Techno-phenomenology: Martin Heidegger and Bruno Latour on how phenomena come to presence

This article will set out to elucidate the ways in which the philosophies of technology of Martin Heidegger and Bruno Latour seek to explain how the phenomenal world of nature, objects and tools come to presence as events through their interrelations with each other and with us. Both thinkers seek to overcome a subject/object divide that they both understand as characterising modernity in order to reveal a greater interdependence between nature and culture, human and machine. Not only do they both seek to deconstruct the subject/object divide that techno-science has imposed as a paradigm dictating how we as subjects understand the world, but they both use a similar strategy to do so, finding a better means of allowing phenomena to come to presence by turning to premodern culture, ancient Greece for Heidegger, ‘primitive’, non-modern cultures for Bruno Latour. And both find in art the link to move beyond the modern paradigm to reveal technology's hidden creative potential. By focusing on a shared problem, that of the subject/object divide that both thinkers understand as constitutive of modernity, and a shared strategy to resolve this problem, that of art, this article will set out to show how Heidegger and Latour's strategies for revealing the co-constitution of Dasein and World as co-dependent agencies are more similar than is commonly held. But through this analysis of co-dependency, a central divergence between the two thinkers will come to the fore, that of singularity (Heidegger) versus multiplicity (Latour). It is this crucial difference, I will hold, that will prove critical in envisioning the future of phenomenology. To the extent that we are now living amongst hybrid entities, cyborgs and forms of intelligent emergence where subject and object, nature and culture, can no longer be so easily differentiated, it seems as though opening ourselves to what presences may entail heeding Latour's call to embrace both mediations and multitudes. If subjects and objects have been replaced by mediations that can finally ‘show themselves in themselves’ and express their own agency, and transcendental consciousness has been abandoned for an emergence consciousness that is immanent, interdependent, and greater than the sum of all individual minds, we must finally question the impact of such a state of affairs on phenomenological perception itself.     

Heidegger,technology and ecology

Abstract

This article investigates Heidegger’s views on technology, specifically focussing on whether it is possible to fit Heidegger’s ideas into an ecologically minded framework. The author concludes that the question of what we should do in the wake of the technological crisis we face is inappropriate in terms of Heidegger’s philosophy, since he proposes that we should first tackle the question “What should we think?”. The question whether Heidegger’s ideas on technology provide us with new paths of action, specifically in terms of ecological practice, is flawed.     

You can't get something for nothing: Kierkegaard and Heidegger on how not to overcome Nihilism 1

This paper analyzes Kierkegaard's Religiousness A sphere of existence, presented in his edifying works, and Heidegger's concept of authenticity, proposed in Being and Time, as responses to modern nihilism. While Kierkegaard argues that Religiousness A is an unsuccessful response to modern nihilism, Heidegger claims that authenticity, a secularized version of Religiousness A, is a successful response. We argue that Heidegger's secularization of Religiousness A is incomplete and unsuccessful, that Heidegger's later work offers a reconsideration of the problem of modern nihilism, and that later Heidegger suggests a way out of nihilism which is compatible with Kierkegaard's Religiousness B sphere of existence.     

Organizational efforts to affirm sexual diversity: a cross-level examination

A growing number of organizations have enacted policies intended to recognize and affirm sexual diversity in the workforce. This research demonstrates that the more prevalent these policies, the less likely sexual minority members are to experience treatment discrimination. Further, as expected, more equitable treatment was associated with higher levels of satisfaction and commitment among lesbian and gay employees. Treatment discrimination was also systematically related to the use of 3 identity management strategies (i.e., counterfeiting, avoiding, integrating). Findings also illustrate the importance of considering individual attributes in diversity research. In particular, group identity attitudes were associated with work-related attitudes and identity management. Overall, the research demonstrates the importance of organizational efforts to affirm sexual diversity and highlights the need for future research in this area.     

How to investigate subjectivity: Natorp and Heidegger on reflection

Continental Philosophy Review - Is it possible to investigate subjectivity reflectively? Can reflection give us access to the original experiential dimension, or is there on the contrary reason to...     

Proximities: Irigaray and Heidegger on Difference

Explicating Heidegger's and Irigaray's critiques of difference, this essay proposes a new approach to the crucial concept of relationship in their thought. Articulated as proximity rather than difference, such relationality works in a manner that is non-appropriative and free from power. The essay shows that at the center of Heidegger's questioning of being is not the ontico-ontological difference but the notion of nearness (Nähe), elaborated by Heidegger as a critique of the metaphysical logic of difference and relation. Linking Heidegger's nearness with his critique of power in the recently published Besinnung, the essay explains how such relationality exceeds the parameters of power (machtlos). The remainder of the essay investigates the way in which Irigaray's reformulation of sexual difference as an ethics of proximity similarly calls into question the differential economy of being and aims at a new model of non-appropriative relation. While Heidegger links the change in relation from power to letting be to a decisive confrontation with modern technicity, Irigaray criticizes this approach and reformulates the question of technology through the prism of sexual difference. By taking into account the often ignored aspects of Irigaray's thought - temporality, event, proximity - the essay situates Irigaray's ethics and culture of sexual difference not only beyond the discussions of essentialism but also outside the equality-difference debates.     

Marxist challenges to Heidegger on alienation and authenticity

Conclusion From what has been argued, it should now be apparent how Heidegger's philosophy of the affect, its ontological disclosures and its relation to authenticity might be enlarged to meet certain marxist challenges. The most valuable instruction to be gained from these citicisms, I think, is that which Lukacs offers in the example of Szilasi's intuition of co-presence. Traditional phenomenology needs to enrich its investigations into the social and historical reality of situation. Kosik's point that Heideggerian authenticity lacks the crucial third step (revolutionary change of society) is also profound but again, not incompatiblein se with Heidegger's concept. Alternatively, one might as easily say that Critical Marxism or any Marxist Humanism can still be enriched by certain Heideggerian insights.     

