Eco Ontology K

RHSM 2008 OntologyD-Will ___ of ___

Index

Long 1NC Shell.............................................................................................................................................. 2Dirty 1NC........................................................................................................................................................ 9

Some Camp’s Overview............................................................................................................................... 102NC Overview.............................................................................................................................................. 122NC: Alternative Energy Link........................................................................................................................132NC: Sovereignty Link.................................................................................................................................. 142NC: Actomania Link.................................................................................................................................... 152NC: Impact.................................................................................................................................................. 162NC: Alternative........................................................................................................................................... 17

Link: IR......................................................................................................................................................... 18Link: Deep Ecology.......................................................................................................................................19Link: Alternative Energy................................................................................................................................20Link: Synthetic Fuels.....................................................................................................................................21Link: Hydroelectricity.....................................................................................................................................22Link: Environment......................................................................................................................................... 23Link: Enframing.............................................................................................................................................24Link: Hegemony............................................................................................................................................ 25Link: Space................................................................................................................................................... 26Link: Solar Power......................................................................................................................................... 28Link: Guilt...................................................................................................................................................... 29

A2: Perm....................................................................................................................................................... 31A2: Nazism................................................................................................................................................... 36Heidegger Cards.......................................................................................................................................... 38

Framework.................................................................................................................................................... 40Dillon Extension............................................................................................................................................ 41Framework Cards......................................................................................................................................... 42Ontology Comes First................................................................................................................................... 44AT Neg Side Bias......................................................................................................................................... 46AT Should Implies Desirability......................................................................................................................47AT Bad Alternatives...................................................................................................................................... 48AT Can’t Punish Every Representation........................................................................................................49AT Policy Simulations Good......................................................................................................................... 50AT No Res Basis.......................................................................................................................................... 51AT Remove Agency/Kill Freedom – Wolan.................................................................................................. 52AT Privileging Being Excludes Other / Wolan...............................................................................................53AT Peace Isn’t Natural / Kagan.................................................................................................................... 54AT Realism................................................................................................................................................... 55AT Extinction Outweighs Ontology............................................................................................................... 56AT Spivak (West Critique is Essentialist)......................................................................................................59A2: Ethics > Ontology................................................................................................................................... 60

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A) Framework: Questions of ontology should be evaluated first.Dillon 1999 (Dillon, Prof of Politics, University of Lancaster, Moral Spaces, p. 97-98)-mikee

Heirs to all this, we find ourselves in the turbulent and now globalized wake of its confluence. As Heidegger-himself an especially revealing

figure of the deep and mutual implication of the philosophical and the political 4-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 anything that is, without always already having made assumptions about the is as such. Any mode of thought, in short, always already

carries an 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 throughout 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 modern 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 aporia, 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.

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B) Links- The affirmative’s ontology is bankrupt and violent.

1. Alternative Energy Bad - Energy consumption represents the peak of our manipulation of the environment. Rather than revealing the ontological beauty of nature, it stores it for human utilization. This is the pinnacle of standing reserve logic that obviates our relation to ourselves and nature.Beckman, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, 2000 [Tad, Harvey Mudd College, Martin Heidegger and Environnmental Ethics, page @ http://www2.hmc.edu/~tbeckman/personal/HEIDART.HTML]

Heidegger clearly saw the development of "energy resources" as symbolic of this evolutionary path; while the transformation into modern technology undoubtedly began early, the first definitive signs of its new character began with the harnessing of energy resources, as we would say. (7) As a representative of the old technology, the windmill took energy from the wind but converted it immediately into other manifestations such as the grinding of grain; the windmill did not unlock energy from the wind in order to store it for later arbitrary distribution. Modern wind-generators, on the other hand, convert the energy of wind into electrical power which can be stored in batteries or otherwise. The significance of storage is that it places the energy at our disposal; and because of this storage the powers of nature can be turned back upon itself. The storing of energy is , in this sense, the symbol of our over-coming of nature as a potent object. "...a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit." {[7], p. 14} This and other examples that Heidegger used throughout this essay illustrate the difference between a technology that diverts the natural course cooperatively and modern technology that achieves the unnatural by force. Not only is this achieved by force but it is achieved by placing nature in our subjective context, setting aside natural processes entirely, and conceiving of all revealing as being relevant only to human subjective needs. The essence of technology originally was a revealing of life and nature in which human intervention deflected the natural course while still regarding nature as the teacher and, for that matter, the keeper. The essence of modern technology is a revealing of phenomena, often far removed from anything that resembles "life and nature," in which human intrusion not only diverts nature but fundamentally changes it. As a mode of revealing, technology today is a challenging-forth of nature so that the technologically altered nature of things is always a situation in which nature and objects wait, standing in reserve for our use. We pump crude oil from the ground and we ship it to refineries where it is fractionally distilled into volatile substances and we ship these to gas stations around the world where they reside in huge underground tanks, standing ready to power our automobiles or airplanes. Technology has intruded upon nature in a far more active mode that represents a consistent direction of domination. Everything is viewed as "standing-reserve " and, in that, loses its natural objective identity. The river , for instance, is not seen as a river; it is seen as a source of hydro-electric pow er , as a water supply, or as an avenue of navigation through which to contact inland markets. In the era of techne humans were relationally involved with other objects in the coming to presence; in the era of modern technology, humans challenge-forth the subjectively valued elements of the universe so that, within this new form of revealing, objects lose their significance to anything but their subjective status of standing-ready for human design. (8)

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2. Finitude Good – The drive for infinite energy taps into a flawed ontological narrative of death. Moving away from the finite accelerates a production/consumption cycle that ends with a loss of humanity and nuclear winter. Romanyshyn in 1989 (Robert D., Professor at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, Technology as Sympton and Dream, pp. 186-188)-mikee

Not only is the world a matter of light, but also this light of the world is energy. With this formula we say, in effect, that the way in which the world matters as light is as energy. We say, in other words, that the world is a matter of energy and that energy is the light of the world. Having experienced energy crises and still facing dwindling energy supplies, and living amidst continuing public debate over the advantages and dangers of nuclear energy, we find that the truth of this statement lies at the center of our lives. For some, energy truly is the light of our world, the promised savior and redeemer; for others it is the threatening spectre of either its absence or eruption in the fires of nuclear annihilation. Moreover, we know the truth of this statement in another, directly 'hands-on' way, for each time we turn the knob or touch the button which switches on the television each of us enacts this equation. Television is everyman's and everywoman's participation in this equation E=mc2, insofar as the television screen is, as noted earlier, the place where the world, broken down at its source, is re-energized as light. We are energy producers and consumers, and it is energy and our need for it which most characterize our age. Loren Eiseley, the naturalist who writes with a poet's soul, calls the western industrial human a 'world eater' 14 who has consumed nature itself. We have fed upon the earth, converting it into a resource to serve our energy needs, making it a 'gigantic gasoline station', in the vibrant image of Martin Heidegger. 15

The history of human civilization has been a history of energy and its consumption, and again it is Eiseley who offers us a memorable image of this history. It is the ice in its cycles of advance and retreat against which humanity has built its fires. Huddled against the long dark night of winter, we wait, as we have always waited, with some dim apprehension of a final moment when the cold and the dark will have outlasted the light of our fires. That image of the last dwindling fire, of the dying light against the cold, frozen background of the distant and indifferent stars, has ensorceled the soul of humanity. Against that moment, Eiseley says, we have constructed our civilizations. To stave off that moment, we have climbed the fiery ladder of energy production and use, and with increasing frequency we have had to consume the resources of our world. Until this century, however, the resources of the earth which we could transform and use as energy were limited. They were limited and non-renewable. They were also a gift, a friend from the past. Our energies were won from a heritage of fossil fuels, and against that final winter night '…we extracted hundreds of millions of years of stored sun …' The 'long-silent burial grounds of the Carboniferous Age' fired our civilizations, and we built upon 'the corpses of the past' 16 a haven against the icy dark. It could be said, therefore, that until this century our production and consumption of energy, based as it was on the limited and non-renewable sources created by the sun, were constrained by the yoke of necessity. What was limited would one day be absent. Scarcity and the promise of this eventual and inevitable absence of resources were Nature's way of setting limits and of enforcing limits. It could also be said that within this context our production and consumption of fossil fuels always had about it some dim, potential reminder of death. Our energies were funded, as it were, by death. The civilizations we built upon the earth were supported by the remains of the past. In our production and consumption of energy, present and past were linked. So too were life and death. The fires we built to warm us against the advancing night, to sustain and advance our life in the present, were kindled by the life which had preceded us.

In this century, however, we have broken the yoke of necessity which heretofore had marked our production and consumption of energy. With the splitting of the atom we have freed ourselves of that dependence upon resources both limited and non-renewable. Breaking into the atomic heart of matter, we have re-created here upon the earth the processes which naturally occur only in the heavens. Like some modern Prometheus we have stolen the secret of heavenly fire, and with this secret we have unleashed from the very matter of the earth the energies of the stars. The earth as repository of the sun's stored energies-wood, coal, natural gas, oil-has itself become a small sun. But the earth as a sun is not an inhabitable place. Having become the creators of a seemingly unlimited supply of energy, having progressed, in the words of Jeremy Rifkin, 17 from a pyrotechnology to a nuclear technology, we have gone from the condition of receiving energy as an inheritance to the condition of making it ourselves. To do so, however, we have had to provoke nature in heretofore undreamt of ways. To become the authors, creators, of our own energies, we have had to discover-invent a way to break down the ancient differences so rooted in our daily lives between energy and matter. And we have done so. Splitting the atom we have overcome the split between energy and matter. We have made them one and the same. Like Dr Frankenstein, however, we may also have succeeded in producing a 'monster': the threat of nuclear conflagration. The fire of the sun, re-created upon the earth, threatens our destruction and even motivates our departure from the earth. That long, cold, wintery night of death we would escape in releasing energy from matter comes back to haunt us in the image of a nuclear winter. 18

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3. Actomania Bad - Frantic activity in the name of fixing the world is the end result of a system of thinking which precludes any real change. The aff is riddled with this technological thought and management. McWhorter, Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies Department of Philosophy University of Richmond, 92 [LaDelle, Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Ethics,) -mikee

What it most illustrative is often also what is most common. Today, on all sides of ecological debate we hea r , with greater and greater frequency, the word management. On the one hand, business people want to manage natural resources so as to keep up profits. On the other hand, conservationists want to manage natural resources so that there will be plenty of coal and oil and recreational facilities for future generations. These groups and factions within them debate vociferously over which management policies are the best, that is, the most efficient and manageable . Radical environmentalists damn both groups and claim it is human population growth and rising expectations that are in need of management. But wherever we look, wherever we listen, we see and hear the term management. We are living in a veritable age of management. Before a middle class child graduates from high school she or he is already preliminarily trained in the arts of weight management, stress management, and time management, to name just a few. As we approach middle age we continue to practice these essential arts, refining and adapting our regulatory regimes as the pressures of life increase and the body begins to break down. We have become a society of managers - of our homes, careers, portfolios, estates, even of our own bodies - so is it surprising that we set ourselves up as the managers of the earth itself? And yet, as thoughtful earth-dwellers we must ask, what does this signify? In numerous essays - in particular the beautiful 1953 essay, "The Question Concerning Technology" - Heidegger speaks of what he sees as the danger of dangers in this, our age. This danger is a kind of forgetfulness – a forgetfulness that Heidegger thought could result not only in nuclear disaster or environmental catastrophe, but in the loss of what makes us the kind of beings we are, beings who can think and who can stand in thoughtful relationship to things. This forgetfulness is not a forgetting of facts and their relationships; it is a forgetfulness of something far more important and far more fundamental than that. He called it forgetfulness of 'the mystery.’ It would be easy to imagine that by 'the mystery' Heidegger means some sort of entity, some thing, temporarily hidden or permanently ineffable. But 'the mystery is not the name of some thing; it is the event of the occurring together of revealing and concealing. Every academic discipline, whether it be biology or history, anthropology or mathematics, is interested in discovery, in the 'revelation of new truths" Knowledge, at least as it is institutionalized in the modern world is concerned, then, with what Heidegger would call revealing, the bringing to light, or the coming to presence of things. However, in order for any of this revealing to occur , Heidegger says, concealing must also occur. Revealing and concealing belong together. Now, what does this mean? We know that in order to pay attention to one thing, we must stop paying close attention to something else. In order to read philosophy we must stop reading cereal boxes. In order to attend to the needs of students we must sacrifice some of our research time. Allowing for one thing to reveal itself means allowing for the concealing of something else. All revealing comes at the price of concomitant concealment. But this is more than just a kind of Kantian acknowledgment of human limitation. Heidegger is not simply dressing up the obvious, that is, the fact that no individual can undergo two different experiences simultaneously. His is not a point about human subjectivity at all. Rather, it is a point about revealing itself. When revealing reveals itself as temporally linear and causally ordered, for example, it cannot simultaneously reveal itself as ordered by song and unfolding dream. Furthermore, in revealing, revealing itself is concealed in order for what is revealed to come forth. Thus, when revealing occurs concealing occurs as well. The two events are one and cannot be separated. Too often we forget. The radiance of revelation blinds us both to its own event and to the shadows that it casts, so that revealing conceals itself and its self-concealing conceals itself, and we fall prey to that strange power of vision to consign to oblivion whatever cannot be seen. Even our forgetting is forgotten, and all races of absence absent themselves from our world. The noted physicist Stephen Hawking, in his popular book A Brief History of Time, writes, "The eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe.,'5 Such a theory, many people would assert, would be a systematic arrangement of all knowledge both already acquired and theoretically possible. lt would be a theory to end all theories, outside of which no information, no revelation could, or would need to, occur. And the advent of such a theory would be as the shining of a light into every corner of being. Nothing would remain concealed. This dream of Hawking's is a dream of power; in fact, it is a dream of absolute power, absolute control. It is a dream of the ultimate managerial utopia. This, Heidegger would contend, is the dream of technological thought in the modern age. We dream of knowing, grasping everything, for then we can control, then we can manage, everything. But it is only a dream, itself predicated, ironically enough, upon concealment, the self-concealing of the mystery. We can never control-the mystery the belonging together of revealing and concealing. I n order to approach the world in a manner exclusively technological, calculative, mathematical, scientific, we must already have given up (or lost, or been expelled by, or perhaps ways of being such as we are even impossible within) other approaches or modes of revealing that would unfold into knowledges of other sorts. Those other approaches or paths of thinking must already have been obliterated; those other knowledges must already have concealed themselves in order for technological or scientific revelation to occur. The danger of a managerial approach to the world lies not then in what it knows nor in its planetary on into the secrets of galactic emergence or nuclear fission – but in what it forgets, what it itself conceals. I t forgets that any other truths are possible , and it forgets that the belonging together of revealing with concealing is forever beyond the power of human management. We can never have, or know, it all; we can never manage everything.

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4. Sovereignty Bad - The marriage of ecology and sovereignty make state oppression inevitable. Biopower is only possible after a specific form of life is glorified and integrated into the ontological system of the state. Luke in 1998 (Timothy W. [Department of Political Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute] “THE (UN)WISE (AB)USE OF NATURE: ENVIRONMENTALISM AS GLOBALIZED,” Alternatives: Social Transformation & Humane Governance, 03043754, Apr-Jun98, Vol. 23, Issue 2)-mikee

In conclusion, Foucault is correct about the network of governmentality arrangements in the modern state. State power is not "an entity which was developed above individuals, ignoring what they are and even their very existence," because its power/knowledge has indeed evolved "as a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form, and submitted to a set of very specific patterns."116 Producing discourses of ecological living, articulating designs of sustainable development, and propagating definitions of environmental literary for contemporary individuals simply adds new twists to the "very specific patterns" by which the state formation constitutes "a modern matrix of individualization."117 The emergent regime of ecologized bio-powers , in turn, operates through ethical systems of identity as much as it does in the policy machinations of governmental bureaux within any discretely bordered territory. Ecology merely echoes the effects from "one of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century," namely, "the emergence of 'population' as an economic and political problem."118 Once demography emerges as a science of statist administration, it is statistical attitudes can diffuse into the numerical surveillance of Nature, or Earth and its nonhuman inhabitants, as well as the study of culture, or society and its human members, giving us ecographies written by the Worldwatchers steering effects exerted from their astropanopticons through every technoscientific space.119 Government, and now, most importantly, superpowered statist ecology, preoccupies itself with "the conduct of conduct," particularly in consumerism's "buying of buying" or "purchasing of purchasing." Habitus is habitat, as any good product semanticist or psychodemographer knows all too well. The ethical concerns of family, community and nation previously might have guided how conduct was to be conducted; yet, at this juncture, "the environment" serves increasingly as the most decisive ground for normalizing each individual's behavior. Environments are spaces under police supervision, expert management, risk avoidance, or technocratic control. By bringing environmentalistic agendas into the heart of corporate and government policy, one finds the ultimate meaning of a police state fulfilled . If police, as they bound and observed space, were empowered to watch over religion, morals, health, supplies, roads, town buildings, public safety, liberal arts, trade, factories, labor supplies, and the poor, then why not add ecology--or the totality of all interactions between organisms and their surroundings--to the police zones of the state? The conduct of any person's environmental conduct becomes the initial limit on other's ecological enjoyments, so too does the conduct of the social body's conduct necessitate that the state always be an effective "environmental protection agency." The ecological domain is the ultimate domain of unifying together all of the most critical forms of life that states must now produce, protect, and police in eliciting bio-power: it is the center of their enviro-discipline, eco-knowledge, geo-power.120 Few sites in the system of objects unify these forces as thoroughly as the purchase of objects from the system of purchases. Mobilizing biological power, then, accelerates exponentially after 1970 along with global fast capitalism. Ecology becomes one more formalized disciplinary mod e of paying systematic "attention to the processes of life ....to invest life through and through"121 in order to transform all living things into biological populations to develop transnational commerce. The tremendous explosion of global economic prosperity, albeit in highly skewed spatial distributions, after the 1973/1974 energy crises would not have been possible without ecology to guide "the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes."122 An anantamo-politics for all of Earth's plants and animals now emerges out of ecology as strategic plans for terraformative management through which environmentalizing resource managerialists acquire "the methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern."123

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C) Impacts – These static and violent ontologies of the aff may seem benign, but each closure denies humanity and makes destruction of the Earth possible. Ontological damnation outweighs nuclear war.Zimmerman in 1997 [Michael, Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity, Berkeley, Calif. University of California Press, 1997. p.119-120]

George Sessions say that if Heidegger had begun with the cosmos and worked his way toward human beings, humans would have seemed less significant in his scheme. Yet by beginning with human Dasein, he disclosed nature as ancillary to human concerns. Sessions says that this anthropocentric turn began when Socrates insisted that philosophy concern itself primarily with human affairs and was “reinforced by Aristotle’s suggestion that nature “has made all things for the sake of man.” This view was popularized by Stoicism and later by Christianity, which depicted Creation as the backdrop for the drama of human salvation. Self-assertive Renaissance men intensified this anthropocentrism. Later, Protestant reformers emphasized the nonsacred charter of nature, thus opening the way for a new burst of empirical inquiry and technological exploitation of nature. The triumph of scientific positivism culminated the drive to interpret all phenomena, including humans, as nothing more than quantifiable material events. That Sessions and Heidegger arrive at such similar conclusion about modernity indicates that both are critics of anthropocentric humanism, even though they seem to differ on the source for such humanism. Sessions says that humanism stems for arrogance in the face of nature. Later Heidegger said that humanism stems not so much from human arrogance, though this does play a role analogous to hubris in Greek tragedy, but rather from the fateful self-concealment of being. Heidegger asserted that human self-assertion, combined with the eclipse of being, threatens the relation between being and human Dasein. Loss of this relation would be even more dangerous than a nuclear war that might “bring about the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the earth.” This controversial claim is comparable to the Christian teaching that it is better to forfeit the world than to lose one’s soul by losing one’s relation to God. Heidegger apparently thought along these lines: it is possible that after a nuclear war, life might once again emerge, but it is far less likely that there will ever again occur an ontological clearing through which such life could manifest itself. Further, since modernity’s one-dimensional disclosure of entities virtually denies them any “being” at all, the loss of humanity’s openness for being is already occurring. Modernity’s background mood is horror in the face of nihilism, which is consistent with the aim of providing material “happiness” for everyone by reducing nature to pure energy . The unleashing of vast quantities of energy in nuclear war would be equivalent to modernity’s slow-motion destruction of nature: unbounded destruction would equal limitless consumption. If humanity avoided nuclear war only to survive as contented clever animals, Heidegger believed we would exist in a state of ontological damnation: hell on earth, masquerading as material paradise.

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D) Our alternative text:

Vote negative to refuse the ontology of the affirmative.

Voting negative is a gesture against the need to manage, control, and act against nature. Only by offering space for meditative thinking can challenge technological thought and open up more productive ontological possibilities. McWhorter 92(Ladelle, Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies Department of Philosophy University of Richmond, “Guilt as Management Technology: A Call to Heideggerian Reflection,” Heidegger and the Earth, 1-9)-mikee

"Thinking today must concern itself with the earth. Wherever we turn - on newsstands, on the airwaves, and in even the most casual of conversations everywhere - we are inundated by predictions of ecological catastrophe and omnicidal doom. And many of these predictions bear themselves out in our own experience. We now live with the ugly, painful, and impoverishing consequences of decades of technological innovation and expansion without restraint, of at least a century of disastrous "natural resource management" policies, and of more than two centuries of virtually unchecked industrial pollution - consequences that include the fact that millions of us on any given day are suffering, many of us dying of diseases and malnutrition that are the results of humanly produced ecological devastation; the fact that thousands of species now in existence will no longer exist on this planet by the turn of the century; the fact that our planet's climate has been altered, probably irreversibly, by the carbon dioxide and chloro-fluorocarbons we have heedlessly poured into our atmosphere; and the mind-boggling fact that it may now be within humanity's power to destroy all life on this globe. Our usual response to such prophecies of doom is to ignore them or, when we cannot do that, to scramble to find some way to manage our problems, some quick solution , some technological fix . But over and over again new resource management techniques , new solutions, new technologies disrupt delicate systems even further, doing still more damage to a planet already dangerously out of ecological balance. Our ceaseless interventions seem only to make things worse, to perpetuate a cycle of human activity followed by, ecological disaster followed by human intervention followed by a new disaster of another kind. In fact, it would appear that our trying to do things, change things, fix things cannot be the solution, because it is part of the problem itself. But, if we cannot act to solve our problems, what should we do? Heidegger's work is a call to reflect to think in some way other than calculatively, technologically, pragmatically. Once we begin to move with and into Heidegger's call, and begin to see our trying to seize control and solve problems as itself a problematic approach if we still believe that thinking's only real purpose is to function as a prelude to action, we who attempt to think will twist within the agonizing grip of paradox, feeling nothing but frustration, unable to conceive of ourselves as anything but paralyzed. However, as so many peoples before us have known, paradox is not only a trap; it is also a scattering point and passageway . Paradox invites examination of its own constitution (hence of the patterns of thinking within which it occurs) and thereby breaks a way of thinking open, revealing the configurations of power that propel it and hold it on track. And thus it makes possible the dissipation of that power and the deflection of thinking into new paths and new possibilities. Heidegger frustrates us. At a time when the stakes are so very high and decisive action is so loudly and urgently called for, Heidegger apparently calls us to do- nothing. If we get beyond the revulsion and anger that such a call initially inspires and actually examine the feasibility of response, we begin to undergo the frustration attendant upon paradox: how is it possible, we ask, to choose, to will, to do nothing? The call itself places in question the bimodal logic of activity and passivity; it points up the paradoxical nature of our passion for action, of our passion for maintaining control. The call itself suggests that our drive for acting decisively and forcefully is part of what must be thought through, that the narrow option of will versus surrender is one of the power configurations of current thinking that must be allowed to dissipate.

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Dirty 1NCThe Times March 26, 2008 (Friedrich Nietzsche's grave under threat from search for brown coal, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article3621725.ece)

Friedrich Nietzsche declared famously that “God is dead!” so it is probably safe to assume that he did not much care what happened to his skeleton. Which may be just as well as bulldozers prepare to turn over the philosopher's grave and his birthplace in search of brown coal.

The village of Röcken, south of Leipzig, is plastered with posters bearing quotes from Nietzsche's masterpiece, Thus Spake Zarathustra, announcing “Be true to the soil!” in a desperate attempt to prevent an energy company from turning the region into a lunar landscape. Ralf Eichberg, head of the Nietzsche Society, said: “We have Nietzsche's birthplace, the church where he was baptised and where his father preached, the orchard where he played, the school where he learnt to read and write, and the graves; his, that of his sister Elisabeth, his parents.” Digging the village up — as has happened to 25 east German communities targeted by mining companies since the Second World War — would destroy most of the physical traces of the 19th-century thinker. Röcken, with barely 600 inhabitants, used to be in East Germany and the Communist authorities considered Nietzsche dangerous; a supplier of ideas to the Nazis because his concept of a “Super-man” could be applied to Nordic German heroes. In fact, Nietzsche thought the idea of a pure Teutonic race to be “a mendacious swindle”. But, no matter, he was put on the Communists' blacklist and Röcken was earmarked for stripmining in the 1980s. With the end of communism there was a revival of interest in Nietzsche and suspicions about the merits of brown coal, or lignite. It is dirtier than hard coal and mining it involves ripping up the landscape. But the pendulum has swung again. “Brown coal makes us less dependent on others for electricity generation,” said Johannes Heithoff, of the RWE Power energy group.

Any attempt to resume a nuclear power programme has been blocked by the Social Democrats. And there is anxiety about gas and oil deliveries from Russia — Germany's main supplier. So mining for brown coal, though making a nonsense of Germany's pledge to cut greenhouse gases, is on the rise. And Röcken is standing in the way. But transferring the bodily remains of one of Germany's most famous philosophers is, say Nietzsche fans, an act of sacrilege. “The parish is unanimously against this,” said the local priest, Joachim Salomon. Unfortunately for villagers, most of the surrounding region is in favour of brown coal mining. There is 20 per cent unemployment locally and some towns have lost more than a third of their population since German unification. The mining companies employ 2,000 people directly and create work for another 3,000. “Ultimately this will have to be decided at the political level,” said Andreas Günther, of Mibrag, the main mining company. And politics is pitted against Nietzsche — and for the bulldozers. All three leading parties in the region — the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats and the Left party — are in favour of job-creating strip mining, whatever it may do to the environment.

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article3621725.ece


Some Camp’s Overview

What does science see when it looks at the evening sky, cast grey-blue in azure hues and shades? The answer, of course, is differentially refracted photons manifesting at a wavelength of 475 nanometers, entering your eyes and colliding with the rod and cone structures in your eyes. But that means nothing much in terms of human signification, doesn’t it?

Listening to the 1ac, you might think this: emissions cause carbon concentration and greenhouse gases shutting in heat and thus we should provide x incentive to decrease emissions preventing warming and otherwise people will die or we’ll go extinct.

We think that’s rather dimensionless. Whatever happened to the island nation resident, slowly watching the waters rise and his life wash away? Or, perhaps, the lifelong farmer, watching his crops grow less and less each year? Whatever happened to them and a million other people, all missing from the 1ac? They are replaced by objective knowledges and descriptions, by solvency mechanisms and well-written plans. But even you. Have you ever seen an ice cap glimmering on a mountaintop? Will your children or your children’s children even know what an ice cap is? Does that matter?

But first, another question: How did we get here? Why, since the Industrial Revolution, have we continued our engagement with technology, and wanted more and more? Why have the last few decades of federal policy for incentivizing energy failed so miserably and terribly? What is greed and consumption and why do we continue on our curve into the abyss? For the heart of the darkness of the way humanity is now, can the technical approach of the affirmative do much? When they sat at a computer all day for days on end, weeks on end, googling and lexis-ing and looking up words like “extinction” and “nuclear war,” how did the thoughts in their minds take shape?

So really, what’s wrong with things?

We’ll tell you. The 1ac – in its presentation, style, analysis, and conceptualization of the problem of climate change, in its the entire assemblage of thought and ontology meant to frame the round in a certain way, is technological. It is management. It reveals the world as temporally linear and causally ordered, when in fact we know that nothing can take human experience and cut it into explainable bits. The 1ac is a forgetting of the poetics of our existence, a forgetting of song and unfolding dream. Even our forgetting is eventually forgotten. In the 2ac, the affirmative will desperately try to secure and close the world we’ve uncovered. Of course, all that is left is a need for more knowledge, for more management.

10


Some Camp’s Overview

The 1ac robs us of the more human dimensions of life, creating a fate worse than extinction.

Listening to the 1ac, you might think this: emissions cause carbon concentration and greenhouse gases shutting in heat and thus we should provide x incentive to decrease emissions preventing warming and otherwise people will die or we’ll go extinct.

We think that’s rather dimensionless. Whatever happened to the island nation resident, slowly watching the waters rise and his life wash away? Or, perhaps, the lifelong farmer, watching his crops grow less and less each year? Whatever happened to them and a million other people, all missing from the 1ac? They are replaced by objective knowledges and descriptions, by solvency mechanisms and well-written plans. Do these things matter?

But first, another question: How did we get here? Why, since the Industrial Revolution, have we continued our engagement with technology, and wanted more and more? Why have the last few decades of federal policy for incentivizing energy failed so miserably and terribly? What is greed and consumption and why do we continue on our curve into the abyss? For the heart of the darkness of the way humanity is now, can the continuous technical approach of the affirmative do much? When they sat at a computer all day for days on end, weeks on end, googling and lexis-ing and looking up words like “extinction” and “nuclear war,” how did the thoughts in their minds take shape?

So really, what’s wrong with things?

What’s wrong is that the 1ac – in its presentation and conceptualization of the problem of climate change, is management. It reveals the world as temporally linear and causally ordered, when in fact we know that nothing can take human experience and cut it into explainable bits. The 1ac is a forgetting of the poetics of our existence, a forgetting of song and unfolding dream. Even our forgetting is eventually forgotten. All the aff can do is continue the disastrous politics that are the root cause of their harms.

The alternative is to thus step away from actomania, to consider and to tarry and to wonder. Pause for meditative thought is the only way to reveal true solutions to problems. You should take the leap of faith to do nothing in the face of catastrophe blackmail meant to continue the technological cycle.

11


2NC Overview

12


2NC: Alternative Energy Link

Extend the Beckman in 2008 evidence. While alternative energy may seem like a step in the right direction, it only appears as such through the lens of technological thinking. The focus on renewable energy simply changes what we consume without interrogating why. This evidence sites both wind and hydropower as an example of a standing reserve logic that lets technological thought infect our ontology.

And, This is not a flaw in the concept of technology, but rather the way it is enframed through technological thought. Exploitation does not stem from how we use technology, but how we think it.Rojcewicz in 2006, Professor of Philosophy at Point Park University, Executive Director of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at Duquesne University, cotranslator of Heidegger’s work, [Richard, The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger, page 71-75]-mikee

The modern windmill certainly arises as the application of scientific discoveries; but it is modern technology that motivates that application in the first place. Modern technology supplies the idea of nature as something exploitable; that is what motivates the actual exploitation by science. In this first example we also see, in a preliminary way, that for Heidegger the antidote to the danger of modern technology is not conservation, or, at least, it is not merely conservation. A modern windmill is "environmentally friendly"; it exploits a renewable energy source and does not pollute. For Heidegger, however, such a windmill is not the solution but is part of the problem. The solution must go deeper than conservation, must go all the way to the root of the problem, which is the attitude toward nature at the heart of modern technology. Conservation-ism may actually include the exact same attitude that nature is merely there to be exploited, only now it is recognized that nature's treasures are finite and we must make them last. For Heidegger, such an attitude is essentially the same as the one of rampant exploitation of nature; they both embody the same view of nature, and it is that view that holds the danger. Thus for Heidegger, as we already hinted and will take up more fully in Part III, the danger is not that technology might get out of hand and make the world uninhabitable; the danger is not merely to human life but to something even more precious, to something even more worthy of defending, namely, human freedom and dignity.

Modern technology is a reductionistic looking upon nature; a reduced face of nature, reduced from the concrete to the abstract, reduced from nature as it presents itself in our experience to nature in the form that allows us to exploit it. We can exploit water, understood as H20; we can exploit it for its hydrogen and oxygen. But no one swims in H20; no one baptizes with H20. To see in water H20 is equivalent to looking upon a woman as a mere sexual object.

If we disrupt the validity of technological thought then none of the impacts make sense. Vote neg.

13


2NC : Sovereignty Link

Extend Luke in 98 – Modern sovereignty is fueled by ecological discourses that encourage state control over energy. Even further, the aff reifies an ecological life script that necessitates a cruel biopolitical expression of the state. And, Sovereignty is at the root of our ontological understanding of politics.Bartleson 95 (Jean, prof. at Dept of Pli Sci at University of Stockholm, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, Cambridge U. Press – pp. 22-23)

International relations theory is thus ‘entitled to take for granted the political units’. No one criticizes chemistry for taking the existence of atoms for granted, lower or higher levels of complexity are simply left to physicists and biologists respectively. Therefore, we should better view criticism along the above lines· not as an ontological dispute going on within a preconstituted and homogeneous field of knowledge, but as· a contest over a problematic disciplinary identity. For example, during the period when the interdependence of states was emphasized in international relations theory, it became commonplace \ :o insist that the distinction between domestic society and international system was blurred or about to be dissolved. But in inter-dependence theorists could not have it both ways; either they were right in their talk about blurring, with the inevitable consequence that their theories ceased to be theories of international politics, or, as was more often the case, talk about blurring was mere lip-service, this being so since talk about blurring and dissolution always presupposes

that that which is. blurred essentially is distinct; in the end one was :tacitly reaffirming the same distinction which one so valiantly criticized. Every scientific practice has to start somewhere, and international political theory happens to take the existence of the state as foundational for its intellectual enterprise. Nevertheless, even if the state is taken to be ontologically primitive, and its primitiveness is integral to the field of knowledge as such, questions about the state as a political actor have not been avoided by international political theory, even if they occupy a somewhat marginal position. For what makes a state a state? What is the crucial property behind its capacity for unitary action? What distinguishes it from other forms of political organization? Facing these questions, sovereignty is introduced both as the defining property of the state and in explaining the presence of an international system. For since the state is regarded as historically and ontologically prior to the system of states in the discourse on international politics, the essence of statehood appears to be the necessary condition also of the larger whole, the international system

The system of sovereignty as a whole takes the state as the only actor – the problem is that states can’t simply interact with life, but rather have to create other units to operate with. Defining these valid political bodies is problematic, because any time an inside is created an outside is necessarily created also. This link turns the case – proves sovereignty creates otherization and prevents us from understanding nature.

Here’s an external and independent DA to the case. Reliance on the state guarantees cycles of increasingly violent wars and atrocityCavanaugh 99 (William T,. Professor of Theology, Cambridge “The City: Beyond Secular Parodies” Radical Orthodoxy pgs. 192-193)

The state has promised peace but has brought violence. The wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seem sufficient prima facie evidence to demonstrate this, and yet the bogus myth of the ‘Wars of Religion’ persists. If my argument is correct, however, the ‘Wars of Religion’ were provoked – not peaceably resolved – by the centralization of the state over/against local forms of governance. Apart from the violence resulting from the process of securing a monopoly on legitimate force within a defined territory, the establishment of territorial borders with a single authority within each assumes a ‘state of nature’ between territorial states, heightening the possibility of war. Our fellow-citizens are limited to all those currently living English,

Americans, French, etc. The dominance of state soteriology has made it perfectly reasonable to drop cluster bombs on ‘foreign’ villages, and perfectly unreasonable to dispute ‘religious’ matters in public. In the absence of shared ends, individuals relate to each other by means of contract, which assumes a guarantee by force. Hobbes was of course clear on this, but Locke too assumed, as we

have seen, that the state body moves in whichever way the greater force compels it. Max Weber rightly perceived that the modern state cannot be defined by ends, but only by its peculiar means, which is a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Internally , such force is necessary to keep the mass of individuals from interfering with each other’s rights. Externally, the violence of war is necessary to provide some unity – albeit a false one – to a society lacking in any truly social process. As Raymond Williams and others have argued, war is for the liberal state a simulacrum of the social process, the primary mechanism for achieving social integration in a society with no shared ends . In a world, violence becomes the state’s religio, its habitual discipline for binding us one to another.

14


2NC: Actomania Link

Extend McWhorter 92. The compulsion to act, manage, and control knowledge closes off ontological awareness. Given the harms of the affirmative, global warming, resource wars, and all other environmental issues, we might feel pressure to "do something" and to wrap our concerns in the prevailing "calculative way of speaking.” However, succumbing to such pressures brings even greater estrangement from Being, and the destruction of an authentic relation with ourselves and nature. Instead, it is essential to cultivate receptivity to Being—all the more so, given the contemporary preoccupation with commodification, control, and the quick fix.

And, There can be no "fix" for environmental issues. Rather, there must be a radical action and investigate ontology. LaDelle McWhorter, Professor of Philosophy, Northeast Missouri State, a joyous and happy bumble, 1992, Heidegger and the Earth, ed.

When we attempt to think ecologically and within Heidegger's discourse (or perhaps better: when we attempt to think Heideggerly within ecological concerns), the paradoxical unfolds at the site of the question of human action. Thinking ecologically - that is, thinking the earth in our time - means thinking death; it means thinking catastrophe; it means thinking the possibility of utter annihilation not just for human being but for all that lives on this planet and for the living planet itself. Thinking the earth in our time means thinking what presents itself as that which must not be allowed to go on, as that which must be controlled, as that which must be stopped. Such thinking seems to call for immediate action. There is no time to lose. We must work for change, seek solutions, curb appetites, reduce expectations, find cures now, before the problems become greater than anyone's ability to solve them - if they have not already done so. However, in the midst of this urgency , thinking ecologically, thinking Heideggerly, means rethinking the very notion of human action . It means placing in question our typical Western managerial approach to problems, our propensity for technological intervention, our belief in human cognitive power, our commitment to a metaphysics that places active human being over against passive nature. For it is the thoughtless deployment of these approaches and notions that has brought us to the point of ecological catastrophe in the first place. Thinking with Heidegger, thinking Heideggerly and ecologically, means, paradoxically, acting to place in question the acting subject, willing a displacing of our will to action; it means calling ourselves as selves to rethink our very selves, insofar as selfhood in the West is constituted as agent, as actor, as controlling ego, as knowing consciousness. Heidegger's work calls us not to rush in with quick solutions, not to act decisively to put an end to deliberation, but rather to think, to tarry with thinking unfolding itself to release ourselves to thinking without provision or predetermined aim.

15


2NC: Impact

Extend Zimmerman 97- Our inability to perceive the essence of the world and instead replace it with the commodification constructed by a technological world view prevents us from authentically being in the world and leaves us in a state of ontological damnation resulting in complete nuclear annihilation.

Extend Luke 98 and Romanyshyn 89 – these are two external and indepdenant impacts that the 2AC dropped! The first is biopower – the aff would result in an eco-managerial system where wars would be waged for ecological populations and where life would only be relevant when it followed the script of sustainability. The second is extinction – The aff’s ignores our finite nature. The aff accelerates the drive for a light that never goes out, this culminates in technological weaponry like nukes, super colliders, and worse. The end result is turning the earth into a giant inhabitable sun.

Unless we challenge the their ontology its insistent comportment will make humans analogous to machines, emotionless beings focused only on objectives. The loss of humanity is tantamount to the loss of human life.Rojcewicz, Professor of Philosophy at Point Park University, Executive Director of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at Duquesne University,

cotranslator of Heidegger’s work, 2K6 [Richard, The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger, page. 145]-mikee

Thus the first danger is that humans will fall (or have already fallen) victim to this delusion, namely that of being the master of all things. In other words, humans are here victimized by the delusory experience of absolute freedom, complete mastery, the ability to impose their will everywhere. For Heidegger, this attitude is a delusion, because, in attempting to be master, humans are actually altogether "in attendance on the challenging of com-posing." That is, to impose on things is really to comply passively with the demands placed on humans by Being in its current guise. To impose on disposables, to pursue technology headlong, is actually to surrender one's freedom to the all-encompassing imposition. It is to be a slave to the all-encompassing imposition.This first delusion, that of mastery over things, also poses a danger for the relation of humans to themselves. As Heidegger

says at the begin¬ning of the passage presently under consideration, in our impositional attitude things are no longer self-standing objects. They become posed ob-jects. As posed, ob-jects have no autonomy; they are entirely determined from the outside, by the one who poses them. Now, if humans view all things as determined, then humans stand on the brink of an un¬derstanding of themselves in the same terms. Humans will be tempted to apply their science to themselves and thereby reduce themselves to the formulas they apply to things. Like determined things, humans will become the outcome of exterior forces. Then, e.g., humans will understand themselves as computers, complex ones, perhaps, but with their output still entirely determined by their input. This input will take the form of various outside forces, such as social, biological, and psychological ones. Humans will become the ob-jects of their own sciences of sociology, bi¬ology, and psychology. Humans will see themselves as included among other disposables, as posed by exterior forces over which they have absolutely no control. Consequently, humans will view themselves not as masters but as slaves, not free but determined, mere cogs in the great machine of forces around them.

16


2NC: Alternative.

Our alternative is a form of meditative thinking. We call for a refusal of aff’s ontology – this means rejecting the idea that the United States federal government is an actor, that policy action is how we engage life, that life is infinite, and that the Earth exists to provide us energy – the affirmative ontology is rooted in these flawed concepts as the starting point for Being.

We want you to vote negative in favor of simply treating being as humans, as life, as equal biological forms. Extend our McWhorter evidence – proves that state intereventions into ecological problems fails. McWhorter says that negating by doing nothing explodes the binary modes of technological thought – this means that ruptures like the alternative in dominant systems of ontology create the possibility of ontological shift – the alternative has real, concrete political value. The only way to escape the cycle of forgetting and ecological catastrophe is to stop and think. This unfolding allows the world to disclose itself to us.

Solvency must be viewed from an ontological perspective. Before we ask “What should we do?” we need to ask “How should we think?” Our K is a prequSwazo, professor of philosophy at university of Alaska, Fairbanks, 2K2 [Norman K, Crisis Theory and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections p.184-185]

Both normative and technocratic futurism are in the service of power empowering itself to the possibility of 'unconditional dominance'. The one (normative futurism) thinks in terms of 'values', the other (technocratic futurism) in terms of the technological as 'utilitarian intelligence'. Both are under the sway of the 'framework', Ge-Stell, the essence of technology as will to power. What is posited as value finds itself in the service of the framework, just as much as does what is preferred as technological 'fix'. The call to world order that finds expression in the work of social scientists is the 'gathering agent' of Ge-Stell "that challenges mankind to put everything that discloses itself into the position of stock, resource, material for technological processing." It is in this specific sense—being in the service of the unconditional dominance of the will to power as the essence of technology—that the move¬ment for world order, as the globalism of normative and technocratic futurism, is the extreme possibility of 'completed' political philosophy. By now we must have learned that properly to approach the problem of world order is not to do so as if it were chiefly or solely an epistemological question, i.e., "approaching a problem as if it were to be solved by the acquisition of knowledge." Rather, it must first and foremost be understood as a metaphysical or ontological question; i.e., it can be solved ptimarily by understanding it as one that requires the penetration of Being as a response to the call of Being. This means that world order thinking must think more deeply the essence of its quest and task, that it must see the problem of world order in terms of the abiding epochal dispensation of the essence of technology, of Being as the will to power, and then in terms of Being's potential 'turning'. World order thinking that thinks in terms of values—peace, justice, economic well-being, ecological balance—or by way of instrumental reason must, if it is to attain to the possibility of an alternative criterion for mankind's world sojourn, come to understand how its movement is steeped in the fundamental features of the modern age. Only in this way can it understand the immediately relevant question of whether the world-order-future is to be the genuine ordo of human being, of Being, or the production of its semblance, the representation of that ordo, rather than its most proper presentation. Only in this way can it come to see the need for asking the fundamental question, "How must we think.," rather than the ambiguously urgent question, "What ought we to do?" (which is not really a 'rather than' but the recognition of thinking itself as action, as the authentic doing).

17


Link: IR

The affirmative theory of international relations relies on the State as its ontological foundation. Their politics is rooted in sovereignty

Bartleson 95 (Jean, prof. at Dept of Pli Sci at University of Stockholm, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, Cambridge U. Press – pp. 22-23

To be sure, this line of criticism is valid but in a sense trivial. The very term ‘international,’ taken as a mark of disciplinary identity, makes up both for the centrality and unproblematic character of the state in international political theory. Thus Raymond Aron was anxiously· guarding his intellectual territory, when stating that 'a complete science or philosophy of politics would include international relations as one of its chapters, but this chapter would retain its originality since it would deal with the relations between political units’. International relations theory is thus ‘entitled to take for granted the political units’. No one criticizes chemistry for taking the existence of atoms for granted, lower or higher levels of complexity are simply left to physicists and biologists respectively. Therefore, we should better view criticism along the above lines· not as an ontological dispute going on within a preconstituted and homogeneous field of knowledge, but as· a contest over a problematic disciplinary identity. For example, during the period when the interdependence of states was emphasized in international relations theory, it became commonplace \ :o insist that the distinction between domestic society and international system was blurred or about to be dissolved. But in inter-dependence theorists could not have it both ways; either they were right in their talk about blurring, with the inevitable consequence that their theories ceased to be theories of international politics, or, as was more often the case, talk about blurring was mere lip-service, this being so since talk about blurring and dissolution always presupposes that that which is. blurred essentially is distinct; in the end one was :tacitly reaffirming the same distinction which one so valiantly criticized.Every scientific practice has to start somewhere, and international political theory happens to take the existence of the state as foundational for its intellectual enterprise. Nevertheless, even if the state is taken to be ontologically primitive, and its primitiveness is integral to the field of knowledge as such, questions about the state as a political actor have not been avoided by international political theory, even if they occupy a somewhat marginal position. For what makes a state a state? What is the crucial property behind its capacity for unitary action? What distinguishes it from other forms of political organization?Facing these questions, sovereignty is introduced both as the defining property of the state and in explaining the presence of an international system. For since the state is regarded as historically and ontologically prior to the system of states in the discourse on international politics, the essence of statehood appears to be the necessary condition also of the larger whole, the international system

18


Link: Deep Ecology

Political reforms and deep ecology still link.Zimmerman in 1997 [Michael, Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity, Berkeley, Calif. University of California Press, 1997. p.119-120]

Deep ecologists might agree that a world of material human comfort purchased at the price of everything wild would not be a world worth living in, for in killing wild nature, people would be as good as dead. But most of them could not agree that the loss of humanity’s relation to being would be worse than nuclear omnicide for it is wrong to suppose that the lives of millions of extinct and unknown species are somehow lessened because they were never “disclosed” by humanity. Later Heidegger became attracted to the view of nature found in the poetry of Holderlin, who proclaimed “the coming god,” the Dionysian divinity who would restore meaning and weight to a nature flattened by excessive rationalism and commercialism. In the 1930s, Heidegger believed that his own thought and National Socialism were opening the way for this god. Years later, though chastened because he had supported a regime that contributed to modern nihilism, Heidegger still concluded that “only a god can save us.” Political activism reinforces the slide into nihilism, for politics manifests the subject’s striving for control, from which the coming god was to free humankind. Similarly, deep ecologists say that reformism will only reinforce the status quo, unless people undergo a spiritual conversion. From Heidegger’s viewpoint, however, the Deep Ecology Platform, ostensibly broad enough to be embraced by activists of many stripes, may itself be influenced by the modern control impulse criticized by deep ecologists. The DEP justifies mass movements, which, despite their noble aim of halting ecological destruction, may unwittingly trigger off events with the opposite effect, for example, the Wise-Use Movement’s growing opposition to deep ecology. To avoid being seduced by their own version of self-righteous subjectivism, then, deep ecologists must be skeptical about whether they have in fact achieved nondualistic, ecological sensibility. Heidegger’s perceived anthropocentrism, his concerns that the DEP manifests modernity’s control-impulse, and the fact that some deep ecologists adhere to progressive views of history, indicate problems in attempts to read Heidegger as a forerunner of deep ecology. But Arne Naess sympathizes with Heidegger’s view that humankind is the site through which entities show themselves: “Man may be the measure of all things in the sense that only a human being has a measuring rod, but what he measures he may find to be greater than himself and his survival. Since our “measuring rod” is language, we fulfill ourselves when we responsibly and joyfully “speak” the world anew. With Heidegger, then, Naess calls for a “more lofty image” of human maturity, in which human interests can be harmonized with deep ecological norms. It is a “sorry underestimation” of humanity’s potential to think that humanity is “destined to be the scourge of the earth.” An “eradicable part” of humankind’s “evolutionary potential” involved being “the conscious joyful appreciator of this planet as an even greater whole of its immense richness.” Apart from the reference to “evolutionary potential,” which is reminiscent of Hegel’s progressive reading of history, Heidegger could agree with much of this. He once said that insofar as man is an entity,

19


Link: Alternative Energy

Alternative energy policy is embedded in a mode of technological thinking which reduces nature to a ‘standing reserve’ of resources always at hand for human consumption. This perspective ignores the intrinsic meaning of nature and instead replaces it with the desire for unlimited control and domination of the natural world. Xuanmeng in 2003 (Yu, “Heidegger on Technology, Alienation and Destiny,” The Humanization of Technology and Chinese Culture Chinese Philosophical Studies, XI, Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change, Series II, Asia, Vol 11, http://www.crvp.org/book/Series03/III-11/contents.htm)

First, "The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging (Herausfordern)".7 Herausfordern is formed by a verb root fordern (which means to summon, to demand, to challenge) and two adverbial prefixes: her-(hither) and aus-(out). No single element can be omitted if we are to grasp the full meaning. Thus, according to Heidegger, as a mode of revealing, challenging means "to come forth by challenge or demand"; this is a matter of putting to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored.8 This contrasts sharply with that of nature whose revealing is physis. "Physis is also the arising of something from itself, a bringing-forth or poiesis,"9 as with the blossoming or fading of a flower according to the season. But in contrast, if a flower is cultivated and preserved in a greenhouse artificially, this is an excessive demand upon nature, hence, is revealing by challenge. The revealing of the ancient technology is basically within the realm of natural presenting, as for instance, the energy of the wind is revealed by an old windmill which is left entirely to the wind and does not unlock energy from the wind in order to store it. In modern technology, however, a tract of land is challenged to bring forth coal and ore, which in turn is to yield energy. Even agriculture today is a mechanized food industry; the field has come under another kind of ordering.Second, Heidegger points out, this challenging that brings forth the energy of nature is an expediting.10 That is, what is revealed is directed towards something else, i.e., toward the maximum yield at the minimum expense. For instance, digging coal is not only for uncovering it but for using the energy, which is challenged to turn the wheels that keep a factory running. This determines the basic characteristic of the things revealed in modern technology: "Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing, namely standing in reserve (Bestand)."11Standing in reserve is a different kind of being from that of object. Where an object is revealed mainly in human knowing what is standing in reverse is called to come forth in challenging and expediting. Its determination is according to its being a key link in the interlocking beings revealed in modern technology. In the age of modern technology, almost everything is standing in reserve which is a more essential determination than that of object. An airliner standing on the runway when seen as a sheer object conceals what and how it is; only when it is put into the air is it revealed as an airliner. On the runway every one of its constituent parts is standing-reserve; they are on call and ready to take off. Heidegger maintains further that in the age of modern technology not only artificial products stand in reserve, but even nature changes and is no longer an object as previously.For example, to build a hydropower station on the Rhine River is much different than building a wooden bridge there. In the former case, the Rhine River is put into the interlocking process of modern technology as a waterpower resource. The difference is obvious if compared with the poem of Holdering entitled "The Rhine River". The Rhine River as natural landscape may be unchangeable, but in what sense is it now a landscape when it is on call for inspection by a tour group sent there by the vacation industry? Heidegger concludes: "Whatever stands by in the sense of standing in reserve no longer stands over against us as object;"12 "the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing in reserve."13On the one hand, everything in the context of the interlocking of modern technology comes forth as standing in reserve. On the other hand, modern technology is a process in which everything is ordered, set into the interlocking context as a key link. Just as from the unfolding of the mountains we can see a mountain range or chain (gebirg) and from a person’s feeling, style etc., his disposition (gemut), so from the context of interlocking shown by standing-reserve we can see its direction or trend, called by Heidegger "Enframing" (ge-stell). Enframing describes the mode of revealing which challenges, orders and determines the standing in reserve: "The essence of modern technology lies in Enframing."14 To understand this seemingly strange statement, we should recall that by "the essence of technology", he is concerned not with "what modern technology is," but with a process or phenomenon.

20

http://www.crvp.org/book/Series03/III-11/contents.htm


Link : Synthetic Fuels

The unnatural joining of objects to create a composite is indicative of the state of the human race, all things have been reduced to standing reserve the last frontier of instrumentalization is humanityRojcewicz, Professor of Philosophy at Point Park University, Executive Director of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at Duquesne University,

cotranslator of Heidegger’s work, 2K6 [Richard, The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger, page 88-89]

The three words in question begin with Ge-, but they are not Ge-words in the special, collective sense. Heidegger does not hyphenate them, and he is not taking them in the special sense. These words, then, correspond to Gestell (without the hyphen); they name examples of Gestell, and so Heidegger is here clarifying the relation between Gestell and Gestell, between technological gadgets and composing, between the products of modern technology and its essence, between things that have been imposed on and the all-encompassing imposition,

between dispos¬ables and the disclosive looking upon things as disposables. Let us give the name "composites" to the high-tech gadgets Heidegger is referring to. We mean "composites" in the specific sense in which the term is used of high-tech, "space-age" materials, such as plexiglass, polymers, and laminates. These materials do not occur naturally; they are specifically com-posed, artificially compounded in a laboratory. The other name for them is "synthetics." These materials are specifically synthesized: they are "posed together," forcefully and intentionally. They do not come together on their own. "Composites" in the sense just indicated can easily serve to name all the products of modern technology. All these high-tech devices are synhetic; scientists force them into being artificially, in laboratories. Thus "composites" can serve to translate Gestell. The latter could mean "eyeglass frame," but, as a high-tech gadget, what makes a frame Gestell, in Heidegger's sense, is that it is composed today of

acrylic, and the glass it holds is made, not of glass, but of thermoplastic. It is as an artificial, synthetic, composite frame that a frame is Gestell. To see how the things of Gestell are related to Ge-stell is to understand the second sense in which Heidegger says that the essence of technology is nothing technological. How are composites related to com-posing? According to Heidegger, as we have just read, composites "arise only as responses to the challenge embodied in com-posing; they do not constitute com-posing itself or bring it about." This expresses a priority of the essence of technology over technological things. The latter come to be only as re¬sponses to the former. The essence of technology is a certain way of looking, a certain way of disclosing things, namely the way that takes things as disposables, as merely there to be imposed on by humans. Composites are the actual disposables; composites are things that have actually been imposed on, things that have been unnaturally, violently, synthesized. Now what Hidegger is saying is that com-posing is not itself one of the composites (that is the first sense in which the essence of technology

is nothing technological), and, furthermore, com-posing does not come into being on account of the composites. The disclosive looking, the com-posing, the challenging, is not only other than the composites, it is prior to them. It is because we take things as merely there to be imposed on that we ever conceive of the idea of synthesizing composites. That is the second sense in which the essence of technology is nothing

technological; the essence does not derive from technological things. The essence of technology is prior to technological things—not only logically, as the condition of possibility, but even temporally or historically, as we are about to see. But if the essence does not derive from high-tech things, whence does it arise? For Heidegger, the essence, the disclosive looking, is indeed a response, it has its motives, and these motives lie in the history of Being. The looking upon things in general as disposables is the human response to the withdrawal of Being, the response to a deficient self-showing of Being. That is the source of the essence of modern technology; the source is Being in its current guise, Being as an all-encompassing imposition.

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Link: Hydroelectricity

Hydroelectric energy is not electric- the process of imposing the the plant onto the power of the river is inherently unnatural- it conceals the identity of the river as anything other than exploitableRojcewicz, Professor of Philosophy at Point Park University, Executive Director of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at Duquesne University,

cotranslator of Heidegger’s work, 2K6 [Richard, The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger, page 81-82]

In the first place, "disposing" here means using at will or ordering about and is a synonym for "challenging." Indeed Heidegger explicitly places these two terms together on numerous occasions and even speaks of a "challenging disposing" (FT, 22/21), i.e., a disposing that exemplifies the challenging carried out by modern technology. Heidegger also explicitly joins "disposing" in this sense to "imposition" and "ravishment." Thus "disposing" expresses the attitude of modern technology we have already seen, namely that the resources and energies of nature are merely at our disposal, there to satisfy human desires. All the characteristic terms of modern technology join forces in the following passage: The hydroelectric plant is imposed on the flowing Rhine. It imposes on it for its hydraulic pressure, which forces turbines to turn, and this turning drives the machines whose works produce the electric current. The relay station and the power grid are then put at the disposal of the further ravishment of the river. In the domain of this interconnected sequence in the disposition of electrical energy, even the flowing Rhine now appears as something at our disposal. (FT, 16/16) Thus the characterization of modern technology as a disclosive looking that disposes is meant to indicate, first of all, that modern technology regards nature as something to be imposed on, something to be ordered about at will. The resources and energies of nature appear to be entirely at our disposal, merely there to satisfy human wants and desires, merely there to be ravished and wasted. Accordingly, "disposing," in the sense of using at will, is here just another name for the imperious attitude Heidegger has already ascribed to modern technology. But there is another sense of disposing at play here in the phrase "disclosive looking that disposes." The phrase also means that modern technology arranges things in a certain way, sees things in a certain way, assigns things to a certain order. Modern technology discloses things as belonging to a certain order. Modern technology is precisely the looking which corresponds to the self-disclosure of things as belonging to a certain order. That is the second sense in which modern technology disposes: it sees in things a certain disposition, it sees things as belonging to a certain order, it sees a certain order as appropriate to things. For Heidegger, to see things in this way is precisely what constitutes modern technology. Modern technology does not simply come onto the scene after things have been investigated insofar as they pertain to this order; on the contrary, modern technology is that which sees this order as pertaining to things in the first place and so gives the investigations their initial impetus.

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Link : Environment

The ontological crisis of technology encompasses nature in enframing. As the 1ac confronts the real of nature, the natural is disclosed one dimensionally as purely a resource, and beings become beings-at-hand devoid of meaning.Ross, 2K7 [Andrew Peter, PhD candidate Queens University department of philosophy, September "Rethinking Environmental Responsibility: Heidegger, Profound Boredom and the Alterity of Nature” https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/bitstream/1974/866/1/Ross_ Andrew_P_200709_MA.pdf]

In order to capture the full importance of concepts such as physis and primordial nature, it is necessary to introduce, very briefly, the background theory to which such concepts are largely a response. In particular, Heidegger’s conception of “technological modernity” offers an understanding of our current environmental crisis that makes notions such as primordial nature and physis particularly relevant to the focus of this

thesis. Technology for Heidegger does not refer to a particular device or mechanism but to the “grounding” of modernity, a ground that Heidegger calls “Enframing” (das Gestell) (QCT 19). As the ground of modernity, the Gestell defines how beings “show up”—how they “presence” or “disclose” themselves—for modern Dasein. The Gestell does not refer to an occasional way of viewing beings, but instead refers to the modern understanding of Being itself; in other words, it is the dominant epoch-defining world-understanding of modernity. In it beings show up as, and only as, “stock” or “standing- reserve” (Bestand) (17). Within the Gestell, beings show up as pure resource: the earth is disclosed as a coal mining district, and its soil as mineral deposit (14). To clarify, we might ask what it means to be disclosed

as Bestand. Significantly, Heidegger is not intending to argue, as might be supposed, that natural beings are simply encountered as a collection of tools, beings that are ready-to-hand for our various human projects. The influence of the Gestell extends somewhat deeper: the Gestell is actually “the way in which the real reveals itself as standing-reserve” (23). Modern technology, then, involves more than the use of beings as means-to-an-end; rather, it entails a particular way of conceptualizing reality or “the real” and all of the beings encountered in it. Consequently, “what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as resource” (26-27

emphasis added). What is unique about modernity, then, is not the fact that beings show up as resources— the world of work

in all epochs requires that beings occasionally show up as subsumable in some manner—but that they show up as nothing but resource. Thus in being disclosed as Bestand, the very Being of beings—the way in which they are disclosed in the world—becomes entirely fixed. Heidegger confirms this one-dimensional disclosure to be the plight of the natural world in his assertion that within the Gestell, “[ N]ature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry” (MA 50). In comparing nature to a gasoline station, Heidegger is not simply arguing that nature shows up as a resource, but that nature shows up as nothing but a

resource: gasoline stations cannot appear as anything other than a resource. Natural beings, then, like gasoline stations, are disclosed as entirely one-dimensional in their being. In this manner, Heidegger offers a somewhat different interpretation of our current “environmental crisis”. For Heidegger, humanity’s assault upon the earth lies not in our plundering of resources or the eradication of species, but in the one-dimensional disclosure of natural beings as nothing other than Bestand.

23

https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/bitstream/1974/866/1/Ross_%20Andrew_P


Link: Enframing The 1AC is rooted in technological thinking. Rather than leaving entities in-the-world, the modern process of science and technology removes the transcendent from non objectivity, reducing all forms of being into enframing. Nature, like the individuals being, becomes a resource to be stored and transported out of its own element. The creation and destruction of being thus renders all forms inauthentic. We must move towards meditative disclosure to heed the call of beingHeine, Professor of Religion and History as well as Director of the Institute for Asian Studies at Florida International University, 90 [Steven, , “Philosophy for an 'Age of Death': The Critique of Science and Technology in Heidegger and Nishitani” Philosophy East and West april p. 175-193]

The aim of Heidegger's analysis of the origin of technology is to show how the scientific objectification and manipulation of entities in-the-world takes place on the primordially nonsubstantive and nonconceptualizable domain of Being. Originally, Heidegger argues in Being and Time, the world is not an object to be met and used, but the nonobjectifiable and nondifferentiated transcendental condition for the interaction of man and things. "Transcendence does not consist in objectifying," he writes, "but is presupposed by it." The fundamentally unbifurcated state of Being-in-the-world is initially breached, however, by the circumspective concern of Dasein's involvement with equipment, which is based on a specific kind of forgetting the self for the sake of manipulating something. Therefore, the decisive factor in the historical development of physics is neither the observation of facts nor the application of mathematical principles in determining natural processes, but "the way in which Nature herself is mathematically projected." Although Heidegger's approach in Being and Time is somewhat neutral and descriptive, he at least raises

the implication that science tends to overshadow the transcendence from which it arises, and thus veils the true meaning of Being through a fixation with beings that are present-at-hand. In his later writings, including the essays included in The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger's criticism of science becomes more direct and forceful. Yet he now maintains that the "prior project" of man's understanding of nature is not based on human intentionality or willfulness, but derives from a particular historical mode of the revelatory interaction of Being and man resulting in an untruth that conceals but remains a part of truth. Thus,

Heidegger rejects an instrumental view of technology as a humanly created means to achieving a certain end. The origin and essence of technology, he argues, lies in certain deeply rooted tendencies of the Western metaphysical tradition which have been completed and fulfilled in modern times by a representational thinking that causes what he terms the network of Enframing (Gestell). Enframing sets up and challenges nature to yield a kind of energy that can be stored and transmitted separately from its source. Although technology has reached this culminative form just recently, it is the outcome of the initial fateful decision concerning the Greek view of techne which determined the course of the onto-theological tradition. In its initial usage, techne signified knowledge, not as the accumulation of information through observation, but the active accomplishment or manifesting realization that brings forth the illuminative power (physis) of an entity.16 The genuine meaning of techne is closer to art (fine art and handicraft as well as philosophical reflection) than science or technology because it neither passively investigates nor deliberately disrupts beings, but allows them

to reside nonobjectively in their true nonsubstantive attunement to Being. At an early stage in Greek thought, according to Heidegger's interpretation, the original meaning of techne was transmuted to the sense of an opposition to the world order (dike) that seeks to master and eventually control and dominate it. This first turn at the dawn of thinking inevitably led to the modern development of

Cartesian subjectivity and Nietzschean nihilism characterized by representational thinking that holds up (or re-presents) the world as an image before oneself conceived as the subject in opposition to the object. Representational thinking is two times separated from genuine illumination. Its inevitable consequence is Enframing, which sees nature only as a reservoir of energy at man's disposal. Heidegger illustrates the difference between techne and Enframing by contrasting the traditional windmill or waterwheel and the modern hydroelectric plant.17 Although each seeks to harness the energy of nature to serve human ends, the former remain dependent on and illuminative of nature much as a work of art. The wheel transfers the natural motion of the river. Each wheel is designed in a way uniquely suited to the particular site, allowing the ground and water to remain

part of an unsullied landscape. The power plant, illustrating Enframing, unlocks and stores up physical energies transformed from the river that are then deposited in another location unrelated to the source. All such plants are built with a uniformity that may be harmful to the natural supply, reflecting a fixation with preserving the quantity of released material rather than a concern for the quality of human participation in nature. Thus, Heidegger suggests that the devastating power of atomic weaponry only brings to light what has already happened since the onset of representational thinking: the destruction of the essential nature of thinghood.

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Link: Hegemony

The spread of American Hegemony is a violent form of ordering that guarantees war.Spanos, Ph.D.-University of Wisconsin, Distinguished Professor, English Department- Binghamton University, 93 [William V., Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, Chapter 6, page 203]

To decode this by now naturalized cultural metaphorics., the massive discursive campaign to recuperate the American Identity (and consensus) shattered by the war has all but obliterated the knowledge of the excesses of violence—the atrocities—perpetrated by the American intervention against the Vietnamese people and their earth in the name of a superior liberal Western democracy. To put it positively, it has, as the renewed interventions in the Third World in the name of the "new world order" suggest, all but reestablished the hegemony of the American cultural memory. It is therefore necessary to retrieve this historical knowledge from the amnesiac cultural memory, however summarily, in all its mul tidimensional horror. What I mean by this imperative is not simply the tetrieval of the knowledge of American military violence—the disciplinary knowledge all too disablingly foregrounded by the

oppositional discourse of liberal intellectuals in the 1960s. I also mean the retrieval of the historical role played by cultural production in the wasting of Viet nam. For what we have learned since then by way of the failure of this oppositional discourse to effect lasting changes in our cultural and polit ical institutions , and by way of the contemporary discourses that have theorized this failure, is that the discourse of knowledge and the practice old power in the Occident, especially since the Enlightenment, constitutes not an opposition but an indissoluble relay. To put this disclosure in terms of the practices at issue in Heidegger's "pronouncement," we have learned that the production of agricultural knowledge and the political practice of domination are essentially complicitous, however differential then historically specific antihuman consequences.

Attempts to impose a rational world order on the international system produces a system that naturalizes violence based on a disconnection with BeingBurke, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2K7 [Anthony, Johns Hopkins University Press, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, page @ http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v010/10.2burke.html]

The epistemology of violence I describe here (strategic science and foreign policy doctrine) claims positivistic clarity about techniques of military and geopolitical action which use force and coercion to achieve a desired end, an end that is supplied by the ontological claim to national existence, security, or order. However in practice, technique quickly passes into ontology. This it does in two ways. First, instrumental violence is married to an ontology of insecure national existence which itself admits no questioning. The nation and its identity are known and essential, prior to any conflict, and the resort to violence becomes an equally essential predicate of its perpetuation. In this way knowledge-as-strategy claims, in a positivistic fashion, to achieve a calculability of effects (power) for an ultimate purpose (securing being) that it must always assume. Second, strategy as a technique not merely becomes an instrument of state power but ontologises itself in a technological image of 'man' as a maker and user of things, including other humans, which have no essence or integrity outside their value as objects. In Heidegger's terms, technology becomes being; epistemology immediately becomes technique, immediately being. This combination could be seen in the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war, whose obvious strategic failure for Israelis generated fierce attacks on the army and political leadership and forced the resignation of the IDF chief of staff. Yet in its wake neither ontology was rethought. Consider how a reserve soldier, while on brigade-sized manoeuvres in the Golan Heights in early 2007, was quoted as saying: 'we are ready for the next war'. Uri Avnery quoted Israeli commentators explaining the rationale for such a war as being to 'eradicate the shame and restore to the army the "deterrent power" that was lost on the battlefields of that unfortunate war'. In 'Israeli public discourse', he remarked, 'the next war is seen as a natural phenomenon, like tomorrow's sunrise.' http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v010/10.2burke.html - _edn22 The danger obviously raised here is that these dual ontologies of war link being, means, events and decisions into a single, unbroken chain whose very process of construction cannot be examined. As is clear in the work of Carl Schmitt, being implies action, the action that is war. This chain is also obviously at work in the U.S. neoconservative doctrine that argues, as Bush did in his 2002 West Point speech, that 'the only path to safety is the path of action', which begs the question of whether strategic practice and theory can be detached from strong ontologies of the insecure nation-state.http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v010/10.2burke.html - _edn23 This is the direction taken by much realist analysis critical of Israel and the Bush administration's 'war on terror'.http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v010/10.2burke.html - _edn24 Reframing such concerns in Foucauldian terms, we could argue that obsessive ontological commitments have led to especially disturbing 'problematizations' of truth.http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v010/10.2burke.html - _edn25 However such rationalist critiques rely on a one-sided interpretation of Clausewitz that seeks to disentangle strategic from existential reason, and to open up choice in that way. However without interrogating more deeply how they form a conceptual harmony in Clausewitz's thought -- and thus in our dominant understandings of politics and war -- tragically violent 'choices' will continue to be made The essay concludes by pondering a normative problem that arises out of its analysis: if the divisive ontology of the national security state and the violent and instrumental vision of 'enframing' have, as Heidegger suggests, come to define being and drive 'out every other possibility of revealing being', how can they be escaped?http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v010/10.2burke.html - _edn26 How can other choices and alternatives be found and enacted? How is there any scope for agency and resistance in the face of them? Their social and discursive power -- one that aims to take up the entire space of the political -- needs to be respected and understood. However, we are far from powerless in the face of them. The need is to critique dominant images of political being and dominant ways of securing that being at the same time, and to act and choose such that we bring into the world a more sustainable, peaceful and non-violent global rule of the political.

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Link : Space

Space travel takes away the intrinsic value of the Earth. Rather than viewing the Earth as our provider it becomes a disposable place in space that we can leave at will and this, utilize to our whimTurnbull, 2K6 [Neil, “The Ontological Consequences of Copernicus: Global Being in the Planetary World”, SAGEJournals Online, Project Muse]

As is well known, in Being and Time, the early Heidegger conceived of the world as a phenomenological space that conditions ‘the totality of our involvement with things’ (1961: 415). For him, the world is constituted by a tacit set of basic existential attitudes to the world – care, understanding, mood and so on – and is related to ‘what lies before’ in the sense of being handy or readily available. In later works such as The Origin of the Work of Art, the world continues to be viewed in a similar way as the ‘governing expanse’, which ‘gives things their measure’, ‘an open space’ within which things ‘receive protection’ (1978b: 160). Thus, in the early Heidegger’s view, it is the world that provides the conditions of possibility for the basic shape and character of phenomenological experience as such. As one commentator has put it: the world . . . gives its rule or law to things as that which directs the way they come to stand such that the opening of a world measures the relations between existent things, giving them proximity or distance, their peculiar temporal status and their scope and limits. (Fynsk, 1993: 141) However, the question of the significance of the earth and its relationship to both technology and world in the context of ‘dwelling’ – as a key element of the ‘fourfold’ of Earth, Sky, Gods and Mortals – is the more prominent feature of his later work

(and it is for this reason that many Heideggerians read him as a proto-ecological philosopher [see Foltz, 1995; Zimmerman, 1994]). Some Heidegger scholars recognize that the new emphasis given to earth in Heidegger’s later philosophy is an ‘attempt to think the essence of things in a new way’ (Mulhall, 1990: 169) and that, for the late Heidegger, ‘authentic dwelling’ is no longer a matter of a temporalized ‘being-in-the-world’ – as it was in Being and Time – but is reconceived as a dwelling ‘poetically on the earth’ and

‘under the sky’ (Heidegger, 1978a: 351). Thus, for the later Heidegger, authentic ways of living stand radically opposed to what might be termed ‘Copernican modes of existence’, for to live authentically on the earth is to ‘receive the sky as sky’ and to ‘leave the sun and moon to their journey, the stars to their courses’ (1978a: 352). As the earth is transformed into a cosmological representation, the earth loses its ontological status as a site of dwelling and is reduced to an object of possible knowledge for modernity’s technological subject. The later Heidegger thus strives to defend an earthbound notion of the world and this, in his view, requires that we reject Copernican ideas of the primacy of space in that, for him, ‘spaces receive their essential being from locales and not from “space”’ (1978a: 356). In Heidegger’s view, the earth is the ontological basis for our localized sense of place. It is what he terms ‘the serving bearer’ – an idea related to the pagan conception of the earth as the giver of life – and as such a primordial ground ‘blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up in plant and animal’ (1971: 149–50). Thus, for the later Heidegger worlds are only conceivable as such – such that the world is attained as world – only when they framed by the sky above and the earth beneath (see Malpas, 2000:

227). Clearly, for the later Heidegger, the idea of ‘the world’ is conceptually inseparable from that of ‘the earth’ (and in many ways, for the later

Heidegger, the idea of the world within which ‘Dasein is’ is replaced by the idea of the fourfold within which ‘man dwells’). The close relationship between earth and world for Heidegger can again be seen in the Origins of the Work of Art, where Heidegger recognizes that ‘[w]orld and earth are essentially different from one

another and yet never separated. The world grounds itself in the earth and the earth juts through the world’ (1978b: 174).2 When seen in this way, the earth is viewed as forming the ontological basis for what Heidegger terms ‘the work’ – of both artist and artisan – and its corollary the ‘thingly character of the world’ (1978b: 180). More generally,

Heidegger conceives the earth as the ground of all appearance and the physys out of which the world emerges (a ground that supports the nomos of the world). For, in Heidegger’s view, only a world supported by the earth can give things their proper measure: and without this relation, things have no ‘true’ measure.

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Link: Space

Using space as an escape route from Earth makes the world more disposable, and manageable- it establishes a mindset of rootlessness that allows continued exploitationMcWhorter, Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies Department of Philosophy University of Richmond, 92 [LaDelle, Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Ethics, page 1 ]

Heidegger often refers in his writings to the dramatic changes to which he was witness - the loss of rootedness to place that came with the invention of the automobile, then the airplane, and now our various vehicles for travel in interplanetary space; the conquering of distances that has accompanied the development of communications technologies such as radio, television, and film,

and of course, the changes in our thinking of and with the natural world that have come as we have become seemingly more and more independent of the earth's forces, more and more capable of outwitting them and even of harnessing them and forcing them to conform to our wills. These changes - but more especially human beings' unreflective incorporation of these changes into our daily lives - struck Heidegger as strange and very dangerous. It may well be that there is

nothing really wrong with using a tractor to plow one's land or with using a computer to write one's book, but there is something ominous, Heidegger believed, about our not giving any thought to what is happening to ourselves and to the world when we do those things, or our not noticing or at least not caring about the disruptions these changes bring about in the fabric of things.

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Link: Solar Power

Solar power epitomizes the technological ontology of modernity - nature is enframed as a calculable machine that operates as a piece of technology. The attempt to solve ecological catastrophes such as global warming through the deployment of technology ignores the very role that modern technological thinking has played in creating these catastrophes.Glenn Hill, Prof. at University of Sydney “DESIGN WITHOUT CAUSALITY: HEIDEGGER’S IMPOSSIBLE CHALLENGE FOR ECOLOGICALLY

SUSTAINABLE ARCHITECTURE”, http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ocs/index.php/AASA/2007/paper/viewFile/38/19, 2006

At this point, the implications for ecological sustainability and for design also become clear. With modernity’s belief that causality in nature could be understood and therefore controlled, technologies have been increasingly deployed with the confidence that their outcomes can be predicted. While the design of each individual technologically mediated intervention would have been intended to cause a (local) beneficial outcome for some portion of humanity (grounded in ‘care’ in Heidegger’s terms), their cumulative impact on the ecological systems of the planet is now considered by many to be potentially catastrophic. If this scenario is accepted, then design could be characterised as the well-intentioned engine driving the proliferation of technologies that now threatens the planet. Designers, and not least architects, are enframed within a view of causality which instils confidence that designed outcomes have predictable effects. Tellingly, this confidence is no less evident in the responses to the perceived ecological crisis, where design is confidently being advocated to develop solutions to overcome the very problems that confident designing has created. Confirming such a view of the designer, Heidegger refers to the ‘engineer in his drafting room’ (which could equally be the architect in his/her studio) as being part of an enframed system, ‘an executer, within Enframing’ (Question, 29). Modernity’s understanding that the entities constituting our universe are a particular way and operate under the rule of causality, marks a momentous shift: in pre-modernity nature is apprehended as mysterious and marvellous; in modernity nature is apprehended as systematic and operable. This shift is, for me, no better illustrated than in the surreal (yet quite serious) design for a solar umbrella consisting of trillions of satellites launched from earth and intended to stop global warming (Brahic). The pre-modern understanding of the mystery and wonder of the sun’s warmth granting life to all beings on earth (for many pre-modern cultures the sun and God were one), has shifted to a modern understanding where the sun’s warming of the earth is a calculable system that we do not merely believe we can understand, but have the hubris to believe that we can control.

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Link: Guilt

The guilt expressed by the affirmative is a porous defense mechanism. They would rather stay wrapped in their soft blankets of guilt than go affect real change.McWhorter, Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies Department of Philosophy University of Richmond, 92 [LaDelle, Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Ethics, page 7-8 ]

And shattered we may be, for our self-understanding is at stake; in fact, our very selves - selves engineered by the technologies of power that shaped, that are, modernity - are at

stake. Any thinking that threatens the notion of human being as modernity has posited it - as rationally self-interested individual, as self-possessed bearer of rights and obligations, as active mental and moral agent - is thinking that threatens our very being, the configurations of subjective existence in our age. Those configurations of forces will resist this thinking. Their resistance will occur in many forms. However, one of the most common ways that modern calculative selfhood will attempt to reinstate itself in the face of Heidegger's paradoxical call to think the earth is by employing a strategy that has worked so well so many times before: it will feel guilty. Those of us who are white know this strategy very well. Confronted with our racism, we respond not by working to dismantle the structures that perpetuate racism but rather by feeling guilty. Our energy goes into self-rebuke, and the problems pointed out to us become so painful for us to contemplate that we keep our distance from them. Through guilt we paralyze ourselves. Thus guilt is a marvelous strategy for maintaining the white racist self. Those of us who are women have sometimes watched this strategy employed by the caring, liberal-minded men in our lives. When we have exposed sexism, pressed our criticisms and our claims, we have seen such men - the 'good' men, by far the most responsive men - deflate,

apologize, and ask us to forgive. But seldom have we seen honest attempts at change. Instead we have seen guilt deployed as a cry for mercy or pity on the status quo; and when pity is not forthcoming we have seen guilt turn to rage, and we have heard men ask, "Why are you punishing us?" The primary issue then becomes the need to attend to the feelings of those criticized rather than to their oppressive institutions and behaviors. Guilt thus protects the guilty. Guilt is a facet of power; it is not a reordering of power or a signal of oppression's end. Guilt is one of the modern managerial self's maneuvers of self-defense. Of course

guilt does not feel that way. It feels like something unchosen, something we undergo. It feels much more like self-abuse than self-defense. But we are shaped, informed, produced in our very selves by the same forces of history that have created calculative, technological revealing. Inevitably, whenever we are confronted with the unacceptability of what is foundational for our lives, those foundations exert force to protect themselves. The exertion, which occurs as and in the midst of very real rain, is not a conscious choice; but that does not lessen - in fact it strengthens - its power as a strategy of self-defense. Calculative, technological thinking struggles to defend and maintain itself through us and as us. Some men feel guilty about sexism; many white people feel guilty about racism; most of us feel guilty about all sorts of habits and idiosyncracies that we tell ourselves we firmly believe should be changed. For many of us guilt is a constant constraint upon our lives, a seemingly permanent state. As a result, guilt is familiar, and, though somewhat uncomfortable at times, it comes to feel almost safe. It is no surprise, then, that whenever caring people think hard about how to live with/in/on the earth, we find ourselves growing anxious and, usually, feeling guilty about the way we conduct ourselves in relation to the natural world. Guilt is a standard defense against the call for change as it takes root within us. But, if we are to think with Heidegger, if we are to heed his call to reflect, we must not respond to it simply by deploring our decadent life-styles and indulging ourselves in a fit of remorse. Heidegger's call is not a moral condemnation, nor is it a call to take up some politically correct position or some privileged ethical stance.

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Link: Guilt

Guilt is the internalization of technological thought, rather than feeling responsible and acting, the affirmative lies on an external manageable power to solve the problem.McWhorter, Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies Department of Philosophy University of Richmond, 92 [LaDelle, Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Ethics, page 8-9 ]

When we respond to Heidegger's call as if it were a moral condemnation, we reinstate a discourse in which active agency and its projects and responsibilities take precedence over any other way of being with the earth. In other words, we insist on remaining within the discourses, the power configurations, of the modern managerial self. Guilt is a concept whose heritage and meaning occur within the ethical tradition of the Western world. But the history of ethical theory in the West (and it could be argued that ethical theory only occurs in the

West) is one with the history of technological thought. The revelation of things as to-be-managed and the imperative to be in control work themselves out in the history of ethics just as surely as they work themselves out in the history of the natural and human sciences. It is probably quite true that in many different cultures, times, and places human beings have asked the question: How shall I best live my life? But in the West, and in relatively modern times, we have reformulated that question so as to ask: How shall I conduct myself? How shall I behave? How shall I manage my actions, my relationships, my desires? And how shall I make sure my neighbors do the same?

Alongside technologies of the earth have grown up technologies of the soul, theories of human behavioral control of which current ethical theories are a significant subset. Ethics in the modern world at least very frequently functions as just another field of scientific study yielding just another set of engineering goals. Therefore, when we react to problems like ecological crises by retreating into the familiar discomfort of our Western sense of guilt, we are not placing ourselves in opposition to technological thinking and its ugly consequences. On the contrary, we are simply reasserting our technological dream of perfect managerial control. How so? Our guilt professes our enduring faith in the managerial dream by insisting that problems - problems like oil spills, acid rain, groundwater pollution, the extinction of whales, the destruction of the ozone, the rain forests, the wetlands - lie simply in mismanagement or in a failure to manage (to manage ourselves

in this case) and by reaffirming to ourselves that if we had used our power to manage our behavior better in the first place we could have avoided this mess. In other words, when we respond to Heidegger's call by indulging in feelings of guilt about how we have been treating the object earth, we are really just telling ourselves how truly powerful we, as agents, are. We are telling ourselves that we really could have done differently; we had the power to make things work, if only we had stuck closer to the principles of good management. And in so saying we are in yet a new and more stubborn way refusing to hear the real message, the message that human beings are not, never have been, and never can be in complete control, that the dream of that sort of managerial omnipotence is itself the very danger of which Heidegger warns. Thus guilt - as affirmation of human agential power over against passive matter - is just another way of covering over the mystery. Thus guilt is just another way of refusing to face the fact that we human beings are finite and that we must begin to live with the earth instead of trying to maintain total control. Guilt is part and parcel of a managerial approach to the world. Thinking along Heidegger's paths means resisting the power of guilt, resisting the desire to close ourselves off from the possibility of being with our own finitude. It means finding "the courage to make the truth of our own presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called in question." It means holding ourselves resolutely open for the shattering power of the event of thinking, even if what is shattered eventually is ourselves.

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A2: Perm

1. Still links –a. extend Luke – recognizes United States government action – creates a

system of eco-managment premised entirely on state ontology – allows the state to short-circuit the alternative by re-defining the alternative’s notion of being

b. extend McWhorter – the action of the plan is incompatible with the alternative – we can’t simultaneously try to re-shape Africa in our own ideal image while recognizing the value to Africa’s current existence

c. The perm links worse to our finitude argument – the perm is the last ditch effort to stave off the darkness leading to technology destruction.

2. Can’t do Both – Our alternative calls into question to very need to act in the first place. You

can’t do nothing and affirm a quick fix solution.

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A2: Perm

The permutation is calculative rationality- allowing the world to reveal itself is not possible if there is a predetermined outcome Spanos, Ph.D.-University of Wisconsin, Distinguished Professor, English Department- Binghamton University, 93 [William V., Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, page 35-36]

The implications of the ontotheological tradition for the hermeneutics of understanding become clear. In transforming the always differential openness of temporal existence into a closed circle, which, emptied of time, can be "looked at" synchronically (object-ively), the metaphysical standpoint negates possibility, the originative interrogative (dialogic) mood, in favor of a derived indicative frame of reference in which the answer is ontologically prior to, and determines, the questions that can be asked of being. From the privileged transcendental vantage point of this "objective" distance from existence, interpretation takes the form of suspending the temporal process in favor of the identical whole: an op¬eration that transforms the time of existential being-in-the-world (and text) into a "pure sequence of'nows'... in which the ecstatical character of primordial temporality has been levelled off" (BT, 377; SZ, 329). Unlike the "anticipatory resoluteness" of authentic Dasein, which runs "ahead-of-itself" in care, interpretation from this objective standpoint thus becomes an "awaiting which forgets and makes present (BT, 389; SZ, 339; Heidegger's emphasis). It becomes a forgetful re-presenting that is now understood to mean "envisaging" (Vergegenwdrtigung) (BT, 410, SZ, 359): a "deliberative"

or, in Heidegger's later term, "calculative" awaiting that, on the basis of the logos and the visual gaze it privileges, expects all temporal and spatial phenomena to cohere eventually. Like the clas¬sical detective, such an interpreter knows he/she will "get the picture" in the end, because the end is ontologically prior to the process. Metaphysical interpretation is a visual practice of self-confirmation. But this metaphysical frame of reference involves more than self-confirmation. Since the iconic circle becomes increasingly the represen¬tation of the subjective desire for certainty, hermeneutics gets subordi¬nated to

the anthropomorphic concept of correctness. It comes to be determined by the derived principle of truth as

"adequaetio intellectus et rei," which, in beginning from the end, inevitably results in the willful coercion of the vital minute particulars into the predetermined and comprehensive circle. In short, the self-confirming interpretive practice enabled by this metaphysical framework also becomes a will to power over the differences that temporality always already disseminates . In spatializing

time, the metaphysical perspective closes off the futural possibilities of differential existence and thus reduces the hermeneutic process to a vicious circle. The metaphysical is a retrospective perspective. As such, its circularity provides a spatial "insight" that at the same time shuts off—blinds—the interpreter to the more primordial and problem¬atic

temporality of being. This is the testimony of modernity itself. In fulfilling the metaphysical tradition and achieving an analogously abso¬lute hermeneutic

methodology, the modern period has (self-) disclosed the temporality to which the West has become increasingly blind, and reactivated—remembered—the question of being (as a question of the

temporality of being) that it has forgotten. It has been the fulfillment of the inexorable binary logic of metaphysics in the modern "world pic¬ture" that has

disclosed the contradictions informing this logic. In "coming to its end," the metaphysical tradition has ruptured the referential surface despite itself—thematized the "lack." In so doing, it has precipitated the need to "surpass" both the logic of metaphysics and the vicious circularity of the retrospective interpretive practice that has determined the meaning of the texts of particular moments of history and of the text of history at large.

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A2: Perm

Their attempt to acknowledge the “value” of our critique a process of colonization which includes dissent only in as much as it contributes to an illusion of consent to dominationSpanos, Christos’ Idol, 2000 [William Spanos, Literature—SUNY Binghampton, 2000 Spanos, William V. America's Shadow : An Anatomy of Empire. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. p 50.]

Unlike its predecessor in the ancien regime, metaphysical inquiry at this advanced Enlightenment stage does not obliterate the contradictory, amorphous, unimproved, and "ahistorical" Other from the vantage point of a visible "center elsewhere." It "acknowledges" this Other's claims as contributive to (the knowledge of) the larger self-identical Whole. In other words, it "classifies" the amorphous Others from the vantage point of an invisible "center elsewhere." It differentiates these Others into discrete phenomena ? attributes distinguishing identities to them ? within and in behalf of a prior encompassing self-present total Identity. This individuation of the amorphous Other conveys a sense of the sovereign integrity of the differentiated entities, but it obscures the fact that their uniqueness is entirely dependent on a dominant synchronic Totality, the always present and determining center of which is always out of sight. To acquire validity the differentiated entity must accommodate its differential partiality to the prior Totality, must, that is, objectify and subordinate itself to ? take its proper place within ? the gridded structure of the dominant Identity. To become a subject it must heed the call ? the hailing ? of the Subject. As his invocation of the ontological metaphorics of the center and the circle should suggest, what the Lacanian Marxist Louis

Althusser says about "the interpellation of the individual as subject" the (subjected) subject invented by the bourgeois capitalist Enlightenment applies by extension to the spatial economy of the (neo) imperial project as such: The Absolute Subject occupies the unique place of the Centre, and interpellates around it the infinity of individuals into subjects in a double mirror-connexion such that it subjects the subjects to the Subject, while giving them in the Subject in which each subject can contemplate its own image (present and future) the guarantee that this really concerns them and Him.... The duplicate mirror-structure of ideology ensures simultaneously: 1. the interpellation of 'individuals' as subjects; 2. their subjection to the Subject; 3. the mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects' recognition of each other, and finally the subject's recognition of himself; 4. the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everythingwill be all right: Amen ? "So be it." Result: caught in this quadruple system of interpellation as subjects, of subjection to the Subject, of universal recognition and of absolute guarantee, the subjects "work," they "work by themselves" in the vast majority of cases, with the exception of the "bad subjects" who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (repressive) State apparatus. But the vast majority of (good) subjects work all right "all by themselves," i. e. by ideology (whose concrete forms are realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses). 93 The fulfillment of this promissory accommodational project is called variously "beauty," "perfection," or, most tellingly, "peace" (pax). In this reconstellated context the differential entity becomes, indeed, productive, but what it produces is a product of exchange value that benefits the economy and increases the authority of the dominant structure projected by the "supervisory gaze" or, alternatively, the invisible

imperial "Subject" or "center elsewhere." This political economy, in the sociopolitical domain, is what Foucault calls

"the repressive hypothesis." Derived in part from its recognition of the ancien regime's economically and politically wasteful economy of power, this is the seductive ruse of the emergent capitalist bourgeoisie that strategically represents knowledge (of the Other) as external to and the essential agent of deliverance from the constraints of power. It is the ruse that conceals the complicity between (Western) truth and power: We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it "excludes," it "represses," it "censors," it "abstracts," it "masks," it "conceals." In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of

truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.

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A2: Perm

The perm is not a compromise but a blatant cooption. Emphasizing practicality pulls the carpet out from under truly radical advocacies and sustains status quo reformism. Prasad and Elmes 5, (Pushkala, Skidmore College, Michael, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, "In the Name of the Practical: Unearthing the Hegemony of Pragmatics in the Discourse of Environmental Management", Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 42, No. 4)

The overriding tone of both corporate environmentalism and reform environmentalism is one of pragmatics. Both genres claim to reject the extreme positions of the dominant technocentric paradigm as well as that of radical environmentalism and deep ecology (Egri and Pinfield, 1996; Gladwin et al., 1995). By positioning itself in some kind of middle ground, environmental management presents itself as being a far more reasonable and practical approach for solving industrially- generated environmental problems. Further, by distancing itself from 'ideological' standpoints such as those of deep ecologists, EM also presents itself as being more concerned with everyday problem-solving than with asserting specific ideological commitments. In the words of some of its advocates, '. . . the reform environmentalism perspective engenders a more optimistic and pragmatic approach to resolving immediate environmental problems' (Egri and Pinfield, 1996, p. 471). It is important to note here that the pragmatism we see undergirding the EM discourse is connotationally closer to a mundane, everyday use of the word rather than to the philosophic use of it. When writers characterize their own positions as being 'pragmatic' (e.g. Egri and Pinfield, 1996), they seem to imply that it relates more to urgent matters of practical affairs rather than philosophic arguments or idealistic concerns. In essence, EM stresses its preference for adopting 'workable' solutions that will eventually promote more ecologically healthy organizations (Roome, 2000), and largely eschews any kind of intellectual debate on the grounds that it is more concerned with the practicalities of solving environmental problems. As a part of this pragmatic approach, environmental management almost uniformly supports strategies involving working within existing systems rather than opposing or dismantling them from outside. The appeal of this stance is without question. Environmental Management receives widespread public support and governmental funding because it is seen as offering a hopeful set of techniques and solutions that take care of the environment and simultaneously produce as little disruption to our everyday lives as possible (Tokar, 1997). It is also singularly optimistic, offering cautious warnings but supplementing these with hopeful prognostications for the future, and is conducted at a reasonable pitch, constantly proposing working solutions for seemingly insurmountable problems. The sheer pragmatics of Environmental Management is incredibly seductive. After all, who could possibly disagree with the reasonable stance adopted by the discourse of EM? How could anyone even remotely imply that the 'practical' resolution of our current environmental problems is not the most useful way of approaching them? It is our contention, however, that the moment any set of ideas or notions become so taken-for-granted and commonsensical that they cannot possibly be questioned, they enter the realm of hegemony so eloquently discussed by Antonio Gramsci (1971).

34


AT: Perm

Reformists believe that if only they had put their technological knowledge to better use or if management techniques had been implemented properly, they’d be able to make a difference. But attempting to right our wrongs without challenging the fundamental assumptions behind the ways in which our policies towards the environment are structured inevitably recreate the harms of the status quo.

McWhorter 92(Ladelle, “Guilt as Management Technology: A Call to Heideggerian Reflection,” Heidegger and the Earth)

Some men feel guilty about sexism; many white people feel guilty about racism; most of us feel guilty about all sorts of habits and idiosyncrasies that we tell ourselves we firmly believe should be changed. For many of us guilt is a constant constraint upon our lives, a seemingly permanent state. As a result, guilt is familiar, and, though somewhat uncomfortable at times, it comes to feel almost safe. It is no surprise, then, that whenever caring people think hard about how to live with/in/on the earth, we find ourselves growing anxious and usually feeling guilty about the way we conduct ourselves in relation to the natural world. Guilt is a standard defense against the call for change as it takes root within us. But, if we are to think with Heidegger if we are to heed his call to reflect, we must not respond to it simply by deploring our decadent life-styles and indulging ourselves in a fit of remorse. Heidegger's call is not a moral condemnation, nor is it a call to take up some politically correct position or some privileged ethical stance.When we respond to Heidegger's call as if it were a moral condemnation, we reinstate a discourse in which active agency and its projects and responsibil ities take precedence over any other way of being with the earth. In other words, we insist on remaining within the discourses, the power configurations, of the modern managerial self. Guilt is a concept whose heritage and meaning occur within the ethical tradition of the Western world. But the history of ethical theory in the West (and it could be argued that ethical theory only occurs in the West) is one with the history of technological thought. The revelation of things as to-be-managed and the imperative to be in control work themselves out in the history of ethics just as surely as they work themselves out in the history of the natural, and human sciences. It is probably quite true that in many different cultures, times, and places human beings have asked the question: How shall I best live my life? But in the West, and in relatively modern times, we have reformulated that question so as to ask: How shall I conduct myself? How shall I behave? How shall I manage my actions my relationships, my desires? And how shall I make sure my neighbors do the same? Alongside technologies of the earth have grown up technologies of the soul, theories of human behavioral control of which current ethical theories are a significant subset. Ethics in the modern world at least very frequently functions as just another field of scientific study yielding just another set of engineering goals. Therefore, when we react to problems like ecological crises by retreating into the familiar discomfort of our Western sense of guilt, we are not placing ourselves in opposition to technological thinking and its ugly consequences. On the contrary, we are simply reasserting our technological dream of perfect managerial control. How so? Our guilt professes our enduring faith in the managerial dream by insisting that problems - problems like oil spills, acid rain, groundwater pollution, the extinction of whales, the destruction of the ozone, the rain forests, the wetlands - lie simply it mismanagement or in a failure to manage (to manage ourselves in this case) and by reaffirming to ourselves that if we had used our power to manage our behavior better in the first place we could have avoided this mess. In other words, when we respond to Heidegger's call by indulging in feelings of guilt about how we have been treating the object earth, we are really just telling ourselves how truly powerful we, as agents, are. We are telling ourselves that we really could have done differently; we had the power to make things work, if, only we had stuck closer to the principles of good management. And in so saying we are in yet a new and more stubborn way refusing to hear the real message, the message that human beings are not, never have been, and never can be in complete control, that the dream of that sort of managerial omnipotence is itself the very danger of which Heidegger warns. Thus guilt - as affirmation of human agential power over against passive matter - is just another way of covering over the mystery. Thus guilt is just another way of refusing to face the fact that we human beings are finite and that we must begin to live with the earth instead of trying to maintain total control. Guilt is part and parcel of a managerial approach to the world. Thinking along Heidegger's paths means resisting the power of guilt, resisting the desire to close ourselves off from the possibility of being with our own finitude. It means finding "the courage to make the truth of our own presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called in question." It means holding ourselves resolutely open for the shattering power of the event of thinking, even if what is shattered eventually is ourselves.

35


A2: Nazism

Heidegger’s personal politics are not a reason to reject his philosophy.Pease, Professor of English at Avalon Foundation Chair of the Humanities, Director, Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program, Visiting Professor, Free University- Berlin, Germany, Ph.D.- University of Chicago, 93 [Donald E., Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, Foreword, page xi-xii]

I consider it my responsibility in this foreword to William Spanos's Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction to sketch out the significance of its occasion—-the possible erasure of Heideggers's influence from American criticism—as well as the figures m a r k i n g it. Those figures include such proper names as "Heidegger," "Dresden," "Auschwitz," "Vietnam," and they share as a common prope l l y only the absence of any speculative instrument capable of conceptualizing their

interrelationship. As grounds for his erasure, Heidegger's critics propose that the Heidegger who persevered in undermining the "forgetting of Being" should have understood himself to be under no obligation to remember Auschwitz (which instantiated what Levinas has c a l l e d the "otherwise than being")1

indicated an unpardonable lapse in lie. thinking; and that the key words from the Nazi propaganda machine ( e . g . , Volk, Arbeit, F-iihrungprinzip) that appeared as well in Heidegger's works entailed nothing less than the engendering, sedimentation, and support of Nazi ideology from within Heidegger's philosophy. Heidegger‘s refusal to speak about Auschwitz bears significant witness to the obstacles Heidegger's involvement with Nazism poses for responsible dunking a b o u t the "Heidegger controversy." While t h e Heidegger controversy does not become an explicit topic until Spanos’s final chapter, it nevertheless informs the book’s overall rationale: the “destruction” ( i n the Heideggerian s e n s e of disassembling t h e s t r u c t u r e i n w h i c h t h e f o r g e t t i n g o f b e i n g i s e n a b l e d ) of liberal H u m a n i s m a s a d i s c o u r s e a p p r o p r i a t e t o a d j u c a t e t h e c o n t r o v e r s y . A r n o l d D a v i d s o n ’ s i n t r o d u c t i o n t o “ s y m p o s i u m o n H e i d e g g e r a n d N a z i s m ” i n a s p e c i a l i s s u e o f C r i t i c a l E n q u i r y p r o v o k e d S p a n o s t o d i s criminate the American from the European “appropriation” of the Heidegger question in an essay that he first published in a special issue of boundary2, ? entitled "Heidegger, Nazism and the Repressive I hypothesis: The

American Appropriation of the Question."4 The terms in Spanos's title call renewed attention to the difficulty of addressing the topic. In taking the "American appropriation" of the Heidegger question as his central concern, Spanos first displaces the European debate over the po litical and philosophical implications of Heidegger's adherence to Na zism, then he replaces the Nazis' extermination of the Jews with the United States' genocidal policies against Vietnam as the pertinent histor ical context. The overall result of Spanos's rhetorical strategy is the sub stitution of the 1960s antiwar controversy for the 1990s Heidegger con troversy. In focusing on the "repressive hypothesis" as the Americanist instrument of appropriation in the Heidegger controversy, Spanos is not conducting a defense of Heidegger but expressing concern over the po tential loss of the question (Man's being in the world) to which Heidegger's thinking gave access. Spanos identifies Davidson's "liberal humanist" critique (free-standing, disinterested inquiry certain of its power conceptually to grasp the truth of the matter) as itself the object of Hei degger's persistent

critique, and a vestigial trace of Nazi humanism. Davidson's liberal humanism, Spanos argues, depends on presupposi tions from the ontotheological tradition for its power and it displays that tradition's capacity to reconstitute its central premises at the very site of the Heidegger controversy.

36


A2: Nazism

Focus on Heidegger’s Nazism prevents use of his philosophy to prevent future violence.Pease, Professor of English at Avalon Foundation Chair of the Humanities, Director, Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program, Visiting Professor, Free University- Berlin, Germany, Ph.D.- University of Chicago, 93 [Donald E., Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, Foreword, page xii- xiii]

The Critical Inquiry symposium included position papers by such post-Heideggerian European philosophers as Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, as well as the anti-Heideggerian Jiirgen Habermas, each of whom (with the possible

exception of Habermas, who understood Nazism as the sole sociopolitical referent for Heidegger's thought), with varying degrees of success, struggled to analyze nonreductively Heidegger's involvement with Nazism. Instead of constructing causal paradigms able to assimilate Nazism to his thinking or derive the one category from the other, these philosophers attempted to read Heidegger under a double obligation: to acknowledge the seriousness of his

political involvement with Nazism as well as the complexity of his thought. Spanos does not excuse Heidegger against these criticisms, but emphasizes. what Davidson left unmentioned about the European critique, namely, its indebtedness to Heidegger's philosophical practice for its efficacy. In calling attention to the Europeans' ambivalent response, their continued dependence upon Heidegger’s philosophical thought for the dismantling of his politics, Spanos isolated, as what might be termed the political unconscious of the American appropriation, Davidson's will to make Nazism the absolute scapegoat for occidental humanism and thereby to forget the mass destruction of civilian populations in Vietnam, Dresden, and Hiroshima.

The alt solves the turn, Heidegger’s Nazism was a result of him not following his own advice.

37


Heidegger Cards

Quoting Martin Heidegger in 1966, writing in Discourse on Thinking, gender paraphrased:

Is man, then, a defenseless and perplexed victim at the mercy of the irresistible superior power of technology? He would be if man today abandons any intention to pit meditative thinking decisively against merely calculative thinking. But once meditative thinking awakens, it must be at work unceasingly and on every last occasion —hence, also, here and now at this commemoration. For here we are considering what is threatened especially in the atomic age: the autochthony of the works of [hu]man[ity]. Thus we ask now: even if the old rootedness is being lost in this age, may not a new ground and foundation be granted again to man, a foundation and ground out of which man's nature and all his works can flourish in a new way even in the atomic age? What could the ground and foundation be for the new autochthony? Perhaps the answer we are looking for lies at hand; so near that we all too easily overlook it. For the way to what is near is always the longest and thus the hardest for us humans. This way is the way of meditative thinking. Meditative thinking demands of us not to cling one-sidedly to a single idea, nor to run down a one-track course of ideas. Meditative thinking demands of us that we engage ourselves with what at first sight does not go together at all. Let us give a trial. For all of us, the arrangements, devices, and machinery of technology are to a greater or lesser extent indispensable. It would be foolish to attack technology blindly. It would be shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the devil. We depend on technical devices; they even challenge us to ever greater advances. But suddenly and unaware we find ourselves so firmly shackled to these technical devices that we fall into bondage to them. Still we can act otherwise. We can use technical devices, and yet with proper use also keep ourselves so free of them, that we may let go of them any time. We can use technical devices as they ought to be used, and also let them alone as something which does not affect our inner and real core. We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature. But will not saying both yes and no this way to technical devices make our relation to technology ambivalent and insecure? On the contrary! Our relation to technology will become wonderfully simple and relaxed. We let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside, that is, let them alone, as things which are nothing absolute but remain dependent upon something higher. I would call this comportment toward technology which expresses "yes" and at the s time "no," by an old word, releasement towards things. Having this comportment we no longer view things only in a technical way. It gives us clear vision and we notice that while the production and use of machines demands of us another relation to things, it is not a meaningless relation. Farming and agriculture, for example, now have turned into a motorized food industry. Thus here, evidently, as elsewhere, a profound change is taking place in man's relation to nature and to the world. But the meaning that reigns in this change remains obscure. There is then in all technical processes a meaning, not invented or made by us, which lays claim to what man does and leaves undone. We do not know the significance of the uncanny increasing dominance of atomic technology. The meaning pervading technology hides itself. But if we explicitly and continuously heed the fact that such hidden meaning touches us everywhere in the world of technology, we stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself just in approaching us. That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery. I call the comportment which enables us to keep open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness to the mystery. Releasement towards things and openness to the mystery belong together. They grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way. They promise us a new ground and foundation upon which we can stand and endure in the world of technology without being imperiled by it. Releasement towards things and openness to the mystery give us a vision of a new autochthony which someday even might be fit to recapture the old and now rapidly disappearing autochthony in a changed form. But for the time being—we do not know for how long—[hu]man[ity] finds [itself] in a perilous situation. Why? Just because a third world war might break out unexpectedly and bring about the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the earth? No . In this dawning atomic age a far greater danger threatens—precisely when the danger of a third world war has been removed . A strange assertion! Strange indeed, but only as long as we do not meditate. In what sense is the statement made valid? The assertion is valid in the sense that the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking . What great danger then might move upon us? Then there might go hand in hand with the greatest ingenuity in calculative planning and inventing indifference toward meditative thinking – total thoughtlessness. And then? Then [hu]man[ity] would have denied and thrown away [its] own special nature—that he is a meditative being. Therefore, the issue is the saving of [hu]man[ity]’s essential nature. Therefore, the issue is keeping meditative thinking alive. Yet releasement toward things and openness to the mystery never happen of themselves. They do not befall us accidentally. Both flourish only through persistent, courageous thinking.

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Heidegger Cards

Meditative thought is critical to solve autochthony.

Martin Heidegger, an adorable and cute bumblebee, 1966, Discourse on Thinking, p. 47-49

There are, then, two kinds of thinking, each justified and needed in its own way: calculative thinking and meditative thinking. This meditative thinking is what we have in mind when we say that contemporary man is in flight-from-thinking. Yet you may protest: mere meditative thinking finds itself floating unaware above reality. It loses touch. It is worthless for dealing with current business. It profits nothing in carrying out practical affairs. And you may say, finally, that mere meditative thinking, persevering meditation, is "above" the reach of ordinary understanding. In this excuse only this much is true, meditative thinking does not just happen by itself any more than does calculative thinking . At times it requires a greater effort. It demands more practice. It is in need of even more delicate care than any other genuine craft. But it must also be able to bide its time, to await as does the farmer, whether the seed will come up and ripen. Yet anyone can follow the path of meditative thinking in his own manner and within his own limits. Why? Because man is a thinking, that is, a meditating being. Thus meditative thinking need by no means be "high-flown." It is enough if we dwell on what lies close and meditate on what is closest; upon that which concerns us, each one of us , here and now; here, on this patch of home ground; now, in the present hour of history. 'What does this celebration suggest to us, in case we are ready to meditate? Then we notice that a work of art has flowered in the ground of our homeland. As we hold this simple fact in mind, we cannot help remembering at once that during the last two centuries great poets and thinkers have been brought forth from the Swabian land. Thinking about it further makes clear at once that Central Germany is likewise such a land, and so are East Prussia, Silesia, and Bohemia. We grow thoughtful and ask: does not the flourishing of any genuine work depend upon its roots in a native soil? Johann Peter Hebel once wrote: " We are plants which whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not-must with our roots rise out of the earth in order to bloom in the ether and to bear fruit" (Works, ed. Altwegg III, 314.) The poet means to say: For a truly joyous and salutary human work to flourish, man must be able to mount from the depth of his home ground up into the ether. Ether here means the free air of the high heavens, the open realm of the spirit. We grow more thoughtful and ask: does this claim of Johann Peter Hebel hold today? Does man still dwell calmly between heaven and earth? Does a meditative spirit still reign over the land? Is there still a life-giving homeland in whose ground man may stand rooted, that is, be autochthonic? Many Germans have lost their homeland have had to leave their villages and towns, have been driven from their native soil. Countless others whose homeland was saved, have yet wandered off. They have been caught up in the turmoil of the big cities, and have resettled in the wastelands of industrial districts. They are strangers now to their former homeland. And those who have stayed on in their homeland? Often they are still more homeless than those who have been driven from their homeland. Hourly and daily they are chained to radio and television. Week after week the movies carry them off into uncommon, but often merely common, realms of the imagination, and give the illusion of a world that is no world. Picture magazines are everywhere available. All that with which modern techniques of communication stimulate, assail, and. drive man-all that is already much closer to man today than his fields around his farmstead, closer than the sky over the earth, closer than the change from night to day, closer than the conventions and customs of his village, than the tradition of his native world. We grow more thoughtful and ask: What is happening here-with those driven from their homeland no less than with those who have remained? Answer: the rootedness, the autochthony, of man is threatened today at-its core. Even more: The loss-of-rootedness is caused not merely by circumstance and fortune, nor does it stem only from the negligence and the superficiality of man's way of life. The loss of autochthony springs from the spirit of the age into which all of us were born. We grow still more thoughtful and ask: If this is so, can man, can man's work in the future still be expected to thrive in the fertile ground of a homeland and mount into the ether, into the far reaches of the heavens and the spirit? Or will everything now fall into the clutches of planning and calculation, of organization and automation?

39


Framework 2NC

Our interpretation is that the role of the ballot should endorse the mode of politics – this necessarily entails resolving questions of ontology first, and then evaluating specific political actions

a. extend Dillon – Ontology as a perquisite is the only cogent way to evaluate policies; any policy necessarily makes an assumption about what is, and so depends on an idea of what being is – ontology directly shapes policy framing and implementation

b. good examination – they encourage gut action policymaking – teaches us to be reactionaries rather than effective and critical thinkers – dealing with framing issues creates better comprehensive and effective policymaking

If we win our framework they must have a defense of their ontological standing before they can access other truth claims

40


Dillon Extension

Extend Dillon – ontology is fundamental – any thought entails ontology, saying anything about anything that is necessarily makes an assumption about the is as sucha. it’s terminal defense – since ontology informs the end point of any mode of thought or prediction like the aff, the entire foundation of those thoughts is problematized by ontological questions – proves no truth value to their claimsb. turns the case – action is inevitable, but questions of ontology define how that action happens – ontology is more than theoretical, it shapes action by defining what the action is responding to and how it operates – means a bad ontology leads to bad and regressive policies

41


Framework

The consumption of knowledge in debate is the same as we relate to the world. Finding the quickest and most efficient way to gain information and then lose it just as fast.

