not mere arbitrariness in what we can and cannot do; nor, on the other hand, is it the mere
submission to a requirement or necessity (and thus to an ontic standard or object). Rather, prior to all such 'negative' or
'positive' construals, freedom is engagement in the disclosure of beings as such." Viewed as an ontological
engagement (or as an engagement with Being and beings), freedom cannot be regarded simply as a human trait, quality, or
property. In Heidegger's words: "Human caprice does not have freedom at its disposal. Man does not 'possess'
freedom as a property; at best, the converse holds: freedom-synonymous with ek-static, disclosive Daseinpossesses man, and this so fully and originally that only it (freedom) secures for humanity that distinctive
relatedness to Being as a whole which first founds all history." As the essay adds, anticipating later formulations regarding the
history of Being: "That man ek-sists now means that for historical humanity the history of its essential possibilities is conserved in the disclosure of
beings as a whole. The rare and simple decisions of history arise from the way the original being of truth unfolds.'22
AT: democracy checks
Liberalism has no capacity to check totalitarian impulses—the appeal to the protection of life is
enforced with weapons of mass death and always reinforces sovereign power.
Dean, 2000 (Mitchell, (Sociologist at Macquarie University), “Always Look on the Dark Side: Politics and the
Meaning of Life”, http://apsa2000.anu.edu.au/confpapers/dean.rtf).
This thesis overcomes the successionist view of forms of power connected with our first thesis, even if it tends to reproduce its bipolar structure. The problem with the
latter however it that somehow the source and point of articulation of sovereign and bio-politics seems to escape intelligibility. Why should our societies become ‘really
demonic’ when they combine within themselves the powers over life with rights of death, or Hebraic understandings of the duties of the shepherd towards his flock with
the virile and agonistic relationships between free citizens found within the Greek polis, as Foucault maintained (1981)? Can one simply make a virtue out of an
absence of intelligibility of the articulation – is it the very heterogeneity of these forms of power that accounts for their devilish potential? Can we democratise
sovereignty and use notions of rights to check the totalitarian impulses of bio-politics? Can we redress such despotic
potentialities by an appeal to an outside of the sphere of limited government? At times Foucault appears to endorse such
possibilities. At others, he seems to suggest that liberalism and democracy are flawed means for this task and that we
should not become complacent. Perhaps, in this case, sovereignty can always return to an atavistic form as in Nazism, or
liberalism can reveal its horribly illiberal side. Perhaps, to try another suggestion, bio-politics simply puts incredible
technological means (the atomic, the biological and the chemical weapons and the organization of the modern military,
and the applications of bio-science and biomedicine) in the service of sovereign powers – a kind of biotechnological
account of genocide. If…but…perhaps…Foucault has identified a problem and a language to investigate the problem
without identifying how and why these elements form the problem. Before moving to a new thesis, let us note that there
is one problem with the view that liberalism can act to check totalitarian administration of life. Both of the means by
which it hopes to do so refer principally to nothing but simple existence. On the one hand, the economic rationality that
provides a limit to government refers before all else to the means of the sustenance of life. On the other, the sovereign
individual has rights, especially in the era of international human rights, simply by virtue of merely living itself. ‘All
human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’ reads the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. If there is optimism in Foucault’s approach, it is one that cannot rely on a movement that checks the powers over
life. The more liberalism and modern rights movements seek to defend us from the dangers of bio-powers, it would seem,
the more they make possible its extension.
AT: tech good turns
We are critiquing technological thought, not particular manifestations of technology - which
are only problematic insofar as they are used uncritically in conjunction with technological
thought.
Heidegger 49 [Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”, December 1, 1949,
http://www.wright.edu/cola/Dept/PHL/Class/P.Internet/PITexts/QCT.html, MV]
In what follows we shall be questioning concerning technology. 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. All ways of thinking, more or less perceptibly, lead through
language in a manner that is extraordinary. We shall be questioning concerning technology, and in so doing we should like
to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence
of technology. When we can respond to this essence, we shall be able to experience the technological within its
own bounds. Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology. When we are seeking the essence of "tree," we have to become aware that
what pervades every tree, as tree, is not itself a tree that can be encountered among all the other trees. Likewise, the essence of technology is
by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of
technology so long as we merely represent and pursue the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we
remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in
the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this Conception of it, to which
today we particularly like to pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology. According to
ancient doctrine, the essence of a thing is considered to be what the thing is. We ask the question concerning technology when we
ask what it is. Everyone knows the two statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end.
