Heidegger K

Sheboygan North Debate
Heidegger = Essence of this file
Jon Cook
Kick Ass Heidegger K Page (1/239)

Kickass Heidegger K
Kickass Heidegger K............................................................................................................................. 1
Acknowledgements........................................................................................................................5
How to Use....................................................................................................................................... 6
***SHELLS***......................................................................................................................................... 7
Long 1NC.......................................................................................................................................... 8
Short 1NC....................................................................................................................................... 18
***LINKS***.......................................................................................................................................... 23
Agriculture.................................................................................................................................... 24
Alternative Energy.......................................................................................................................25
Astronauts..................................................................................................................................... 27
Asteroids........................................................................................................................................ 28
Biopolitics, Biogenetics and Post-Humanism......................................................................30
Body Counts.................................................................................................................................. 32
Colonization.................................................................................................................................. 33
Cosmopolitanism/Thinking Globally.....................................................................................34
Cyborgs........................................................................................................................................... 36
Cyborgs/Biotech........................................................................................................................... 38
Cyborgs/Overcoming Death......................................................................................................40
Distance from the Other.............................................................................................................41
Economy........................................................................................................................................ 44
Efficiency Movements................................................................................................................46
Ending Oil Dependency..............................................................................................................47
Energy Storage.............................................................................................................................48
Environment................................................................................................................................. 49
Environmentalism (1/2).............................................................................................................50
Environmentalism (2/2).............................................................................................................51
Fiat................................................................................................................................................... 52
Get Off the Rock (1/2).................................................................................................................53
Get Off the Rock (2/2).................................................................................................................55
Global Warming........................................................................................................................... 56
Guilt/Lifestyle Changes/Morality............................................................................................57
Hegemony...................................................................................................................................... 59
Hubble Telescope......................................................................................................................... 61
Hydropower.................................................................................................................................. 62
Industry.......................................................................................................................................... 64
International Relations..............................................................................................................65
Kritikal Affirmatives (Oppression and Inequality).............................................................67
Kritikal/Anthropocentrism Affirmatives..............................................................................68
Mars (1/2)...................................................................................................................................... 69
Mars (2/2)...................................................................................................................................... 70
Mining............................................................................................................................................. 71
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Morality.......................................................................................................................................... 72
Nanotechnology............................................................................................................................73
Nietzsche (Eternal Return)........................................................................................................75
Nuclear Power (1/2).....................................................................................................................77
Nuclear Power (2/2)....................................................................................................................78
Nuclear War.................................................................................................................................. 79
Overcoming Human Growth....................................................................................................80
Privatization..................................................................................................................................81
Satellites......................................................................................................................................... 82
Science (1/2).................................................................................................................................. 83
Science (2/2)................................................................................................................................. 84
Security.......................................................................................................................................... 86
Solar Power (1/2)......................................................................................................................... 88
Solar Power (2/2)........................................................................................................................ 90
Space Exploration (1/2)..............................................................................................................91
Space Exploration (2/2).............................................................................................................92
Space Exploration (Philosophical)..........................................................................................93
Space Hegemony.......................................................................................................................... 94
Space Pictures (1/2)....................................................................................................................96
Space Pictures (2/2)....................................................................................................................97
Technology.................................................................................................................................... 98
Telescopes (1/2)............................................................................................................................ 99
Telescopes (2/2)......................................................................................................................... 100
Terraforming..............................................................................................................................102
Terrorism (1/2)........................................................................................................................... 103
Terrorism (2/2)..........................................................................................................................104
Transportation............................................................................................................................105
War Claims..................................................................................................................................106
Wind Power................................................................................................................................. 107
***IMPACTS***................................................................................................................................... 108
Anthropocentrism.....................................................................................................................109
Biopower...................................................................................................................................... 110
Capitalism (1/2)...........................................................................................................................111
Capitalism (2/2)..........................................................................................................................112
Environmental Destruction (1/2)...........................................................................................113
Environmental Destruction (2/2)...........................................................................................114
Laundry List (1/2).......................................................................................................................115
Laundry List (2/2)......................................................................................................................117
Neoliberalism..............................................................................................................................118
Nihilism......................................................................................................................................... 119
Nuclear War (1/2)......................................................................................................................120
Nuclear War (2/2)......................................................................................................................122
Terrorism (1/2)...........................................................................................................................124
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Terrorism (2/2)...........................................................................................................................125
Trump............................................................................................................................................ 127
Try or Die Extinction.................................................................................................................129
Tyranny......................................................................................................................................... 130
Value to Life (1/2).......................................................................................................................131
Value to Life (2/2)......................................................................................................................132
Value to Life Outweighs Everything Else.............................................................................134
War and Violence.......................................................................................................................135
Zero Point of the Holocaust.....................................................................................................137
Zimmerman................................................................................................................................. 138
***ALTERNATIVES***......................................................................................................................138
Heideggerian Resistance (1/2)................................................................................................139
Heideggerian Resistance (2/2)...............................................................................................140
Hermeneutics.............................................................................................................................. 141
Meditative Thinking (1/2)........................................................................................................142
Meditative Thinking (2/2)........................................................................................................144
Poetry (1/2).................................................................................................................................. 146
Poetry (2/2).................................................................................................................................. 149
Profound Boredom....................................................................................................................150
Quantum Mechanics (1/2)........................................................................................................152
Quantum Mechanics (2/2).......................................................................................................153
Works of Art................................................................................................................................ 154
***TURNS***....................................................................................................................................... 154
Anthropocentrism......................................................................................................................155
Biopower...................................................................................................................................... 156
Capitalism..................................................................................................................................... 157
Cede the Political/Political Processes...................................................................................158
Community/Empathy................................................................................................................159
Democracy....................................................................................................................................161
Distance from the Other...........................................................................................................163
Freedom (1/2).............................................................................................................................166
Freedom (2/2).............................................................................................................................167
General/Mars..............................................................................................................................168
Hegemony.................................................................................................................................... 169
Nihilism......................................................................................................................................... 171
Nuclear War................................................................................................................................. 173
Overcoming Human Growth...................................................................................................175
Terrorism..................................................................................................................................... 176
Realism......................................................................................................................................... 178
Totalitarianism........................................................................................................................... 179
War and Security....................................................................................................................... 180
***FRAMEWORK***......................................................................................................................... 180
2NC Frontline.............................................................................................................................. 181
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Ballot Becomes the Criticism..................................................................................................182
Calculative Utilitarianism Fails..............................................................................................185
Ontological Thinking Key.........................................................................................................186
Ontology before Ethics..............................................................................................................187
Ontology First............................................................................................................................. 189
Resolved = Ontology..................................................................................................................192
Western Enframing Kills Solvency........................................................................................193
***2NC BLOCKS***............................................................................................................................ 194
2NC Overview.............................................................................................................................. 195
2NC................................................................................................................................................ 196
A2: Affirmative is Non-Unique...............................................................................................197
A2: Alternative Doesnt End All Technological Thought..................................................198
A2: Alternative not Real World..............................................................................................201
A2: Cede the Political................................................................................................................202
A2: Clausewitz/Schmitt............................................................................................................203
A2: Cohran...................................................................................................................................205
A2: Doing Nothing Bad.............................................................................................................206
A2: Ethics is Greater than Ontology......................................................................................207
A2: Habermas Kritik of Heidegger/Villa Evidence............................................................213
A2: Individual Choice Solves Value to Life..........................................................................214
A2: Infinite Justice (Derrida)..................................................................................................215
A2: Ketels..................................................................................................................................... 216
A2: Kritik is Primitivist.............................................................................................................217
A2: Latour.................................................................................................................................... 218
A2: Must Act................................................................................................................................219
A2: Nazism...................................................................................................................................221
A2: No Scenario.......................................................................................................................... 223
A2: Perm All Other Instances.................................................................................................225
A2: Perm Do Both......................................................................................................................226
A2: Realism................................................................................................................................. 230
A2: Rose {Calculations = Responsibility and Ethics).......................................................234
A2: Technology Good................................................................................................................235
A2: Truth Exists (Sokal Style Arguments)...........................................................................237
A2: Wolin..................................................................................................................................... 238
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Acknowledgements
I would like to say: This file has been cut to many artists. Each of which contributed to this file
by keeping me sane enough to not shoot myself after reading 3000 pages of Heidegger
crappily cut by freshman at debate camps. It-has-been-hell.
Let's thank...
Mainly, The Mountain Goats. Thank some omnipotent being for John Darnielle.
http://grooveshark.com/#/playlist/Debate+File+Cutting+Playlist/57482685
and
Cedarwell - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9Sg-HSh-Ck&feature=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=golLMWAOW-c&feature=relmfu
JCOOK
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How to Use
"The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine... The Rhine itself appears to be
something at our command.. The word expresses here something more, and something more
essential, than mere "stock." The word "standing-reserve" assumes the rank of an inclusive
rubric... Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as
an object... The words "setting--upon," "ordering," "standing-reserve," obtrude and accumulate in
a dry, monotonous, and therefore oppressive way this fact has its basis in what is now coming to
utterance. Martin Heidegger described in 1949 the idea of a Technological Mindset. This
critique of the technik mindset gave way the modern day policy debate critique. Many current
debaters cannot grasp the nuances of the Heidegger argument. This has lead to a hate of the
Heidegger critique. It has been run so badly Bill Batterman, 3NR creater and Woodword Coach,
has stated in his JudgeWiki, I have engaged in meditation on your K, it reveals itself to me, and it
still sucks. work harder. To rectify this problem you must learn the kritik from the ground up.
Stop being lazy and stupid. Learn it.
To begin with, you must understand Heidegger's idea of phenomenology. According to
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy phenomenology is described as, the study of structures of
consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The idea of phenomenology
was created by German philosopher Husserl. Husserl was a professor at the University of Freiburg
where Heidegger was a good friend and a student. Here had a revolutionary idea. Husserl thought
that the being of things, the essence and what they are, is defined and found by the phenomenon
in this world. These phenomenon are everything we sense. Our sights, feelings, smells. Everything
that is observed by us is a phenomenon. Husserl stated that these phenomenon, these
observations by the viewer, allow us to find the things true being. Yet, after the end of WWI
Heidegger began to doubt Husserl's view that there was a true Being (A god in the sense of a
absolute truth.) Because of this doubt, Heidegger began to redefine the view of phenomenology on
the world. He described that there was no true Being to things, and that everyone's Being is
based off people's subjective perception of phenomenon. He proposed that our perception
changed the essence of people.
Now I shall explain my awesome paint drawing showing a visual representation of
phenomenology. A is being shown as the sun. It is shining onto B which is our orange. This casts a
shadow (F) onto the wall which is E. Then sitting in front of wall C is our little Heidegger (D). The
shadow is our perceptions within the word. Heidegger is us. Walls C and E are the world. The
object is any object in the world. Lastly, the sun is our senses allowing for perception. Now our
sense, the sun, sense this the object, the orange. This produces our perception of the object, the
shadow. This process of our perceptions take place ON and IN the world, the walls C and E. We sit
in and on the world like lil' Heidegger and observe our perceptions with our mind. These
perceptions make us see the being of the object, in this case an orange. It is our perceptions, the
shadow, that allow this object to become an orange. If we saw the characteristics of a dog, we
would believe the essence was a dog. But because we perceived this way it is this way. Yay for
paint.
Now that we understand Heidegger's view on ontology, let us look at the kritik! Heidegger
believed that the world today is seen in the technological mindset. This mindset is when we
begin to order things about. When a hydroelectric damn was put into the Rhine river, it was no
longer seen as a river. It was now just a power source waiting for us to use it. This makes the river
become a Standing Reserve waiting for human's to use it. It looses it's ontological status as an
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object because of it. It is no longer seen as an object or a river in any poetic or lived sense, but it's
merely a resource for us to gather. Because humans began to become so attached to this mindset,
they began to view everything in this light. Woods are now seen as waiting timber, mountains are
seen as mineral deposits and even soldiers are seen as foot units and numbers to be calculated.
Everyone begins to be seen as an object and we lose all of our relationships with other people.
Zimmerman describes this in '94 as an Ontological Damnation. This card sucks. Don't read it.
But what Zimmerman is meaning by this is that we'll reach a point where no one has an
ontological relationship with anyone else. This makes it so we shall never again come back to a
point where we will have ontology. Once we reach the point where everyone has this mindset, no
one will be able to go back because they no longer see the value of people other than objectifying
them, and we will, as the human species, get back to a point where we have a form of ontology.
Ontological Damnation... Hell on Earth... Masquerading in a material paradise.
In the context of a debate round, the kritik is simple. The Affirmative provides a plan which uses
this technik mindset. As the negative you say this is bad. We should oppose this mindset so as we
do not lose out ontological valuing of the Earth and People. It is the root cause of all their impacts
and your impacts will out weight theirs (Go VtL).
I can not stress enough. You don't care about technology. It rules. It rocks. You love it. You
want to have sex with it. You want to bring it to your house, make love to it and be there in the
morning to cook it breakfast and drive it to work. You concede technology rocks, in the sort of way
that you want to rock it all night long. You are kritiking the technological mindset, not technology.
There is a large difference. The technological mindset is order things about and making things
standing reserves. Technology is not that. You kritik technik not technology. I can't stress this
enough.
One last thing I can't stress enough. Read the fucking literature. It will better your
understanding so much. It will make everything make sense. It will make the terms become clear
and every nuanced argument gold. Read the cards, read the literature.
Hopefully now that you understand the basics of the Heidegger kritik you will be able to
understand the picture at the top. For more fun and help go to:
http://en.wikipedia....ian_terminology
http://en.wikipedia....artin_Heidegger
For questions: joncookdebate@gmail.com
One last thing, he was totally a Nazi.
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Long 1NC
Space exploration makes forces humans to view the world in a copernican

mannerism, and obliterates our ontological connection to the Earth and forces
us into the technological mindset.
Turnbull '06
[Neil, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Social Theory at. Nottingham Trent University, The Ontological
Consequences of Copernicus, Theory, Culture & Society, 23(1)).]
Essentially, Nietzsches claim is that Copernicanism and Darwinism force us to question the significance of both the Greek
Humanist and the [end of page 125] JudeoChristian conceptions of humanity and its world (that is, to think beyond the
territorialization of Western philosophy as somewhere between Athens and Jerusalem). In Nietzsches view, modern
metaphysics is both groundless and simian because, after Copernicus and Darwin, the earth does not stand fast
(Nietzsche, 1998: 2) and man is more of an ape than any ape (Nietzsche, 1969: 42). In such a context Nietzsches
madman is not a prophet of lost archaic theological certainties, but a new voice of sanity, castigating, warning and
exhorting his metaphysically somnambulant audience to wake up to the truly frightening placelessness of modernitys
Copernican and Darwinian forms of life. And many who have followed Nietzsche in this regard have noted that the key to
understanding the significance of modernitys unheimlich ontology resides within a broader appreciation of the way in
As Nietzsches heir Martin Heidegger

claimed, when seen in Copernican planetary-cosmological terms, the
earth is no longer the earth in any vital or lived sense but simply an object
comprised of purely technological relationships and an object, moreover, that
is subjectivized into a representation, a vorstellung, that stands before us rather
than as something in our midst (Heidegger, 1993: 1056). For Heidegger, once
perceived and conceived as a visual representation of a planetary bounded
whole, the earth becomes deworlded: appearing as just one more casual
system within a much wider cosmological causal order . And this is why for
Heidegger in his much-cited reflections on this matter the interplanetary images of the earth
from space are not simply the end product of a rather complex and powerful set
of technological process that enframe the earth as a mass industrialized object,
but are images that radically diminish the meaning of the earth, rendering
humanity without a world within which to dwell (a theme that I return to later). When seen in
Heideggerian terms, Copernicanism reduces the earth to mere planetary matter; an
absurd and inhuman cosmic accident devoid of any ultimate sense or
significance. In such a context we can no longer speak of a meaningful world at all, because when the earth
is reduced to a visual representation, it ceases to be a context of significance
but stands as something that transcends all tacitly shared assumptions . As such, it
which the new cosmology has undermined traditional conceptions of earth.
famously
is beyond all frameworks an abyss (Wood, 2002: 15). It becomes a spectral earth a mere flicker of light in the
cosmological void. As Lyotard claimed, as a Copernican technologized object the earth isnt at all originary but merely a
spasmodic state of energy, an instant of established order, a smile on the surface of matter in a remote corner of the
cosmos (Lyotard, 1991: 10).
Space Exploration is a symptom of Western desire to enframe the Earth and

understand every being as standing reserve.
Zimmerman '94
[Michael E., PhD, Tulane, 1974 is Professor of Philosophy and former Director of the Center for
Humanities and the Arts at CU Boulder, Contesting earths future: radical ecology and postmodernity, UT Library Catalog,
MB]
***SHELLS***
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Like many deep ecologists, Capra criticizes modernity because it interferes with the smooth functioning of the Earth's
ecosystem hence, he suggests that systems theory is not intrinsically domineering, any more than quantum theory, which
is so useful for the computers and other electronic equipment on which systems theory applications are so dependent.
Deep ecologists warn that despite supercomputers, scientists cannot fully predict the consequences of their actions.
Chaos theory, though not mentioned by Capra in The Turning Point, argues that this lack of
predictive capacity is due to the fact that most natural phenomena, including
weather, are nonlinear systems, which are in principle unpredictable beyond the short term. Very
small scale perturbations can trigger off a vast, system altering event . Hence,
although some people may wish to use systems theory and cybernetics to
support schemes for domination, chaos theory shows the limits to such aspirations .
The debate about photographs of Earth taken from outer space also reflects the debate between New Agers and deep
The technical accomplishments required to build the spacecraft from which to

were made
possible by the same objectifying attitude that discloses Earth as a stockpile of
raw materials for enhancing human power. Hence, Yaakov Garb has argued that although those photos may
seem to disclose the interconnectedness of life, they may also be read as symptoms of Western
"man's" drive to escape from his dependence on Earth .65 By achieving a perspective
that reduces Earth to an image reproducible on a postcard, "man" gains the
illusion of control over the planet. Recoiling against his organic origins and his
mortality, man begins conceiving of himself as godlike and as radically other than nature.
Satellite photos of Earth may be instances of that "high altitude thinking"
(MerleauPonty) which conceives of itself as pure spirit rising above the natural world . In
ecologists.
take those photos, regarded by some ecological activists as inspiring images of the living Earth,
such photos, we see Earth reflected in the rearview mirror of the spaceship taking us away from our home in order to
conquer the universe. Heidegger warned that in the technological era, for something "to be" means for it to be an "image"
(Bild) projected by and constrained in accordance with the demands of the powercraving subject.66 In 1966, he remarked
that "I was frightened when I saw pictures coming from the moon to the earth. We don't need any atom bomb. The
uprooting of man has already taken place. This is no longer the earth on which man lives."67 Garb argues that the same
environmentalists who charge that the objectifying technological attitude that reduces natural phenomena to
highaltitude photos of Earth also erase

difference and reduce the planet to two dimensions . Garb notes that immersing
oneself in wild nature for an extended period lets one experience the multilayered
complexity and specificity of the living Earth, as well as one's dependence on it .
indistinguishable raw material sometimes fail to notice that
Though deep ecologists, New Agers, and many postmodern theorists extol the virtues of the local, the particular, and the
different, the very idea of the "local" becomes problematic as the socioeconomic world becomes increasingly
interdependent. Consider the following scenario: rising global oil prices make cooking fuel too expensive for many Third
World people, who then cut trees for fuel. The felled trees no longer absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, thus
exacerbating the global warming that may trigger climate changes that devastate midwestern American agriculture, while
at the same time melting polar ice caps and thus flooding New Orleans and Miami. Further, felled trees may contribute to
local topsoil erosion, but may also cause erosion that silt up rivers, thereby causing massive flooding downstream.
Complex socioeconomic events thus can set off a chain of events with catastrophic consequences at local and global levels.
All attempts to think global politics presuppose an ontology which inform all
following action IR and world order studies inherently follow a calculatative
and technology mindset! All the aff claims are premised on an ontology of
calculation which must be confronted before we can enact change.
Swazo '02
[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
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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 profound change taking place in humanity's selfunderstanding, 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 nonphilosophical 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, Heidegger 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 scientific 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 science, 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 beingthat's
World order studies are,

concerned with a number of domainspolitical, 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
something, a table, a chair, a tree, the sky, a body, some words, an action.9
properly speaking, nonphilosophical. While
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 delimitedregimes, states, constitutions, organizations, associations; in short, things that
All beings of the political domain become the

proper concern of this thinking qua world order studies , despite the division of this domain
have theit being in thought, wotd, and deed.
into particular spheres (domestic politics and international relations) and individual fields (foreign policy, legislation, public
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 ontologywhat 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.
law, public administration, state and municipal or provincial and local government, party politics, etc.).
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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 prescientific 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 of being. 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.
We are doomed to complete ontological damnation if we allow calculative

mastery over the world to continue. This results in ecological destruction,
nuclear war, a complete loss of meaning, the end of thinking, the end of politics
and the end of everything.
Thiele 95
[Leslie, Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida, Timely Meditations: Martin Heidegger and
Postmodern Politics, pg 203-204]
The age of planetary mastery, technological dominance, and the end of

metaphysics, Heidegger speculates, will likely endure for a long time (EP 95). Indeed, there is no
certainty that, from humanity's point of view, a succession to some other mode of revealing truth is ordained. The
In the absence of an ontological

reorientation, humanity would then be "left to the giddy whirl of its products so
that it may tear itself to pieces and annihilate itself in empty nothingness" (EP 87).
Estimating the likelihood of this apocalyptic conclusion is not Heidegger's concern. In any case, it is fair to say
that the physical annihilation of humanity is not Heidegger's most proximate
worry. Foremost in his mind is the on-tological meaning of this potential selfannihilation. If, as Heidegger put it, "the will to action, which here means the
will to make and be effective, has overrun and crushed thought," then our
chances of escaping the catastrophic whirlwind of enframing are slim indeed
(WCT25). The danger is that intensive technological production may simply
overpower human being's capacity for manifold modes of disclosure, displacing
the freedom inherent in philosophic thought, artistic creativity, and political
action. Undeniably technology fosters thinking, creating, and acting of sorts. Calculation, cognition, innovation, and
technological quest may reach its climax, as it were, without us.
engineering are highly valued within technological society, though even here it is not clear that computers and robots
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might not eventually displace more of these capacities than their production demands. The real menace, however, is that
social engineering would obviate political action, endlessly innovative

production would leave artistic creativity to atrophy, and utilitarian cognition
would fully displace philosophic questioning." Because the human capacity for thought is the
foundation for artistic creativity and political action, Heidegger indicates that its loss is his most pressing concern. He
writes, "In
this dawning atomic age a far greater danger threatensprecisely

when the danger of a third world war has been removed . ... 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" (DT 56). In the wake of this revolution we
find ourselves desperately in need of "an education in thinking" (TB 72). Such an education would, at a minimum, allow us
to discern why calculative thought could never adequately substitute for philosophic thought. In the absence of such
learning, and in the continued thrall of enframing, our capacity for philosophic thought may wither beyond resuscitation.
Most disturbing and dangerous, however, this situation need not disturb or appear
dangerous at all. Technological calculation and innovation may satisfy both our
intensified material needs and our diminished spiritual demands . As Heidegger warns:
"The devastation of the earth can easily go hand in hand with a guaranteed
supreme living standard for man, and just as easily with the organized
establishment of a uniform state of happiness for all men" (WCT 30). Devastation
need not mean discontent. Indeed, technological devastation may consist in
humanity's creation of a brave and exciting new world. Utopia and oblivion , as
Buckminster Fuller prophesied, may well coincide. Devastation, Heidegger states, "is the high-velocity expulsion
of Mnemosyne" (WCT 30). Mnemosyne, or remembrance, designates not simply a
recollection of what was, but also a "steadfast intimate concentration" on and a
"devotion" toward worldly things and affairs. Remembrance is the "constant concentrated abiding
with something not just with something that has passed, but in the same way with what is present and with what may
The expulsion of memory, therefore, is the loss of the capacity to abide by , rather than
challenge forth, the world. Once the fourfold is reduced to an extension of our
cerebral computations and technical orderings our capacity to dwell within its
horizons vanishes. We sit complacent in homelessness. The devastation is
complete
come. What is past, present, and to come appears in the oneness of its own present being" (WCT 140).
The technological age places humans and nature in standing reserve- Standing
reserve is to be objectified, counted and calculated- the impact is you are
assigned no value to your life
Mitchell '05
[Andrew J. Mitchell, Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University, "Heidegger and
Terrorism," Research in Phenomenology, Volume 35, Number 1, 2005 , pp. 181-218]//jrc]
Opposition is no longer an operative concept for Heidegger, since technology has served to eradicate the distance that
would separate the supposedly opposed parties. The analysis of technology in Heidegger's work is guided by the
(phenomenological) insight that "All distances in time and space are shrinking" (GA 79: 3; cf. GA 7: 157/PLT, 165).13
Airplanes, microwaves, email, these serve to abbreviate the world, to be sure,

but there is a metaphysical distance that has likewise been reduced, that
between subject and object. This modern dualism has been surpassed by what Heidegger
terms the standing-reserve (Bestand), the eerie companion of technological dominance and "enframing."
Insofar as an object (Gegenstand) would stand over against (Gegen) a subject, objects can no longer be found. "What
stands by in the sense of standing-reserve, no longer stands over against us as
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object" (GA 7: 20/QCT, 17). A present object could stand over against another; the
standing-reserve, however, precisely does not stand; instead, it circulates, and
in this circulation it eludes the modern determination of thinghood. It is simply
not present to be cast as a thing. With enframing, which names the dominance of position, positing, and
posing (stellen) in all of its modes, things are no longer what they were. Everything becomes an item for
ordering (bestellen) and delivering (zustellen) everything is "ready in place" (auf der Stelle
zur Stelle), constantly available and replaceable (GA 79: 28). The standing-reserve "exists" within
this cycle of order and delivery, exchange and replacement. This is not merely a
development external to modem objects, but a change in their being. The standing-reserve is found only in its circulation
along these supply channels, where one item is just as good as any other, where, in fact, one item is identical to any other.
Replaceability is the being of things today. "Today being is being-rephlceable"

(VS, 107/62), Heidegger claims in 1969. The transformation is such that what is here now is not really here now, since
there is an item identical to it somewhere else ready for delivery. This cycle of ordering and delivery does not operate
there is only a steady

circulation of the standing-reserve, which is here now just as much as it is
there in storage. The standing-reserve spreads itself throughout the entirety of
its' replacement cycle, without being fully present at any point along the circuit.
But it is not merely a matter of mass produced products being replaceable. To complete Heidegger's view
of the enframed standing reserve, we have to take into consideration the global
role of value, a complementary determination of being : "Being has become value" (GA 5:
serially, since we are no longer dealing with discrete, individual objects. Instead,
258/192). The Nietzschean legacy for the era of technology (Nietzsche as a thinker of values) is evident here. But the
preponderance of value is so far from preserving differences and establishing order of rank, that it only serves to further
When everything has a value,

an exchangeability and replaceability operates laterally across continents,
languages, and difference, with great homogenizing and globalizing effect. The
standing-reserve collapses opposition. The will that dominates the modem era is personal, even if, as
level the ranks and establish the identity of everything with its replacement.
is the case with Leibniz, the ends of that will are not completely known by the self at any particular time. Nonetheless,
the will still expresses the individuality of the person and one's perspective. In
the era of technology, the will that comes to the fore is no longer the will of an
individual, but a will without a restricted human agenda. In fact, the will in question no
longer wills an object outside of itself, but only wills itself; it is a will to will. In this way, the will need never leave itself.
This self-affirming character of the will allows the will an independence from the human. Manifest in the very workings of
technology is a will to power, which for Heidegger is always a will to will. Because the will to will has no goal outside of it,
The human is just another piece of a standing-reserve

that circulates without purpose. Actually, things have not yet gone so far; the human still retains a
its willing is goalless and endless.
distinction, however illusive, as "the most important raw material" (GA 7: 88/EP, 104). This importance has nothing to do
"The human is the 'most

important raw material' because he remains the subject of all consumption, so
much so that he lets his will go forth unconditionally in this process and
simultaneously becomes the 'object' of the abandonment of being" (GA 7: 88/EP, 104).
Unconditioned willing transcends the merely human will , which satisfies itself with
restricted goals and accomplishments. Unconditioned willing makes of the subject an agent
of the abandonment of being, one whose task it is to objectify everything. The
more the world comes to stand at the will's disposal, the more that being
retreats from it. The human will is allied with the technological will to will. For this
with the personal willing of conditional goals, as Heidegger immediately makes clear,
reason-and the following is something often overlooked in considering Heidegger's political position between the warsHeidegger is critical of the very notion of a FR'hrer, or leader, who would direct the circulation of the standing-reserve
The leaders of today are merely the necessary

accompaniment of a standing-reserve that, in its abstraction, is susceptible to
according
to
his
own
personal
will.
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planning. The leaders' seeming position of "subjectivity," that they are the ones
who decide, is again another working of "objectification," where neither of
these terms quite fits, given that beings are no longer objective. The willfulness of the
leaders is not due to a personal will: One believes that the leaders had presumed everything of their own accord in the
blind rage of a selfish egotism and arranged everything in accordance with their own will [Eigensinn]. In truth, however,
leaders are the necessary consequence of the fact that beings have gone over to a way of errancy, in which an emptiness
expands that requires a single ordering and securing of beings. (GA 7: 89/EP, 105; tin) The leaders do not stand above or
control the proceedings, the proceedings in question affect beings as a whole, including the leaders. Leaders are simply
points of convergence or conduits for the channels of circulation; they are needed for circulation, but are nowhere outside
of it. No leader is the sole authority; instead, there are numerous "sectors" to which each leader is assigned. The demands
of these sectors will be similar of course, organized around efficiency and productivity in distribution and circulation. In
short,
leaders serve the standing-reserve.
A loss of value to life precedes all other impacts death is preferable to a

valueless life
Mitchell '05
Terrorism," Research in Phenomenology, Volume 35, Number 1, 2005 , pp. 171-217]
Devastation (Verwistung) is the process by which the world becomes a desert (Wfiste),
a sandy expanse that seemingly extends without end , without landmarks or direction, and is
devoid of all life.20 If we follow the dialogue in thinking an ancient Greek notion of "life" as another name for "being," then
the lifeless desert is the being-less desert. The world that becomes a lifeless
desert is consequently an unworld from which being has withdrawn . The older
prisoner makes this connection explicit, "The being of an age of devastation would then consist in the abandonment of
being" (GA 77: 213). As we have seen, this is a process that befalls the world, slowly dissolving it of worldliness and
rendering it an "unworld" (cf. GA 7: 88, 92f./EP, 104, 107f., etc.). Yet this unworld is not simply the opposite of world; it
remains a world, but a world made desert. The desert is not the complete absence of world. Such an absence would not be
reached by devastation (Verwisiung), but rather by annihilation (Vernichtung); and for Heidegger,
annihilation is
far less of a concern than devastation : "Devastation is more uncanny than mere annihilation [blofle
Vernichtung]. Mere annihilation sweeps aside all things including even nothingness,
while devastation on the contrary orders and spreads everything that blocks
and prevents" (WHD, 11/29-30; tin). Annihilation as a thought of total absence is a thought from metaphysics. It is
one with a thinking of pure presence: pure presence, pure absence, and. purely no contact between them. During another
lecture course on H6lderlin, this time in 1942 on the hymn "The Ister," Heidegger claims that annihilation is precisely the
agenda of America in regards to the "homeland," which is here equated with Europe: "We know today that the AngloSaxon world of Americanism has resolved to annihilate [zu vernichten] Europe, that is, the homeland, and that means: the
inception of the Western world. The inceptual is indestructible [unzersto'rbar]" (GA 53: 68/54; tm). America is the agent of
technological devastation, and it operates under the assumptions of presence and absence that it itself is so expert at
dissembling. America resolves to annihilate and condemns itself to fdilure in so doing, for the origin is "indestructible." We
could take this a step further and claim that only because the origin cannot be annihilated is it possible to destroy it. This
possibility of destruction is its indestructible character. It can always be further destroyed, but you will never annihilate it.
Americanism names the endeavor or resolution to drive the destruction of the world ever further into the unworld. America
is the agent of a malevolent being. This same reasoning explains why the older man's original conception of evil had to be
Evil is the "devastation of the earth and the annihilation of the human
essence that goes along with it" (GA 77: 207), he said, but this annihilation is simply too easy, too much
rethought.
of an "Americanism." The human essence is not annihilated in evil-who could care about that? Instead it is destroyed and
Devastation does not annihilate, but brings about something

worse, the unworld. Without limit, the desert of the unworld spreads, ever
worsening and incessantiy urging itself to new expressions of malevolence.
Annihilation would bring respite and, in a perverse sense, relief . There would be nothing
left to protect and guard, nothing left to concern ourselves with-nothing left to terrorize. Devastation is also
irreparable; no salvation can arrive for it . The younger man is able to voice the monstrous conclusion
devastated by evil.
of this thinking of devastation: "Then malevolence, as which devastation occurs [sich ereignet], would indeed remain a
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-basic characteristic of being itself" (GA 77: 213, 215; em). The older man agrees, "being would be in the ground of its
essence malevolent" (GA 77: 215). Being is not evil; it is something much worse; being is malevolent.
Here's our alterntive text: Reject the aff and their technological jump to solve
problems and instead open up this space for meditative thinking. Our
alternative grounds our thinking and dwells-upon the earth. Instead of pursuing
the rigid confines of calculative thought, we instead take root to allow the
human spirit to flourish and allow thinking about thinking.
Heidegger '66
[Martin. The 20th centurys Slavoj. Discourse on Thinking. 1966. pp. 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
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
current business. It profits nothing in carrying out practical affairs. And
follow the path of meditative thinking in his own manner and within his own limits. Why? Because man is a thinking, that
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
is, a meditating being. Thus meditative thinking need by no means be high-flown.
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
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,
than the conventions and customs of his village, than the tradition of his native world.
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the autochthony, of man is threatened today at-its core . Even more: The loss-ofrootedness is caused not merely by circumstance and fortune, nor does it stem
only from the negligence and the superficiality of mans 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 mans 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?
Acts of will cannot transform bad forms of thinking. We have to deeply reflect
and meditate with our alternatives meditative thought to allow meaning to
reveal itself to us. This allows us to rediscover our worldly home and choose
how we want to be in the world.
Thiele 95
Heidegger offers a hint about the nature of the thinking that might loosen the grip of technology. He writes that " the
coming to presence of technology will be surmounted \venvunden] in a way that

restores it into its yet concealed truth. This restoring surmounting is similar to
what happens when, in the human realm, one gets over grief or pain" (QT 39).
Importantly, one gets over grief not through a willful overcoming. Such self-mastery
only displaces grief, with the likelihood of its resurgence at some other time, in
an invidious form. Like moods in general, grief is overcome not by mastery, intellect, or
will, but only by another mood (WPA 99). And moods, Heidegger insists, cannot be created, only
summoned (ST 105). The mood that allows our overcoming of grief might best be described as one of rediscovered
One gets over grief by once again coming to feel one's belonging in a
world that, because of to its cruel deprivations, had for a time become alien.
sanctuary.
Hannah Arendt often called to mind Isak Dinesen's saying that "all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell
we get over grief by reflecting on our grief-stricken

selves and becoming interpretively reintegrated in the world. Looking back on
our grieved selves allows us to surmount grief not by denying our misfortune
but by finding meaning in the story of our sorrow. To look back on ourselves in
time is to gain distance , and, at the same time, a nearness to the ongoing and
often tragic saga of worldly habitation. Homelessness is the mood of the technological
"progress." Heidegger's admonition to think the nature of technology, though far from a resigned musing, is not the
devising of a counteroffensive. We are asked to respond first to the question " What shall we think?" rather
than the question "What is to be done?" But the point is not simply that we must think before
we act. The needed thinking of what we are doing and how we are being is not
solely a strategic preparation for more informed and effective behavior . Thought
must first save us from our typical modes of behaving, namely those oriented to possessive
mastery. Heidegger warns that "so long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain held fast in the will
a story about them." Dinesen's point is that
to master it" (QT 32). The more we fail to experience the essence of technology as enframing, persevering in the mistaken
notion that complex machinery is the danger, the more we will believe that salvation lies in our mastering technology
Heidegger explicitly states that he is "not against

technology," nor does he suggest any "resistance against, or condemnation of,
before it masters us. With this in mind,
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technology" (MHC 4344). Indeed, the development of complex machines and
techniquestechnology as it is commonly understoodhas enormous benefits
that must not be depreciated. It would be shortsighted to condemn such
technology out of hand. Apart from our obvious dependence on technical devices, their development also
often "challenges us to ever greater advances" (DT 53 ). From political, social, cultural, and
environmental standpoints, technology demonstrates many virtues. Indeed,
given the unrelenting extension of human power and population, technological
developments that buffer the earth from our predaceousness seem both urgent
and indispensable. A good bit of the destruction humanity presently visits on the earth and itself makes
sophisticated technological remedies necessary. Having machines efficiently serve our needs is
neither evil nor regrettable. But this service must be grounded on our discovery
of what needs we truly have. More importantly, it must be grounded on our
discovery of what transcends human need.'* These, decidedly, are not technological
questions, and our capacity to answer them largely rests on our recovery of the
capacity to think beyond the criterion of instrumental service. 213-214
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Short 1NC

Turnbull '06

famously
Swazo '02
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the modern period of Western philosophy ; for these are the positions


For world
properly
speaking,
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grounds the science of politics. That is, political
domain or region of beings that politics is,
order thinking.
This Technik Managerial approaches to ecology and the Earth constitutes a

mode of concealing that pushes us into a spiral of meanginglessness that robs
all beings of value.
McWhorter '92 [Ladell, Prof. of Philosophy @ Univ. of Richmond, Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental
Philosophy, p. vii]
The danger of a managerial approach to the world lies not, then, in what it knows - not in
its penetration into the secrets of galactic emergence or nuclear fission - but in what it
forgets, what it itself conceals. It 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. What is now especially dangerous about this sense of our
own managerial power, born of forgetfulness, is that it results in our viewing the world as mere resources to
be stored or consumed. Managerial or technological thinkers, Heidegger says, view the earth, the
world, all things as mere Bestand, standing-reserve. All is here simply for human use. No
plant, no animal, no ecosystem has a life of its own, has any significance, apart
from human desire and need. Nothing, we say, other than human beings, has any intrinsic value. All
things are instruments for the working out of human will . Whether we believe that God gave
Man dominion or simply that human might (sometimes called intelligence or rationality) in the face of ecological fragility
makes us always right, we managerial, technological thinkers tend to believe that the earth is only a stockpile or a set of
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Even people have
become resources, human resources, personnel to be managed, or populations
to be controlled. This managerial, technological mode of revealing, Heidegger says, is
embedded in and constitutive of Western culture and has been gathering
strength for centuries. Now it is well on its way to extinguishing all other
modes of revealing, all other ways of being human and being earth. It will take
tremendous effort to think through this danger , to think past it and beyond, tremendous courage
commodities to be managed, bought, and sold. The forest is timber; the river, a power source.
and resolve to allow thought of the mystery to come forth; thought of the inevitability, along with revealing, of
concealment, of loss, of ignorance; thought of the occurring of things and their passage as events not ultimately under
even the call to allow this thinking - couched as it so often must be in a

is itself a paradox, the first that must be faced
and allowed to speak to us and to shatter us as it scatters thinking in new
directions, directions of which we have not yet dreamed, directions of which we
may never dream.
human control. And of course
grammatical imperative appealing to an agent -

valueless life
Mitchell '05
annihilation is
rethought.

devastated by evil.
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problems and instead open up this space for meditative thinking.
Thiele 95

sanctuary.

often tragic saga of worldly habitation. Homelessness is the mood of the technological age.
Rediscovering our worldly home (as threatened) signals the "restoring surmounting"
of technology. This rediscovered sense of (threatened) sanctuary is chiefly
summoned, Heidegger indicates, by memory or recollective thought. Recollecting our
worldly habitat not only fosters resistance to enframing, but also provides
guidance in negotiating relations with the products of technology , namely machines
and techniques. Heidegger ac-knowledges that we should neither reject nor do without technological artifacts or skills as a
whole. He neither advocates nor accepts a retreat to a pretechnological state of being. Nor, despite much misinterpretation by his commentators, does he suggest that we fatalistically resign ourselves to the victory of enframing. Its victory, he
emphatically states, is not inevitable (OGS 61). "We cannot, of course, reject today's tech-nological world as devil's work,
nor may we destroy itassuming it does not destroy itself," Heidegger maintains. "Still less may we cling to the view that
To confuse our
destined relation to Being as if it were a fate, particularly one that leads to the
inevitable decline of our civilization because of technological rule, is itself a
historically determinist, and therefore metaphysical and technological,
the world of technology is such that it will absolutely prevent a spring out of it" (ID 4041).
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understanding. According
to Heidegger, "All attempts to reckon existing reality morphologically, psychologically, in

terms of decline and loss, in terms of fate, catastrophe, and destruction, are merely technological behavior" (QT 48).14
Fatalism is no answer because fatalism reflects the same absence of thought

that is evidenced in a naive complacency with technological "progress ." Heidegger's
admonition to think the nature of technology, though far from a resigned musing, is not the devising of a counteroffensive.
We are asked to respond first to the question " What
shall we think?" rather than the question "What is to be

But the point is not simply that we must think before we act. The needed
thinking of what we are doing and how we are being is not solely a strategic
preparation for more informed and effective behavior . Thought must first save
us from our typical modes of behaving, namely those oriented to possessive mastery. Heidegger warns that
done?"
"so long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain held fast in the will to master it" (QT 32). The more we
fail to experience the essence of technology as enframing, persevering in the mistaken notion that complex machinery is
the danger, the more we will believe that salvation lies in our mastering technology before it masters us. With this in mind,
Heidegger explicitly states that he is "not against technology," nor does he

suggest any "resistance against, or condemnation of, technology " (MHC 4344).
Indeed, the development of complex machines and techniquestechnology as it
is commonly understoodhas enormous benefits that must not be depreciated.
It would be shortsighted to condemn such technology out of hand. Apart from our
obvious dependence on technical devices, their development also often "challenges us to ever greater advances" (DT 53 ).
From political, social, cultural, and environmental standpoints, technology
demonstrates many virtues. Indeed, given the unrelenting extension of human
power and population, technological developments that buffer the earth from
our predaceousness seem both urgent and indispensable . A good bit of the destruction
humanity presently visits on the earth and itself makes sophisticated technological remedies necessary. Having
machines efficiently serve our needs is neither evil nor regrettable. But this
service must be grounded on our discovery of what needs we truly have. More
importantly, it must be grounded on our discovery of what transcends human
need.'* These, decidedly, are not technological questions, and our capacity to answer
them largely rests on our recovery of the capacity to think beyond the criterion
of instrumental service. 213-214
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Agriculture
Modern agriculture uses technology to maximize efficiency by manipulating

nature. This results in the technological, managerial mindset!
Rojcewicz '06
[Richard, Professor of Philosophy at Point Park University 2006, The Gods and Technology: A
Reading of Heidegger Page 77]
The main point is unmistakeable,

as illustrated in the example of traditional farming versus modern agriculture.
The farmer of old submitted, tended, and nurtured. These are the quintessential activities of
This is a clear and vigorous paragraph that scarcely needs commentary.
poiesis; the old war of farming is midwifery, and what it brings forth is that with which nature is already pregnant.
Modern agriculture, on the other hand, hardly brings forth crops; it produces
foodstuffs or, perhaps we should rather say, ingesta. Modern agriculture does not submit
seeds to the forces of growth; on the contrary, it interferes with the seeds, generically
manipulating them. The forces of growth are now in the farmer's own hand,
whichis to say that she imposes the conditions that determine growth. The end
product, in the extreme case, to which we may be heading inexorably, is astronauts' food. It would be a travesty
to say grace before eating a meal of such foods. They are not gifts; they are human creations. They are not
grown; they are synthesized. They are created by someone playing God, and it would make no sense to
pray to God before ingesting them.
***LINKS***
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Alternative Energy
The rhetoric of alternative energy furthers a purely technological mindset

everything in our surroundings, every part of nature, is something to be
exploited and violently controlled.
Beckman '2K
[Emeritus Professor of Philosophy Humanities and Social Sciences Harvey Mudd College - 00 (Tad,
Martin Heidegger and Environmental Ethics, 2000, http://www2.hmc.edu/~tbeckman/personal/Heidart.html) //JRC]
Perhaps it is not difficult to understand the separate paths of the fine arts, craftsmanship, and modern technology. Each
seems to have followed different human intentions and to have addressed different human skills. However, while the fine
arts and craftsmanship remained relatively consistent with techne in the ancient sense, modern technology withdrew in a
radically different direction. As Heidegger saw it, " the
revealing that rules in modern technology

is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that
it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such." {[7], p. 14} Modern
technology sets-upon nature and challengesforth its energies, in contrast to
techne which was always a bringing-forth in harmony with nature. The activity
of modern technology lies at a different and more advanced level wherein the
natural is not merely decisively re-directed; nature is actually "set-upon." The
rhetoric in which the discussion is couched conveys an atmosphere of violence
and exploitation. (6) To uncover the essence of modern technology is to discover
why technology stands today as the danger. To accomplish this insight, we
must understand why modern technology must be viewed as a "challengingforth," what affect this has on our relationship with nature, and how this
relationship affects us. Is there really a difference? Has technology really left the domain of techne in a
significant way? In modern technology, has human agency withdrawn in some way beyond involvement and, instead,
Heidegger clearly saw the

development of "energy resources" as symbolic of this evolutionary path ; while the
acquired an attitude of violence with respect to the other causal factors?
transformation into modern technology undoubtedly began early, the first definitive signs of its new character began with
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 overcoming 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
the harnessing of energy resources, as we would say. (7)
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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
power, 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
objects lose their significance to anything but

their subjective status of standing-ready for human design. (8)
universe so that, within this new form of revealing,
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Astronauts
Space exploration depends upon an astronautic condition of modernity that

abandons a sense of home and distances us from lived reality. It forces us to
into the technological mindset.
Turnbull '06
Consequences of Copernicus, Theory, Culture & Society, 23(1))]
the modern astronaut is seen as one of the primary agents of modern

worldlessness in Heideggerian philosophy (and one is immediately struck by the phenomenological
Thus
similarities between the spatial nihilism of Nietzsches madman and the free-floating placeless experience of the modern
when the earth is seen from an astronautic point of view , all

traditional human concerns are deterritorialized and strangely diminished to the
extent that interplanetary representations of the earth threaten to sever the
connection between humanity and its traditional ontological supports. Heideggerian
scholars such as Robert Romanyshyn have developed this idea and used it as the basis for an existential critique of the
mad astronaut: the quintessentially modern avatar that stands as the highest expression of
modernitys unheimlich rootlessness. Romanyshyns is a critique of what might be termed the
astronautic condition of modernity (1989; 200), as, in Romanyshyns view, the modern astronaut
what so many modern Western children want to grow up to be is a metaphor for a hypermodern
cultural-psychological dream of distance, departure and escape from matter
that reveals a world of pure spectacular wonder, and that disguises and
perhaps even obliterates those deep and emotional connections to the earth that
maintain a sense of ontological security and lived reality.
astronaut). For
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Asteroids
The narratives surrounding asteroid detection and deflection rely upon the
notion of technological mindset which allow us to use technology to manage
and control space and asteriods.
Mellor '07
[Felicity, lecturer in the Department of Humanities @ Imperial College in London, Colliding Worlds :
Asteroid Research and the Legitimization of War in Space, August 2007, Social Studies of Science 37:499,
http://sss.sagepub.com/content/37/4/499.abstract]
With the swarming asteroids filling space, space itself was also resigni- fied. What had been an abstract
mathematical space became a narrative place, the location where particular and contingent events
occurred. Although the scientists continued to appeal to the predictability of celestial
dynamics it was this that would enable a survey of near-Earth objects to identify any that might pose a threat
they also noted that chaotic processes disturbed the orbits of comets and also, to a
lesser degree, asteroids (for example, Yeomans & Chodas, 1994; Milani et al., 2000). The inherent
unpredictability of the orbits was enhanced by the current state of scientific
uncertainty. These chaotic and uncertain processes were projected onto space
itself, construed as a place of random violence . In the popular books, the Solar System became a
dangerous cosmic neighbour- hood (Sumners & Allen, 2000b: 3), a capricious, violent place (Verschuur, 1996: 217), a
place of mindless violence (Verschuur, 1996: 18) and wan- ton destruction (Levy, 1998: 13). Even in a peer-reviewed
Despite the agency attributed to

the asteroids themselves, in the narratives of technological salvation it was
the human agents, acting through new technologies, who moved the narratives
forward. Narrative progression was thus generated through an assumption of
technological progress. Through technology, humans intervene in space and
become agents of cosmic events. The scientists promotion of the impact threat
shared this assumption of technological progress. Like the US Air Force study, their technical
papers on mitigation systems considered speculative technologies such as solar
sails and mass drivers as well as more established explosive technologies (for
example, Ahrens & Harris, 1992; Melosh & Nemchinov, 1993; Ivashkin & Smirnov, 1995; Gritzner & Kahle, 2004). Even
those scientists who warned that it was too early to draw up detailed blueprints
of interception technologies accepted the narratival implication that there was a problem
that needed addressing, that the problem could be addressed by human action, and that
this action would involve a technological solution. Technology, in this picture,
was configured as inherently progressive. As Morrison & Teller (1994: 1137) put it: The
development of technology in the past few centuries has been towards
increasing understanding and control of natural forces in an effort to improve
human life. Those scientists who argued against the immediate development of
mitigation technology shared with its proponents a belief in the inexorable
progress of technology. Future generations, they argued, would be better equipped than we are at the
paper, Chapman (2004: 1) described space as a cosmic shooting gallery.
moment to meet the technological challenge of an impacting asteroid (for example, Ahrens & Harris, 1992). In contrast to
traditional astronomical systems, which passively watched the skies, asteroid detection systems were to be surveillance
systems that actively hunted the skies for objects of human import. The Spaceguard Survey was predicated on a will to
action in a way in which the earlier Spacewatch Survey was not. Similarly, when it fired its impactor at Comet Tempel 1,
NASAs Deep Impact mission took a far more active intervention in space than did earlier generations of probes. This was
not far from Edward Tellers call for experimentation with near-Earth objects to test defence technologies (Tedeschi &
Teller, 1994; Teller, 1995), an idea dis- missed at the time as extreme by some civilian scientists (Chapman, 1998).
Likewise, one of the recommendations of the 2004 Planetary Defense Conference was that deflection techniques should be
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The technologization of space promoted in
both the fictional works and the scientists technical proposals, also formed an
integral part of the imagery and rhetoric that surrounded SDI, as its detractors
highlighted when they re-named the project Star Wars. SDI was always premised on
a vision of space as a technologized theatre of war. In the hands of a technoenthusiast such as Edward Teller, SDI was configured as a space-based technological
extravaganza with few limits.29 In SDI, as in asteroid research and science
fiction, space became a dynamic arena through which our technologies would
move, in which our weapons would be placed, and across which our wars were
to be waged.30
demonstrated on an actual asteroid (Ailor, 2004: 5).28
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Biopolitics, Biogenetics and Post-Humanism
Engagment in the technological age aims to take-control-of-ones-self by

controlling the densest and most occluded aspects of nature and human life
creating the a second nature and new humans that autonomously dominates
first nature- This coming new age will supplant the technological age and result
in catastrophe more dangerous than pollution or nuclear war
Zizek 8 [Lady killing suave machine, In defense of lost causes p.434-437 JCOOK]
Ericsson phones are no longer, Swedish, Toyota
cars are manufactured 60 percent, in the USA, Hollywood culture pervades the
remotest parts of the globe ... Furthermore, does the same not, go also for all
forms of ethnic and sexual identity? Should we not supplement Marx's description in this sense, adding:
Is this not, more than ever, our reality today?
that also sexual one sidedness and narrow-rnindedness becomes more and more impossible," that concerning sexual
capitalism tends to
replace standard normative heterosexuality with a proliferation of unstable
shifting identities and/or orientations? And today, with the latest biogenetic
developments, we are entering a new phase in which it is simply Nature itself
which melts into air: the main consequence of the scientific breakthroughs in
biogenetics is the end of nature. Once we know the rules of its construction,
natural organisms are transformed into objects amenable to manipulation,
Nature, human and inhuman, is thus "desubstantialized," deprived of its
impenetrable density, of what Heidegger called "earth." This compels us to give a new twist
practices, it also true that" all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned," so that
to Freud's title Unbehagen in der Kultur ~ discontent, uneasiness, in culture.19 With the latest developments, the
discontent shifts from culture to nature itself: nature is no longer "natural,': the reliable "dense" background of our lives; it
Biogenetics, with
its reduction of the human psyche itself to an object of technological
manipulation, is therefore effectively a kind of empirical instantiation of what
Heidegger perceived as the "danger" inherent-in modern technology. Crucial
here is the interdependence of man and nature: by reducing man to just another
natural object whose properties can be manipulated, what we lose is not (only)
humanity but nature itself. In this sense, Francis Fukuyamais right: humanity relies on some
notion of "human nature" as what we have inherited, as something that has
simply been given to us, the impenetrable dimension in/of ourselves into which
we are born/thrown. The paradox is thus that there is man only insofar as there
is impenetrable inhuman nature (Heidegger's "earth"): with the prospect of biogenetic
interventions opened up by the access to the genome, the species freely
changes/redefines itself its Own coordinates; this prospect effectively
emancipates humankind from the constraints of a finite species, from its
enslavement to "selfish genes. This emancipation, however, comes at a price:
With interventions into man's genetic inheritance, the domination over nature
reverts into an act of taking-control-over-ones self, which changes our genericethical self-understanding and can disturb the necessary conditions for an
autonomous way of life and universalistic understanding of morals. How, then, should
we react to this threat? Habermass logic is here : since the results of science pose a threat to our
(predominant notion of) autonomy and freedom, one should curtail science. The
now appears as a fragile mechanism, which, at any point can explode in a catastrophic manner.
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price we pay for this solution is the fetishistic split between science and ethics _
"I know very well what science claims, but, nonetheless, in order to retain (the
appearance of) my autonomy, I choose to ignore it and act as if I don't know
it." This prevents us from confronting the true question: how do these new
condition compel us to transform and reinvent the very notions of freedom,
autonomy, and ethical responsibility. Science and technology today no longer
aim only at understanding and reproducing natural processes, but at generating
new forms of life that will surprise us; the goal is no longer just to dominate
nature (the way it is), but to generate something new, greater, stronger than
ordinary nature, including ourselves-exemplary here is the obsession with
artificial intelligence, which aims at producing a brain more powerful than the
human brain. The dream that sustains the scientific-technological endeavor is
to trigger a process with no return, a process that would exponentially
reproduce itself and go on and on autonomously. The notion of "second nature" is
therefore today more pertinent than ever, in both its main meanings. First,
literally, as the artificially generated new nature: monsters of nature, deformed
cows and trees, or-a more positive dream-genetically manipulated organisms,
"enhanced" in the manner that suits us then, "second nature" in the more
standard sense of the autonomization of the results of our own activity: the way
our acts elude us in their consequences, the way they generate a monster with
a life of its own. It is thru horror at the unforeseen results of our own acts that
causes shock and awe, not the power of nature over which we have no control;
it is thru horror that religion tries to domesticate. What is new today is the
shortcircuit between these two senses of "second nature": "second nature" in
the sense of objective Fate, of autonomized social process, is generating
"second nature" in the sense of artificially created nature, of natural monsters,
namely, the process which threatens to run out of control is no longer just the
social process of economic and political development, but new forms of natural
processes themselves, from unpredictable nuclear catastrophes to global
warming and the unimaginable consequences of biogenetic manipulation . Can one
even imagine what would be the unprecedented result of
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Body Counts
The aff's cost-benefit analysis is exactly the type of technological thought that
leads to our impacts!
Shrader-Frechette '97
[ONeill Family Professor at Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame;

Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Windsor. Technology and Values, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing.]
As his thinking develops, however, Heidegger does not deny these are serious problems, but he comes to the surprising
and provocative conclusion that focusing on loss and destruction is still technological. All
attempts to reckon
risking realityin terms of decline and loss, in terms of fate, catastrophe, and
destruction, are merely technological behavior . Seeing our situation as posing a
problem that must be solved by appropriate action turns out to be technological
too: The instrumental conception of technology conditions every attempt to
bring man into the right relation to technologyThe will to mastery becomes all
the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.
Heidegger is clear this approach cannot work . No single man, no group of men, no
commission of prominent statesmen, scientists, and technicians, no conference
of leaders of commerce and industry, can brake or direct the progress of history
in the atomic age. His view is both darker and more hopeful. He thinks there is a more dangerous situation
facing modern man than the technological destruction of nature and civilization, yet a situation about which something can
The threat is not a problem for which there can be a solution

but an ontological condition from which we can be saved. Heideggers concern is the human
be doneat least indirectly.
distress caused by the technological understanding of being, rather than the destruction caused by specific technologies.
Heidegger distinguishes the current problems caused by technology

ecological destruction, nuclear danger, consumerism, etc.from the devastation
that would result if technology solved all our problems. What threatens man in his very
Consequently,
nature is theview that man, by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies of physical
nature, could render the human conditiontolerable for everybody and happy in all respects. The greatest danger is that
the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man
calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the

only way of thinking.
that
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Colonization
Modern projections and pushes for the colonization of planets in the Solar
System cause these planets to be commodified as a standing reserve A sitting
resource waiting on human construction and control all resulting from the
technological mindset!
Jerkins '09
[Jae, Professor at Florida State University, Heideggers Bridge: the Social and Phenomenological
Construction of Mars, Florida Philosophical Review, 9(2).]
When Modernitys gaze upon the

world calls forth the project of colonization, this causes the process of
enframing to begin, whereupon we mark the world for our own usage until the
day comes when humanity itself may be commodified as a standing-reserve.
Heidegger explains, Man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as
regards the manner of its Being and its truth. Man becomes the relational center
of that which is as such. As objects in nature are relegated to standingreserve, Heidegger explains, everything man encounters exists only insofar as it has
his construct. Since nothing exists outside of humanitys construction, we end
up only ever encountering ourselves. Yet because we do not realize that the
phenomena before us are of our own construction, a distortion caused by
enframing, Heidegger contends that we fail to grasp an important existential truthwe
can never truly encounter ourselves, our world, or Mars for that matter.50 When
humanity gazes out at the world, he fails to see himself as the one spoken
to.51The dizzying rise in modern technology has precipitated a fundamental change in our perception of objects and,
inevitably, in ourselves. By turning the world into technology, humankind turns itself into the worlds technicians. We
reassemble and reconfigure the natural world for our own use, playing the part
of the self-made, frontier-forging individualthe modern man. Technology unlocks the
This is a central point of concern I have over the issue of colonization.
energy in nature, transforming the rushing water of the Rhine into energy, storing up that energy, distributing it to German
power outlets, and thus revealing the concealed power in nature. This challenge to nature, to stop being and to become a
resource/commodity for modern human beings, is how modern technology serves as revealer.
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Cosmopolitanism/Thinking Globally
Cosmopolitanism and representations of a Global Community rely

upon a technological view of the world as picture. These globalisms
compete over totalizing views of Earth and ultimately leave our
planet as a barren horizon.
Lazier '11
[Benjamin, is Associate Professor of History and Humanities at Reed College.

,Earthrise; or, The
Globalization of the World Picture The American Historical Review Vol. 116, No. 3 (June 2011), pp. 602-630 Published by:
The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Article DOI: 10.1086/ahr.116.3.602 Article
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.116.3.602-MB]
Views of Earth are now so ubiquitous as to go unremarked. But this makes them all the more
important, and their effects historically novel. Our ideas and intuitions about
inhabiting the world are now mediated through images that displace local,
earthbound horizons with horizons that are planetary in scope the distinction
between earth and sky surmounted by that between Earth and void. These
intuitions have dovetailed with new habits of speech, a vocabularyand a second key
development of the Earthrise era. But there is something peculiar about this vocabulary. It is just as global
as Earthly, if not more so, and it is peculiar because the Earth as seen from space is often
perceived as the natural or organic antithesis of an artifactual globe. Still, there is
no avoiding the fact that as common expressions, the word globalization and the
phrases global environment, global economy, and global humanity simply did not exist before
the Earthrise era, and this explosion of globe talk is part and parcel of changes in the Western pictorial
imagination that at first glance seem unsuited to it. 12 To make sense of these developmentsthe
combination of Earthly vision with global vocabulary we might think of the Earthrise era as a
stage in a longer history, a globalization of the world picture . World picture is the
English equivalent of Weltbild, a philosophical term of art coined by Wilhelm Dilthey but now associated with Martin
the ways we
comport ourselves visvis our natural and humanbuilt worlds are pre
structured by a grasp of the world and everything in it as a picture , as something
to survey and frame for our pleasure and use. Consider in this context the words of Apollo 8
Heidegger. Heidegger did not use it to refer literally to images of the planet. Rather, he meant that
astronaut Frank Borman: Look at that picture over there! The first human to lay eyes on an Earthrise made intuitive
appeal to a language that is the staple of tourists everywhereto describe not the sight itself, but the conditions in which
the sight could first be disclosed or come into view, its frame. It may be the most definitive confirmation possible of
Heidegger's claim, made thirty years before, that the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world
as picture.13 Thinkers in the phenomenological tradition, which attends to precognitive ways of being in the world, help
us see that this was no failure of imagination on Borman's part. His remark voiced something more like the condition for
modern human experience in the first placeand if Heidegger was right, our condition in this alleged age of the world
picture.14 So we are left with several questions about the Earthrise era: the scope of its vision, the peculiarity of its
vocabulary, and the changes it inaugurated in the conditions for human experience, or what some philosophers call the
human condition. To address these questions, it helps, first, to situate the reactions of these philosophers to the view of
Earth from space alongside those of their nonphilosophical contemporaries, on the premise that philosophers and Grub
Street pamphleteers alike reflect on the shared events of the day. They do so, of course, with different vocabularies, and
at times philosophical discourse can come off as alien indeed. This is a difference to acknowledge. It is also a difference for
historians to exploit. Arendt and company wrote with enormous depth, and so it can help, second, to think with them, on
the premise that philosophers have something to say even to those of us who do not answer to the name. At the very
least, they provide us with a repository of conceptual tools with which to reassess the era of which they were themselves a
part. This approach is openly eclectic. It swings between the registers of intellectual history, cultural history, environmental
history, and the history of science. It also affords returns, above all in new kinds of stories about the Earthrise era. For
example, we typically include the Earthrise photograph in a congratulatory story about the rise of environmentalism.
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Like globe talk, the language of environmentalism is an
invention of the Earthrise era.15 But there is a more sober and wideranging story to be told. The
examples of Heidegger, Arendt, and Blumenberg help us see how the history of the Whole Earth icon is
part of a history of competing globalisms, and still more of technologically
complicit onescommercial and environmental globalisms above all. Their example therefore prompts us to ask
whether the visions and vocabularies of the Earthrise era have inadvertently
accelerated our planetary emergency as much as they have inspired us to slow
it down. They also help reveal the structural tensions between organism and artifact at the core of canonical
There is something to this.
environmental texts of the Earthrise era (such as Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog and James Lovelock's Gaia) that
destabilize the concept of a global environment itself. If this approach supplements traditional contexts (the Cold War,
it also calls attention

to categories often excluded from historical consideration in the first place, by
subjecting to historical analysis what philosophers such as Arendt call the human condition
or, in a different key, what Heidegger means by world picture. Here is where the expression globalization of the
environmentalism) with new ones (the history of organisms and artifacts in the modern era),
world picture can help. It opens Heidegger's totalizing view of the modern age to the swerve of historicity, so that we
might speak of reversals, ruptures, and heterogeneous erasan Earthrise era, for example, or a postEarthrise condition in
which the view of the whole Earth exerts its most subtle and wideranging effects precisely when its novelty fades. Stated
a bit differently, the expression illuminates the historical predicament in the injunction to Think globally, act locally! The
first half of this phrase is not so much a moral directive, which we may or may not opt to follow, as it is one description of
There now holds sway a world picture in which the

condition of earthliness is conjured by way of a view from the most unearthly
of placesthe void; in which the horizons of earthbound experience compete with
horizons that are planetary, or capitalE Earthly, in scope; and in which the vision of the naked Earth is also
the view of a globe in disguise, the greatest of organisms: a manmade planet. Thinking globally is probably
now less our choice than our lot. A history of the Earthrise era can help us
understand what this means and how it came to be.
the human condition in the Earthrise era.
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Cyborgs
The desire to achieve cyborg subjectivity represents a state of being where the
ontic swallows the ontological, closing the circle of technological enframing.
The ontic will fail at preserving humanness and ultimately justify human
destruction.
Zizek '08
[Slavoj Ladykiller. In Defense of Lost Causes. 2008. pp. 447-449]
Today, with the prospect

of the biogenetic manipulation of human physical and psychic features, the
notion of danger inscribed into modern technology, elaborated by Heidegger,
becomes a commonplace. Heidegger emphasizes how the true danger is not the physical
self-destruction of humanity, the threat that something will go terribly wrong
with biogenetic interventions, but, precisely, that nothing will go wrong, that
genetic manipulation will function smoothlyat this point, the circle will, in a
certain manner, be closed and the specific openness that characterizes beinghuman abolished. That is to say, is the Heideggerian danger (Gefahr) not precisely the
danger that the ontic will swallow the ontological (with the reduction of man, the da [here]
What the ecology of fear obfuscates is thus a far more radical dimension of terror.
of Being, to just another object of science)? Do we not encounter here again the formula of the fear of the impossible:
what we fear is that that which cannot happen (since the ontological dimension is irreducible to the ontic) will nonetheless
happen The same point is made in a cruder fashion by cultural critics from Fukuyama and Habermas to Bill McKibben,
worried about how the latest techno-scientific developments (which potentially give the human species the capacity to
redesign and redefine itself) will affect our being humanthe call we hear is best encapsulated by the title of McKibbens
book: Enough. Humanity as a collective subject has to set down limits and freely renounce further progress in this
direction. McKibben endeavors to specify such limits empirically: somatic genetic therapy is still this side of the tipping
point, one can practice it without leaving behind the world as we know it, since it simply involves intervention in a body
When
we manipulate psychic and bodily properties of individuals before they are even
conceived, we pass the threshold into full-fledged planning, turning individuals
into products, preventing them from experiencing themselves as responsible
agents who have to educate/form themselves by the effort of focusing their
will, thus obtaining the satisfaction of achievementsuch individuals no longer
relate to themselves as responsible agents .. . The insufficiency of this reasoning is double. First, as
Heidegger would have put it, the survival of the being-human of humans cannot depend
on an ontic decision of humans . Even if we try to define the limit of the permissible in this way, the
true catastrophe has already taken place : we already experience ourselves as in
principle manipulable; we just freely renounce the possibility of fully deploying
this potential. In the technological age, what matters to us most is getting the
greatest possible use out of everything.46 Does this not throw a new light on how ecological
formed in the old natural way; germline manipulations lie on the other side, in the world beyond meaning.45
concerns, at least in their predominant mode, remain within the horizon of technology? Is the point of using the resources
sparingly, of recycling, and so forth, not precisely to maximize the use of everything? But the crucial point is that, with
biogenetic planning, not only will our universe of meaning disappearin other words, not only are the utopian descriptions
of the digital paradise wrong, since they imply that meaning will persistbut the opposite, negative, critical descriptions of
the meaningless universe of technological self-manipulation also fall victim to a perspectival fallacy, for they too measure
the future by inadequate present-day standards. That is to say, the future of technological self- manipulation only appears
as deprived of meaning if measured by (or, rather, from within the horizon of) the traditional notion of what a meaningful
universe is. Who knows what this post-human universe will reveal itself to be in itself? What if there is no singular and
simple answer; what if the contemporary trends (digitalization, biogenetic self- manipulation) open themselves up to a
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What if the utopiathe perverted dream of the passage
from hardware to software of a subjectivity freely floating between different
embodimentsand the dystopiathe nightmare of humans voluntarily
transforming themselves into programmed beingsare just the positive and the
negative sides of the same ideological fantasy ? What if it is only and precisely this technological
multitude of possible symbolizations?
prospect that fully confronts us with the most radical dimension of our finitude?47
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Cyborgs/Biotech
A transhuman biology recalls both the practice of eugenics and expresses the
culmination of technicity as everything becomes reduced to an objectless object
ready for manipulation.
Kroker '03
[Arthur. Professor of Political Science at the University of Victoria. The Will to Technology and the Culture
of Nihilism: Heidegger, Nietzsche and Marx. 2003. http://ctheory.net/will/codes.html
the will to technology is a data cannibal feeding on itself,

simultaneously disappearing the actual referents of society - knowledge, sex,
power, economy, politics - into nodes on the circuit of electronic production and
furiously throwing itself into the future as digital destiny . A hyper-religion, the will to
Always a double movement,
technology requires an act of faith in the efficacy of technology itself as the ritual of admission into its axiomatic
procedures. A hyper-ideology, the will to technology is historically realized in the material form of the triumph of the virtual
A hyper-science, the will to technology transforms the scientific imagination

into a database for harvesting the residues of human and non-human nature . A
class.
hyper-myth, the will to technology presents itself in the ancient language of the gods, speaking in the more enduring
the will to technology ushers in a biotech future written

under the sign of transgenic determinism . Transgenic determinism? That's the dominant tendency in
global cultural politics. After a long sleep during the interregnum years of the Cold War, the language of
eugenics stirs again: here articulating itself in the vivisectionist visions of
genetic experimentation; there pushed forward by a newly emergent form of
transgenic capitalism intent on coding, classifying, manipulating, and
harvesting the genetic history of humanity, animals, and plants ; now working in
the laboratory procedures of stem cell research, clonal propagation, gene
sequencing, organ growing, and tissue replacement; later expressing itself in
the conjunction of bio-sociality and artificial intelligence to produce artificial
life-forms; never acknowledging its historical precedents in the first wave
eugenics of the hygiene movement of the early 20th century or the political
fascism of National Socialism; always masquerading itself in the cloak of a
science of completed genetics. Immunized from its historical genealogy cleansed of its political history,
speaking the scientific language of molecular biology and the economic
language of the "life industries," transgenic determinism limits for now its
discourse to the preservation of "life" and the genetic improvement of "health ."
terms of destiny. A hyper-eugenics,
Later, it will reveal that the cultivation of genetically improved species being is its essence. Determinist because it is power
expressing itself in the predatory language of harvesting human flesh, and transgenic because it involves the capricious
recombination of heretofore distinct species--firefly monkeys, jellyfish rabbits, headless organ "donors," transgenic
determinism vivisects life into nothingness. Physics may have been the privileged language of the atomic age, but
biology is now the ruling vernacular of the era of completed technology . More than a
technical language of the life sciences, biology expands now to become the dominant discourse of bio-politics: the framing
language of capitalism, culture, politics, and media. No longer simply technological determinism, the order of the
In genetic engineering, the

order of the transgenic expresses itself in molecular freebase experiments
where the genetic heritage of different species-types is capriciously recombined
as primal models of the post-human. Streaming the genetic codes of animals,
humans and plants, the first inhabitants of post-human culture suddenly made
their appearance: hybrid humans with the eyes of migratory birds capable of
transgenic reflects something more subtle, equivocal, uncertain and undecided.
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detecting invisible magnetic polarities in the sky; chip enhanced bodies with
slaved nervous systems centrally processed for better social control, always on
standby for upgrading and virus protection; insect robots programmed with
warrior genes, predatory instincts and "perverse" intelligence. If molecular
biology can adapt so quickly to the epistemological possibilities of the order of
the transgenic, it may be because the specter of transgenics originate less in
the order of science than in culture. For quite some time, we have already lived within a
deeply transgenic culture: in a culture of hybrid media images, streamed
marketing practices, recombinant fashion, blended genders, a global skin of
culture. Transgenic imagery: that is the "bio-vision" of special effects cinema or television ads playing with the digital
referentials of space and speed to produce a visual universe of stretched vision, compressed skin, hybrid icons, performing
cyborgs. Transgenic capitalism: that is the most recent fashion edition of GAP and Club Monaco where, probably
responding to the fear of ethnic difference in the air, the privileged color is white accompanied by the ideological slogan:
Pilgrims of the future, we are already deeply

habituated to the culture of the post-biological, to the language of post-human
culture. We are only now in the infant stages of the order of the transgenic. The
will to technology reveals itself under the sign of post-biologics
"Finally have the courage to be the same."
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Cyborgs/Overcoming Death
Human beings need an ontological limit to ground meaning in their experience

of reality, which includes the existential limit of death. Overcoming Death
untethers us from dwelling in the world and signals the end of creativity and
poetry.
Thiele 95
The world is the web of our social and cultural relations , our relations to artifacts, and our
relations to nature. Relationships are defined as much by their boundaries as by their
content. With this in mind, Heidegger defines the world as a "fourfold" (Gcuicrte] that encompasses and limits these
relationships. "The unitary fourfold of sky and earth, mortals and divinities," Heidegger states, "we callthe world" (1'LT
The sky serves as a limit to the earth, as the earth does to the sky. Mortals,
are defined in their timely limitations in contrast to the (immortal) divinities. Being at home
in the world, then, is not tantamount to gaining security for one's status or
station. It does not mean securing our self-preservation, and certainly not the
preservation of ourselves from eventual death. Quite the opposite: in discovering our
place in the world we gain acceptance of a "good death. " Not security but belonging is what
199).
in turn,
characterizes being at home. The sense of belonging consists of a knowledge and acceptance of the boundaries of the
The world as home is less a place of security

than a relationship in need of securing, a set of boundaries in need of tending.
It is a place of limits: limits to perception, limits to knowledge, and , most salient,
limits to life itself. Being at home in the world is a self-reflective exploration of
and living within limits. The essence of human dwelling is the acknowledgment of that which human being is
place, or of the relationships, that one inhabits.
not, in the context of what is. The fourfold of earth and sky, mortals and divinities, defines the world of human beings in
the same sense that the flowing water and impervious banks define the river. The river is neither the water without the
banks, nor the banks without the water. The boundaries of each allow the identification of the whole. In being an issue for
itself, human being makes the world its issue. With the world in focus, the question of boundaries arises, including those
human being discovers its home in the

world primarily by means of poetic thinking, the thoughtful disclosure of Being
through language. He writes that "poetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and
boundaries mortals never transgress. Heidegger insists that
thus brings him into dwelling" (PLT 218). Heidegger frequently invokes and discusses this verse by Holderlin: "Full of merit,
yet poetically, man / Dwells on this earth." Human life is full of merit for its wondrous deeds and accomplishments, yet our
To dwell is to
discover and accept the world as a fourfold marking the human horizon. Such
discovery and acceptance is a poetic actthat is, an act of thank-ful and
thoughtful disclosure. To dwell in the fourfold is to shepherd Being poetically in the company of fellow humans,
preserving its world and awaiting death. To say that humans dwell poetically on earth is not a
question of geography, ethnicity, or technical mastery, but of on-tological
disclosure. Being homeless, in this sense, signifies the absence of a poetica thoughtfully disclosivecapacity. To be
capacity to dwell, to find a home in the world, is defined not by our productivity but by our poetry.
truly homeless, for Heidegger, is to lose one's ability to reveal the world as the place of human dwelling. To be truly at
home is to exercise one's ontologically disclosive capacities. Being at home in the world and being free are the same. To be
at home everywhere is to experience the freedom that allows our disclosure of the Being of our world.
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Distance from the Other
Trying to control and manage our relationship with the Other manages it into a
standing reserve to be control and waiting on our control over it. It is an
example of technological enframing of the Otherness and it forces a
technological mindset on the world.
Further, an authentic relationship with the other is not based only of nearness,
but distance. The 1ac dream of encountering new worlds is an act of ontological
colonizationan ethical relationship can only begin in that gap between myself
and the other. Any other relation will only produce a non-being.
Guenther '02
[Lisa, Assistant Professor of Philosophy @ Vandy, Towards a Phenomenology of Dwelling Canadian

Journal of Environmental Education, 7(2), Spring]
The
dwelling of human beings our essential character, our everyday habits, and the
very root of our ethicsexists not only in the nearness of, but at a distance
from, an other that both surpasses me and makes me what I am . We can think of this
other as a spirit or intermediary, or as the human community; but we can also think of the other as the
entire human and more-than-human world : the plants, animals, elements, and people with whom
we inhabit the earth. An ethics of dwelling emerges from the preservation of a tension
between this nearness to others, and the distance which keeps us distinct from
others. The gap between myself and the other is the space which makes ethical
dwelling possible; in keeping us apart, it also preserves the difference which
makes an ethical relation possible. For this is the paradox articulated by fragment 119: that I am only
Ethos anthropoi daimon. In light of Heideggers translation, I propose that we interpret these words as follows:
myself in being divided, that I can only become myself by risking my identity in proximity to others. In effect, the
boundary that separates me from a blade of grass, or from the moose across the river, is precisely that which grants me
Often we are tempted by the

romantic idea of fusing consciousness with the natural world, denying that
there is a difference which keeps us apart from others and, precisely in keeping
us apart, also directs us towards them. But the very possibility of an environmental ethics of dwelling
the possibility of approaching, addressing, and giving to these others.
rests upon the twofold nearness and distinction from others whom we need and for whom we are responsible. In the pages
that follow, I will reflect more concretely on this relation between nearness and distance, or relation and otherness, which
an ethical
relation with the natural world is only possible given the gap of difference or
otherness which is maintained by setting a boundary or limit to our dwellingspace. This boundary, far from alienating us from the natural environment,
actually forms the basis for an environmental ethics of dwelling. Consider also an
emerges from my re-translation of Heideggers translation of ethos anthropoi daimon. I shall argue that
apartment in the city. Cities are more like beehives. When I look out a city window (turning away from the television,
opening the curtains and blinds, and peering out over the back of the couch), I see houses just like my own, arranged into
rows like cells in a honeycomb. They are inhabited by people more or less like me: people who work, come home, make
spaghetti for dinner, fall asleep during the news. And yet I can walk through this city and see things that surprise me: a
man with green hospital pants tied around his head, calmly walking his dog. A cat stalking a bird. Fireweed pushing
through a crack in the sidewalk. For cities leak too, even in spite of themselves. The air conditioning may be on, the stereo
may be blaring; but a storm outside can knock this out in less than a minute. Thus cities tend to show themselves most
clearly just there, where they fail: a robins nest in the mailbox; a leaking tap; the sound of an argument next door. In
these moments of disruption we realize what the city tries most to conceal: that we dwell in relation to others, and that we
can only be there if others are there, too. While the cabin and the apartment are undoubtedly very different sorts of
dwelling-space, both offer a glimpse into the ethical significance of dwelling. While there is much to say here, I want to
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focus on one aspect in particular: the relation between inside and outside in a home. The inside of a place can exist only
thanks to the boundary (the walls, floor, and roof) which separates it from the outside. Without this sense of a place
hollowed out from the world at large, there could be no dwelling, no intimacy, no home in which I welcome friends and
strangers. The boundary that separates inside from outside need not be visible or material; for even among people who
dwell under the open sky, there is the sense of a socially interior space, a space which is described more by trails and
hunting grounds than by walls and floorboards. Dwelling requires a sense of the inside: an intimate space where I belong
with others who do not, properly speaking, belong to me. If the boundary which creates this interior space were absolute
and impermeable, then life within its bounds would be impossible. We need windows and doors; we need wood for the
dwelling occurs neither inside nor outside but in the tension

between the two: in the interaction of spaces which have something to give one
another precisely because they are not the same. The dwelling of human
beings, the root of our ethics and the very character of our existence, occurs in
the nearness of, but distinction from, an other, an outside, a complex of human
and more-than-human beings who both transcend me, and let me become who I
am. Though our contemporary cities have largely neglected this tension between inside and outside, ancient
Greek cities were founded upon the principle of a boundary or city wall, which
both sets limits on the citys proper sphere, and establishes a connection
between the human community and the cosmos in which it dwells. In his book, H2O
stove and air to breathe. Thus
and the Waters of Forgetfulness, Ivan Illich (1985) describes the way Greek cities were ritually traced out upon the earth
in relation to heavenly bodies, the flight of birds, or the movement of clouds. For the Greeks, a city could only be founded
in relation to that which exceeds it, that which is not the city but nevertheless is the condition for its very existence. An
ethos of ritual and custom inaugurated the city once a site 42 Lisa Guenther had been divined; a team of one female and
one male ox pulled a plough around the cosmic shape of the city, the driver lifting the plough at intervals to make
thresholds or city gates, places where the interior would meet and interact with the external world. Illich (1985) calls this
ritual of inauguration a sacred marriage of heaven and earth (p. 15), an opposition and wedding of right and left, inside
and outside, animal and human (p. 14). Without this collaboration of more-than-human othersthe stars, the clouds, the
oxen, the birds, and the ground into which the template is etchedthe human city could not come into being. And yet this
relation between the city and the more-thancity only comes into view when the city-space is marked off from that which
exceeds it and from which it emerges .
The Greeks, we might say, had an ethos of citydwelling: an understanding that human beings need to dwell with one another,
but that we can only do so by dwelling within the limits of a boundary which
both separates us from and aligns us with an exterior which is other-thanhuman and more-thanhuman. One could argue, of course, that the Greeks built walls around their cities not
because of their deep sensitivity to the nature of ethical dwelling, but rather to protect themselves from armies and
barbarians and beasts from the wild. For it is also trueand especially true in the history of the Westthat boundaries
have been erected in the spirit of exclusion and self-protection rather than in pursuit of harmonious dwelling. Thus we
must turn to the past not in order to repeat its mistakes, but rather to learn how not to repeat them; we need the
retrospective gaze of history not only to find inspiration for the future from the past, but also to mark the line which
separates past from future, and opens a different horizon. The Greeks may not have conceived the city wall as a boundary
which separates and connects humanity with the more-than-human world; and Heraclitus may not have understood his
words as the starting-point for environmental ethics. And yet, when we remember these ancient words and customs, we
are given the responsibility to hear both what has been said in the past, and how this saying resonates for the future. For
Heidegger, to remember is not to make the past present through re-presentation, but rather to preserve from the past a
meaning which exists ecstatically in relation to the future. By letting an ethical sense of the boundary address the
traditional history of the boundary as an instrument of exploitation and self-assertion, we open up the possibility of new
meanings for old words. We need to remember the history of Western culture in this way in order to understand why our
We cannot change the way we dwell

simply by wiping the slate clean and starting over; any change in habits must
arise first from an examination of our current habits and the conditions under
which they were formed. For Ivan Illich (1985), To dwell means to inhabit the traces left by ones own living,
own cities are the way they are, and how they could be otherwise.
by which one always retraces the lives of ones ancestors (p. 8). What does this sense of dwelling mean for the future of
our cities? Drive into Vancouver or Toronto Towards a Phenomenology of Dwelling 43 for one cannot help but drive there
This is no longer
dwelling space, but rather what Illich calls garages for living, storage-space for human
enterprise. Now, more than ever, we need to recuperate a sense of dwelling
and witness the hundreds of kilometres of occupied space sprawling out of our mega-cities.
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within limits: not in order to protect ourselves from the wilderness (as perhaps the
ancient Greeks were concerned to do ) but rather to protect the wilderness from ourselves.
We must do this not only because our physical existence depends upon it, but
also because without this relation to, and distinction from, others we cannot
become who we are: namely, human beings whose character is our ethos . And yet
we cannot stop here. For ultimately, and more essentially, we must set a limit to human dwelling not
for our own sake, but for the sake of the other, making room for an other not
out of enlightened self-interest, but out of respect and hospitality . I propose, arising
from this brief exploration of dwelling as thought and as experience, an environmental ethics grounded in these gestures
of respect and hospitality. To respect someone is to hold her in regard while still letting her remain at a distance from me,
Respect thrives only where this distance and difference is

maintained in the very midst of my regard and concern for the other. Likewise
to offer hospitalitya notion which I have inherited from the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1969) is
to open ones dwelling space to an other, a stranger whom I cannot grasp or
comprehend but for whom I am nevertheless responsible. To be hospitable is,
like the gift of respect, to take a step back so that the other can step forth; it is
to set limits on my own dwelling so that the other has room to come and go . The
giving her room to move.
genius of human being is not only that we can be ourselves only in relation to an other which both surpasses and
the genius of the human character, and the root of our ethics, is
in our propensity to give space, or make room for, an other who exceeds our
grasp. An ethics of respect and hospitality has political, social, and intellectual implications. In concrete terms, it means
constitutes us. Rather,
that we ought to set aside wilderness spaces that have no human function, not even the relatively benign function of
providing recreation for people like you and me. It means that we ought to rethink our cities in terms of density rather
than sprawl, and to preserve within them spaces of otherness and ecological diversity: parkland spaces without mowed
lawns and barbeque pits. And it means that in our everyday lives, as well as in our municipal and territorial planning, we
must cultivate habits of respect for those with whom we dwell, and without whom we could not exist .
An ethics of
dwelling based on hospitality and respect demands that we resist the
temptation to believe, even in a spirit of generosity, that we are the same as the
other, that there is no difference between a person and a tree and a lynx across
the river. For although we are by no means indifferent to these others, it is precisely our difference from them, our
not knowing who they are from the inside out, that lets us be ethical towards
them. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1991) ends his book, Language and Death, with the following words,
and this is where I, too, will conclude these reflections upon the ethos of dwelling: We walk through the woods: suddenly
we hear the flapping of wings or the wind in the grass. A pheasant lifts off and then disappears instantly among the trees,
a porcupine buries in the thick underbrush, the dry leaves crackle as a snake slithers away. Not the encounter, but this
flight of invisible animals is thought. No, it was not our voice. We came as close as possible to language, we almost
brushed against it, held it in suspense: but we never reached our encounter and now we turn back, untroubled, toward
home. So, language is our voice, our language. As you now speak, that is ethics. (p. 108)
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Economy
The Affirmatives use of the economic control, with its use of production and
profit, are a prime example of neo-technik mindset set on controling the world.
This will make it IMPOSSIBLE to EVER have a different mindset infused with the
plan.
de Beistegui '97
[Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick (Miguel, Heidegger and the Political, ed. by
K. Ansell-Pearson and S. Critchely, p.71, ASG)JRC]
What monstrousness does Heidegger have in mind here? In what sense can technology be declared monstrous? And why
associate technology with nihilism? At this stage,
nihilism can only be envisaged
in the most simple sense,
and that is as a phenomenon linked to the effects produced by global technology.

Following Jungers descriptions of the age of the Worker, Heidegger provides his most economic description of the actuality
Technology defines the way in which the

world, perceived solely as extended space, is mobilized, ordered,
homogenized and used up so as to enhance mans will to hegemony. The ordering
takes the form of a total planning or an equipping Rustung), which consists in the division of the
whole of being into sectors and areas, and then in the systematic organization
and exploitation of such areas. Thus, each domain has its institute of research as well as its ministry, each
of nihilism in section XXVI of Overcoming Metaphysics.
area is controlled and evaluated with a view to assessing its potential and eventually calibrated for mass consumption.
Resources are endlessly extracted, stocked, distributed and transformed,

according to a logic which is not that of need, but that of inflated desires and
consumption fantasies artificially created by the techniques of our postindustrial era. Beings as a whole have become this stuff awaiting consumption. Nothing falls outside
of this technological organization: neither politics, which has become the way to
organize and optimize the technological seizure of beings at the level of the
nation; nor science which, infinitely divided into ultra-specialized sub-sciences,
rules over the technical aspect of this seizure , nor the arts (which are now referred to as the
culture industry); nor even man as such, who has become a commodity and an object
of highly sophisticated technological manipulation (whether genetic, cosmetic or cybernetic).
The hegemony of technology, which can take various forms according to the domains of being it rules over, seems to be
It is, for technology, a question of organizing the

conditions of its optimal performance and ultimate planwhether these be the
totalitarian or imperialistic politics of yesterday, the global economics and the
new world order of today, or the uniformalized culture and ideology of
tomorrow. Yet behind this seemingly ultra-rational organization rules the most
nihilistic of all goals: the absence of goals. For why is such an ordering set up? What are all
those plans for? For the sole sake of planning. For no other purpose than the
artificial creation of needs and desires, which can be fulfilled only by way of an
increase in production and further devastation of the earth. Under the sway of
technology, manthe man of metaphysics, the rational animalhas become the
working animal. For such a man, there is no other truth than the one that
produces results, no other reality than that of use and profit. His will, this very
will that constitutes his pride and that he erects as an instrument of his
domination over the whole of the earth, is nothing but the expression of the will
to will. Yet what this man does not realize is that his labor and his will spin in a
limited only by the power of its own completion.
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vacuum, moving him ever more forcefully away from his provenance and his
destination, from his position amidst beings and from the relation to being that
governs it. Busy as he is at using up and producing, at manipulating and consuming, todays man no
longer has the eyes to see what is essential (namely presence in its epochal configuration) and
can no longer greet the discrete echo of presencing which resounds in thinking
and poeticizing alone. At best is he in a position to accumulate experiences (Erlebnisse), which he flaunts as
his truths.
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Efficiency Movements
Modern efficiency movements are the worst application of technological

development and lead us to view Nature solely as standard reserve- we must
incorporate the fourfold
Zizek 08
[Lady killing suave machine (In defense of lost causes p.448-449)//Collin//jrc]
the survival of the beinghuman of humans cannot depend on an ontic decision of humans. Even if we try
to define the limit of the permissible in this way, the true catastrophe has
already taken place: we already experience ourselves as in principle
manipulable; we just freely renounce the possibility of fully deploying this
potential. "In the technological age, what matters to us most is getting the
'greatest possible use' out of everything.,,46 Does this not throw a new light on how ecological
concerns, at least in their predominant mode, remain within the horizon of technology? Is the point of using
the resources sparingly, of recycling, and so forth, not precisely to maximize the
use of everything? But the crucial point is that, with biogenetic planning, not only will our universe of meaning.
The insufficiency of this reasoning is double. First, as Heidegger would have put it,
disappear-in other words, not only are the utopian descriptions of the digital paradise wrong, since they imply that
meaning will persist - but the opposite, negative, critical descriptions of the "meaningless" universe of technological selfmanipulation also fall victim to a perspectival fallacy, for they too measure the future by inadequate present-day
the future of technological self-manipulation only appears as

"deprived of meaning" if measured by (or, rather, from within the horizon of) the traditional
notion of what a meaningful universe is. Who knows what this "post-human"
universe will reveal itself to be "in itself"? What if there is no singular and
simple answer; what if the contemporary trends (digitalization, biogenetic self-manipulation)
open themselves up to a multitude of possible symbolizations? What if the utopia-the
standards. That is to say,
perverted dream of the passage from hardware to software of a subjectivity freely floating between different
embodiments-and the dystopia-the nightmare of humans voluntarily transforming themselves into programmed beings-are
just the positive and the negative sides of the same ideological fantasy? What if it is only and precisely this technological
prospect that fully confronts us with the most radical dimension of our finitude ? Heidegger himself remains ambiguous
It is true that Heidegger's answer to technology is not nostalgic longing for

"former objects which perhaps were once on the way to becoming things and
even to actually presencing as things" ("The Thing"), but rather allowing ourselves to
be conditioned by our world, and then learning to "keep the fourfold in things"
by building and nurturing things peculiarly suited to our fourfold. When our
practices incorporate the fourfold, our lives and everything around us will have
importance far exceeding that of resources, because they and only they will be
geared to our way of inhabiting the world.48
here.
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Ending Oil Dependency
The Aff's attempt to free the U.S. from oil dependency merely shifts the
technological mindset towards new venues, sanitizing practices that reduce the
world to a standing reserve.
Kinsella 06
[Wiiliam, Ph.D Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University, Heidegger and Being at the
Hanford Reservation: Linking Phenomenology, Environmental Communication, and Communication Theory,
http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/9/0/9/8/pages90982/p90982-1.php]
Heideggers concept of projection indicates that nature is always disclosed in

light of its usefulness for Daseins practical activities. This characteristic of
disclosure is fundamental and inevitable, and Heidegger is not critical of this
human propensity to utilize the world. The technological attitude that he calls
enframing, however, is a specific and problematic mode of utilization in which
nature becomes a standing reserve (Heidegger, 1977c) or a gigantic gasoline
station, an energy source for modern technology and industry (Heideggger, 1966, p.
50). Heidegger (1977c) illustrates this concept with a series of poignant examples: The revealing that rules
in modern technology is a challengingwhich puts to nature the unreasonable
demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. But does this
not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in the wind.But the windmill does not unlock
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. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is set upon to yield
nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uraniumuranium is set upon to
yield atomic energy. The coal that has been hauled out in some mining district has not been supplied in order
energy from the air currents in order to store it.
that it may simply be present somewhere or other. It is stockpiled; that is, it is on call, ready to deliver the suns warmth
The suns warmth is challenged forth for heat, which in turn is

ordered to deliver steam whose pressure turns the wheels that keep a factory
running. The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine.In the
context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of
electrical energy, even the Rhine appears as something at our command. What
the river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the
essence of the power station.But, it will be replied, the Rhine is still a river in the landscape, is it not?
that is stored in it.
Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation
These examples do not reflect mere nostalgia. Instead, they illustrate a radical
break in Daseins relationship with the earth. That relationship is now
characterized by calculation, control, and deliberate disruption of the natural
order. Indeed, in the last two of these examples the natural order is displaced when steam and a tour group are
industry (pp. 14-16).
ordered, and ambiguously, this ordering can be understood as a calculated physical arrangement but also as an
imperative command. I suspect that this same ambiguity is present in the original German text, and that Heidegger was
well aware of its presence.
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Energy Storage
The act of extracting and storing the earths energy renders the world in standing
reserve leading to inevitable violence and exploitation!
Beckman '2K
[Emeritus Professor of Philosophy Humanities and Social Sciences Harvey Mudd College (Tad, Martin
Heidegger and Environmental Ethics, 2000, http://www2.hmc.edu/~tbeckman/personal/Heidart.html) //JRC]
"Technology [in its essence] is a mode of

revealing. Technology comes to presence [West] in the realm where revealing
and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens." {[7], p. 13} (4)
What Heidegger wanted us to recognize by bringing technology to the concept
of revealing is that technology's essence is to be found in the most basic realm
of experience. That realm is the realm of "truths happening." It could be argued, of
Both paths of interpretation lead to the same thing.
course, that all of this analysis takes ancient Greece as its focal point and that modern technology has little or nothing to
do with ancient Greece. This is true, of course, in the sense that technology has obviously developed far beyond its origins
in Greece; however, it is also misguided if it tries to convince us that technology's essence has been fundamentally
the basic essence of technology has

remained unchanged and that this essence is most readily observed in the Greek origins of our thinking about
these things. The problem remaining, then, is to understand how modern technology
has evolved within this essential nature as a mode of revealing. We have
arrived at the opening of the essence of modern technology. Technology is a
mode of the fundamental way in which things happen in the universe and we,
as agents, are involved in this happening within the cooperative elements of
causation. But technology has evolved through the intervening three millennia; what was previously called 'techne'
changed. Heidegger's point is precisely the assertion that
and was a form of the general process of bringingforth has separated into different modes of revealing. What we
understand as modern technology can scarcely be recognized as having a common origin with the fine arts or crafts;
indeed, modern technology is distinguished in having made its "alliance" with modern physical science rather than with the
arts and crafts. (5) Therefore, to understand technology as it is today and in its complete essence, we must understand
the course of that separate and unique evolution. Perhaps it is not difficult to understand the separate paths of the fine
arts, craftsmanship, and modern technology. Each seems to have followed different human intentions and to have
addressed different human skills. However, while the fine arts and craftsmanship remained relatively consistent with
techne in the ancient sense, modern technology withdrew in a radically different direction. As Heidegger saw it, " the
revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which

puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be
extracted and stored as such." {[7], p. 14} Modern technology sets-upon nature and
challengesforth its energies, in contrast to techne which was always a bringingforth in harmony with nature. The activity of modern technology lies at a
different and more advanced level wherein the natural is not merely decisively
re-directed; nature is actually "set-upon." The rhetoric in which the discussion
is couched conveys an atmosphere of violence and exploitation. (6)
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Environment
Fear of environmental catastrophe separates our relationship from the earth,

turns the case. It is the technological mindset which caused their impacts, and
the technological mindset which they act through.
McWhorter '92
[Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeast Missouri State University (Ladelle, Heidegger and
the Earth, ed. by Ladelle McWhorter)JRC]
Stenstad's essay, "Singing the Earth," takes us further along two of the paths that Maly's
thinking indicates: earth as dark (the selfconcealing that is both sheltering and frightening) and our
longing to be with the earth. She suggests that it is our be-longing to the earth that is
at stake. If, when we fear the dark, our desire or longing moves away from what
IS earthy, we live disconnected from the earth, with disastrous consequences.
However, if we allow ourselves to be moved by and with the revealing and
concealing of earth and earthy things, our longing is also our be-longing. This beGail
longing will play itself out in, as Heidegger's thinking hints, our language (not just words but also: song, dance, art,
buildings, ritual) and our ways of dwelling.
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Jon Cook
Environmentalism (1/2)
Attempts to manage environmental catastrophe lock us into a calculative

mindset that perpetuate the root cause of your impacts
McWhorter '92
the Earth, ed. by Ladelle McWhorter)//JRC]
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.
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Environmentalism (2/2)
The affs engagement in technological thought and mandating the order of

natural resources culminates in stripping of the need/desire to help others and
culminates in the technological understanding of being
Dreyfus '93
[Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley (Charles B., Heidegger on the
connection between nihilism, art, technology, and politics chapter of The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. By
Charles B. Guignon, p. 306)JRC]
In this technological perspective, ultimate goals like serving God, society, our
fellows or even ourselves no longer make sense to us. Human beings, on this
view, become a resource to be used-but more important, to be enhanced-like
any other: Man, who no longer conceals his character of being the most important raw material, is also drawn into
this process (EP 104; VA 90). In the film 2001, the robot HAL, when asked if he is happy
on the mission, says: Im using all my capacities to the maximum. What more
could a rational entity want? This is a brilliant expression of what anyone
would say who is in touch with our current understanding of being. We peruse
the development of our potential simply of the sake of further growth. We have
no specific goals. The human potential movement perfectly expresses this
technological understanding of being, as does the attempt to better organize
the future use of our natural resources. We thus become part of a system that no one directs but that
moves toward the total mobilization and enhancement of all beings, even us. This is why Heidegger thinks
the perfectly ordered society dedicated to the welfare of all is not the solution
to our problem but the culmination of the technological understanding of being.
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Fiat
Debate relies upon an assumption of givenness which creates a faade of

knowability related to empirical events, but this knowledge causes us to reward
our own narcissism and encounter the world as ready-made for our
consumption. The theoretical foundations of fiat simplify create a technological
mindset in the round.
Seigfried '90
[Hans, professor in the Department of Philosophy at. Loyola University Chicago, Autonomy and
Quantum Physics: Nietzsche, Heidegger and Heisenberg, Philosophy of Science 57, pp. 619-630]
But, of course, Heidegger's (early) analyses do not disprove the Nietzschean claim that we ourselves are not such that we
always already are and remain what we are, nor that the whole world of experience is the product of our organization and
the whole point of his lengthy

phenomenological, existential, and fundamental-ontological analyses is to
demonstrate concretely that the received notions of both ourselves and the
world are phenomenally inadequate abstractions and that all forms of givenness
whatsoever, together with the corresponding forms of intuition and understanding, are functions of the
care for our own being. Heidegger describes this care as the attempt at
"acquiring power" over our being and "dispersing all fugitive self-concealment"
(1962, p. 310)-in the Nietzschean idiom: giving ourselves laws and thus becoming ourselveswith the understanding that we can never have such power "from the ground
up" (1962, p. 284) and there always remains the vast profusion of impenetrability described by Nietzsche. It is this
care, Heidegger argues, which not only determines what we ourselves are at any given
time, but also what all other things are which we encounter as ready-made and
given in our concernful dealings and in our most objective observations and
theoretical explorations. Appearances of detached and absolute givenness arise
only when we give in to the "tendency to take things easily and make them
easy" by concealing from ourselves the responsibility for the care of our being
grounded
in
our
form
of
life
and
"behavior".
On
the
contrary,
(1962, pp. 127-128), which is most of the time, and when the success of such determinations makes us forget their origin.
Only under such conditions does it look as if we had no hand in the making of the laws that seem to be the dictates of
alien forces (inside and outside of us) which determine what we are and regulate our form of life. In short, Heidegger tries
to do what he criticizes Cassirer and neoKantians for failing to do, namely, to explicitly demonstrate that all forms of
dealing, intuition, understanding, and the givenness of things have their origin in our form of life (1976b, p. 42).
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Jon Cook
Get Off the Rock (1/2)
The affirmative attempt to liberate humanity from our earthly imprisonment

provides a framework for violent domination of the universe and disposability of
planet earth.
Macauley '96
[David, teaches philosophy and literature classes at several colleges in New York City. Minding
nature: The philosophers of ecology, March 29, 1996, Guilford Publications]
Earth Alienation Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into
the heavens above? THOREAU, Walden In the prologue to The Human Condition, Arendt writes of the launching in 1957
of the first satellite, an event, she asserts boldly, that is "second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the
atom." With the projection of this man-made, earth-born, and once earthbound
object into the depths of outer space, she locates both a symbolic and an historic
step toward realizing the hubristic dream of "liberating" us from nature , biological
necessity, and earthly "imprisonment." This desire to escape the earth (and our success in
so doing) signifies to Arendt a fundamental rebellion against the human condition, of
which the earth is the "very quintessence ," and marks our departure into the
universe and a universal standpoint taken deliberately outside the confines and
conditions in which we have lived from our genesis. This monumental action, too, can be
viewed as a prelude to and encapsulation of Arendt's own thinking about the realm of nature, for it is here that she
establishes a stark distinctionor, more exactly, oppositionbetween earth and world and calls attention to an alienation
which, she claims, we experience from both spheres. Arendt also shows an early concern with the subject of dwelling
on-the-earth and in-the-worldan activity she speaks of elsewhere as homelessness and rootlessness, and she signals
a preference for turning toward or returning to an older conception of the natural and the political, namely, a Greek one.
Thus, she announces her intention to "trace back modern world alienation, its twofold flight from the earth into the
universe and from the world into the self, to its origins." 4 In the initial pages of The Human Condition, Arendt reveals a
penchant for resorting to phenomenological, historical, and, later, etymological accounts of politics and "what we are
doing" within and to the world and earth, and for employing spatial metaphors and descriptions in the process. In fact,
the satellite which carries us from our home and earthly place into a cosmic
space and new Archimedean point is merely the first such vehicle Arendt invokes to
launch us into consideration of a politics of the spatial and placial. She examines public and private space, spaces of
appearance (the polis) and places of disappearance (the death camps), the inner space and life of the mind, and outer
space and its conquest by modern science and technology. In assessing such thoughts on nature and the earth and their
relevance for contemporary ecological and political thought, it is necessary to situate her views historically by positioning
them against the Greeks (to whom she looks), Marx (whom she criticizes), Heidegger (from whom she borrows), and the
Frankfurt School and its heirs (whom she neglects). In this way, one can perhaps better measure her contributions and
failings, her blindnesses and insights. The phenomenon of earth alienation , as Arendt conceives of it,
is an interesting but curious and problematic notion. It is typified strangely by an historical expansion
of known geographic and physical space which, ironically, brings about a closing-in process that shrinks and abolishes
distance. Earth alienation stands in contrast, though not complete opposition, to world alienation. Both originate, in her
view, in the sixteenth and seventieth centuries. According to Arendt, there were three great events which inaugurated the
modern age and led to the withdrawal from and loss of a cultural rootedness in place and estrangement from the earth.
First, the most spectacular event was the discovery of America and the subsequent exploration, charting, and mapping of
the entire earth which brought the unintended result of closing distances rather than enlarging then. It enabled humans to
take "full possession of [their] mortal dwelling place" and to gather into a globe the once infinite horizons so that "each
man is as much an inhabitant of the earth as he is of his own country." 5 Second, through the expropriation of chixch
property, the Reformation initiated individual expropriation of land and wealth which, in turn, uprooted people from their
homes. Third, the invention of the telescope, the least noticed but most important event, enabled humans to see the earth
not as separated from the universe but as part of it and to take a universal standpoint in the process. From this bellwether
moment, Arendt traces our ability to direct cosmic processes into the earth , the
reversal of the historic privileging of contemplation over action, a resultant
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distrust of the senses, and a marked tendency on the part of science to
dominate nature.6 The telescope, in short, "finally forced nature, or rather the universe, to yield its secrets." 7 The
roots of earth and world alienation seem to be related for Arendt, though two of themthe charting of the earth and the
invention of the telescopeare more closely linked with her conception o : earth alienation than the third. To these events,
we can add the rise of Cartesian doubt, for with it our earthbound experience is called into question with the discovery that
the Earth revolves around the sun, a phenomenon which is contrary to immediate sense experience. Cartesian doubt is
marked by its universalizability, its ability to encompass everything (De omnibus dubitandum), and to leave the isolated
mind alone in infinite, ungrounded space. Modern mathematics and particularly Cartesian geometry an; also indicted
because they reduce all that is not human to numerical formulas and truths. They free us from finitude,
terrestrial life, and geocentric notions of space, replacing them with a science
"purified" of these elements. In effect, they take the geo (the earth) out of geometry. This movement
from natural to universal science and the creation of a new Archimedean point in
the human mind (a metaphor Descartes employs in the Second Meditation), where it can be carried and moved
about, is at the heart of her conception of earth alienation , a distinguishing feature of the
modern world.8 It is this historic process which has enabled us to handle and control
nature from outside the earth: to reach speeds near the speed of light with the aid of technology, to
produce elements not found in the earth, to create life in a test tube and to destroy it with nuclear weapons. In Arendt's
view, this process is responsible for estranging us so radically from our given
home. In fact, she appears to take a step even further in the direction of pessimism when she claims that the
earth is, in a sense, dispensable and obsolete: "We have found a way," she says, "to act on the earth and
within terrestrial nature as though we dispose, of it from outside, from the Archimedean point." 9 In her essay "The
Conquest of Space and the Stat are of Man," Arendt elaborates on these themes and shows the futility of humans ever
conquering space and reaching an Archimedean point, which would constantly be relocated upon its discovery. She
suggests that we recognize limits to our search for knowledge and that a new, more geocentric world-view might emerge
once limitations are acknowledged and accepted. Arendt is not especially optimistic about such an occurrence , but feels
that we must recover the earth as our home and begin to realize that mortality is
a fundamental condition of scientific research . It is not only modern science which she finds
culpable, though, for it was philosophers, she assert;, who were the first to abolish the dichotomy between earth and sky
(by which she might also mean space since the earth includes the sky 10) and to situate us in an unbounded cosmos. And
so the task of reconceiving our relation to the universe also rests on the
shoulders of philosophers.
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Get Off the Rock (2/2)
This is a symptom of Western desire to enframe the Earth and understand every
being as standing reserve.
Zimmerman '94
MB]

were made
ecologists.

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Global Warming
Attempts to reduce global warming is futile The quick fix actions are rooted in
the technological mindset which initially produced the problem!
Hill '07
[Glenn,DESIGN WITHOUT CAUSALITY: HEIDEGGERS IMPOSSIBLE CHALLENGE FOR ECOLOGICALLY

SUSTAINABLE ARCHITECTURE, http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/dspace/handle/2100/474]
the implications for ecological sustainability and for design also

become clear. With modernitys 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
Heideggers 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
At this point,
architects, are enframed within a view of causality which instils confidence that designed outcomes have predictable
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 .
effects. Tellingly,
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).
Modernitys 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
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
suns 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
suns 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.
nature is apprehended as systematic and operable.
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Jon Cook
Guilt/Lifestyle Changes/Morality
Appeals to guilt and lifestyle changes or morality are the link they seek to
accomplish the perfect life and are the ultimate form of managerial control
McWhorter '92
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
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 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
at times, it comes to feel almost safe.
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? 4Alongside 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
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
set of engineering goals. Therefore,
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
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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
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.
of a managerial approach to the world.
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Hegemony
The affs world-ordering engages in a type of thinking that reduces all life on
earth to a tool to be instrumentalized, further disconnecting ourselves from
what it means to be.
Swazo '02
[Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alaska (Norman K., Crisis Theory and World Order:
Heideggerian Reflections, p. 110-11]
The inevitability of such a fight issues from the pathology of nihilism all political thought and practice in our time cannot
The attraction to
"rational design" of the world order is today motivated by a Sense of imminent
catastrophe and, thus, by the human impulse to self preservation. Here, however, it is
life itself that compels; and precisely in this attraction to rational design of the world order is there betrayed what
Nietzsche recognizes in Western moralism: It is pathologically conditioned . And what is this pathology? It
is nothing other than the strife of subjective egoisms as yet unmastered. Such is
the essence of power-politics. But this, presumably, is life (will to power); and, as Nietzsche puts it, " life itself
forces us to posit values; life itself values through us when we posit values "
(Twilight of the Idols, "Morality as Anti-Nature," note 5). In world order thinking, I submit, the West discharges
the energy of its moral essence, doing so as author of the prevailing morality
and as the locus of the dominant subjective egoisms which have been inevitably
diffused to determine all political cultures, the latter of which are now bound to
the West's hegemony over world political culture . The contemporary world order
in structure and value orientation is instituted on the basis of Western reaso n,
but be "pathologically conditioned" (Twilight of the Idols, "The Problem of Socrates," note 10).
and as such it is characterized by an "order of rank" in which European values have primacy, i.e., are hegemonous vis-a-
World order thinking,

posits its values-peace, justice, economic
well-being, ecological balance-over against all that shows itself as the
contemporary pathology of "petty politics" and all that is countervaluation in
the strife motivated by the requirements of global hegemony. In this positing of
primacy to the Western valuation, the Occident reveals its near exhaustion , if not
its desperation, in the face of competing modes of subjectivity as manifest by a
fragmented and antagonistic "system" of nation-states, each with its "splinterwill." Given that this world order movement is transnational, the West co-opting sympathetic forces in the developing
world, twit her this exhaustion nor this desperation is restricted to the West: The "crisis" is effectively
planetary. Nietzsche was not amiss in his articulation of the great task that would define the twentieth century, i.e.,
vis all "other" (Asian, African, Latin American, etc.) plausibly autochthonous valuations.
thus, compelled by life itself in all its prevalent pathology,
the problem of global governance. Neither was he amiss in appreciating its hesitant approach, despite its inexorability.
That is, Nietzsche recognizes the persistent, though declining, influence of the Christian ideal with respect to the problem
of global governance, anticipating that this ideal would yet issue in the call for a moral world order: Notwithstanding the
death of God, Christian value judgments would be transmuted into the political domain. The twentieth century's emerging
order would be a "hybrid" of sickness, the will to power heightening the demands of modern man's self-determination, the
Christian conscience yet restraining-in short, a "fettered" moment in humanity's movement toward total self-affirmation,
total sovereignty in the absence of God and transcendent norms. "They are rid of the Christian God," writes Nietzsche in
his Twilight of the Idols ("Skirmishes of an Untimely Man," note 5), yet "now believe Al the more firmly that they must
cling to Christian morality." It is not yet realized, observes Nietzsche, that "when one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls
the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet." Accordingly, the contemporary world order movement expresses
a commitment to transforming the philosophic orientation (values) as well as transforming institutional structures and
That world order thinking is value

thinking is evidence of its essential debt to the Nietzschean metaphysic, to
thinking the world order from the vantage of subjectness, for it is only with
patterns of behavior. World order thinking is, thus, normative.
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Nietzsche that value thinking comes to predominate in the twentieth century. "'
As Heidegger puts it, "Values stem from valuation; valuation corresponds to the will to power." That is, insofar as
the creation of secureness is grounded in value-positing and world order
thinkers on their own essential authority (understood metaphysically, not personally) seek to
secure a world order, then world order thinking cannot but be so grounded. It is
precisely this ground, i.e., a self-grounded value-posit, that entails the technocratic
conception of world order and, thus, eliminates a meaningful distinction
between the normative and technocratic approaches. How so? Heidegger answers in words
that indict all value thinking: "thinking in terms of values is a radical killing. It ... strikes
down that which is as such, in its being-in itself. . . ." Everything which is "is
transformed into object" and "swallowed up into the immanence of
subjectivity.""' Commensurate with this subjectivity is that objectivity which, in the essence of the technological, is
total, and which finds its instrument in technocracy .
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Hubble Telescope
The Hubble is a prime example of managerialism in space. International Space

organizations reframe the meaning of telescopes to account for malfunction and
maintenance, which simply exports technological enframing to the domain of
outer space.
Egan 09
[Professor of Management at Leicester University, Hubble, Trouble, Toil, and Space Rubble: The Management
History of an Object in Space, Management & Organizational History Volume 4, pg 272-273]
Approximately two months after launch, the Hubble Space Telescope Project Manager declared there was a critical flaw in
one or both of the mirrors in the Optical Telescope Assembly, and this incident becomes the second part of the objects
Historical biographies can suddenly reappear, as previously

forgotten pieces of equipment return to the concern of management. Objects
are often implements taken for granted, existing in a vast subterranean
backdrop supporting the surface layer of practice and place of explicit
management activity. Therefore things often only come into the sight of
management as technology comes into view through malfunction. The broken mirror
man-agement history.
escaped the telescope's assemblage, erupting into the management landscape, and compelling the organization of NASA to
History is often made by failure, breakage or fiasco. A

mirror's pathway into the totality of the technological system was disturbed and
made visible by its fault; creating a new ontological depth and enrolment of
management attention. However, the chance of redemption for NASA came in the
guise of Hubble's breakdown not being aberrant but as a normal condition of
the object's existence (Petroski 1985). Here the third stage in the life of the object is
the credit NASA gained through recovery , which was not just a reactionary
derivative of failure, but an intended part of the objects biography; service was
built into design. The repair illustrated the importance of human space labour
and ingenuity where management learning occurred through maintenance (Orr
take stock of this new contingent realm.
1996); but it ostensibly allowed NASA to regain credibility and capture the public imagination with televised record
The concluding episode in the

biography of the Hubble Telescope examines its recent oscillation between
worth and eventual demise. In this period, the value of an object is inseparable
from managerial motive. Throughout the lifespan of the telescope
management strived to fend off decay through service, and failure through
repair; eventually allowing NASA to decide and control the fate of its most
sublime technological object in space.
breaking space walks displaying a new level of performance from astronauts.
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Hydropower
Hydropower essentializes the river into a standing reserve --- perpetuating the
notion that the world is nothing more than a resource for humanity
Brassington '7 [CSEP, School of Law, University of Manchester (Iain,On
Heidegger, medicine, and the modernity of

modern medical technology, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy,10, pg. 192-193]
Inasmuch as an item would not have brought itself into presence without human intervention, such a bringing forward is,
in a sense, violent (biai) but, of course, all bringing-forward including truth, inasmuch as aletheia wrests from leth e
is violent anyway, and this is simply a bullet that we have to bite (and, appropriately, Heidegger does associate tekhn e
What is important is that

Heidegger can claim that non-modern technology does not encroach on the
world in the same manner as might modern technology, for it does not see the
world as a mere standing-reserve from which it might manufacture things.
Because production is not conceived metaphysically, enframing is not likely. The
windmill certainly does capture the energy within the breeze, but the
millwheels are responsive to the wind , revealing the wind as wind. The supply
of energy to the watermill is, perhaps, more constant however, it, too, is
responsive to the world around it. This sort of technology retains its essence as
with violence in the Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger, 2000, p. 160ff)).
bringing-forth in the sense of poi esis, inasmuch as it retains the essence of the wind or the river as wind or river and, in a
sense, simply takes advantage of the abundant energy latent therein. This is what Heidegger is driving at in his idea that
the water mill preserves the river. By contrast, the modern hydroelectric plant (or
windfarm) does not respond to, but challenges the world around it; it transforms
the essence of the river into a standing-reserve: The revealing that rules in
modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable
demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such ... [E]ven
the Rhine itself appears to be something at our command. The hydro-electric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was
the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather, the river is dammed up into the power
What the river is now, namely, a water- power supplier, derives from the
essence of the power station. (Heidegger, 1999a, pp. 3201) In effect, the watermill takes
advantage of a river that can supply power, while the hydro-electric plant takes
advantage of a power supply , the riverness of which is incidental. (Admittedly, the
plant.
difference is not so pronounced in the Letter on Humanism, which appears to be more generally anti-technological: while
it concedes that technology is a form of truth, it insists that it is grounded in the history of metaphysics. There is no
distinction between metaphysical and pre-metaphysical tekhn e here, and I am admittedly unsure about how well this
claim squares with the remainder of Heideggers thought.) Hence, while the essence of technology in its broadest sense is
causative, there is still a significant difference between modern technology and non-modern tekhn e. This is why the
correct instrumental definition of technology still does not show us technologys essence (Heidegger, 1999a, p. 313).
while modern technology is

enframing, non-modern technology is poetic . As far as Heidegger is concerned,
[i]nstrumentality is considered to be the fundamental characteristic of
technology. If we inquire step by step into what technology, represented as means, actually is, then we shall arrive
Technology cannot be separated from production and instrumentality, but,
at revealing. The possibility of all productive manufacturing lies in revealing. Technology is therefore no mere means.
Technology is a way of revealing ...
It reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie
here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another... Thus what is decisive in tekhn e does not
at all lie in making and manipulating, nor in the using of means, but rather in the revealing mentioned before. It is as
revealing, and not as manufacturing, that tekhn e is a bringing-forth. (Heidegger, 1999a, p. 3189) Technology reveals the
Modern technology reveals the world as

a standing-reserve; the revealing that belongs with non-modern technology is
such that things are allowed to come to presence without thereby challenging
world in a certain manner, although this manner is variable.
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or enframing the worldness of the world from which they come to presence. To be sure, we
might want to say that the hydro-electric plant preserves the forces of the
river, and this could be correct. Heidegger never seems to confront this possibility. But he does not have to, for
human Dasein, as I have pointed out, ek-sists and dwells in a world of things, not
onta:a world of rivers, not fluid dynamics and force.
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Industry
The development of industry and tech renders the world into standing reserve!
Heidegger '77 [Martin, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, p18,
ASG/JRC]
Only to the extent that man for his part is already challenged to exploit the
energies of nature can this ordering revealing happen. If man is challenged,
ordered, to do this, then does not man himself belong even more originally than
nature within the standing-reserve? The current talk about human resources, about the supply of
patients for a clinic, gives evidence of this. The forester who, in the wood, measures the felled
timber and to all appearances walks the same forest path in the same way as
did his grandfather is today commanded by profit-making in the lumber
industry, whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability
of cellulose, which for its part is challenged forth by the need for paper, which
is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated magazines. The latter, in their
turn, set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set
configuration of opinion becomes available on demand. Yet precisely because
man is challenged more originally than are the energies of nature, i.e., into the process
of ordering, he never is transformed into mere standing-reserve. Since man drives technology forward, he takes part in
ordering as a way of revealing. But the unconcealment itsel f,
within which ordering unfolds, is never

a human handiwork, any more than is the realm through which man is already
passing every time he as a subject relates to an object.
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International Relations
Swazo '02

the political domain that is central to these inquiries, presupposing the
etc.it is

For world
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properly
speaking,
order thinking.
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Kritikal Affirmatives (Oppression and Inequality)
Engaging one facet of inequality or oppression only replicates the harm- only
the re-examination of Dasein can prevent spirit murder and extinction. Trying to
engage in only one facet kills all thoughts of Being-in-the-world and is an
example of the managerial mindset of technik.
Spanos '2K [Professor
of English at SUNYBinghamton) 2k (The Question of Philosophy and Poiesis in the

Posthistorical Age: Thinking/ Imagining the Shadow of Metaphysics, William V. Spanos, boundary 2, 27.1 (2000)
169)//JRC]
And in thus focusing this indissoluble relay, which could be collectively subsumed under the silence that belongs to the
this reconstellation also

points the way that the rethinking or retrieval of thinking (and poiesis) must take
when history has come to its end in the age of the world picture , which is to say, in
the posthistorical age of transnational capitalism. In the interregnum, which
bears witness to the massive displacement of human lives precipitated by the
globalization of the idea of liberal capitalist democracyand the utter
inadequacy of the Western interpretation of human rights it is not enough to
engage capitalist economics or politics, or patriarchy, or racism, or classism,
and so on. All these pursued independently remain trapped within the strategic
disciplinarity of the dominant discourse. In the interregnum, rather, the thinker and the
poet must think the polyvalent manifestations of the spectrality released by the
consummation of the Pax Metaphysica if they are to prepare the way for a
politics that is adequate to the task of resisting the impending Pax Americana
and, beyond that, of establishing a polis that, in its always open-ended
agonistics, precludes what Arendt, far more clearly than Heidegger and all
those postmodern critics of the city of modernity, recognized as the banality of
evil incumbent on the reduction of being at large to a territory, planetary in
scope, to be conquered, compartmentalized, and administered. Which is to say
on all self-righteous proclamations of universal peace that justify the physical
and spiritual slaughter and maiming of human life.
totalized saying privileged by a metaphysical representation of being as Being,
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Kritikal/Anthropocentrism Affirmatives
All life is not equally valuable--certain species are inherently more important!
Further, to manage every Being to be equal is denying their being and simply an
example of the managerial mindset on the control of Beings.
DeLuca '05 [Associate Professor of Speech Communication and adjunct in the Institute of Ecology at the University of
Georgia [Kevin Michael DeLuca, Ethics & the Environment, "Thinking with Heidegger: Rethinking Environmental Theory
and Practice," Issue 10.1, p67-87, Muse]
The first stasis point revolves around humanity's relation to nature. To put it
plainly, in environmental circles it is still a Cartesian world, wherein the
founding act is human thinking (cogito ergo sum) and the [End Page 71] earth is object to humanity's
subject. This position is clear in mainstream environmentalism, where humans act
to save the object earth and , fundamentally, this action is motivated by the
subject's self-interest. So, we must save the rain forests because they contain potential medical resources and
because they alleviate global warming. Now certainly this base anthropocentrism has come under attack from various
these antianthropocentric positions have not escaped the gravity of Cartesianism. This is
evident at both theoretical and practical levels. Theoretically, in the effort to avoid the stain of
anthropocentrism all beings are posited as having equal intrinsic worth/value and
difference is leveled. The banana slug is equal to homo sapiens. There are
problems with this. Most obviously, the concept of intrinsic worth/value is
philosophically incoherentworth/value by definition is always relational . More
significantly for this discussion, to posit intrinsic worth/value is to deny the ecological
insight that all beings are constituted in relation to other beings and their
environment. Further, to deny difference is to blunt analysis of our current situation and to deny the differential
radical environmentalisms that posit biocentrism or ecocentrism. I would argue, however, that
levels of effects different species have. Homo sapiens is not another type of slug and must be analyzed with that
awareness.
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Mars (1/2)
Mars Colonization is only valuablt when undersyood through the lens of the aff's
discourse and narrative. This discourse of Mars Colonization is just an example
and justification of the drive for technological efficiency and the technological
mindset.
Jerkins '09
Today, scientists studying Mars use the tools of the narrative of colonialismwith the enthusiasm of nationalism, the
promises of corporate success, and the desire to dominate new frontiersall to legitimate the project of going to Mars.
When one legitimates an activity, they are promoting said activity as authorized, validated, or normative.33 Both scientific
and governmental discourses are legitimated by narrative, and yet scientific discourse tends to push narrative aside as an
inferior method of conveying knowledge. There also exists a vague correlation between legitimation and truth. JeanFranois Lyotard explains, The language game of science desires its statements to be true but does not have the
to legitimate their truth on its own.34 The state tends to render science
understandable by relating scientific knowledge to popular knowledge,
doing so by spend[ing] large amounts of money to enable science to pass itself
off as an epic.35 Scientific documentaries like MARS: Dead or Alive are saturated with narratives, from the
resources
anthropomorphic rovers to the hostile land, because scientific knowledge cannot know and make known that it is the
true knowledge without resorting to the other, narrative, kind of knowledge, which from its point of view is no knowledge
This paradoxical viewpoint of scientific narratives threatens to render

scientific accounts of Mars unchallengeable. Scientists attempt to explain what
Mars is like, but then use colonialist narratives, modernist narratives, and
Hegelian narratives of progress to induce the public into funding scientific
projects. Thus, it becomes cumbersome to engage in dialogue concerning the
legitimacy of Martian endeavors when scientists utilize narrative to legitimate
what they do, while dismissing narrative as non-science. Instead, the scientific
discourse of Mars should be seen for what it is a changing, subjective, and complex
exchange of the narrative and the empirical , influenced by historical context,
bureaucratic powers, and the technological drive toward efficiency.
at all.36
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Mars (2/2)
Enframing Mars with a technological mindset constrains its forms which haven't
been revealed to us yet and may cause permanent damage to it. It further
pushes us to see the Earth in a technological mindset and everything around us.
Jerkins '09
For Mars, the prospect of enframing is extremely problematic, given its

phenomenological nature. As interpretive discourse directs the narratives of
Mars (scientific and otherwise), enframing comes rather easily and often appears as a
benign force in the media and public discourse, asking, What can Mars do for us? Because the interpretation of
Mars precedes any objective knowledge, as illustrated by Lowells once popular canal theories, we must proceed in the
awareness that Mars is, in the public mind, what is said of it. Heidegger warns, The rule of Enframing threatens man with
the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing, adding his somewhat romantic call to
modernity, and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.52 Heideggers point is well-taken what
is
damaging to our participation in the world is the exclusivity technology brings
to bear as a form of modern revelation. Heidegger explains that when technological
enframing takes place, it drives out every other possibility of revealing .53
When technological ordering comes to be the only way we perceive the world,
then the world becomes revealed to us only through the banal act of securing
natural resources, no longer allowing what Heidegger calls the fundamental
characteristics of our resources to appear to us .54 The Earth becomes minerals,
the sky becomes gases, and the Martian surface becomes whatever those with
means will it to be. When we gaze at Mars with an eye toward technologically
enframing it, we deny ourselves the possibility of other forms of revelation
which, given the great passage of time, may come to make our generation appear quite nearsided and audaciousor worse, cause permanent damage to a planet we are far from
grasping in its sublime entirety . Heidegger describes the enframing of a tract of earth as a coalmining
district; can the enframing of Mars as a natural resource be far from Heideggerian thought?55 To appreciate
fully the meaning in this world and of the red planet, we must come to terms
with our modern predilection for technological enframing and be accepting of
other, more long-term, open-minded and inclusive perspectives of placemaking.
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Mining
Minging is an example of enframing and the technological view over the

universe. Modern mining is exactly like the process of mining Heidegger saw in
1966. It is used to store energy, making nature and the world into a standing
reserve.
Absher
'10
[Brandon-,
Prof
of
Philosophy
at
http://imaginenoborders.org/blog/brandon/toward-a-concept-of-eco-violence/]
University
of
Kentucky,
To sum up, human existence is constituted by its dynamic engagement in practical possibilities which disclose a world of
Traditional philosophy, then, unduly reifies human existence

and the world in which it is involved it treats both as mere things only
practically significant entities.
contingently related to one another. Heidegger intensified this critique of the Western philosophical tradition in his later
For Heidegger, technology is not so much a particular (perhaps

more complicated) kind of apparatus or instrument as it is a way of being-inthe-world. As such, technology is distinctive in the manner in which it uncovers
or reveals beings. Heidegger calls it En-framing (Ge-stell). The En-framing is a way of
disclosing the world in which everything appears as a mere resource (Bestand) for
production (Her-stellung) and representation (Vor-stellung). Technology, that is, is a way of life
that treats humans and the world in which they are involved as mere sources of
power to be exploited in accordance with the independent beliefs, intentions, or values of individuals. As
Heidegger writes, The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts
to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted
and stored as such. 3 Whereas in previous ages beings were manifest in their intricate involvement in a web of
social/natural significance, technological modernity dissembles this web and treats beings as
abstract, quantifiable units of power. Pre-technological ways of life, in Heideggers view, are
distinctive in their responsiveness to the independent self-showing of beings. The En-framing, on the other hand,
sets out to abolish this independence and to disclose beings in accordance with a calculable
ordering of human devising. Everywhere, Heidegger writes, 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. 3 He offers the mining of
coal as an example, The coal that has been hauled out of some mining district has not
been supplied in order that it may simply be present somewhere or other. It is
stockpiled; that is, it is on call, ready to deliver the suns warmth that is stored
in it. The suns warmth is challenged forth for heat, which in turn is ordered to
deliver steam whose pressure turns the wheels that keep the factory running .3
Rather than responding to the independent self-showing of the mountains or
the coal beneath them, modern technology demands of the mountains and the
coal they hold that they conform to a rational ordering and that they be on
hand for whatever use people may make of them.
reflections on technology.
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Morality
Moral discourse is a link it reaffirms power over the Earth and people! It
forces a technological mindset because we try to calculate morals and ethics
and everything, in the process, becomes a standing reserve.
McWhorter '92
The first essay, "Guilt as Management Technology: A Call to Heideggerian Reflection," gives an overview of Heidegger's
thinking on technology and discusses Heidegger's call for reflection as opposed to instrumental or calculative thinking
about the earth. It carefully distinguishes reflection, in Heidegger's sense, from moral stock-taking or ethical judgment. In
moral discourse and practice are themselves forms of technology, sets of

techniques for maintaining control over self and other. As such, morality shows
itself as a danger, as part of the technological, calculative, managerial thinking
that currently endangers the earth itself. The essay closes with a kind of warning. If it is the case
fact, it suggests that
that morality is part of technological discourse and practice rather than a separable discourse whose purpose is critique,
moral condemnation and moral guilt are reinstantiations of the calculative.

Thus, our tendency to feel guilty about our treatment of the earth is not a
change of heart but is rather a perpetuation of human domination.'
then
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Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology reduces nature to a standing reserve and destroys our

relationship to Being.
Keekok Lee '99
[**Visiting Chair in Philosophy at the Institute for Environment, Philosophy and PublicPolicy at
Lancaster University The Natural and the Artefactual: The Implications of Deep Science and DeepTechnology for
Environmental
Philosophy,
p.
30-33.
http://books.google.com/books?
printsec=frontcover&vid=ISBN0739100610&vid=LCCN9902032599020325]
nanotechnology may be seen as an instance of the long awaited

fulfillment of the ultimate promise given by modern science at its inception in the
In other words,
seventeenth century, but, which it has taken four centuries to make good. As we have seen, according to the metaphysics
of Scientific Naturalism, matter isuniformly dead or inert, consisting of mere extension, and is itself devoid of form or telos.
Such metaphysicsis
is a general process of production which

consists ultimately of there arrangement of the elements of such matter to serve solely human ends.
Hence modern science and its technology become the study of the manipulation
of nature. Nanotechnology cannot, and does not, dispensewith elementary matter as atoms of the various
elements which exist in nature, the analogue of what Aristotle called first or prime matter. Instead, its implied claim
amounts to being able only to dispense with second matter , that is to say, natural
kinds, be these biotic like species of plants and animals, or abiotic like diamondor granite. These are forms of low
in keeping with the view that there
entropic structures which are scarce because humans may render extinct or use biotic kinds far faster than they can
nonrenewable, at least in the

time-span which could be relevant to the sustainability of our industrial civilization. But in a
nanotechnological world, such scarcity would not be worrying . Nanotechnology appearsto
be able to bypass most, if not all, abiotic natural kinds, by rendering them irrelevant to
the process of production . In their place, it will be able to construct new forms of second matter, new
synthetic kinds. By this maneuver, not only is the scarcity of natural kinds rendered
irrelevant to the industrial processes of production but the artefactual kinds may be said to supersede them. Such
supersession, in turn, as we shall see, would lead to both the ontological and
the physical elimination of natural kinds . Natural kinds are entities which come into existence and
replace themselves. In the case of certain
abiotic kinds,
they
are
simply
continue to exist independent of human volition and agency; artefactual kinds, in contrast, are entities whose existence
and maintenance are the intended outcome of human volition and agency. They come into, or go out of, existence entirely
Technological products are artefacts, and artefacts are the material

embodiment of human intentional structures . Nanotechnology, by allowing humans to
assemble objects (or to disassemble them), atom by atom, with absolute precision, embodies the perfect
technique for the manipulation of nature . Such manipulationamounts to near perfect, if not perfect,
at
human
bidding.
control and, therefore, near perfect or perfect mastery of nature. Whether such control and mastery are considered as
domination is immaterial. If the notion of domination conjures up physical conquest, such as disemboweling the earth as in
current mining, tearing out part of theearth as in quarrying, disfiguring the earth's landscape as in surface waste disposal,
cutting down trees anddestroying habitats and whole ecosystems as in massive deforestation, then such images of laying
waste theland through the equivalent of scorch-earth policies are clearly irrelevant in the context of nanotechnology .But if
domination is to be understood in terms of a relationship between two parties where one party (thedominator) totally and
successfully imposes its will on the second party (the dominated), then the notioncould be said to be appropriate.
Humans in possession of nanotechnology are in a position systematic ally tore

place natural abiotic by artefactual kinds if and when it suits their purposes to do so-humans
are in total charge, the master of their own destinies, whereas natural kinds are, powerless,
at their mercies. Such a situation justifies the political image of domination with
which modem science has been associated. This image is reinforced by another
matter, that of the ultimate humanization of nature. 23 Under extant
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technologies, the process of humanization is, relatively speaking, not as
profound as it could be when compared with nanotechnology.
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Nietzsche (Eternal Return)
Nietzsches concept of the eternal return attempts to control and master the
unfolding of experience through space and time. It refuses an authentic
relationship with beings and lies about the possibilities of human mastery. This
forces us into a technological mindset of control of infinity and eternity.
Thiele 95
The
intent, Nietzsche stipulates, is for the present never to be depreciated as a mere
means to the future: each moment is to be self-fulfilling . Were it not an end in itself but only
So conceived, the thought of the eternal recurrence appears as the greatest vindication of the here and now.
a means to some other end, each moment would not merit eternal repetition. Instrumentality must disappear altogether in
Heidegger gives us pause to reflect on the

meaning of Nietzsche's thought experiment. Truly to live in the here and now is
resolutely to will that what is, is. To live in the here and now is to let being be.
Letting being be, however, entails letting time be, for being is only in time. Full
participation in the timely disclosure of what is, then, is the greatest celebration of life and being. Nietzsche's
effort to will the eternal return, in other words, signifies not the living of one's being
in time but the attempt to administer its unfolding. Yet as thrown, human being neither sets
the brilliance of performance. Nietzsche's vision is enticing. But
this unfolding in motion nor overcomes its contingency. Psychologically and philosophically (no less than socially and
Nietzsche's
effort to will life's endless repetition does not fully trans-late into an affirmation
of life, for it implicitly denies and deprecates "that aspect of human life which it
seeks to overcome: its timely and bounded nature. The freedom won is not the freedom to
politically) to flee the horizons of one's historical finitude is to give up the task of dwelling in time.
disclose what is, but the freedom to control and conquer the (psychological or spiritual) effects of historical and worldly
Freedom becomes a possessive mastery of time . But herein the slave's

basic antipathy toward time is not really overcome. It is simply redirected, time is
now forced to swallow its tail. Effectively, Nietzsche exchanges the resentment of the slave for
that of the master. He fails to discern the spirit of revenge inherent in the drive
to overcome temporal horizons. The attempt to conquer time by willing the
eternal return, to undo time's "It was" by way of a voluntaristic imposition of
ultimate value on the endless repetition of its component parts, is perhaps the
most sublime resentment yet achieved. But it is resentment nonetheless.
Heidegger offers an alternative. Human being, he agrees with Nietzsche, is not the
naysayer who resentfully projects life as a punishment. But neither is human
being the yea-sayer whose willful affirmation is "a highly spiritualized spirit of
revenge" (ERS 228). Human being is the "why asker." The questioner is neither slave nor
master of time. The questioner seeks neither to escape this world for the next,
nor to dominate this world in lieu of any next . Rather, the questioner lives in time, in anxious and
awe-full interrogation of the very medium of her world-liness. The questioner thinks Being as time, as
an unfolding disclosure in which she is privileged to participate but will never
fully control. To practice this questioning is to gain wisdom, as an acceptance of
limits. And it is wisdom, Heidegger writes, that teaches us how to dwell in the here and now of the "permanent
everywhere."4 Among the many types of refusal that humankind has ingeniously
dwelling.
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invented, only interrogative refusal does not reduce itself to resentment. Only
in profound questioning, which is neither complacent nor rebellious, is chagrin
at existence altogether eschewed. Only for the questioner are mundane and
historical limits encountered not as constraints on an .insatiable will, but as the
very conditions for a freedom manifest in their disclosure.
222-224
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Nuclear Power (1/2)
Nuclear power engages in calculative thought kills value to life it turns nature
and humanity into standing reserve and is a result of the technological mindset!
McWhorter '92 [Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeast Missouri State University
(Ladelle, Heidegger and the Earth, ed. by Ladelle McWhorter)//JRC]
its penetration into the secrets of galactic emergence or nuclear fission - but in
what it forgets, what it itself conceals. It 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. What is now
especially dangerous about this sense of our own managerial power , born of
forgetfulness, is that it results in our viewing the world as mere resources to be stored or
consumed. Managerial or technological thinkers, Heidegger says, view the earth, the
world, all things as mere Bestand, standing-reserve. All is here simply for human use.
No plant, no animal, no ecosystem has a life of its own, has any significance, apart from
human desire and need. Nothing, we say, other than human beings, has any intrinsic
value. All things are instruments for the working out of human will. Whether we
believe that God gave Man dominion or simply that human might (sometimes called intelligence or rationality) in the face
we managerial, technological thinkers tend to believe that the

earth is only a stockpile or a set of commodities to be managed , bought, and sold. The
forest is timber; the river, a power source. Even people have become resources, human resources,
of ecological fragility makes us always right,
personnel to be managed, or populations to be controlled.
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Nuclear Power (2/2)
Nuclear science objectifies nature- objects cease to occur in the world and
become meaningless!
Hodge '95
[Joanna Hodge, Professor of Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, Heidegger and Ethics,
1995, pg. 62]
The nuclear age is special as a planetary epoch of human beings in so far as the
power of this enormously powerful principle, the principle of the giveability of reasons
(principium reddendae rationis) develops, indeed is let loose in an unsettling [unheimliche] manner
in the domain which provides measure for the determinate existence of human
beings [des Daseins des Menschen]. He goes on: It is to be thought in word and matter that the
unique letting loose of the claim of presenting and providing reasons threatens
everything which is settled [alles Heimische] for human beings and robs them of
every ground and basis for having a sense of groundedness , robs them of that
from which for a long time has grown every great epoch of humanity, every
intellectual activity, opening up of worlds, every stamping of a human image
[Menschengestalt]. (SG: 60) He then remarks how few people seem to be aware of this as an
issue, and here recurs the theme that the most obvious is the least thought
about, raised, as noted, in the first lecture in relation to the principle of
sufficient reason itself, but also applicable here in the context of the naming of
the current historical epoch. In conclusion to this lecture he says: 'It is important to
notice in what region we find ourselves, when we think about the principle of sufficient
reason reflectively' (SG: 61). With this clue, Heidegger proceeds in the next lecture to consider
the effect of this principle on conceptions of objectivity. He makes connections between atomic
energy, nuclear science and a particular kind of objectivity in the following way: 'The
reason whose production is required accomplishes at the same time what it is
to be adequate as a ground, that is to suffice as fully given. For what? In order
to place an object firmly in its place ' (SG: 64). Heidegger goes on to point out that
in fact in nuclear physics there are no objects any more, at least in the
Newtonian sense: 'Rigorously thinking, we cannot really any more, as will be
shown, speak of objects. We already move in a world , if we look carefully, in which
objects, as things which stand over against, no longer occur. ' He suggests that there is a
connection here to the non-representational character of modern art.
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Nuclear War
The aff's language of nuclear [war/catastrophe/suffering] reveals a world of a

bureaucratized science objective descriptions of impact scenerios rob death of
meaning and replace human existence with a railway timetable. It is an
example of the technological mindset set in controling humans and politics.
Visvanathan '88
[Shiv. Fellow, Center for the Study of Developing Societies. Anthropologist. 1988. Atomic
Physics: The Career of an Imagination. JCOOK'
Jungk sensitizes us in particular to the language of the discourse. The language of nuclear catastrophe as apocalypse is
The literature on plagues, famines, floods, each has in

its own way contributed to the expansion of language, reflected cosmology,
mediated between man and nature and the natural and the supernatural. They have added to the verbal quality
marred by an inadequate vocabulary.
of our deepest imaginings on pain, death and deformity. The 'scenarios' on nuclear catastrophe seem aridly secular. Denied
the availability of both the sacred and the humanist vocabulary,
they reflect the terminology of a
bureaucratized science.
The bureaucratic normality of the genocidal scenario, its clockwork predictability, the
timetable of deaths, the extrapolated statistics, all hide the inability of science to talk meaningfully of death and genocide.
So lacking in poetry is this futurology that it is forced to mimic the style of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. This mimicry
serves as an ersatz s ubstitute
for the metaphors of the sacred, and also of humanism.

The language of the scenarios is homologous to the machine. Science represents the disembodied
mind, the scenario mirroring the disembodied future, and the computer
programme provides the decisional calculus. Death and destruction sound
woefully banal. Yet the structure of evil lies in this very banality. In the banality
of bureaucratic science, genocide becomes an office memo and the census, a
death warrant. The nuclear future as catastrophe has the everyday quality of a
railway timetable. Jungk then questions even the basic claims of these scientists to dispassionate objectivity.
Wolf Hafele's advocacy of fast-breeder plutonium technology scares even such ardent supporters of nuclear energy as
Edward Teller. The scientist has begun to wallow in his own power. To Hafele, the objection that such breeder technology is
in its infancy is irrelevant. He sweeps aside the time-honoured practice of painstaking trial runs for new technical
installations as irrelevant. According to Jungk, Hafele is not alone in these departures from the unwritten ground rules of
technological innovation: repeated prior testing of a prototype. 'Today, new reactors are put into operation in densely
populated areas without experimental knowledge about the unpredictable interplay between thousands of components
which make up these gigantic systems. Computer simulations and game theory substitute for trial runs.' 96 These
the scientist is plugged into

these verbal machines. And these machines provide a substitute for the human
encounter with danger, pain, error. It is not truth but images that one is concerned with;
the necromantic fantasies of Kahn and Hafele masquerade as theories without
experimental verification. Seen in this light, the scientist's belief in the objectivity of
these simulations is truly remarkable. Again, it reminds one of Joey whose 'pantomime was so
scenarios function as the equivalent of verbal machines. Like Bettelheim's Joey,
contagious that those who watched him seemed to suspend their own existence and become observers of another
reality'.97 Yet, Jungk refuses to caricature these scientists. He shows that the problem lies in their
expertise, that many are individuals with intelligence and sensitivity. The
structure of their expertise, however, desensitizes them, draws them into
'objective acts' whose consequences are evil. It is this evil, this banal evil that Jungk sensitizes us
to.
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Overcoming Human Growth
To overcome human growth is to treat humans as standing reserves! It forces

us into the technological mindset! Moreover, The idea of overcoming limits and
growth is precisely the problem that turns the case!
Thiele '95 [Professor of Political Science at University of Florida (Leslie Paul, Timely Meditations, p.191)]
in postmodern times largely as a result of the increasingly
apparent limits to human growth. The more these limits are ignored - or worse, viewed as
obstacles to be overcome - the graver the crisis becomes. Heidegger develops a philosophy
of limits. More to the point, Heidegger describes our freedom as dependent on rather
than curtailed by our worldly boundaries. Once the boundaries of human being
are experienced neither as a threat to human freedom nor as an affront to
human dignity, the tragic attempt to conquer the earth might be abated and the
opportunity for its caretaking approached.
Ecological concerns have erupted
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Privatization
Private actors fail the codes of business ethics under which they act
perpetuate the objectification critiqued by Heidegger and are meaningless in
the post-modern world. This business ethic is used to order about ethics only
when usable by humans want them too forcing humans into a technological
mindset.
Ladkin '06 [Donna, PhDProfessor in Leadership and Ethics @ Cranfield School of Management
When Deontology and

Utilitarianism Aren't Enough: How Heidegger's Notion of "Dwelling" Might Help Organisational Leaders Resolve Ethical
Issues Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Apr., 2006), pp. 87-98) JM]
business ethics has largely

come to mean adherence to codes of practice, or the development of those codes of
practice. Accordingly, business ethics has come to be associated with beureaucracy,
systems whose intent is to control, delineate, or prescribe behaviors. As Cummings
(2000) points out, these conceptions of business ethics have their legacy in the
Enlightenments project of objectification, rationality, and the pursuit of metanarratives unaffected by context. Ethics born of this approach are , paradoxically, in
opposition to what many of us know the modern world of oganisations to be
that is, post-modern; in which meanings are constantly shifting, in which we are
encouraged to acknowledge the plurality of stories informing organizational
life, and wherein no one is believed to have an undisputed corner on truth. He
Limitations of current approaches to Business Ethics In contemporary times,
notes the irony of the growth of business ethics literature, and the proliferation of codes of conduct which are ever more
lacking in meaning for the world in which we operate. Elaborating on this idea he writes: many
now regard
the current codes that constitute peoples appreciation of what business ethics
amounts to, as so general as to be meaningless as a guide to practical action in a fast changing
world characterized by unique situations, why ethics is of little use in the development of company strategy (except in the
sense) why many
see business ethics as only being cynically or
instrumentally adhered to on an as needed basis (213). This view is supported by the kind of
restrictive
response often evoked by organizational leaders encountering the topic of business ethics. From their perspective,
initiatives to make them more aware of the need to adhere to certain codes of practice can seem irrelevant in the face of
those situations which truly test their ethical sensibilities. The following case study illustrates such a scenario and the
issues it raises. The details of this actual case have been altered in order to preserve the anonymity of those involved.
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Satellites
Satellites represent a human desire to colonize space and mentally leave the
Earth. These assumptions produce a foundation for the technological mindset
because man feels he should redefine and redesign Earth. Earth becomes a
standing reserve for our use.
Lazier '11
[Benjamin, Associate Professor of History and Humanities at Reed College. Earthrise; or, The Globalization
of the World Picture The American Historical Review Vol. 116, No. 3 (June 2011), pp. 602-630 URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.116.3.602-MB]
In 1990, the German astronomers Freimut Brngen and Lutz Schmadel named an asteroid after one of the foremost
Arendt would have

opened her philosophical masterpiece The Human
Condition (1958) by voicing grave concerns about a second satelliteSputnik. In 1957, man
had for the first time propelled his artifacts into the beyond, and he was likely to
follow by propelling himself as well. But to desire to depart from the scene of the
world, she felt, meant also to think of the world as something worth leaving. To
emancipate ourselves from its physical limitsgravitymeant also to emancipate
ourselves from the gravity of its existential claims upon us. Sputnik therefore embodied
an impulse already much in evidence on Earthto create an artificial planet. In
political philosophers of the twentieth century, the German Jewish migr Hannah Arendt.1 Whether
appreciated the gesture is uncertain.2 After all, she
Sputnik the ambitions of modern man lay revealed.3 These ambitions were ominous. They had also in part been realized.
The Human Condition appeared not long after Arendt's famous study The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), and she
Totalitarianism, it turns out,

shared something important with the Russian satellite. Sputnik embodied a desire
to fabricate an artificial substitute for the living Earth. Totalitarianism, in turn,
distinguished itself from every other form of rule in its ambition to create a new world fit to
advanced through Sputnik some of the themes broached in that earlier effort.
compete with this one, the nontotalitarian world, and its success was to be measured in the consistency of its artful
Totalitarian regimes create an artificially fabricated insanity, and their art

consists in using and at the same time transcending the elements of reality .4
fiction.
Totalitarianism's artful fiction, however, had its all too real apotheosis in the concentration camp universe, a realm
we did not need

to depart from the surface of the Earth to create a death star. Western
civilization had already managed it, right here. All of this is curious. Only the morally maladroit would
inhabited by a population of twilight creatures that Arendt called the living dead. In her view,
think to compare the death camps with a metal ball called Companion. Notwithstanding the Cold War context in which it
was launched or the shock it unleashed, Sputnik was for some just a harmless piepende Kunstmond, as the German
philosopher Hans Blumenberg described it.5 It was a beeping, diminutive moonmanqu, a stimulus to reflection, but
hardly to panic. Nonetheless, Arendt appealed to the same vocabulary to make sense of them both. For all their
Sputnik and totalitarianism, modern science and modern politics shared

a common pathology. Each testified to the modern displacement of the grown by the
made, of living organisms by technical artifacts.
differences,
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Science (1/2)
The use and drive of science seperates humans from the world - valuing and
devaluing the world
Weinberger '92
[Jerry Weinberger, Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University, Politics and the
Problem of Technology: An Essay on Heidegger and the Tradition of Political Philosophy, The American Political Science
Review, Vol. 86, No. 1 (Mar. 1992), pp. 112-127, JSTOR)KR/JRC]
Heidegger, modern science and technology are rooted conjointly in the
metaphysical worldview. According to this view, the world is conceived of as a spatial whole made up of three
For
parts. These three parts are the demonstrably knowable and eternal ground (objective laws of matter) of every particular
entity; all the particular entities; and the human subject who discovers the objective ground and lives among the various
In discovering the ground, human beings become able completely to

manipulate and transform the various things in nature. In doing so they endow
the things with values. Science tells us that only humans, not other entities,
have value, and that humans give the world its meaning or value as their
knowing discloses the world's manipulability. Science is thus humanistic to its core.
In its light every particular entity stands neutrally (not as nature) between the
necessity of its objective ground (matter in motion, extension, etc.) and the freedom of
subjective human art, between fact and value. When understood as the
indubitable vantage point for universal, scientific (mathematical) knowledge,
subjectivity is the certain and fixed beginning point for discovering the
objective ground of manipulable things. But when experienced as the animus of
the individual soul, subjectivity is merely arbitrary. Thus, facts are taken to be
objective, and values are taken to be merely subjective, thus revealing the
essential kinship of subjectivity and manipulable entities, both of which have no fixed
entities.
character or nature. We cannot hope for salvation from Kant, says Heidegger, because Kant's account of subjectivity-as
transcendental unity of apperception and as the free legislation of the absolute moral law-itself assumes dogmatically a
metaphysical conception of the subject. Thus, free subjectivity and the manipulability of entities turn out to be the same in
for modern science there are no essential

differences between subjectivity, objectivity, freedom, and manipulability.
These aspects of "reality" are actually united in a technological understanding
of being: subjectivity is the Archimedean point for uncovering objectivity (Descartes); the doctrine of moral freedom
comparison to the necessity of objective ground. In fact,
dogmatically presumes that very subjectivity (Kant); and the identification of being with the knowable and changeless
entity (objectivity) grew out of the problem of fixing stable grounds for the arbitrary manipulations of human art (Plato and
Even for pure natural science "to be" is "to be the ground of the
manipulable." Science is humanistic and humanism is technological. (See Heidegger
Aristotle).
[1927] 1972, 89-101, 202-208, 317-21; 1962, 122- 34, 246-52, 364-68; 1982, 112-17; SchUrmann 1987, 75;
Zimmerman 1990, 157-63, 196, 222- 23.)
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Science (2/2)
The metaphysical worldview established by science makes every entity the

standing reserve of an endless industrial business transaction!
Weinberger '92
[Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University (Jerry, March 1992, Politics and the
Problem of Technology: An Essay on Heidegger and the Tradition of Political Philosophy, The American Political Science
Review, Vol. 86, No. 1, 112-113, Jstor //VR]
Heidegger, modern science and technology are rooted conjointly in the
metaphysical worldview. According to this view, the world is conceived of as a
spatial whole made up of three parts. These three parts are the demonstrably knowable and
eternal ground (objective laws of matter) of every particular entity; all the
particular entities; and the human subject who discovers the objective ground
and lives among the various entities. In discovering the ground, human beings become
able completely to manipulate and transform the various things in nature. In doing
so they endow the things with values. Science tells us that only humans , not other entities, have
value, and that humans give the world its meaning or value as their knowing
discloses the world's manipulability. Science is thus humanistic to its core. In its
For
light every particular entity stands neutrally (not as nature) between the necessity of its objective ground (matter in
motion, extension, etc.) and the freedom of subjective human art, between fact and value. When understood as the
indubitable vantage point for universal, scientific (mathematical) knowledge, subjectivity is the certain and fixed beginning
point for discovering the objective ground of manipulable things. But when experienced as the animus of the individual
facts are taken to be objective, and values are

taken to be merely subjective, thus revealing the essential kinship of
subjectivity and manipulable entities, both of which have no fixed character or
nature. We cannot hope for salvation from Kant, says Heidegger, because Kant's account of subjectivity-as
soul, subjectivity is merely arbitrary. Thus,
transcendental unity of apperception and as the free legislation of the absolute moral law-itself assumes dogmatically a
metaphysical conception of the subject. Thus, free subjectivity and the manipulability of entities turn out to be the same in
comparison to the necessity of objective ground. In fact, for modern science there are no essential differences between
subjectivity, objectivity, freedom, and manipulability. These aspects of "reality" are actually united in a technological
understanding of being: subjectivity is the Archimedean point for uncovering objectivity (Descartes); the doctrine of moral
freedom dogmatically presumes that very subjectivity (Kant); and the identification of being with the knowable and
changeless entity (objectivity) grew out of the problem of fixing stable grounds for the arbitrary manipulations of human
Even for pure natural science "to be" is "to be the ground of the
manipulable." Science is humanistic and humanism is technological. (See Heidegger
art (Plato and Aristotle).
[1927] 1972, 89-101, 202-208, 317-21; 1962, 122- 34, 246-52, 364-68; 1982, 112-17; SchUr- mann 1987, 75;
Zimmerman 1990, 157-63, 196, 222- 23.) But our view of the world (including human beings) as manipulable, as the
object of control, is not itself within our control. Modern technology is rooted in the metaphysical conception of being that
Metaphysics conceived of being in terms of one particular

kind, or "domain," of being-objects permanently present before knowing. The task
began long ago with Plato.
of metaphysics was thus epistemology, which aimed to establish the conditions for certain knowledge of the objects located
in the external world. But metaphysics was dogmatic because it merely assumed that we have access to a privileged
position outside the presuppositions of a given practical world, because it assumed and thus missed the character of
Metaphysics assumed an
impossible independence of theory from practice and confused one domain of
being with being itself, forgetting that being neither is an entity or thing nor is
identifiable with one or another or even all of its domains , which include objects of
knowledge, tools, human beings, the earth, the heavens, and the gods. Under the sway of metaphysics, the domains
of being are so conceived as ultimately to produce the domination of all by oneby objective manipulability. Thus, metaphysics comes to a peak in modern
"being-in-the-world," and because it assumed that being is an entity or thing.
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook

technology, for whose conception of being-which Heidegger calls the enframing
(Gestell)- every entity, whether theoretical object, human being, earth, sky, or god,
is taken as the manipulable stuff-the standing reserve (Bestand) - of an endless
industrial business transaction (Heidegger 1977, 17-28). 1 In the full- blown age of
technology, the phenomena of art, politics, and the gods are flattened in being understood as the objects of scientific knowledge, in the light of which they become merely useful. In such an age genuine
creativity, reverence, loyalty, rootedness, and the full possibilities of
astonishment and estrangement are obliterated in a cybernetic swirl that
spares nothing, that annihilates everything. The age of technology is the age of
the last man, for whom the whole of nature and every human being is the
standing reserve of a plethora of industries : publishing, war, travel, entertainment, agriculture,
concentration camps, education, and so on. And in this age there are no differences among the
great competing social and political systems, all of which are bound together in
the embrace of global technology. Yet despite technology's being the dark night of the world, Heidegger
tells us that it is a "danger that saves" (1977, 28-35); for the result of technology is nihilism, the frame of mind that
forgets completely the differences among the domains of being and between being and its domains.
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Security
Security necessitates endlessly expanding threats in order to justify its own

existence. Calculative thought leads to increasingly large-scale war on
difference.
Mitchell '05 [Andrew J. Mitchell, Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University, "Heidegger and
The uniformity of beings arising from the emptiness of the abandonment of

Being, in which it is only a matter of the calculable security of its order, an
order which it subjugates to the will to will, this uniformity also conditions
everywhere in advance of all national differences the uniformity of leadership
[FiihrerschaAlj, for which all forms of government are only one instrument of leadership among others. (GA 7: 93; EP,
Government and politics are simply further means of directing ways of

life according to plan; and no one, neither terrorist nor politician, should be able to alter these carefully
108; tm)
constructed ways of life. Ways of life are themselves effects of the plan, and the predominant way of life today is that of an
all-consuming Americanism. National differences fall to the wayside. The homeland, when not completely outmoded, can
only appear as commodified quaintness. All governments participate in the eradication of national differences. Insofar as
Americanism represents the attempt to annihilate the "homeland," then under the aegis of the abandonment of being, all
The loss of national differences is

accordant with the advent of terrorism, since terrorism knows no national bounds
but, rather, threatens difference and boundaries as such. Terrorism is
everywhere, where "everywhere" no longer refers to a collection of distinct places and locations but instead to a
"here" that is the same as there, as every "there." The threat of terrorism is not international,
but antinational or, to strain a Heideggerian formulation, unnational. Homeland
security, insofar as it destroys the very thing that it claims to protect, is nothing
opposed to terrorism, but rather the consummation of its threat. Our leaders, in
their attempt to secure the world against terrorism, only serve to further drive
the world towards its homogenized state. The elimination of difference in the
standing-reserve along with the elimination of national differences serve to
identify the threat of terrorism with the quest for security. The absence of this threat would
governments and forms of leadership become Americanism.
be the absence of being, and its consummation would be the absence of being as well. Security is only needed where there
Security
is for those who know they can be injured, for those who can be damaged. Does
America know that it can be damaged? If security requires a recognition of
one's own vulnerability, then security can only be found in the acknowledgment
of one's threatened condition, and this means that it can only be found in a
recognition of being as threat. To be secure, there must be the threat. For this reason, all of the planned
securities that attempt to abolish the threat can never achieve the security they seek. Security requires that
we preserve the threat, and this means that we must act in the office of
preservers. As preservers, what we are charged to preserve is not so much the present being as the concealment
that inhabits it. Preserving a thing means to not challenge it forth into technological
availability, to let it maintain an essential concealment. That we participate in this essencing
is a threat. If a threat is not perceived, if one believes oneself invulnerable, then there is no need for security.
of being does not make of it a subjective matter, for there is no isolated subject in preservation, but an opening of being.
Heidegger will name this the clearing of the truth (Wahrhet) of being, and it is this clearing that Dasein preserves
(bewahrt). When a thing trutlfulyl is, when it is what it is in truth, then it is preserved. In preserving beings, Dasein
The truth of being is being as threat, and this

threat only threatens when Dasein preserves it in terror. Dasein is not innocent in the
participates in the truth (preservation) of being.
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook

a
Heideggerian thinking of terrorism must remain skeptical of all the various
measures taken to oppose terrorism, to root it out or to circumvent it. These are so
many attempts to do away with what threatens, measures that are themselves in the highest degree willful. This will
can only impose itself upon being, can only draw out more and more of its
wrath, and this inward wrath of being maintains itself in a never-ending supply.
The will can only devastate the earth. Rather than approaching the world in
terms of resources to be secured, true security can only be found in the
preservation of the threat of being. It is precisely when we are busy with
security measures and the frantic organization of resources that we directly
assault the things we would preserve. The threat of being goes unheeded when
things are restlessly shuttled back and forth, harried, monitored, and surveilled.
The threat of being is only preserved when things are allowed to rest. In the notes to
terrorization of being. On the contrary, Dasein is complicit in it. Dasein refuses to abolish terrorism. For this reason,
the "Evening Conversation," security is thought in just such terms: Securi_y (what one understands by this) arises not
from securing and the measures taken for this; security resides in rest [in der Ruhe] and is itself made superfluous by this.
The rest in question is a rest from the economic cycling and

circulating of the standing reserve. The technological unworld, the situation of
total war, is precisely the era of restlessness ("The term 'totality' says nothing more; it names only
(MA 77: 244)23
the spread of the hitherto known into the 'restless"' [GA 69: 181]). Security is superfluous here, which is only to say that it
Utility and function

are precisely the dangers of a c'vil that has turned antagonistic towards nature.
In rest, they no longer determine the being of the thing. In resting, things are
free of security measures, but not for all that rendered insecure. Instead, they are
is unnecessary or useless. It is not found in utility, but in the preserved state of the useless.
preserved. There is no security; this is what we have to preserve. Heideggerian thinking is a thinking that thinks away
It thinks what Heidegger calls "the between" (das Zwischen).

This between is a world of nonpresence and nonabsence. Annihilation is
impossible for this world and so is security. The terror experienced today is a
clue to the withdrawal of being. The world is denatured, drained of reality.
Everything is threatened and the danger only ever increases. Dasein flees to a
from simple presence and absence.
metaphysics of presence to escape the threatened world, hoping there to find security. But security cannot do away with
Dasein guards the truth of being in the experience of

terror. What is perhaps repugnant to consider in all this is that being calls for terrorism and for terrorists. With the
enframing of being and the circulation of standing-reserve, what is has already
been destroyed. Terrorism is merely the ugly confirmation of this point. As we have
seen, being does not linger behind the scenes but is found in the staging itself. If being is to terrorize-if, in
other words, this is an age of terrorism-then being must call for terrorists. They
the threat, rather it must guard it.
are simply more "slaves of the history of beyng" (GA 69: 209) and, in Heidegger's eyes, no different from the politicians of
the day in service to the cause of Americanism. But someone might object, the terrorists are murderers and the politicians
both politicians and

terrorists are called for by the standing-reserve, the one to ensure its
nonabsence, that the plan will reach everyone everywhere , and the other to ensure its
nonpresence, that all beings will now be put into circulation by the threat of destruction. In this regard, "human
resources" are no different from "livestock," and with this, an evil worse than
death has already taken place. Human resources do not die, they perish.
are not. Granting this objection despite its obvious nalvet6, we can nonetheless see that
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Solar Power (1/2)
Link Turn Solar energy has devastating environmental impacts!

Huesemann '02
[Michael H. Huesemann, Ph. D. Marine Science Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Received: 16 August 2002 Accepted: 29 October 2002 Published online: 14 December 2002 The limits of technological
solutions
to
sustainable
development
http://www.springerlink.com/content/bd6tbkx8r4va03rc/fulltext.html#ContactOfAuthor1]
It has been commonly assumed that renewable energy generation is more environmentally friendly than the use of
nonrenewable energy sources such as fossil fuels or nuclear power (Hayes 1977, Lovins 1977, Brower 1992, Boyle 1996).
that the capture and conversion of solar

energy will have significant negative environmental impacts, especially if they
are employed on such a large scale as to supply nearly 100% of the U.S. energy
demand (Abbasi et al. 1995, Trainer 1995a). Before discussing some of the potential negative impacts of different
While this assumption may be correct, it must be realized
solar energy technologies, it is useful to review the implications of the second law of thermodynamics in order to show that
environmental impacts of renewable energy generation are inherently

unavoidable. This is because the flux of solar energy (or neg-entropy) onto
Earth is used to create highly ordered (i.e., low entropy) so-called "dissipative
structures" in the environment (Nicolis and Prigogine 1977, Atkins 1984, Ayres 1998a). Evidence of such
structures can be seen in the complexity of organisms, ecosystems, biodiversity, and carbon and nitrogen cycles, all of
If the flow of solar

energy were to stop, as it ultimately will in a few billion years, all these
complex structures would decay and reach a final equilibrium state where
entropy is maximized. Similarly, if humans divert a fraction of solar energy away
from the environment to create ordered structures for their own purposes (i.e.,
houses, appliances, transportation infrastructure, communication systems, etc.), less energy is available to
maintain highly ordered dissipative structures in nature. The disturbance of
these structures translates into the various environmental impacts that are associated
which are maintained by the constant in-flow of solar energy (Ayres and Martinas 1995).
with renewable energy generation. As shown in Fig. 3, the total amount of solar energy (E s) that is received on Earth
can be viewed as the sum of energy diverted for human purposes (E h) and energy that remains available to maintain
"order" in the environment (E e): According to the second law of thermodynamics, energy (E) is used to decrease the
entropy (S) (increase the order) of a system at temperature T [K] according to (Faber et al. 1995): Combining Eqs. (2)
and (3) yields: where S e and S h are the change in entropy (order) in the environment and human-dominated subsystem, respectively. Combining Eqs. (2) and (4), it follows that a change of entropy in the environment is related to a
change of entropy in the human-dominated subsystem according to: Since the total flow of solar energy (E s) is
constant, it follows that, for each unit of "order" (neg-entropy) created by the diversion of solar energy in the humandominated subsystem, at least one unit of "disorder" (entropy) is caused in the environment as evidenced by a wide range
of different environmental disturbances4. Thus, the second law of thermodynamics dictates that it is impossible to avoid
environmental impacts (disorder) when diverting solar energy for human purposes.This prediction, based on the second
law of thermodynamics, should be no surprise considering the numerous roles solar-based energy flows play in the
environment (Holdren et al. 1980, Haefele 1981, Clarke 1994). For example, direct solar energy radiation is responsible for
the heating of land masses and oceans, the evaporation of water, and therefore the functioning of the entire climatic
system. Wind transports heat, water, dust, pollen, and seeds. Rivers are responsible for oxygenation, transport of nutrients
and organisms, erosion, and sedimentation. The capture of solar energy via photosynthesis results in biomass that
provides the primary energy source for all living matter and therefore plays a vital role in the maintenance of ecosystems
(Clarke 1994). According to energy expert John Holdren, the potential environmental problems with solar energy
"Many of the potentially harnessable natural energy

flows and stocks themselves play crucial roles in shaping environmental
conditions: sunlight, wind, ocean heat, and the hydrologic cycle are the central
ingredients of climate; and biomass is not merely a potential fuel for civilization
but the actual fuel of the entire biosphere. Clearly, large enough interventions in these natural
generation can be summarized as follows:
energy flows and stocks can have immediate and adverse effects on environmental services essential to human well-being"
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Solar Power (2/2)
The Aff's attempt to free the U.S. from oil dependency merely shifts the
technological mindset towards solar technology reducing the world to a
standing reserve.
Kinsella 06
[Wiiliam, Ph.D Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University, Heidegger and Being at the
Hanford Reservation: Linking Phenomenology, Environmental Communication, and Communication Theory,
http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/9/0/9/8/pages90982/p90982-1.php]
Heideggers concept of projection indicates that nature is always disclosed in

light of its usefulness for Daseins practical activities. This characteristic of
disclosure is fundamental and inevitable, and Heidegger is not critical of this
human propensity to utilize the world. The technological attitude that he calls
enframing, however, is a specific and problematic mode of utilization in which
nature becomes a standing reserve (Heidegger, 1977c) or a gigantic gasoline
station, an energy source for modern technology and industry (Heideggger, 1966, p.
50). Heidegger (1977c) illustrates this concept with a series of poignant examples: The revealing that
rules in modern technology is a challengingwhich puts to nature the
unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as
such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in the wind.But
the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it. 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. Agriculture is now the mechanized food
industry. Air is set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield
uraniumuranium is set upon to yield atomic energy. The coal that has been hauled out in
some mining district has not been supplied in order that it may simply be present somewhere or other. It is stockpiled;
The suns warmth is challenged

forth for heat, which in turn is ordered to deliver steam whose pressure turns
the wheels that keep a factory running. The hydroelectric plant is set into the
current of the Rhine.In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to
the orderly disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine appears as
something at our command.What the river is now, namely, a water power
supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station .But, it will be replied, the
that is, it is on call, ready to deliver the suns warmth that is stored in it.
Rhine is still a river in the landscape, is it not? Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection
These examples do not reflect mere

nostalgia. Instead, they illustrate a radical break in Daseins relationship with the earth.
That relationship is now characterized by calculation, control, and deliberate
disruption of the natural order. Indeed, in the last two of these examples the natural order is displaced
by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry (pp. 14-16).
when steam and a tour group are ordered, and ambiguously, this ordering can be understood as a calculated physical
arrangement but also as an imperative command. I suspect that this same ambiguity is present in the original German
text, and that Heidegger was well aware of its presence.
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Space Exploration (1/2)

Turnbull '06

famously
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Space Exploration (2/2)
Space Exploration is a symptom of Western desire to enframe the Earth and

understand every being as standing reserve.
Zimmerman '94
MB]

were made
ecologists.

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Space Exploration (Philosophical)
Mentally distancing ourselves from our Earth home forces us into new
ontological modalities of reduction and control.
Lazier '11
[Benjamin, is Associate Professor of History and Humanities at Reed College.

,Earthrise; or, The
Globalization of the World Picture The American Historical Review Vol. 116, No. 3 (June 2011), pp. 602-630 Published by:
The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Article DOI: 10.1086/ahr.116.3.602 Article
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.116.3.602-MB]
The reflections of Heidegger's teacher Edmund Husserl attest to the importance of this point. Husserl, the founder of the
phenomenological movement, did not live to see photographs of the Earth from space. He did, however, consider the
possibility in a thought experiment broached in an unpublished essay left behind in his papers. Its title, Foundational
Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature, is a bit misleading. A note scrawled on the
envelope in which the manuscript was discovered revealed his true aim: Overthrow of the Copernican theory in the usual
interpretation of a world view. Why on earth would Husserl have wished to contest the Copernican turn? Why on earth:
Taken to its logical conclusion, he feared, the Copernican

theory dislodged man from his earthly horizon . Notwithstanding our post
Copernican knowledge that the Earth revolves around the sun , Husserl insisted that our
that, precisely, was the problem.
everyday experience is preCopernican through and through. This held as much for ancient cave dwellers as for his
students at the university in Freiburg. Or as he had written on his envelope, The original ark [arch], earth, does not
move.20 Husserl therefore recommended that we recall an experience Copernicanism had suppressed: nature as it is
intuitively felt and lived. Heidegger would consider something of the same. He would ask after the prospect of retreating
from mathematical formalism in favor of an immediate return to intuitively given nature (if never wholly to embrace it).
He would look with disfavor on the tendency of modern astronomical science to make obsolete the distinction between
earthly and celestial bodies by reducing all natural bodies to specimens of a single kind. He would dispute the exclusive
truth claims made by postCopernican science: Galileo, he once wrote, is not more true than Aristotle.21 He too would
insist that the planet as such could not be the proper scene for human being. Or at least not the kind he had in mind. The
Heidegger's word for human being, Dasein, means being

there. It presumes local, situated, and finite, not global or planetary, horizons.
To enter into a relation with something of such size therefore demands a form
of management and radical reduction, and a mode of being human especially
suited to the process: hence his talk in a later essay of the planetary imperialism of technologically organized
man.22 The rise of the planetary in the modern imagination was synonymous for
Heidegger with the demise of the earthly and the worldly , and these images from space only
consolidated a processa globalization of the world picturealready long in the making.
planet was simply too big.
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Space Hegemony
Space militarization is the ultimate representation of technological enframing.

Space Heg projects full spectrum dominance into the 4th Dimension, which
results in a process of annihilation as America projects itself into the cosmos.
Kroker '03
[Arthur, Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory at the University of Victoria, Canada,
The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism:Heidegger, Nietzsche and Marx, book available online @
http://www.ctheory.net/will/index.html]
the age of Artificial War has begun. In its manifesto for the future of cyber-war, Vision
2020, the newly created United States Space Command theorizes a future
battlefield of "full spectrum dominance." Abandoning the earth-bound
dimensions of land, sea air, USSPACECOM projects a new era of artificial war in
which the battlefield occurs in the "4th dimension" of space . Befitting a "spacefaring nation" such as the United States, third-dimensional warfare is surpassed
by a vision of future war in which "battle managers" are , in essence, computerized
editing systems running on automatic, absorbing fluctuating data fields
concerning attacks and responses, monitoring satellite transmissions from
20,000 miles in deep space , sequencing missile launches, integrating "dominant
maneuvers" in space with "precision engagement " on the ground, sea and air, providing
"full-dimensional protection" to "core national assets" and focusing logistics"
for a virtual battlefield that stretches into an indefinite future. As USSPACECOM
With this,
theorizes: the control of the seas in defense of commercial economic interests and the war of the western lands in defense
of the expansion of the American empire to the shores of California has now migrated to a war for the "control of space"
Consequently, a future
of artificial warfare in which space itself is weaponized. 4th Dimensional
warfare is the technical language by which the American empire now projects
itself into a future of Artificial War: a 4th Dimensional rhetoric of "global
engagement," "full-force integration," "global partnerships," weaponized space stations, tracking
satellites, reusable missile launchers, and on-line, real-time remotely controlled
anti-missile systems. I emphasize this story because it is revelatory of the meaning of the will to technology.
Here, technology is not only the chosen aim of technological instrumentality
(weaponizing space), but also involves technologies of mythology (the wellrehearsed story of the unfolding American frontier where wagon trains evolve
into Predator Drones, and sea-faring navies migrate into space-bound automated battlefield manager
systems), technologies of thinking (the fourfold "tactics" of space war: dominant maneuver, precision
befitting a "space-faring nation" like the United States, this spearhead of technology.
engagement, full-dimensional protection, focused logistics), and technologies of (aggressive) judgment ("multinational
corporations" are also listed in Vision 2020 as potential 'enemies' of USSPACECOM). More than futurist military doctrine
for the 21st century, Vision 2020 represents the essence of the will to technology. Here ,
technology is both a
space-faring means to the successful prosecution of artificial warfare and its
sustaining ethical justification. The will to technology folds back on itself --a closed
and self-validating universe of thinking, willing, judging, and destining-- that brooks no earthly opposition
because it is a will, and nothing else. As Nietzsche reflected in advance: "it is a will to nothingness." Or,
as Hannah Arendt eloquently argues in her last book, The Life of the Mind, "the famous power of negation inherent in the
Will and conceived as the motor of history (not only in Marx but also, by implication, already in Hegel) is
an
annihilating force that could
just as well result in a process of annihilation as of Infinite

Progress."[1] Could it be that the world-historical movement captured by the military logic of Vision 2020-- this command
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vision of America as the historical spearhead of the will to technology-represents that which is probably unthinkable but consequently very plausible, a contemporary
expression of the metaphysics of "not-being?" If "permanent annihilation" is the sustaining
(military) creed of Vision 2020, then this also indicates that the world-historical movement, which it so powerfully
strategizes, is driven onwards by the seduction of negation, another suicide note on the way to the weaponizing of space.
Consequently, if the American novelist, Don DeLillo, can write so eloquently in his recent essay, "In the Ruins of the
Future," that '(T)echnology is our fate, our truth" this also implies that in linking its fate with the "truth of technology," the
United States, and by implication the culture of globalization, may have, however inadvertently, infected its deepest
political logic with the will to nihilism .
In the sometimes utopian, always militaristic,

language of technological experimentalism, "Not-being" finally becomes a
world historical project. Those who are only passive bystanders to the unfolding destiny of the contemporary
American descendents of the Puritan founders can only look on with amazement coupled with distress as the
"American project" embraces not only the weaponizing of space but also
genetic experimentation with the question of evolution itself . While DeLillo goes on to say
that (technology) "is what we mean when we call ourselves a superpower ," his
pragmatism sells short the point he really wants to make: namely, that by linking its fate, its truth, with
the question of technology the United States has also enduringly enucleated
itself within the larger historical, indeed if USSPACECOM is to be believed, post-historical,
project of technology. Enucleated not as something other than the technological destiny which is its profession
of faith, of truth, but enucleated in the more classical sense of the term, of being somehow interior to the unfolding destiny
The larger cultural consequence of this bold act of willing

remains deeply enigmatic. In this case, is the will to technology an intensification of the
pragmatic spirit upon which the American experiment was founded ? Or has the will to
technology, at the very moment of its historical self-realization, already reversed its
course, becoming its own negation: Arendt's prophecy of "not-being" as a
"process of annihilation." On the ultimate resolution of this question depends the
American fate, the American truth, as the spearhead of technology. On the public
of the will to technology.
evidence, what makes the American project truly distinct today is its enthusiastic abandonment of the pragmatic will for
the uncharted metaphysical territory of "not-being." The will to the conquest of empty spatialization and the vivisectioning
the language of "notbeing"--the desiccating logic of what Heidegger memorably termed,

"Nothingness nothings" as the historical form of the technological project of
"permanent annihilation" --expresses itself vividly in two master commands: Space
Command and Genetic Command. The first operates in the language of weaponized
astrophysics where the curvature of space is manipulated for strategic
purposes, and the other sequences the human genetic code itself. Thus, control of space is inextricably linked with
control of time. The dynamic will to technology projects itself doubly in the
macrophysics of a "space-faring nati on" and the microphysics of a body-faring cellular biology. This is a
of the code of life itself has about it the negative energy of suicidal nihilism. Here,
collective demonstration of hubris that Greeks in the classical age would only admire, and then fear, for its (technical)
at the very instance that USSPACECOM projects an

of "full spectrum dominance," 9/11 occurs and we are
suddenly time-shifted into the age of viral terrorism . Similar to the incommensurability of
audacity and stunning (metaphysical) innocence. Ironically,
imperialist
military
future
technology itself where the reality of "permanent annihilation" is sometimes offset by other ways of thinking technology,
the human imagination does not begin, cannot begin, with tactics of 'dominant
maneuver' and 'precision engagement' and 'full-dimensional protection' and
'focussed logistics' but, with the terrorist side of fluid, earth-bound, real
material warfare.
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Space Pictures (1/2)
The pictures taken of outer space represent a political sphere seduced by

technological enframing that has already predetermined space as a standing
reserve.
Ball '05
[Karyn, teaches critical and literary theory @ University of Alberta, Paranoia in the Age of the World Picture:
The Global "Limits of Enlightenment", Cultural Critique 61 (2005) 115-147, MUSE]
The 1989 photographs of Neptune are an artifact of the collaboration between

political economy and scientific authority: the modes of production that are symbiotically
harnessed to research in the extraction of resources, the design of machines,
and the disclosure of the intrinsic properties of objects and materials. This
collaboration wields a far-reaching power not only to secure diverse fields of belief
and action but also to transform and petrify the visual contents of the cultural
imaginary. To capture Neptune in photographic light is thus to seal its fate as an
image of our knowledge while forgetting its Great Dark Spota natural metaphor for the possible and for all
that remains unthought or unseen. Emmanuel Levinas has foregrounded the "totalitarian" character of this imperialism of
a violent light that encloses transcendence

in immanence and thereby establishes the object as a manageable stasis (a
the visible that he associates with metaphysical reason:
definition that strikes me as profoundly resonant with photographic technology itself). But this last poeticism enjoins a
double-edged question.
The photographs of Neptune
presumably perform a service for us [End Page 118]
by replacing our naive inner visions with a more accurate description, but do they not also
homogeneity of representations
ensure the
(under
the rubric of democratic freedom of the press), hence effecting a contraction rather than
an extension of imagination and fantasy? And does this very question not fall prey to a romantic nostalgia for "pure" expression, a paranoid reaction formation
against modernization? My introduction is intended to raise the issue of paranoia by performing a prototypically romanticist or humanist reaction against the
the photographs of Neptune and the redemptive

political rhetoric they inspired as a tableau of the global confluence of
technology and the mass media to encompass the invisible. In this tableau, the invisible
retains its traditional function as a figure for epistemological transcendence and for thought beyond episteme. The
combined technologies of newsprint, photography, and space exploration
overdetermine the organization and transmission of pictures of the solar
system, which can only thereafter certify the value of the pregiven frame . Certainty
would then be the sensation affected by this indisputable confirmation of the rigor of mathematical science that
produces the ground of what Heidegger calls Weltbild, or "world picture," to mark
the closure of modern thought. Heidegger writes that "the fundamental event of the
modern age is the conquest of the world picture," by which he means a "structured
image" [Gebild] "that is the creature of man's producing which represents and sets
before."4 He adds that this process of producing and structuring provides a venue
through which man strives to give the measure and draw up the guidelines "for
everything that is" and thus occupy a position of mastery over "the whole ." This
observation leads him to argue that the emergence of the world as picture
coincides with the constitution of man as subjectum: the center of all relation, the
Cartesian cogito that only grants being to "life experience" and that "explains and
evaluates whatever is in its entirety, from the standpoint of man and in relation
to man."5 The historical conjuncture that inaugurates this solipsism is earmarked by the oxymoron of an a historical
"advances" of modernity. It consequently treats
subject who misrecognizes his own moment as firmly and expressly "new."
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Space Pictures (2/2)
Pictures and representations of Earth as a blue globe replace old forms of

ontology with a technik mindset!
Turnbull '06
[Neil, Cool Dude, The Ontological Consequences of Copernicus, Theory, Culture & Society Journal,
2006, Vol. 23(1): 125-139, DOI: 10.1177/0263276406063232, Page 127-128, JCOOK]
planetary
representations of the earth have been mass produced and redeployed as a
symbolic resource bearing a different more critical, that is aesthetic, ethical and
political sense and significance. When seen from space, the earth appears as much more than mere
cosmological detritus or icon of global capitalism. As many have commented, it strikes us as a rather
remarkable planet: redolent with ethical and aesthetic significance and more
like a planetary home than a substellar geological object (see Russell, 1982). As humanity
reconceives itself through its movement across another sky,1 representations of the
earth become suggestive of a new cosmopolitan ontology of worldly copresence and integral to what has become known as banal globalism (Szserzynski
[end of page 127] and Urry, 2002: 467). The satellite representation of the earth as the blue
globe connotes a world with potentially no formal political boundaries,
revealing itself as a rhizome of meteorological, oceanic and technoscientific
flows whose indeterminate geometry coordinates a new symbol to rival the
religious and political symbols of the past by exposing the futility of
nationalistic strife (see Blumenberg, 1987; Hoyle, 1960: 19).
However, what Nietzsche and Heidegger and their followers could not foresee is the extent to which
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Technology
Subjecting the world and people to science and technology results in its
destruction and the hollowing of Being
DeLuca 05
[Kevin Michael DeLuca, Associate Professor of Speech Communication and adjunct in the Institute of
Ecology at the University of Georgia, Thinking With Heidegger: Rethinking Environmental Theory and Practice, Ethics &
the Environment 10.1 (2005) 67-87, Project Muse)//JRCno change]
Machination is unconditional controllability, the domination of all beings, the

world, and earth through calculation, acceleration, technicity, and giganticism.
Calculation represents a reduction of knowing to mathematics and science and
a reduction of the world and earth to what is calculable , a step taken decisively by Descartes
(1999, 8496). Machination is the "pattern of generally calculable explainability, by
which everything draws nearer to everything else equally and becomes
completely alien to itself" (1999, 92). The unrestrained domination of machination produces a
totalizing worldview that enchants: "When machination finally dominates and
permeates everything, then there are no longer any conditions by which still
actually to detect the enchantment and to protect oneself from it. The
bewitchment by technicity and its constantly self-surpassing progress are only
one sign of this enchantment, by [End Page 75] virtue of which everything presses
forth into calculation, usage, breeding, manageability, and regulation" (1999, 86
87). Heidegger prophetically predicts that machination will produce "a gigantic progress of sciences in the future. These
advancements will bring exploitation and usage of the earth as well as rearing
and training of humans into conditions that are still inconceivable today" (1999,
108). Animals and plants are reduced to various forms of use value and, more
significantly, are banished from Being-in-the-world with us: "What is a plant and an
animal to us anymore, when we take away use, embellishment, and
entertainment" (1999, 194). "Nature" suffers a similar fate: " What happens to nature in
technicity, when nature is separated out from beings by the natural sciences?
The growingor better, the simple rolling unto its enddestruction of 'nature'.... And finally
what was left was only 'scenery' and recreational opportunity and even this still
calculated into the gigantic and arranged for the masses" (1999, 195). Under the
unrestrained domination of machination, humans suffer a "hollowing out" (1999,
91, 348) and Being-in-the-world is replaced by "adventures." (I am here translating Erlebnis
as adventure. Others translate it as lived-experience.)
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Telescopes (1/2)
Space Telescopes are historically rooted in political and technological

calculation. The desireability of telescopes derives not from meditation or
revealing, but from the attempt to use telescopes to control the political and
scientific field.
Egan 09
It was the astronomer Lyman Spitzer who first committed the idea of a Space Telescope to paper. In an
audacious 1946 publication entitled the 'Astronomical Advantages of an Extra-terrestrial Observation' (Spitzer 1990), he
initially offered a proposal for the development of a space telescope claiming 'it would uncover
new phenomenon not yet imagined, and perhaps modify profoundly our basic
concepts of space time.' (Zimmerman 2008, 11). Others before had shared his desire to transcend Earth's
firmaments. Previous enterprising designs to exploit the inert and image friendly
environment of space had included the strapping of balloons to a scientific
payload and the science fiction fuelled fancy of moon telescopes. Although there were
certain bold aspects to the report for the time the proposed space telescope being three times bigger than anything
The
delineation of Spitzer's proposal into a government funded publication was a
significant translation of his vision into a material realm; imbued with the
vigour of substance, the idea could now forge a potential trajectory into design
where the dreams of astronomers could be realized. However the early stages of a projects
life, before prospective support is augmented, can contain its most unsettling moments (Latour 1996) and the
mutability of endorsement in the immediate period after the Second World War
demonstrated the capricious nature of an object residing in the stages of
conception. Spitzer's ambitious thinking was greeted with derision from colleagues who regarded the project
ground based in existence his proposal began to forge crucial alliances that gave his idea momentum.
'hazardous and probably undesirable' (Zimmerman 2008, 15). This opposition continued in 1958 when the eminent
astronomer Fred Hoyle insisted 'the cart was being put before the horse' his belief centred on the argument any orbiting
observatory should be offered as an ancillary to the space programme, and not become the principal figure, complaining
the case for space based observation had been 'promulgated with almost
Madison Avenue techniques' (Zimmerman 2008, 20). Such opposition from within one's own community
further
was a difficult obstacle for the project to surmount. Colleagues may have been unconvinced of its merit but their
opposition was rendered insignificant against the development of a more

serious political concern; an object in space not of America's making.
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Telescopes (2/2)
Telescopes will inevitably malfunction. They are created with the assumption
that they will be repaired and maintained, which converts space into a
construction zone for human affairs.
Egan 09
Heidegger wants to highlight incidents that allow us to glimpse at the world 'What is it that makes this world light up'
An important aspect for understanding the narrative of Hubble's

malfunctioning mirror is that our acquaintance with an entity is born from its
failure; it is when they become unusable that we gain knowledge of their existence. Heidegger develops three different
(Heidegger 1962, 75).
modes in which equipment becomes unusable; conspicuousness when something is damaged; obtrusiveness
'we discover its unusability,

however not by looking at it and establishing its properties, but rather by the
circumspection of the dealings in which we use it . When its unusability is thus discovered, equipment becomes
something is missing; obstinacy something stands in the way. For Heidegger
conspicuous' (Heidegger 1962, 102). In Heidegger's vocabulary the equipment that is the mirror becomes pres-ence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit). The mode of
conspiciousness has the function of bringing to the fore the characteristic of presence-at-hand. The mirror was once part of the referential whole amongst a totality
when there is malfunction we

are forced to recognize the mirror for what it is 'the assignment has been
disturbed when something is unusable for some purpose then the
assignment becomes explicit' (Heidegger 1962, 105). Once breakdown has occurred
'Pure presence-at-hand announces itself in such equipment (Heidegger 1962, 103). The
customary action is now for repair where the equipment becomes available to
us once more and reverts 'to the ready-to-hand o(something with which one concerns oneself (Heidegger 1962,
where it was 'constantly sighted beforehand in circum-spection' (Heidegger 1962 ,
105), but
103). The broken mirror becomes presence-at-hand but the relation to the mirror once more becomes ready-tohand once it is under repair. With the incident of
faulty mirror, 'the drama of things themselves' (Harman 2005) erupted into the view of management . With malfunction
acquaintance was renewed with the forgotten mirror, which had become
concealed as part of the referential whole of the telescope, compelling
management to engage with the consequences of past mishandlings, averting
attention to back to the crucial time frames of Hubble's construction ; what had
become hidden in the totality of Hubble's equipmentality now ruptured into
view. The world of management is often peripheral to the actual workings of equipment. It is only through
failure that what was once a tangential piece of equipment becomes the focus
of an organizations full consideration. The fully assembled Hubble takes on an essence of its own,
becoming an autonomous object, sharing the goals of management. When the blurred images are
revealed for the first time, the relationship between organization and object is
disturbed; different circumstances are thrust into the awareness of management, asking to be dealt with, a different
management goal is now revealed, that of repair. The mirror came into view through
management's concernful dealings 'entities become accessible when we put
ourselves into the position of concerning ourselves with them in some such
way' (Heidegger 1962, 96). It was not until the telescope was pointed towards a
constellation of stars and required to take an image that its fault came into
view. 'We discover its unusability, however not by looking at it and establishing
its properties, but rather by the circumspection of the dealings in which we use
it' (Heidegger 1962, 85). It is therefore difficult for management to be fully expectant and therefore prepared for
malfunction. Our primary interaction with equipment comes from use, and in this
the
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sense it is not until the telescope is fully operational that things burst into
management praxis and arrest the attention of NASA's organization . Heidegger suggests
there are ready ways of coping with the disturbance, and the next section will discuss NASA's ways of coping with the faulty mirror; through the serviceable nature
of Hubble's design and human endeavour in space.
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Terraforming
Terraformation of other planets is anthropocentric because it elevates human

use value over all other values of land. It makes us the managers us the world.
This managerial approach forces us into the technological mindset where
planets, the earth and even humanity is waiting on us as a standing reserve.
Markley '97
[Robert, Jackson distinguished chair of British Literature @ West Virginia University, 1997, Falling into
Theory: simulation, terraformation, and eco-economics in Kim Stanley robinsons Martian Trilogy, Modern Fiction Studies
43.3]
At stake in Ann's comments is the moral relationship of humankind to the land . For her,
the Martian landscape itself challenges androcentric and biogenic justifications
for terraforming the planet; creating the conditions for life is purposeless in her mind because the
geology of the planet is inherently valuable as a "record" of planetary and solar systemic
history that dwarfs human technologies, intentions, and desires . If Red Mars is "pure,"
however, its purity can be appreciated only through what are ultimately anthropocentric perceptions and values, through
an aesthetic appreciation of its beauty and an intellectual, and even spiritual, recognition of the knowledge it offers. In
response to Ann, Sax emphasizes our inability to imagine beauty, or knowledge, or usefulness without giving in to a
mystical anthropocentrism. His scientific defense of rapid terraformation makes heroic the irrevocable imposition by
humans of a metaphysics of order on physical reality: "'The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind,' [Sax] said in that
dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. 'Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no
different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It's we who understand it, and we who give it meaning'"
(177). Sax's pronouncements suggest something of the attraction and limitations of his traditional scientific outlook, a
worldview which itself will evolve throughout Green Mars and Blue Mars. If Ann's defense of a "pure" Mars provokes a
questioning of biocentrism, Sax identifies knowledge rather than the exploitation of resources as the ultimate rationale for
terraformation. In this regard, his response to Ann becomes a kind of philosophical one-upmanship; it is precisely human
intervention that produces the "meaning" that structures even her celebration of an aesthetics and science of "pure"
11 Yet Sax's insistence on the anthropocentric nature of meaning in the universe

the basis of terraformation, of Baconian science
itself, is an adolescent faith in human significance, a will-to-play (and play God)
with the universe. For Sax, at least in Red Mars, science may be unpredictable and modeling techniques limited,
observation, an ideal of nonintervention.
ironically reveals the accuracy of Ann's criticism :
but the mind remains capable of constructing knowledge by the inductive method, of organizing experimental programs
and then using the results to generate rather than simply recognize meaning in the cosmos.
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Terrorism (1/2)
Political responses to terrorism are destined to fail a thinking of terrorism is a

prior question.
Mitchell '05
This does not mean that being exists unperturbed somewhere behind or beyond these beings. The withdrawal of being is
Heideggerian
thinking, then, allows us to ask the question of our times and to think terrorism. My
contention in the following is that the withdrawal of being shows itself today in terrorism ,
where beings exist as terrorized. Terrorism, in other words, is not simply the sum
total of activities carried out by terrorist groups, but a challenge directed at
beings as a whole.Terrorism is consequently a metaphysical issue , and it names the
way in which beings show themselves today, i.e., as terrorized. This "ontological" point demands that
there be the "ontic" threat of real terrorists. Further, this metaphysical aspect of terrorism also
indicates that a purely political response to terrorism is destined to fail. Political reactions to terrorism,
which depict terrorism from the outset as a political problem, miss the fact that
terrorism itself, qua metaphysical issue, is coincident with a transformation in
politics . That is to say, political responses to terrorism fail to think terrorism. In what
found in these abandoned beings themselves and is determinative for the way they exist.
follows I will elaborate some of the consequences of thinking terrorism as a question of being and sketch a few
characteristics of the politicotechnological landscape against which terrorism takes place.
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Terrorism (2/2)
It's the aff's technological enframing that makes terrorism inevitable we

should recognize that true security is impossible and not look at the
metaphysical issue of terrorism in a technological view.
Mitchell '05
Heideggerian thinking is a thinking of being , then it must be able to think

terrorism, for the simple reason that terrorism names the current countenance of being
for our times, and without such a correspondence to being, Heideggerian thinking is nothing. The issue is
not one of applying a preestablished Heideggerian doctrine to an object or
situation that would remain outside of thought. Rather, the issue is one of
recognizing that the objects and situations of our world themselves call for
thought , and that in thinking the world, we enter into a correspondence with being. But what sort of
correspondence can be achieved between the thinking of being and terrorism?
Insofar as
Heidegger's articulation of the age of technology already contains in germ four routes of access for the thinking of
Heidegger himself witnessed a transformation in the making of war,

such that he was led to think beyond the Clausewitzian model of modem
warfare and to open the possibility for a "warfare" of a different sort. This thought
beyond war is itself an opening to terrorism. Second, Heidegger prioritizes terror (Erschrecken) as a
fundamental mood appropriate to our age of technological enframing. Terror is a
positive mood, not a privative one, and it corresponds to the way that being gives itself today. Third, Heidegger
thinks threat and danger in an "ontological" manner that calls into question
traditional notions of presence and absence. Terrorism attends this transformation in presence.
Finally, and following from all of this, Heidegger rethinks the notion of security in a manner
that alerts us to the oxymoronic character of "homeland security" and the
impossibility of ever achieving a condition of complete safety from terrorism. In
terrorism. First,
each of these ways, Heideggerian thinking responds to this most uncommon of challenges.
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Transportation
1. The affirmative plan forces people to view transportation in terms of efficiency and control, making
the safest, fastest way to force people to travel in only so many directions. This form of logic is the
basis of the technological mindset that develops in all of us forcing us to view people in terms of
control.
Bonham and Cox 10 [Jennifer and Peter. Lecturer in Geographical and Evironmental Studies at the
University of Adelaide. Teaches in Faculty of Social Science at the University of Chester as a Senior
Lecturer. The Disruptive Traveller? A Foucauldian Analysis of Cycleways.pg. 44. JCook.]
Through the late nineteenth but especially the twentieth century it became thinkable, practicable and
meaningful to study urban movement. Until recently, the meaning of that movement has been asserted and
widely accepted as transport the journey from a to b specifically to accomplish some activity or task at point b (Bonham 2000).
Over time, the journey, or trip, has come to appear as selfevident, as mechanisms for the study of journeys
origindestination studies, household travel surveys, vehicle counts excise particular practices from the mass of daily activities and bring
them under scrutiny. Objectifying travel as transport establishes the journey as a by-product of its end
points derived demand and provides the imperative for trips to be accomplished as quickly, or as
economically, as possible (Bonham and Ferretti 1999). Derived demand functions as a statement (Foucault 1976:10217) within
the field of transport, a statement that both disciplines those who would study travel, and discounts, if not excludes, the many other
possibilities of our journeys. Drawing on Foucaults (1980:119) understanding of power as productive, the
objectification of travel as transport is productive in that it has enabled the development of a vast body
of knowledge and brought new subjects into effect the pedestrian, cyclist, motorist, passenger. These
subjects have been facilitated through the operation of power at a micro-scale involving practices of
differentiation and separation of users of public space, identifying those who are stationary and those
who move (Bonham 2002; Frello 2008), and subsequently scrutinising, sorting, categorising and disciplining
those who move according to the conduct of their journey (Bonham 2006). A number of practices particular ways of
moving, particular types of observations, pauses, conversations have been separated out, excluded as NOT-transport and marginalised in
the space of the street. Other practices keeping to course, attuning hearing, sight and reflexes to the
operation of vehicles have been worked upon in disciplining the mobile bod y (Bonham 2006; Paterson 2007).
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
War Claims
The very act of war depends on technological thought- Its very nature is based
on the foundation of the technological mindset. It's the use of force and
violence to control and manage other nations and peoples to follow our will!
Burke 07 [Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney, Ontologies of
War: Violence, Existence, and Reason, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007, Project Muse]
war and existence are intertwined. However within such existential imperatives to war lies a more
performative (and thus rationalistic) discourse: that once it is deemed
necessary to use force in defence of one's right to exist it is possible to do so, to
translate military means into political ends in a controlled and rational way.
This is the second, rationalist form of state reason that most commonly takes the
name of 'strategy'. Its fundamental tenet was most famously expressed in Carl Von Clausewitz's argument that
war 'is a mere continuation of policy by other means ...a pulsation of violent
force...subject to the will of a guiding intelligence'. 10 That this is a textbook model
of instrumental reason, one that imports Newtonian physics into human relations, is clear in Clausewitz's
influential definition: 'War is an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will '.
Thus
technical,
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Wind Power
Wind Turbines are the worst manifestations of the device mentality and the
technological mindset
Brittain 02
[professor of philosophy (Gordon G. Jr. , Fitting Wind Power to landscape: a place-based wind
turbine)//CP]
Borgmanns interpretation of technology and the character of contemporary life can be criticized in a number of ways. Still,
the distinction between things and devices reveals , I think, the essence of our
inability to develop a landscape aesthetic on which contemporary wind turbines
are or might be beautiful and thereby explains the widespread resistance to
placing them where they might be seen. The fact of the matter is that
contemporary wind turbines are for most of us merely devices. There is
therefore no way to go beyond or beneath their conventionally uncomfortable
appearance to the discovery of a latent mechanical or organic or what-have-you
beauty. The attempt to do so is blocked from the outset by the character of the
machine. Think about it for a moment: Except for the blades, virtually
everything is shielded, including the towers of many turbines, hidden from view
behind the same sort of stainless steel that sheathes many electronic devices.
Moreover, the machinery is located a great distance away from anyone, save the mechanic
who must first don climbing gear to access it and often, for liability reasons, behind chain-link fences and locked
gates.The
lack of disclosure goes together with the fact that the turbines are
merely producers of a commodity, electrical energy, and interchangeable in this
respect with any other technology that produces the same commodity at least
as cheaply and reliably. The only important differences between wind turbines
and other energy generating technologies are not intrinsic to what might be
called their design philosophies. That is, while they differ with respect to their
inputs, their fuels, and with respect to their environmental impacts, the same
sort of description can be given of each. There is, as a result, but a single
standard on the basis of which wind turbines are to be evaluated efficiency. It
is not to be wondered that they are, with only small modifications among them,
so uniform. In terms of this uniformity, wind turbines are very much unlike other architectural arrivalsfor example,
houses and traditional windmills. Different styles of architecture developed in different parts of the world in response to
local geological and climatic conditions, to the availability of local materials, to the spiritual and philosophical patterns of
In Heideggers wonderful, dark expression,

these buildings gather. But there is nothing local or gathering about
contemporary wind turbines. They are everywhere and anonymously the same ,
whether produced in Denmark or Japan, placed in India or Spain alien objects
impressed on a region and in no deeper way connected to it. They have nothing
to say to us, nothing to express, no inside. They conceal rather than
reveal. The sense of place that they might eventually engender cannot,
therefore, be unique. In addition, wind turbines are quintessential devices in
that they preclude engagement. Or rather, the only way in which the vast
majority of people can engage with them is visually (and occasionally by ear). People
cannot climb over and around them, they cannot get inside them, they cannot
tinker with them. They cannot even get close to them. There is no larger and
the local culture. As a result, these buildings create a context.
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook

non-trivial physical or biological way in which they can be appropriated or their
beauty grasped. The irony, of course, is that, precluded from any other sort of
engagement with wind turbines, most people find them visually objectionable,
though they might be willing to countenance their existence as the lesser of
evils.
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Anthropocentrism
A Technological View of Earth Pushes Us Into Anthropocentrism because we see

everything as having no inherent relationship. Other species and animals
become less than objects to us allowing the justification of an anthropocentric
view of the world.
Turnbull '06
2006, Vol. 23(1): 125-139, DOI: 10.1177/0263276406063232, Page 131 - 132, JCOOK]
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
Thus,
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 Heideggers view, only a world
supported by the earth can give things their proper measure: and without this
relation, things have no true measure (and in such a case, the measurement of
the world in terms of an abstract [end of page 132] mathematicized facticity
required for the efficient maintenance of purely technological relationships
becomes the anthropocentric measure of all things).
***IMPACTS***
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Biopower
The technological mindset manifests itself in the form of biopower that renders
all life to standing reserve
Dean '2k
[Sociologist at Macquarie University (Mitchell, "Always Look on the Dark Side: Politics and the Meaning of
Life", http://apsa2000.anu.edu.au/confpapers/dean.rtf).JRC]
Aristotle said that while the polis comes into existence for the sake of life, its exists for the good life (1967, 9, I.i.8).
Today the good life has come to require a politics for the sake of life. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we
Rarely a week
goes by when there is not a new biotechnological discovery or application which
allows us to use and manipulate the processes of life itself for any number of
ends. Post-menopausal women can now bear children. Infertile women and men can become parents. The genes from
appear to be crossing ever-new thresholds towards learning the secrets of the creation of life itself.
an animal can be implanted into a vegetable. Sheep and other animals can be cloned. Evidence of criminality or innocence
can be discovered through DNA testing. With the Human Genome Project in competition with private companies
engaged in completing the map of the human genome, we are issued with extraordinary promises in disease detection,
prevention and eradication. We are also issued with warnings concerning designer babies, the new eugenics, and the uses
the manipulation
of the very biological processes life are not limited to what has been called the
genetic age made possible by molecular biology and human genetics. There
are advances in organ transplantation and in our medical capacities to sustain
life. All of these processes of the manipulation of life contain what we like to
think of as ethical questions. Notions of brain death and the ensuing futility of further attempts to
of genetic information by governments, private companies and employers. The possibilities for
restore normal life functioning redefine problems of euthanasia. Various forms of prenatal testing and screening of
Other such ethical questions

concern the harvesting of organs for transplantation, or of the maintenance of
the integrity and diversity of biological species in the face of genetically
modified crops and seeds, etc. The capacity to manipulate our mere biological
life, rather than simply to govern aspects of forms of life, implies a bio-politics
that contests how and when we use these technologies and for what purposes.
pregnant women redefine the conditions of acceptability of abortions.
It also implies a redrawing of the relations between life and death, and a new thanato-politics, a new politics of death. At
some distance from these advances in biomedicine and biotechnology are the issues of life and death that are played in
various arenas of international politics and human rights. These concern the effects of the break-ups of nation-states from
Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union to Indonesia, the subsequent movement, detention and mass death of refugees and illegal
immigrants, and the conditions and forms under which military action, peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention are
acceptable. Detention camps are becoming a feature of modern liberal-democratic states. On the one hand, the twentieth
century gave us a name for the death of a whole people or race, genocide. On the other, it sought to promote the
universal rights of individuals by virtue of their mere existence as human beings. Biopolitics and thanato-politics
are played out in war, in torture, and in biological, chemical and atomic weapons of mass destruction as much as in
declarations of human rights and United Nations peacekeeping operations. The potentialities for the care and the
manipulation of the biological processes of life and of the powers of death have
never appeared greater than they do today. But how do we consider this problem as a political problem? How
are issues of life and death related to our conceptions of politics and to the way in which we think about states and
societies, and their futures? Are the ideas of powers of life and death peculiarly modern, or do they lie at a deeper strata?
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Capitalism (1/2)
Technological enframing is the ideological basis for capitalist production and

power relations.
Joronen '11
[Mikko, Dept. of Geography, U. of Turku, Finland, Dwelling in the Sites of Finitude: Resisting the
Violence of the Metaphysical Globe, Antipode, 0(0).]
As a self-strengthening metaphysical imperative, machination is not just

structured to further maximise the utility and control of beings under the predelineating framework of calculation it imposes, but also to extend its control
over the earth and thus to use the whole planet as its product. Like the planetary
earth, human beings are also set up into this positioning of machination so that
everything appears, as Heidegger (2005:2930) points out in DasGestell, to have the potential to
be set up for orderings and profit making. Hence, the contemporary globe-wide
economic subjugation and commodification of beings under the profit-seeking
and utilisation of markets evidently rise out of the ontological foundation of
machination: within machination all beings are positioned (gestellt) under the
power (Macht) that unfolds everything as makeable (machbar) in the calculation-driven procedures
of command (eg Heidegger 1998:47, 2000:8894; see Eldred 2000; Haar 1993:80; Heidegger 1973:107). Thus,
machination does not imply a mere levelling of the space of the earth where space becomes amenable to the manipulative
Machination also promotes an ever expanding and enhancing power that

orders the globe through the pervasive calculations capable of operating in
different disguises disguises such as the contemporary capital-led promotion of the all embracing market-globe
orderings.
through expanding profit-seeking activities and increasing consumption of things as a useable resource subjugated under
the calculated market value.
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Capitalism (2/2)
The technological, planetary-cosmological view of space is only a symbol of

Western capitalism's ever expansive nature. The technological mindset only
furthers this expanse.
Turnbull '06
2006, Vol. 23(1): 125-139, DOI: 10.1177/0263276406063232, Page 127, JCOOK]
the planetary earth is a symbol of

Western capitalisms domination of nature and global exploitation of cultural
life. Seen thus, the image of the earth from space can be seen as the aesthetic core
of the ideology of the expansionary neo-liberal phase of global capitalism
and the sublime object of the post-ideological West . It is an object that conveys a new
satellite geography (see Redfield, 1996) and a placeless map that is the representational
condition of possibility for the establishment of global surveillance and
communication systems (Western capitals command-and-control system). This
These Heideggerian concerns are echoed in the claim that
placeless space of the planet is seen as challenging traditional notions of space and perhaps even traditional conceptions of
the interplanetary idea of the earth is not only

internally related to the idea of limitless capitalist expansion (see Virilio, 2002: 63)
because, in his view, planetary technologies are bringing about an exotic
reorganisation of sight enabling perception to escape from the real space of
our planet into what he terms a horizonless perception under a vanished sky (see
Virilio, 1997: 2, 2000: 63). Here, as with more orthodox Heideggerian analyses, the representation of the
earth as planet is seen as a symbol of the deterritorializing technological power
of global capitalism: a power that renders the sphere of experience as a synthesis of home and non-place, a
the real itself. And according to Paul Virilio,
nowhere place (Beck, 2002: 30).
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Environmental Destruction (1/2)
Technological enframing justifies a totalizing worldview that encourages the

domination and elimination of animals, plants and natural environments.
Deluca '05
[Kevin, Assistant Professor of Speech Communication and an adjunct in the Institute of Ecology at the
University of Georgia, Thinking With Heidegger: Rethinking Environmental Theory Ethics and the Environment 10.1]
Machination is unconditional controllability, the domination of all beings, the

world, and earth through calculation, acceleration, technicity, and giganticism.
Calculation represents a reduction of knowing to mathematics and science and a
reduction of the world and earth to what is calculable , a step taken decisively by Descartes
(1999, 8496). Machination is the pattern of generally calculable explainability, by which everything draws nearer to
The unrestrained domination

of machination produces a totalizing worldview that enchants: When
machination finally dominates and permeates everything, then there are no
longer any conditions by which still actually to detect the enchantment and to
protect oneself from it. The bewitchment by technicity and its constantly self-surpassing progress are only one
everything else equally and becomes completely alien to itself (1999, 92).
sign of this enchantment, by virtue of which everything presses forth into calculation, usage, breeding, manageability, and
machination will produce a gigantic

progress of sciences in the future. These advancements will bring exploitation
and usage of the earth as well as rearing and training of humans into conditions
that are still inconceivable today (1999, 108). Animals and plants are reduced to
various forms of use value and, more significantly, are banished from Being-inthe-world with us: What is a plant and an animal to us anymore, when we take
away use, embellishment, and entertainment (1999, 194). Nature suffers a similar fate:
What happens to nature in technicity, when nature is separated out from beings by the
natural sciences? The growing or better, the simple rolling unto its end destruction of
nature. . . . And finally what was left was only scenery and recreational opportunity and even this still calculated into
regulation (1999, 8687). Heidegger prophetically predicts that
the gigantic and arranged for the masses (1999, 195). Under the unrestrained domination of machination, humans suffer
a hollowing out (1999, 91, 348) and Being-in-the-world is replaced by adventures. (I am here translating Erlebnis as
adventure. Others translate it as lived-experience.)
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Environmental Destruction (2/2)
Attempts to manage environmental catastrophe lock us into a calculative

mindset that perpetuate the root cause of your impacts
McWhorter '92
the Earth, ed. by Ladelle McWhorter)//JRC]
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.
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Laundry List (1/2)
We are doomed to complete ontological damnation if we allow calculative

mastery over the world to continue. This results in ecological destruction,
nuclear war, a complete loss of meaning, the end of thinking, the end of politics
and the end of everything.
Thiele 95
The age of planetary mastery, technological dominance, and the end of

metaphysics, Heidegger speculates, will likely endure for a long time (EP 95). Indeed, there is no
certainty that, from humanity's point of view, a succession to some other mode of revealing truth is ordained. The
In the absence of an ontological

reorientation, humanity would then be "left to the giddy whirl of its products so
that it may tear itself to pieces and annihilate itself in empty nothingness" (EP 87).
Estimating the likelihood of this apocalyptic conclusion is not Heidegger's concern. In any case, it is fair to say
that the physical annihilation of humanity is not Heidegger's most proximate
worry. Foremost in his mind is the on-tological meaning of this potential selfannihilation. If, as Heidegger put it, "the will to action, which here means the
will to make and be effective, has overrun and crushed thought," then our
chances of escaping the catastrophic whirlwind of enframing are slim indeed
(WCT25). The danger is that intensive technological production may simply
overpower human being's capacity for manifold modes of disclosure, displacing
the freedom inherent in philosophic thought, artistic creativity, and political
action. Undeniably technology fosters thinking, creating, and acting of sorts. Calculation, cognition, innovation, and
technological quest may reach its climax, as it were, without us.
engineering are highly valued within technological society, though even here it is not clear that computers and robots
might not eventually displace more of these capacities than their production demands. The real menace, however, is that
social engineering would obviate political action, endlessly innovative

production would leave artistic creativity to atrophy, and utilitarian cognition
would fully displace philosophic questioning." Because the human capacity for thought is the
foundation for artistic creativity and political action, Heidegger indicates that its loss is his most pressing concern. He
writes, "In
this dawning atomic age a far greater danger threatensprecisely

when the danger of a third world war has been removed . ... 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" (DT 56). In the wake of this revolution we
find ourselves desperately in need of "an education in thinking" (TB 72). Such an education would, at a minimum, allow us
to discern why calculative thought could never adequately substitute for philosophic thought. In the absence of such
learning, and in the continued thrall of enframing, our capacity for philosophic thought may wither beyond resuscitation.
Most disturbing and dangerous, however, this situation need not disturb or appear
dangerous at all. Technological calculation and innovation may satisfy both our
intensified material needs and our diminished spiritual demands . As Heidegger warns:
"The devastation of the earth can easily go hand in hand with a guaranteed
supreme living standard for man, and just as easily with the organized
establishment of a uniform state of happiness for all men" (WCT 30). Devastation
need not mean discontent. Indeed, technological devastation may consist in
humanity's creation of a brave and exciting new world. Utopia and oblivion , as
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook

may well coincide. Devastation, Heidegger states, "is the high-velocity expulsion
Mnemosyne, or remembrance, designates not simply a
recollection of what was, but also a "steadfast intimate concentration" on and a
"devotion" toward worldly things and affairs. Remembrance is the "constant concentrated abiding
Buckminster Fuller prophesied,
of Mnemosyne"
(WCT 30).
with something not just with something that has passed, but in the same way with what is present and with what may
The expulsion of memory, therefore, is the loss of the capacity to abide by , rather than
challenge forth, the world. Once the fourfold is reduced to an extension of our
cerebral computations and technical orderings our capacity to dwell within its
horizons vanishes. We sit complacent in homelessness. The devastation is
complete.
come. What is past, present, and to come appears in the oneness of its own present being" (WCT 140).
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Laundry List (2/2)
Technological enframing is the root cause of militarism, geopolitics, economic

exploitation and ecological destruction. It locks us into discursive constraints
which do not allow us to think in other ways. We must stop the technological
mindset to stop the root of the impacts.
Burke '07
[Anthony, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney. Ontologies of
War: Violence, Existence and Reason, John Hopkins University Press, Project Muse]
I have sought to extend by analyzing the

militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security -- is a
view that the challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon,
government, technology or policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and
understanding that lays claim to our entire space of truth and existence . Many of
the most destructive features of contemporary modernity -- militarism,
repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention, geopolitics, economic
exploitation and ecological destruction -- derive not merely from particular choices
by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical'
discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment
images of being. Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe,
policymakers' choices become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities,
and humans suffer and die. Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the
chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course
of action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that
reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints -available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that
derive from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which
then preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses , however
What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that
ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic.
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Neoliberalism
Viewing everything in a calculable, manageable and technological mindset is

mearly symbolic for the exploitation and expanse of neo-liberalism! Pushing
things into a calcuable position is used to expand neo-liberalism and capitalism
and is a result of Western enframing or the world through the technological
mindset!
Turnbull '06
2006, Vol. 23(1): 125-139, DOI: 10.1177/0263276406063232, Page 127, JCOOK]
the planetary earth is a symbol of

Western capitalisms domination of nature and global exploitation of cultural
life. Seen thus, the image of the earth from space can be seen as the aesthetic
core of the ideology of the expansionary neo-liberal phase of global
capitalism and the sublime object of the post-ideological West . It is an object that
conveys a new satellite geography (see Redfield, 1996) and a placeless map that is the
representational condition of possibility for the establishment of global
surveillance and communication systems (Western capitals command-andcontrol system). This placeless space of the planet is seen as challenging traditional notions of space and perhaps
even traditional conceptions of the real itself. And according to Paul Virilio, the interplanetary idea of the
earth is not only internally related to the idea of limitless capitalist expansion
(see Virilio, 2002: 63) because, in his view, planetary technologies are bringing about an
exotic reorganisation of sight enabling perception to escape from the real
space of our planet into what he terms a horizonless perception under a
vanished sky (see Virilio, 1997: 2, 2000: 63). Here, as with more orthodox Heideggerian analyses, the
representation of the earth as planet is seen as a symbol of the
deterritorializing technological power of global capitalism : a power that renders the sphere
These Heideggerian concerns are echoed in the claim that
of experience as a synthesis of home and non-place, a nowhere place (Beck, 2002: 30).
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook
Nihilism
The assumption that the universe is intelligible and knowable erases creative
revealing in the world. The result is the worst form of nihilism and
meaninglessness imaginable.
Seigfried '90
After pointing out that to "the one great Cyclops eye of Socrates . . . was denied the pleasure of gazing into the Dionysian
the Apollinian tendency becomes disastrous when

by insisting that the
world is completely intelligible and comprehensible (1967a, p. 91), that is, "that thought, using
the thread of causality, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not
only of knowing being but even of correcting it" (1967a, p. 95). It is this kind of
excessive optimism and faith in the universal applicability of the principle of
causality that terminates Greek tragedy (1967a, pp. 89-91) which is also dangerous in science and
technology. For unless they remain conscious of the volatility of the world before and/or
apart from our cultivation, scientists will, like Socrates, necessarily overlook the creative
transformation in their work. They will then end in despair and nihilism
whenever they reach limits from which they "gaze into what defies
illumination" (1967a, pp. 97-98) and come to realize that nature cannot be
transformed into a purely logical world (1984, p. 34). And they will inevitably reach
such limits because in their drive to penetrate the abysses of being and uncover
its truths, they will again and again be forced to acknowledge that what they
formerly took to be its truths were actually appearances, that is, a web of
configurations which the genius of people (in pre-scientific ages mainly in the name of religion)
has spread over an aimlessly shifting world, covering it by imposing on it the
appearance of as much law- and order as was necessary for cultivating certain
forms of life. They will come to recognize that nature is a creature of our needs and realize that instead of pure
being we encounter only a projection of ourselves. Of course, such discoveries must lead to despair
only as long as scientists keep forgetting the bewildering character of the
undeveloped world and overlook its creative organization and cultivation in and
through our constructive work (1967a, p. 98).
abysses" (1967a, p. 89), Nietzsche argues that
in his rationalist method Socrates withdraws "into the cocoon of logical schematism"
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Nuclear War (1/2)
The forgetting of being makes all acts of destruction not events in and of
themselves but rather merely signs of a new age defined by technological
comportmentan unworld that justifies nuclear annihilation.
Milchman and Rosenberg '96
[Alan, Alan. Professor of Political Science at Queens College and Assistant

Professor of Philosophy at Queens College. Heidegger, Planetary Technics, Holocaust. Martin Heidegger and the
Holocaust. Ed. Milchman and Rosenberg. 1996. pp. 225-226]
The Holocaust can provide insight into the meaning of the danger that threatens
the West. We are not suggesting that the Holocaust constitutes that danger, but
rather that it is a sign of that danger. For Heidegger the danger was that, as a
result of the reduction of nature and humans to standing reserve , the oneness of the
fourfold would be definitively shattered and modern man would cease to be a mortal and would
henceforth perish but not die. For Heidegger, such a condition would be marked not
simply by the forgetting of Being, butfar worseby a forgetting of the
forgetting of Being; the essential distress of modernity would be immeasurably
heightened by the inability of humans to any longer feel that distress. In
place of a world, humankind would inhabit an un-world (Unwelt). While Heidegger is
eloquent concerning the danger in his later writings, the fashion in which mans factical existence would be actually
transformed by the growing specter of an un-world, the stages by which such an Unwelt would emerge, as the danger
loomed, was never clearly spelled out. Hubert Dreyfus, basing himself on Heideggers own insistence that what threatened
the real danger, was less the atomic bomb than the technological
understanding of Being that tendentially reduced all beings to standing reserve ,
man,
has concluded that the un-world that Heidegger saw emerging might be a perfectly ordered society dedicated to the
welfare of all.41 This view, that the Unwelt might be a smoothly functioning, consumerist society, though one in which
man no longer felt distress and no longer manifested a concern for Being, a society in which there would seem to be no
If Heidegger was determined to

show that what threatens man was not the atomic bomb but the reign of das
Ge-Stell, it was not to deny the threat posed by the bomb, but rather to make
clear that the bomb was the culmination of a process that began with the
technological understanding of Being. As Heidegger asserts in The Thing: Man stares at
what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He does not see that
the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long
since taken place, has already happened.42 Heidegger does not deny the threat posed by the bomb,
place for Auschwitz and its death-world, seems questionable to us.
or the train of destruction that would characterize such an un-world, so much as insist on its source, and identify what he
sees as its Grund. Moreover, what is implied in Dreyfuss position is that the smoothly functioning society and the deathworld are mutually exclusive, that the man-made mass death symbolized by Auschwitz cannot be factored into the unworld. But why is the extermination of those designated as the Other, those who are the embodiment of alterity,
incompatible with this image of a perfectly ordered society? It seems to us that the horror of the death-world can all too
easily be routinized and normalilized in an Unwelt, where humans have been turned into standing reserve. Finally, the
image of the un-world as a site where everyone might simply become healthy and happy, even as they forget their
forgetting of Being,43 overlooks Heideggers insistence, in his Overcoming Metaphysics, that: The
world wars
and their character of totality are already a consequence of the abandonment
of Being.44 It is precisely this character of the Unwelt as a site of misery and
devastation which seems to stamp Heideggers thinking. Thus , in his Heraclitus lecture
course of 1943, Heidegger raises the question of the progress to which humankind
can look forward under the reign of planetary technics: Forward? Where to,
please? To the shattered cities on the Rhine and the Ruhr ?45 This imagery of broken cities
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and people seems to us to better accord with Heideggers vision of the un-world than that of a consumer society. Thus, we
Auschwitz constitutes a grim sign of what it would mean for the

oneness of das Geviert to be shattered, for the dwelling (Wohnung) of mortals to be
destroyed, and of just how close that threat is. At Auschwitz the Heideggerian imagery became
believe that
real: Behind its barbed wire we can see, in all its horror, what in Heideggerian terms might constitute the end of the world.
The Holocaust thereby provides an indication of what an Unwelt would look like. The linkage of the Holocaust to the image
of the un-world makes it possible to bring out what is latent in the Heideggerian text.
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Nuclear War (2/2)
Enframing of the world turns all of existence to standing-reserve, an ontological

contradiction that makes nuclear annihilation possible.
Beckman '2K
[Tad, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, California, Martin Heidegger and Environmental Ethics,
http://www2.hmc.edu/~tbeckman/personal/Heidart.html.]
nuclear annihilation is, currently, the most dramatic and ironic sign of
technology's "success" and of its overwhelming power; mass itself has been
grasped as a standing-reserve of enormous energy . On the one hand we consider
ourselves, rightfully, the most advanced humans that have peopled the earth but,
on the other hand, we can see, when we care to, that our way of life has also become
the most profound threat to life that the earth has yet witnessed. (14) Medical science
The threat of
and technology have even begun to suggest that we may learn enough about disease and the processes of aging in the
human body that we might extend individual human lives indefinitely . In this respect,
we have not only

usurped the gods' rights of creation and destruction of species, but we may
even usurp the most sacred and terrifying of the gods' rights, the determination
of mortality or immortality. The gods, it is true, have been set aside in our time; they are merely antiquated
conceptions. The "withdrawal of the gods" is a sign of our pervasive power and our
progressive "ego-centrism." The human ego stands at the center of everything
and, indeed, sees no other thing or object with which it must reckon on an equal footing. We have become
alone in the universe in the most profound sense. Looking outward, we see only
ourselves in so far as we see only objects standing-in-reserve for our dispositions . It
is no wonder that we have "ethical problems" with our environment because the whole concept of the environment has
been profoundly transformed. A major portion of the environment in which modern Westerners live, today, is the product
of human fabrication and this makes it ever more difficult for us to discover a correct relationship with that portion of the
environment that is still given to us. It is all there to be taken, to be manipulated, to be used and consumed, it seems. But
There is nothing that

we can see today that really hinders us from doing anything with the
environment, including if we wish destroying it completely and for all time. This, I take
it is the challenge of environmental ethics, the challenge of finding a way to
convince ourselves that there are limits of acceptable human action where the
environment is involved . But where can we look for the concepts that we need to fabricate convincing arguments?
The contemporary critique of technology has taken the form of attacking these and other sensitive issues. Both the
creative and destructive powers of technology have begun to frighten us
because we can begin to see our real limitations as knowledgeable managers
and organizers of the world. And the concept of a human fabricated immortality staggers us because it
what in that conception limits us or hinders us from using it in any way that we wish?
places us, now, in the position of having to make the fundamental decision of whether we humans are better off as mortals
or as immortals. These are matters that nature once dictated and that demanded no human consideration. We have to ask
whether human intelligence is really capable of addressing them? Can we trust our judgment in matters of this scope?
What Heidegger pointed out in "The Question Concerning Technology" is, first of all, that this critique is fundamentally
misplaced. It is misplaced in time and it is misplaced in scope. It is misplaced in time because we assume that technology
we assume that
technology is merely a neutral instrument in our hands and with which we can
do as we will. Both of these erroneous assumptions tend to render us less effective
in working out our problems with technology and with ourselves. By limiting the era of
has been problematic for us only in the last two centuries; it is misplaced in scope because
technology to the last two centuries, we create the hidden assumption that the historical path of Western development is
essentially independent of technology. Thus, we assume that Western civilization is founded firmly on various roots that
can be called forth to deal with technology. Seeing technology as a relative newcomer, we assume that we are anchored in
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something else that can take "spiritual" command of technology and turn it into a more constructive agency of design. Our
mistaken assessment of the lifetime of technology is really caused by our failure to understand its essence.
Technology must be understood in its essence and not merely as industrial

machinery, space-age refrigerators, and computer-directed guidance systems.
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Terrorism (1/2)
The aff's technological enframing that makes terrorism inevitable we should

recognize that true security is impossible and see the metaphysical issue of
terrorism.
Mitchell '05
Heideggerian thinking is a thinking of being , then it must be able to think

terrorism, for the simple reason that terrorism names the current countenance of being
for our times, and without such a correspondence to being, Heideggerian thinking is nothing. The issue is
not one of applying a preestablished Heideggerian doctrine to an object or
situation that would remain outside of thought. Rather, the issue is one of
recognizing that the objects and situations of our world themselves call for
thought , and that in thinking the world, we enter into a correspondence with being. But what sort of
correspondence can be achieved between the thinking of being and terrorism?
Insofar as
Heidegger's articulation of the age of technology already contains in germ four routes of access for the thinking of
Heidegger himself witnessed a transformation in the making of war,

such that he was led to think beyond the Clausewitzian model of modem
warfare and to open the possibility for a "warfare" of a different sort. This thought
beyond war is itself an opening to terrorism. Second, Heidegger prioritizes terror (Erschrecken) as a
fundamental mood appropriate to our age of technological enframing. Terror is a
positive mood, not a privative one, and it corresponds to the way that being gives itself today. Third, Heidegger
thinks threat and danger in an "ontological" manner that calls into question
traditional notions of presence and absence. Terrorism attends this transformation in presence.
Finally, and following from all of this, Heidegger rethinks the notion of security in a manner
that alerts us to the oxymoronic character of "homeland security" and the
impossibility of ever achieving a condition of complete safety from terrorism. In
terrorism. First,
each of these ways, Heideggerian thinking responds to this most uncommon of challenges.
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Terrorism (2/2)
Terrorism the result of technological domination of the world it is an attempt

to break free from the standing reserve which the aff creates through their
technological mindset.
Mitchell '05
Terror takes a situation that

looks hopelessly doomed and finds the essential within it, but terror contains its own demise, too. We
flee from it. We respond to it with a hardening of our own ways; we reaffirm the
identity of being instead of opening ourselves to others. The American response
to terror has been one of Americanism , there can be no doubt about that. Terror ends in this, and
Nothing stable, this juncture in being itself must be followed and traced. It trembles.
there is no commemoration, just a forgetting. The commemorative aspect of terror allows us to remember the fallen and
Terrorism will take place in

the withdrawal of being, in the unworld of machination. The modem
configuration of war is surpassed by the technological plan of homogenized
circulation, and the distinction between war and peace falls away in their
mutual commitment to furthering the cycle of production and consumption. The
abandonment of being that forms this unworld by draining the world of its
being does not occur without a trace, however, and terror in its trembling
corresponds to that trace. Terrorism necessarily results from such a devastation-or, "becoming-desert,"
Vendiistung-of the world; terrorism is always born in the desert. Terrorism is metaphysical because
it touches everything, every particular being, all of which may be attacked and annihilated. The
circulation of the standing-reserve sets an equivalence of value among things
with a resulting worldlessness where existence is another name for
exchangeability. The exchanged and replaceable things are already replaced and exchanged, not serially, but
understand how they can still be with us today in our American way of being.
essentially. They are not fully present when here. Terrorism names this absence, or rather is the effect of this absence,
which is to say it is that absence itself, since here we are not dealing with an absence that could be the effect of any loss
It
would be ridiculous to think that such a change in being would lack a
corresponding change in beings. This change in' the nature of being shows itself in the fact that all
beings today are terrorized. They all stand under a very real threat of destruction via -terrorist acts.
There would be no terrorist threat were it not for these terrorists , yet there would be no
possibility of a threat were it not for being. Certainly terrorism is not the only "effect" of this
absence in presence; Heidegger frequently refers to the atomic bomb in precisely this regard. Terrorism's
claim, however, is distinct from that of atomic war. Like the atomic bomb, terrorism operates at
the level of threat. Insofar as it calls into question all beings, terrorism is itself
a metaphysical determination of being. Terrorism makes everything a possible object of terrorist
attack, and this is the very terror of it. Everything is a possible target, and this now means
that all beings exist as possible targets, as possibly destroyed. But this should not be taken
to mean that there are discrete beings, fully present, now threatened with destruction. The ineradicable threat
of destruction transforms the nature ofthe being itself. The being can no longer
exist as indifferent to its destruction; this destruction does not reside outside of
the being. Instead, destruction inhabits the being and does so, not as
something superadded to the being, but as the essence of the being itself.
of presence. The absence in question is not an absence of presence, but an absence in and through presence.
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Beings are henceforth as though destroyed. Terror brings about an alteration in the very mode of being
of reality, the real is now the terrorized. Reality is already terrorized; the change has already taken place, -and this
Beings exist as endangered, as terrorized, and

this means as no longer purely self-present. It means that, in terms of pure
presence, beings exist asalready destroyed. Destruction is not something that comes at a later date, nor is it
regardless of whether an attack comes or not.
something that may or may not already have taken place. Destruction exists now as threat. The effectiveness of terror lies
in the threat, not the attack.
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Trump
A world subsumed by technological thought destroys our ontological relationship in such a way that
things cease to be things in any meaningful way. The value in human lives are lost as we lose our
connection with the world and other Beings. The "Standing Reserve" obliterates the essential Being of
all things making even total planetary destruction a radically less important issue and a
likely inevitability, turning your extinction scenarios.
Caputo '93 [John. Professor of Religion and Humanities at Syracuse University. Also published a bunch of works on a bunch of philosophers and
junk. Yo. Demythologizing Heidegger, p. 136-41. JCOOK]
The essence of technology is nothing technological; the essence of language is nothing linguistic; the essence of starvation has
nothing to do with being hungry; the essence of homelessness has nothing to do with being out in the cold. Is this not to repeat a
most classical philosophical gesture, to submit to the oldest philosophical desire of all, the desire for the pure and uncontaminated,
not to mention the safe and secure? (2) In his essay "The Thing" Heidegger remarks upon the prospect of a nuclear conflagration
which could extinguish all human life: Man stares at what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He
does not see that what has long since taken place and has already happened expels from itself as its
last emission the atom bomb and its explosion not to mention the single nuclear bomb, whose triggering, thought
through to its utmost potential, might be enough to snuff out all life on earth. (VA, 165/PLT, 166). In a parallel passage,
he remarks: ... [Man finds himself 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 threatensprecisely 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. (G, 27/DT, 56). The thinker is menaced by a more radical threat, is
endangered by a more radical explosiveness, let us say by a more essential bomb, capable of an emission (hinauswerfen) of
such primordiality that the explosion (Explosion) of the atom bomb would be but its last ejection . Indeed, the point
is even stronger: even a nuclear bomb, or a wholesale exchange of nuclear bombs between nuclear megapowers, which would
put an end to "all life on earth," which would annihilate every living being, human and nonhuman, is a derivative threat
compared to this more primordial destructiveness. There is a prospect that is more dangerous and uncannyunheimhcherthan
the mere fact that everything could be blown apart (Auseinanderplatzen von allem). There is something that would bring about more
homelessness, more not-beingat-home (un-Heimlich) than the destruction of cities and towns and of their inhabitants. What is truly
unsettling, dis-placing (ent-setzen), the thing that is really terrifying (das Entsetzende), is not the prospect of the destruction of
human life on the planet, of annihilating its places and its settlers. Furthermore, this truly terrifying thing has already happened and
has actually been around for quite some time. This more essential explosive has already been set off; things have already been
destroyed, even though the nuclear holocaust has not yet happened. What then is the truly terrifying? The terrifying is that which
sets everything that is outside (heraussitzl) of its own essence (Wesen)'. What is this dis-placing [Entsetzendel? It shows itself and
conceals itself in the way in which everything presences (anwest), namely, in the fact that despite all conquest of distances the
nearness of things remains absent. (VA, 165/P1.T, 166) The truly terrifying explosion, the more essential destruction is that
which dis-places a thing front its Wesen, its essential nature, its ownmost coming to presence. The essential destruction occurs in
the Being of a thing, not in its entitative actuality; it is a disaster that befalls Being , not beings. The destructiveness of
this more essential destruction is aimed not directly at man but at "things" (Dirge), in the distinctively Heideggerian sense. The
Wesen of things is their nearness, and it is nearness which has been decimated by technological proximity and speed. Things
have ceased to have true nearness and farness, have sunk into the indifference of that which, being a
great distance away, can be brought close in the flash of a technological instant. Thereby, things have ceased to be
things, have sunk into indifferent nothingness. Something profoundly disruptive has occurred on the level of
the Being of things that has already destroyed them , already cast them out of (herauswerfen) their Being. Beings have
been brought close to Us technologically; enormous distances are spanned in seconds. Satellite technology can make events
occurring on the other side of the globe present in a flash; supersonic jets cross the great oceans in a few hours. Yet, far from
bringing things "near,"this massive technological removal of distance has actually abolished nearness, for nearness is
precisely what withdraws in the midst of such technological frenzy. Nearness is the nearing of earth and heavens, mortals and
gods, in the handmade jug, or the old bridge at Heidelberg, and it can be experienced only in the quiet
meditativeness which renounces haste. Thus the real destruction of the thing, the one that abolishes its most
essential Being and Wesen, occurs when the scientific determination of things prevails and compels our assent. The thingliness
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of the jug is to serve as the place which gathers together the fruit of earth and sun in mortal offering to the gods above. But all that is
destroyed when pouring this libation becomes instead the displacement of air by a liquid; at that moment science has suc ceeded in
reducing the jug-thing to a non-entity (Nichtige). Science, or rather the dominion of scientific representation, the rule of science over
what comes to presence, what is called the Wesen, which is at work in science and technology, that is the truly explosive-destructive
thing, the more essential dis-placing. The gathering of earth and sky, mortals and gods, that holds sway in the thingfor "gathering"
is what the Old High German thing meansis scattered to the four winds, and that more essential annihilation occurs
even if the bomb never goes off: Science's knowledge, which is compelling within its own sphere, the sphere of objects,
already had annihilated things long before the atom bomb exploded. The bomb's explosion is only the grossest of all
gross confirmations of the long -since accomplished annihilation of the thing. (VA, 168/PLT, 170J) When
things have been annihilated in their thingness, the mushroom clouds of the bomb cannot be far
behind. So whether or not the bomb goes off is not essential, does not penetrate to the essence of what comes to presence in the
present age of technological proximities and reduced distances. What is essential is the loss of genuine nearness ,
authentic and true nearness, following which the actual physical annihilation of planetary life would be a
"gross"confirmation, an unrefined, external, physical destruction that would be but a follow-up,
another afterthought, a less subtle counterpart to a more inward, profound, essential, authentic, ontological
destruction.
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Try or Die Extinction
Technological thought makes extinction inevitable try or die for the neg
Thiele '95 [Professor of Political Science at University of Florida (Leslie Paul, Timely Meditations, pg. 203)//markoff]
The age of planetary mastery, technological dominance, and the end of metaphysics, Heidegger speculates, will likely
endure for a long time (EP 95). Indeed, there is no certainty that, from humanity's point of view, a succession to some
In the
absence of an ontological reorientation, humanity would then be "left to the
giddy whirl of its products so that it may tear itself to pieces and annihilate
itself in empty nothingness" (EP 87). Estimating the likelihood of this apocalyptic conclusion is not
other mode of revealing truth is ordained. The technological quest may reach its climax, as it were, without us.
Heidegger's concern. In any case, it is fair to say that the physical annihilation of humanity is not Heidegger's most
If, as Heidegger put it,

"the will to action, which here means the will to make and be effective, has overrun and crushed
thought," then our chances of escaping the catastrophic whirlwind of enframing
are slim indeed (WCT 25). The danger is that intensive technological production may
simply overpower human being's capacity for manifold modes of disclosure ,
displacing the freedom inherent in philosophic thought, artistic creativity, and political action. Undeniably
proximate worry. Foremost in his mind is the ontological meaning of this potential selfannihilation.
technology fosters thinking, creating, and acting of sorts. Calculation, cognition, innovation, and engineering are highly
valued within technological society, though even here it is not clear that computers and robots might not eventually
The real menace, however, is that social

engineering would obviate political action, endlessly innovative production
would leave artistic creativity to atrophy, and utilitarian cognition would fully
displace philosophic questioning.'
displace more of these capacities than their production demands.
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Tyranny
Understanding the world through the lens of human need and demand feeds a
tyranny that tempts us to forget about our agency and responsibility as human
beings.
Seigfried '90
As a descriptive name and catchword for what is at work in the new situation Heidegger coins the admittedly clumsy
The
new situation arises when everything is set up for inspection in terms of human
interests, needs, and demands. In this setup of demand (Herausforderung, 1977, p. 16)
everything must appear as supply and resource (Bestand, 1977, p. 18). Such a setup
becomes destructive only when it goes into business for itself and turns into blind
tyranny (Herrschaft, 1977, p. 28); for then we would have to encounter everything only
in terms of supply and demand. In Nietzschean terms, we would be caught in the Socratic-Apollinian
trap, become the slaves of the laws of supply and demand, and no longer have
the possibility to "become those we are-human beings who are new, unique,
incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves" (Nietzsche 1974, p. 265). Heidegger
tries to show that the power of this setup is such that it always tends toward such
tyranny. For the more triumphant the success of the setup, the greater will be the
temptation to forget our reasons for it and see in its demand something that is
beyond us and in which we have no say-and thus we become mere supplies to
be used up in its service (1977, p. 27). And since the nature and organization of the
things which we encounter is a function of this setup, under its tyranny things
would appear to be what they already are and remain (1977, p. 19) and the world
we encounter would be "what it is or the way that it is" without us (1976a, p. 278). In short,
under the tyranny of the setup we nowhere any longer encounter ourselves as
"becoming those we are".
(1976a, p. 278) German neologism 'Ge-stell' (1977, p. 19). For us the perfectly ordinary English term 'setup' will do.
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Value to Life (1/2)
This Technik Managerial approaches to ecology and the Earth constitutes a

mode of concealing that pushes us into a spiral of meanginglessness that robs
all beings of value.
McWhorter '92 [Ladell, Prof. of Philosophy @ Univ. of Richmond, Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental
Philosophy, p. vii]
its penetration into the secrets of galactic emergence or nuclear fission - but in what it
forgets, what it itself conceals. It 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. What is now especially dangerous about this sense of our
own managerial power, born of forgetfulness, is that it results in our viewing the world as mere resources to
be stored or consumed. Managerial or technological thinkers, Heidegger says, view the earth, the
world, all things as mere Bestand, standing-reserve. All is here simply for human use. No
plant, no animal, no ecosystem has a life of its own, has any significance, apart
from human desire and need. Nothing, we say, other than human beings, has any intrinsic value. All
things are instruments for the working out of human will . Whether we believe that God gave
Man dominion or simply that human might (sometimes called intelligence or rationality) in the face of ecological fragility
makes us always right, we managerial, technological thinkers tend to believe that the earth is only a stockpile or a set of
Even people have

become resources, human resources, personnel to be managed, or populations
to be controlled. This managerial, technological mode of revealing, Heidegger says, is
embedded in and constitutive of Western culture and has been gathering
strength for centuries. Now it is well on its way to extinguishing all other modes
of revealing, all other ways of being human and being earth. It will take
tremendous effort to think through this danger , to think past it and beyond, tremendous courage
commodities to be managed, bought, and sold. The forest is timber; the river, a power source.
and resolve to allow thought of the mystery to come forth; thought of the inevitability, along with revealing, of
concealment, of loss, of ignorance; thought of the occurring of things and their passage as events not ultimately under
even the call to allow this thinking - couched as it so often must be in a

is itself a paradox, the first that must be faced
and allowed to speak to us and to shatter us as it scatters thinking in new
directions, directions of which we have not yet dreamed, directions of which we
may never dream.
human control. And of course
grammatical imperative appealing to an agent -
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Value to Life (2/2)
The technological age places humans and nature in standing reserve- Standing
reserve is to be objectified, counted and calculated- the impact is you are
assigned no value to your life
Mitchell '05
Terrorism," Research in Phenomenology, Volume 35, Number 1, 2005 , pp. 181-218]//jrc]
Opposition is no longer an operative concept for Heidegger, since technology has served to eradicate the distance that
would separate the supposedly opposed parties. The analysis of technology in Heidegger's work is guided by the
(phenomenological) insight that "All distances in time and space are shrinking" (GA 79: 3; cf. GA 7: 157/PLT, 165).13
Airplanes, microwaves, email, these serve to abbreviate the world, to be sure,

but there is a metaphysical distance that has likewise been reduced, that
between subject and object. This modern dualism has been surpassed by what Heidegger
terms the standing-reserve (Bestand), the eerie companion of technological dominance and "enframing."
Insofar as an object (Gegenstand) would stand over against (Gegen) a subject, objects can no longer be found. "What
stands by in the sense of standing-reserve, no longer stands over against us as
object" (GA 7: 20/QCT, 17). A present object could stand over against another; the
standing-reserve, however, precisely does not stand; instead, it circulates, and
in this circulation it eludes the modern determination of thinghood. It is simply
not present to be cast as a thing. With enframing, which names the dominance of position, positing, and
posing (stellen) in all of its modes, things are no longer what they were. Everything becomes an item for
ordering (bestellen) and delivering (zustellen) everything is "ready in place" (auf der Stelle
zur Stelle), constantly available and replaceable (GA 79: 28). The standing-reserve "exists" within
this cycle of order and delivery, exchange and replacement. This is not merely a
development external to modem objects, but a change in their being. The standing-reserve is found only in its circulation
along these supply channels, where one item is just as good as any other, where, in fact, one item is identical to any other.
Replaceability is the being of things today. "Today being is being-rephlceable"

(VS, 107/62), Heidegger claims in 1969. The transformation is such that what is here now is not really here now, since
there is an item identical to it somewhere else ready for delivery. This cycle of ordering and delivery does not operate
there is only a steady

circulation of the standing-reserve, which is here now just as much as it is there
in storage. The standing-reserve spreads itself throughout the entirety of its'
replacement cycle, without being fully present at any point along the circuit. But it
is not merely a matter of mass produced products being replaceable. To complete Heidegger's view of
the enframed standing reserve, we have to take into consideration the global
role of value, a complementary determination of being : "Being has become value" (GA 5:
serially, since we are no longer dealing with discrete, individual objects. Instead,
258/192). The Nietzschean legacy for the era of technology (Nietzsche as a thinker of values) is evident here. But the
preponderance of value is so far from preserving differences and establishing order of rank, that it only serves to further
When everything has a value,

an exchangeability and replaceability operates laterally across continents,
languages, and difference, with great homogenizing and globalizing effect. The
standing-reserve collapses opposition. The will that dominates the modem era is personal, even if, as
level the ranks and establish the identity of everything with its replacement.
is the case with Leibniz, the ends of that will are not completely known by the self at any particular time. Nonetheless,
the will still expresses the individuality of the person and one's perspective. In
the era of technology, the will that comes to the fore is no longer the will of an
individual, but a will without a restricted human agenda. In fact, the will in question no
longer wills an object outside of itself, but only wills itself; it is a will to will. In this way, the will need never leave itself.
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This self-affirming character of the will allows the will an independence from the human. Manifest in the very workings of
technology is a will to power, which for Heidegger is always a will to will. Because the will to will has no goal outside of it,
The human is just another piece of a standing-reserve

that circulates without purpose. Actually, things have not yet gone so far; the human still retains a
its willing is goalless and endless.
distinction, however illusive, as "the most important raw material" (GA 7: 88/EP, 104). This importance has nothing to do
"The human is the 'most

important raw material' because he remains the subject of all consumption, so
much so that he lets his will go forth unconditionally in this process and
simultaneously becomes the 'object' of the abandonment of being" (GA 7: 88/EP, 104).
Unconditioned willing transcends the merely human will , which satisfies itself with
restricted goals and accomplishments. Unconditioned willing makes of the subject an agent of
the abandonment of being, one whose task it is to objectify everything. The
more the world comes to stand at the will's disposal, the more that being
retreats from it. The human will is allied with the technological will to will. For this
with the personal willing of conditional goals, as Heidegger immediately makes clear,
reason-and the following is something often overlooked in considering Heidegger's political position between the warsHeidegger is critical of the very notion of a FR'hrer, or leader, who would direct the circulation of the standing-reserve
to his own personal will. The leaders of today are merely the necessary
accompaniment of a standing-reserve tha t, in its abstraction, is susceptible to
planning. The leaders' seeming position of "subjectivity," that they are the ones
who decide, is again another working of "objectification," where neither of
these terms quite fits, given that beings are no longer objective. The willfulness of the
according
leaders is not due to a personal will: One believes that the leaders had presumed everything of their own accord in the
blind rage of a selfish egotism and arranged everything in accordance with their own will [Eigensinn]. In truth, however,
leaders are the necessary consequence of the fact that beings have gone over to a way of errancy, in which an emptiness
expands that requires a single ordering and securing of beings. (GA 7: 89/EP, 105; tin) The leaders do not stand above or
control the proceedings, the proceedings in question affect beings as a whole, including the leaders. Leaders are simply
points of convergence or conduits for the channels of circulation; they are needed for circulation, but are nowhere outside
of it. No leader is the sole authority; instead, there are numerous "sectors" to which each leader is assigned. The demands
of these sectors will be similar of course, organized around efficiency and productivity in distribution and circulation. In
short,
leaders serve the standing-reserve.
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Value to Life Outweighs Everything Else

valueless life
Mitchell '05
annihilation is
rethought.

devastated by evil.
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War and Violence
Technological thought allows humans themselves to become standing-reserve.

It is the root cause of war and genocide.
Thiele 95 [Leslie, Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida,
Timely Meditations: Martin Heidegger and
Technology has the Midas touch, and a particularly contagious one at that.
Everything with which it comes in contact becomes uniformly subsumed into a
framework of efficiently exploited resources. Indeed, technology reconfigures human society itself
to accommodate the exigencies of its furthest extensions and intrusions. What is essential to modern technology is its
humanity itself becomes part and

parcel, indeed a most crucial element, of technological ordering. This is true in a
number of respects. First, humankind is, by and large, the only producer of
technology. Second, the efficient and endless production of technological
artifacts requires their equally efficient and endless consumption. Once again,
humankind is, by and large, technology's only consumer. But the circle is only
fully completed when humanity becomes not simply the primary producer and
consumer of technology, but that which technology primarily produces and
consumes. The novelty of the postmodern world, in this light, is not that we live in a consumer society, but that
society itself has become the consumed. Heidegger lays out in detail the ramifications of this total ordering: The
"world wars" and their character of "totality" are already a consequence of the
abandonment of Being. They press toward a guarantee of the stability of a
constant form of using things up. Man, who no longer conceals his character of
being the most important raw material, is also drawn into this process. Man is
the "most important raw material" because he remains the subject of all
consumption. He does this in such a way that he lets his will be unconditionally equated with this process, and thus
refusal of limits, its rejection of boundaries and difference. In the end,
at the same time become the "object" of the abandonment of Being. The world wars arc the antecedent form of the
War has become a distortion of the

consumption of beings which is continued in peace. Contending with a long war is only the
already outdated form in which what is new about the age of consumption is acknowledged. . . . Since man is the
most important raw material, one can reckon with the fact that some day
factories will be built for the artificial breeding of human material based on
present-day chemical research. (El' 103-6) Written after Hitler's rise to power and before the war had
removal of the difference between war and peace. . , .
revealed its final devastations, Heidegger indicates in the above passage, though only backhandcdly and without assuming
personal responsibility, that he has glimpsed the terrible error in his support for Nazism. Once in power, the Nazis quickly
No more horrific and ruthless example of the total

ordering of humanity as standing-reserve has ever been constructed than that
of the Nazi concentration camps. Here technology's limitless scope and capacity
for summoning horror was made evident in the unbridled exploitation of and
experimentation with human raw material, the literal using-up of human bodies
and minds. In the Nazis' "final solution," technology, understood not as a
neutral tool or technique but as an overpowering ontological condition, came
most dangerously to the fore. Yet present-day genetic research, which bears out Heidegger's prediction of
displayed their technological demon.
the artificial breeding of human material, is ultimately no less dangerous for all its humanistic appeal. And present-day
politics generously pays its dues to the technological demon.
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The success of contemporary political
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candidates largely rests on their ability to promote themselves as efficient
managers of the growth of the forces of production and consumption. Wars are
won and lost because of this same proficiency, and in large part with the
singular purpose of deciding which state is to control what share of the global
market. Yet amidst intense and occasionally bloody competition, the significance of national boundaries actually
diminishes as states become equally subject to the same technological forces. Heidegger concludes that the distinction
between national and international is becoming increasingly untenable (EP 107).
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Zero Point of the Holocaust
The 1AC is equal to the zero point to the holocaust.

Dillon '99
[Michael Dillon, professor at the University of Lancaster, "Another Justice," Political Theory, Vol. 27 No. 2,
April 1999]
Otherness is
born(e) within the self as an integral part of itself and in such a way that it always remains an inherent
derives from the lack, absence, or ineradicable incompleteness

which comes from having no security of tenure within or over that of which the
self is a particular hermeneutical manifestation ; namely, being itself. The point about the human,
stranger to itself." It
betrayed by this absence, is precisely that it is not sovereignly self-possessed and complete, enjoying undisputed tenure in
and of itself. Modes of justice therefore reliant upon such a subject lack the very foundations in the self that they most
violently insist upon seeing inscribed there. This does not, however, mean that the dissolution of the subject also entails
the dissolution of Justice. Quite the reverse. The subject was never a firm foundation for justice, much less a hospitable
vehicle for the reception of the call of another Justice. It was never in possession of that self-possession which was
supposed to secure the certainty of itself, of a self-possession that would enable it ultimately to adjudicate everything. The
very indexicality required of sovereign subjectivity gave rise rather to a commensurability much more amenable to the
expendability required of the political and material economies of mass societies than it did to the singular, invaluable, and
The value of the subject became the standard unit of

currency for the political arithmetic of States and the political economies of
capitalism. They trade in it still to devastating global effect. The
technologisation of the political has become manifest and global . Economies of
evaluation necessarily require calculability. Thus no valuation without mensuration and no
mensuration without indexation. Once rendered calculable, however, units of
account are necessarily submissible not only to valuation but also, of course, to
devaluation. Devaluation, logically, can extend to the point of counting as nothing. Hence, no mensuration without
demensuration either. There is nothing abstract about this: the declension of economies
of value leads to the zero point of holocaust. However liberating and
emancipating systems of value-rights-may claim to be , for example, they run
the risk of counting out the invaluable . Counted out, the invaluable may then lose its purchase on life.
uncanny uniqueness of the self.
Herewith, then, the necessity of championing the invaluable itself. For we must never forget that, "we are dealing always
with whatever exceeds measure. But how does that necessity present itself? Another Justice answers: as the surplus of the
That duty, as with the advent of another

Justice, is integral to the lack constitutive of the human way of being.
duty to answer to the claim of Justice over rights.
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Zimmerman
**Don't use this. I will rape you if you do. It's a joke
more than anything.**
The loss of being signals the arrival of ontological damnation, an existential
meaninglessness that is more destructive than any nuclear war.
Zimmerman '97 [Michael, Professor of Philosophy and former Director of the Center for
Humanities and the Arts @ CU Boulder, Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and
Postmodernity, Berkeley, Calif. University of California Press, 1997. p.119-120]
Heidegger asserted that human self-assertion, combined with the eclipse of being,
threatens the relation between being and human Dasein .53 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 ."54 This
controversial claim is comparable to the Christian teaching that it is better to forfeit the world than to lose one's soul by
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 .55 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.56 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. 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.
losing one's relation to God. Heidegger apparently thought along these lines:
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Heideggerian Resistance (1/2)
Here is the alternative text: Reject the aff's managerial approach to issues and
instead enact in a Heideggerean resistance of letting-be.
Letting the Earth be is a form of Heideggerean resistance that recovers the
Earth as a site of open possibilities and allows us to follow the Earth without
manipulating it.
Joronen '11
[Mikko, Dept. of Geography, U. of Turku, Finland, Dwelling in the Sites of Finitude: Resisting the Violence
of the Metaphysical Globe, Antipode, 0(0).]
The ambiguity between the overcoming and incorporation of metaphysicsthe overcoming of the metaphysical constitution
of being through an incorporation of the originary abyssality of being with a hope of its transformation into what Heidegger
calls the other beginning is above all connected with the fact that Heidegger, especially in his later thought, aims to
all human dwelling, including our contemporary metaphysical sojourning

in the planetary machination, takes place through the sites of unfolding. Hence, in
order to overcome the metaphysics of planetary machination, the violent
manipulation of the earth into a planetary globe, we need not just to recover
the hidden event that appropriated machination from the abyssal plenitude in
the first place, but also to show how this fundamental abyssal realm of
openness is connected to the earth-site aspect of the unfolding. As an alliance
between non-violent letting-be of the earth the realm of selfemerging thingsand thinking
that remembers the originary abyssal groundlessness of beingthe an-arkhe
underneath all metaphysical grounds incorporation of being into non-metaphysical dwelling
is obligated to provide more than a plain nihilation of all groundings , which is nothing
show how
but praise for a negative nothingness affording absolute emptiness and the nihilist nomadism of the (late) modern way of
life. Instead of total nihilation ,
this incorporation of abyssal being follows the earth

without violently manipulating it: Heideggerean resistance developed herein is a
critique of prevailing world-disclosure, the manipulative grounding of planetary
machination, that attempts explicitly to rationalise and capture the earth, bind,
control and secure it (de Beistegui 2007:17; Dreyfus 1993:299300). Such resistance of the
world-disclosure of machination, then, marks another form of power, a force other than the will to
power, a force that comes from the fundamental source of being itself, and thus, because of the alliance between being and
earth, shows itself as a power of abyssal openness of the earth, as
a site of non-violent letting-be of
the open and abyssal earth.
Moreover, if the fundamental resistance comes from the united force of earth
and abyssal being, instead of making new human efforts that underline the mastery of machination, the will-centred
manipulative making, ordering and mastering of the earth, resistance requires that we let the unity of earth and being
the overcoming of the contemporary epoch of

planetary mastery of machination requires a power-free letting-be of the
violence machination implicates; that is to say, a way of thinking that eventually enables nonmake the transformation. In other words,
metaphysical dwelling in the earth-sites of abyssal being.
***ALTERNATIVES***
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Heideggerian Resistance (2/2)
Letting the Earth be acts as a radical rejection of technological enframing,

opening possibilities for new modes of dwelling in the world.
Joronen '11
letting-be, refers to human release from the

manipulative moulding of things, and thus, to the recognition and rejection of the
rule of the prevailing ground of being, the power of machination (eg Kaufer 2005:488; Zimmerman
1993:241). Through its letting-be the calculative power of machination , its one-track
course of manipulative and ever-more-exploiting handling of nature (the earth of things), and ourselves, becomes
simply rejected. Nevertheless, as Schurmann (1978:16) reminds us, in German the lassen of Gelassenheit
means only secondarily to abandon, to reject or to ignore, and primarily to let or to let be. Hence , it is not
just the rejection and abandonment of the power of machination, but also
letting-of-the-transformation-of-being into such other beginning where being
unfolds as power-free, as a modality other than violence and power, and thus,
where the earth is not forced under our orderings and calculations but rather where
In its most basic sense, the word Gelassenheit, the
earths leading strings are followed. Our power-free letting-be thereby indicates a double sense, a doubleway of resisting:
by rejecting the willfull power and by permissive letting of fundamental transformation based on abyssal being and self-
letting-be indicates a radical

negation of the domain of the power of machination, a negation that interrupts
its total and perfectly functioning unfolding (cf. Davis 2007:303). In its first sense, then,
emergence of things on earth. According to the first sense of rejecting,
Gelassenheit means a leap that breaks open in the midst of the planetary power of machination through negation, by
It happens as a breaking open into the primordial freedom of abyssal

being, into the openness prior to the freedoms and acts of a subject. Thus, this
comportment of rejecting eventually brings out the abyssal groundlessness of
being, which according to Heidegger works as an abundant reservoir that grants us the possibility of
dwelling [. . .] in a totally different way (1966a:55). In its second sense, then, Gelassenheit intimates
rejecting.
a possibility of a mode of being radically other than willing, a release from the grasp of limitless power- and profitseeking,
a futural force of transformation that eventually offers what Heidegger calls the other beginning based on abyssal timespaceplay of the Event of being (see Heidegger 1958:188, 2000:4, 6061, 181, 2006:8486).
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Hermeneutics
Here is the alternative text: Reject the aff and their technological views of the
world and being. Instead vote negative to embrace a mindset and politics of
hermeneutics in interpreting the world the world in all of its possible ways and
forms!
Modern modes of thought overlook how the world plays into the creation of
entities in order to understand how entities behave we must take a hermeneutic
approach to the world.
Dreyfus & Wrathall '05
[Hubert L. Prof of Philosophy @ Berkeley, Original Gangsta. Mark, Assoc. Prof of

Philosophy @ Brigham Young Univ. A Companion to Heidegger. Blackwell Publishing p.4]
philosophical
tradition has overlooked the character of the world, and the nature of our
human existence in a world. Dasein, for instance, is not a subject, for a subject in
the traditional sense has mental states and experiences which can be what they
are independently of the state of the surrounding world . For Heidegger, our way of
being is found not in our thinking nature, but in our existing in a world. And our
being is intimately and inextricably bound up with the world that we find
ourselves in. In the same way that the tradition has misunderstood human being by focusing on subjectivity, it also
failed to understand the nature of the world, because it tended to focus exclusively on entities
within the world, and understood the world as merely being a collection of
inherently meaningless entities. But attention to the way entities actually show
up for us in our everyday dealings teaches us that worldly things cannot be
reduced to merely physical entities with causal properties. Worldly things, in
other words, have a different mode of being than the causally delineated
entities that make up the universe and which are the concern of the natural
sciences. To understand worldly entities entities, in other words, that are
inherently meaningfully constituted requires a hermeneutic approach (see Lafont,
Using his account of what is involved in human existence so understood, Heidegger argues that the
this volume, chapter 16)
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Meditative Thinking (1/2)
problems and instead open up this space for meditative thinking.
Our alternative grounds our thinking and dwells-upon the earth. Instead of
pursuing the rigid confines of calculative thought, we instead take root to allow
the human spirit to flourish and allow thinking about thinking.
Heidegger '66
[Martin. The 20th centurys Slavoj. Discourse on Thinking. 1966. pp. 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
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
current business. It profits nothing in carrying out practical affairs. And
follow the path of meditative thinking in his own manner and within his own limits. Why? Because man is a thinking, that
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
is, a meditating being. Thus meditative thinking need by no means be high-flown.
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
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?
thoughtful and ask: does not the flourishing of any genuine work depend upon its roots in a native soil? Johann Peter Hebel once wrote :
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
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
mans 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,
of his native world.
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can man, can mans 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?
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Meditative Thinking (2/2)
Thiele 95

sanctuary.

often tragic saga of worldly habitation. Homelessness is the mood of the technological age.
Rediscovering our worldly home (as threatened) signals the "restoring surmounting"
of technology. This rediscovered sense of (threatened) sanctuary is chiefly
summoned, Heidegger indicates, by memory or recollective thought. Recollecting our
worldly habitat not only fosters resistance to enframing, but also provides
guidance in negotiating relations with the products of technology , namely machines
and techniques. Heidegger ac-knowledges that we should neither reject nor do without technological artifacts or skills as a
whole. He neither advocates nor accepts a retreat to a pretechnological state of being. Nor, despite much misinterpretation by his commentators, does he suggest that we fatalistically resign ourselves to the victory of enframing. Its victory, he
emphatically states, is not inevitable (OGS 61). "We cannot, of course, reject today's tech-nological world as devil's work,
nor may we destroy itassuming it does not destroy itself," Heidegger maintains. "Still less may we cling to the view that
To confuse our
destined relation to Being as if it were a fate, particularly one that leads to the
inevitable decline of our civilization because of technological rule, is itself a
historically determinist, and therefore metaphysical and technological,
understanding. According to Heidegger, "All attempts to reckon existing reality morphologically, psychologically, in
the world of technology is such that it will absolutely prevent a spring out of it" (ID 4041).
terms of decline and loss, in terms of fate, catastrophe, and destruction, are merely technological behavior" (QT 48).14
Fatalism is no answer because fatalism reflects the same absence of thought

that is evidenced in a naive complacency with technological "progress ." Heidegger's
admonition to think the nature of technology, though far from a resigned musing, is not the devising of a counteroffensive.
We are asked to respond first to the question " What
shall we think?"
Jon Cook
rather than the question "What is to be
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But the point is not simply that we must think before we act. The needed
thinking of what we are doing and how we are being is not solely a strategic
preparation for more informed and effective behavior . Thought must first save
done?"
"so long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain held fast in the will to master it" (QT 32). The more we
fail to experience the essence of technology as enframing, persevering in the mistaken notion that complex machinery is
the danger, the more we will believe that salvation lies in our mastering technology before it masters us. With this in mind,
Heidegger explicitly states that he is "not against technology," nor does he

suggest any "resistance against, or condemnation of, technology " (MHC 4344).
Indeed, the development of complex machines and techniquestechnology as it
is commonly understoodhas enormous benefits that must not be depreciated.
It would be shortsighted to condemn such technology out of hand. Apart from our
obvious dependence on technical devices, their development also often "challenges us to ever greater advances" (DT 53 ).
From political, social, cultural, and environmental standpoints, technology
demonstrates many virtues. Indeed, given the unrelenting extension of human
power and population, technological developments that buffer the earth from
our predaceousness seem both urgent and indispensable . A good bit of the destruction
humanity presently visits on the earth and itself makes sophisticated technological remedies necessary. Having
machines efficiently serve our needs is neither evil nor regrettable. But this
service must be grounded on our discovery of what needs we truly have. More
importantly, it must be grounded on our discovery of what transcends human
need.'* These, decidedly, are not technological questions, and our capacity to answer
them largely rests on our recovery of the capacity to think beyond the criterion
of instrumental service. 213-214
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Poetry (1/2)
Forgotten Planet
Dorph '2K
I ask my daughter to name the planets.