Their experts and academics are stuck in the same mode of thought- instead participating in a process of reflection, their framework dooms the world to serial policy failure that is inextricably tied to acting too quickly.McWhorter, Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies Department of Philosophy University of Richmond, 92 [LaDelle, Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Ethics, page 1-2 ]

Heidegger calls us to give thought to - or give ourselves over to thought of - the strangeness of our technological being within the world . His works resound with calls for human beings to grow more thoughtful, to take heed, to notice and reflect upon where we are and what we are doing, lest human possibility and the most beautiful of possibilities for thought be lost irretrievably in forces we do not understand and only pretend we can control. Heidegger's admonitions are sometimes

somewhat harsh. "Let us not fool ourselves," he wrote in 1955. "All of us, including those who think professionally, as it were, are often enough thought-poor; we all are far too easily thought-less. Thoughtlessness is an uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere in today's world. For nowadays we take in everything in the quickest and cheapest way, only to forget it just as quickly, instantly." Some might find this unnecessarily harsh. We academicians may wish to contest the accusation. Surely, in the universities of all places, thinking is going on. But Heidegger had no respect for that or any other kind of complacency. The thinking he saw as essential is no more likely, perhaps unfortunately, to be found in universities or among philosophers than anywhere else. For the thinking he saw as essential is not the simple amassing and digesting of facts or even the mastering of complex relationships or the producing of ever more powerful and inclusive theories. The thinking Heidegger saw as essential, the thinking his works call us to, is not a thinking that seeks to master anything, not a thinking that results from a drive to grasp and know and shape the world; it is a thinking that disciplines itself to allow the world - the earth, things - to show themselves on their own terms. Heidegger called this kind of thinking 'reflection'. In 1936 he wrote, "Reflection is the courage to make the truth of our own

presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called in question."2 Reflection is thinking that never rests complacently in the conclusions reached yesterday; it is thinking that continues to think, that never stops with a satisfied smile and announces: We can cease; we have the right answer now. On the contrary, it is thinking that loves its own life, its own occurring, that does not quickly put a stop to itself, as thinking intent on a quick solution always tries to do.

42


Framework

Questioning the nature of politics is the only way to understand politics, the alternative solves the technological mindset that makes politics violent, without the alternative the earth is doomed to ecological catastrophe.Swazo, Professor of Philosophy at University of Alaska, Fairbanks, 2K2 [Norman K., Crisis Theory and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections,]

In the question "What is politics?" is that which is essential and which has, indeed, come back again and again throughout the history of political philosophy. But the question was surrendered from the outset to the guiding question concerned with theoretical and empirical investigations of forms of government—as if this were the sole and chief con¬cern of political inquiry. The grounding question claims us today in the historical moment of philosophy's completion. It cannot but

claim us out of the authentic future and, hence, in a transformed manner: Metaphysical thinking asks and hears "what is . . ."; essential thinking asks and hears "what calls for. . . ." The grounding question properly formulated, then, is not merely "What is politics?" but, rather "What calls for politics?" In this question we have a pathway for essential political thinking. It is incumbent upon us to understand the question, to hold out the question as a possibility of thinking without presuming to answer forthwith. Obscurity, uncertainty, and precariousness hold sway along this pathway of transition; to think otherwise is to surrender the authentic future to that inauthentic future in which historic ism and actualism give determi-nation to the political. To think along the pathway of this question is to understand the relation between planetary thinking and planetary building in new light. Inasmuch as there is an essential connection between planetary politics and the planetary domination of technology, the question of the relation of planetary thinking and planetary building must first be understood in terms of "a preparation of man for taking over a world-domination." We must recognize, however, that both the manner of preparation and the character of this world-domination are problematic, especially to the extent that modern subjectivity drives humanity towards this goal. In short, says Dauenhauer, "The man of vengeance cannot protect the earth. Since he would debase it to raw material for his own purposes, he cannot rule the earth. Rather, he destroys it as earth." Thus, both the normative and technocratic dimensions of world order thinking, grounded as they are in . subjectivist metaphysics, entail a world-domination wholly indefensible:

global dominion under the sway of metaphysical vengeance—in which the human himself succumbs to the enhancement of his power—ultimately entails precisely that crucible of tragedy and catastrophe about which world rder scholar Richard Falk has warned. It is in recognition of this imminent consequence that Heidegger asks: But, how could man accede to rulership over the earth, how can he take under his protection the earth as earth, if and for so long as he debases what is terrestrial, in permitting the spirit of vengeance to determine his meditation? If it is a question of saving the earth as earth, it is necessary from the outset that the spirit of vengeance disappear. It may be said that, despite the lack of an explicit thematic treatment of :he political in his thought, Heidegger concerns himself with the same decisive question raised by Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche,

Heidegger seeks to overcome the spirit of vengeance. Heidegger's "solution" (to use the word loosely), however, is unlike Nietzsche's insofar as Heidegger does not think ontologically in terms of values or a mere reversal of Platonism." The whole of Heidegger's later thinking, as a meditation on this preparation of humanity for global governance, attends to the decisive question in a way that is no longer metaphysical but essential. Heidegger is the first to think this decisive question essentially inasmuch as he thinks this question in terms of the history of Being. Only thus is it possible to overcome metaphysical vengeance, for in questioning concerning the meaning of Being in general the tension between a 'transcendent-permanent' and an 'earthly-temporal' is transformed. Through this thinking Heidegger vouchsafes to us a significant possibility—that of assisting the advent of humanity's global governance in an authentic manner, precisely insofar as humanity is receptive to Being's claim in its dispensation of a new criterion of world sojourn. It is in appreciation of this possibility that Heidegger’s thought is compelling in orienting us towards essential political thinking.

43


Ontology Comes First

Ontology comes first- it’s the starting point for all political considerations

Ignoring ontological questions leaves us in a nihilistic position where existence loses its meaning. Cropsey 87 (Josepth, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, “History of Political Philosophy,” 891)

On the surface there is little indication that this project has a practical or political motive. Indeed, the work presents itself only as an attempt to recover the foundations of science. In this sense it stands within the horizon of phenomenology. A somewhat closer examination, however, reveals a fundamental continuity of the theoretical and practical. The question of Being, according to Heidegger, is the source and ground of all ontologies or orderings of beings and thus of all human understanding. In forgetting this question , man thus forgets the source of his own knowledge and loses the capacity to question in the most radical way, which is essential to both real thought and authentic freedom. Without it , man is reduced to a calculating beast concerned only with preservation and pleasure , a "last man," to use Nietzsche's terminology, for whom beauty, wisdom, and greatness are mere words. The nihilistic brutality of this last man thus seems to lie behind Heidegger's concern with the foundations of science .

Heidegger’s reflective ontology is an act, a projected engagement with the world that allows humanity’s saving in the face of Tecnik. The alternative comes before any ontic engagement with the question of technology.Milchman & Rosenberg ,1996 (Alan, Professor of Politiical Science at Queens College CUNY, Alan, Assistant professor at Queens College CUNY, “Heidegger, Planetary Technics, Holocaust” Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust p. 227-228)

If we follow this latter path with Heidegger, then the saving would appear to have little to do with the Handeln of mortals. If we follow the former path, then it is the nature of this "cooperation," or rather Heidegger's understanding of action, that must concern us if we are to address the question of the saving and the possible insight into it that is provided by the Holocaust. Heidegger makes a distinction between Handeln (action) and Tun (doing or making). The latter is integrally linked to Technik and its mode of disclosing entities. As such it is part of the danger and not the saving. As Heidegger asserts in "The Question Concerning Technology": "Human activity [menschliches Tun] can never directly counter this danger."50 Handeln, however, includes thinking or reflection (Besinnung), and this latter is a crucial factor in the saving. Heidegger insists that thinking is itself action, and that the readiness for the saving—without which it cannot take place—occurs through thinking and poetry. In 1966, in the Spiegel interview, Heidegger forged a link, albeit not a causal one, between thinking and the saving: It is not a matter of simply waiting until something occurs to human beings after three hundred years have gone by; it is about thinking ahead, without prophetic claims, into the coming time from the standpoint of the fundamental characteristics of the present age, which have hardly been thought through. Thinking is not inactivity, but is itself the action that has a dialogue with the world's destiny. ... I do not think the situation of human beings in the world of planetary technology is an inextricable and inescapable disastrous fate; rather I think that the task of thinking is precisely to help . . . human beings to attain an adequate relationship to the essence of technology. . . .51 Such a thinking that can prepare for the saving involves a radical questioning of every facet of reality and its Weltanschauungen, including philosophy and science. That at least is one way to understand the meaning of the statement with which Heidegger concludes "The Question Concerning Tech¬nology": "For questioning is the piety of thinking."

44


Ontology Comes First

Ontology must come before all science or politics. All the aff claims are premised on an ontology of calculation which must be confronted before we can enact change.Swazo, professor of philosophy at university of Alaska, Fairbanks, 2002 [Norman K, Crisis Theory and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections p.74-76]

To the extent that world order studies are steeped in a strategic rationality, in calculative thinking, they do not concern themselves with the task of having a reflective insight into the fundamental features of the age. They do not concern themselves with the ground that enables any thinking and doing such as is pursued by a science, natural or social. Yet, it is this enabling ground that is really determinative of that science, inasmuch as all positing of a domain of inquiry presupposes an ontology. World order studies, as a development of contemporary social science, likewise are dependent upon one or another ontological commitment. Specifically, I shall argue, they are determined by the ontological positions that prevail in the modern period of Western philosophy; for these are the positions fundamentally decisive for the pro¬found change taking place in humanity's self-understanding, in our conception of all that is content of our world, and our relation to this world. About this I shall concern myself in section 2. Before doing this it is important that this relation between a positive science and ontology be stated in broad outline. For this I turn to Heidegger. "All non-philosophical sciences," remarks Heidegger, "have as their theme some being or beings, and indeed in such a way that they are in every case antecedently given as beings to those sciences."8 Continuing, Heideg¬ger writes: They are posited by them in advance; they are a positum for them. All the propositions of the non-philosophical sciences, including those of mathematics, are positive propositions. Hence, to distinguish them from philosophy, we shall call all non-philosophical sciences positive sciences. Positive sciences deal with that which is, with beings; that is to say, they always deal with specific domains, for instance, nature. Within a given domain scien¬tific research again cuts out particular spheres: nature as physically material lifeless nature and nature as living nature. It divides the sphere of the living into individual fields: the plant world, the animal world. Another domain of beings is history; its spheres are art history, political history, history of sci¬ence, and history of religion. . . . The beings of these domains are familiar to us even if at first and for the most part we are not in a position to delimit them sharply and clearly from one another. We can, of course, always name, as a provisional description which satisfies practically rhe purpose of positive science, some being that falls within the domain We can always bring forward and picture ourselves some being belonging to any given domain. ... A being—that's something, a table, a chair, a tree, the sky, a body, some words, an action.9 World order studies are, properly speaking, nonphilosophical. While concerned with a number of domains—political, economic, historical, etc.—it is the political domain that is central to these inquiries, presupposing the classical architectonic claims of the science of politics fot thinking and doing.10 Insofar as the political domain is primary, world order studies deal with beings that are said to be political, however explicitly or ambiguously this denomination is to be understood. Such beings are things of vatious kinds: humans qua citizens, office holders, rulers, legislatots; words such as public or official documents, codes of law, tteaties of reciprocal obligation, spoken discoutse; actions in all modes of public being-with-one-another; things mote or less familiar but not so well delimited—regimes, states, constitutions, organizations, associa¬tions; in short, things that have theit being in thought, wotd, and deed. All beings of the political domain become the proper concern of this thinking qua world order studies, despite the division of this domain into particular spheres (domestic politics and international relations) and individual fields (foreign policy, legislation, public law, public administration, state and municipal or provincial and local government, party politics, etc.). For world order studies, politics presents itself as global. Politics so conceived, as well as patterns of behaviot and practice between levels of government, matter insofar as they bear upon and contribute to the overall condition of our common planetaty existence. Indeed, properly speaking, where global identity and global interdependence are determinative of outlook concerning political existence, the distinction of domestic and international spheres becomes rather anachronistic, remaining useful only for purposes of analyses and investigations proper to the science of politics in its present empirically-oriented methodology. It is important to undetstand that political science posits in advance the various political things that constitute its objects of investigation. In this posit, an ontology—what these things are, how they are, their way of being— is implicit, if not explicit. This ontology, insofar as it is the ontology of the specific domain or region of beings that politics is, grounds the science of politics. That is, political science can be said to be dependent on, or to derive from, a regional ontology, viz., political ontology. Ontology as such is a theoretical inquiry, i.e., inquiry "explicitly devoted to the meaning of entities," this meaning being articulated by way of basic concepts. Political ontology, too, is a theoretical inquiry devoted to the meaning of those entities that provide the subject matter of empirical political science qua positive science. Consider Heidegger's following comments concerning such a relation: Scientific research accomplishes, roughly and naively, the demarcation and initial fixing of the areas of subject-matter. The basic structures of any such area have already been worked out after a fashion in our pre-scientific ways of experiencing and interpreting that domain of Being in which the area of subject-matter is itself confined. The 'basic concepts' which thus arise remain our proximal clues for disclosing this area concretely for the first time. ... Basic concepts determine the way in which we get an understanding beforehand of the subject-matter underlying all the objects a science takes as its theme, and all positive investigation is guided by this understanding. Only after the area itself has been explored beforehand in a corresponding manner do these concepts become genuinely demonstrated and 'grounded'. But since every such area is itself obtained from the domain of entities themselves, this preliminary research, from which the basic concepts are drawn, signifies nothing else than an interpretation of those entities with regard to their basic state ofbeing.n It is in taking the "step back," so to speak, from the positing of a domain and the research undertaken by a positive science to the ontology implicit in this "demarcation and initial fixing of the areas of subject-matter" that one begins to make the move from calculative thinking to meditative thinking. Inasmuch as meditative thinking is concerned with the "meaning" that reigns in things and thus with the ground that enables scientific inquiry, the orientation of such thinking is primarily ontological rather than positive (scientific). Here we have the distinction between philosophy and science— specifically, between philosophy qua metaphysics and science. We can now begin to make our way through the questions initially set forth at the beginning of this chapter, and to clarifying the need for and justification of meditative thinking as it bears upon contemporary world order thinking.

45


AT Neg Side Bias

1. no such thing – the block is equalized by total speech time – the aff has a last speech to rhetorically and strategically frame the debate, and has infinite prep time to mount a defense of any aspect of their framing

2. irrelevant – side bias isn’t a warrant for ignoring a politically more productive and more cogent framework

46


AT Should Implies Desirability

1. Our critique impacts desirability – problems with ontology and framing are reasons why specific policies are bad – that’s Dillon

2. Counterinterpretation – should is “Used to indicate obligation, duty, or correctness, typically when criticizing someone’s actions” – that’s the Oxford English Dictionary 5 – we meet, the critique is a reason the plan is incorrect

47


AT Bad Alternatives

1. No warrant why our interpretation incentivizes bad alts – other checks like alt solvency debates solve this

2. Our alternative is good – that’s Bartleson

48


AT Can’t Punish Every Representation

Our framework doesn’t lead to an evaluation of representations – we evaluate the ontology and framing of a policy first. You can defend this – you chose how to frame your plan, and our argument is essentially that your view of international relations is bad, which is a product of how the plan text works, not a representation.

49


AT Policy Simulations Good

First, defense –a. our interp allows these if you justify the way they’re framed – ensures good and socially productive simulations – K is a reason their simulation is badb. specialization – other forums for public policy discussion and simulation – mock UN, public lobbying, poli sci classes – questions of ontology are salient but have become so isolated no public space discusses them – you can’t lobby for ontology – debate key to accessibility

Second, offensea. critical discussions better – a policy simulation has no immediate impact; they can only access solvency for their framework claims through a few select policy debaters who go on to be public advocates or legislators – every debater has a view of the world and will produce some sort of socially productive knowledge base – resolving ontological concerns is better in this contextb. (CA or read Bartleson fiat card)

50


AT No Res Basis

1. Irrelevant – concerns of what the resolution would have intended aren’t as important as ensuring a politically useful and good discussion – the K generates net better policymaking – that’s above

2. Yes there is – should is “Used to indicate obligation, duty, or correctness, typically when criticizing someone’s actions” – that’s the Oxford English Dictionary 5 – we meet, the critique is a reason the plan is incorrect

3. There’s no specific resolutional basis for any argument, including disads – we get any warrant why the plan should not be done

51


AT Remove Agency/Kill Freedom – Wolan

1. No link – this is a critique of a specific conception of being – links more to them, they take a definitive state-centered stance on the question 2. The alt solves – everyone retains absolute agency, ontological contingency allows individuals to define their own relationship to being instead of accepting state-centrism3. p.33

52


AT Privileging Being Excludes Other / Wolan

1. This evidence doesn’t support their impact claim – it says our alternative is “amoral” and then ends – there’s no impact to this, the alt is still politically viable2. No link – this evidence presumes a specific conception of being like the aff – it concludes neg, their state-centric view of the world excludes non-state others – the alternative of ontological contingency allows for every other because every concept of ‘being’ is valid3. Ontology necessarily preceeds a question of ethics to the other – extend Dillon – saying “we should endorse the other” necessarily makes a determination about what that other is – we have to investigate this statement before ethics becomes possible

53


AT Peace Isn’t Natural / Kagan

1. It’s irrelevant; they can’t solve peace – our link arguments prove2. Turn – they’re net worse for peace – impact arguments prove3. No link – the alternative isn’t a return to the state of nature, it’s a movement away from static state-centric ontologies – this would be net-better for peace because it de-justifies state forms of violence4. Framework makes this irrelevant – their ontology should be evaluated first, and they don’t have a cogent argument why that solves peace – they can’t access this claim before justifying the way they frame their policy 5. This argument just proves the value of the alt – violence is inevitable, but it becomes exacerbated and possible in worse incarnations when we use static constructs of being and identity to legitimize divisions and conflicts – the alt is the best way to minimize the effects of violence

54


AT Realism

1. p. 322. Realism isn’t responsive to this argument – realism is a defense of epistemology, a certain way of producing knowledge about states – our critique is of the ontological starting point of these claims, that things like states are objective real entities through which we can describe life – realism doesn’t create a defense of its own starting point, it only justifies the way their aff works after they win the aff is cogent3. Realism is wrong – our Dillon evidence proves ontology informs all other modes of thinking as a starting point; means ontology undercuts the epistemic assumptions of realism – if states are no longer our ontological foundation, realism’s predictions become irrelevant – means the alt solves4. Our Cavanaugh evidence impact turns this – that’s aboveSampson 2 (Aaron Beers, Professor @ American University school of international service “Tropical Anarchy: Waltz, Wendt, and the Way We Imagine International Politics” Alternatives 27 429-457)

This article considers the dangers of positing anarchy as the fundamental fact of international politics. Like Helen Milner, I suggest that “clarification of this central concept in international relations is important since such a key term should not be used without knowing what is meant by it.” Unlike Milner, however, I argue that the discourse of international politics employs a particular conception of anarchy – tropical anarchy – that portrays the international system as “primitive.” As a result, the foundation upon which much of the

discipline rests is not anarchy but rather an image of primitive society popularized by British social anthropologists during the 1930s and 1940s.The dangers of employing claims about a supposedly primitive society as the foundation for analysis are threefold. First, as anthropologists have long since realized, primitive systems and societies are inventions that no longer serve as valid categories of classification. Second, by transforming what was once the explicit concern of social anthropology into an implicit theoretical assumption, we prejudge the nature of international politics. Third, using primitive society as the starting point for scholarship creates an inescapable logic that reduces possible policy responses to a simple choice: either maintain the primitive status quo or civilize the world. Kenneth Waltz’ Theory of International Politics selects the first option; Alexander Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics chooses the second.