The other says: Technology is a human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together. For to posit ends and
procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity. The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the
manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what technology is. The whole complex of these
contrivances is technology. Technology itself is a contrivance—in Latin, an instrumentum. The current conception of technology, according to which it is
a means and a human activity, can therefore be called the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology. Who would ever deny that it is
correct? It is in obvious conformity with what we are envisaging when we talk about technology. The instrumental definition of technology is indeed so
uncannily correct that it even holds for modern technology, of which, in other respects, we maintain with some justification that it is, in contrast to the
older handicraft technology, something completely different and therefore new. Even the power plant with its turbines and generators is a man-made
means to an end established by man. Even the jet aircraft and the high--frequency apparatus are means to ends. A radar station is of course less simple
than a weather vane. To be sure, the construction of a high-frequency apparatus requires the interlocking of various processes of technical-industrial
production. And certainly a sawmill in a secluded valley of the Black Forest is a primitive means compared with the hydroelectric plant on the Rhine
River. But this much remains correct: Modern technology too is a means to an end. This is why the instrumental
conception of technology conditions every attempt to bring man into the right relation to technology.
Everything depends on our manipulating technology m the proper manner as a means. We will, as we say, "get"
technology "intelligently in hand." We will master it. The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more
technology threatens to slip from human control. But suppose now that technology were no mere means: how
would it stand with the will to master it? Yet we said, did we not that the instrumental definition of technology is correct? To be sure. The correct always
fixes upon something pertinent in whatever is under consideration. However, in order to be correct, this fixing by no means needs to
uncover the thing in question in its essence. Only at the point where such an uncovering happens does the true
propriate. For that reason the merely correct is not yet the true. Only the true brings us into a free relationship with that
which concerns us from its essence. Accordingly, the correct instrumental definition of technology still does not show us technology's
essence. In order that we may arrive at this, or at least come close to it, we must seek the true by way of the correct. We must ask: What is the
instrumental itself? Within what do such things as means and end belong? A means is that whereby something is effected and thus attained. Whatever
has an effect as its consequence is called a cause. But not only that by means of which something else is effected is a cause. The end that determines the
kind of means to be used may also be considered a cause. Wherever ends are pursued and means are employed, wherever instrumentality reigns, there
reigns causality.
We don’t reject technology—just blind acceptance of its utility.
Elden 2 [Stuart Elden, “Mapping the Present: Hedegger and the Project of a Spatial History.” 2002, pg. 81 MV]
Heidegger expressly sees this in terms of technology, a point he makes several times in his works. ‘Thus the essential
unfolding of technology harbours in itself what we least suspect, the possible rise of the saving power’ (VA 36; BW 337). Though he is deeply
sceptical about the advances of technology, Heidegger, contrary to how his critics have often characterized him,
suggests that outright rejection is absurd. Instead, Heidegger suggests that we must give it a trial: For all of us,
the arrangements, devices and machinery of the technological world are to a greater or lesser extent
indispensable. It would be foolish to attack the technological world blindly. It would be short-sighted to condemn it as the
work of the devil. We depend on technical devices; they even challenge us to ever greater advances. (G22– 3; DT53) What is
important is to work with technology, but not surrender ourselves to it, so that it affects our inner and real core.
Heidegger suggests that this ‘yes’ and ‘no’ is best summarized as releasement toward things [Die Gelassenheit zu den Dingen] (G 22– 3; DT 54; see ID
40/105). Unlike the early Ju ¨ nger he neither sees technology as a solution, nor looks to a new mode of thought over the line. What we have to do
is understand and think: where there is danger, there is the potential of salvation; where there is power there lies the means of its resistance.
This leads Heidegger to one of his most famous formulations: ‘The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the paths into the saving power
begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought’ (VA 40; BW 341).