"Venus ...Mars ...and Plunis!" she says.
When I was six or seven my father
woke me in the middle of the night.
We went down to the playground and lay
on our backs on the concrete looking up
for the meteors the tv said would shower.
I don't remember any meteors. I remember
my back pressed to the planet Earth,
my father's bulk like gravity next to me,
the occasional rumble from his throat,
the apartment buildings dark-windowed,
the sky close enough to poke with my finger.
Now, knowledge erodes wonder.
The niggling voce reminds me that the sun
does shine on the dark side of the moon.
My daughter's ignorance is my bliss.
Through her eyes I spy like a voyeur.
I travel in a rocket ship to the planet Plunis.
On Plunis I no longer long for the past.
On Plunis there are actual surprises.
On Plunis I am happy.
Here is the alternative text: Reject the aff and their use of fallen language and
instead vote for the acceptance and use of poetic language to enframe beings in
positions that are other than standing reserves!
Prose always technologically enframes nature and reduces it to the position of
standing reserve - Poetry allows us to break down our metaphysical
assumptions about the world and people, and allow us to disclose its Being in
an authentic way. We must make language a process of listening as well as
speaking.
Ross '07
[Andrew Peter, Professor at Queens University, Rethinking Environmental Responsibility: Heidegger,

Profound Boredom and the Alterity of Nature, September 2007]
Since Heideggers theory of language (logos) is complex, for present purposes I only offer a brief caricature of it in order
to illustrate the way in which it has been appropriated within environmental philosophy. Put simply, the later
Heidegger draws a distinction between fallen and poetic language. The

former sense of language refers to an inauthentic mode of language that
treats language as a tool, subsequently restricting the disclosure of Being and
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beings. The latter sense of language, the poetic, does not view language as a tool or
instrument, but as something that can enable a less restricted disclosure of
both Being and beings. More specifically, poetic language does not simply
acknowledge the existence of beings in the world; rather it makes beings
manifest by allowing them to come forth and linger of their own accord,
drawing our attention not only to the way in which they are revealed, but to the
ways in which they remain concealed and withdrawn. Modern Dasein remains entrapped
within the use of fallen language; language today, according to Heidegger, has been debased to a means of commerce
and organization (ECP 214). The deterioration of language within modernity facilitates the Gestells restrictive disclosure
poetic
languagewhat we might think of as authentic or primordial language
resists the conceptual entrapment of Being in a world of words, allowing beings
to come forth of their own accord. In paying heed to our words in this manner, language
becomes more a form of listening than a way of speaking. In light of this contrast
between fallen and poetic language , it has been argued that this form of poetic language is one way in
which physis might be enabled to manifest itself (Langer 114; Taylor 257; Zimmerman
of beings by preventing language from disclosing beings in a more original or primordial sense. In contrast,
Ethos115).
As a point of clarification, it should be noted that poetry or the poetic within this context does not
the poetic refers to a form of

expression that attempts to make evident the revealing and concealing the play of
truth (aletheia)that occurs within every disclosure. Poetic expression can , for
example, also be accomplished in works of art: van Goghs painting of the peasant shoes, lets us
know what shoes are in truth: the shoes are disclosed in their thing-hood presenting
them not as solely functional objects, but as beings that can be contemplated
for what they reveal and hide (OWA 161). Charles Taylor, for example, argues that paying heed to
language in the manner that Heidegger proposes will dictate a certain way of
talking about beings: a way that restores their thingness and sense of meaning .
In this sense, natural entities will demand that we use the type of language that
discloses them as things rather than as standing reserve (267). In other words, we can
necessarily refer to verse, rhyme, or meter (though it can); rather,
think of the demands of language as a demand put upon us by natural entities themselvesa demand moreover, that
Heideggers
philosophy of language, or so Taylor argues, may form the basis of an ecological
politics founded on something other than instrumental calculations. Additionally,
Michael Zimmerman argues that Heideggers sense of authentic language can lead to a
profound understanding and respect for the Being of all beings (Ethos107-131).
Significantly, poetic language has a way of formulating matters which can help to
restore thingness to natural beings and subsequently facilitate Heideggers notion of
dwelling (TT 172). In being disclosed within their thing-hood, beings co-disclose their place in the clearing: Daseins
amounts to the acknowledgement of the natural world as having certain meanings (267).
field of disclosure, its understanding of Being. More specifically, in being disclosed as things, beings make ones
worldhood evident or in Heideggers later terminology, things gather together the elements that make up the four-fold:
The jug
as it shows up in the world of the peasant, untarnished by modern technology
is embedded with the human activities in which it plays a part, such as the
pouring of wine at the common table. The jug draws together the earth which
provides the water and the grapes of the wine, the sky in the sunshine that
ripens the grapes, the gods to whom the peasants give thanks, and the mortals,
the peasants themselves who partake in the outpouring of the wine and who
are aware of the mystery of the world and life itself. In this sense, the jug
serves at the point where a rich web of practices can be sensed and made
earth, sky, gods and mortals. To illustrate this, Heidegger uses the example of an ordinary jug (167-174).
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evident. Significantly, it is the jugor more precisely the thinging of the jugthat
assembles the elements of the four-fold. The thinging of objects like the jug or
the oak tree brings together the four-fold in such a way as to encourage one to nurse and nurture
ones immediate environment
Poetic language brings about a sense of
nearness that facilitates a co-existence with the beings of ones environment
in which we take care of (pflegen) beings, and spare (schonen) them (351).
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Poetry (2/2)
Poetry provides a unique mechanism for interrogating

technology and for exploring new ways of thinking.
the
Heidegger
Concerning
'49 [Martin
German
philosopher,
1949,
The
http://www.wright.edu/cola/Dept/PHL/Class/P.Internet/PITexts/QCT.html [BGB]]
Question
essence
of
Technology,
The question concerning technology is the question concerning the constellation in which revealing and concealing, in
which the essential unfolding of truth propriates. But what help is it to us to look into the constellation of truth?
look into the danger and see the growth of the saving power.
We
Through this we are not yet
Here
and now and in little things, that we may foster the saving power in its increase. This
includes holding always before our eyes the extreme danger. The essential unfolding of
saved. But we are thereupon summoned to hope in the growing light of the saving power. How can this happen?
technology threatens revealing, threatens it with the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in ordering and that
everything will present itself only in the unconcealment of standing-reserve. Human activity can never directly counter this
danger. Human achievement alone can never banish it. But human reflection can ponder the fact that all saving power
must be of a higher essence than what is endangered, though at the same time kindred to it. But might there not perhaps
be a more primally granted revealing that could bring the saving power into its first shining-forth in the midst of the
danger that in the technological age rather conceals than shows itself? There was a time when it was not technology alone
that bore the name techne. Once the revealing that brings forth truth into the splendor of radiant appearance was also
called techne. There was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called techne. The poiesis of the
fine arts was also called techne. At the outset of the destining of the West, in Greece, the arts soared to the supreme
height of the revealing granted them. They illuminated the presence [Gegenwart] of the gods and the dialogue of divine
and human destinings. And art was called simply techne. It was a single, manifold revealing. It was pious, promos, i.e.,
yielding to- the holding sway and the safekeeping of truth. The arts were not derived from the artistic. Artworks were not
enjoyed aesthetically. Art was not a sector of cultural activity. What was artperhaps only for that brief but magnificent
age? Why did art bear the modest name techne? Because it was a revealing that brought forth and made present, and
therefore belonged within poiesis. It was finally that revealing which holds complete sway in all the fine arts, in poetry, and
in everything poetical that obtained poiesis as its proper name. The same poet from whom we heard the words But where
danger is, grows there the saving power also . . . says to us: . poetically man dwells on this earth. The poetical brings the
The
poetical thoroughly pervades every art, every revealing of essential unfolding into
the beautiful. Could it be that the fine arts are called to poetic revealing? Could it be that revealing
lays claim to the arts most primally, so that they for their part may expressly foster the
growth of the saving power, may awaken and found anew our vision of, and trust in, that which grants?
true into the splendor of what Plato in the Phaedrus calls to ekphanestaton, that which shines forth most purely.
Whether art may be granted this highest possibility of its essence in the midst of the extreme danger, no one can tell. Yet
the frenziedness of technology

may entrench itself everywhere to such an extent that someday , throughout
everything technological, the essence of technology may unfold essentially in
the propriative event of truth. Because the essence of technology is nothing
technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation
with it must happen in a realm that is , on the one hand, akin to the essence of
technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art. But
we can be astounded. Before what? Before this other possibility: that
certainly only if reflection upon art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth, concerning which we
Thus questioning, we bear witness to the crisis that in our sheer

preoccupation with technology we do not yet experience the essential unfolding
of technology, that in our sheer aesthetic-mindedness we no longer guard and
preserve the essential unfolding of art. Yet the more questioningly we ponder the
essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes . The closer
are questioning.
we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we
become.
For questioning is the piety of thought.
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Profound Boredom
Here's the alternative text: Reject the aff and their technological view of the
world and being, but instead vote negative for an openness to engage the
otherness of the world through profound boredom.
To step outside of technoloigcal evaluations and become numb, disrupting our
usual manner of being-in-the-world and opening up a space to re-formulate our
ontological values. The clearing of this ontologcal space results in an authentic
realization of Dasein and a call to responsibility when confronting natures
alterity.
Ross '07
[Andrew Peter, Professor at Queens University, Rethinking Environmental Responsibility: Heidegger,

Profound Boredom and the Alterity of Nature, September 2007]
The emptiness that

constitutes profound boredom is not the emptiness that stems from the lack of
a particular fulfillment (as in the first stage), nor is it the emptiness that arises from the
self- abandonment with particular beings in a particular situation (as in the second
stage) (137). Instead, the emptiness of profound boredom stems from the telling
refusal of beings as a whole (137). Beings refuse themselves in such a way as to make everything seem
of equally great and equally little worth (137). Beings appear, in other words, so as to make the very
activity of valuingthe ability to draw distinctions on the basis of worth
impotent. This is not to say that one cannot draw distinctions among beings in the sense that one cannot differentiate
a stone from a tree. The telling refusal does not collapse such distinctions stones remain stones and
trees remain treesrather, the type of distinction that is refused is the type of
meaningful distinction that facilitates ones ordinary engagement with the
world. What is missing, in other words, is not the category stone or tree but the
type of valuing that facilitates the actual use of such categories . The emptiness
of profound boredom can be thought of as experiencing the world as radically
indifferent: as something that refuses value. Significantly, the radical indifference of beings
precludes any attempts at evading boredom; one cannot seek out the engagement of a particular being
nor attempt to immerse oneself in a particular situation. While Heidegger does not offer a
Third, the emptiness of profound boredom is far different from the first two stages.
particular scenario to illustrate the experience of profound boredom, it may be helpful to consider an illustrative scenario.
the experience of being under a sedative may bear a

resemblance to the experience of profound boredom. Specifically, through the
haze of anesthesia one remains aware of the ordinary categories that make up
the worldhood while being simultaneously incapable of engaging with such
categories in a meaningful fashion. Of course, the comparison fails when it is noted that what is
numbed in profound boredom is not ones physical body but the type of valuing that
facilitates ones usual way of being-in-the-world . Additionally, the source of incapacitation differs
greatly: one is a sedative, while the other results from the refusal of beings. Notably, the refusal of value
within profound boredom makes it tempting to think of profound boredom as a
form of depression: a state in which the beings of the world are stripped of their
value. However, as I will explain further below, the refusal of value within profound boredom
should not be thought of as the complete absence of value as beings might
Though it is not a perfect likeness,
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appear in a state of depressionbut as the withholding of
value. In particular, what the
The indifference of
beings as a whole prevents Dasein from engaging in its ordinary ways of doing
and acting in the world ; Dasein is stripped of its everyday attachments and
projects. The complete removal of Daseins ordinary ways of doing and acting
brings Dasein into an encounter with itself as a being that is responsible for its
own being. In Heideggers own words: profound boredom brings the self in all its
nakedness to itself as the self that is there and has taken over the being there
of its Da-sein. For what purpose? To be that Da-sein (143). The telling refusal of beings impels Dasein towards the
telling refusal refuses Dasein is the very possibilities of its doing and acting (140).
original making-possible of Dasein as such: Dasein is forced to assume its own there-being as an actual burden. In other
profound boredom places Dasein within a relationship of responsibility: the

emptiness of profound boredom reveals Dasein as answerable for what it makes
of its there-being. Simultaneously, the telling refusal exposes Dasein to a genuine
experience of freedom in the sense that Dasein recognizes itself as free for its
own existence.
words,
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Quantum Mechanics (1/2)
Here is the alternative text: Reject the aff and their technological mindset and
instead embrace a meditation of quantum mechanics and physics.
Meditation on quantum mechanics and quantum physics offers an invitation to
encounter the deepest abysses of being, disrupting technological assemblages
of meaning and radically rearranging our concept of ourselves.
Seigfried '90
Heisenberg states the lesson of quantum physics about the relationship

between us and the world in many forms and on many occasions, frequently
illustrating it by demonstrating its sobering effect on what Nietzsche describes as
theoretical optimism, namely, "the unshakable faith that thought, using the
thread of causality, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being" (1967a, p. 95), for
quantum physics shows that the use of the principle of causality remains
restricted to the surface (1984a, p. 21; 1984b, pp. 26-28). The statement which Heidegger takes issue with
is found in "Das Naturbild der heutigen Physik": ". . . for the first time in history man encounters only himself on this
earth, he no longer finds other partners or opponents" (1984c, p. 412). When first made, this statement is actually
our relationship to nature is radically

different from that of earlier ages. In earlier epochs man encountered nature as
the other, as a realm with its very own structure and laws which had to be
obeyed somehow. Today we live in a different world; the structures which we
encounter in the world are our own constructs, and this is why we encounter
only ourselves, as it were. Heisenberg then goes on to show that the new situation is most
obvious in modem physics. The uncertainty relations show that what we
originally conceived as the ultimate objective reality , namely, the elements of matter,
cannot be observed "in themselves", that is, their objective determination in space
and time is impossible. It can no longer be the aim of science to get to know the
atom in itself and its motion in itself, apart from our experimental setup and
performance. We decide-for specific reasons of our own-what to ignore and
what to look for. Our experimental setup is part-and only a small part-of a much larger exchange and transaction
between man and nature. The new situation in physics indicates that such received
distinctions as subject/object, inside/outside, mind/body are no longer
applicable and useful. Heisenberg mostly develops the implications for nature and what we ordinarily call
objective reality. But, of course, there are also similarly radical implications which need to
be drawn out for what we ordinarily call the self.
understood in a very broad sense. Heisenberg finds that
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Quantum Mechanics (2/2)
Quantum Mechanics and advanced scientific theory is better at accessing

Heideggers realization of the meaning of being than meditative thinking.
Seigfried '90
in recognizing this danger of the complete elimination of

ourselves through the tyrannical demand of the setup we would be forced to
relax our obedience to it and learn to see in the demand not a dictate from
beyond us (1966, pp. 52-57), but an invitation (Anspruch) and call (Zuspruch) from within us
to "become those we are" (1977, p. 27). The very tyranny of the setup would bring
about its downfall. For the demand could then be seen as something we have a
say in (1977, pp. 24, 32) and the encountering of the world and of ourselves in terms
of the setup could be seen as a free response . The demand could be recognized
as a function of the care for our own being and the attempt of "acquiring power" over it (1962, p. 310), that is, of
"choosing [ourselves] and taking hold of [ourselves]" (1962, p. 188). But since Heidegger
But Heidegger thinks that
from early on argues that we can never acquire such power "from the ground up", he must also claim, seemingly against
Heisenberg, that we can never encounter only ourselves (1977, p. 27), that the setup does not happen exclusively in us or
decisively through us (1977, p. 24), and that "the world cannot be what it is or the way that it is through [us], but neither
can it be without [us]" (1976a, p. 278). Perhaps Heidegger is right when he maintains that
inducing this
profound realization is all that one can expect of thinking and, consequently, philosophy
comes to an end (1976a, p. 278). But it seems to me that this lesson is much more clearly and
forcefully taught today by quantum physics than by phenomenological analysis
and contemplative thinking, the two kinds of philosophical thinking Heidegger engages in. And so, once
again: we must become physicists.
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Works of Art
Here is the alternative text: Reject the aff and their technological control of the
world and people, which turns everything into a standing-reserve and instead
vote neg and embrace a new cultural paradigm shift through works of art!
Cultural Signposts (works of art) allow individuals to unite for a common goal
and shift our ontological ideas in the process! We solve in round technological
mindsets.
Dreyfus '02
[Hubert, Prof. Of Philosophy at grauate university, University of California Berkeley, Heidegger and
Foucault on the Subject, Agency and Practices October 11 th, 2002, JCOOK]
For everyday practices to give meaning to people's lives and unite them in a
community something must collect the scattered practices of the group, unify
them into coherent possibilities for action, and hold them up to the people. The
people can then act and relate themselves to each other in terms of this
exemplar. And the object that performs this function best Heidegger calls a
work of art. As his illustration of an art work working, Heidegger takes the Greek temple. The temple held up to the
Greeks what was important and so established the meaningful differences such a victory and disgrace in respect to which
they could orient their actions. The style of the background practices as a whole change radically each time a culture gets
a new art work. After such a change different sorts of human beings and things show up. For the Greeks, what showed up
were heroes and slaves and marvelous things; for the Christians, saints and sinners, rewards and temptations. There could
not have been saints in Ancient Greece. At best there could have been weak people who let everybody walk all over them.
Likewise, there could not have been Greek-style heroes in the Middle Ages. Such people would have been regarded as
Heidegger holds that "there must always be

some being in the open [the clearing], something that is, in which the openness
takes its stand and attains its constancy" (PLT 61, G 5 48). Let us call such special
things cultural paradigms. A cultural paradigm is any being in the clearing that
disclose a new world or, by refocusing the current cultural practices can
disclose the world anew. Heidegger mentions five types of cultural paradigms--works of art, acts of
prideful sinners. Generalizing the idea of a work of art,
statements, nearness of a god, and sacrifice of a god, and the words of a thinker-- but, for brevity's sake, we shall concern
ourselves only with two, the founding political act and the thinker's words. The U.S. Constitution would count as a cultural
paradigm for Heidegger. For it is just the sort of political act that establishes an understanding of what it is to be a state by
Once established, because it is so important

to the people whose world it organizes, it becomes the center of a struggle to
make it clear, coherent and complete. Heidegger calls this tendency in the practices to move towards
articulating an understanding already in that culture.
clarity the world aspect. But any being resists being completely clarified. Heidegger calls this resitance the world aspect.
The struggle between them sets up what he calls an outline which is the specific
style of the culture. The struggle between various interpretations of the
paradigm makes the culture historical since the present repeatedly reinterprets
the past and sets up a new future.
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Anthropocentrism
Turn - A Technological View of Earth Pushes Us Into Anthropocentrism.

Turnbull '06
2006, Vol. 23(1): 125-139, DOI: 10.1177/0263276406063232, Page 131 - 132, JCOOK]
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
Thus,
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 Heideggers view, only a world
supported by the earth can give things their proper measure: and without this
relation, things have no true measure (and in such a case, the measurement of
the world in terms of an abstract [end of page 132] mathematicized facticity
required for the efficient maintenance of purely technological relationships
becomes the anthropocentric measure of all things).
***TURNS***
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Biopower
Turn - The technological mindset manifests itself in the form of biopower that
renders all life to standing reserve!
Dean '2k
[Sociologist at Macquarie University (Mitchell, "Always Look on the Dark Side: Politics and the Meaning of
Life", http://apsa2000.anu.edu.au/confpapers/dean.rtf).JRC]
Aristotle said that while the polis comes into existence for the sake of life, its exists for the good life (1967, 9, I.i.8).
Today the good life has come to require a politics for the sake of life. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we
Rarely a week
goes by when there is not a new biotechnological discovery or application which
allows us to use and manipulate the processes of life itself for any number of
ends. Post-menopausal women can now bear children. Infertile women and men can become parents. The genes from
appear to be crossing ever-new thresholds towards learning the secrets of the creation of life itself.
an animal can be implanted into a vegetable. Sheep and other animals can be cloned. Evidence of criminality or innocence
can be discovered through DNA testing. With the Human Genome Project in competition with private companies
engaged in completing the map of the human genome, we are issued with extraordinary promises in disease detection,
prevention and eradication. We are also issued with warnings concerning designer babies, the new eugenics, and the uses
the manipulation
of the very biological processes life are not limited to what has been called the
genetic age made possible by molecular biology and human genetics. There
are advances in organ transplantation and in our medical capacities to sustain
life. All of these processes of the manipulation of life contain what we like to
think of as ethical questions. Notions of brain death and the ensuing futility of further attempts to
of genetic information by governments, private companies and employers. The possibilities for
restore normal life functioning redefine problems of euthanasia. Various forms of prenatal testing and screening of
Other such ethical questions

concern the harvesting of organs for transplantation, or of the maintenance of
the integrity and diversity of biological species in the face of genetically
modified crops and seeds, etc. The capacity to manipulate our mere biological
life, rather than simply to govern aspects of forms of life, implies a bio-politics
that contests how and when we use these technologies and for what purposes.
pregnant women redefine the conditions of acceptability of abortions.
It also implies a redrawing of the relations between life and death, and a new thanato-politics, a new politics of death. At
some distance from these advances in biomedicine and biotechnology are the issues of life and death that are played in
various arenas of international politics and human rights. These concern the effects of the break-ups of nation-states from
Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union to Indonesia, the subsequent movement, detention and mass death of refugees and illegal
immigrants, and the conditions and forms under which military action, peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention are
acceptable. Detention camps are becoming a feature of modern liberal-democratic states. On the one hand, the twentieth
century gave us a name for the death of a whole people or race, genocide. On the other, it sought to promote the
universal rights of individuals by virtue of their mere existence as human beings. Biopolitics and thanato-politics
are played out in war, in torture, and in biological, chemical and atomic weapons of mass destruction as much as in
declarations of human rights and United Nations peacekeeping operations. The potentialities for the care and the
manipulation of the biological processes of life and of the powers of death have
never appeared greater than they do today. But how do we consider this problem as a political problem? How
are issues of life and death related to our conceptions of politics and to the way in which we think about states and
societies, and their futures? Are the ideas of powers of life and death peculiarly modern, or do they lie at a deeper strata?
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Capitalism
Turn - Resisting Capitalism alone is not enough. We must combine anticapitalist movements with ontology to overcome the violence of global
capitalism.
Joronen '11
lack of awareness about the grounding

dimension of machination eventually leads to the uncritical oblivion of the
fundamental condition of possibility constitutive for globalisation: the
metaphysical scaffolding of the calculative ordering of space that has reached a
climax under the contemporary rubric of planetary economics. Accordingly, even
though the contemporary powers of capital have become far more capable and
flexible at ordering and utilising the earth than Heidegger imagined in the late
1930s, these forces present only one of the manifestations grounded upon the
omnipotent power of machination and its calculative orderings .1 One of the core
arguments of the paper is that due to this fundamental condition of machination we also
need to sharpen our ways of criticising and resisting the totalitarian and violent
tendencies of contemporary capitalism. Resistance of things such as the
capitalist means of production or the globalisation of neoliberal ideologies is not
radical enough; we also need to enter into the resistance of the violence already
promoted at the ontological level of calculative machination, the manipulative
ordering and production of beings.
The present paper concentrates on showing how
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Cede the Political/Political Processes
Turn - Technological enframing is the root cause of militarism, geopolitics,

economic exploitation, and ecological destruction. It locks us into discursive
constraints which do not allow us to think in other ways. We must stop the
technological mindset to stop the root of the impacts.
Burke '07
[Anthony, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney. Ontologies of
War: Violence, Existence and Reason, John Hopkins University Press, Project Muse]
I have sought to extend by analyzing the

militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security -- is a
view that the challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon,
government, technology or policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and
understanding that lays claim to our entire space of truth and existence . Many of
the most destructive features of contemporary modernity -- militarism,
repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention, geopolitics, economic
exploitation and ecological destruction -- derive not merely from particular choices
by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical'
discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment
images of being. Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe,
policymakers' choices become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities,
and humans suffer and die. Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the
chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course
of action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that
reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints -available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that
derive from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which
then preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses , however
What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that
ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic.
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Community/Empathy
Turn - Only by first accepting that ontological examination exists for the self
can feelings of altruism and community grow. Voting negative allows, through
our alternative, this ontological examination ot emerge.
Thiele '95
[Ph.D. from Princeton, professor of political science at the University of Florida, has published books from
Princeton and Oxford (Leslie Paul, Timely Meditations: Martin Heidegger and Postmodern Politics, Princeton University
Press, Chapter two, pg 52- 54)]
This is not to say that empathy is synonymous with Being-with. Empathy is an

emotional and ethical disposition. Heidegger calls it ontic, signifying that which
does not directly address the ontological fundamentals of human being but
rather pertains to its concrete possibilities. Being-with, on the other hand, is an ontological
category. Nevertheless, empathy, as an ontic capacity, is made possible only on the
basis of the ontological structure of Being-with. Just as solitude is a mode of Beingwith that is asocial, so empathy is a mode of Being-with that is , as it were,
hypersocia. To be empathetic is to extend a self already embedded in a social world in such a way that emotional
and ethical connections to others come to the fore and achieve prominence. Empathy reflects the
emotional and ethical extension of a self beyond the ontological sharing of
worldly life that defines human being. The stimulus for empathy may often be
the desire to offset the egoistic or immoral dispositions frequently encountered
in social life. As Heidegger notes, "Dasein, as Being-in-theworld, already is with Others. 'Empathy' does
not first constitute Being-with; only on the basis of Being-with does 'empathy'
become possible: it gets its motivation from the unsociability of the dominant modes of Being-with" (BT 162).
Empathy and egoism, in other words, are two possible ways that human being
may experience its Being-with-others. The prominence of one or the other, historically or
phenomenologically, constitutes neither a confirmation nor a refutation of the more
fundamental nature of Being-with, Heidegger defines human being's shared Being-in-the-world as care
(Sorge). Human being cares to the extent that it concerns itself with its worldly nature, This entails a concern for its Beingwith-others as well as a concern for the meaning of this ontological structure." By care Heidegger means the alwaysalready-interpretive comportment of human being. Human beings care because they are involved with the world and its
meanings, including the meaning of their own worldly existence. Heidegger offers this concise definition: "Care is the term
for the Being of Dasein pure and simple. It has the formal structure, a being for which, intimately involved in its Being-inthe-world, this very Being is at issue" (HCT 294). To have one's Being as an issue is constantly to be involved with the
meaning of one's Being. As such, human being can be said to live "for the sake of its own self ... so far as it is, it is
occupied with its own capacity to be" (BP 170). But being occupied with one's own capacity to be, like being selfinterpreting, is not the same as being self-absorbed. Rather, to care is to be concerned with the meaning of oneself in the
world. The focus of human being's self-interpretation and self-articulation is not a detached self, but a situated one. To be
for the sake of the self is to care about worldly existence as a whole. Heidegger states that care is the "primary totality of
the constitution of Dasein, which as this totality always adopts this or that particular way of its can-be" (HCT 306). The
particular "can-be" of an individual Dasein refers to its ontic possibilities, which, though always founded on the ontological
structure of care, remain distinct from it. Thus Heidegger attempts to distinguish between ontological descriptions and
"Being towards oneself constitutes the Being of Dasein and is not

something like an additional capacity to observe oneself over and above just
existing. Existing is precisely this being towards oneself," Heidegger writes. "Only
because Dasein, constituted by for-the sake-of, exists in selfhood , only for this reason
is anything like human community possible. These are primary existentialontological statements of essence, and not ethical claims about the relative hierarchy of
egoism and altruism" (MFL 190). Being for the sake of the self, then, is the only possible
ethical dictates.
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foundation out of which anything like ethical obligation within human
community might grow. Human being always already exists as an embodied, social, worldly relation, and this
ontological description is neither more nor less valid simply because particular human beings deny or obscure their social
To be altruistic is to
choose to channel one's thoughts, feelings, and actions into one's capacities for
empathy. To be egoistic means to redirect this energy elsewhere. Neither
activity changes the fundamental structure of human being as care, a Being-inthe-world-with-others fundamentally concerned with the meaning of its Being.
and worldly nature or repudiate its practical extension to an explicitly moral realm.
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Democracy
Turn - Only by challenging the tenants and practices of democracy can one
achieve true democracy. The alternative allows people to see their relationship
with the world and allow for the people to maintain being people.
Zizek 08 [Lady killing suave machine (In defense of lost causes p.102-104 )//Collin//JRC]
However, Brown takes here a crucial step further and pushes all the paradoxes of democracy to the end, more radically
than Chantal Mouffe did with her "democratic paradox." Already with Spinoza and Tocqueville, it became clear that
democracy is in itself inchoate empty, lacking a firm principle - it needs anti-democratic

content to fill in its form; as such, it really is constitutively "formal." This anti-democratic
content is provided by philosophy, ideology, theory - no wonder that most of the great philosophers,
from Plato to Heidegger, were mistrustful of democracy, if not directly anti-democratic: What if democratic
politics, the most untheoretical of all political forms, paradoxically requires theory, requires an
antithesis to itself in both the form and substance of theory , if it is to satisfy its
ambition to produce a free and egalitarian order? Brown deploys all the paradoxes from this fact
that "democracy requires for its health a nondemocratic element ": a democracy
needs a permanent influx of anti-democratic self-questioning in order to remain
a Living democracy-the cure for democracy's ills is homoeopathic in form : If, as the
musings of Spinoza and Tocqueville suggest, democracies tend towards cathexis onto principles antithetical to democracy,
then critical scrutiny of these principles and of the political formations animated by them is crucial to the project of
refounding or recovering Democracy Brown defines the tension between politics and theory as the tension between the
political necessity to fix meaning, to "suture" textual drift in a formal principle which can only guide us in action, and
theory's permanent "deconstruction" which cannot ever be recuperated in a new positive program: Among human
politics is peculiarly untheoretical because the bids for power that

constitute it are necessarily at odds with the theoretical project of opening up
meaning, of "making meaning slide," in Stuart Hall's words. Discursive power functions by
concealing the terms of its fabrication and hence its malleability and
contingency; discourse fixes meaning by naturalizing it, or else ceases to have
sway in a discourse. This fixing or naturalizing of meanings is the necessary
idiom in which politics takes place. Even the politics of deconstructive
displacement implicates such normativity . at least provisionally. Theoretical
analyses which unearth the contingent and inconsistent nature and lack of
ultimate foundation of all normative constructs and political projects, "are antipolitical endeavors insofar as each destabilizes meaning without proposing
alternative codes or institutions. Yet each may also be essential in sustaining an existing democratic
practices,
regime by rejuvenating it.,,13 It is thus as if Brown is proposing a kind of Kantian "critique of deconstructive (antidemocratic) reason," distinguishing between its legitimate and illegitimate use: it is legitimate to use it as a negatively
regulative corrective, a provocation, and so on, but it is illegitimate to use it as a constitutive principle to be directly
Brown discerns the same ambiguous link in the

relationship between state and people: in the same way that democracy needs
anti-democracy to rejuvenate itself, the state needs the people's resistance to
rejuvenate itself: Only through the state are the people constituted as a people;
only in resistance to the state do the people remain a people. Thus, just as
democracy requires antidemocratic critique in order to remain democratic, so
too the democratic state may require democratic resistance rather than fealty if
it is not to become the death of democracy. Similarly, democracy may require theory's provision of
applied to reality as a political program or project.
unlivable critiques and unreachable ideals.
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Distance from the Other
Turn - An authentic relationship with the other is not based only of nearness,
but distance. The 1ac dream of encountering new worlds is an act of ontological
colonizationan ethical relationship can only begin in that gap between myself
and the other. Any other relation will only produce a non-being.
Guenther '02
[Lisa, Assistant Professor of Philosophy @ Vandy, Towards a Phenomenology of Dwelling Canadian

Journal of Environmental Education, 7(2), Spring]
The
dwelling of human beings our essential character, our everyday habits, and the
very root of our ethicsexists not only in the nearness of, but at a distance
from, an other that both surpasses me and makes me what I am . We can think of this
other as a spirit or intermediary, or as the human community; but we can also think of the other as the
entire human and more-than-human world : the plants, animals, elements, and people with whom
we inhabit the earth. An ethics of dwelling emerges from the preservation of a tension
between this nearness to others, and the distance which keeps us distinct from
others. The gap between myself and the other is the space which makes ethical
dwelling possible; in keeping us apart, it also preserves the difference which
makes an ethical relation possible. For this is the paradox articulated by fragment 119: that I am only
Ethos anthropoi daimon. In light of Heideggers translation, I propose that we interpret these words as follows:
myself in being divided, that I can only become myself by risking my identity in proximity to others. In effect, the
boundary that separates me from a blade of grass, or from the moose across the river, is precisely that which grants me
Often we are tempted by the

romantic idea of fusing consciousness with the natural world, denying that
there is a difference which keeps us apart from others and, precisely in keeping
us apart, also directs us towards them. But the very possibility of an environmental ethics of dwelling
the possibility of approaching, addressing, and giving to these others.
rests upon the twofold nearness and distinction from others whom we need and for whom we are responsible. In the pages
that follow, I will reflect more concretely on this relation between nearness and distance, or relation and otherness, which
an ethical
relation with the natural world is only possible given the gap of difference or
otherness which is maintained by setting a boundary or limit to our dwellingspace. This boundary, far from alienating us from the natural environment,
actually forms the basis for an environmental ethics of dwelling. Consider also an
emerges from my re-translation of Heideggers translation of ethos anthropoi daimon. I shall argue that
apartment in the city. Cities are more like beehives. When I look out a city window (turning away from the television,
opening the curtains and blinds, and peering out over the back of the couch), I see houses just like my own, arranged into
rows like cells in a honeycomb. They are inhabited by people more or less like me: people who work, come home, make
spaghetti for dinner, fall asleep during the news. And yet I can walk through this city and see things that surprise me: a
man with green hospital pants tied around his head, calmly walking his dog. A cat stalking a bird. Fireweed pushing
through a crack in the sidewalk. For cities leak too, even in spite of themselves. The air conditioning may be on, the stereo
may be blaring; but a storm outside can knock this out in less than a minute. Thus cities tend to show themselves most
clearly just there, where they fail: a robins nest in the mailbox; a leaking tap; the sound of an argument next door. In
these moments of disruption we realize what the city tries most to conceal: that we dwell in relation to others, and that we
can only be there if others are there, too. While the cabin and the apartment are undoubtedly very different sorts of
dwelling-space, both offer a glimpse into the ethical significance of dwelling. While there is much to say here, I want to
focus on one aspect in particular: the relation between inside and outside in a home. The inside of a place can exist only
thanks to the boundary (the walls, floor, and roof) which separates it from the outside. Without this sense of a place
hollowed out from the world at large, there could be no dwelling, no intimacy, no home in which I welcome friends and
strangers. The boundary that separates inside from outside need not be visible or material; for even among people who
dwell under the open sky, there is the sense of a socially interior space, a space which is described more by trails and
hunting grounds than by walls and floorboards. Dwelling requires a sense of the inside: an intimate space where I belong
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with others who do not, properly speaking, belong to me. If the boundary which creates this interior space were absolute
and impermeable, then life within its bounds would be impossible. We need windows and doors; we need wood for the
dwelling occurs neither inside nor outside but in the tension

between the two: in the interaction of spaces which have something to give one
another precisely because they are not the same. The dwelling of human
beings, the root of our ethics and the very character of our existence, occurs in
the nearness of, but distinction from, an other, an outside, a complex of human
and more-than-human beings who both transcend me, and let me become who I
am. Though our contemporary cities have largely neglected this tension between inside and outside, ancient
Greek cities were founded upon the principle of a boundary or city wall, which
both sets limits on the citys proper sphere, and establishes a connection
between the human community and the cosmos in which it dwells. In his book, H2O
stove and air to breathe. Thus
and the Waters of Forgetfulness, Ivan Illich (1985) describes the way Greek cities were ritually traced out upon the earth
in relation to heavenly bodies, the flight of birds, or the movement of clouds. For the Greeks, a city could only be founded
in relation to that which exceeds it, that which is not the city but nevertheless is the condition for its very existence. An
ethos of ritual and custom inaugurated the city once a site 42 Lisa Guenther had been divined; a team of one female and
one male ox pulled a plough around the cosmic shape of the city, the driver lifting the plough at intervals to make
thresholds or city gates, places where the interior would meet and interact with the external world. Illich (1985) calls this
ritual of inauguration a sacred marriage of heaven and earth (p. 15), an opposition and wedding of right and left, inside
and outside, animal and human (p. 14). Without this collaboration of more-than-human othersthe stars, the clouds, the
oxen, the birds, and the ground into which the template is etchedthe human city could not come into being. And yet this
relation between the city and the more-thancity only comes into view when the city-space is marked off from that which
exceeds it and from which it emerges .
The Greeks, we might say, had an ethos of citydwelling: an understanding that human beings need to dwell with one another,
but that we can only do so by dwelling within the limits of a boundary which
both separates us from and aligns us with an exterior which is other-thanhuman and more-thanhuman. One could argue, of course, that the Greeks built walls around their cities not
because of their deep sensitivity to the nature of ethical dwelling, but rather to protect themselves from armies and
barbarians and beasts from the wild. For it is also trueand especially true in the history of the Westthat boundaries
have been erected in the spirit of exclusion and self-protection rather than in pursuit of harmonious dwelling. Thus we
must turn to the past not in order to repeat its mistakes, but rather to learn how not to repeat them; we need the
retrospective gaze of history not only to find inspiration for the future from the past, but also to mark the line which
separates past from future, and opens a different horizon. The Greeks may not have conceived the city wall as a boundary
which separates and connects humanity with the more-than-human world; and Heraclitus may not have understood his
words as the starting-point for environmental ethics. And yet, when we remember these ancient words and customs, we
are given the responsibility to hear both what has been said in the past, and how this saying resonates for the future. For
Heidegger, to remember is not to make the past present through re-presentation, but rather to preserve from the past a
meaning which exists ecstatically in relation to the future. By letting an ethical sense of the boundary address the
traditional history of the boundary as an instrument of exploitation and self-assertion, we open up the possibility of new
meanings for old words. We need to remember the history of Western culture in this way in order to understand why our
We cannot change the way we dwell

simply by wiping the slate clean and starting over; any change in habits must
arise first from an examination of our current habits and the conditions under
which they were formed. For Ivan Illich (1985), To dwell means to inhabit the traces left by ones own living,
own cities are the way they are, and how they could be otherwise.
by which one always retraces the lives of ones ancestors (p. 8). What does this sense of dwelling mean for the future of
our cities? Drive into Vancouver or Toronto Towards a Phenomenology of Dwelling 43 for one cannot help but drive there
This is no longer
dwelling space, but rather what Illich calls garages for living, storage-space for human
enterprise. Now, more than ever, we need to recuperate a sense of dwelling
within limits: not in order to protect ourselves from the wilderness (as perhaps the
ancient Greeks were concerned to do ) but rather to protect the wilderness from ourselves.
We must do this not only because our physical existence depends upon it, but
also because without this relation to, and distinction from, others we cannot
and witness the hundreds of kilometres of occupied space sprawling out of our mega-cities.
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become who we are: namely, human beings whose character is our ethos . And yet
we cannot stop here. For ultimately, and more essentially, we must set a limit to human dwelling not
for our own sake, but for the sake of the other, making room for an other not
out of enlightened self-interest, but out of respect and hospitality . I propose, arising
from this brief exploration of dwelling as thought and as experience, an environmental ethics grounded in these gestures
of respect and hospitality. To respect someone is to hold her in regard while still letting her remain at a distance from me,
Respect thrives only where this distance and difference is

maintained in the very midst of my regard and concern for the other. Likewise
to offer hospitalitya notion which I have inherited from the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1969) is
to open ones dwelling space to an other, a stranger whom I cannot grasp or
comprehend but for whom I am nevertheless responsible. To be hospitable is,
like the gift of respect, to take a step back so that the other can step forth; it is
to set limits on my own dwelling so that the other has room to come and go . The
giving her room to move.
genius of human being is not only that we can be ourselves only in relation to an other which both surpasses and
the genius of the human character, and the root of our ethics, is
in our propensity to give space, or make room for, an other who exceeds our
grasp. An ethics of respect and hospitality has political, social, and intellectual implications. In concrete terms, it means
constitutes us. Rather,
that we ought to set aside wilderness spaces that have no human function, not even the relatively benign function of
providing recreation for people like you and me. It means that we ought to rethink our cities in terms of density rather
than sprawl, and to preserve within them spaces of otherness and ecological diversity: parkland spaces without mowed
lawns and barbeque pits. And it means that in our everyday lives, as well as in our municipal and territorial planning, we
must cultivate habits of respect for those with whom we dwell, and without whom we could not exist .
An ethics of
dwelling based on hospitality and respect demands that we resist the
temptation to believe, even in a spirit of generosity, that we are the same as the
other, that there is no difference between a person and a tree and a lynx across
the river. For although we are by no means indifferent to these others, it is precisely our difference from them, our
not knowing who they are from the inside out, that lets us be ethical towards
them. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1991) ends his book, Language and Death, with the following words,
and this is where I, too, will conclude these reflections upon the ethos of dwelling: We walk through the woods: suddenly
we hear the flapping of wings or the wind in the grass. A pheasant lifts off and then disappears instantly among the trees,
a porcupine buries in the thick underbrush, the dry leaves crackle as a snake slithers away. Not the encounter, but this
flight of invisible animals is thought. No, it was not our voice. We came as close as possible to language, we almost
brushed against it, held it in suspense: but we never reached our encounter and now we turn back, untroubled, toward
home. So, language is our voice, our language. As you now speak, that is ethics. (p. 108)
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Freedom (1/2)
Turn - Freedom demands a openness to being and a letting-be. The alternative

truly creates freedom.
Thiele '95
[Professor of Political Science at University of Florida (Leslie Paul, Timely Meditations, p.75)]
Heidegger remarks that freedom demands pantheism (ST 85).

freedom demands openness to the impenetrable immanence of Being in
beings. It also demands what Heidegger calls "releasement toward things"
(Gelassenheit zu den Dingen). Heidegger borrows the term Gelassenheit from Meister Eckhardt. It literally means
a letting-be. The dispositions that best prepare human being for the visitations
of freedom, then, are an ontological openness to no-thingness (Being) combined
with a receptive releasement toward things (beings). Human freedom for Heidegger, particularly
Summing up Schelling's thesis,
That is,
after his "turning" of the mid-1930s, is fundamentally and foremost an openness and letting-be.
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Freedom (2/2)
The alternative's key to releasement and openness to being allowing for

freedom!
Disclosive freedom is facilitated by releasement toward things and openness to
the mystery of Being. But this is not to say that freedom is achieved without effort and enjoyed in passivity.
Heidegger insists that "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" (DT 56). Persistent, courageous thinking
provides the foundation on which disclosive freedom gains its foothold in the
world. Indeed, there is a unique and original freedom to be practiced in thought itself.
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General/Mars
Turn - Investigating Inner Space allows us to cognitively meditate on the

meaning of [Insert here]/ Mars and its position in our ontology. It not only
allows us to know it, but also to bridge the distance cognitively and lets us
know [Insert here]/ Mars better than physical means.
Jerkins '09
Using the double-entendre example of a bridge, Martin Heidegger examines the proximity of phenomenological distance.
Heidegger implores his reader to think of the old bridge in distant Heidelberg,
though for our purposes the place to consider could very well be Mars.39 Heidegger
instructs, This thinking toward that location is not a mere experience inside the
persons present here; rather, it belongs to the nature of our thinking of that
bridge that in itself thinking gets through, persists through, the distance to that
location.40 From where we are, we are also at that bridge in Heidelbergor on Mars
for that matter. Heidegger informs us, we are by no means at some representational content
in our consciousness. From right here we may even be much nearer to that
[bridge, city, or planet]than someone who uses it daily as an indifferent river
crossing.41 When we pause to consider critically a place of great physical
distance, we can become conscious of it in a far more powerful way than
someone near it who casually takes for granted the existence of that place . This
notion only further legitimizes the relevance of our phenomenological
knowledge
of
Mars.
We
not
only
construct
Mars
socially
and
phenomenologically, we may even bridge the very distance cognitively .
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Hegemony
Turn - The affs world-ordering engages in a type of thinking that reduces all life
on earth to a tool to be instrumentalized, further disconnecting ourselves from
what it means to be.
Swazo '02
[Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alaska (Norman K., Crisis Theory and World Order:
Heideggerian Reflections, p. 110-11]
The inevitability of such a fight issues from the pathology of nihilism all political thought and practice in our time cannot
The attraction to
"rational design" of the world order is today motivated by a Sense of imminent
catastrophe and, thus, by the human impulse to self preservation. Here, however, it is
life itself that compels; and precisely in this attraction to rational design of the world order is there betrayed what
Nietzsche recognizes in Western moralism: It is pathologically conditioned . And what is this pathology? It
is nothing other than the strife of subjective egoisms as yet unmastered. Such is
the essence of power-politics. But this, presumably, is life (will to power); and, as Nietzsche puts it, " life itself
forces us to posit values; life itself values through us when we posit values "
(Twilight of the Idols, "Morality as Anti-Nature," note 5). In world order thinking, I submit, the West discharges
the energy of its moral essence, doing so as author of the prevailing morality
and as the locus of the dominant subjective egoisms which have been inevitably
diffused to determine all political cultures, the latter of which are now bound to
the West's hegemony over world political culture . The contemporary world order
in structure and value orientation is instituted on the basis of Western reaso n,
but be "pathologically conditioned" (Twilight of the Idols, "The Problem of Socrates," note 10).
and as such it is characterized by an "order of rank" in which European values have primacy, i.e., are hegemonous vis-a-
World order thinking,

posits its values-peace, justice, economic
well-being, ecological balance-over against all that shows itself as the
contemporary pathology of "petty politics" and all that is countervaluation in
the strife motivated by the requirements of global hegemony. In this positing of
primacy to the Western valuation, the Occident reveals its near exhaustion , if not
its desperation, in the face of competing modes of subjectivity as manifest by a
fragmented and antagonistic "system" of nation-states, each with its "splinterwill." Given that this world order movement is transnational, the West co-opting sympathetic forces in the developing
world, twit her this exhaustion nor this desperation is restricted to the West: The "crisis" is effectively
planetary. Nietzsche was not amiss in his articulation of the great task that would define the twentieth century, i.e.,
vis all "other" (Asian, African, Latin American, etc.) plausibly autochthonous valuations.
thus, compelled by life itself in all its prevalent pathology,
the problem of global governance. Neither was he amiss in appreciating its hesitant approach, despite its inexorability.
That is, Nietzsche recognizes the persistent, though declining, influence of the Christian ideal with respect to the problem
of global governance, anticipating that this ideal would yet issue in the call for a moral world order: Notwithstanding the
death of God, Christian value judgments would be transmuted into the political domain. The twentieth century's emerging
order would be a "hybrid" of sickness, the will to power heightening the demands of modern man's self-determination, the
Christian conscience yet restraining-in short, a "fettered" moment in humanity's movement toward total self-affirmation,
total sovereignty in the absence of God and transcendent norms. "They are rid of the Christian God," writes Nietzsche in
his Twilight of the Idols ("Skirmishes of an Untimely Man," note 5), yet "now believe Al the more firmly that they must
cling to Christian morality." It is not yet realized, observes Nietzsche, that "when one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls
the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet." Accordingly, the contemporary world order movement expresses
a commitment to transforming the philosophic orientation (values) as well as transforming institutional structures and
That world order thinking is value

thinking is evidence of its essential debt to the Nietzschean metaphysic, to
thinking the world order from the vantage of subjectness, for it is only with
patterns of behavior. World order thinking is, thus, normative.
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Nietzsche that value thinking comes to predominate in the twentieth century. "'
As Heidegger puts it, "Values stem from valuation; valuation corresponds to the will to power." That is, insofar as
the creation of secureness is grounded in value-positing and world order
thinkers on their own essential authority (understood metaphysically, not personally) seek to
secure a world order, then world order thinking cannot but be so grounded. It is
precisely this ground, i.e., a self-grounded value-posit, that entails the technocratic
conception of world order and, thus, eliminates a meaningful distinction
between the normative and technocratic approaches. How so? Heidegger answers in words
that indict all value thinking: "thinking in terms of values is a radical killing. It ... strikes
down that which is as such, in its being-in itself. . . ." Everything which is "is
transformed into object" and "swallowed up into the immanence of
subjectivity.""' Commensurate with this subjectivity is that objectivity which, in the essence of the technological, is
total, and which finds its instrument in technocracy .
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Nihilism
Turn - The alternative commits to ontological reflection, which is critical for

overcoming Nihilism.
Dreyfus '06 [Hubert. Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkley, Heidegger on the Connection
between Nihlism, Art, Technology, and Politics, http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/pdf/HdgerOnArtTechPoli.pdf]
In his lectures on Nietzsche in 1936 Heidegger quotes with approval Nietzsche's Kierkegaardian condemnation of the
present age: Around the year 1882 [Nietzsche] says regarding his times, "Our age is an agitate one, and precisely for that
reason, not an age of passion; it heats itself up continuously, because it feels that it is not warm -- basically it is
freezing.... In our time it is merely by means of an echo that events acquire their `greatness' -- the echo of the
Heidegger agrees with Nietzsche that "There is no longer

any goal in and through which all the forces of the historical existence of
peoples can cohere and in the direction of which they can develop". 4 Nihilism is
Nietzsche's name for this loss of meaning or direction. Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche agree
newspapers" (XII, 343-344). 3
that if nihilism were complete, there would be no significant private or public issues. Nothing would have authority for us,
would make a claim on us, would demand a commitment from us. In a non-nihilistic age there is something at stake; there
are questions that all can agree are important, even if they violently disagree as to what the answers to these questions
are. But in our age, everything is in the process of becoming equal . There is less and less
difference between political parties, between religious communities, between social causes, between cultural practices --
all meaningful differences are being levelled. Kierkegaard

thought that the answer to nihilism was to make one's own individual absolute
commitment. If you can commit yourself unconditionally -- in love for instance -- then that
becomes a focus for your whole sense of reality. Things stand out or recede into
insignificance on the basis of that ultimate concern. One doesnot discover a significance that is
everything is on a par,
already there. There is no basis for this commitment in the cosmos. Indeed, such a commitment is exactly the opposite of
You are called by some concrete concern -- either a person or

a cause -- and when you define yourself by your dedication to that concern,
your world acquires seriousness, and significance . The only way to have a meaningful life in the
belief in an objective truth.
present age, then, is to let your involvement become definitive of reality for you, and what is definitive of reality for you is
once a society like

ours becomes rational and reflective, such total commitments begin to look like
a kind of dangerous dependency. The committed individual is identified as a
workaholic or a woman who loves too much . This suggests that to be recognized and appreciated
individual commitment requires a shared understanding of what is worth pursuing. But as our culture comes
more and more to celebrate critical detachment, self-sufficiency, and rational
choice, there are fewer and fewer shared commitments. So, commitment itself
beings to look like craziness . Thus Heidegger comes to see the recent
undermining of commitment as due not so much to a failure on the part of the
individual, as to a lack of anything in the modern world that could solicit
commitment from us and sustain us in it. The things that once evoked commitment --gods, heroes,
the God-man, the acts of greatstatesmen, the words of great thinkers -- have lost their authority. As a result,
individuals feel isolated and alienated. They feel that their lives have no
meaning because the public world contains no guidelines. When everything that
is material and social has become completely flat and drab, people retreat into
their private experiences as the only remaining place to find significance. Heidegger
not something that is in any way provisional -- although it certainly is vulnerable. That is why,
sees this move to private experience as characteristic of the modern age. Art, religion, sex, education all becomes varieties
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of experiences. When all our concerns have been reduced to the common denominator of "experience" we will have
reached the last stage of nihilism. One then sees "the plunge into frenzy and the disintegration into sheer feeling as
redemptive. The `lived experience' as such becomes decisive."
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Nuclear War
Turn - The forgetting of being makes all acts of destruction not events in and of
themselves but rather merely signs of a new age defined by technological
comportmentan unworld that justifies nuclear annihilation.
Milchman and Rosenberg '96
[Alan, Alan. Professor of Political Science at Queens College and Assistant

Professor of Philosophy at Queens College. Heidegger, Planetary Technics, Holocaust. Martin Heidegger and the
Holocaust. Ed. Milchman and Rosenberg. 1996. pp. 225-226]
The Holocaust can provide insight into the meaning of the danger that threatens
the West. We are not suggesting that the Holocaust constitutes that danger, but
rather that it is a sign of that danger. For Heidegger the danger was that, as a
result of the reduction of nature and humans to standing reserve , the oneness of the
fourfold would be definitively shattered and modern man would cease to be a mortal and would
henceforth perish but not die. For Heidegger, such a condition would be marked not
simply by the forgetting of Being, butfar worseby a forgetting of the
forgetting of Being; the essential distress of modernity would be immeasurably
heightened by the inability of humans to any longer feel that distress. In
place of a world, humankind would inhabit an un-world (Unwelt). While Heidegger is
eloquent concerning the danger in his later writings, the fashion in which mans factical existence would be actually
transformed by the growing specter of an un-world, the stages by which such an Unwelt would emerge, as the danger
loomed, was never clearly spelled out. Hubert Dreyfus, basing himself on Heideggers own insistence that what threatened
the real danger, was less the atomic bomb than the technological
understanding of Being that tendentially reduced all beings to standing reserve ,
man,
has concluded that the un-world that Heidegger saw emerging might be a perfectly ordered society dedicated to the
welfare of all.41 This view, that the Unwelt might be a smoothly functioning, consumerist society, though one in which
man no longer felt distress and no longer manifested a concern for Being, a society in which there would seem to be no
If Heidegger was determined to

show that what threatens man was not the atomic bomb but the reign of das
Ge-Stell, it was not to deny the threat posed by the bomb, but rather to make
clear that the bomb was the culmination of a process that began with the
technological understanding of Being. As Heidegger asserts in The Thing: Man stares at
what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He does not see that
the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long
since taken place, has already happened.42 Heidegger does not deny the threat posed by the bomb,
place for Auschwitz and its death-world, seems questionable to us.
or the train of destruction that would characterize such an un-world, so much as insist on its source, and identify what he
sees as its Grund. Moreover, what is implied in Dreyfuss position is that the smoothly functioning society and the deathworld are mutually exclusive, that the man-made mass death symbolized by Auschwitz cannot be factored into the unworld. But why is the extermination of those designated as the Other, those who are the embodiment of alterity,
incompatible with this image of a perfectly ordered society? It seems to us that the horror of the death-world can all too
easily be routinized and normalilized in an Unwelt, where humans have been turned into standing reserve. Finally, the
image of the un-world as a site where everyone might simply become healthy and happy, even as they forget their
forgetting of Being,43 overlooks Heideggers insistence, in his Overcoming Metaphysics, that: The
world wars
and their character of totality are already a consequence of the abandonment
of Being.44 It is precisely this character of the Unwelt as a site of misery and
devastation which seems to stamp Heideggers thinking. Thus , in his Heraclitus lecture
course of 1943, Heidegger raises the question of the progress to which humankind
can look forward under the reign of planetary technics: Forward? Where to,
please? To the shattered cities on the Rhine and the Ruhr ?45 This imagery of broken cities
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and people seems to us to better accord with Heideggers vision of the un-world than that of a consumer society. Thus, we
Auschwitz constitutes a grim sign of what it would mean for the

oneness of das Geviert to be shattered, for the dwelling (Wohnung) of mortals to be
destroyed, and of just how close that threat is. At Auschwitz the Heideggerian imagery became
believe that
real: Behind its barbed wire we can see, in all its horror, what in Heideggerian terms might constitute the end of the world.
The Holocaust thereby provides an indication of what an Unwelt would look like. The linkage of the Holocaust to the image
of the un-world makes it possible to bring out what is latent in the Heideggerian text.
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Overcoming Human Growth
Turn - The idea of overcoming limits and growth is precisely the problem that
turns the case!
in postmodern times largely as a result of the increasingly
apparent limits to human growth. The more these limits are ignored - or worse, viewed as
obstacles to be overcome - the graver the crisis becomes. Heidegger develops a philosophy
of limits. More to the point, Heidegger describes our freedom as dependent on rather
than curtailed by our worldly boundaries. Once the boundaries of human being
are experienced neither as a threat to human freedom nor as an affront to
human dignity, the tragic attempt to conquer the earth might be abated and the
opportunity for its caretaking approached.
Ecological concerns have erupted
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Terrorism
Turn - Terrorism the result of technological domination of the world it is an

attempt to break free from the standing reserve.
Mitchell '05
Terror takes a situation

that looks hopelessly doomed and finds the essential within it, but terror contains its own
demise, too. We flee from it. We respond to it with a hardening of our own ways;
we reaffirm the identity of being instead of opening ourselves to others. The
American response to terror has been one of Americanism , there can be no doubt about
Nothing stable, this juncture in being itself must be followed and traced. It trembles.
that. Terror ends in this, and there is no commemoration, just a forgetting. The commemorative aspect of terror allows us
Terrorism
will take place in the withdrawal of being, in the unworld of machination. The
modem configuration of war is surpassed by the technological plan of
homogenized circulation, and the distinction between war and peace falls away
in their mutual commitment to furthering the cycle of production and
consumption. The abandonment of being that forms this unworld by draining
the world of its being does not occur without a trace, however, and terror in its
trembling corresponds to that trace. Terrorism necessarily results from such a devastation-or,
"becoming-desert," Vendiistung-of the world; terrorism is always born in the desert. Terrorism is
metaphysical because it touches everything, every particular being, all of which may
be attacked and annihilated. The circulation of the standing-reserve sets an
equivalence of value among things with a resulting worldlessness where
existence is another name for exchangeability. The exchanged and replaceable things are already
to remember the fallen and understand how they can still be with us today in our American way of being.
replaced and exchanged, not serially, but essentially. They are not fully present when here. Terrorism names this absence,
or rather is the effect of this absence, which is to say it is that absence itself, since here we are not dealing with an
absence that could be the effect of any loss of presence. The absence in question is not an absence of presence, but an
It would be ridiculous to think that such a change in

being would lack a corresponding change in beings. This change in' the nature of being shows
itself in the fact that all beings today are terrorized. They all stand under a very real threat of destruction
via -terrorist acts. There would be no terrorist threat were it not for these terrorists , yet
there would be no possibility of a threat were it not for being. Certainly terrorism is not the only "effect"
of this absence in presence ; Heidegger frequently refers to the atomic bomb in precisely this regard.
Terrorism's claim, however, is distinct from that of atomic war. Like the atomic bomb,
terrorism operates at the level of threat. Insofar as it calls into question all
beings, terrorism is itself a metaphysical determination of being. Terrorism makes
everything a possible object of terrorist attack, and this is the very terror of it. Everything is a possible
target, and this now means that all beings exist as possible targets, as possibly
destroyed. But this should not be taken to mean that there are discrete beings, fully present, now threatened with
destruction. The ineradicable threat of destruction transforms the nature ofthe
being itself. The being can no longer exist as indifferent to its destruction; this
destruction does not reside outside of the being. Instead, destruction inhabits
the being and does so, not as something superadded to the being, but as the
essence of the being itself. Beings are henceforth as though destroyed. Terror brings
absence in and through presence.
about an alteration in the very mode of being of reality, the real is now the terrorized. Reality is already terrorized; the
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Beings exist as
endangered, as terrorized, and this means as no longer purely self-present. It
means that, in terms of pure presence , beings exist asalready destroyed. Destruction is not
change has already taken place, -and this regardless of whether an attack comes or not.
something that comes at a later date, nor is it something that may or may not already have taken place. Destruction exists
now as threat. The effectiveness of terror lies in the threat, not the attack.
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Realism
Turn - The alternative solves the imbalances of power that are experience in
hegemony! The alternative also solves for Realism's inability to view Beings,
which entraps them in the Realist perspective.
Dallmayr '04
[PhD, Professor, Department of Government and International Studies, Notre Dame, Constellations
Volume 11, No 1, 2004 The Underside of Modernity: Adorno, Heidegger, and Dussel Fred Dallmayr).//JRC]
the
reflective recovery of the question of and care for being, a care completely
immune to managerial manipulation. As before, Heidegger distinguishes between power and violence,
Moving beyond the critique of Machenschaft, Besinnung offers glimpses of a radically other possibility: namely,
on the one hand, and genuine authority (Herrschaft), on the other. Apart from exuding intrinsic dignity or worth, he
writes, Herrschaft
means the free potency or capacity for an original respect for

being (rather than merely empirical things). To characterize this dignity, Besinnung introduces a
new vocabulary, by presenting being (Seyn) as a basically power-free domain (das Machtlose) beyond
power and non-power or impotence (jenseits von Macht und Unmacht). As Heidegger emphasizes,
power-free does not mean powerless or impotent, because the latter remains fixated on power, now experienced as a
From an everyday realist angle, beings realm may appear powerless or

impotent; but this is only a semblance or illusion resulting from its reticent
inobstrusiveness. Due to its reticence, beings realm can never be dragged into
human machinations, into the struggles between the powerful and the
powerless (as long as the latter merely seek power); but precisely in this
manner it reveals its Herrschaft, a reign that cannot be matched by any power
or superpower because they necessarily ignore the nature of the basically
power-free possibility. To be sure, access to this reign is difficult and radically obstructed by the
Machenschaft of our age. Yet, an important pathway through and beyond these
obstructions is offered by meditative thinking (Besinnung) which opens a glimpse
into the time-space-play (Zeit-Spiel- Raum) of being as Ereignis, that is, into the interplay
and differential entwinement of being and beings, of humans, nature, and the
divine.
lack.
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Totalitarianism
Turn - Only the alternatives pluralistic Being bring down authoritarianism.