Sampson 2 (Aaron Beers, Professor @ American University school of international service “Tropical Anarchy: Waltz, Wendt, and the Way We Imagine International Politics” Alternatives 27 429-457)In both social anthropology and international politics, the classic account of ‘primitive’ society has served similar ends. The systems approach of Radcliffe-Brown, Fortes, Nadel, Evans-Pritchard, Waltz, and Wendt presumes the scholar can somehow step outside the field of analysis and observe the object of investigation with unbiased, scientific objectivity. Yet every “purely positional picture” shows the brush strokes of those who painted it. British social anthropologists turned their microscopes on “primitive” societies just as the British colonial empire began to crumble. Their theories legitimated the desire to control and “reflected Britain’s loss of the self-confidence it once enjoyed as the first industrialized nation and economic leader of the world.”Waltz’ neorealism emerged from a similar context: the apparent decline of a hegmeon. Theory of International Politics “reaffirmed the primacy of American power in the international system.” And it, too, legitimated the need to control. “The urge to explain,” writes Waltz, “Is not born of idle curiosity alone. It is produced also by the desire to control, or at least to know if control is possible.”Second, by accepting the received account of primitive society, we turn what was once an explicit concern (order in decentralized, ‘primitive’ societies) into an implicit theoretical assumption (decentralized systems are primitive and anarchic). The binary oppositions and biological analogies upon which this assumption is based are deeply problematic. Failing to question this assumption affects our ability to interpret events and leads us to prejudge international politics as a primitive struggle of all against all.Finally, tropical anarchy and the images of primitive society it activates limit our range of policy responses to an overly simplistic choice: maintain the status quo or civilize the world. This choice is neither realistic nor desirable. It is not desirable because it presumes only Western powers have the moral authority and material capability to initiate meaningful change. It is not realistic because the international system of the twenty-first century is no more primitive than the African political systems of one hundred years before.

55


AT Extinction Outweighs Ontology

1. Even if this is true; they can’t access an extinction claim – our link arguments problematize the case harms – 2. Not offense – extend Smith or read impacts3. p. 344. Framework makes this irrelevant – their ontology should be evaluated first, and they don’t have a cogent argument why that solves extinction – they can’t access this claim before justifying the way they frame their policy 5. Their ontology makes extinction inevitable – Cavanaugh proves despite the peace-promises of their mode of sovereignty, states will create larger and larger escalatory conflicts in the name of unity and state ontological cohesiveness – ontology comes first because their viewpoint makes their impacts inevitable

56


AT Solve Terrorism First

1. Not offense – our link arguments problematize their terrorism solvency – 2. The alt solves the impetus for terrorism – ontological contingency means no exclusionary concepts of being that propogate one particular notion of society or life as acceptable or superior – this is the reason terrorist attacks are conducted3. p. 344. Framework makes this irrelevant – their ontology should be evaluated first, and they don’t have a cogent argument why that solves terrorism – they can’t access this claim before justifying the way they frame their policy 5. Terrorism is inevitable now – Duffield proves the ways we treat “terrorists” as the unstable outside to a stable state notion of being make the constructions of divisions and hostility to states inevitable, these pressures manifest themselves in the form of things like terrorism, our link evidence explains why the harms they describe happen – alt is a perquisite to solving

57


AT Alt Disarms the US In Face of Enemies

1. Framework makes this irrelevant – their ontology should be evaluated first, and they don’t have a cogent argument why that solves dangerous enemies – they can’t access this claim before justifying the way they frame their policy 2. No link and alt solves – our link arguments problematize the way they perceive “enemies” and “danger” – – and our alternative solves this; allows an effective re-conceptualization of the concept of danger to create better solutions3. The enemies their authors perceive aren’t real – relies on a specific ontological backdrop of states having real substance and real threats that can thus impact them – our link arguments – our link arguments prove this isn’t an objective or accurate depiction of the world4. the K impact turns this – we should be disarmed in the face of so-called “enemies” – their static ontological position guarantees not only the constant creation of external enemies, but also that our conception of being becomes the weapon against them that enables violence – disarming ourselves is how we undo the cycle of hatred and danger that we’ve created

58


AT Spivak (West Critique is Essentialist)

1. This links worse to them – they use state-dominated and ontologically prefigured forms of knowledge to devise policy actions – epitome of flawed Western knowledge construction2. alt solves – it allows the recognition of the imperfections of knowledge Spivak is talking about – a state of ontological vulnerability with no set notion of being opens up the space for any form of knowledge production to be legitimate, instead of the Eurocentric policy and theoretical modes Spivak is criticizing

59


A2: Ethics > Ontology

Placing ethics before ontology presupposes a neutral, generic, homogenized Other towards which we have responsibility – this is an INDEPENDENT internal to damnation.Rudi Visker, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2003 (“Is ethics fundamental? Questioning Levinas on irresponsibility”, Continental Philosophy Review, 36: 263–302)

These broad strokes should suffice to give us the outline of Levinas’ ethics of responsibility. Admittedly, it not only seems to be coherent; but is also quite attractive. For it is no doubt the central place this ethics reserves for the Other that explains why people are so impressed by it, as Levinas himself seems have realized quite early. “In 1968 . . . all values were being contested as bourgeois – this was quite impressive – all except for one: the other. . . . [E]ven when a language against the other resounds, language for the other is heard behind it” (RTB, p. 99). Indeed, the otherness of the Other seems to have become our obsession. It is an otherness we should respect, learn from, and refrain from reducing to a copy of ourselves – as we have done for too long – in a euro- or occidentalocentrism that, like king Midas, fatally turned whatever it encountered, into of copy of what it had wished to be the ideal world.17 But this world turned out to be uninhabitable, the lonely world of knowledge where everything has finally become familiar and thus uninteresting, and where we have become, as a result, terribly alone, bored by everything including ourselves. In short, we’re faced with the crisis of the European sciences that, as Husserl remarks in the opening of his last great book, “no longer seem to have anything to say” about “the questions that are decisive for genuine humanity.”18 Is it not time to dig a hole in which we can bury our shame? “First philosophy has donkey’s ears” – is it not that confession for which we are truly grateful to Levinas, whose ethics of the Other finally justifies our desire to break with the past? And what a break it is: The discovery of the value of cultures and of the subcultures within these cultures. A vulgar critique of pure judgment (Bourdieu). The triumph of multiculturalism. And within that triumphant celebration of alterity, a new sobriety: one should learn one’s lessons from the past, and avoid, for example, reducing the Other to a culture – not ours, but his/hers/theirs! One should avoid homogenization by letting him/her/them be absorbed by a new totality – the “other” culture(s) – for that would be but another way of labeling and controlling others by making them recognizable. Besides, one should perhaps mistrust all this talk about multiculturalism. Is it not, in truth, an ideology that simply serves to mask late capitalism’s true contradictions: exploitation, deprivation, repression?19 A false consciousness, to be sure! But then again, for Marx, ideology is not simply a false consciousness but the correct consciousness of a false world. In covering up its injustice, multiculturalism at least indirectly testifies to the need for such a cover-up, and in the false harmony it preaches, there is nonetheless the desire for happiness, for a better world.20 In all this confusion, clearly one value keeps us going: the Otherness of the Other. His/Her hunger, as Levinas says,

is sacred. But can this hunger be approached, as Levinas believes, “objectively” (TI, p. 201, quoted above)? Does it provide us with a

firm standard? Couldn’t it be confusing us, in its turn? For human beings not only need to be kept alive. The food one offers to humans

should, lest one treats them as cattle, be spiced. Alain Finkielkraut, who considers himself a disciple of Levinas,21 comes across this complication without noticing that it makes the whole edifice tumble. “The reverse side of the humanitarian concern with suffering,” he says, “is a disdain for everything in life which does not let itself be reduced to Life in the biological sense of the term.”22 And in a chilling passage in which he protests again “against this Olympian indifference toward a

peasant humanity” (CC, p. 88) – a humanity that is more than such a biological life, that has all sorts of customs and practices which divide it – he writes, “To save lives, such is the global task of the doctor without frontiers; he is too busy filling the hungry mouth with rice, to still have time to listen to what it is trying to say” (HP, p. 128).

Finkielkraut protests against a uniformization in suffering. In the end, pain would be the final equalizer; we all moan and cry the same way. The Olympian indifference about which he is so shocked would be, in fact, a refusal to take into account “the meaning which people give to their existence” (CC, p. 88) – a meaning about which, needless to say, they do not agree. Spices are important, but it is hard to prove why they are. Like everything important in life, they are without reason. We do not bury our dead simply because we are afraid of epidemics – there would then be more efficient ways of getting rid of them, some sort of garbage-service, perhaps. It is important how we bury them; and on this, there

is no agreement – not even among the monotheistic religions. We can, of course, give some sort of “explanation” for our practices (e.g., for

being buried on your right side, with your head facing Mecca rather than Madrid), but the process will soon come to a fruitless end (why the head and not the feet? why lying on the right side, rather than on the left or the back?) Such things are extremely important (hence the existence of ‘multicultural’ graveyards), but we cannot “prove” why they are. They are, so to speak, both necessary and arbitrary. They are like that because they are like that. And it may not always be pleasant to be confronted with our incapacity to fully argue for what is truly important to us, to fully account for those practices that constitute the inner core of our intimacies. It is as if this incapacity is somehow improper. How can what is most our own be something we so poorly possess that

we cannot even give conclusive argument for it? Finkielkraut’s protest against a humanitarianism that does not allow “the words [of the Other] to reach the domain of its care” (HP, p. 128) is no doubt justified. But what exactly is happening here?

Why do these words not reach me? Could it be that precisely because these words do not reach me, I prefer to stuff the Other’s mouth with rice? What is the status of this “not reaching,” this “not hearing”? Is there, then, some sort of

appeal, which – contrary to what Levinas had told us – I can not hear? Can there be some sort of insensitivity or

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impassibility between me and the Other that points to something other than the attempt to sedate/anaesthetize a prior sensitivity? Could it be that, if there is something in this life of the Other to which I do not respond, this lack of response on my part is something quite different from any attempt to muffle what in me has already responded? Insensitivity, impassibility, non-response: could it be that what announces itself here, should not be understood in the privative mode? Is any other way to understand these non-responses possible, however, once one has embraced (like Finkielkraut, in the same book) the principles of a philosophy like that of Levinas – a philosophy which has perhaps not by accident expressed a similar disdain for what is peasant in humanity and sung the praise of Socrates “who preferred the town to the countryside and the trees”? Here is the passage immediately preceding this sentence, where Levinas seems to speak from his heart: One’s implementation in a landscape, one’s attachment to Place, without which the universe would become insignificant and would scarcely exist [Levinas

is rendering here what he sees as Heidegger’s view], is the very splitting of humanity into natives and strangers. And in this light [supreme provocation against Heidegger] technology is less dangerous than the spirits of the Place. Technology does away with the privileges of this enrootedness and the related sense of exile. It goes beyond this alternative. It is not a question of returning to the nomadism that is as incapable as sedentary existence of leaving behind a landscape and a climate. Technology wrenches us out of the Heideggerian world and the superstitions surrounding the Place. From this point on, an opportunity appears to us: to perceive men outside the situations in which they are placed, and let the human face shine in all its

nudity (DF, pp. 232–233). Let us linger with this passage, for it is crucial if we are to understand why Finkielkraut may be raising an issue that can only be taken seriously once one leaves the alternatives that Levinas allows here. As Levinas sees it, the choice is either being “attached” to or “complemented” in a landscape, a Place, a climate – in short, being en-rooted – or being without such attachment. This latter “unrootedness,” however, is

no mere absence. It is not, for Levinas, a handicap, but a positive capacity: the ability to leave behind all such roots. To truly perceive the Other as a human being presupposes that one is wrenched out of one’s native world – that the ties by which that world holds us are broken. It thus presupposes an emancipation: a doing away with that mancipium that holds us in its spell.23

Technology can break that “ grip” by situating us in a space in which the division between the autochthonous and the allochthonous no longer makes sense. Hence, it is surely no coincidence that Levinas never employs the latter term in reference to the Other . Whereas the I is

said to be autochthonous – “enrooted in what it is not [and yet] within this enrootedness, independent and separated” (TI, p. 143) – the Other is never referred to as the one belonging to a different (allo) soil (chthoon). He or she is, instead, consistently called a Stranger, someone without a homeland (apatride) who is “outside the situation in which he or she is placed.” And again this “outside” or this “without” are positive qualifications, not privative ones: it is thanks to them, it seems, that the human face can shine in all its nudity. Whoever is “native” will first have to unlearn his/her inborn tendency to treat that nudity as a lack of something the Other should have in order to belong to the community of those who are “inside.” To overcome the division between natives (inside) and strangers (outside of that inside), means to break with the meaning privative reasoning bestows on these terms. Better still, it means to turn this reasoning against itself. For, to be a native – to be “inside” – is in fact itself a shortcoming. It refers to the incapacity to have broken with what Totality and Infinity calls participation. In this

condition, one is still part of a whole to which one finds oneself subjected. One is spell-bound, under the spell of some Difference to which one finds oneself attached to the point of being pre-judged, for it is precisely this difference which will render one indifferent to those who seem to lack these very same ties. It is only by breaking its spell – whether with the help of technology, as the above quote suggests, or through the appeal of the Other, as other texts tell us24

– that one is able to accede to that “non-indifference” which Levinas sees as our deepest essence: responsibility. The above is as fair a comment as I could give on the passage that concerns us here and in which, as I now hope to have shown, Levinas

indeed speaks from his heart. Leaving the polemics with Heidegger aside,25 one can perhaps begin to see why Finkielkraut, in complaining about the “Olympian indifference toward a peasant humanity,” may have raised an issue that does not fit at all well with the way Levinas would want to approach this issue. Indeed, whereas for Levinas “peasantism” breeds “indifference” – both categories characterizing the “native” – Finkielkraut seems to see in “peasantism” something that characterizes both my humanity and that of the Other. There is, as it were, something “peasant” about the human condition as such. Whether it be that of beings who live in the town or in the countryside, the human condition would appear to owe its humanity to what Finkielkraut – with another (and to my mind: better) metaphor – calls “an inscription in a world.” Without such inscription, a human being would be reduced to anonymity, i.e., would be “nothing more than a collection of

bodily functions, nothing else than the anonymous organic life that pulsates in him” (HP, p. 128). One would be what Finkielkraut elsewhere calls a “victim” – “a human being severed from its surroundings and its roots, who no longer has a spot and a situation of his own, whose essence and possibilities are taken away from him” (HP, p. 132). Our question then is this.

Is the Levinasian Other such a victim? If so, is this due to an implicit naturalization of his/her otherness? Let us not discuss this question straightaway, but try to clear up the apparent confusion of tongues that may make it difficult to hear what exactly is being addressed by it.

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Their arbitrary metaphysical notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ must be peeled back to reveal the universal horizons of concern and environmental justice that will function as the ground for authentic ecological value, even to the exclusion of some human life in order to salvage all wellbeing. Thomson 4 (Iain, Dept. of Philosophy, Univ. of New Mexico. “Ontology and Ethics at the Intersection of Phenomenology and Environmental Philosophy”, published in Ecophenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself copyright 03. PDF accessed July 2, 2008 p. 389-91)

The next two questions, then, are, first, whether there are any universal horizons of concern, and thus any ‘values ... that actually do hold for all subjects’ (Embree, p. 40), and if so, second, whether these universal ‘values’ are substantive enough to ground an eco- phenomenological ethics. The neo-Husserlian eco-phenomenologists answer ‘Yes’ to both questions. What makes their naturalistic ethical realism so interesting is their further contention that our pre-given world of ‘background values’ can itself be peeled back to reveal ‘an axiological transcendental’ (p. 13), that is, a protoethical substrate of nature which they believe can function as the ground for a new eco-phenomenological ethics. According to naturalistic eco-phenomenologists such as Brown, Koha W k, Diehm, Ted Toadvine, and David Wood, the very notion of something’s being ‘good’ is ultimately rooted in the objective conditions required to sustain and enhance the life of an organism, while the ‘bad’ comes from those conditions which diminish or eradicate such life. Hence, Koha W k maintains, ‘good and evil does have an ontological justification: some things sustain life, others destroy it’.19 Brown suggests how one might develop Koha W k’s view of the intrinsic value of life into a full-blown ethics: ‘Why are we so sure that dishonesty, fraud, rape, and murder are evil? Because they each, although in different ways, retard and inhibit the intrinsic purposes and desires of life’ (p. 14, cf. pp. 27–28). It is easy to understand why a naturalistic environmentalist might find such a view attractive. Yet, one need not believe the ‘rape is in our genetic interest’ view some sociobiologists defend in order to be skeptical of the claim that what we in the West take to be ethically good (or bad) is what serves (or undermines) the ‘intrinsic purposes and desires of life’ – even assuming, concessio non dato, that we can make adequate sense of that phrase, something Koha W k does only by making ‘Husserl’s phenomenology an anticipation of evolutionism in sociobiology’ (p. 28), a view implicitly shared by a surprising number of Eco-Phenome- nology’s contributors. For, the sociobiology literature is replete with less controversial studies of behaviors we would condemn as immoral among humans that seem to have been advantageous from the perspective of Dawkins’s ‘selfish gene’.20 (Perhaps that should only surprise the prudish; as Freud explained in Totem and Taboo, societies do not morally prohibit acts no one wants to commit.) Indeed, both Nietzsche and Freud argue that Western civilization is premised on the repression and sublimation of the very innate purposes and desires of life to which the naturalistic ethical realists appeal, and that ethics functions, at least in part, to codify and enforce this very repression.21 So, instead of assuming that our core values are natural (which would be to mystify rather than to naturalize the ground of ethics), we should admit that, insofar as we can articulate an ethics in conformity with the ‘intrinsic purposes and desires of life’ (which Nietzsche too called for), the resulting naturalistic ethics is likely to differ significantly from the core value system we have inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition, with its familiar proscription of ‘dishonesty, fraud, rape, ... murder’ and so on (and its defense of pity and compassion for the weak, Nietzsche would add).22 Eco- Phenomenology’s naturalistic contributors thus seem more forthright when they suggest, for example, that an ethics that does justice to ‘life’ may require not only ‘an attitude of moral regard and respect for some nonhuman others’ (Brown, p. 10), but even – and as one of its ‘basic principles’ – ‘that the human population needs to be reduced by several billion’ (Embree, p. 47). If we cannot expand our core Judeo-Christian-Kantian value-system to accommodate such differences, they may render the adoption of a naturalistic eco-phenomenological ethics unlikely, undesirable, or both. At best, Marietta may be correct to see in this ethics a ‘rejection of humanistic ethical concerns – which thinkers of our day are not ready to accept, but at which thinkers in the future might not blanch’.

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