AT: Alt= nazism
Nazism is the end point of humanism – only embracing Heidegger’s philosophy can avoid this
fate.
Spanos, 93 – Heideggerian literary critic, Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at
Binghamton University, completed his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison [1993, William V.
Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, University of Minnesota Press,
ISBN: 9780816684427, pg. 148-50, Accessed through Ebrary]
In the historically specific context in which Heidegger is writing— and which he is implicitly addressing— what this disclosure concerning the origins of humanism suggests is
that the Parmenides lectures and the "Letter on Humanism" constitute Heidegger's acknowledgment of the culpability of his political discourse during the rectorship, without
succumbing to the judgment of his accusers. That is, they acknowledge its complicity with the dreadful practices of the Nazis, and they also constitute his decisive dissociation
from the Nazis' grotesque imperial project, without, at the same time, subscribing to the compelling but dubious binary (ideo)logic (which, since Victor Farias's "revelations" in
Heidegger et le nazisme, has been used against him) that radically distinguishes between the democracy of Western Europe (including the United States) and the fascism of
the Third Reich. What Heidegger indirectly seems to be saying in these texts, at least in part, is that the
nihilistic Nazi imperial project (which was
not an aberration from the circular humanist logic of the Occident but
its concrete and horribly explicit fulfillment. Heidegger indeed failed later to discriminate between the
civilized barbarism of "Europe" and the Nazis' unspeakable project to exterminate the Jews, and for this he is
profoundly culpable. But this (as I shall argue at length in the last chapter) is not reason enough to write off his resonant
equation. As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe puts it against those recent detractors of Heidegger's thought at large, who represent the horror perpetrated by the Nazi regime as
the triumphal vindication of humanist democracy: Nazism is a humanism, insofar as it is grounded on a humanitas that in its
view is more powerful, that is to say more effective, than any other. The subject of absolute auto-creation, even
if it transcends all the determinations of the modern subject in a position that is immediately natural (the specificity
of race), gathers and concretizes these same determinations, and constitutes itself as the absolute speaking subject
in absolute terms. That this subject lacks the universality that apparently defines the humanitas of humanism in a received sense does not mean that Nazism is
antihumanist. This subject simply inscribes humanism in the logic, of which there are many examples, of the
realization and becoming concrete of abstractions. 24 And, though Lacoue-Labarthe insists that Heidegger's "fault" was precisely his failure to
about to culminate in Auschwitz) was
think Auschwitz, "this event, the Extermination, is for the West, the terrible revelation of its essence." 25 I shall address the question of the historically specific politics of
Heidegger's philosophical discourse at large in the last chapter. Here, what
concerns me is precisely his disclosure of the essential
complicity of truth as veritas and the idealized figure of the circle informing it with the domination of the
marginal "other": the disclosure enabled by his genealogical analysis of the "disinterested" discourse of
Western (i.e., humanist) modernity, specifically its re-presentation of being and time, identity and difference, as
hierarchized binary opposites in which the first term is empowered (as principiwn or center or truth) over the second (as
accident— from cadere, to fall or perish— or periphery or falseness). For whatever the degree to which Heidegger appropriated his
philosophical thought in behalf of the ends of Nazi practice— and I am not at all convinced that the anecdotal or circumstantial and
retrospective strategy employed by his humanist detractors is adequate to the task of determining it— the fact remains that Heidegger's
philosophical texts as such insist fundamentally on precisely this dis-closure vis-a-vis the philosophical
discourse of the Occident. As such, they have enabled or at least catalyzed a number of contemporary discursive practices committed to the
emancipation or emergence of a variety of cultural and sociopolitical subject positions hitherto spoken for and colonized by the hegemonic discursive
practices of Occidental modernity.
***AFF
Alt = Nazism
Heidegger really was a Nazi and the alt will recreate the holocaust
Romano, 9, - lecturer in Philosophy and Media Theory at the University of Pennsylvania, [Carlin Romano,
The Chronicle Review, “Heil Heidegger!”, http://chronicle.com/article/Heil-Heidegger-/48806/]
How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as
Germany's greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in
his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one
wonder whether there's a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at
a distance. To be sure, every philosophy reference book credits Heidegger with one or another headscratcher achievement. One lauds him for his
"revival of ontology." (Would we not think about things that exist without this ponderous, existentialist Teuton?) Another cites his helpful boost to
phenomenology by directing our focus to that well-known entity, Dasein, or "Human Being." (For a reified phenomenon, "Human Being," like the Yeti,
has managed to elude all on-camera confirmation.) A third praises his opposition to nihilism, an odd compliment for a conservative, nationalist thinker
whose antihumanistic apotheosis of ruler over ruled helped grease the path of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Next month Yale University Press will issue an
English-language translation of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy, by Emmanuel Faye, an associate professor at the University of
Paris at Nanterre. It's the latest, most comprehensive archival assault on the ostensibly magisterial thinker who
informed Freiburg students in his infamous 1933 rectoral address of Nazism's "inner truth and greatness,"
declaring that "the Führer, and he alone, is the present and future of German reality, and its law." Faye, whose book
stirred France's red and blue Heidegger départements into direct battle a few years back, follows in the investigative footsteps of Chilean-Jewish
philosopher Victor Farias (Heidegger et le Nazisme, 1987), historian Hugo Ott (Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu Zeiner Biographie, 1988) and others.
Aim? To expose the oafish metaphysician's vulgar, often vicious 1930s attempt to become Hitler's chief academic tribune, and his post-World War II
contortions to escape proper judgment for his sins. "We now know," reports Faye, "that [Heidegger's] attempt at self-justification of
1945 is nothing but a string of falsehoods." The Heidegger exposés, like Annie Leibovitz's tasteless photos of partner Susan Sontag in the
latter's final battle against cancer, force even refined, sophisticated observers of intellectuals to gape. See "Professor Being and Time" wear his swastika
like a frat pin while meeting German-Jewish philosopher Karl Löwith! Recoil at the hearty "Heil Hitlers" with which Martin closed his missives! Wince as
he covertly maneuvers another Jewish colleague or student out of a job with a nasty, duplicitous "recommendation" letter! Unfortunately, Faye's
scrupulously documented study, like Jytte Klausen's controversial The Cartoons That Shook the World, about depictions of Muhammad, lacks the
satirical illustrations that might have given it knockdown force. In the case of Heidegger, it may be that only ridicule—not
further proof of his sordid 1930s acts—can save us. To his credit, Faye takes the usually avoided logical step of articulating that goal.
He essentially calls on publishers to stop churning out Heidegger volumes as they would sensibly desist from hate speech. Similarly, he hopes librarians
will not stock Heidegger's continuing Gesamtausgabe(collected edition), shepherded by the Heidegger family, a project that Faye rightly attacks as
sanitized and incomplete. Even on this side of the Atlantic, one can share Faye's distaste for the flow of reverent Heidegger volumes. In 2006, MIT Press
brought us Adam Sharr's Heidegger's Hut, about the philosopher's Black Forest hideaway in Todtnauberg. It began with Simon Sadler asking in a
foreword, "Is the hut described in this text the smallest residence ever to merit a monograph? Might it be the most prosaic, too?" A couple of quick yeses
would have stopped the project right there. We wouldn't have had to read that while Heidegger's "politics were an
abomination," the reader must "concede that any belief in something at Todtnauberg conducive to political
crime would be essentialist." Oh, really? Sounds bad. You wouldn't want "essentialism" to make you think Heidegger's mullings at home base
for 50 years had any connection to his rancid politics. MIT, in fact, gifted us that year with a doubleheader, also offering up Heidegger's Topology: Being,
Place, World. That came from Jeff Malpas, professor of philosophy at the University of Tasmania, which is about as far away from the camps as you can
get. While conceding Heidegger's true-believer behavior, Malpas wrote of "the addresses from the early 1930s in which Heidegger seems to align himself
with elements of Nazi ideology," as if there were any doubt. Malpas repeated a falsehood put into play by Heidegger himself
after the war, that the philosopher had resigned his rectorship "after having apparently found it increasingly
difficult to accommodate himself to the demands of the new regime." For Malpas, "Heidegger's own politics cannot be taken, in
itself, to undermine his philosophy in any direct way." In that respect, Malpas revived an old standard view that Faye seeks to eliminate once and for all.
For Faye, new material about Heidegger's 1930s teaching and administrative work turns a crucial point upside-
down. While other thinkers, including Löwith and Maurice Blanchot, suggested that Heidegger's Nazism stemmed directly from his philosophy, Faye
counters that his philosophy grew out of his Nazism, forcing us to see it as a kind of philosophical propaganda for Nazism in a different key. Faye's
leitmotif throughout is that Heidegger, from his earliest writings, drew on reactionary ideas in early-20th-century
Germany to absolutely exalt the state and the Volk over the individual, making Nazism and its Blut und Boden
("Blood and Soil") rhetoric a perfect fit. Heidegger's Nazism, he writes, "is much worse than has so far been
known." (Exactly how bad remains unclear because the Heidegger family still restricts access to his private papers.) Faye pulls
no punches: Heidegger "devoted himself to putting philosophy at the service of legitimizing and diffusing the very
bases of Nazism," and some of his 1930s texts surpass those of official philosophers of Nazism in "the virulence of their Hitlerism." Lacking any
respect for Heidegger as thinker, Faye writes that the philosopher Hannah Arendt so deeply admired "has done nothing but blend the characteristic
opacity of his teaching with the darkness of the phenomenon. Far from furthering the progress of thought, Heidegger has helped to conceal the deeply
destructive nature of the Hitlerian undertaking by exalting its 'grandeur.'" Faye agrees that it was possible, even in the wake of Farias's and Ott's work,
"with a lot of self-delusion, to separate the man from the work." He asserts it's no longer possible, since scholars can now access "nearly all the courses"
that Heidegger taught in the 1930s. According to Faye, "we witness, in the courses and seminars that are ostensibly presented as 'philosophical,' a
progressive dissolving of the human being, whose individual worth is expressly denied, into a community of people rooted in the land and united by
blood." The unpublished seminar of 1933-34 identifies the people with a "community of biological stock and race. … Thus, through Heidegger's teaching,
the racial conceptions of Nazism enter philosophy." The "reality of Nazism," asserts Faye, inspired Heidegger's works "in their entirety and nourished
them at the root level." He provides evidence of Heidegger's "intensity" of commitment to Hitler, his constant use of
"the words most operative among the National Socialists," such as "combat" (Kampf), "sacrifice" (Opfer) and
völkisch (which Faye states has a strong anti-Semitic connotation). He also cites Heidegger's use of epithets
against professors such as the philologist Eduard Fraenkel ("the Jew Fraenkel") and his fervid dislike for "the
growing Jewification" that threatens "German spiritual life," mirroring Hitler's discourse in Mein Kampf about
"Jewified universities." For Faye, Heidegger's 1930s Nazi activism came from the heart . Pains takingly providing sources,
Faye exhibits Heidegger's devotion to "spreading the eros of the people for their Führer," and the "communal destiny of a people united by blood." We
learn of Heidegger's desire to be closer to Hitler in Munich, and his eagerness to lead the Gleichschaltung, or "bringing into line," of the German
universities with Nazi ideology. According to several witnesses, Heidegger would show up at class in a brown shirt and salute students with a "Heil
Hitler!" Tellingly, Faye also mines the internal papers of the Munich philosophy faculty, showing that the department's professors considered
Heidegger's work "claptrap," and saw him as so politicized that they believed "no philosophy could be offered the students" if he were appointed. They
considered appointing Heidegger only because of his well-known status as a professor favored by the Nazis. Synthesizing details with the precision of a
Simon Wiesenthal researcher, Faye further undermines Heidegger's later lies that he was not involved with book
burning or anti-Semitic legislation, withdrew from active support of the party after he resigned his rectorship,
and became rector only to protect the independence of the universities. "We must acknowledge," Faye says in one
fierce conclusion, "that an author who has espoused the foundations of Nazism cannot be considered a philosopher ."
Finally, he reiterates his opposition to the Heidegger Industry: "If his writings continue to proliferate without our being able to
stop this intrusion of Nazism into human education, how can we not expect them to lead to yet another
translation into facts and acts, from which this time humanity might not be able to recover?" Is it superficial to yoke
wildly different cultural worlds (Daseins, if you will) together? Might much the same reasoning heard among a few Manhattan TV executives recently
about David Letterman—like Heidegger, a would-be touchstone for the authenticity of his Volk—apply as well to the Meister from Messkirch? Well,
Heidegger did think that Daseins intersect. "Only the jokes can do him in," opined one savvy network veteran in the group. All agreed that Letterman
would survive or fall at the hands of fellow talk-show hosts and comics torn between instincts to eviscerate and guild solidarity. No sober column by, say,
The New York Times's Nicholas Kristof, analogizing Ball State University's most famous alum to a Cambodian brothel owner, would pack the requisite
resonance with key audiences. It would seem that Heidegger, likewise, will continue to flourish until even "Continental" philosophers mock him to the
hilt. His influence will end only when they, and the broader world of intellectuals, recognize that scholarly evidence fingers the scowling proprietor of
Heidegger's hut as a buffoon produced by German philosophy's mystical tradition. He should be the butt of jokes, not the subject of dissertations. In the
meantime, we can expect Heidegger's Faux Tyrolean Wardrobe and the Specter of Carl Schmitt to roll off a university press before too long, sans
cartoons or illustrative plates.
Heidegger’s vision is elitist and leads to Nazism
Hodge, 95 – Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan
University [1995, Joanna Hodge, Heidegger and Ethics, Routledge, ISBN: 9780203004159, pg. 5-6, accessed
through Ebrary]
Technical relations as the context for human existence break that existence loose from the division into ethics
and metaphysics, and from the related subordination of ethics to metaphysics, within which the entire tradition
of Western political life has been held since its inception among the Greeks. The public life of the Greek city state, which provided a
site for the articulation of political ideals, is transformed out of recognition in the modern world; there is no longer a secluded, private sphere of economy, meeting needs, as
distinct from a public, political, symbolic world, concerned with producing meanings. The
permeation of both private and public life by
information systems and electronic gadgets fundamentally shifts human relations to each other , to the world
and to the divisions installed at the beginning of the history of philosophy. These changes require a rethinking
of what politics consists in. This questioning of politics requires a questioning of the division between ethics and metaphysics within Greek philosophy. This,
in turn, presupposes a questioning of the division within ethics between a concern with the evolution of
individuals into mature rationality on the one side, through which women, children, the impious and the
barbarian are excluded from rational deliberation about the collective good, and, on the other, a concern with
the processes of affirming and developing conceptions of collective well-being and collective identities in the
gymnasia of Eurocentric and androcentric privilege. The status of the tradition which links current thinking
about politics, ethics and metaphysics back to some supposed Greek origin is a central question for Heidegger,
and for this study. Heidegger’s insistence on embedding philosophy back into the tradition out of which it emerges
makes philosophy a specialist, elite, esoteric enterprise, open only to those with access to the relevant forms of
training. It leads Heidegger to suppose that, with the loss of access to that tradition, the practice is irretrievable.
The specificity of the European tradition has gone missing through the spread of the results of that tradition
throughout the world. Heidegger is committed to the thought that philosophy is essentially a Greek and , by
extension, a European practice. In his late lecture What is Philosophy?, 7 given in Normandy in 1955, he claims: The word philosophia tells us that philosophy is
something which, first of all, determines the existence of the Greek world. Not only that – philosophia also determines the innermost basic feature of our Western – European
history. The often heard expression ‘Western-European philosophy’ is, in truth, a tautology. Why? Because philosophy is Greek in its nature: Greek in this instance means that
in origin the nature of philosophy is of such a kind that it first appropriated the Greek world, and only it, in order to unfold itself. (WP: 28– 31 ) This is an odd view for
someone who supposes that philosophy results from responding to a homelessness and ungroundedness, 8 which is irreducibly characteristic of human existence. It
is
furthermore unfortunate that Heidegger does not stress a distinction between philosophy having some
inherent connection to the Greek language and philosophy belonging essentially to some ‘Greek nation’ . This
latter view is meaningless, since at the time of the formation of philosophy in Greek, there was no Greek nation.