Status quo metaphysics ensure that authoritarianism happens by ignoring the
pluralities of metaphysics.
Vattimo '03 [Gianni Vattimo, Philosophy Professor, University of Turin, and member of the EU Parliament, Nihilism
&
Emancipation, Edited Satiago Zabala, Translated William McCuaig, pg. 65-69]

"Compelle intrare"-the
slogan that justified Christian missionaries in using force to

convert the pagans they encountered in the new lands that became colonies of Christian powers "for their
own good"-is one of the well-known consequences of the assurance that one
possesses the truth. And it accurately portrays the linkage between metaphysics ,
essentialism, Eurocentrism, and authoritarianism. It is the same authoritarianism that we see
today in the claim advanced by churches and other "moral" authorities that they may ignore even decisions taken by
legitimate parliamentary majorities when values deriving from "natural law" are at stake. (Let me state in passing that I do
not mean by this that the natural-law theorists who legitimized the modern revolutions, starting with the French
Revolution, were wrong. I maintain only that the claim to incarnate a law of nature is always a violent position;
sometimes, as in the case of the revolutions against the ancien regime, it is justifiable as a reaction against prior violence.
But no more than that.) The reasons for preferring
the "post metaphysical" reading of current
ethical discourse
are more or less the same as the ones advanced in favor of a postmetaphysical reading of
modernity and the situation to which it has brought us. They are "historical" reasons in many senses of the term: they
have the force of "ad hominem" arguments and hence are situated within the very situation they claim to interpret (which
is the nature of interpretation in any case), and they are historical in the sense that they survey the history through which
is the end of colonialism and the

discovery of the existence of other cultures that resist being assigned a
backward and primitive place on an evolutionary line leading to western civilization. They
are not "absolute" reasons, they flow from no essence : it would after all be a contradiction to
we have lived and are living. Their practical-theoretical background
claim to demonstrate in absolute terms the positive significance of a process that has dissolved all absolutes. Yet despite
it is hard to find anyone who

denies that the recognition of the plurality of cultures and the rejection of a
Eurocentric historicist model are positive steps toward achieving a "better"
form of rationality. Even admitting that there is nothing absolute about these last arguments, a shared criterion
does appear to emerge. At the least it seems undeniable that the emancipatory significance of the
dissolution of metaphysical absoluteness understood in this way is widely
shared, is a matter of common sense-so that the burden of proof falls on whoever defends the opposite view, and it is
all, the historical reasons to which I refer are persuasive to this extent:
hard to find anyone fitting that description.
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War and Security
Turn - Ontological interrogation is the only way to solve the root cause of war.
Without the ontological interrogation we will be forced to not understand
beings and be forced into the mindset we must act for security. Yet, these paths
of action are due to an ontological disattachment due to the technik mindset.
Burke '07
[Anthony, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations @ UNSW in Sydney, Ontologies of War:
Violence, Existence, and Reason, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Project Muse]
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. 23 This is the
direction taken by much realist analysis critical of Israel and the Bush administration's 'war
on terror'.24 Reframing such concerns in Foucauldian terms, we could argue that obsessive ontological commitments
have led to especially disturbing 'problematizations' of truth.25 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 danger obviously raised here is that these
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2NC Frontline
1. GUT CHECK This is the VARSITY level of debate [and we are in OUT
ROUNDS]. If youre not prepared to debate the ontological reasoning behind the
exploration of space then you should LOSE on PRESUMPTION
2. Our interpretation the debate should answer the question do we endorse
or oppose the technological mindset of the status quo. The Neg still gets their
impacts, but they have to win they solve despite our links
3. If we win the kritik we win frameworkthe entire neg is a disadvantage to
their framework. They have to beat the thesis of our kritik before they get to
access offense on this flow.
4. [Insert Specific Framework Arguments]
***FRAMEWORK***
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Ballot Becomes the Criticism
The ballot is a line of flight, a single cry of dissent which echoes all over the
world. The point is to recognize the infinity of the lines and understand an
overarching framework through which these lines become revolutionary. Vote
affirmative not only because of our micropolitical, rhizomatic tactic for
resistance, but also for the method by which our tactic allows voting negative to
turn the ballot into the criticism. Turns into the line of flight to create real
change. The ballot can adopt and become the criticism with a negative vote.
Holloway '10 [John, Professor in the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades of the Benemerita Universidad
Autonoma de Puebla in Mexico, Crack Capitalism, 17-20]
Imagine a sheet of ice covering a dark lake of possibility. We scream 'NO' so

loud that the ice begins to crack. What is it that is uncovered? What is that dark
liquid that (sometimes, not always) slowly or quickly bubbles up through the
crack? We shall call it dignity. The crack in the ice moves, unpredictable,
sometimes racing, sometimes slowing, sometimes widening, sometimes narrowing, sometimes
freezing over again and disappearing, sometimes reappearing. All around the
lake there are people doing the same thing as we are, screaming 'NO' as loud as
they can, creating cracks that move just as cracks in ice do, unpredictably,
spreading, racing to join up with other cracks, some being frozen over again.
The stronger the flow of dignity within them, the greater the force of the cracks .
Serve no more, La Boetie tells us, and we shall at once be free. The break begins with refusal, with No.
No, we shall not tend your sheep, plough your fields, make your car, do your
examinations. The truth of the relation of power is revealed: the powerful depend
on the powerless. The lord depends on his serfs, the capitalist depends on the workers who create his capital. But
the real force of the serve no more comes when we do something else instead. Serve no more, and then
what? If we just fold our arms and do nothing at all, we soon face the problem
of starvation. The serve no more, if it does not lead to an other-doing, an
alternative activity, can easily become converted into a negotiation of the terms
of servitude. The workers who say 'no' and cross their arms, or go on strike, are
implicitly saying 'no, we shall not carry out this command ', or 'we shall not carry on working under
these conditions.' This does not exclude the continuation of servitude (of the relationship of
employment) under other conditions. The 'serve no more' becomes a step in the negotiation of new conditions
of servitude. It is a different matter when the negation becomes a negation-andcreation. This is a more serious challenge. The workers say 'no' and they take
over the factory. They declare that they do not need a boss and begin to call for a world without bosses.2 Think of
the sad story of Mr Peel, who, Marx tells us ... took with him to Swan River, West Australia,
means of subsistence and of production to the amount of 50,000 pounds . Mr. Peel
had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the working-class, men,
women and children. Once arrived at his destination, 'Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or
fetch him water from the river.' Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of
What happened was that land was still freely

the 3,000 persons of the working class went off and
cultivated their own land. One can imagine the scene as the unhappy Mr. Peel's initial anger, when the
workers refused to carry out his orders , turned to despair when he saw them going off to
production to Swan River. (1867/1965: 766; 1867/1990: 933)
available in Swan River, so that
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develop an alternative life free of masters.
The availability of land made it possible for them to

convert their refusal into a decisive rupture and to develop an activity quite different from that planned for them by Mr.
Peel. Think of the exciting story of the teachers in Puebla.3 When the government announced in 2008 the creation of a
new scheme to improve the quality of education by imposing greater individualism, stronger competition between
students, stricter measurement of the output of teachers, and so on the teachers said 'No, we will not accept it.' When the
government refused to listen, the dissident teachers moved beyond mere refusal and in consultation with thousands of
students and parents, elaborated their own proposal for improving the quality of education by promoting greater.
cooperation between students, more emphasis on critical thinking, preparation for cooperative work not directly
subordinate to capital, and began to explore ways of implementing their scheme in opposition to the state guidelines, by
taking control of the schools.4 Here too the initial refusal begins to open towards something else, towards an educational
activity that not only resists but breaks with the logic of capital. In both of these cases, the No is backed by an other-
The original No is then not a

closure, but an opening to a different activity, the threshold of a counter-world
with a different logic and a different language. The No opens to a time-space in
which we try to live as subjects rather than objects. These are times or spaces
in which we assert our capacity to decide for ourselves what we should do whether it be chatting with our friends, playing with our children, cultivating the land in a different way,
developing and implementing projects for a critical education. These are times or spaces
in which we take control of our own lives, assume the responsibility of our own humanity. Dignity is the
unfolding of the power of No. Our refusal confronts us with the opportunity, necessity and responsibility of
developing our own capacities. The women and men who left Mr. Peel in the lurch were
confronted with the opportunity and necessity of developing abilities
suppressed by their previous condition of servitude. The teachers who reject the state
doing. This is the dignity that can fill the cracks created by the refusal.
textbooks are forced to develop another education. The assumption of responsibility for our own lives is in itself a break
This does not mean that everything will turn out to be

perfect. The dignity is a breaking, a negating, a moving, an exploring. We must
be careful not to convert it into a positive concept that might give it a
deadening fixity. The women and men who deserted Mr. Peel may well have
turned into small landholders who defended their property against all
newcomers. The teachers who take their schools to create a critical education may possibly reproduce authoritarian
practices as bad as those which they are rejecting. It is the moving that is important, the moving
against-and-beyond: the negating and creating of those who abandoned Mr.
Peel, more than the new spaces that they created; the taking of the schools by the teachers,
more than the schools that they have taken. It is the assuming of our own responsibility that is
important, though the results may well be contradictory .6 Dignity, the
movement of negating-and-creating, of taking control of our own lives , is not a
simple matter: it is, we said, a dark liquid bubbling up from a lake of possibility. To give a positive solidity
to what can only be a moving of refusing and creating and exploring can easily
lead to disillusion. A pro-Zapatista collective, or a social centre , or a group of piqueteros
ends in conflict and disarray and we conclude that it was all an illusion, instead
of seeing that such dignities are inevitably contradictory and experimental. The
cracks are always questions, not answers. It is important not to romanticise the
cracks, or give them a positive force that they do not possess. And yet, this is
where we start: from the cracks, the fissures, the rents, the spaces of rebellious
negation-and-creation. We start from the particular, not from the totality. We
start from the world of misfitting, from the multiplicity of particular rebellions,
dignities, cracks, not from the great unified Struggle that simply does not exist,
nor from the system of domination . We start from being angry and lost and trying to create something
with the logic of domination.
else, because that is where we live, that is where we are. Perhaps it is a strange place to start, but we are looking for a
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We are trying to theorise hope-againsthope. This is surely the only subject matter of theory that is left.
strange thing. We are looking for hope in a dark night. 7
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Calculative Utilitarianism Fails
Calculative attempts to assign weight to and compare between alternatives

destroys the essence of what these options were in the first place by viewing
their meaning solely through their value and makings an authentic relationship
impossible.
Haynes '08
[John D., Professorial Visiting Fellow School of Information Systems, Technology and Management
University of New South Wales, Calculative Thinking and Essential Thinking in Heideggers Phenomenology,
http://wwwdocs.fce.unsw.edu.au/sistm/staff/Heidegger_calculation_essential_March08.pdf]
In Heideggers work What is Metaphysics? reprinted with an introduction by Heidegger himself in Kaufmanns
Existentialism From Dostoevesky to Sartre (Kaufmann 1975), we find perhaps in all of Heideggers works the clearest
rendition of Heideggers distinction between calculative thinking and essential thinking. Indeed Heidegger himself returns
again and again to this work. Firstly, in relation to calculative thinking, Heidegger says (Kaufmann 1975, pp 261-2): All
Nothing counts
for calculation save for what can be calculated. Any particular thing is only what
it adds up to, and any count ensures the further progress of counting. This
process is continually using up numbers and is itself a continual selfconsumption. The coming out of the calculation with the help of what-is counts as the explanation of the latters
Being. Calculation uses every-thing that is as units of computation, in advance,
and, in the computation, uses up its stock of units. This consumption of what-is reveals the
consuming nature of calculation. Only because number can be multiplied indefinitely ... is it possible for the
consuming nature of calculation to hide behind its products and give
calculative thought the appearance of productivity.... Calculative thought
places itself under compulsion to master everything in the logical terms of its
procedure. And of essential thinking, Heidegger says (Kaufmann 1975, pp 263-4): The thought of Being seeks no
calculation makes the calculable come out in the sum so as to use the sum for the next count.
hold in what-is. Essential thinking looks for the slow signs of the incalculable and sees in this the unforeseeable coming of
the ineluctable. Such thinking is mindful of the truth of Being and thus helps the Being of truth to make a place for itself in
mans history. This help effects no results because it has no need of effect. Essential thinking helps as the simple
inwardness of existence, insofar as this inwardness, although unable to exercise such thinking or only having theoretical
knowledge of it, kindles its own kind. In relation to calculative thinking, Heidegger makes it clear in a further passage
(Kaufmann 1975, p 262) that this kind of thinking cannot comprehend itself. One gets a sense of this in view of the notion
of calculative thoughts compulsion to master everything in the logical terms of its procedure at the tail end of the above
[calculative
thinking] has no notion that in calculation everything calculable is already a
whole before it starts working out its sums and products , a whole whose unity
naturally belongs to the incalculable which, with its mystery, ever eludes the
clutches of calculation. That which, however, is always and everywhere closed at
the outset to the demands of calculation and, despite that, is always closer to man in
its enigmatic unknowableness than anything that is, than anything he may
arrange and plan, this can sometimes put the essential man in touch with a
thinking whose truth no logic can grasp.
quoted passage, but the following passage (Kaufmann 1975, p 262) makes it abundantly clear: It
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Ontological Thinking Key
We cannot base our policy choices off of statistical analysis alone, we must
include the ontological questions about being before we can come to a
conclusion about reality.
Olivier '07
[Bert, Professor of Philosophy at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Nature as abject, critical
psychology, and revolt: The pertinence of Kristeva, South African Journal of Psychology, 37(3), 2007, pp. 443469]
any responsible human being who has taken note of the current
state of affairs cannot and should not avoid making use of every possible
medium to create and expand an informed awareness of the situation, as well
as a sense of urgency and the need to act, among as many people as possible. In
my experience, mere factual knowledge is not sufficient to have the desired effect of
galvanising people into action in the present information age, people with access to
In the light of this,
media (that is, the vast majority of people on the planet) are better informed than in any previous era, but arguably just
by placing
information about the precarious state of the earth in the context of not only a
philosophical-theoretical
but
also,
crucially,
a
critical-psychological
interpretation, people are afforded the intellectual, psychological, and ethical
means to appreciate what all this information means for them and for other
creatures on the planet.
as apathetic as informed, judging by the deteriorating condition of natural resources.3 Rather, therefore,
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Ontology before Ethics
Dwelling is the only way ethics can be fully cultivated. Rather than defining
ethical values as static and universal rules, dwelling allows ethics to be more
fluid and dynamic.
Hatab '97
[Lawrence J., Professor of Philosophy at Old Dominion University, ETHICS AND FINITUDE: Heideggerian
Contributions to Moral Philosophy, http://www.focusing.org/apm_papers/hatab.html]
Dwelling (Wohnen) is a word that occupied Heidegger's later thinking. But it is completely consistent with, and expressive
The word
"dwelling" captures both "subjective" and "objective" tones (human meaning and the
environment which we inhabit), but in a single, indivisible, existential term. The word in all
its resonances becomes Heidegger's replacement for traditional subject-object
ontologies. In Letter on Humanism, Heidegger takes up the Greek word ethos in its sense of abode and dwelling
of, the nonobjective-nonsubjective configuration of being-in-the-world delineated in the early writings.
place, and concludes that his ontological investigations might then be called an "original ethics" (p. 235). Although this
answer is a typically unsatisfying "end run" around the specific question regarding the possibility of ethics in Heidegger's
a normative ethics can

benefit from attention to ethos-as-dwelling, that we can ask questions about
how we dwell ethically, and how we should dwell in the world. Heidegger's
notion of dwelling offers two main contributions to moral philosophy ; the first points
back to and summarizes preceding sections of my text, the second points forward to the rest of my essay: 1) Values
can not be understood as either objective or subjective conditions; they are
modes of being-in-the-world. 2) Being-ethical-in-the-world must be understood
as radically finite. For Heidegger, from beginning to end, from being-in-the-world to the fourfold, dwelling
means being at home in the finitude of Being, in its mixture of presence and
absence, especially in terms of human mortality and the limit conditions of
unconcealment. Dwelling is contrasted with the "flight" from Being indicated in the closure of metaphysical
systems and the quest for certainty and control. Dwelling names something like what the poet John Keats called
"negative capability," the capacity to live with conditions of uncertainty , or as I would put it, a
thinking, I believe that we can go beyond Heidegger's ontological fixation, that
reconciliation with finitude. Although dwelling has a positive content suggesting a sense of placement in the world to
counter radical versions of skepticism, phenomenalism, or anarchism, it also presents a deep challenge in that we must
The same radical

finitude can be shown in our ethical dwelling. In fact, this finitude has always
been acknowledged in moral philosophy, but it was deemed a deficiency that
either needed correcting or that prevented ethics from achieving intellectual
legitimation. The moral life is always faced with cognitive, psychological,
empirical, and practical limits, which are effectively expressed in the mixture of presence and absence that
rings in Heidegger's favorite word, aletheia, unconcealment: Values are not grounded in proof or
demonstration; the moral arena is marked by disagreement and conflict; moral
situations are often complex and ambiguous, where outcomes are uncertain,
where goods conflict with each other , where a balance of differing interests is hard to gauge--but we
have to decide and sometimes all we are left with is an abyssal moment of
choice; we sometimes fail in our aim for the good, or in doing good we
sometimes instigate harmful effects ; extreme or degraded environments can ruin ethical potential;
ethical commitments often require risk and sacrifice, which makes anxiety and
mixed dispositions inevitable. The value of Heidegger's notion of dwelling is
exist in a world without foundations, guarantees, or ultimateresolution of existential difficulties.
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that we are forced to give up the idea that such conditions of finitude are
"deficiencies." This is the ethical world, and the myth of pure "presence" must
be surrendered in moral philosophy no less than in ontology . The problem with ethical
beliefs that insulate the good from limit conditions is not simply a philosophical flaw. There is an irony that history has
The "purer" the concept of the good, the greater the capacity
to do evil on its behalf. With a definitized ideal, the world now appears "fallen" and in need of reform; when
demonstrated all too often:
elements in the world continue to resist or fall short, there arises a potential to commit terror in the name of "salvation."
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Ontology First
1) Your Framework is built upon fundamental ontological assumptions that our

Kritik is designed to call into question. Ontology makes its way into every mode
of thought. Everything the aff claims is based off their ontological
pressumptions. Without first begging the ontological questions we are stuck in
the mindset we originally had and cannot even think of change.
Dillon '99
[Michael, Prof. of Politics @ University of Lancaster, Moral Spaces, p. 97-98]
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
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
out,
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
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.
corporatized form, to be invulnerable to ontological perturbation.
2) 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
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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.
somewhat closer examination, however, reveals a fundamental continuity of the theoretical and practical.
3) Discourse in every society is managed and controlled in order to contain its

potential implications on the governments ability to manage populations. The
failure of the neg is its inability to challenge the ontological assumptions behind
their very problematization. Our critique proves voting aff is necessary to an
effective political thought in order to prevent error replication.
Dillon and Reid '2K
[Michael and Julian, Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency,
Alternatives: Social Transformation & Humane Governance, Jan-Mar 2000, Vol. 25, Issue 1, Ebsco]
As a precursor to global governance, governmentality, according to Foucault's initial account, poses the question of order
not in terms of the origin of the law and the location of sovereignty, as do traditional accounts of power, but in terms
instead of the management of population. The management of population is further refined in terms of specific
problematics to which population management may be reduced. These typically include but are not necessarily exhausted
by the following topoi of governmental power: economy, health, welfare, poverty, security, sexuality, demographics,
where there is an operation of power there is

knowledge, and where there is knowledge there is an operation of power. Here discursive formations emerge and, as
Foucault noted, in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected,
organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its
powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its
ponderous, formidable materiality.[34] More specifically, where there is a policy problematic
there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy problematic will
emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete
forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains. Policy domains reify
the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically and
politically contestable orderings of life into "problems" that require the
continuous attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions of
policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and compete on the basis of the expertise that
grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client populations . Here,
resources, skills, culture, and so on. Now,
too, we may also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed
and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or
there is no limit to the ways in which the

management of population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter
with life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of becoming a policy
problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for science and for policy
science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors
fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is
constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding
accepted "problems," and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable
otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle,
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ontological
assumptions that go into their very formation . There is

there is nothing so
fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations
exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is
precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly
to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they
proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the control that they want. Yet serial policy
failure--the fate and the fuel of all policy --compels them into a continuous search
for the new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they
constantly find themselves enmeshed.[35] Serial policy failure is no simple
shortcoming that science and policyand policy sciencewill ultimately overcome. Serial
policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that fashion
the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process
and epistemological
nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological assumption. And
of emergence through fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate.
global governance promotes the very changes and

outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure .
Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear problem-solving process committed
to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better
information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of
power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and radically
inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally
and globally through the very detailed ways in which life is variously (policy)
problematized by it. In consequence, thinking and acting politically is displaced by the
institutional and epistemic rivalries that infuse its power/ knowledge networks,
and by the local conditions of application that govern the introduction of their
policies. These now threaten to exhaust what "politics," locally as well as globally, is about.[ 36] It is here that the
"emergence" characteristic of governance begins to make its appearance. For it is increasingly recognized
that there are no definitive policy solutions to objective, neat, discrete policy
problems. The "subjects" of policy increasingly also become a matter of definition as well, since the concept
As a particular kind of intervention into life,
unintended
population does not have a stable referent either and has itself also evolved in biophilosophical and biomolecular as well as
Foucauldian "biopower" ways.
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Resolved = Ontology
Our interpretation is best Resolved does not indicate action It is becoming

aware of our own Being.
Pezze '06 [Barbara, PhD Philosophy at Honk Kong
http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol10/Heidegger.html]
U, Heidegger on
Gelassenheit, Minerva,
vol
.10,
Let us pause for a moment to consider a possible misunderstanding. It could appear, from what we have been saying, that
Gelassenheit floats in the realm of unreality and so in nothingness, and, lacking all power of action, is a will-less
letting in of everything and, basically, the denial of the will to live! (1966a, p. 80). But this is not the case, for in the
Gelassenheit we find something that recalls the power of action, but which is
not a will. It is a resolve [Entschlossenheit] (ibid., p. 81), but not as an act of will that
makes a decision and finds a solution to a problem or a situation. This

resolve, as Heidegger himself suggests, must be thought as the one that is spoken
of in Being and Time, that is, it is a letting oneself be called forth (1996, p.
283) to ones own most possibility of being . Resoluteness as Entschlossenheit is
translated in Being and Time is authentic being a self (1996, p. 274). It is quite difficult to
think a resolve that is not a matter of will that moves to an action; we tend, in
fact, to consider resoluteness as a strong determination to attain something . As
we read in Heideggers Introduction To Metaphysics (2000), the essence of the resolve, as he
intends it, is not an intention to act ; it is not a gathering of energy to be released
into action. Resolve is the beginning , the inceptual beginning of any action
moved. Here acting is not be taken as an action undertaken by Dasein in being resolute. Rather, acting refers to the
existential and fundamental mode of being of Dasein, which is to be care, and which is the primordial being of Dasein.
Resoluteness, in its essence, is the remaining open of Dasein for be-ing. In the context of the Conversation, this
particularly undertaken by him for openness [als das

eigens bernommene Sichffnen des Daseins fr das Offene ] (Heidegger 1966a, p. 81). It is a resolve to
resolve should thus be understood as the opening of man
remain open to be-ing, and therefore to what is ownmost to mans nature, which is disclosed in relation to be-ing. This
resolve is what Heidegger, in the Conversation, indicates as releasement to that-which-regions, the resolve to release
oneself to that-which-regions, to remain open towards the openness itself. Now, there is another element that pertains to
Gelassenheit: there is, in fact, not only a resolve, but also a steadfastness [ Ausdauer] (Heidegger 1966a, p.81)
proper to
Gelassenheit. Thinking, becoming more and more aware of its nature, and
experiencing more clarity about it, remains firm and resolute. Thinking stands
within and rests in this composed steadfastness (ibid., p. 81]). The steadfastness
proper to
Gelassenheit.
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Western Enframing Kills Solvency
and technology mindset! All the aff claims are based off Western Enframing of
the world which must be confronted before we can enact change.
Swazo '02


For world
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matter insofar as they bear upon and
properly
speaking,
patterns of behaviot and practice between levels of government,
order thinking.
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2NC Overview
The aff views the world in a technological mindset. In doing so, we no longer
ask the ontological questions of who we are or why we do things and instead
views everything as an object to be ordered about. These objects are seen as
WAITING on our usage of them, and therefore, aren't even objects to us but a
waiting reserve. We lose all relations to people and the value in our lives
because we are these waiting, standing reserves. This loss of the value in our
lives is worse than a nuclear catastrophe because even if we die it doesn't
matter. We had no value, so our lives meant nothing anyway. Further, once in
this place we can't even get out of this mindset ourselves because we lost our
ontological relationship with people, and therefore can't think in new
ontological terms because we don't have that relationship to do so, and can't
unless we can be broken from this thought. That's the alt.
The aff is like the movie Roger Dodger, when aging Lothario takes his socially
awkward nephew out for a night on the town to teach him to talk to girls. Roger
works at an advertising firm and his view on persuasion is simple: in order to
get someone to buy something you first have to make them feel terrible about
themselves. Convince them that their lives are empty and meaningless and that
the only way to fill that hole inside themselves is to buy a pair of cargo pants.
He talks to women by using an endless string of glib remarks and snide insults
trying to lower their self esteem so that they feel bad enough to go home with
him. As the movie progresses we see that Rogers bravado is a front- it is his
life that is totally empty and devoid of meaning. He hooks each potential pick up
for a short time but ultimately they are turned off by his act and he ends up
alone. Roger has used a flawed form of calculation to formulate his plan, and so
he keeps getting poor results.
***2NC BLOCKS***
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2NC
1. There is No Status Quo the affs description of harms and solvency should be
viewed with extreme suspicion the way they understand the world is based on a
highly technical, skewed picture which excludes the element of human conscious and
uses nature as standing-reserve. Extend Swazo '02 and Turnbull '06
[and Zimmerman '94]
2. Value to Life their technical breakdown of the world means we forget other modes
of thinking the world Heidegger indicates this destroys humanitys essential nature as
such, which reduces us to clever contented animals. Life is not worth living when we as
humans we are no longer living as such. This subsumes their impacts even if they
save lives, those lives have already been rendered worthless. Extend Both Mitchell '05
and McWhorter '92!
[and Thiele '95]
3. We Turn the Aff breaking out of the technological cycle allows us to reveal the
world in human dimensions. The continual drive to management and technology can
only continue the aff's harms. We turn their impacts both on a discursive level and in a
world of fiat. That's Swazo '02.
4. We offer a role of the ballot separate from framework: you should decide between
competing forms of thought i.e., technological and meditative. Extend Thiele '95.
[And Heidegger '66]
5. [Add framework here]
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A2: Affirmative is Non-Unique
1. Derp-a-derp. We're a fucking K, we don't need uniqueness. We critique a

view of the earth and an ontological presumption. We do not critique your
action. The aff provides the uniqueness.
2. The world sucks in the squo, and we have massive problems in the squo
there are wars and genocide across the globe, the world economy is shit,
peoples globally starve and die and blow themselves up and live in extreme
poverty and are killed every day their inherency and the state of the world
just proves our impacts. Many people live empty daily lives entirely dependent
on technology, and its only a question of time before nuclear war erupts
because weve forgotten how to be human. You exaserbate these harms. That's
Thiel.
3. K is key to aff solvency. Your mindset caused every harm. The only way to
stop these harms from recreating themselves is to think. That's Thiele [and
Heidegger]!
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A2: Alternative Doesnt End All Technological Thought
1. Its irrelevant you should decide between competing forms of thought

i.e., technological and meditative. The debate here is only over the paradigm to
frame our discussion; i.e., debate is a forum for comparing political imaginaries
fiat isnt real either.
2. Every instance is key again THIS ISN'T A COUNTER PLAN DEBATE, this
decision is between competing philosophies, not competing actions. Its like
saying, We agree with nonviolence, except when we dont.
3. And, the ideas
implementation
matter
most
Frameworks
discursive
Institute
03 [The FrameWorks
http://www.frameworksinstitute.org/strategicanalysis/perspective.shtml]
framing
Perspective:
Strategic
affects
Frame
policy
Analysis,
This interdisciplinary work is made possible by the fact that the concept of framing is found in the literatures of numerous academic disciplines across the social,
behavioral and cognitive sciences. Put simply, framing refers to the construct of a communication its language, visuals and messengers and the way it signals
By framing, we mean how messages are

encoded with meaning so that they can be efficiently interpreted in relationship
to existing beliefs or ideas. Frames trigger meaning. The questions we ask, in applying the concept of frames to the arena of
to the listener or observer how to interpret and classify new information.
social policy, are as follows: How does the public think about a particular social or political issue? What is the public discourse on the issue? And how is this
How can an issue be

reframed to evoke a different way of thinking , one that illuminates a broader
range of alternative policy choices? This approach is strategic in that it not only
deconstructs the dominant frames of reference that drive reasoning on public
issues, but it also identifies those alternative frames most likely to stimulate
public reconsideration and enumerates their elements (reframing). We use the term reframe to mean changing "the context of the message
exchange" so that different interpretations and probable outcomes become visible to the public (Dearing & Rogers, 1994: 98). Strategic frame
analysis offers policy advocates a way to work systematically through the
challenges that are likely to confront the introduction of new legislation or
social policies, to anticipate attitudinal barriers to support, and to develop research-based strategies to overcome
discourse influenced by the way media frames that issue? How do these public and private frames affect public choices?
public misunderstanding. What Is Communications and Why Does It Matter?The domain of communications has not
changed markedly since 1948 when Harold Lasswell formulated his famous equation: who says what to whom through
what channel with what effect? But what many social policy practitioners have overlooked in their quests to formulate
effective strategies for social change is that communications merits their attention because it is an inextricable part of the
agenda-setting function in this country. Communications plays a vital role in determining which issues the public prioritizes
for policy resolution, which issues will move from the private realm to the public, which issues will become pressure points
for policymakers, and which issues will win or lose in the competition for scarce resources. No organization can approach
such tasks as issue advocacy, constituency-building, or promoting best practices without taking into account the critical
role that mass media has to play in shaping the way Americans think about social issues. As William Gamson and his
colleagues at the Media Research and Action Project like to say, media is "an arena of contest in its own right, and part of
a larger strategy of social change." One source of our confusion over communications comes in not recognizing that each
new push for public understanding and acceptance happens against a backdrop of long-term media coverage, of
perceptions formed over time, of scripts we have learned since childhood to help us make sense of our world, and folk
beliefs we use to interpret new information. As we go about making sense of our world, mass media serves an important
function as the mediator of meaning telling us what to think about (agenda-setting) and how to think about it (media
effects) by organizing the information in such a way (framing) that it comes to us fully conflated with directives (cues)
about who is responsible for the social problem in the first place and who gets to fix it (responsibility). It is often the case
that nonprofit organizations want communications to be easy. Ironically, they want soundbite answers to the same social
problems whose complexity they understand all too well. While policy research and formulation are given their due as
tough, demanding areas of an organization's workplan, communications is seen as "soft." While program development and
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practice are seen as requiring expertise and the thoughtful consideration of best practices, communications is an "anyone
can do it if you have to" task. It is time to retire this thinking. Doing communications strategically requires the same
investment of intellect and study that these other areas of nonprofit practice have been accorded. A Simple Explanation of
Frame Analysis In his seminal book Public Opinion (1921:16), Walter Lippmann was perhaps the first to connect mass
communications to public attitudes and policy preferences by recognizing that the " the
way in which the

world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do ." The
modern extension of Lippmann's observation is based on the concept of
"frames." People use mental shortcuts to make sense of the world. Since most people are looking to process
incoming information quickly and efficiently, they rely upon cues within that new information to signal to them how to
connect it with their stored images of the world. The "pictures in our heads," as Lippmann called them, might better be
thought of as vividly labeled storage boxes - filled with pictures, images, and stories from our past encounters with the
world and labeled youth, marriage, poverty, fairness, etc. The incoming information provides cues about which is the right
container for that idea or experience. And the efficient thinker makes the connection, a process called "indexing," and
how an issue is framed is a trigger to these shared and durable

cultural models that help us make sense of our world. When a frame ignites a cultural model,
moves on. Put another way,
or calls it into play in the interpretation, the whole model is operative. This allows people to reason about an issue, to
make inferences, to fill in the blanks for missing information by referring to the robustness of the model, not the sketchy
frame.
[we disagree with the gendered language used]
4. Our argument deals with the in-round interactions in which we as debaters

conceptualize action through certain modes of knowledge-production.
6. This is not an argument you wouldnt accept racism in one instance
because you can't solve every instance if we prove the aff is undesirable then
you should vote negative.
7. We dont need to win that everyone does the alternative the mere call to
resist calculations forces critical reflection
McWhorter '92 [Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeast Missouri State University (Ladelle, Heidegger and
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.
8. Western nation must be the ones to lead the revolution because they are the
current technological leaders.
Padrutt '92
[Hanspeter. Heidegger & The Earth. 1992. Heidegger and Ecology. Pg. 33]
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a turning can come about only from out of the same place in he
world where the modern technical world has emerged and that it cannot take
place by an acceptance of Zen-Buddhism or other Easter experiences of the world. This rethinking needs the help of the European tradition and a new appropriation of it.
Thinking is trandsformed only through a thinking that has the same origin and
destiny.
It I my conviction that
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A2: Alternative not Real World
Only by denying the right of technological thought to dominate can we reorient

our relationship with technology and beingJapan is our historical proof
Dreyfus '93 [Hubert, Prof of Philosophy @ Cal-Berkeley, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, p. 307]
Heidegger, however, sees that "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" (DT 53, G 24~.
there is a way we can keep our technological devices and

yet remain true to ourselves as receivers of clearings: "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 " (DT 54; G 24-25). To understand how
Instead, Heidegger suggests that
this might be possible, we need an illustration of Heidegger's important distinction between technology and the
In contemporary Japan traditional,

nontechnological practices still exist alongside the most advanced high-tech
production and consumption. The television set and the household gods share
the same shelf - the Styrofoam cup coexists with the porcelain teacup. We thus
see that the Japanese, at least, can enjoy technology without taking over the
technological understanding of being.
technological understanding of being. Again we can turn to Japan.
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A2: Cede the Political
1. We dont have to defend all of Heidegger [the warrant is Heideggers

rejection of democracy, which we dont do] we arent a total rejection of any
political engagement ever, we just think the specific technological action of the
aff is bad.
2. Political engagement in a technological manner SUCKS the thesis of our
criticism turns participating in management just furthers the cycle of
domination and replication. That's Swazo '02!
3. C/A Thiele '95. The root of politics is depended on the neg's alt. We turn the
argument. Rejecting the neg's critism ends the political.
4. Non-Unique the rights already in power look around you theres only a
risk the alternative can be a different way of looking at the world..
5. Meditative thinking allows us to consider a multiplicity of perspectives it
means we can engage with modern technological society without being
corrupted by it, thats Heidegger and Thiel.
6. View this argument with extreme suspicion Swazo indicates actomania is
propagated by the expert linkage of thought to action in the modern era.
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A2: Clausewitz/Schmitt
Schmitt/Clausewitz ontology causes endless warfare and precludes alternative

solutions to conflicts
Burke '07
[Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney, and author of many books
(Anthony, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, Truth & Existence, 10:2, ZR]
Schmitt claims that his theory is not biased towards war as a choice
('It is by no
means as though the political signifies nothing but devastating war and every political deed a military action...it neither
but it is hard to accept his caveat at

face value.36 When such a theory takes the form of a social discourse (which it does
in a general form) such an ontology can only support, as a kind of originary ground,
the basic Clausewitzian assumption that war can be a rational way of resolving
political conflicts -- because the import of Schmitt's argument is that such
'political' conflicts are ultimately expressed through the possibility of war. As he
says: 'to the enemy concept belongs the ever-present possibility of combat'. 37
Where Schmitt meets Clausewitz, as I explain further below, the existential and
rationalistic ontologies of war join into a closed circle of mutual support and
justification. This closed circle of existential and strategic reason generates a number of dangers. Firstly, the
emergence of conflict can generate military action almost automatically simply
because the world is conceived in terms of the distinction between friend and
enemy; because the very existence of the other constitutes an unacceptable
threat, rather than a chain of actions, judgements and decisions. (As the Israelis insisted
of Hezbollah, they 'deny our right to exist'.) This effaces agency, causality and responsibility
from policy and political discourse: our actions can be conceived as independent
of the conflict or quarantined from critical enquiry , as necessities that achieve an instrumental
purpose but do not contribute to a new and unpredictable causal chain. Similarly the Clausewitzian idea of
force -- which, by transporting a Newtonian category from the natural into the social sciences, assumes the very effect
it seeks -- further encourages the resort to military violence. We ignore the
complex history of a conflict, and thus the alternative paths to its resolution
that such historical analysis might provide, by portraying conflict as
fundamental and existential in nature; as possibly containable or exploitable,
but always irresolvable. Dominant portrayals of the war on terror, and the Israeli-Arab
conflict, are arguably examples of such ontologies in action. Secondly, the militaristic force of
favours war nor militarism, neither imperialism nor pacifism')
such an ontology is visible, in Schmitt, in the absolute sense of vulnerability whereby a people can judge whether their
'adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life'. 38 Evoking the kind of thinking that would become controversial
in the Bush doctrine, Hegel similarly argues that: ...a state may regard its infinity and honour as at stake in each of its
concerns, however minute, and it is all the more inclined to susceptibility to injury the more its strong individuality is
impelled as a result of long domestic peace to seek and create a sphere of activity abroad. ....the state is in essence mind
and therefore cannot be prepared to stop at just taking notice of an injury after it has actually occurred. On the contrary,
there arises in addition as a cause of strife the idea of such an injury... 39
Identity, even more than physical security

is put at stake in such thinking and can be defended and redeemed
through warfare (or, when taken to a further extreme of an absolute
demonisation and dehumanisation of the other, by mass killing, 'ethnic
cleansing' or genocide). However anathema to a classical realist like Morgenthau, for whom prudence was a
or autonomy,
core political virtue, these have been influential ways of defining national security and defence during the twentieth
century and persists into the twenty-first.
They infused Cold War strategy in the United States
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(with the key policy document NSC68 stating that 'the Soviet-led assault on free institutions is worldwide now, and ... a
defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere') 40
and frames dominant Western

responses to the threat posed by Al Qaeda and like groups (as Tony Blair admitted in 2006,
'We could have chosen security as the battleground. But we didn't. We chose values.') 41 It has also become
influential, in a particularly tragic and destructive way , in Israel, where memories of the
Holocaust and (all too common) statements by Muslim and Arab leaders rejecting Israel's existence are mobilised by
conservatives to justify military adventurism and a rejectionist policy towards the Palestinians. On the reverse side of such
ontologies of national insecurity we find pride and hubris, the belief that martial preparedness and action are vital or
healthy for the existence of a people. Clausewitz's thought is thoroughly imbued with this conviction. For example, his
definition of war as an act of policy does not refer merely to the policy of cabinets, but expresses the objectives and will
ofpeoples: When whole communities go to war -- whole peoples, and especially civilized peoples -- the reason always lies
in some political situation and the occasion is always due to some political object. War, therefore, is an act of policy. 42
Such a perspective prefigures Schmitt's definition of the 'political' (an earlier

translation reads 'war, therefore, is a political act'), and thus creates an
inherent tension between its tendency to fuel the escalation of conflict and
Clausewitz's declared aim, in defining war as policy , to prevent war becoming 'a
complete, untrammelled, absolute manifestation of violence'.43 Likewise his
argument that war is a 'trinity' of people (the source of 'primordial violence,
hatred and enmity'), the military (who manage the 'play of chance and
probability') and government (which achieve war's 'subordination as an
instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone') merges the
existential and rationalistic conceptions of war into a theoretical unity. 44
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A2: Cohran
1. We straight turn action the only real warrant is that actions valuable, but
our entire K answers this action presupposes a world described through
technological thought, causing our impacts. - That's all in the overview!
2. Action cannot be made with new thought. We are stuck in the current
mindset until we STOP and think, which destroys the basis for combination
thats the Swazo '02 evidence; in the modern age, technology and action have
become too intertwined. We have to be willing to step back from our visions of
catastrophe and think meditatively.
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A2: Doing Nothing Bad
1. Letting be is the opposite of a retreat from action. It lets action occur.

