Abstract
Development is unveiled in the global south most inconspicuously as the experience of the modern. Looking back at Western modernity in the first half of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger argued that late modernity marked an understanding of all that is or Being as readily available resource or standing reserve. For Heidegger, the technological understanding of Being has a planetary impetus. The chapter briefly lays out the argument of the book that development as modernization can be understood as concretizing the planetary essence of the technological understanding of Being, beset with the problems of an impossible conception of justice and equality, devastation of the planet and the technological transformation of the essence of the human being. Despite Heidegger’s problematic politics, his response to the technological society, especially in its planetary dissemination, is insightful.
The word O Logos names … that in which the presencing of what is present comes to pass…. Since the beginning of Western thought the Being of beings emerges as what is alone worthy of thought. If we think this historic development in a truly historical way, then that in which the beginning of Western thought rests first becomes manifest: that in Greek antiquity the Being of beings becomes worthy of thought is the beginning of the West and is the hidden source of its destiny. Had this beginning not safeguarded what has been, i.e. the gathering of what still endures, the Being of beings would not now govern from the essence of modern technology. Through technology the entire globe is today embraced and held fast in a kind of Being experienced in Western fashion and represented on the epistemological models of European metaphysics and science.
—Heidegger, “Logos: Heraclitus , fragment B 50”, 76.
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Notes
- 1.
I abide by the conventional translation device of capitalizing the ‘B’ of “Being” (Sein) in order to distinguish it from “beings” or entities (das Seiende).
- 2.
An interesting example that Heidegger cites regarding this is the disappearance or death of God: “Whether the god lives or remains dead is not decided by the religiosity of men and even less by the theological aspirations of philosophy and natural science. Whether or not God is God comes disclosingly to pass from out of and within the constellation of Being” (TT: 49).
- 3.
I shall explore in detail these strains in Heidegger’s thought in the next chapter.
- 4.
Heidegger writes 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” (MA: 56).
- 5.
Heidegger writes: “Then man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature—that he is a meditative being. Therefore, the issue is the saving of man’s essential nature” (MA: 56).
- 6.
For a succinct treatment of this problem, see (Thomson 2005: Chap. 2).
- 7.
For a discussion on Heidegger’s notion of essence, see my essay (George 2012).
- 8.
The ontotheological nature of the essence of technology, which Iain Thomson emphasizes, will be discussed in §7 of the next chapter.
- 9.
Denis Goulet, who pioneered development ethics, asks: do cultural communities “also wish to be viewed as worthy of merit independently of their viability or their utility to other communities?” (1981: 4). He thinks it necessary to ask “whether multiple cultural rights are compatible with technology’s inherent rationality” (1981: 5).
- 10.
As Albert Camus writes, hoping for a world where freedom and justice would flourish together: “Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other” (1991: 291). My attempt in this book is to explore these ‘limits’.
- 11.
- 12.
Probably the most sustained critic of Heidegger’s politics and ontology, on almost every page of his philosophical prose, is Emmanuel Levinas. John Caputo argues that the anti-essentialist Levinasian perspective of the Other is absent especially from the later Heidegger’s essentializing history of Being, and so, he contends, Levinas’s relentless critique “made it impossible to discuss Heidegger today without wrestling with the question of ethics” (1998: 232).
- 13.
Levinas’s theoretical position is about “every man’s responsibility towards all others, a responsibility which has nothing to do with any acts one may really have committed” (1989: 290).
- 14.
The publication of Black Notebooks has reignited the concern about the Nazi contamination of Heidegger’s philosophy. While this publication has sounded the death knell for Heidegger’s philosophy according to his stringent critics, Heideggerians still think that his anti-Semitism was in no way exceptional for his times and that the prejudices of thinkers cannot nullify thought as such. They point to the fact that Heidegger allowed the publication of the diary, scheduled albeit as the very last, knowing fully well what was inside them and, thus, making himself vulnerable to hostile assessment. He dared to put his deep failure in the dock, they contend. Some of them point to Heidegger’s own concept of errancy (withdrawal of Being and therefore of truth) within which human existence is always adrift just as existence is in the truth. “The errancy through which human beings stray is not something that, as it were, extends alongside them like a ditch into which they occasionally stumble; rather, errancy belongs to the inner constitution of the Da-sein into which historical human beings are admitted.… The concealing of concealed beings as a whole holds sway in that disclosure of specific beings, which, as forgottenness of concealment, becomes errancy” (ET: 150). Heidegger’s anti-Semitism can be said to be a fundamental error and concealment of the truth common among prewar westerners. But certainly, as the best-known philosopher of his times and astute observer of the human condition, Heidegger’s moral and intellectual failure was far more serious and shameful than that of the common westerner of those days. His supporters are sometimes surprised by the intellectual lethargy in his anti-Semitic observations (Rothman 2014; Rée 2014). Heidegger thinks that no human being stands as close to error as the philosopher, the venturesome poet of thought (FCM: 19).
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George, S.K. (2015). Heidegger and Development: An Introduction. In: Heidegger and Development in the Global South. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 82. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2304-7_1
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