It is dangerous, because it permits a mistaken slide from ascribing importance to the German language for
philosophy to affirming a specific destiny for a German nation. This view led Heidegger into his endorsement
of Nazism and is still in evidence in his responses to Hölderlin in lectures given in 1943 and in the ‘Letter on humanism’ (1947).
Alt fails
The alternative fails – ignores all political problems
Weinberger 92 (Jerry Weinberger, Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University, “Politics and
the Problem of Technology: An Essay on Heidegger and the Tradition of Political Philosophy”, The American
Political Science Review, Vol. 86, No. 1 (Mar. 1992), pp. 112-127, JSTOR)
In other words, we
would have to show that Heideggerian being, which grants a causeless and tacticall" play of its domains, cannot
account for the genuine gravity of political life-for how the elements of experience contend against each
other, as we see in the challenge of thought to faith, the tension between private and public life, the conflicts
between morality and politics, the difference between the good and the just, and so on. We would have to show that such
contention is possible only insofar as their elements are related causally and hierarchically, so that each by its very nature claims an authority, beyond
the contingencies of any given world, to order the others. And we would have to see that however much the fact of such contention calls forth our efforts
to overcome it by way of making and knowing, both making and knowing are even at their best the very source of this contention. Nature, as I propose to
think about it, is beyond any project for conquest. Technology could, of course, simply destroy the natural soul by making it
either subhuman or godlike; but it could never wholly stamp the human species because it cannot supply all of
the needs that the soul has spontaneously (or by nature), such as the desire for noble preeminence. Consequently, the
harder technology presses, the more intensely we sense a "problem" with it. I am suggesting that the problem
of technology is most fully understood when we approach it through the old-fashioned question of natural
justice that transcends any given political conventions. I am thus suggesting that no era's thinking and practice
is so finite and self-contained that it can be wholly stamped by technology and that we do not have to recur to
Heideggerian being to see the limits of the stamp. But I am also suggesting that such direction as nature gives
to our groping for justice will never satisfy the demands of everyday politics and morality; for that direction
consists in the limited extent to which the widest opening of our eyes can cure the blindnesses of political
life. All this is to say that we can choose against Heidegger only by showing that our view inclines us best to see
unblinkingly the fissures within political life and to resist the dogmatic partisanship that is inseparable from
techne and poiesis. Is it possible that for all its extraordinary power, the Heideggerian attempt to grasp the
character of thought and art results in an equally extraordinary obtuseness toward the nature of political life ? I
would argue that both anticipatory resoluteness and Gelassenheit do just this: the former tempts us to a spurious unity of such things as work, thought,
and war; and the latter tempts us to the spurious disconnectedness of these same phenomena. 32 Is it thus possible that Heideg-gerian
being is itself a danger of technology, which always (like morality) tempts us vainly to try to jump out of our
political skins? My argument is that if we own up to what it means to be human, the answer is a provisional yes. But
if we need further proof that the homely problems of political life just will not go away, that there
really are not that many of them, and that we deny this at our peril, perhaps we need only relearn how to look right under
our noses. There is nothing more technological than the idea that a metaphysical tradition-some rational system-could wholly stamp an age and its practical life. This is, however, just what Heidegger's account of technology
would have us believe. And yet Heidegger's accounts of Gestell and Bestand do help us to think about what is so disturbing about modern
technology-its tendency to deny the objects of the soul's desire, the noble and beautiful things that are in essence both rare and elusive. In thinking about
technology, we discover that not the stamp of meta-physics but the political problems within which thought arises out of production is turned toward a
mysterious but necessary whole and is always pre-carious. Technology is indeed a danger that saves: it compels us to think anew about the meaning of
nature. But if, in grasping technology, we owe any-thing to Heidegger (and we certainly do) it is that Heidegger helps us to see how technology turns us
away from Heidegger.33 I suspect that such a turn will require us to admit that we cannot escape the question of the highest good and that while neither
politics nor justice is that highest good, we cannot think it apart from the moral demands for justice that frame political life
and any questioning about being and the soul.