Openness
and releasement do not preclude, but rather invite, activity and thought. In
turn, letting-be is not tantamount to a retreat from the world. Quite the
opposite: it entails the formation of worldly relationships made all the more
dynamic because they are no longer constrained by the habits of possessive
mastery. Heidegger writes: "The freedom to reveal something overt lets whatever 'is'
at the moment be what it is. Freedom reveals itself as the 'letting-be' of whatis.... The phrase we are now using, namely the 'letting-be' of what-is, does not,
however, refer to indifference and neglect, but to the very opposite of them. To
let something be is in fact to have something to do with it.... To let what-is be
what it is means participating in something overt and its overtness in which
everything that 'is' takes up its position."
Disclosive freedom is always the freedom resolutely to will openness to Being and releasement to beings.
2. C/A Thiele '95 [and Heidegger '66]. It's not doing nothing. It's resistence
and ontological examination. Resistance is NOT no action. We directly answer
this in the 1NC.
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A2: Ethics is Greater than Ontology
1. This argument makes no senseontology comes firstthe way we think

about something frames how the problem is perceived. The moment of decision
the way we act towards the otheris determined by how we know the world,
which means its impossible to develop an ethics towards the other without
having an ontology first.
2. Cant reconstruct ethics without ontology they merely replicate the JudeoChristian model of suffering
Larochelle 99 [Gilbert, Philosophy Today (Summer), Proquest]
While Levinas only made sporadic reference to the Holocaust in his work, his entire philosophy is
admittedly impregnated with the lessons it teaches. However, my argument consists in
demonstrating that he is not able to reconstruct metaphysics without ontology ,
justice without identity, responsibility without subjectivity. Instead of actually
decentering all points of view, Levinas seems rather to displace the final
legitimacy of history from the persecutor to the persecuted, by giving the victim
the final right to ontology. Three propositions can serve here to establish the framework for
this reflection: a) reflexivity, as a form of identity, resurfaces in Levinas through the status of the
victim in the Holocaust; b) his notion of responsibility is defined by the will to adopt
the point of view of the victim and opens onto, in accordance with JudeoChristian tradition, an ontology of suffering as a way to salvation ; c) that
conception of identity and responsibility ends up justifying the moral superiority
of the Jew, victim par excellence, and of his universal model of justice. The
paradox we wish to expose is that the weakness of the victim curiously
becomes the instrument of a will of power in which the Jew takes on the form
of the "last man" in history. To demonstrate these assertions, it seems pertinent first to try
to understand, through a rereading of Difficult Freedom, Levinas' offensive against Western
philosophy and paganism, then to see how Nazism became its worst manifestation. Finally,
bringing light onto the victim will serve to unveil Levinasian ontology and the
failure of his decentering effort.
3.) Ethics reifies responsibility over any other mode of revealing it represents
just another way of managing being.
McWhorter '92 [LaDelle, Professor of Philosophy, Northeast Missouri State, also of the bumbles, 1992, Heidegger
and the Earth, ed. McWhorter.]
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 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,
Guilt is a standard
defense against the call for change as it takes root within us . But, if we are to think with
feeling guilty about the way we conduct ourselves in relation to the natural world.
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
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moral condemnation, nor is it a call
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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 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.
4.) Placing ethics before ontology presupposes a neutral, generic, homogenized
Other towards which we have responsibility this is an INDEPENDENT internal
to damnation the aff is too busy stuffing the Others mouth with rice to hear
the Other speak.
Visker '03
[Rudi, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2003 (Is ethics fundamental? Questioning Levinas on
irresponsibility, Continental Philosophy Review, 36: 263302]
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
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,
against the other resounds, language for the other is heard behind it (RTB, p. 99). Indeed,
terribly alone, bored by everything including ourselves. In short, were 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 donkeys 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 ones 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 capitalisms 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
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? Couldnt 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
world.20
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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? Finkielkrauts 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 Others 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
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
Levinas seems to speak from his heart: Ones implementation in a

landscape, ones attachment to Place, without which the universe would
become insignificant and would scarcely exist [Levinas is rendering here what he sees as
Heideggers 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
this sentence, where
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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. 232233). 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 ones 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
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
who are inside.
as I could give on the passage that concerns us here and in which, as I now hope to have shown, Levinas indeed speaks
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
from his heart. Leaving the polemics with Heidegger aside,25
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.
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Without such inscription, a
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human being would be reduced to anonymity,
i.e., would be nothing more than a collection of
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
bodily functions, nothing else than the anonymous organic life that pulsates in him (HP, p. 128).
the apparent confusion of tongues that may make it difficult to hear what exactly is being addressed by it.
5. Dwelling is the only way ethics can be fully cultivated. Rather than defining
ethical values as static and universal rules, dwelling allows ethics to be more
fluid and dynamic.
Hatab '97
[Lawrence J., Professor of Philosophy at Old Dominion University, ETHICS AND FINITUDE: Heideggerian
Contributions to Moral Philosophy, http://www.focusing.org/apm_papers/hatab.html]
Dwelling (Wohnen) is a word that occupied Heidegger's later thinking. But it is completely consistent with, and expressive
of, the nonobjective-nonsubjective configuration of being-in-the-world delineated in the early writings.
The word
"dwelling" captures both "subjective" and "objective" tones (human meaning and the
environment which we inhabit), but in a single, indivisible, existential term. The word in all
its resonances becomes Heidegger's replacement for traditional subject-object
ontologies. In Letter on Humanism, Heidegger takes up the Greek word ethos in its sense of abode and dwelling
place, and concludes that his ontological investigations might then be called an "original ethics" (p. 235). Although this
answer is a typically unsatisfying "end run" around the specific question regarding the possibility of ethics in Heidegger's
a normative ethics can

benefit from attention to ethos-as-dwelling, that we can ask questions about
how we dwell ethically, and how we should dwell in the world. Heidegger's
notion of dwelling offers two main contributions to moral philosophy ; the first points
back to and summarizes preceding sections of my text, the second points forward to the rest of my essay: 1) Values
can not be understood as either objective or subjective conditions; they are
modes of being-in-the-world. 2) Being-ethical-in-the-world must be understood
as radically finite. For Heidegger, from beginning to end, from being-in-the-world to the fourfold, dwelling
means being at home in the finitude of Being, in its mixture of presence and
absence, especially in terms of human mortality and the limit conditions of
unconcealment. Dwelling is contrasted with the "flight" from Being indicated in the closure of metaphysical
systems and the quest for certainty and control. Dwelling names something like what the poet John Keats called
"negative capability," the capacity to live with conditions of uncertainty , or as I would put it, a
thinking, I believe that we can go beyond Heidegger's ontological fixation, that
reconciliation with finitude. Although dwelling has a positive content suggesting a sense of placement in the world to
counter radical versions of skepticism, phenomenalism, or anarchism, it also presents a deep challenge in that we must
The same radical

finitude can be shown in our ethical dwelling. In fact, this finitude has always
been acknowledged in moral philosophy, but it was deemed a deficiency that
either needed correcting or that prevented ethics from achieving intellectual
legitimation. The moral life is always faced with cognitive, psychological,
empirical, and practical limits, which are effectively expressed in the mixture of presence and absence that
rings in Heidegger's favorite word, aletheia, unconcealment: Values are not grounded in proof or
demonstration; the moral arena is marked by disagreement and conflict; moral
exist in a world without foundations, guarantees, or ultimateresolution of existential difficulties.
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situations are often complex and ambiguous, where outcomes are uncertain,
where goods conflict with each other , where a balance of differing interests is hard to gauge--but we
have to decide and sometimes all we are left with is an abyssal moment of
choice; we sometimes fail in our aim for the good, or in doing good we
sometimes instigate harmful effects ; extreme or degraded environments can ruin ethical potential;
ethical commitments often require risk and sacrifice, which makes anxiety and
mixed dispositions inevitable. The value of Heidegger's notion of dwelling is
that we are forced to give up the idea that such conditions of finitude are
"deficiencies." This is the ethical world, and the myth of pure "presence" must
be surrendered in moral philosophy no less than in ontology . The problem with ethical
beliefs that insulate the good from limit conditions is not simply a philosophical flaw. There is an irony that history has
The "purer" the concept of the good, the greater the capacity
to do evil on its behalf. With a definitized ideal, the world now appears "fallen" and in need of reform; when
demonstrated all too often:
elements in the world continue to resist or fall short, there arises a potential to commit terror in the name of "salvation."
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A2: Habermas Kritik of Heidegger/Villa Evidence
Habermass critique of Heidegger is false the alternative can aid the recovery
of praxis
Villa '96
[Professor of Political Theory at Notre Dame (Dana, Arendt and Heidegger, p 229-30, Rbatra]
with the devaluation of intersubjectivity in Being and Time , what starts out as a
plausible and helpful critique by Habermas and his followers rapidly degenerates into a fairly crude
campaign to place Heideggers thought outside the boundaries of the Western
tradition. Whether willful (early) or nonwillful (later), Heideggers thought is presented as
ineluctably leading to a worship of authority and a celebration of obedience. The problem with
this interpretation is that it so fully hinges upon the binary of voluntarism and
fatalism, evils one supposedly slides into the moment reasons power to
comprehensively adjudicate competing ends, or the subjects power to act
autonomously, is questioned.127 Thus, while the proponents of communicative rationality employ Arendt
to expose a very real blind spot in Heideggers thought, their desire to exclude him from any
conversation about what postmetaphysical conceptions of action, freedom, and
agency might look like produces a caricature. This , I suggest, is a function of two
factors: first, a reifying, metaphysical interpretation of the ontological
difference, which enables the view that Being is an all-powerful metasubject;
second, a failure to penetrate the surface of Heideggers thought in order to see
how his critique of productionist metaphysics and the technical interpretation
of action might be appropriated precisely to aide in the recovery of praxis. These
As
themes will be explored further below, but first I wish to turn to the matter of Arendts own Heidegger critique.
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A2: Individual Choice Solves Value to Life
No, it doesnt. Ones own perception of value to life does not equal ontology.
The reason lives become worthless is not that people become depressed to
the point where theyre suicidal or whatever. Rather, it is that our relation to
the world has become fundamentally changed. It is an epistemological mindset.
The affirmative has essentially locked us in ontological cages. No matter what
we think or wish, those cages still exist. The only way out is to refuse that
worldview altogether, to restore ontological creativity by allowing being to be
fluid, to flow out of the cages the aff has established.
[you can also think of it in terms of having a disease. The aff is like, diseases
dont suck at all! We can still enjoy doing things we choose to enjoy. But, youre
still sick.]
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A2: Infinite Justice (Derrida)
1. They do not access this evidence. Calculation is not monolithic. We dont

reject all calculation, we reject technological revealing specifically. This
evidence is NOT talking about calculation of energy as technology being good. It
is talking about the calculation of justice. It says that the notion of what
justice is, although it is an infinite ideal beyond determination, should be
calculated to prevent reappropriation by the worst purposes. The affirmative
does not attempt to redefine justice; in fact, they operate within their own
preconceived notions of what would be best. This is the opposite of what
Derrida advocates. Theyve simply underlined where Derrida uses the term
calculation but theyve left out his explanation.
2. Derrida would vote negative. Weve indicted their preconceived worldviews,
which is what Derrida means by the phrase we must take it as far as possible.
He means that we should calculate beyond the current ideological coordinates,
which the aff has unquestioningly accepted.
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A2: Ketels
Ketels votes negative Ketels indicates a, quote, gradual transformation of

human consciousness would solve what he proposes thats exactly
meditative thought. The human dimension is exactly what is missing from the
affirmative. Technological thought functions as a net benefit.
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A2: Kritik is Primitivist
1. The critique doesn't strive to recreate the past Merely to reject the demand that
nature become ordered and calculable The alternative breaks down the illusion.
Heidegger '49
[Martin. The 20th centurys Slavoj. The Question Concerning Technology. 1949. JCOOK]
The modern physical theory of nature prepares the way not simply for
technology but for the essence of modern technology. For such gathering-together, which
challenges man to reveal by way of ordering, already holds sway in physics. But in it that gathering does not yet come
expressly to the fore. Modern physics is the herald of enframing, a herald whose provenance is still unknown. The essence
of modern technology has for a long time been concealed, even where power machinery has been invented, where
electrical technology is in full swing, and where atomic technology is well under way. All coming to presence, not only
modern technology, keeps itself everywhere concealed to the last. Nevertheless, it remains, with respect to its holding
sway, that which precedes all: the earliest. The Greek thinkers already knew of this when they said: That which is earlier
with regard to its rise into dominance becomes manifest to us men only later. That which is !primally early shows itself
in the realm of thinking, a painstaking effort to think

through still more primally what was primally thought is not the absurd wish to
revive what is past, but rather the sober readiness to be astounded before the
coming of the dawn. Chronologically speaking, modern physical science begins in the seventeenth century. In
only ultimately to men. Therefore,
contrast, machine-power technology develops only in the second half of the eighteenth century. But modern technology,
which for chronological reckoning is the later, is, from the point of view of the essence holding sway within it, historically
If modern physics must resign itself ever increasingly to the fact that its
realm of representation remains inscrutable and incapable of being visualized,
this resignation is not dictated by any committee of researchers. It is
challenged forth by the rule of enframing, which demands that nature be
orderable as standing-reserve. Hence physics, in its retreat from the kind of representation that turns
only to objects, which has been the sole standard until recently, will never be able to renounce this one
thing: that nature report itself in some way or other that is identifiable through
calculation and that it remain orderable as a system of information. This system is
earlier.
then determined by a causality that has changed once again. Causality now displays neither the character of the
occasioning that brings forth nor the nature of the causa etficiens, let alone that of the causa formalis. It seems as though
causality is shrinking into a reportinga reporting challenged forthof standing-reserves that must be guaranteed either
simultaneously or in sequence. To this shrinking would correspond the process of growing resignation that Heisenberg's
modern
technology must employ exact physical science. Through its so doing the deceptive appearance
arises that modern technology is applied physical science. This illusion can maintain itself precisely
insofar as neither the essential provenance of modern science nor indeed the
essence of modern technology is adequately sought in our questioning.
lecture depicts in so impressive a manner. 'Because the essence of modern technology lies in enframing,
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A2: Latour
1. Fatalism/Creativity Distinction We dont say do nothing forever we say

should meditatively think over things before acting.
2. We dont say technology PROPER cant have being we say technological
THOUGHT is bad. This evidence is based off a silly misreading of Heidegger.
3. Internal/External Distinction this card actually goes negative it says we
shouldnt determine the subjectivity of others thats exactly what the aff does
through technological thought the alternative solves this evidence by allowing
people to determine their own subjectivity even if they win a link, the aff is
far more hegemonic.
4. There are no actual warrants in the card. The argument boils down to, I
think Heideggers wrong because there is actually being in other things. Why?
Because despite what Heidegger thinks, there is in fact being there. Prefer our
analysis.
5. The point of ontological damnation is that you cannot know that you are
ontologically damned when we weigh impacts in a certain manner all
alternative viewpoints are viewed with suspicion err negative on the question
of risk in terms of problematizing the way they relate to the world we are
winning a big enough risk that what the aff proposes is a terrible way to
conceptualize life!
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A2: Must Act
1. Extend Swazo '02. We can't create change without first stepping back and
thinking.
2. The call to act is precisely the link calculative action presupposes a world
described through technological thought, turning case and causing our impacts
thats all in the overview. The entire K answers this.
3. Ontology prefigures fundamental meaning their argument makes no sense
without an accurate ontology the K must come prior. Policies that can solve
can appear after you vote negative.
Dillon '99
[Michael, Prof. of Politics @ University of Lancaster, Moral Spaces, p. 97-98]
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
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
out,
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
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.
now, in its industrialized and corporatized form, to be invulnerable to ontological perturbation.
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4. Letting be is the opposite of a retreat from action. It lets action occur.
Openness
and releasement do not preclude, but rather invite, activity and thought. In
turn, letting-be is not tantamount to a retreat from the world. Quite the
opposite: it entails the formation of worldly relationships made all the more
dynamic because they are no longer constrained by the habits of possessive
mastery. Heidegger writes: "The freedom to reveal something overt lets whatever 'is'
at the moment be what it is. Freedom reveals itself as the 'letting-be' of whatis.... The phrase we are now using, namely the 'letting-be' of what-is, does not,
however, refer to indifference and neglect, but to the very opposite of them. To
let something be is in fact to have something to do with it.... To let what-is be
what it is means participating in something overt and its overtness in which
everything that 'is' takes up its position."
Disclosive freedom is always the freedom resolutely to will openness to Being and releasement to beings.
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A2: Nazism
1. Nazism is the product of humanism, not its rejection Heideggers alignment

with Nazism was a product of his inability to follow his own advice.
Pease '93 [Donald, HumanitiesDartmouth, 1993. Introduction, Heidegger and Bumblebees by Spanos, p. xix-x]
it is difficult not to
affiliate this factor with the Nazi residue sedimented in Heideggers philosophy.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe gave this interanimation of Nazism and humanism the follow-ing description: Nazism is a
humanism in that it rests on a determination of humanitas, which is in its eyes more
powerful, i.e., more effective, than any other. The subject of absolute self-creation, even if it transcends all the
determinations of the modern subject in an immediately natural position (the
particularity of race), bring together and concretizes these same determinations (as does
Stalinism with the subject of absolute self-production) and sets itself up as the subject, absolutely
speaking. The fact that this subject lacks the universality that seems to define the humanitas of humanism in the
Having dis-covered the liberal humanism at work in Spanos own retrieval of Heidegger,
usual sense does not, however, make Nazism and anti-humanism. Quite simply it fits Nazism into the logic, of which there
are many other examples, of the realization and concretization of abstractions. 11 But if Heideggers adherence to Nazism
cannot, in the last instance, be understood as separable from the liberal humanism of his detractors, can Spanoss
destruction of liberal humanism be understood as a tacit reconstruction of (Heideggers) residual adherence to Nazi
humanism? Spanos explains why it definitely cannot in the following succinct account of Heideggers involvement with
Heideggers failure to
perceive and fulfill the practical (i.e. sociopolitical) emancipatory imperatives of his
destructive ontological project in the context of his own historically specific
occasionto make thinking overtly a critical theory, as it werewas in some fundamental sense, perhaps, the result
Nazism: It will have to suffice for this context to suggest all too summarily that
of a combination of his vestigial nostalgic loyalty to the separation of theoria and praxis inscribed by the post-Socratics into
the philosophical tradition and an unexamined nationalism that reinscribed, against his destructive discourse, the principle
his apparent
complicity with Nazism was the result of the tension on the one hand between
the political circumstances in which he was teaching and writing , circumstances, that is,
which demanded an indirect rather than overt confrontation of the brutal excesses of the Nazi regime, and on the
other, his overdetermined commitment to the critique of Western technological
imperialism. To focus his discourse after the brief period of the rectorship (April
1933 to February 1934) on the enormities of the Nazis atrocities would especially after the war, be to read it
as a tacit acknowledgement and confirmation of the Western metaphysical principle that,
according to his essential thought, had come to its end in the globalization of technik. It
would, in short, tacitly reprieve the Wests essential complicity in the making of the
Nazi machine and the horrors it perpretrated.
of ethnic (not racial) identity. Whatever the source of this failure.. It is possible that
2. Our reading of Heidegger avoids Nazism.

Pease '93 [Donald, HumanitiesDartmouth, 1993. Introduction, Heidegger and Bumblebees by Spanos, p. xvii-iii]
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Spanoss intervention disclosed the political consequences of the Europeans appropriation to be twofold: they authorized
their belated American followers to understand Heideggers texts as superfluous and to institutionalize a representation
Spanos rediscovers in these postHeideggereans the fault that originated with Heidegger; that is, the failure to
theorize the political implication of a historically polyvalent logocenter, which
restricts their critical discourse to the generalized site of ontology at the
expense of sociopolitical critique. Having thereby retrieved a second
Heideggerianism as the European post-Heideggereans failure to theorize the
lateral continuum of Being, Spanos exports this new post-Heideggerian tradition to the site of the American
of temporal difference as Derridean textuality. In essence,
appropriation, where it counters Davidsons recurperative retrieval of liberal humanism. That Spanos finds the entire
lateral continuum itself in danger of disappearing at the site of the American appropriation of the Heidegger question
In retrieving Heideggers destructive hermeneutics

in a site missing from Heideggers own project, Spanos quite literally produces, as an
after-the-fact extenuating circumstance, the sociopolitical critique that , had it been available at the time of
Heideggers wartime writings, would have rendered him immune to Nazism.
discloses the stakes of Spanoss project.
3. Hitler wore pants. They wear pants. This doesn't make them Nazis. Just
because we read a card about a guy who was at one point a nazi doesns't make
us nazis nor his philosophy inherently Nazi philososphy. This argument is
stupid. You have not proven causality.
4. Ideology isn't enough to cause impacts. It takes people and idividuals who
activate the cores of the ideologies.
Freedman '11 [Jesse. JUNE, 13, 2011. Historical Musings. http://booksinq.blogspot.com/2011/06/historicalmusings.html. JCOOK]
As a history teacher, Ive always found it interesting to discuss with high schoolers the complicated idea of causation (that
Whats striking about conversations involving this topic is

the extent to which students are willing (often through no fault of their own) to attribute
events to ideologies as if Nazism itself were responsible for the Holocaust.
Regarding Nazism (and Fascism, too), I stress that, without Nazis, Nazism (as an ideology) would have
been unable to do, well, to do anything. This, I think, is key: that students confront the idea that
systems of belief are not , in and of themselves, capable of destruction. Ideology
becomes dangerous in a historical sense when individuals activate their core tenets.
is, what caused, what contributed to, past events).
At the high school level, conversations involving causation can lead in other directions as well. Most rewarding, I think, are
those which involve the idea of attribution. Continuing for a moment with the example of the Second World War: students
must address in their thinking the notion that Germany (with a capital G) was not in itself responsible for the Holocaust.
True, that country initiated the events which conspired against Europes Jews, but again, a nation cannot act without
To attribute to Germany (as many text books do) blame for the Holocaust seems,
as irresponsible as attributing that same umbrella of blame to Nazism.
individuals.
therefore,
After discussions involving ideology and attribution, students, I find, are more effectively positioned to handle the crux of
the issue involving causation that is, that individuals, and individual action,
trigger historical events. To get at the Holocaust, students need to wrestle with documents which reflect the
mindset, the priorities, of the German people
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A2: No Scenario
1. Turns case our K functions as a case turn, even in a post-fiat world in

addition to discursively continuing the logic of technology can only exacerbate
the harms of the aff. That's Swazo and Thiele.
2. You gotta defend your discourse if we win a link, that ideology is to be
considered part of the aff advocacy, just as if it were in the plan text. This
means perm do both includes that ideology, for one example.
a. fairness its critical to stable links and negative ground. Otherwise, even in
a non-K debate they could randomly discard advantages to get out of impact
turns, because the plan in a vacuum doesnt connect to the advantages.
b. education and effect The ideas matter most Discursive framing affects
policy implementation!
Frameworks
Institute
03 [The FrameWorks
http://www.frameworksinstitute.org/strategicanalysis/perspective.shtml]
Perspective:
Strategic
Frame
Analysis,
This interdisciplinary work is made possible by the fact that the concept of framing is found in the literatures of numerous academic disciplines across the social,
behavioral and cognitive sciences. Put simply, framing refers to the construct of a communication its language, visuals and messengers and the way it signals
By framing, we mean how messages are

encoded with meaning so that they can be efficiently interpreted in relationship
to existing beliefs or ideas. Frames trigger meaning. The questions we ask, in applying the concept of frames to the arena of
to the listener or observer how to interpret and classify new information.
social policy, are as follows: How does the public think about a particular social or political issue? What is the public discourse on the issue? And how is this
How can an issue be

reframed to evoke a different way of thinking , one that illuminates a broader
range of alternative policy choices? This approach is strategic in that it not only
deconstructs the dominant frames of reference that drive reasoning on public
issues, but it also identifies those alternative frames most likely to stimulate
public reconsideration and enumerates their elements (reframing). We use the term reframe to mean changing "the context of the message
exchange" so that different interpretations and probable outcomes become visible to the public (Dearing & Rogers, 1994: 98). Strategic frame
analysis offers policy advocates a way to work systematically through the
challenges that are likely to confront the introduction of new legislation or
social policies, to anticipate attitudinal barriers to support, and to develop research-based strategies to overcome
discourse influenced by the way media frames that issue? How do these public and private frames affect public choices?
public misunderstanding. What Is Communications and Why Does It Matter?The domain of communications has not
changed markedly since 1948 when Harold Lasswell formulated his famous equation: who says what to whom through
what channel with what effect? But what many social policy practitioners have overlooked in their quests to formulate
effective strategies for social change is that communications merits their attention because it is an inextricable part of the
agenda-setting function in this country. Communications plays a vital role in determining which issues the public prioritizes
for policy resolution, which issues will move from the private realm to the public, which issues will become pressure points
for policymakers, and which issues will win or lose in the competition for scarce resources. No organization can approach
such tasks as issue advocacy, constituency-building, or promoting best practices without taking into account the critical
role that mass media has to play in shaping the way Americans think about social issues. As William Gamson and his
colleagues at the Media Research and Action Project like to say, media is "an arena of contest in its own right, and part of
a larger strategy of social change." One source of our confusion over communications comes in not recognizing that each
new push for public understanding and acceptance happens against a backdrop of long-term media coverage, of
perceptions formed over time, of scripts we have learned since childhood to help us make sense of our world, and folk
beliefs we use to interpret new information. As we go about making sense of our world, mass media serves an important
function as the mediator of meaning telling us what to think about (agenda-setting) and how to think about it (media
effects) by organizing the information in such a way (framing) that it comes to us fully conflated with directives (cues)
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about who is responsible for the social problem in the first place and who gets to fix it (responsibility). It is often the case
that nonprofit organizations want communications to be easy. Ironically, they want soundbite answers to the same social
problems whose complexity they understand all too well. While policy research and formulation are given their due as
tough, demanding areas of an organization's workplan, communications is seen as "soft." While program development and
practice are seen as requiring expertise and the thoughtful consideration of best practices, communications is an "anyone
can do it if you have to" task. It is time to retire this thinking. Doing communications strategically requires the same
investment of intellect and study that these other areas of nonprofit practice have been accorded. A Simple Explanation of
Frame Analysis In his seminal book Public Opinion (1921:16), Walter Lippmann was perhaps the first to connect mass
communications to public attitudes and policy preferences by recognizing that the " the
way in which the

world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do ." The
modern extension of Lippmann's observation is based on the concept of
"frames." People use mental shortcuts to make sense of the world. Since most people are looking to process
incoming information quickly and efficiently, they rely upon cues within that new information to signal to them how to
connect it with their stored images of the world. The "pictures in our heads," as Lippmann called them, might better be
thought of as vividly labeled storage boxes - filled with pictures, images, and stories from our past encounters with the
world and labeled youth, marriage, poverty, fairness, etc. The incoming information provides cues about which is the right
container for that idea or experience. And the efficient thinker makes the connection, a process called "indexing," and
how an issue is framed is a trigger to these shared and durable

cultural models that help us make sense of our world. When a frame ignites a cultural model,
moves on. Put another way,
or calls it into play in the interpretation, the whole model is operative. This allows people to reason about an issue, to
make inferences, to fill in the blanks for missing information by referring to the robustness of the model, not the sketchy
frame.
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A2: Perm All Other Instances
1. The other instances they reject arent present in this round. You cannot
reject something that doesnt exist. Our argument deals with the in-round
interactions in which we as debaters conceptualize action through certain
modes of knowledge-production. This type of permutation is a debate artifact
which doesnt apply to our criticism. They dont even name, and no one knows,
what these other instances they reject are. There is zero solvency or
discursive effect to this perm. They ask you to imagine criticism in a world of
fiat, we ACTUALLY criticize.
2. This is not an argument you wouldnt accept racism in one instances
because you had the opportunity to reject it in other instances if we prove the
aff is undesirable then you should vote negative.
3. Every instance is key this decision is between competing philosophies, not
competing actions. Its like saying, We agree with nonviolence, except when
we dont.
[read some at: p / both if desired]
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A2: Perm Do Both
1. Its too late The 1AC has already engaged in enframing Their
representations of technology have already been introduced to the round NO
NET BENEFIT TO THE PERM
2. Its Severence They sever out of their methodology The alternative text
rejects action as such. Severance is a voting issue it destroys all negative
ground by making links to disads and Ks impossible and makes no counterplan
competitive.
3. The permutation still links to the criticism- An embracement of the
technological mindset is mutually exclusive from examination of ontology!
Thiele '95 [Professor of Political Science at University of Florida (Leslie Paul, Timely Meditations, p.193-4, JRC)]
Technology is one of Heidegger's enduring and foremost concerns.
Though Heidegger
only explicitly formalized this concern in his later work, he expressed his worry about the systematic rationalization of the
world early on. In 1919, Heidegger clearly described in a personal letter what over two decades later would become a
preoccupation of his published work. He writes: " The
unbridled, basically Enlightenment directive to nail

life and everything living onto a board , like things, orderly and flat, so that
everything becomes overseeable, controllable, definable, connectable, and explicable, where only many
pure and unrestrained (sit venia verbo)`ables' exist this directive underlies all the many quasimemories of life, which are being attempted today in every sphere of
experience."' For Heidegger, the "Enlightenment directive" to control and standardize
life ensues from the metaphysical drive to objectify the world. Modern technology and
metaphysics, it follows, are largely equivalent terms (EP 93). Both arise from and evidence a refusal to think Being in their
Modern technology and

metaphysics stand entwined. As such, neither allows a proper perspective from
which to evaluate or overcome the other (OGS 59). Technology entices us into a
productive process that precludes questioning thought , yet only such
questioning could adequately reveal the nature of metaphysics. In turn, metaphysical
systematic (conceptual and practical) effort to possess and master being.
humankind, engaged as a subject in the reductive objectification of being, is left little alternative but a technological
apprehension and manipulation of the world.
4. Kills Alt Solvency - Technological thought shuts out all other modes of
thinking!
McWhorter '92 [Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeast Missouri State University (Ladelle, Heidegger and
This managerial, technological mode of revealing, Heidegger says, is embedded in and constitutive of
Western culture and has been gathering strength for centuries. Now it is well on its way to extinguishing
all other modes of revealing, all other ways of being human and being earth. It
will take tremendous effort to think through this danger, to think past it and
beyond, tremendous courage and resolve to allow thought of the mystery to
come forth; thought of the inevitability, along with revealing, of concealment, of loss, of ignorance; thought of
the occurring of things and their passage as events not ultimately under human
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control. And of course even the call to allow this thinking - couched as it so
often must be in a grammatical imperative appealing to an agent - is itself a
paradox, the first that must be faced and allowed to speak to us and to shatter
us as it scatters thinking in new directions, directions of which we have not yet
dreamed, directions of which we may never dream. And shattered we may be, for our selfunderstanding 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.
5. Permutations are incoherent the perm asks you to IMAGINE doing the plan
and part of the alt; we ACTUALLY criticize the 1AC for this argument to
function theyd have to re-read our shell.
6. This is not an argument you wouldnt accept racism in one instances
because you had the opportunity to reject it in other instances if we prove the
aff is undesirable then you should vote negative.
7. Every instance is key this decision is between competing philosophies, not
competing actions. Its like saying, Yo, we agree with nonviolence, except
when we dont with it, yo!
8. Meditative thought cannot be accessed by the perm, its a way of living that
lets things be. Taking action is incompatible with meditative thinking because it
directs meditative thinking to a desired end, technologizing the very process
that is supposed to provide the escape.
Brown and Toadvine '03
[Charles S. professor in dept of philosophy @ University of Oregon, and Ted assoc

professor in dept of philosophy @ University of Oregon , Eco-phenomenology : Back to the Earth Itself, Excerpted
from a book, MUSE]
"Calculative thinking- is actually thoughtless and oblivious of Being which

withdraws, leaving humans "rootless' and "homeless." By contrast, "meditative
thinking" is profoundly thoughtful and receptive to Being. It dwells in the
nearness of Being, where humans are truly root, and "at home.- As the thinking
of Being' meditative thinking is nonmanipulative and noncoercive. It lets Being
and beings be; and "letting be" involves profound care and concern. Such
thinking is not a matter of having ideas or constructing theories nor is it a
particular act or series of acts. Rather, it is an entire disposition and way of living
which, .11 a thought a heart, heeds Beings call. Such heart-full, thought-full thinking
cannot, of course be coerced or willfully begun because it is itself noncoercive.
Ultimately, it comes to us as a gift from Being. It is up to us to "step back" from our thoughtless
ways of thinking so as to "prepare the ground for this gift just as a farmer
prepares the soil but cannot force the seed to grow. Such receptivity opens us
to nature's meaning and mystery. Meditative thinking lets the unspoken Truth
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of Being come to Language ; and "[l]anguage is the house of Being" insofar as it shelters the
Truth which Being discloses. Such authentic language is the "home" in which we
thoughtfully dwell.. Already decades before his "Letter on Humanism- and "Memorial Address," Heidegger
emphasized the crucial importance of language, claiming that "the power of language" distinguishes us "from stones,
plants, animal, but also from the gods." He cautioned that "words and language are not wrappings in which things are
It is in worlds and language that things

first come into being and are. For this reason the misuse of language ...
destroys our authentic relation to things."23
packed for the commerce of those who write and speak.
9. We cannot change the current state of the world without FIRST changing our
ontological views of the world. That's our Swazo '02 evidence straight from the
1NC.
10. Nazism Disad Combining the K with state action recreates the
exclusionary blind spot that caused Heidegger to be unable to take his own
advice The end result is a genocide!
Dillon '96
[Michael, Professor of Politics, Lancaster University, Small Bumble, 1996. The Politics of Security. P. 131-2]
There is a pressing need to

recover the question of the political as much from Heidegger-the-Nazi, who
seems to corrupt it, as from Heidegger the philosopher who appears to elide it.
A refurbished interrogation and understanding of the political is consequently
one of the prizes to be prised-out of an engagement with Heidegger. The preface for
Here, with his very political fallibility, arises a particular reason why it does so.
such an engagement, which is all I have been attempting here, mut, I have been arguing, proceed through security by
We cannot, therefore, go the route which Heidegger himsel first

took and against which his subsequent thinking was quite clearly and critically
devoted. That is precisely the technological nemeis to which his own thoughts
alert us and from which the recovery of the political will always be required. The
way of the tragic.
matter of Heidegger's 'silence' that I to say, his refusal to repudiate the Nazi period publicly, to 'atone' for his
membership of the Nazi Party, and his silence concerning the fate of European Jewry is particularly relevant here. I could
say that I do not have the pace to give it all the thought and close attention it deserves, but in fact I do not know precisely
what amount of space it would require. For this conventional genflection to seriousness implies that somehow I do know,
or could know. Bud I do not. And uet it I not a matter of me not knowing. I simply think it is not knowable. The question
will never be answered and so it will never be settled. This is in fact what allows me to go on about it, and with it. Given
the importance attached to silence in all of Heidegger's thought, this 'silence' cannot be mere omision. In his lectures on
Parmenides, for example, he says, 'In keep silent' is not merely to say nothing. Without something essential to ay, one
cannot keep silent. Only within essential speech, and bu means of it alone, can there prevail essential silence, having
nothing in common with secrecy, concealment, or 'mental reservations' Manifestly, it is not a simple oversight either,
because silence always resounded for Heidegger, and so perhaps it I also something even more than a 'radical failure of
thought'. For, in his thinking, Heidegger systematically and conistently elevated reticence and comportment even above
thought. Or, rather, consonance with his radical hermeneutical phenomenological, and with his history of Being and it
preoccupation with the hidden and the inconsoicuous, Heidegger made of thought osmethign which was fundamentally
related to dwelling in a piou attentiveness to the mystery of Being. Hense, one might supect that hi of hi own 'disposition'
or comportment. And it is precifely this, though worked through his thought in detailed waysm which John Caputo
Somehow Heidegger, here on this site and with respect to the site-ing of the
seemed unwilling to think through the fundamental belonging together of
dwelling and displacement: that we are all strangers native born, and so always
already dwelling en route; that routes and roots are ineradicably intertwinned; hence, that to found
and be a people (even, in his terms, with the assignment of the word) is an exclusionary practice;
that indigeneity, however useful it may be as a device to protect some from the violence of Modernity and its
modernisers, is a certain sort of violent claim; and that to circumscribe and inhabit a
concludes is Heidegger's scandal.
political,
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'place' simultaneously also poses the question of the one who is thereby
estranged from that place, or comes to that place as a stranger.
11. Thought fails when done from within the existing frame of technological
reference we must step back and not act for contemplation to be successful.
Ijselling '88
[Samuel, Professor of Philosophy and Bumblebees, Catholic University of Louvain, 1988, The End of
Philosophy as the Commencement of Thinking: Critical Heidegger, p. 196-7]
To metaphysical thinking, Heidegger counterposes another kind of thinking

which he calls recollective (andenkende) thinking. Under Holderlin's influence, it is also
associated with celebrating, greeting, remembering, thanking. It is an abidingwith, a wonderful tarrying, a holding out, an ability to wait - indeed for a lifetime - a
stepping back, an abode. It reminds us perhaps of Far Eastern wisdom which was not alien to Heidegger or of a
probing of reality of the kind to be found in Paul Klee, a man who astonished Heidegger and whose theoretical and
pedagogical writings the latter perused thoroughly. In my opinion, it can also be understood as the realization and the
radicalization of the original idea of phenomenology. Thinking as the enduring of being, as an abiding with beings in their
being, an abiding with thinking and precisely in view of the fact that we really do think in this way and finally, as an
abiding with what determines our thinking, what calls us to think, what commands our thinking and so points the way. One
question which keeps on arising is: is such a thinking (still) possible? Does it not once again and necessarily
amount to a metaphysico-technical thinking? If we are dominated by metaphysico-technical thinking and, in the end, are
solely directed by the key concepts of computer science, is another kind of thinking then still possible? One should not
Heidegger is himself fully aware of the seriousness of this

problem. He will contend that this other thinking can only be prepared, that it is
essentially, and indeed remains, untimely and can always only be a task. It
requires quite specific strategies to guard it and to protect it against the danger
which threatens it to an ever-increasing degree from the side of the sciences
and their cybernetic organization within a self-regulating world civilization. Heidegger
knows that this other thinking can never be a purely university or academic affair
because these organizations, with their indigenous research operations, their conferences and their literary
directives are carried along by the metaphysico-technical thinking and themselves
belong to world civilization. Still less can it subsist outside of a particular historical, technico-economic,
politico-scientific, institutional and linguistic frame of reference. For this reason, the greatest possible care
has to be taken to prevent it from being the victim of the attempt to interpret it
and to integrate it within the existing frame of reference. Much of Heidegger's rhetoric must
underestimate this difficulty and
be viewed in this light.
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A2: Realism
1. Realism isn't inevitable - their authors are wrong - the 1NCs attempt to
question security is key
Mantle '06
[Lecturer in the College of International Relations @ Ritsumeikan University, Defending the Dugong:
Redefining Security in Okinawa and Japan", pg. 90, http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/acd/cg/ir/college/bulletin/evol.5/MANTLE.pdf]
Although critical scholars, within IR generally and the study of security specifically, draw on a variety of theoretical
traditions from within and beyond the disciplinary borders of IR, including the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and Post-
a common understanding is that the way things are is only

one of many possibilities. As Berger and Luckmann state, Social order exists only as a
product of human activity (Berger & Luckmann, 1991: 70, emphasis in original). Humans
construct their own realities, and within those realities their own identities.
What is named as male, female, art or nature is given meaning and value
particular to a time and culture. This specific meaning is constructed and then
reconstructed daily through language and social custom . Once the temporal and
cultural contingency of such concepts is recognised, what has been assumed to
be real, inevitable and immutable can be challenged. Such critical thinking is a profound
Modernism/Post-Structuralism,
challenge for IR as a discipline and the study of security within the discipline. Anarchy is what states make of it says
security is what we make it (Booth,

Saying that thinking about politics and doing politics can be
done differently opens up the space for change. Since power is integral to any
social relation, security can be seen as sociopolitical construct. As one concept of
security becomes dominant others are ridiculed, suppressed or not even considered. Since such perceptions
are often entrenched to the point of naturalness, problematizing them is
potentially disturbing and even threatening. The status quo is the status quo
because it suits those who have the power to define and keep it that way.
Nevertheless, without such dangerous critical questions little substantive
change can occur.
Alexander Wendt (1992: 395). Booth takes this one step further,
1997: 106, emphasis added).
2. Inevitability is a self fulfilling prophecy

Kim '84 [Samuel S, Dept of Poli Sci Monmouth College, Global Violence and a Just World Order, Journal of Peace
Research, no 2, 1984 p. 187]
This pacified and disarmed consciousness or alienation in Marxian terms - has allowed the managers of the national
security superstate to shift both their military doctrine and hardware toward making nuclear war more thinkable, more
fightable, and more 'winnable'. The resultant expectations of nuclear war do not augur well, for, as social psychologist
Allport put it: 'The greatest menace to the world today are leaders in office
who regard war as inevitable and thus prepare their people for armed conflict.
For by regarding war as inevitable, it becomes inevitable. Expectations
determine behavior' (Allport 1968, p. 11).
Gordon
3. Their proclaimed inevitability arguments are based off of subjective realist

viewpoints. Fusion with critical thinking includes more accurate conclusions!
Jon Cook
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Zalewski and Enloe '95 [Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Wales **Professor of Government
at Clark University (Marysia and Cynthia, 1995, International Relations Theory Today, pg. 299]
The positivist conception of the world and reality typifies much of mainstream
international relations theory in the 1990s despite the emergence of the 'third
debate' or the so-called post-positivist revolution. This understanding of the
world allows the possibility of thinking that defining specific referents or
identities as the central issues in international relations theory is not a
particularly political or epistemologically significant act; it is merely one of
choice. In other words, the choice of referent is seen as a neutral activity by
positivists. Waltz can choose to study states, wars and the activity of leaders, others can look at the situation of
women or whatever group they wish. Each then collects data and facts about the chosen group and ultimately develops
theories about them. Jim George calls this the 'spectator theory of knowledge, in which knowledge of the real world is
gleaned via a realm of external facts' (1993, p. 204). Mark Neufeld similarly talks about 'truth as correspondence' (1993,
p. 55). This involves believing that there is a distinct separation between 'theory' and the 'real' world, 'the former, the
realm of "internally" generated "invention" - the latter, the "external" repository of laws which theories (retrospectively)
The
key point to be taken from this is that theory is represented as a 'cognitive
reaction to reality rather than integral to its construction. Theory, in this
context, takes place after the fact' (p. 213).But theory does not take place after the
fact. Theories, instead, play a large part in constructing and defining what the
facts are. This is a central claim made by those scholars working on
postpositivist perspectives in international relations theory but it is not a new
claim. Albert Einstein once pointed out that 'on principle it is quite wrong to try founding a
theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality, the very opposite happens'
(quoted in MacKinnon, 1989, p. 106). However, it is a claim resisted strongly by mainstream
international relations theory, which remains, despite recent claims to the
contrary, entrenched in a realist-positivist paradigm (Runyan and Peterson, 1991; Peterson,
1992b; George, 1993). When vilified for serving the interests of the powerful and
preserving the status quo, classical and neo-realists simply reply that they are
'telling things the way they are' (Runyan and Peterson, 1991, p. 70). It may be becoming somewhat of
explain, order and systematise . . . theory . . . always remains distinct from that world' (George, 1993, p. 209).
post-positivist cliche to claim that we are living in a complex world and thus simplistic theories will be of little explanatory
if we are trying to understand more about the world and in

particular those events which cause pain and destruction, why would anyone
not want to include insights which might help us do that? If realist scholars
want genuinely to investigate the causes of war in a sophisticated and
systematic manner, why not investigate the construction and internalization of
certain images of masculinity in military ideology? If they want to argue that
students be better equipped, intellectually and conceptually, to understand
international politics, why not extend their analyses to include concepts of
identity? There may, of course, be ideological resistance to thinking about these
issues. The assumption is made that sexual identity or gender identity can have nothing to do with the causation and
or descriptive use. But
enactment of war. But although these are just assumptions they do a great deal of work in defining what is and is not
When this ideological commitment is linked with a limited

epistemological understanding of the construction of reality, it becomes easy
for scholars within international relations to think that such things as the
politics of identity can have no real importance to our understanding of the
international system. Additionally, it implies a lot more work in the sense that more
relevant to consider.
Jon Cook
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Jon Cook

books have to be read (ones that many realist scholars might think irrelevant), new methodological
tools have to be learned and old positions have to be rethought. iCKal Holsti (1993) is
one who laments the increasing theoretical expansion of the discipline of international relations. This expansion, he argues,
Unless we can agree on, at least, the purposes of the

theoretical enterprise and on what some of the fundamental problems in the
real worldare, the 'menu [of international relations theory] threatens to become
tasteless for all but the few that inhabit the rarefied sanctuaries of the
Universities' (p. 408). Why should this be the case? If, as Holsti suggests, our 'consumers' are students and policyis not necessarily evidence of progress.
makers and what they want most of all is to know 'what is going on in the real world' (p. 407), it seems to make eminent
sense to find out more about how that 'real world' works by asking more, deeper and searching questions. What
apparently seems to be 'staring us in the face' (p. 407) in the world may well be an example of what psychologists call a
perceptual illusion. In these illusions what stares one person in the face cannot be seen at all by another person. The same
can be true when we move from a psychologist's drawing to the 'reality' of politics on a global scale. The simple questions
'Who am I?' and 'Who defines who I am?' might be as revolutionary for the discipline of international relations as that of
the little boy who questioned not the magnifi- _ cence of the Emperor's clothes, but whether he had any at a l l ! ^ 3 **
one characterized by a global menu, global music and global time,

the resurgence of claims to identity might be seen as a response to a fear of
disappearing into bland sameness. We can drink Coke, eat sushi and watch
Neighbours and be in practically any country in the world. The fight for identity may, at one
level, be an example of resistance to such an image of global uni-identity. Alternatively, the struggle for
identity may be a reaffirmation of belonging, in a postmodern, post-local age.
This desire may be fuelled by nostalgia, a nostalgia for 'tradition', which might
be construed as a nostalgia for the nation-state, the icon of modernity.
Identities in this view may be increasingly fluid and multiply at ever more rapid
rates as we approach the twentyfirst century. But those properties do not make them analytically
In a global age,
irrelevant to the international relations analyst. Who we are, how we are, who defines us, how international processes and
Anyone
trying to make sense of international political trends in the near future who
treats these maddeningly complex and infuriatingly dynamic identities as a
mere mosquito to be swatted away risks being surprised.
events are moulded and manipulated by identities: these are all questions relevant to international politics.
4. C/A Swazo '02. International Relations can't change unless we change our
ontological views.
5. Turn - The alternative solves the imbalances of power that are experience in
hegemony! The alternative also solves for Realism's inability to view Beings,
which entraps them in the Realist perspective.
Dallmayr '04
[PhD, Professor, Department of Government and International Studies, Notre Dame, Constellations
Volume 11, No 1, 2004 The Underside of Modernity: Adorno, Heidegger, and Dussel Fred Dallmayr).//JRC]
the
reflective recovery of the question of and care for being, a care completely
immune to managerial manipulation. As before, Heidegger distinguishes between power and violence,
Moving beyond the critique of Machenschaft, Besinnung offers glimpses of a radically other possibility: namely,
on the one hand, and genuine authority (Herrschaft), on the other. Apart from exuding intrinsic dignity or worth, he
writes, Herrschaft
means the free potency or capacity for an original respect for

being (rather than merely empirical things). To characterize this dignity, Besinnung introduces a
new vocabulary, by presenting being (Seyn) as a basically power-free domain (das Machtlose) beyond
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power and non-power or impotence
(jenseits von Macht und Unmacht). As Heidegger emphasizes,

power-free does not mean powerless or impotent, because the latter remains fixated on power, now experienced as a
From an everyday realist angle, beings realm may appear powerless or

impotent; but this is only a semblance or illusion resulting from its reticent
inobstrusiveness. Due to its reticence, beings realm can never be dragged into
human machinations, into the struggles between the powerful and the
powerless (as long as the latter merely seek power); but precisely in this
manner it reveals its Herrschaft, a reign that cannot be matched by any power
or superpower because they necessarily ignore the nature of the basically
power-free possibility. To be sure, access to this reign is difficult and radically
obstructed by the Machenschaft of our age. Yet, an important pathway through and
beyond these obstructions is offered by meditative thinking (Besinnung) which
opens a glimpse into the time-space-play (Zeit-Spiel- Raum) of being as Ereignis, that is,
into the interplay and differential entwinement of being and beings, of humans,
nature, and the divine.
lack.
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Jon Cook
A2: Rose {Calculations = Responsibility and Ethics)
1. Ethics reifies responsibility over any other mode of revealing it represents

just another way of managing being.
McWhorter '92 [LaDelle, Professor of Philosophy, Northeast Missouri State, also of the bumbles, 1992, Heidegger
and the Earth, ed. McWhorter.
Any thinking that threatens the 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
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 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 ethic s just as surely as they work
themselves out in the history of the natural and human sciences.
natural world.
2. Technological thought sucks, dood thats in the overview, straight turns

this argument. It eternally maintains the status quo.
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A2: Technology Good
1. Uhm. Derp-a-derp. We say the technological mindset is bad. We don't care

about technology. Look at our link.
2. Turn technological thinking drives technology into darkness- only the
alternative creates the capacity of reclaiming technology for non-aggressive
ends
Wolcher '04
[Louis E., Professor of Law, University of Washington School of Law, Washington Law Review, February
2004]
Like all things human, the essence of modern technology makes a world - an
odious world, perhaps, but a world nonetheless. In a world in thrall to
technological thinking, freedom's mode of abiding consists for the most part in
its withdrawal and quiescence. A manifestation of human being-i n-theworld, technological thinking
stands in the sharpest possible contrast to what we will now call freedom for responsibility. The latter is also a
manifestation of human being-in-the-world, but unlike technological thinking it maintains a certain critical distance
Technological thinking falls into its world

wholeheartedly, becoming its world to such a degree that it is incapable of
imagining any other possibility of existence. In a manner that will become clear later, however,
between itself and its world. In it, freedom awakes.
freedom for responsibility always remains on the hither side of its world in the form of freedom's possibilities and
Modern technology, in the sense of technics, has been

"captured" by technological thinking to such a degree that the latter has driven
the ultimate end of technology as such into darkness and obscurity . It is high time for
freedom's
responsibility.
freedom to rediscover that end - namely,itself - and in so doing to transform modern technology's essence, its mode of
being.
3. The alternative doesnt link to your tech good disads, it only changes our
relationship towards technology!
Thiele '95
[Professor of Political Science at University of Florida (Leslie Paul, Timely Meditations, pgs. 213-
215)//markoff]
Recollecting our worldly habitat not only fosters resistance to en-framing, but
also provides guidance in negotiating relations with the products of technology ,
namely machines and techniques. Heidegger acknowledges that we should neither reject
nor do without technological artifacts or skills as a whole. He neither advocates
nor accepts a retreat to a pretechnological state of being. Nor, despite much
misinterpretation by his commentators, does he suggest that we fatalistically resign ourselves to the victory of
enframing. Its victory, he emphatically states, is not inevitable (OGS 61). "We cannot, of course,
reject today's technological world as devil's work, nor may we destroy itassuming it does not
destroy itself," Heidegger maintains. "Still less may we cling to the view that the world of
technology is such that it will absolutely prevent a spring out of it" (ID 40-41). To
confuse our destined relation to Being as if it were a fate, particularly one that leads to the inevitable decline of our
civilization because of technological rule, is itself a historically determinist, and therefore metaphysical and technological,
understanding. According to Heidegger, "All attempts to reckon existing reality morphologically, psychologically, in terms of
decline and loss, in terms of fate, catastrophe, and destruction, are merely technological behavior" (QT 48)." Fatalism is no
answer because fatalism reflects the same absence of thought that is evidenced in a naive complacency with technological
"progress." Heidegger's admonition to think the nature of technology, though far from a resigned musing, is not the
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We are asked to respond first to the question "What shall
we think?" rather than the question "What is to be done?" But the point is not simply that
devising of a counteroffensive.
we must think before we act. The needed thinking of what we are doing and how we are being is not solely a strategic 214
CHAPTER EIGHT RECEIVING THE SKY 215 preparation for more informed and effective behavior. Thought must first save
"so long
as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain held fast in the will to
master it" (QT 32). The more we fail to experience the essence of technology as
enframing, persevering in the mistaken notion that complex machinery is the
danger, the more we will believe that salvation lies in our mastering technology
before it masters us. With this in mind, Heidegger explicitly states that he is "not against
technology," nor does he suggest any "resistance against, or condemnation of,
technology" (MHC 43-44). Indeed, the development of complex machines and techniquestechnology as it is
commonly understood has enormous benefits that must not be depreciated. It would be shortsighted to condemn such
technology out of hand. Apart from our obvious dependence on technical devices, their development also often "challenges
us to ever greater advances" (DT 53). From political, social, cultural, and environmental standpoints,
technology
demonstrates many virtues.
Indeed, given the unrelenting extension of human power and population,

technological developments that buffer the earth from our predaceousness seem both urgent and indispensable. A good bit
of the destruction humanity presently visits on the earth and itself makes sophisticated technological remedies necessary.
Having machines efficiently serve our needs is neither evil nor regrettable. But
this service must be grounded on our discovery of what needs we truly have .
More importantly, it must be grounded on our discovery of what transcends human need." These, decidedly, are not
technological questions, and our capacity to answer them largely rests on our
recovery of the capacity to think beyond the criterion of instrumental service.
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A2: Truth Exists (Sokal Style Arguments)
1. Technological thought creates bad notions of truth they cant access it

because their mode of revealing necessarily creates flaws in their worldview,
thats the first piece of Swazo ev. Their truth isnt objective, but is based on a
drive towards ever-more revealing and management.
2. The offense assumes a postmodern alternative of affirming local
knowledges, which we dont do. We replace any sort of assumption with
thought.
3. Alternative accesses truth best Thiele indicates that meditatively thinking
allows the world to disclose it to us, solving for a multiplicity of perspectives
which means we can actually think things through and analyze the world
carefully this is exactly what Sokal would demand of us.
4. Truth doesnt exist independent of our ontological relationship towards the
world!
Burke '07
[Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney, and author of many books
(Anthony, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, Truth & Existence, 10:2, ZR]
This essay develops a theory about the causes of war -- and thus aims to generate lines of action and critique for peace -that cuts beneath analyses based either on a given sequence of events, threats, insecurities and political manipulation, or
the play of institutional, economic or political interests (the 'military-industrial complex').. In this light, the two 'existential'
and 'rationalist' discourses of war-making and justification mobilised in the Lebanon war are more than merely arguments,
rhetorics or even discourses. Certainly they mobilise forms of knowledge and power together; providing political
leaderships, media, citizens, bureaucracies and military forces with organising systems of belief, action, analysis and
They are truth-systems of the most powerful and

fundamental kind that we have in modernity: ontologies, statements about
truth and being which claim a rarefied privilege to state what is and how it must
be maintained as it is. I am thinking of ontology in both its senses: ontology as both a statement
about the nature and ideality of being (in this case political being , that of the nationstate), and as a statement of epistemological truth and certainty, of methods and
processes of arriving at certainty (in this case, the development and application
of strategic knowledge for the use of armed force, and the creation and maintenance of
geopolitical order, security and national survival). These derive from the
classical idea of ontology as a speculative or positivistic inquiry into the
fundamental nature of truth, of being, or of some phenomenon; the desire for a solid
metaphysical account of things inaugurated by Aristotle, an account of 'being
qua being and its essential attributes'. 17 In contrast, drawing on Foucauldian
theorising about truth and power, I see ontology as a particularly powerful
claim to truth itself: a claim to the status of an underlying systemic foundation
for truth, identity, existence and action ; one that is not essential or timeless,
but is thoroughly historical and contingent, that is deployed and mobilised in a
fraught and conflictual socio-political context of some kind. In short, ontology is
the 'politics of truth' in its most sweeping and powerful form.
rationale. But they run deeper than that.
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Jon Cook
A2: Wolin
1. Wolin has no warrants as to why Heideggers theory of technology fails.

Prefer our reasons why the technik mindset is bad
2. Wolin advocates an expansion of instrumental reason, essentially advocating
an expansion of the technik mindset itself! Any reason we win that the technik
mindset is bad means that Wolins alternative magnifies that exponentially.
3. Wolin says Heideggers will to will only confuse the issue- clearly he
doesnt understand Heideggers writings.
4. Wolins criticism of Heidegger is completely illogicala) He assumes that for something to be authentic it has to be realized in
the world, and thus Dasein is not authentic because it isnt realized in the
world? Thats what we said
b) Discussing ontology does not prevent us from discussing reality- those
exist on two different levels but are not opposed to each other- rather they
supplement each other
c) Private language prevents private meaning? That doesnt even apply to
our alt
5. The aff cant explain Wolins argument- dont vote on something you dont
understand
6. Wolin is Non-unique- the technik mindset is ruling over everyone in order to
perfectly order the world right now, which means that this impact is happening
in the status quo
7. We control the direction of this link- there is only a chance that the alt can
break away from the status quo grip of the technik mindset
8. T/ we can develop a space of authentic Dasein or being-in-the-world by
rejecting the technik mindset of the status quo and redefining our ontologythis solves Wolin authenticity concerns
9. T/ Our alt allows us to lead authentic lives
10. T/ the technik mindset prevents feeling by turning us into standing
reserves- only the act of the 1ac can allow us to actually feel
11. Alt is comparably advantageous- any risk that we allow even one more
person to live authentically where they didnt before means you vote neg
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Jon Cook

12. This doesnt prove Heidegger endorsed National Socialism- this is merely a
sad attempt to sling mud at a dead German philosopher
13. Doesnt matter- even if we are nihilistic, rejecting the technik mindset is
more important than action- extend [impact evidence] on this point
14. The 1nc is literally steeped in reality- if you didnt realize that this is what
goes on under the sombrero, then now you know
15. Ontology precedes reality- it shapes how we view reality, which means it
must logically comes first
16. Empirically denied- we can comprehend feeling without calculative reasonwe all did as little kids- that may sound naive but actually recognizes that
calculative reason is not inevitable
Jon Cook
- 239 -

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Sheboygan North Debate

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Space exploration makes forces humans to view the world in a copernican

As Nietzsches heir Martin Heidegger

Space Exploration is a symptom of Western desire to enframe the Earth and

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The technical accomplishments required to build the spacecraft from which to

highaltitude photos of Earth also erase

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World order studies are,

All beings of the political domain become the

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We are doomed to complete ontological damnation if we allow calculative

The age of planetary mastery, technological dominance, and the end of

In the absence of an ontological

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Sheboygan North Debate

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social engineering would obviate political action, endlessly innovative

this dawning atomic age a far greater danger threatensprecisely