Heidegger and The Environment
William J. Kinsella
The U. S. Department of Energy’s Hanford nuclear reservation serves as an illustrative text, exemplifying Heidegger’s reading of nuclear energy as a culmination of both Western metaphysics and the instrumental stance that he calls “enframing.”
Eleanor D. Helms
...the fact of not being able to ind a hammer or pair of shoes does not
usually—or perhaps ever—result in a new, authentic awareness that we live in
a world full of things that exist as part of a meaningful web of relations. That
awareness, Heidegger thinks, involves an awareness not just that any object
may break or be lost but that the whole world as world depends on the human
being who lives and works, for whom the things have meaning.
Jonathan Schwartz
[T]he fact that as ereignis, as the event of appropriation, Being
simultaneously presents itself--by making manifest what entities are--while at the same
time withdrawing itself, by refusing to disclose what it is. It is an open space, a clearing,
where beings show up.
For Heidegger, then, our existence in a World is ‘spread’ over the people who are
in the place with us, and the ‘things’ that share these places. In Heidegger’s later work,
this notion of Being-in-the-World is extended to include the notion of ‘dwelling’.
With dwelling, our self, ‘stretched’ in time and place,
exists in a manner that cares for the people and ‘things’ that are incorporated into
this ‘stretching’.
Matthew Antolick
[Heidegger] is not attempting to reveal the application of mathematical
knowledge as faulty: there is far too much evidence in support of the effectiveness of
mathematical method in problem solving, scientific experimentation, and so-called
“mastery” of nature by humans. The problem lies in the assumption that such successes
point to the mathematical comportment as the comportment: as the one way of grasping
the real. To put it another way: while Heidegger clearly acknowledges the correctness of
mathematical method, he doubts the mathematical as primordially true.
Simon P. James
To free ourselves of the alienating influence of technology and recover our rootedness
in the world, Heidegger maintains that we must cultivate a mode of being he calls a
“releasement toward things.” To be “released” toward a thing is to attend to it as the
particular thing that it is, rather than as a placeholder for some other thing that
would serve the same function.
Because phenomenological methods
undercut mind/world dualism, phenomenology is able to recognize the reality
of environmental ‘values’, the alleged ‘fact’ that certain pro-environmental
values are ‘always already in the world’ and so simply await the appropriate
phenomenological approach in order to be discovered and made the basis of a
new environmental ethics.
[I]n Heidegger, dwelling involves an attunement to the given, it is itself not given,
either by place of birth or ancestral belonging,
even if your dwelling place does in fact happen to be that of your forefathers.
Sean McGrath
At the end of “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger leaves us with the cryptic
suggestion that a “saving power” lies concealed in this “dangerous” moment in the destiny of the West.
We are at a stage in the history of being where the human being no longer fully encounters itself because
everywhere it finds only itself.
Michael Peters
Ruth Irwin
Crucially, physis does not rely on the materiality of the planet, but rather on its dynamic
of obscurity and emergence into the light of truth, aletheia. Physis is, at once, aspects
of the earth coming forth and at the same time, necessarily, retaining a hidden element.
Arne Naess
Alberto Carrillo Canán
Tad Beckman
Created 2000/8/8
Last updated 2009/27/09
Back to Ereignis
Pete