Heidegger on presence: A reply

Taylor Carman has argued that the passages I submitted to him as proof that Heidegger identifies being with presence are really just his characterizations of a metaphysical conception of being that he repudiates. I show that he has misread these passages and has misunderstood the nature of the continuity that Heidegger himself recognizes between the views of Kant which are under discussion in the texts from which these passages are drawn and his own (Heidegger's) position which finds expression in them. I then cite other passages from another work by Heidegger that make the same point about being and presence just as emphatically and quite independently of any account of any other philosopher's views. Finally, I explain the difference between the ways Heidegger uses the word Anwesenheit ‐ his word for presence. One of these is as a translation of the Greek ousia which he interprets as a concept of being as presence sans temporality; the other is the radicalized concept of being as presence toward which Heidegger was working in Being and Time.     

Authenticity in Heidegger: A response to Dreyfus

In his book, Being‐in‐the‐World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I, Hubert Dreyfus argues that Heidegger's concept of authenticity is incomprehensible. He maintains that there are two conflicting accounts of inauthenticity in Being and Time. He elucidates what he calls the ‘structural account’ of inauthenticity and being‐in‐the‐world in the main body of his work, and then criticizes what he calls the ‘motivational account’ in an Appendix. Because he overlooks certain textual evidence and underemphasizes fleeing and the role of choice, his interpretation is neither complete nor compelling. I offer an alternative interpretation of authenticity. While Heidegger's notion of authenticity may still be weakened by other flaws, it is not incomprehensible in the sense that Dreyfus contends.     

Being bored: Heidegger on patience and melancholy

In his reflections on ethics, Descartes distances himself from the eudaimonistic tradition in moral philosophy by introducing a distinction between happiness and the highest good. While happiness, in Descartes’s view, consists in an inner state of complete harmony and satisfaction, the highest good instead consists in virtue, i.e. in ‘a firm and constant resolution' (e.g. CSMK: 325/AT 5: 83) to always use our free will well or correctly. In Section 1 of this paper, I pursue the Cartesian distinction between happiness and the highest good in some detail. In Section 2, I discuss the question of how the motivation to virtue should be accounted for within Descartes’s ethical framework. In Section 3, I turn to Descartes’s defence of the view that virtue, while fundamentally distinct from happiness, is nevertheless sufficient for obtaining it. In the final section of the paper (Section 4), my concern is instead with a second and sometimes neglected distinction that Descartes makes between two different senses of the highest good. I show that this distinction does not remove the non-eudaimonistic character of Descartes’s ethics suggested in Section 1, and present two reasons for why the distinction is important for Descartes’s purposes.     

Heidegger on Macht and Machenschaft

In a paradoxical manner, Heidegger's work is deeply tainted by his complicity with totalitarian (fascist) oppression, despite the fact that his philosophy, in its basic tenor, was always dedicated to freedom and resistance to totalizing uniformity. While acknowledging his early fascination with power struggles, the essay tries to show how, as a corollary of his turning (Kehre), Heidegger steadily sought to extricate himself from the tentacles of oppressive power (Macht) and manipulative domination (Machenschaft). The focus here is on recently published treatises of the 1930's. The conclusion inserts Heidegger's thought into the contemporary arena of global standardization.     

Dawn and dusk: Gadamer and Heidegger on truth

Understanding certainly does not mean merely the taking over of traditional opinion or the acknowledgment of what has been enshrined by tradition. Heidegger, who had first identified the concept of understanding as a universal determination of Dasein, means thereby precisely the character of understanding as project, which is really to say, Dasein in its orientation toward its own future. At the same time, I do not wish to deny that I for my part have emphasized within the universal matrix of the elements of understanding its direction toward the appropriation of what is past and has been handed-down. Heidegger, too, like many of my critics, may here feel the absence of an ultimate radicality in drawing out consequences. What does the end of metaphysics as a science mean? What is the significance of its ending in science? If science climaxes in a total technocracy and brings on with it the cosmic night of the forgetfulness of being, the nihilism foretold by Nietzsche, is one then permitted to look back toward the last rays of dusk as the sun sets in the evening sky instead of turning to watch out for the first shimmer of its return?     

Heidegger on Animality and Anthropocentrism

Throughout his writings, Heidegger's view of animals is ostensibly anthropocentric, defining them as deficient in relation to human beings. His most extensive analysis of animality, found in the 1929–1930 lecture course entitled The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, seems to be a clear example of this anthropocentrism, defining the animal as poor in world in opposition to the human being's world-forming character. Nevertheless, Heidegger is explicitly ambivalent regarding the anthropocentric implications of this conception of animality. This paper examines Heidegger's articulation of the notion of world-poverty as a distinct form of negativity, its implications for the question concerning Heidegger's anthropocentrism, as well as his ambivalence with regard to this question.     

Thinking love: Heidegger and Arendt

“Thinking Love: Heidegger and Arendt” explores the problematic nature of romantic love as it developed between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, whom Heidegger later called “the passion of his life.” I suggest that three different ways of understanding love can be found at work in Heidegger and Arendt’s relationship, namely, the perfectionist, the unconditional, and the ontological models of love. Explaining these different ways of thinking romantic love, this paper shows how the distinctive problems of the perfectionist and unconditional models played out in Heidegger and Arendt’s relationship and how that relationship eventually gave rise to the third, ontological understanding of love. This ontological vision of love combines some of the strengths of the perfectionist and unconditional views while avoiding their worst problems, and so emerges as perhaps the most important philosophical lesson about romantic love to be drawn from studying the lifelong love affair between two of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers.